“[…] part of the process of trying to make something better is to listen open-heartedly to what the world says. Before I was able to start publishing, I was feeling a certain way toward what I was writing – feeling pretty good, working from a certain realist mindset – but the world kept yawning at what I had written. So, this “allowed” (i.e., forced) me to seek around for a different mindset out of which to write – one that ended up being more truthful to who I actually was as a person. (In short, I’d been keeping the humor out of it, as well as my growing class-awareness.)
This is the great gift that rejection affords us: it drives us down into a place of deeper and sometimes uncomfortable honesty about what we’ve done – about where the work came from – and might cause us to ask questions like, “Is this how I really feel?” or, “Is this voice related at all to the the person I am in my real life – the way I approach problems, make joy, entertain others?”
George Saunders, “On Rejection”, Story Club
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