Not that I’m able to get much real physical distance from anything right now. Sometime over the weekend, my ankle decided to spontaneously age 60 years. I now limp around like someone missing a foot when I can move at all. It’s odd—putting pressure on it doesn’t hurt, but when I bring my weight up off of it, it screams like it just saw one of those camo aliens in Signs. (Shitty movie? Yes. Did it scare the piss out of me? Also yes.) Anyway, if I come across as cranky to you, this is why. My sanity, as someone who basically spends 10 hours a day staring at the same four walls, hinges on my ability to go for regular walks around the park and neighborhood. I figure if my ankle doesn’t stop hurting by the end of the week, I’ll be painting REDRUM on the walls and chasing Shelley Duval with an axe. But coping with working at home is a topic for another day. Today, I’m going to talk about how important it is to learn to distance yourself from your work. Emotionally.
You have got to get aloof about this shit. You need to treat your work like a pickup artist treats women. With mild disrespect and insults. See, if you care too much, story won’t care about you. Story is used to being hit on a million times a day by better looking writers than you. No, wait, that’s not what I meant at all.
You have to not care, for real, so you can keep failing. It’s more like the Boomhauer approach to dating—get rejected and move on to the next one. You don’t invest yourself in one attempt or even one pickup line. You’re invested in the game, not the pieces.
Christ, how many metaphors can I throw into this mix? Well, let’s see.
Big issue I’ve always faced is that I hate failure. Hate it like a blind man hates subtitled foreign films. Which is just ridiculous, as I’ve covered on this here blog recently. Failure is not the end; it’s the whole point. You learn from failure more than you learn from success. Which is why so many authors who—when they start succeeding more than they fail—have no goddamn clue what to do with themselves. Nothing more clueless than a struggling writer who suddenly doesn’t have to struggle so much. Sophomore slump, anyone? I expect this phenomenon on a much larger financial scale is why so many Hollywood stars turn to sniffing mountains of cocaine. Because shit, what else are you going to do with kiddie pools full of cash? Acting school really should have a class on setting up your 401K is all I am saying.
If you let each rejection get to you, really knock you down, eventually, you’re just going to stop getting up. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen it happen to me, sad to say. Because I am a pathetic blob of fat and stringy tendons a lot of the time. Nobody ever taught me how to take a punch. (God damn it. Another metaphor?)
The secret is not letting the punch connect, see? You’ve got to be standing waaaay over there when it comes. Or you have to be built like a brick shithouse so when the punch of failure connects, you don’t even feel it. By this, I mean you have to have massively narcissistic levels of self-confidence. You’re generally born with it or not, in my experience. I was not. I’m trying to learn how to fake it, so that one day I might wake up and discover it’s become real self-confidence. I’ll let you know how that pans out.
If you’re just starting out in a creative field with lots of rejection and you’re in it to win, you either toughen up or distance yourself. Those are your options. If you cry every single time you get a rejection letter? You’re going to be either burned out or in the nuthouse inside of a year, two tops. Not that either one of those options are entirely bad. Like someone famous once said that I can’t be bothered to look up, if you can stop writing, then do so immediately. Because we’re like bad noir detectives in this business. We’re getting our shit jumped all the time. And very few of us saps get to make it with hot blonde dames afterward.
Tags: distance, My Writing, pain, rejection
If you get hit, hit back.