“ I ' ve been talking a lot about rejection here, but I can ' t tout its usefulness enough. Yes, rejection hurts. But it also toughens you up as a creative person.”
QUILL
“ I ' ve been talking a lot about rejection here, but I can ' t tout its usefulness enough. Yes, rejection hurts. But it also toughens you up as a creative person.”
No two people are going to read your work and perceive it the same way. " One man ' s trash is another man ' s treasure," and all that. When you submit your work frequently, and compare the reasons why your work was rejected, you begin to learn that 1) you are not your work, 2) sometimes, an editor rejects your work for reasons that have nothing to do with quality, and 3) sometimes, editors reject stories because they do not conform to certain cultural tropes or maybe their own biases. In which case, you ' re better off finding a more inclusive venue to send your story to.
Apart from that, you learn a few of the ins and outs of the writing and publishing business if you ' re an old hat at putting your work out there; on the writing end, writers should know Standard Manuscript Format, how to write cover letters and how to follow submission guidelines.
You were also part of the prestigious Clarion workshop for science fiction writing. What pushed you to join, and how did it help you mature and grow as a writer?
All the workshops and writing classes I ' d joined at that point were geared toward more general, realist fiction. I felt like I wasn ' t getting the mentoring I needed, so when I googled writing workshops for science fiction and fantasy, Clarion came up. The roster of instructors for the year I was accepted to( 2014) included Catherynne Valente and N. K. Jemisin— two writers whose work I really admired years before I ' d even heard of the Clarion workshops. When you find an opportunity to learn from writers whose work you love, you take it— well, at least, that ' s what I believe.
Clarion proved to be an intense but also really fun SFFH( Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror) writers ' boot camp. It ' s said that undergoing Clarion accelerates one ' s growth as writers by two years— and I can attest to that being true for me, too. But apart from picking up new techniques, I also learned new ways of seeing things there; before Clarion, I rarely set my stories in the Philippines and I would write white characters. Being in the US for six weeks, surrounded by likeminded people who were also mostly white( although I did have classmates of Iranian, Indian and Japanese descent) really brought home to me how brown my skin was and how different my values were. Nearly every story I wrote at Clarion starred brown characters and tinkered with the Philippines as a setting, whether present day, near-future or pre-colonial-inspired secondary world. And every story I ' ve written since coming back from Clarion has done the same.
What truths and insights has a career in short fiction writing revealed to you so far?
Well, I ' m only at the beginning of mine, but here ' s what I learned thus far:
1. I tend to write long short stories, and that ' s okay. 2. Writers can get several big breaks in their careers if they keep at it. 3. Career plans are important, but they should be bounded by loose timelines, not hard deadlines. 4. When one has a career plan, one is better able to say
' no ' to whatever doesn ' t fit that plan. 5. Whatever path I take in my career, I need to commit to it
Follow Vida on Instagram @ vidadrawsthings for her drawings or tweet your opinions at her @ laviecestmoi.
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