How to Handle #Criticism or #Rejection of Your Writing

This morning I read through my rejection letters for #After the Rains. It has been a bittersweet process as well as a revealing one. In this blog I will focus on the bittersweet part. My next piece will be on the random nature of publishing so be sure to check in on my next blog as well. Here’s the thing. If you’re a writer and you intend to publish you are going to be rejected. It’s par for the course. Everyone knows that the now vilified writer JK Rowling who is judged these days more for her views on same sex toilets than the merits of her work, toiled away as a single parent in a cafe on the Harry Potter series only to be rejected by 12 publishers. A thousand writers will tell you the same thing. Occasionally you hear of a writer who gets snapped up for a whacking advance and goes on to make millions, but most writers explore rejection on the way up. It’s like a game of snakes and ladders - remember that? - you’re happily climbing in your career when all of a sudden a an agent publisher rejects you or a reviewer is unkind. The trick is to stay in the game. Keep your eyes on the ladder and know what your ladders are.

Readers can be scathing. When I was first published the publisher sent my book out to bloggers. One blogger told me she thought my characters ‘boorish.’ She did not seem to get that I was showing 70s farming families as they were. If she’d continued reading she might have understood what I was doing, but she broke her cardinal rule of only reading 50 pages before making up her mind about the book. I was annoyed that the publisher hadn’t at least chosen someone who read world literature or ‘post colonial literature’ as it was marketed at the time. This blogger was a fan of fantasy novels. Which is fine. Nowt wrong with fantasy novels but I did wonder why my publishers did not send it out to someone who had a taste for coming of age novels set during a civil war. The aforementioned  blog was ironically named. It had the word ‘sympathy’ in it. Simpatico it was not. What a commissioning editor at a top UK publishing house referred to as “This is compelling literary writing” she couldn’t abide. The internet is the wild west. As JK Rowling knows you can be gunned down with an AK47 for having a view dissimilar to someone with a jittery finger hovering above a keyboard. People who can barely craft a sentence will round on you and scratch your eyes out. Trolls that ambushed your views on Twitter or hex you on X. Some people will not understand what you are doing and others will be very, very kind, even in criticism.

Here is some advice: when rejection in one form or another comes, hold fast to your developing craft and to your values. When criticism stings, tend to the hurt, and then apply the healing balm: examine why you write. Realign yourself with your purpose. Naturally, I write to be read and because I feel I have something to say but I also write for my own health. I have always made art - written and visual art - for my own mental health and for the pleasure in the process. I once craved publication, and I still enjoy being widely read but this is not my primary goal. I no longer need validation, I know I’m a good writer. I have the awards and the publications and press and the lovely feedback (in the main) from readers far and wide. All feedback, good and ‘bad,’ is grist for the mill. Examine it. Take the meat and spit out the bones. There is often (not always) something to learn.

One of my most treasured emails is from a white #Zimbabwean woman who said that my book had changed her political perspective and helped her see the perspective of the 'other side.' There is always another side to the story. There is always an 'other' and how we engage with people with alternative views to our own lies at the heart of After the Rains along with other themes such as forgiveness. In writing the book, I was interested in individual motivations rather than ‘taking sides.’ The Rhodesia/Zimbabwe war was not a 'black and white' issue. There were many grey areas as well as areas of overlap: black people fought on the white side (Rhodesia) and there were many white people that advocated for a black majority rule Zimbabwe and for a fairer country overall. What most people on both sides did not want was what has happened to Zimbabwe. Both sides lost. Here was a compelling reason to write. If I could change just one person’s mind about a strongly held view, create more empathy for ‘the other’, then my job was done. Corny as this sounds, I’d have done it for the one. Even if that ‘one’ was me, given I write to find out how I feel, what I think, and what makes me tick. Often the person who is changed by the work is me.
I write to entertain as well, which is why I work so hard on characters and plot, poetry and prose. 

In a letter to my agent from a publishing executive After the Rains was described thus: “It’s terrific, isn't it. So good at showing UDI through the eyes of a girl growing up/coming of age; so good at conveying the subtleties of choosing sides and not, at how civil war affects a family (drink, break-up), so good at conveying life as it was, its banalities, its dramas. Brilliant dialogue. The crudeness, the violence, the male conversation, rats trapped.” A newspaper reviewer described it as “A great novel and well worth reading. Barosso explores relationships between black and white, right and wrong, and the reader is left with a grey area called life and the fact that ‘It’s all vanity, it’s all an illusion, everything except that infinite sky’ (Tolstoy)” – Lindsay Jardine, The South African. Why do I quote these now? Because they are the polar opposite views of the blogger I described. The point being, we can’t take things personally. There are a broad range of readers out there with a broad range of tastes. Some of them will love your work and others won’t. It’s very subjective and we need to be objective about it all. We can’t take it personally, though of course we do, but only in the moment. In the great scheme of a career, those occasional darts fall to the ground as each ladder is scaled. The antidote to rejection or unfair criticism, is to crack on my friend. Take out the good reviews and feedback from professionals - not your friends - and get some balance. And then write on, and on and on. You will get more rejection and bad reviews and even press but this is not why you write. You write for all sorts of reasons, because you must. So keep calm (and balanced) and carry on. Success has many faces and it will have its reward in time.

Touching the #Sublime: #Art and #Travel

 On our recent trip to Chicago, I almost didn't make it to #TheArtInstituteofChicago. I had reasoned it wasn't likely to live up to the #TateGalleries. How wrong I was. To stand in front of Monet's Irises, is to enter the creative mind of a genius and enter into the #sublime. I found myself overcome with emotion - a state somewhere between weeping and joy rose in my chest and threatened to overwhem me: a kind of ecstasy: here was an abject experience of engaging with a stunning unique creation. A completely new, and arguably mind altering experience. But how do we enter into this sublime experience? By opening mind and heart and looking, with the eyes of a child: in wonder. What provokes it? I believe a divine connection between artist and viewer that touches both takes place - like experiencing the eternal in the temporal. A form of time traveling takes place. There I stood in direct communication with the living work of a dead artist, but it was his work that continued to speak and it spoke of creation, the creation as he saw it back in 1914, and creation as I was viewing it in 2024. Across space and time his soul communicated with mine and it spoke of a rich engagement with creation that caused him to create something fresh and new and astonishing out of the fabric of the heavenly design he saw before him. I see this as a spiritual act, though I am not ascribing Monet's motivations in creating Irises. I can only describe the affect it had on me, over a hundred years later. It was simply and fundamentally an extraordinary experience for me, even a spiritual experience, if you believe, as I do, that all creation was created by God and by becoming children of God, who create in turn, we enter into this divine communication that transcends space and time, given God dwells eternally outside of time. Georgia O'Keefes bleakly beautiful New Mexico landscapes are rerendered in full glorious colour as if her creative eye had splashed kaleidoscopic paint over the landscape; viewing my first Helen Frankenthaler in the paint was thrilling a psychedelic mishmash of her private physical and internal landscapes; Joan Mitchell's Cityscape was an actual joy to behold, and Grant Wood's American Gothic were all highlights that remain splashed vividly in my mindscape having been projected there by these inimitable creators. I was like a toddler on ten iced buns, racing around, trying not to miss anything in the limited time that I had which was what was left of the afternoon before it closed. 

 

Chicago is a stunning city with an emerald green river that runs through it from Lake Michigan that is as wide as the sea. I was struck by how clean the city is compared to London or Paris. We spent an unexpected three weeks with friends at their house in Lamont thanks to the Aer Lingus strike that had us lingering like The Cranberries song for a further week which meant we were able to experience our first Fourth of July replete with fireworks hotdogs and burgers and lots of fun with our incomparable friends. A highlight for me was sitting on the wide white porch within sightline of the American flag and a lawn as wide as the Sargasso sea, sipping coffee and allowing my mind to drift and expand with all that was novel. Other highlights were the #PuertoRican murals. On the Sunday I went, the racing of motorbikes up and down the main street, gave the works and extra dimension of power. Afterwards, we experienced the explosive garlicky spicy taste of Puerto Rican food. As you can possibly tell the neurons were mind blowing. There is something so powerfully unifying and humane about art when it is not exclusified, to coin a new term, as it should never really be, and sharing food for that matter. Those murals point up that truth along with any by #DiegoRiviera.

Travel does something expansive to the mind and the imagination. Where the everyday or the commonplace causes one to just tick along in auto mode, new sights and sounds stir the imagination and unlock creativity as one shifts into high gear and the brain is lit up in new ways. As we know, the #brain is a muscle. Traveling, with all it’s rich, visionary stimuli, causes the brain to quite literally workout. See it as an imperative Arnie experience. Now I’m dating myself, age wise. Who is the new Arnie? Everything seems much more possible when traveling. The mind and imagination are constantly evoked and stirred as fresh ideas come. When we are freed from our everyday constraints, the freedom that traveling allows brings with it unexpected insights and solutions to problems, as the soul becomes unburdened and the mind uncluttered. #Traveling also boosts the happy chemicals in your brain. Yes, it boosts dopamine. What a dream! It is the greatest of treats and a gift to experience and explore, to get to be a big kid in God's infinitely creative and ever inventive playground. It's the best way to forget your troubles and get happy. I loved the city of #Chicago with all its attractions and being in that wondrous museum, but to just sit and be in another landscape is pure bliss and instigates the sort of internal travel that changes mind and soul and recharges spirit. Oh to travel more! Glad to vicariously relive it here: the benefits of travel stay with you even after the experience has ended.

 

#Travel Broadens the #Mind and Expands the #Brain

I recently returned from a mind and heart expanding trip to Chicago aka The Windy City. It wasn't windy during our visit but we certainly felt the winds of change as one does when traveling. Traveling expands not only our physical horizons, but also our mental ones, in that it helps us literally expand our thinking by making surprising connections which cause new neural pathways to form. You can quite literally cause your brain to grow by enriching it with fresh experiences. How many times have you had breakthroughs with problem solving or creative ideas when traveling?

Earlier this summer, I’d been fortunate enough to attend a writer's conference in Wheaton which is a small town in Illinois. Wheaton College was founded by the abolitionist Jonathan Blanchard and was a safe harbour for runaway slaves during the Civil War part of the Underground Railroad it was the first college to take black students. You can read more about Blanchard Hall and its role in the Underground Railroad here: https://www.wbez.org/shows/morning-shift/whats-that-building-blanchard-hall-at-wheaton-college-and-the-underground-railroad/484bc97e-b846-4763-bbd4-fc215a2efab7. Wheaton College is also the site of the Billy Graham Museum. Some delightful friends of ours had lent us their condo in the city. The condo, was situated right on the river with astonishing views, so my husband and children, were able to go sightseeing while I went off to college. Each morning I experienced the bliss of simply having to turn up and attend fascinating and informative talks in a completely new environment which was in and of itself thrilling. Everything was different. Everything was new. Even traveling there through the insane Chicago traffic was a buzz, particularly interstate 290. All these highways are named after presidents. I’m pretty sure president 290 must have had a live fast, die young mentality. I must look up more on Ike Eisenhower. The 290 is situated near the Chicago loop, where everyone appears to go loopy. There were some hilariously battered vehicles on that road. More than once we clocked vehicles without their rear panels.  

Meals during the conference took place in an award-winning canteen with so much choice as to induce gobsmacking wonder and an inability to choose. The American attendees seemed nonplussed at the lavish abundance, whilst I tried to maintain a semblance of self control and increasingly, the ability to do up the button on my jeans. Even trying new food can set neurons firing. Certainly the ice-cream machine had my brain in a tizz, so much so that I had to avoid it after the first day, such was it's magnetic pull to my brain. The sun was out and so was I. We all know that a lack of vitamin D makes one glum. I adored the Chicago heat so much, that I wandered about suspended in it at every ten minute break while most people ducked into the shade, moony face raised to the sun in abject adoration. The sun is a rare treat in Wales and I was going to lap up as much of its intensity as possible. 

I was there in cicada season which was wild. Walk under a tree and myriad wings like mini helicopters assaulted you as they landed in your hair with a small but not insignificant thud. The ringing noise that accompanied tese joyous flying sequences penetrated skull and bone in the intense heat. The wildness of this intensity was only intensified by the cicada experience. I was told by the event organiser that the cicada season of 2024 was the first in 17 years that periodical cicadas emerged from the soil as fully fledged adults. I was awed by this. I related to this, I identified with those critters who’d burrowed out of the soil. It took some doing to burrow out of UK soil to get over there in the first place. I was once againthe 17 year old kid who left my home in Africa to travel to Europe, desperate for new experiences. If you’re in a rut, try to travel. The only way out of a rut is to physically move out of it. If you can’t hop on a plane or train, hop on a bike and take a new route. Vary your walking route to work. Embrace change. Whatever you do, make it new. It’ll make you a better, more empathetic, happier person. More soon.

#mindrenewal #braintraining #expandyourmind #mentalfitness

Catching Up the Years

Hello Again
I see I haven't been here since 2021! I'm undone. November 2021, was the last one! I'll snap out of this rhyming now and cast my mind back. Covid19 was in full scream. Boris was in office (sort of managing - me, not Boris) presiding over all sorts of nonsense which led this country down a sorry road. Hamas was designated a terrorist organisation; now they are heroes to some; three men are arrested after a bomb explodes outside Liverpool Women's Hospital; the UK government ratchets up the terrorism threat level to 'severe.' The Queen, who sprained her back; was alive. This was the UK setting my last blogpost arose from. Oooh, and I published my third book Unless a Seed Falls to the Ground and took part in an international arts collective, the fruits of our artwork appeared in a film highlighting disabled artists. As a home educating family we navigated the Covid years with ease given our family has been arranged and adapted to suit homeschooling - we are flexible freelancers. We were grateful and cosy.

What do I recall of 2022? The nation came out of the frustration of Covid, though it still hasn't recovered. Boris, Liz and Rishi were passed the political baton and the country was beaten with it. Russia invaded Ukraine. Our beloved queen died. I won an art award and prepared visual artwork that toured Wales. My eldest son and I went to Cardiff for the opening, on a rare evening away together. The work that I made was the closest to the bone I have ever made, detailing as it did the mental, physical and emotional suffering of 2018/2019, when I went through ovarian cancer and chemotherapy, and worse. The messages I received from strangers in response to the work were joyous. My children thrived, my daughter who already had an online clothing and jewellery business developed as a singer songwriter and budding artist. But mid year, my husband and I were exhausted from working and our ongoing building project. We made the decision to blow the building fund for the sake of sanity and feeling free. We jetted off to Perth where a close friend lives and basing ourselves there, out backed in a four wheel drive straight up north and back again, tracking the unequaled coastline and squealing with delight at every beach we stopped and snorkelled at along the way. Racing along empty roads through a landscape that sometimes resembled Mars, with peculiar red ant mounds sculpted metres high, blew our minds clean. We stopped at odd cabin parks and resorts with lollipop coloured pool slides along the way. We stopped by for a peculiar, hot Christmas and then took off along the south back road to Exmouth and beyond. if we thought the beaches couldn't get better, we were wrong. We drove back through fires that turned the moon to blood. It was a wild and primal experience and it made our blood thrum for the colour of the soil of Western Australia and beat to the sound of a different drum: we would not allow our building project to keep us captive.

In 2023, Hamas fighters carried out horrific acts of terrorism in Israel and the war is still raging. People took sides and hatred seemd to reign. Mass protests began to take place in defence of Palestine and Israel's response. Antisemitism reached record highs. On the London Underground, I watched an Orthodox Jewish Man stand by the doors, bristling, ready to bolt if need be. I could feel his fear. Jewish schools were attacked. On London streets veiled women tore down posters of Israeli children. Like noxious gas, hatred and fear made city streets toxic. In March, I landed in Manchester with a headache that did not leave for a week and saw me land up in a corridor of a hospital in North Wales where I remained for three days beneath an alarm bell the size of a dustbin lid. During this time I received a number of botched lumber punctures, anti bacterial and anti viral drips and more headaches in both senses. It was to be three months - the length of my time in Australia before I recovered. As we say in Zimbabwe, it was a hellava time but not in the good sense. I haven't had a summer since Australia as the one of 2023 was a 'you're not going to see me,' event, sun wise. I'm still hankering for the sun. Also in Australia, I began training to be a coach and took clients in Australia and the UK. I love coaching and currently do both transformational coaching as well as coach writers. I particularly love seeing people's mindsets shift as they change their thinking. I am writing and preparing visual art for two Welsh galleries, my children thrive in all their ways, which include coding, art, debating, lots of science and maths, essay and creative writing and politics; and it's good to be alive. Mealtimes are a riot of stimulating conversation, laughter, and being together. We try to keep good and God at the heart of things. I do need more sun though. If it won't come to me. I'm going to it. This blog has been a log for around twelve years. Good to b/logging again.