Here's a portion of a so-called rejection letter I got in 2004 for the earliest version of my future best-seller Ten Things Every Child with Autism Wishes You Knew: "Your story idea does not meet our needs. We look for pitches that offer, at the very least 1) a compelling story that educators will find informative and enlightening, and 2) a story that relates in some way to a larger educational trend."
This isn't quite up there with Disney getting fired for not being creative enough, but it's entertaining nonetheless. Today, Ten Things has been in continuous print for nineteen years, sold hundreds of thousands of copies in 27 languages, and is available at thousands of libraries worldwide.
To have a fledgling writing dream or goal too often means jousting with naysayers. “No one will read your book,” says our snide cousin. “No one cares what you have to say,” says a prickly sister. Years ago, I met a charming young woman who wanted to write a book about her family's experiences with autism. She wavered under remarks from friends suggesting she needed "a reality check," that she was setting “very high goals” and it would be too hard to meet them because she wasn't famous.
I told her, listen up here. That wasn't a reality check. That was a wet blanket, a fire extinguisher. If not high goals, what? Low goals, or no goals at all? I can only pity people whose thinking is so cynical and narrow that they feel the need to tear down their friends’ or family members’ dreams. Happy to say that woman did pick up her pen, turned the dial down on the static, and wrote.
Whatever our dream or goal, the choice is ours whether to buy into the naysaying and despair, or to learn from it and continue climbing. I was nothing but a mom with a pencil when I started writing. I took up Oprah's challenge: "What would you do if you knew you couldn't fail?" I knew the chances were good that I would not succeed, at least not by traditional measures. But I did it anyway. I believed that what I had to say had a place in the world, and I listened to wise, experienced advisers and mentors. And whaddaya know, I didn’t fail. First a magazine article, then a monthly column, then a book, and another, and another and on it went, under its own momentum.
And we have to remember that deflecting naysayers goes both ways. Other people's dreams aren’t ours to stomp on. When my fifth-grade class had the usual career-day discussion of what everyone wanted to be, I said astronaut. This is was fifteen years before Sally Ride, and the class hooted with laughter. Our teacher, Mrs. Lee, pulled herself up to her full imposing size and barked, "What's so funny?" The class fell silent. "Why shouldn't she be an astronaut?" The class silence deepened. She said no more and didn't need to.
Why shouldn’t she?
The message came back to me many decades later when I was deep into writing my novel The River by Starlight and starting to have doubts. Who was I to think I could tell this story, this way? A friend rescued me with a booming “Why NOT you?” I wrote it down and placed those words next to some found talismans: a well-worn penny, a heart-shaped rock, and a shell that cradles the rock perfectly. Why not me? I finished the novel that won the Sarton Award, and others. And those three little words have remained by my side since.
Leave a Reply