I got one of those emails.

 

The no.

 

The rejection, the big kind.

 

My agent (smart, kind, experienced) wrote to say that my manuscript was not viable in the market. She could not get behind it. She would not submit it for publication. It was not, in her (smart, kind, experienced) opinion, to be printed, shared, read.

 

Before you say But you can always (publish it yourself, find a new agent, send it to me and I’ll read it), I want to sit for a moment. In the no.

 

 

How many novels have you written, Andrew?

 

I’ve written five. I’ve published two, Wilder and A Night Twice as Long.

 

I have two beloved manuscripts in the drawer, unread, unpublished: Lineville and Florida (working title). And now, that drawer is opened by my agent saying: Add one more.

 

Collectively, these three unpublished novels are thirteen years of my writing life. I am 54. For about a quarter of my weeks on Earth, I have been working on that stack of 800 unread, unprinted pages.

 

 

 

There is, of course, another number, and that is the multiplier. All of this times X artists. All of the art that has gone unseen, unshared, unvalidated, unadmitted into the cherished spaces where the work of artists is held, displayed, and spotlighted.

 

Just among the recipients of this email, there are artists—dozens? hundreds? thousands?— with their own drawers, their own weeks and years spent creating work unseen.

 

I am not sure what to do with that.

 

Work that is unloved when it is shown or published or performed is one thing. I accept that the reception of our work is not ours to control. But what of the work that is never offered and never received?

 

What of the days and decades of human creativity that are never shared?

 

 

 

As a writer, I feel I rip myself quite open (particularly with this recent manuscript) to find the truths and depths that make a story useful, weighty, real.

 

And then, to bring that story to readers, I must put on armor so thick and so steely that I can survive this industry, this gatekeeping, this so-called market which everyone pontificates about but which no one, I suspect, understands very much at all.

 

Or maybe this is exactly wrong.

 

 

Maybe the strength gained in stripping down, in pushing deeper even when—especially when—the writing hurts, maybe that can carry me through the vagaries and absurdities of a marketplace.

 

 

I try to think in decades, not years. I try to play the long game.

 

Then I look in that drawer and see a decade of my creative output collated, formatted, and unread.

 

This is hard.

 

This No hurts.