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by Kate Gaston
Let’s suppose, for a moment, that writing is like fishing.
You set out early one morning, and as the sun begins to rise over the treetops, you set your mind to the day’s work. You have one goal. To catch a fish. But not just any fish. The big fish. You cast your line far out and away into the subconscious murk, hoping to snag that big idea, all your senses alert for the silver-flashing scales of the muse.
Hours pass, and the morning ripens around you. Your eyes remain trained on that bobber, placidly floating on the surface of the water. As you sit, waiting, jiggling the shiny lure, you daydream about that fish. In your bones, you sense its presence. Somewhere, lurking in that murk, exists a real humdinger of a fish.
If you can succeed in catching this fish, it will—you are almost sure of it—provide for your every need, maybe even your every desire. It’ll feed your family. It’ll put you on the map. Everywhere you go, people will clamor to hear the story of how you wrestled this fish out of the depths with nothing but sheer determination.
Hours, days, weeks pass as you cast about for that elusive big fish of an idea. Reluctantly, you reset your expectations. You know the fish is there; you’re not giving up. But while you’re waiting for it to bite, you begin to take stock of all the other weird stuff you’ve hooked on your line. Rolling around in the bottom on your boat is an odd assortment of tin cans and old soda bottles. This hodgepodge of ideas—the flotsam and jetsam of your mind—aren’t exactly the big fish you’ve been waiting for. But you write them all down anyway. Might as well, since you’re passing the time.
As a writer, your work is to put words on a page. The words sometimes aren’t particularly good words. Every idea won’t be the big fish. And on the hard days, you’re happy with any old tin can of a word. After you’ve created new work, you must often safeguard it from the withering blasts of your own negativity. You steel yourself against those brutalities, cocooning your work with words of affirmation. You sprinkle on the creative Miracle-Gro of artist dates and Morning Pages. you surround yourself with friends and love and gentleness in an effort to give space for these fledgling creations to flourish.
And by jingo, sometimes it works. Often the writing is not the thing you thought it was going to be when you started out. It’s possible you meant it to be something different entirely. No one needs to know that, though, do they? The point is, the writing is standing on its own two feet. It’s alive. Here, you find yourself faced with a choice.
You can pull a Gandalf, tucking your writing away. You can keep it secret. You can keep it safe. And up until now, that’s exactly what you’ve done. After squirrelling it all away for these many years, however, the day finally comes when you must ponder that age-old question. Unless something is witnessed, does it have value?
In the presence of the extraordinary—when you’re standing in front of the Caravaggio, after you’ve hiked to the top of the mountain, or when the cat is doing something cute—there’s a visceral urge to photograph it, film it, prove it, and why? Is it simply so people can see you doing a cool thing, and therefore extrapolate that you are, in fact, a cool person, and not a waste of oxygen after all? Could it be that we are all just metaphysical trees falling in a forest, and we just really want someone to hear us crash?
With all this talk of trees falling in forests, you decide to paste some wings on that fledgling creation and set it into the wind, wishing it the best wherever God would have it go. That’s his business, anyway, right? So, you pull the work out of the envelope, closet, box, or file it’s been lurking in. You dust off the cobwebs. Make a few tweaks.
It takes you all morning to work up the nerve to hit the submit button. You wonder, will your submission trigger a generic, automated reply? Will it land in some intern’s inbox? Will it warrant a cursory glance from the intern who will then hit the delete button on your submission?
In an optimistic moment, you imagine a scenario in which the intern gives your submission a glance, then he does a double take. He pulls his chair closer to his desk, nose mere inches from his computer screen, his eyes widening. He can’t believe his luck. He gets to be the one who discovered you. He’ll rush, red-cheeked, breathless, to his editor, saying, “Boss, you’ve got to see this.”
Maybe you’re more gifted than you know. Maybe the only thing standing between you and your meteoric rise to fame is that submit button. So you do it. You press the button. And then you wait.
As you wait, you have a little chat with yourself. You chide yourself for daydreaming so aggressively. Who do you think you are, after all? You re-work the scenario, trying to trim off some of the blatant optimism. In this revision, the intern is a little less breathless. In fact, he’s chewing a roast beef sandwich while reading your submission, and instead of dashing to his editor’s door, he chucks your submission into the Maybe Pile, thinking, what the heck, I’ll pass it up the chain. Maybe it’s what the boss is looking for.
You concede to yourself, for the hundredth time, that this particular submission wasn’t the big fish. This submission is clearly one of your flotsam pieces. You gave yourself permission to be a little bit weird—a bit daring—with this submission. You’ve risked the exposure because isn’t it true that audacity often gets rewarded?
Yes, sometimes audacity is rewarded. Your audacity, however, is rewarded with rejection. It takes you by surprise, the rejection. You hadn’t been expecting it, after all, because it arrives on a regular, humdrum Tuesday afternoon. You’d checked your email. And then there it was, right there, sitting in your inbox.
There is an exquisite split second as you register the existence of the email, but before your brain fully interprets the information. In that split second, you hold space for hope. Correction: you build a magnificent castle for hope. But in the next heartbeat, your castle collapses. You have been rejected.
And what does it feel like when that castle collapses? It feels like Jane Eyre, wandering friendless and homeless on the howling moor. It feels like George Bailey, stumbling blindly through the snow, Zuzu’s petals scattering to the wind. It feels like 63 dead bunnies in Watership Down. It feels like the rifle crack that puts an end to Old Yeller. It feels like you’re setting up camp on the bridge to Terabithia.
There, in that moment, you feel the crumpling implosion of hope, and you hear the tinkling glass of broken daydreams. Time slows down as the aftershocks roll through. As best you can, you scoop your dangling entrails of shattered hope back inside your body, and you drag yourself to shelter.
You might not pull through this, you think, the pain is too visceral. Too close to the marrow. You expect to be dead any moment, you really do, and you welcome the soothing bosom of oblivion. While you wait for death to claim you, you decide to watch Netflix.
After a few hours, it occurs to you that you’re not, in fact, dead. It dawns on you that you’re going to pull through. Though your soul bears the raw wounds of a hard-fought battle, the wounds are now dressed, gently swathed in sweatpants. An hour ago, you thought you’d be dead soon. But now your body suggests pizza would be just the thing. And a bowl of ice cream. Thus fed, and despite thinking it will be impossible, you sleep through the night.
The following morning as you blink into consciousness, in those first quiet moments, you consider the path before you. Where once your creative journey carried you straight along, there now exists a fork in your creative road. The first path isn’t really a path at all. It’s simply a comfortable bench. You could choose to sit down on this bench and never create again. Creating is painful. The toll often seems too high. It is easier to sit than to walk. It is easier to not do than to do, certainly easier than failing.
Though you’re still smarting from your fresh rejection, you can’t quite reconcile yourself to the bench, to the sitting, to the not creating. After all, you’ve just survived what you thought would be the worst thing. You created original work. You clicked the submit button. Your work was rejected. And yet, you aren’t dead.
Down another fork, you glimpse the scenario in which you create new work, but you succumb to that initial inclination to keep it secret. Keeping the work secret is safe, you’re not wrong about that. And your soul might very well need a reprieve before being coaxed back out into the open. It may require you to speak gently into the fear, to feather the nest with comforting solace.
Down the final fork in your road, you find your way to this truth: you are created in the image of the first and greatest Creator. It is for his pleasure you create, and here’s the gift he gives—he thinks you’re amazing. He’s a father who’s watching his child find their passion and courage and voice for the first time. Plus, lest we forget, this is the same God who created the platypus. There’s nothing weirder or more audacious than a platypus. And over it, God said, “Yeah, this is good.”
Down this path is the life in which you get to create, and create, and create again. Like a kid who has found that perfect, fluffy, white-globed dandelion on a summer afternoon, you give your creations a walloping big blow and send them whirling and cavorting out into the world.
Where do they all land? Do they sink into the soil of a fertile heart and germinate? Is there a reason for your creations? A purpose? A plan? You can’t possibly know. It’s not your business to know. And this veiled mystery doesn’t bother you. No, and why? Because of the delight—the absolute, settled rightness—it brings to simply do the thing.
On this road, you sidestep the molasses of self-consciousness. You thank the inner critic for its opinion, and ask it to take a seat. You hold loosely the tension of perfectionism in an already-but-not-yet existence, and you dance along that knife edge with the skerfuffling joy of a stone platypus who’s been set free by the power of Aslan’s breath.
In this reality, rejection and acceptance mean the same thing to you—precisely nothing. You welcome the pruning of those parts of you which require a thumbs up, which tally the likes, which obsess over the stats. You allow the rejection, the acceptance, the applause, the sneering—all these reactions, real or imaginary—to evaporate.
You perform to an audience of one. Yes, it’s from him, to him, and by the generosity of his hand you draw your next breath, and what, pray tell, is the by-blow of this sacred call and response? Nothing less than a world made more beautiful by your thrumming resonance.
By your obedience in creating—and it is obedience, isn’t it?— you collaborate with the Creator to bring singing into existence works which have never been seen before. It will never be seen again. Such is the stunning magnitude of the story God is telling through your creativity. He can maintain these infinite storylines without any redundancy of plot.
Further, the story of your creativity doesn’t end with beauty for beauty’s sake. It’s about more than just saying and doing pretty things, wouldn’t you agree? Our creative work isn’t just some sidewalk beautification project God’s cooking up. All the weird, wild, and mundane ingredients which went into making you are unlike any other concoction ever before seen on earth. Your particular vintage will never be seen again on the face of the earth.
In the same way, the relational interplay between you and your Creator is equally unique. You have a perspective on God unlike anyone else’s. As you’ve walked with him, you have been allowed glimpses of his nature which are known only to the two of you. At the quietly beating heart of your creativity is the opportunity to give expression to your singular perspective on the prismatic glory of God.
There are many inducements to hide what you have to offer under the proverbial bushel. Rejection is one of those inducements. When your heart’s deepest work gets stiff-armed, yes, it hurts. But when it happens, after you’ve swaddled yourself in sweatpants and eaten the bowl of ice cream, remember that we are, all of us, desperate to see God more clearly, to understand him more deeply. As fellow dwellers on this side of the glass, tell us, please, of that portion of earth-darkened glory you’ve been privileged to see.
An Alabama native, Kate was homeschooled before it was even remotely considered normal. She completed her undergraduate degree at Bryan College and went on to graduate school at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. For eight years, Kate worked as a PA in a trauma and burn ICU before ping-ponging across the nation for her husband’s medical training. She and her family are currently putting down roots in Nashville, Tennessee. Today, Kate enjoys homeschooling her daughter and tutoring in her local classical homeschool community. She also finds deep satisfaction in long, meandering conversations at coffee shops, oil painting, writing, and gazing pensively into the middle distance. You can read more of her work at her Substack: That Middle Distance.
So well and kindly said. It expresses the pure joy of creation but alas, the purity of your wisdom gets lost on me when my need for affirmation rears. The mountaintop of creation can be humbling. Thanks for the encouragement!