It’s another Monday morning at The Writing Barn and the summer is just flying by. This week’s Rejecting Rejection comes to us from surgeon by day/YA author by night, I.W Gregorio. Her inspiring post celebrates the need for diversity in the literary community. Read more to find out about her book that’s coming out early next year.
Accepting Rejection without Rejecting Yourself.
by I.W Gregorio
There are lots of forms of rejection in the publishing industry, but perhaps one of the most heartbreaking is when a writer rejects herself.
Like many, when I set out to write my first novel (let’s call it Thing One) I took the whole “Write what you know” dictum perhaps a little too seriously. They say to “Write the story that only you can write,” so I grabbed many of the details for Thing One from real life. Asian-American main character? Check. Involvement in Mathletics? Check. Parent who is a surgeon? Check. Upstate New York setting? Check.
Following this age-old advice got me pretty far. It got me some amazing feedback from manuscript consultations, and landed me a rockstar agent pretty quickly. After the usual rounds of revision, we went on submission, and I can still remember the heady sense of excitement, the thrill of anticipation.
Then: Nothing.
Not just nothing – a whole lot of nothing. Then, when the R’s actually did come my way, my agent and I got the most crushing kind of feedback possible, to the tune of three rejections saying “We love your voice, we love your writing, but this book is too similar to something else on our list.” Specifically, three other novels with an Asian-American protagonist on their lists.
(Note that this was about five years ago, before the lack of diversity in children’s literature made the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, and CNN. Before the #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign, of which I am a founding member.)
In an excellent article on diversity in kidlit on Story and Chai, Simon and Schuster editor Zareen Jaffrey talked candidly about the challenges in acquiring diverse books, and wrote, in reference to my exact experience, “I can understand why a letter like that would rankle, and really should never be written. That said, it’s more likely that the editor just didn’t fall in love with a book and is looking for an easy way to reject it.”
Looking back from the far side of my publishing journey, with a book coming out next year, it’s easy for me to agree with Zareen’s assessment. Today, I readily acknowledge that while my book had merit, it also had issues – no surprise. It was a first novel. I can see its flaws quite clearly, now.
But back then? It was easy to read too much into the kind words of editors, and to jump to the conclusion that my manuscript was fine if only it weren’t about a person of color.
Despite my pathetic attempts at developing a thick skin, despite my clear knowledge that publishing is hard and it’s all about the right fit and the phase of the moon and what the acquiring editor ate for breakfast that day, I took those rejections pretty personally. Perhaps it’s because they resonated — in the worst possible way — with my childhood experiences as one of the few people of color in my Central New York town.
It took me years to realize it, but I’d been rejecting myself for my entire life. I avoided the other Asian-American kid in my class like the plague. When friends came over I begged my grandmother to make tuna casserole or macaroni and cheese. By the time I went to college, and encountered Asian-Americans who had been raised in more diverse parts of the country and were actually proud of their ethnicity, I had become a true banana — yellow on the outside and white on the inside.
In some respects, the fact that I’d chosen to write an Asian-American character at all was a minor miracle that can probably be attributed to moving to the San Francisco Bay Area and stuffing a lifetime worth of dim sum down my throat.
Of course, no amount of dim sum could lift me out of the creative dumps when I tried (and failed) to revise my manuscript into workable shape and parted ways with my agent. After yet another revision, I attempted once again to query my poor, shopworn Thing One and got mild interest, but no bites.
I shelved my book and stopped writing for a while. I had recently moved across the country and started a new job. I took some time to read without the baggage of an aspiring writer. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever be able to put together another novel again.
Then, an idea that’d been percolating in my head for years started to blossom. I had dreamt for years of writing a YA version of Jeffrey Eugenides’ Pulitzer Prize-winning Middlesex. Compared to Thing One, it was an ambitious project, requiring dual narrative (or so I thought in my one stab at the story) interviews and research. I’d always thought that it’d be something I’d write later in my career, when I was a better writer.
When you’re at rock bottom, it’s easy to take risks. So I wrote my YA Middlesex book. And after a long, circuitous path, I landed my amazing agent and sold Thing Two (now called None of the Above) to the dreamiest of editors.
Happy ending, right? I rejected rejection, right?
Well, not exactly. Because near the end of edits, my brilliant editor pointed out to me ever so delicately — in the middle of my heavy involvement with the #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign — that my main character’s peer group was blindingly white.
I had written my teenage self out of the book (though interestingly, there were adults who were people of color (PoC)).
When I realized that I’d whitewashed my own book, three things came to my mind immediately: 1) I was a bad person. 2) How awesome was it that I had an editor who supported diversity enough to tell me that I no longer had to reject my culture? 3) My next book had to have an Asian-American main character.
I wish I could say that my experience with submitting my multicultural first novel is unique, but it most certainly is not. Multiple published authors have shared with me similar stories; I’ve even had one PoC author say to me point blank, “From now on I’m writing about white people.”
Yet, there are success stories, like my friend Kelly Loy Gilbert’s recent sale, and the novels of my fellow Diversity League members. As I start writing Thing Three (still very much in its embryonic stage) I can only hope that the groundswell of public support for diverse literature continues, and that I have the guts to truly reject rejection by accepting myself and the stories I want to tell.
I. W. Gregorio is a practicing surgeon by day, masked avenging YA writer by night. After getting her MD, she did her residency at Stanford, where she met the intersex patient who inspired her debut novel, NONE OF THE ABOVE (Balzer & Bray / HarperCollins, 4/28/2015). She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and two children, and is a recovering ice hockey player. She is a proud member of the #WeNeedDiverseBooks team.