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.
