I feel like I say this every week, but I really don’t know where the past [week/month/year] has gone. It’s August? Are we sure?

Yesterday morning I booked a trip for January 2024, the first trip I’ve booked for 2024, and I was momentarily confused because it felt soon even though my brain still thinks it’s April 2023. I’m also applying to a bunch of fellowships right now—writing and research fellowships—and a few of them are for 2025. 2025! They want me to plan my life that far in advance, to be available to them for a month or more in 2025, and to know what I’m going to want to research then! How????

All that got me thinking a lot about the passage of time. There are so many things I want to do and it’s starting to feel like there’s not enough time. I find myself jealous of my younger cousins who graduated from high school or college this summer, their whole lives in front of them. (I know, I know, I’m only 33—but the possibilities seem more limited, suddenly.)

If you’ve been around here long, you know this question of passing time haunts me frequently. I worry about making time to write everything I want to write, I worry about whether I’m laying out my schedules in the most efficient ways, and I worry about how much time I spend worrying.

And this month, as I fall further behind on my Goodreads Reading Challenge, I’m fighting my urge to worry about all the books I won’t have time to read.

The best thing about Goodreads—well, second to peeking at what my friends are reading—is their annual reading challenge. It motivates me to read more because every January I set an ambitious goal of reading x books and usually about halfway through the year I find myself really far behind the weekly average I need to meet to make it. (As I write this, I’m 11 books behind my goal.) And of course, I’m a competitive monster, so seeing that gets me to start reading a lot more in the second half of the year. Also great? Goodreads archives all your reading challenges, so you can always go back and see what you read during a year—and whether you met your goal.

For the last seven years, I’ve averaged reading 58 books per year. Which is a lot, it’s more than 1 per week! I could certainly read a lot more if I didn’t watch as much TV as I do, but, I mean—have you seen the great storytelling going on on television right now? The second season of Good Omens, I mean—a chef’s kiss, truly.

Assuming that I maintain this pace, and hoping that I have 48 years left on Earth, which takes me to the US average women’s lifespan of 81 years old—a decent number that I'm good with living until—that means I have about 2,784 books left that I'll read in my lifetime.

2,784 books is both a lot--it's in the thousands!--and not a lot at all. It’s only 420 books more than my current TBR shelf on Goodreads. And—somewhat terrifyingly—worldwide, there were over 4 million new books published in 2022. 4 million! New! Not reprints, translations, paperback copies of hardcovers—4 million brand-spankin’-new books. It really puts my 2,784 books over my lifetime in perspective! I can reasonably read .07% of the books published in a single year. That's all I've got left!

And, okay, yes—it helps to note that of those 4 million, there are probably a million or two that I have no interest in reading. And at least a million were probably published in a language I can’t read. Even if we assume I would only be interested in 10% of the books published last year, that’s still 40,000 books-a whopping 15 times more books than I’ll be capable of reading in my life.

Okay, now that I’ve got us all in a tizzy.

When I first did this math about five years ago, it gave me permission to start doing something I’d loathed to do until then: Quit reading a book before the end.

I know some of you are gasping into your inbox. The horror! Listen, I know the logic behind finishing a book, even if it’s a slog and you hate it the whole time. What if it gets better? What if the end ties it all together in a way that works and suddenly it was all worth it?

I’m here to tell you that it won’t. If you haven’t liked the first 200 pages of a book, you’re not going to like the last 200. It is incredibly rare that the last 20 pages of a book are going to change your whole opinion of it for the better. So stop reading! The world will not end. It doesn’t mean that the writer is bad, and it’s not a condemnation of the book. But if it’s not for you, then why waste your time with it? You only have time to read so many books in your life!

Subscribe now

I think this is easier to make peace with when you’re reading non-fiction because there’s not necessarily “a story” in the same way as a fiction book. Just get the information you need and get out. Read the final chapter if you’re concerned about missing any insights or conclusions.

Recently, I was struggling through an incredibly dense and long novel. I had set out to read it because it was set in early 14th-century Europe and the book I’m currently writing is also set in early 14th-century Europe. There are not a lot of modern books set during this time period! I wanted to read it to see how a 20th-century author treated the 14th century—luckily, the premise also sounded interesting.

It was not an easy book to get through. The cast of characters is huge, and I quickly regretted not taking notes when I first started reading. The narrator would go on long tangents completely unrelated to the central story, and it was driving me crazy. I’d skip 5 or 6 pages at a time, skimming them to make sure I wasn’t missing action, but ultimately just trying to get through it.

Finally, I paused and thought, “Why am I doing this?” I searched for the synopsis, to see if it was going to make the book worth finishing. Was I going to be surprised by the conclusion? Did these big sections I was skipping matter?

And the answer was sort of, but not in a fun way, and then yes! The end of that book is often criticized for being sort of weird and nonsensical! It’s a beloved book because those long asides are the author showing off how ridiculously smart he is. And he was! The intellectual world of a 14th-century monastery is rendered perfectly and those debates might be similar to what real monks, scribes, and intellectuals would have been debating at that time.

But I don’t care. I mean, as a historian I sort of care but ecclesiastical debates of the 14th century aren’t my focus. I wanted to like it so much, and I felt kind of bad about not liking a book that is an international bestseller—“Am I wrong? Do I have bad taste?”—but this book just wasn’t for me. And that’s okay!

(The book, by the way, is The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco.)

So I didn’t finish it! And I refused to feel guilty about that, because it meant I could move on to a collection of poetry I’m really enjoying!

And that’s my point here. Stop reading books you don’t like because it’s taking time away from books you could like. I get that some people are going to push back against this—if we only read books we like, isn’t that just creating another echo chamber in our lives? Isn’t that exactly what you were advocating against in this post about expanding the voices inhabiting your bookshelves, Valorie?!

And yes! Totally! Read more diverse stories! Read books by authors you’re unfamiliar with, who you don’t share a culture with! Expand your understanding of the world by expanding the voices present on your bookshelves!

But don’t make yourself miserable doing it. If you hate fantasy novels, don’t pick up a fantasy novel just because it’s by an Indian author and you’ve never read a book by an Indian author. That way lies madness. Read genres you already like! Just, you know, please realize that white British authors do not have a monopoly on good fantasy.

(Though, if you’re looking for a good fantasy book by an Indian author, may I recommend The Devourers by Indrapramit Das?)

To paraphrase an unfairly abused Mary Oliver line of poetry: What are you going to read during your one wild and precious life? Why would it be something you hate?

Share

What’s the best book you’ve read this summer? Tell me about it in the comments!

Leave a comment

Last week I published the final episode of season 2 of Unruly Figures. It’s all about Mekatilili wa Menza, a freedom fighter in Kenya in the early 20th century. Her story is one of resilience, determination, and women coming together to fight invaders—in short, it’s awesome.

For Sprudge, I wrote up a guide to the great coffee shops of the LA Arts District. If you’re coming to LA and you love coffee, this is a great neighborhood to start in.

Just FYI, some of the links here are affiliate links. That just means that if you click through and buy something, I’ll receive a few cents of profit but it won’t change the price for you.

Read more

How is your summer going? We’re creeping up on August, which is usually when I take a month off to reset, but this year I don’t feel like I need it. Maybe it’s because I accidentally took two weeks off at the beginning of July when I had a little health crisis, but I’m feeling okay this year—rested and good, even. So even though season two of the Unruly Figures podcast will be coming to an end on August 1, I’m planning to still be writing here as normal through August.

I don’t have much else in the way of updates, but I *do* want to resurface a post I wrote last summer about working in the heat. The gist of it, if you don’t want to read the whole thing, is that—well—the human brain didn’t evolve to work in this godforsaken heat. So if you’re feeling less productive than usual and you’re tired all the time and everything seems 5% (or 10% or 25%) harder, that’s because it is! It literally is, and science says so. So cut yourself some slack.

(I have been back on my nocturnal bullshit this summer, maybe that’s also what’s helping me feel good now.)

All right, a craft essay. Let’s do this.

Let’s Talk Psychology

I have kind of a weird essay for y’all today. I loved writing the hero series, and I considered immediately jumping into other story archetypes next. They’re so fun to talk about, at least to me!

But I’ve been working on my novel again lately (got pretty distracted from it in April/May, but I’m back on my bullshit) and it’s got me thinking a lot about character motivation. I feel like most people only talk about a story plot as a series of events that have to build on one another: An event happens, someone learns x, and that forces them to do y. But sometimes the plot could veer off in different directions due to a character’s internal motivations! And that can get tricky. If a character starts making decisions to serve the plot, but those decisions aren’t based on the character’s needs, then it can seem strange or even unbelievable to readers.

A long time ago, to really check if my character’s motivations feel realistic and believable, I started checking their behavior against psychology. I love psychology anyway, so this wasn’t a big leap for me, but I think more writers should be turning to some of the psychological tools that have stood the test of time. Consider this me encouraging you to go read more articles about psychology!

A great place to start is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. If you’re unfamiliar with Abraham Maslow, he was a pioneering mind of the humanist and self-actualization school of psychotherapy; he argued that integration of the self is the most important goal of psychological treatment. He believed that we are all individuals who need to be treated that way by therapists, instead of being lumped into diagnostic categories the way we would diagnose and treat someone with a viral infection.

But Maslow still believed that all humans needed to meet the same emotional needs to feel fulfilled. How people meet those needs and how they react to unmet needs can vary, but as a framework, he established five categories of needs that are built upon one another, like a pyramid. He believed that people could climb the pyramid, so to speak, only as they met all their needs in each lower layer.

So the basis of the pyramid is Physiological, your basic survival needs: Food, shelter, water. Above that is Safety, like good health, a job, feeling physically safe and secure. Above that comes Love and Belonging—it’s all about healthy relationships and feeling connected to people. The fourth is all your Esteem needs, like freedom, self-confidence, and respect. And the fifth, the pinnacle of the pyramid, is Self-Actualization—basically, reaching one’s full potential and feeling existentially satisfied. Maslow called these five layers the hierarchy of needs. Again, he believed that humans couldn’t achieve things from an upper layer without first meeting all the needs of the layer(s) beneath it. I think this is flawed (plenty of loving families starve together, to be blunt) but the hierarchy is still really useful.

On a large scale, the hierarchy of needs sets out what drives human behavior. It can be used to explain why communities throughout history have battled over water or arable land—their need to have food and water outweighed their need for safety and security, so violent conflict becomes worth it. People can’t achieve peace if their children are starving. They need to fulfill that bottom layer first.

Because it explains human behavior, Maslow’s hierarchy can be adapted to writing fiction. It’s especially easy for stories that follow the classic hero’s journey, but it also works for stories that don’t.

Where Does Your Character Start On the Hierarchy of Needs?

Where your character is starting on Maslow’s pyramid is where you want to begin examining how their needs inform your plot. And that spot is going to vary. For instance, in a coming-of-age tale, you might be looking at a kid who has all their Physiological and Safety needs met—they have food, a home, they go to school, all that. So their character arc throughout the story is going to start them at the middle Love and Belonging stage—maybe they have a good family but they don’t have friends at school, so they need to meet that need to move up the pyramid. This kind of story can end at the Esteem stage, where they figure out they’re good at music and they get accepted by a group of friends. It can also end at Self-Actualization, where they gain their friends, go on to win the rap battle (or whatever), and figure out who they are as a person. It just depends on what you want to write.

But maybe your character is starting lower on the pyramid. Maybe your character is broke and doesn’t know how they’re going to afford dinner. That’s a very different story, everything then is about meeting their Physiological needs. Whether that means stealing food or selling a prized possession, they have to do whatever it takes to eat. So your plot is going to focus on that.

Or, your character might start on a higher level and then fall down before climbing back up. This is every single horror arc. Things are okay, maybe even good, and then something goes horribly wrong and the characters slide all the way down to Physiological needs. Frankly, no one cares if they have status in their community if they might not survive the night! (And, in horror, the people who do prioritize status over life usually die.) The story then usually ends with the protagonists somewhere on the Safety or Love and Belonging layers. Maybe they need to rebuild their home, but hey, at least the monster is dead and they’re safe.

Share

Ascending the pyramid is not a straightforward journey. Characters can bounce around, climbing up and sliding down. Sometimes characters don’t know where they are on the pyramid! A lot of romance stories will see characters striving to meet their Love and Belonging needs, only to realize that a Safety need is standing in their way. Maybe they’re single because their job is too demanding or because they don’t feel psychologically safe after a traumatic event. They have to figure that out before they can have their happily ever after, so the plot sees them backtrack to the lower level.

Using the Pyramid to Create Obstacles

The middle bit of a story is often the hardest, right? Your character can’t just set a goal and sail on to it, they have to struggle! They have to fail and try again, fall down and get back up. Otherwise, the story is boring!

Thankfully, Maslow’s pyramid is useful for this too. Say your character is a child living on the streets and trying to find their family. Their ultimate goal then is on the Love and Belonging tier, but access to food and other resources stands in their way. They can’t just walk into the library, Google their mom’s name, and voila! Family!

So, maybe they have regular access to food and shelter, but they need clean clothes to get into the library. Or maybe their Physiological needs are met, but they’re trying to avoid some kind of terrible system that disappears children (I’m thinking Hunger Games, but worse), so they need to somehow fly under the radar to stay safe. So your plot will be informed by how they stay safe on the journey to finding their parents.

Harry Potter is a good example of part of a tier acting as an obstacle. Throughout the series, he is reaching for Self-Actualization by fulfilling the prophecy of his birth, but he gets stuck on the “Voldemort killed my parents!” complaint for a long time. He’s traumatized by their murder and his subsequent abusive upbringing, and that leaves him realistically trapped at the Love and Belonging level. All his lower-stage needs are met; he has friends and an adoring public for most of the series, but the family piece is missing. Even as he starts to gain the respect of his peers through Quidditch, how much he wishes his father could see him play comes up again and again as a reminder that this family piece is missing. This doesn’t change the arc of the series, but it does impact his emotional arc and drives smaller plot points like arguments with Ron and Hermione. It’s not until he accepts his found family and his place in the larger community of the Wizarding World that he can focus on Esteem and Self-Actualization. Arguably, this isn’t complete until he summons his parents’ ghosts right before his 7th book battle with Voldemort in the woods.

Like Harry’s family trauma, you can harness missing features at each layer to create challenges to throw your character’s way. You just have to decide how they’re going to react to them based on what they’ve already achieved. And those challenges will feel more natural or believable because they’re grouped on the same psychological level. It will make sense for that character in that world. A character’s choices can start to feel unbelievable when you try to have characters reaching for the respect of their peers when they have empty bellies.

But, that introduces the major caveat when using this to write fiction: Your character doesn’t have to follow the pyramid perfectly.

Readers Value Some Things More Than Food

In real life, no one is going to say that a person should forgo food in order to gain their boss’s respect. Fill your belly first!

But in fiction, we get into this weird world of heroic behavior where suddenly these kinds of sacrifices gain near-mystical meaningfulness. For example, if you’ve seen Oppenheimer, you know that David Krumoltz’s character Isidor Rabi repeatedly offers Oppenheimer food throughout the movie. This is based on a real character trait of J. Robert Oppenheimer: The man was incredibly slender and tended to forget to eat, especially during grad school and the nuclear bomb testing at Los Alamos; his peers said that he seemed to feed on ideas instead. In real life it’s described as a bit of a character flaw; people worried about him, he was described as dangerously thin during World War II. But in the movie it seems like this amusing sign that Oppenhimer is destined for greatness: He’s so busy trying to achieve Self-Actualization (creating the atomic bomb, yikes) that he forgets those lower-level needs like eating. They’re literally beneath him.

This fiction logic is why we can have perfectly successful fictional stories about a woman saving other women and rebelling against an unjust government even though her access to potable water is not guaranteed (Mad Max: Fury Road). There are some things that readers value more in fiction, like justice and freedom. Since Furiosa has the emotional strength to escape and take the enslaved women with her, no one is going to enjoy a version of the story where she lives under Immortan Joe’s rule just because he doles out clean water. Their entire world might be trying to meet their basic Physiological needs, but Furiosa is operating on the stages of Safety and Love because those are more important to her soul or spirit.

The soul is often more important than the body in fiction, so having a character forgo scoring a goal because their ankle hurts a little is rarely going to play well on screen or on the page, even if that’s what you’d tell them to do in real life. When it’s a character as strong as Furiosa, drinking water is not enough to keep her in place when hope and freedom lie just beyond Immortan Joe’s rule.

Subscribe now

Hope, love, integrity, justice—these are not Physiological needs according to Maslow. We can subsist without them. But in fiction, they operate like Physiological needs. Heroic characters often sacrifice food, water, et cetera for Love, Esteem, or Self-Actualization, and we love it. Those are the stories we keep coming back to. In almost every story that follows the Hero’s Journey, the protagonist sacrifices a lower-tier need in favor of a higher-tier one (and I’m saying ‘almost’ to hedge; I would bet that it’s in every single Hero’s Journey story).

That said, Maslow might point out that in my earlier example, Furiosa is not reaching for self-actualization, she’s still on the bottom and middle tiers of the pyramid. Even with fiction logic, it can be hard to have someone reach that high when their circumstances have brought them so low. Furiosa is reaching for Safety and giving up water for it. Oppenheimer forgetting to eat in favor of Self-Actualization only works because he has easy access to food; it wouldn’t work if the cupboards were bare and his family was going hungry.

Fiction logic makes skipping needs on the pyramid acceptable, but there are limits to how many needs a character can skip over or ignore before we start looking at them with concern. For instance, there’s a scene in Oppenheimer when he asks his friend to just take the oldest Oppenheimer child for a while. The kid is a toddler at the time, and his wife, Kitty, is really struggling with alcoholism, so to some extent, it’s for the safety of the child. But Oppenheimer admits that they are bad people for asking someone else to care for their child for an extended period; especially because we don’t see him making any sacrifices to take care of Kitty or their child. He’s sacrificing family, in the Love and Belonging tier, for his own Self-Actualization. It’s very selfish, and it’s one of the ways that Christopher Nolan makes him an anti-hero.

As a rule of thumb, we can take it when characters hurt themselves in pursuit of their goals. We don’t like it as much when they hurt other people in pursuit of their goals, especially when those other people are children. The Love and Belonging tier is a particularly hard one to see a character betray or ignore, and any trauma in that tier is often an origin story, for villains and for heroes.

If you’re going to have a character sacrifice a lower-tier need for a higher-tier need, the motivation has to be good. Luckily, with fiction logic, there are many ways to establish that motivation. It can be internal, like Furiosa’s desire for freedom over tyranny.* It can also be simpler—a parent skipping a meal (Physiological) so that their child can eat (Love); that happens in real life and in fiction.

There also usually needs to be a good device to make this level jump work. Aladdin is a great example of this: Our hero is catapulted from stealing food to eat (Physiological need) all the way to a challenge that straddles both Love and Esteem—he falls in love with Princess Jasmine and needs to convince the sultan that he belongs and deserves respect. How does he achieve this? The genie. Without Genie, all of that is impossible because Aladdin alone can’t meet his basic Physiological needs. Though his personality is what wins over the Sultan and the Princess, he wouldn’t have the time or resources to focus on doing that without Genie’s help. Genie acts as the device to make skipping Maslow’s lower levels possible.

Finally, How to Make It Work

Here’s a quick guide to actually using Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to figure out a character’s motivations and help plot a story:

1. Establish where your character is starting on the pyramid.

2. Figure out which tier they’re trying to reach.

3. Check off which needs have already been met, and circle which needs are standing in their way to the next level.

4. Figure out why some needs remain unmet (this can be one sentence—Harry’s missing a family because his parents were murdered). This is what serves are the foundation for all the character’s motivations and reactions when they come up against these missing needs.

5. Brainstorm ways to have the character either meet or fail to meet those needs.

6. If you’re going to skip needs (or entire tiers, like Aladdin), come up with a device or extreme motivation that enables that.

7. Decide which needs the protagonist can sacrifice to meet their higher need (if any).

8. Accept that your character might slide down and climb back up as they come up against new obstacles. (In fact, the more this happens, the more people get invested in the story.)

It’s not the easiest tool in the world, I’ll give you that. But digging into your character’s psychological needs will help you figure out where they’re going to get into conflicts, what’s going to make them feel safe, and how they’re going to choose to act in any situation. And that is what’s going to make your plot feel believable and relatable.

*Before you say that this is what every revolution is about, I’ll point out that Furiosa lives in a post-apocalyptic wasteland without clean water one more time. While revolutions are often influenced by scarce resources, it is usually because those resources exist but they’re being denied to the people who need them.

I hope you enjoyed this longer-than-usual post. I know it’s a little strange, but I genuinely love using psychological tools to figure out characters and their challenges. If this works for you too, I’d love to hear it!

Leave a comment

Last week, I released a podcast episode about Sarah Bernhardt. I get the feeling that if you liked this essay, you might also like her story. Her whole story sees her achieving Self-Actualization, occasionally at the expense of financial security or the respect of her community. Proof that Maslow’s hierarchy isn’t bulletproof.

I am only able to dig deep into these sorts of tools because many incredible people like you support Collected Rejections. If $5 a month isn’t a huge ask for you, I encourage you to become a paying subscriber! You’ll get extra writing prompts, access to our subscriber-only virtual writing sessions, voiceovers for posts, and more.

Subscribe now

Last week I published a longer thinkpiece about Barbie, Oppenheimer, and their shared exploration of existential dread. Check it out if you’re into that kind of thing.

Hope you’re all well. Stay safe out there.

Read more

But today is my birthday! I’ve done as much as I can this week to solve problems and today I’m trying to just take it easy—pretty soon I’ll go get a massage and maybe treat myself to the new Indiana Jones movie. I am trying to celebrate how far I’ve come and reflect on where I want to go next. How do I want my 34th year to look?

I think a lot of people try to do big “33 Things I’ve Learned on my 33rd Birthday” or “33 Things I’d Tell My Younger Self” type posts but I have always found those posts kind of forced, even vapid.

I don’t have 33 things to tell my younger self. I don’t have 33 lessons on writing to share. I guess I have one kind of good one though.

Listen to me very carefully: No one else is going to make time for your creativity. Once you graduate kindergarten and stop fingerpainting to learn fine motor skills, most of the people in your life are going to prioritize your productivity, your work, and what you can do for them. I’m not trying to be cynical in saying that—it’s just that they don’t know what you need. They don’t know what you do when you’re not with them. They can’t read your mind.

You want to have a creative practice? You have to stake a claim in your time for that. You have to draw the boundaries around your time strictly and you can’t let the anxieties of what you owe to anyone else get in the way of that, because they’re not going to enforce those boundaries for you. They’re not going to remember that you need to spend an hour a day writing, and they’re never going to say “Well let’s not meet until 10 am because I know you need your mornings for your creative practice.”

If you have a spouse that does this for you, that’s wonderful. Count yourself very very lucky because almost no one else does.

Image source.

Staking out your time looks different for everyone. Working moms have less free time than almost anyone else on planet Earth, but even ten minutes of sketching a day counts.

But you have to claim those ten minutes. No one else is going to set it aside for you.

That’s it, that’s all I’ve got. If you want to be a writer, you have to write. And to write you have to set aside time. The equation is simple, though it can be hard to put into practice.

You’ve got this.

Like this post? Support my work by becoming a paying subscriber! For my birthday, I’m offering a 20% discount on annual subscriptions.

Get 20% off forever

Well, we’ve arrived: The final installment in our heroes series! We’ve covered Classic Heroes, Everyman Heroes, and Tragic Heroes. I’ve left the—well, not the best for last, but certainly my favorite for last. I love talking about anti-heroes so much that, once upon a time, I almost applied to do a Ph.D. that traced the increase of anti-heroes in fiction as a response to an increasingly interconnected world that easily aired the dirty laundry of real-world “heroes.” I decided not to, but sometimes I still think it would be a fascinating study. Feel free to steal that idea.

Anyway, anti-heroes. Here we go.

If you’d like to hear this essay read in my totally appealing Texafornia accent, upgrade to a paid subscription today. You’ll get a 7-day free trial!

Subscribe now

In some ways, I think the anti-hero is the hardest hero to define because the definition really exists in its opposition to the other heroes (and villains). That means it shifts across time as what we like about heroes (and hate about villains) shifts. What previous cultures found acceptable or pitiful, we find annoying or even abhorrent. Take a look at Oedipus! He has long been classified as a tragic hero, but I think if Oedipus Rex was written today we’d hate this guy.

So, that said, what is an anti-hero right now? Well, this is what that Ph.D. I mentioned at the top was going to cover. Our standards have changed—we expect people to have flaws, so even our classic heroes have bad qualities, which used to be less true in literature. Archetypes used to be more rigid.

Anti-heroes, in the loosest sense, do bad things but usually end up on the hero’s side of the story. To dig a tiny bit deeper, I would say that anti-heroes tend to embody one or more traits that run counter to what a given society most prizes, but they can be convinced to do the right thing. It might take some cajoling, and they might do it reluctantly, but when push comes to shove, an anti-hero is not going to support a villain at the climax of the story. In the absence of a true villain though, or if they can’t see the villain for what they are, anti-heroes might choose not to help the hero.

The traits your anti-hero embodies depend on what is highly valued in a given society. in time periods when honor was more heavily prized, we see anti-heroes behaving dishonorably (perhaps stealing or skipping out on military duty) before ultimately doing the right thing. A lot of historical fiction, especially historical military fiction, relies on this. In historical fiction, anti-hero soldiers might steal gold or abandon their post, but they will never hurt a child, for instance. Meanwhile, the classic heroes may never abandon their post, and they might not get the girl, but they alone retain their honor at the end of the story. The season one finale of The Musketeers is a perfect example of this!

Aramis: So, at the end of it all, what do we have? …No glory.

Porthos: No money.

D’Artagnan: No love.

Aramis: None of the things that make life bearable.

Athos: We have honor.

Porthos: Hmm.

Aramis: I can live with that.

D’Artagnan: For honor then!

Porthos: Still… a little money would be nice.

(I know this show is ten years old and based on The Three Musketeers, but I have not watched season 3 yet, please do not spoil it for me!)

Today we don’t prize honor as much as we prize love or success, so characters acting dishonorably isn’t as big of a deal. Modern anti-heroes then step out on their spouses or cheat their way to the top and we find ways to forgive them for that because they did it in pursuit of love or success.

Some consider the modern classic to be Severus Snape in Harry Potter. He is a jackass who once sided with a Hitler-esque figure (Voldy) and only came to the right side out of guilt that the woman he loved was going to die. He then spends the rest of his life being a bitter man who is cruel to almost everyone but is ultimately loyal to the good guys. He dies a hero, but that doesn’t erase how awful he often was in life.

On the complete other end of the anti-hero spectrum is Han Solo, from Star Wars. He starts out as a sarcastic smuggler, only really out for fast money and faster ships. At first, he only helps Leia because she’s beautiful. It takes a while for him to see the Rebels’ cause as worthy, and even then he’s never really all in. Over and over again we’re told that Han thinks it’s dumb to risk his life in a war they’ll probably lose, but he does it for lust love.

The thing is, in US culture we highly prize individuality, wealth, and the Robin Hood-esque figure that steals from the rich, so a lot of people forget that Han’s selfish tendencies are meant to be flaws. It helps of course that he’s dashing and charming and has a heart of gold; we’ll forgive a lot if it’s masked by a good smile. But Han’s personality is so revered that US culture has remade him into a classic hero. Strictly speaking, he’s not though.

Perhaps the least questionable example is Loki, especially the modern MCU take on him that we get in his own show. Loki is a trickster god, and his tricks are sometimes amusing pranks and sometimes they screw with the fabric of reality. You never know what you’re going to get when Loki enters the picture, and that unpredictability is part of what makes him an anti-hero. That combined with his tendency to lie, sleep around, and duck his responsibilities make him… well, not hateable but frustrating, especially if you’re Thor. But at the end of the day, Loki is usually on Thor’s side. He might drag his feet and whine and try to get out of responsibility, but he doesn’t always abandon the good guys when they need him. This is really classic anti-hero behavior.

And I could go on. Jack Sparrow is an anti-hero, Bonnie and Clyde, even Robin Hood… I mean, the Wikipedia list of fictional anti-heroes has over 500 characters listed, and it only goes back to Shakespeare. But part of what makes me so interested in talking about anti-heroes is our love for them. We love anti-heroes so much, and I am so fascinated by the psychological implications of why.

Through their stories, anti-heroes allow us to explore bad (or “bad”) choices, things that we would never do. Anti-heroes steal and lie and cheat; they rob casinos and they shoot bad guys and they kiss the hottie they just met. Just like rollercoasters give us a safe outlet to explore physical danger, watching anti-heroes gives us a way to interact with people who in real life we might shy away from. Think about it—it would be fun to be friends with Loki, but would you be excited about your child dating him?

Given our subject, I am legally obligated to include this song. I’m sorry, I don’t make the rules.

I think this is an especially potent question because anti-heroes are often portrayed as dangerously attractive. Where classic heroes are clean-cut with sweet smiles, anti-heroes often glitter in the dark. They are the perfect avatar for people with “But I can fix him” complexes because, well, in many stories anti-heroes do get “fixed.” They mend their ways and do the right thing and end the story celebrating with the hero, but there’s always a hint that their transformation was temporary. Han Solo goes back to smuggling.

Psychologist Carl Jung wrote about our shadow sides—the impulses of the id that we learn to suppress in order to exist within polite society because they’re considered “unacceptable.” What exactly those impulses are varies within each society and even within subcultures. It might be theft or sex or violence. Even when we know we shouldn’t, sometimes we want those things anyway. We each struggle with this to varying degrees every day. So watching anti-heroes seize those opportunities, follow those impulses? We can’t help but cheer, even if we know we’re not going to go home and follow in their footsteps.

I mean, just look at us cheering for the orcas sinking ships in the waters off Gibraltar. None of us are going to go out and sink a yacht, but we’re also not rushing to stop them. Orcas are this month’s ultimate anti-heroes. And maybe it was always in the name—killer whale? Combining the name of the most peaceful creature on earth with the most violent crime known to man? Come on. That is anti-hero nirvana.

Anti-heroes give us a safe way to be bad, with the reassurance that we can always be redeemed. Unlike every other hero, anti-heroes get to live the full gamut of the human experience, even the dirty parts. While classic heroes are trapped in their ivory towers, anti-heroes get to muck around in the messiness of humanity and still get invited back. That’s part of why we love them.

This can lead people down a dangerous path though. Once you start excusing bad behavior, it becomes easier to excuse worse and worse behavior. We see this a lot in true crime communities when some people’s interest in the crime starts to verge into admiration for the criminal. This is how people in real life end up in cycles of abuse. They think they’re dating Jack Sparrow but they’re actually dating Johnny Depp. They think he can be “tamed” with love, but he just destroys everyone around him. I even hesitated to use Severus Snape as an example because his treatment of his students is pretty bad, especially Neville Longbottom. Rowling let Snape be too bad to ever be fully redeemed—in a line between anti-hero and villain, he’s got more than one foot on the bad side. But we excuse a lot for love and heartbreak so Snape gets by; I’d be interested to see if that excuse holds up in fifty years.

Further, I’d suggest that everyone give a lot of thought to the characters in “prestige” TV—The Sopranos, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Succession. Sometimes these characters are downright evil but their world is portrayed as so amoral that they still look like heroes. These characters are anti-heroes in the most literal sense of the term: They are the protagonists of their shows, but they’re the opposite of our classic heroes, the anti hero in the sense of ‘anti-’ meaning ‘opposite of’. And sometimes they neither come back to the good side nor get their comeuppance.

This is one way the term has become complicated in recent years. This happened in books too, for the record—Lolita is the classic example. It’s told from the point of view of a rapist and child abuser, but because it’s told from his point of view he is the protagonist and the reader is implicated in his crimes. Humbert Humbert is the protagonist, but he’s a monster. He’s an anti-hero in the most literal sense, but we don’t (or shouldn’t) cheer for him.

I think we need a new term, to be honest. The gulf of difference between Humbert Humbert and Han Solo is too great, yet today we’d file them under the same archetype title. I don’t think it makes sense any longer.

If it were up to me, today I’d coin Shadow Heroes for characters like Han Solo and Loki. It rests on Jung’s idea of Shadow sides and would represent people who are otherwise good but act on their “bad” impulses. Anti-heroes then, can be Humbert Humbert and Walter White and the Roys. They don’t have to be redeemed, they can have their universes where goodness doesn’t get rewarded and badness doesn’t get punished.

So, how do you write one of these characters?

First, I guess decide if you’re aiming for Han Solo or Humbert Humbert. If you’re aiming for the latter, I’d say write a villain but make him the main character. Don’t read any further.

If you’re aiming for Han Solo, then figure out what your culture—and the culture in your work—values and find a way to rebel against that, but make sure they don’t cross the line into outright immorality.

Next, make them hot; anti-heroes are almost never “handsome” or “beautiful” they’re sexy. It’s part of our weird Western moral value assigned to attraction that we inherited from Christianity—we can appreciate beauty, but when it leads to temptation and arousal, then it’s “bad.” Anti-heroes are always tempting.

Included in that: give them an edgy sense of humor, an edgy outfit, anything that toes the line between just enough and too much. Compare the outfits of Milady de Winter and Constance Bonacieux (this is the BBC’s The Musketeers take). You don’t need me to tell you which of these characters is the anti-hero/villain and which is the ally. Their poses help, but it’s also depicted in Milady de Winter’s outfit. It’s excessive and luxurious—ropes jewels around her neck, pearls sewn into her sleeves. It sexualizes her a lot more than Constance Bonacieux’s outfit does. The difference in their clothes also reflects a class difference, of course, but de Winter’s hair and outfits are always a little excessive while Constance’s almost never are. (Historically Milady de Winter is more of an outright villain than an anti-hero, the 2014 series shakes a few things up, including her motivations and how she grows, so I’ve included her here.)

Next, consider their ending very carefully. Some anti-heroes die at the end, some survive the story. Usually, when they die, it’s their big redeeming moment—they sacrifice themselves for the hero. Other times, they die because the moral arc of the story is skewed toward a strict idea of what’s right, and anti-heroes can’t survive in that world. In some cases, they die as a result of something they did before they changed sides. Then, it’s a lesson to the reader/viewer that their bad things looked fun but have a price. If they survive the story, consider how transformed they are; will they go back to their old ways? If so, hint at that.

Finally, have fun with it. Anti-heroes tap into the forbidden fruit that lies just beyond our reach. You’ll have to reach for it.

Thanks for reading! Let me know in the comments what you think of our anti-heroes—Are they your favorite?

Leave a comment

Also, I hope you liked this hero series! Let me know your thoughts—maybe I can come up with more character and craft series in the future.

Our July virtual write-ins have been scheduled! Are you joining?

Finally, last week a big story I wrote about the closure of one of the oldest specialty coffee shops in the US was published. It was a very fun story to write, and I’d love it if you checked it out.

FYI: A few of the links in this post are affiliate links. That just means if you click through a buy a book, I’ll get a few cents of profit but it won’t cost any more for you.

Read more

Thank you for bearing with my tangents in May! I was really feeling overwhelmed and frustrated, but I’m feeling better now. And I’m ready to get back into the hero mini-series I started back in April.

We’ve already gone over Classic Heroes and Everyman Heroes. If you haven’t yet, I recommend checking them out first because I’ll be using them to compare and contrast the tragic hero archetype. Without further ado, Tragic Heroes!

Want to hear this essay read aloud in my very appealing Texas/California mishmash of an accent? Upgrade to paid today!

Subscribe now

Tragic hero almost sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? Don’t heroes always win? Not these guys, unfortunately.

In the most simple definition, tragic heroes are classic heroes gone wrong. They’re doing their best, but not only is their best not the best (like our everyman heroes), but they have a fatal flaw that means the story ends badly for them. This is the key—tragic heroes end in tragedy. It’s where the name comes from. Good examples of this trope are Hamlet and Jay Gatsby.

Everyone remembers the story of Hamlet, right? (If not, just follow me on Instagram, I can’t seem to stop talking about him lately.) Hamlet is just a college student doing frat boy things when his dad is murdered. The rest of the play is motivated by his desire to avenge his father’s death. Unfortunately, this obsession ends up costing him his life (don’t cry spoiler, the play was published in 1603).

Jay Gatsby’s life follows a similar tragic trajectory. He falls in love with Daisy Buchanan and gets rich just to impress her. The book is motivated by his desire to win her back. Unfortunately, that obsession ends up costing him his life. (Again, the book was published in 1925, y’all.)

I happened to pick two main characters whose obsessions are their downfall, but tragic heroes can have other fatal flaws. Romeo and Juliet are tragic heroes too—their flaws are that they’re terrible communicators and impulsive. Hester Prynne, in The Scarlet Letter, is another—her flaw is that she is too loyal and noble to name her lover, leading to her ostracization from the village while he walks free.

There are two key factors to a tragic hero:

1. They’re essentially good people who get a little sidetracked by love or trauma.

2. Their story ends sadly.

It’s in the name—tragic heroes live tragic lives. But they are heroes at their core. They mean well, even if a good therapist would discourage a lot of their behavior.

Tragic heroes are very similar to anti-heroes. And I find that, often, people who aren’t reading critically confuse the two. They take any flaw to mean that a character is either an anti-hero or a tragic hero, without seeing the differences between them. But there are two main differences between tragic heroes and anti-heroes:

1. Motivation. Tragic heroes always mean well, whereas anti-heroes don’t necessarily. I’ll get more into in my anti-heroes final installment, but the key to remember is that tragic heroes are trying to do the right thing.

2. Their endings. Anti-heroes can have happy endings, whereas tragic heroes never do.

You might be familiar with Oedipus of the Freudian Oedipus Complex (and the famous Oedipus Rex play by Sophocles). He often gets lumped in with tragic heroes but I would argue that he’s more of an anti-hero, or even a villain. The problem with Oedipus is that he is prideful and he kills people. He is not an essentially good person. Romeo might be impulsive and a bit of a fuckboy and Jay Gatsby might not have come by his money honestly, but they don’t feel good about murder. They are driven to kill when Plan A doesn’t go well. They are good people who got sidetracked.

Oedipus just kills the king because they annoy each other. The two characters just crossed paths, Oedipus isn’t fighting the king for something noble. That’s not decent person behavior!

Whereas Hamlet is a great example of a tragic hero because he initially tries to make his uncle confess to murder with a play. That’s good kid behavior! Murder gets introduced to the plot eventually because Hamlet loses his mind, but he doesn’t set out to kill anyone.

Tragic heroes remain heroes because the audience empathizes with them throughout the story, even as they fail. We empathize with Hamlet, it’s much harder to empathize with Oedipus.

To set up a good tragic hero story, it’s necessary to have strong villains, weak allies, and other outside forces. For instance, Hamlet only loses in his bid for vengeance because he’s young and inexperienced. He doesn’t have good guidance from a mentor figure and his allies—Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Ophelia—all have their own stuff distracting them from the main mission. Moreover, unlike classic heroes, tragic heroes tend to not be good at the inspirational “rally the troops” type of speech. They can get people on their side for the easy stuff, but they usually end up alone when they have to face the final challenge.

Is Anakin Skywalker a Tragic Hero?

This question is also known as: How to divide a fandom with six words.

Anakin starts out good, right? He’s a jedi and wants to fight for justice against the Empire. But his fears of losing Padmé lead him to the dark side and he becomes Darth Vader, a formidable villain.

Anakin is definitely a tragic hero in the prequels. And if he had died instead of becoming Vader, this question would be easy to answer. But his time as a terrifying villain in Episodes four, five and six makes the question a bit fraught. It’s hard to call someone who is actively fighting for genocide a hero of any kind.

In the end, Anakin comes back to the right side. He saves his son, Luke, by sacrificing himself. But is that enough to redeem the harm he caused as Darth Vader? Usually, tragic heroes don’t cause a lot of pain to other people. The pain they cause is usually restricted to their direct enemy. Anakin breaks that rule.

It’s quite a character arc, one that’s really only possible in a longer series. Arguably, Anakin doesn’t have to occupy just one role, just like humans don’t occupy just one role their entire lives.

Interestingly, Elphaba in Wicked follows a similar character arc as Anakin! She means well and does her best, but eventually is misunderstood and ostracized from Oz. Jaded and upset, she becomes the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz and dies without ever redeeming herself.

I hope you enjoyed our third installment in the heroes mini-series! Let’s get the debate about Anakin going in the comments.

Leave a comment

Don’t forget about our June writing hours! We get together, we write together, we commiserate. It’s a good time. Our next one is on June 24th at 10 am PT.

RSVP Here

Psssst—paying subscribers get access to extra sessions! Learn more about them here.

And, finally, if you like my work you can also check out my podcast, Unruly Figures. It’s a celebration of rebels, rule-breakers, and ne’er-do-wells across time. Recently I’ve covered Hans Christian Andersen and Alan Turing. Come join us!

Read more

Writing and then posting content on the internet has created this odd Möbius strip-like cycle of genuine, fulfilling creative expression—followed by this absolute, undeniable loss of self. And this loss of self has happened rather quickly and I have found it to be increasingly unbecoming of me.

It struck me. Froze me in my tracks. The whole post did.

I have found myself, lately, thinking over the creative decisions I’ve made in my life, what’s gotten me to where I am now. I was rubbing this worry stone in my head with last week’s post too. I wouldn’t change a thing and also can’t continue this way.

Last night, I sat down at 11 pm, up against a deadline for a submission window. I needed to write a 2,000-6,000 word essay—wanted to, as well. It’s the kind of essay I used to post here all the time. It’s the kind of essay I wanted to stop writing every other week because it felt too much like ripping myself open for the internet’s hyenas to feast on. It’s the kind of essay that terrifies me and thrills me—the literary equivalency of a perfect storm, the only place that I want to exist, creatively.

I pulled that essay from the depths of my soul, yanked it out like an infected tooth with floss tied to a doorknob. It hurt, it bled, it was a relief when it was over. It took five hours to write, from 11 pm to 4 am, and then another hour for me to decompress enough to fall asleep.

I had forgotten how much I love to write in the dead of night, when there is no one else around, when I'm not expected to do anything or be anywhere and no one is going to hold anything against me. I've spent my late twenties and early thirties thinking I'm not allowed to write like this, that I have to conform my artistic schedule to the patterns of suburban life. If I want the spouse, the picket fence, and the happy home, then art couldn’t coexist in the time frame that felt most natural. For years, I’ve wrestled my artistic impulses into the measured cadence of suburban expectations. Sleeping from 1 am to 8:30 am was my rebellious allowance, a sheepish white flag written using the unassailable science of circadian rhythms and chronobiology.

But this late-night writing, tucked into the quiet blanket of darkness, is the only way to write from my soul and not from my frontal cortex’s concerns of what will sell. Who cares if [redacted] doesn't like this essay? It wasn't for them, it was for me. And that’s the fucking point of writing anything.

I was going to come up with some more packaged way to say this, some sanitized, peppy, happy way to say that if your art doesn’t thrill you and terrify you in equal parts, then what, exactly, is the point? If you’re not right up against your edge, staring into the abyss of the creative unknown, then what the hell are you doing?

What the hell am I doing?

This onslaught of AI art has made this an urgent issue in my mind, a worry stone to add to the pile I keep on the desk in my mind, the desk inside a cave that overlooks an unknown valley where monsters lurk. Then wrote about this too, just this morning, and I felt a relief because he’d put words to a thought I couldn’t: That capitalism is cannibalizing art to make it real estate, to continue its long-established pattern of reducing anything soulful into a quantifiable investment, a bullshit practice meant to subdue something they’re afraid they can’t understand.

We can’t let it.

A computer-generated Starry Night will never understand why Van Gogh framed that painting the way he did. Expanding it to show the parts of the town left out doesn’t automatically make it better. More is not more.

Just like conforming an artistic practice to the boundaries of capitalism doesn’t automatically make it more legitimate or acceptable.

I wrote that essay last night by confronting the caverns of my soul, where dripping water echoes and eerie eyes stare out, floating in the dark without bodies. Perhaps it’s good, perhaps it’s not; perhaps it will sell, perhaps it won’t. That’s not the fucking point.

Yesterday, Vanity Fair published an article on Caroline Calloway, student-turned-scammer, a certain segment of the internet’s favorite beautiful girl to hate. I followed Calloway for a while, then got exhausted during the “I Was Caroline Calloway”/“I Am Caroline Calloway” set pieces. I muted her, then unfollowed her. I forgot about her for a while.

The author of the piece seems aware that she is a participant in the ongoing performance of Caroline Calloway. (How willing/unwilling she is as a participant is up for debate—she wrote the story, after all. Maybe her editor made her, maybe she pitched it.) By the end of the piece, she comes to the conclusion that Calloway is a con artist with an emphasis on artist. She’s a performance artist and her life, her lies, her book deals, and her scams are a 21st-century canvas. I’m fascinated by this interpretation of Calloway. I like it, even. Maybe she is conscious of what she’s doing, maybe she is deliberately showing us the folly of expecting art to conform to contracts and capitalism. She makes promises only to pull the rug out from followers; with every interview, she seems to ask, “Do you get it yet?” CHAOS IS THE BRAND, she once wrote.

Chaos is the art.

I don’t want my art to conform to the polite rules of suburban capitalism. I don’t want to write from 7 am to 8 am every day before I go do my job. I want to throw tantrums and throw paint and throw literary pasta at a paper wall to see what sticks. Because in those throws are the messiness of being human, which is the only art that really matters.

Is this a change in Collected Rejection’s terms of service? Fuck if I know. I’ll still write here. I’ll finish the heroes series because it interests me. But I’m tired of packaged and sanitized and rules obeyed.

Let’s see what waits in the valley, among the monsters and fog.

Subscribe now

I didn’t have an On Rejection interview lined up this week, so I thought I’d go ahead and write an entry about what I’ve got going on with writing personally right now. I’m never sure if people are into peeks behind the scenes, but I’m dealing with a struggle around how to prioritize creative work, and I think that’s something a lot of creative people can relate to.

If you’re a writer or creative and would like to be interviewed for part of the On Rejection series, get in touch!

email me

There is, simply put, too much in my brain right now. I’ve got this project, the Unruly Figures podcast, ongoing edits for the Unruly Figures book, my freelancing work, and Go Fund Bean all clamoring for my time every day. Those are my public-facing works. But in the background, I’ve got other projects on my mind: Fellowship applications and grant applications and a novel I’m trying to write, plus two non-fiction book proposals that would need some serious research and time dedicated to them before I can even think about taking them to a publisher. All of them feel Important-with-a-capital-I, in that they’re important to me and could be important to other people too.

There is not enough time in the day to work on all of these things. There just isn’t! Even if I didn’t have the tasks of upkeeping a house to do too, even if I could dedicate myself 100% to my work with no outside pulls on my time, there still wouldn’t be enough time to do all this.

(Do y’all remember Peak.Tobi from last summer?)

It’s made worse by the fact that I’ve been doing research on Hans Christian Andersen for the podcast, and he was notorious for getting halfway through a project before abandoning it to work on the next one. He finished some things, but his biographers point out that a lot of his writing projects would be really detailed in the beginning and end in sort of abrupt sketches. Sometimes, once he got an outline down, the project was more or less “finished” in his head and he’d just move on creatively. I keep seeing his example and thinking, “Well, maybe…”

Frankly, it’s causing me a lot of creative anxiety. I am constantly wondering if I’m spending my time on the right things, if what I do day-to-day is in line with what I want to be doing, if Future Valorie is going to be grateful I focused on these things or annoyed about them. If, if, if, if, if….

All of this has forced me to come up with a new reminder that I’ve been telling myself a hundred times per day: You can create everything you want to, but you can’t create it all at once.

Share

Read more

It’s time for part two of the mini-series on heroes! Last time, I covered classic heroes. Today I’m covering Everyman Heroes, which are personally my favorite kind of hero. They’ve always existed, but I would bet that if we could crunch the numbers on it, we would see that number of everyman heroes who serve as the main protagonist has probably skyrocketed in the last seventy-five years.

Before we hop in, I just want to remind everyone that there are a bunch of extra perks for being a paid member of Collected Rejections! You’ll get voiceovers of all the essays, writing prompts every Monday morning, and access to extra virtual writing sessions. You can upgrade here:

Subscribe now

All right, here we go.

You’ve probably come across the term “the everyman.” It’s a way of talking about qualities that are pretty much universal across a culture, if not all of humanity. An everyman type is not specific or special, they’re anybody. The everyman is every man; it’s well-named. And that’s the foundation of this character archetype.

Some well-known everyman heroes include Neville Longbottom, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Edna Pontellier, Bilbo Baggins, Anna, and almost every character Paul Rudd has ever played. You know these characters—even if you don’t recognize their names right away. That’s okay! That’s kind of the point, in fact.

Every one of these characters is just a person. They’re usually nice enough. They have average abilities, average intelligence, average charm, average looks. There’s nothing wrong with them, so it’s rare to hate them, but they’re also not really an archetype that people aspire to. Which sounds mean, I know! I don’t mean it in a bad way; if you’re not on a pedestal you can’t be dragged off of it. Sometimes we love these characters; Anna has a big following among young girls who can’t relate to Elsa’s morose darker side. (“Oh, right, Anna from Frozen,” I hear you saying.) And the older I get, the more I understand Bilbo dragging his feet before setting off on an adventure.

Everyman heroes are almost always normal people who are in the wrong place at the wrong time but decide to rise to the occasion. Neville Longbottom (from Harry Potter), seizing the Sword of Gryffindor to kill Nagini is a perfect example; no one expected it of him, and that’s what makes the moment so satisfying. The reader watched Neville try his hardest but rarely rise above mediocrity for six straight books; in book seven Neville finally comes into his own and it culminates in this feat of bravery and athleticism that no one else was capable of.

Edna Pontellier, the main character of The Awakening by Kate Chopin, is also a great example from literary fiction. She’s just a woman living in New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century. She has artistic aspirations and she proves to be brave enough to leave a loveless marriage (very daring in the 19th century), but she’s not “special” the way that classic heroes are. This was Chopin’s point—this was a work of feminism, showing what life was like for normal women, so Edna had to be as normal as possible.

Even Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are arguably villains in Hamlet, are recast as hapless everyman heroes in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. They stumble through their lives, Hamlet’s tragedy happening in the background, trying to do the right thing but not really sure what the right thing is. They make attempts to rise to the occasion but they’re usually too late or are outsmarted. They’re the least heroic characters who make my list, but I think they count because they are doing their best. Their best just isn’t great.

The decision to try to rise to the occasion is key for the everyman hero archetype. If they don’t try to slay the snake or go on the adventure, then they’re just side characters. Sometimes they can accidentally do stuff; maybe they stumble into the bookcase because they lost their balance tying their shoe, and the bookcase falls and kills the bad guy. You could argue that that’s an everyman hero, but it’s really more of just like… a lucky character. Comedic relief.

The decision to try is what sets everyman heroes apart from their affable friends. They might fail, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern did. They might whine the whole time, like Bilbo. But they make the decision to try and that’s what makes them heroic. If classic heroes are the cream of the crop of humanity, then the everyman hero is the closest most of us will ever get. Most of us have taxes and groceries and jobs—classic heroes don’t deal with any of that. But everyman heroes do! They have overbearing grandmothers and date the wrong guy. They make mistakes. And that’s what makes them relatable. We may all aspire to the pure goodness of a classic hero, but we can all relate to an everyman hero.

I hope you liked this installment! We have two more essays for our hero series. What do y’all want to hear about next?

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading! Come join us for one of our May virtual writing sessions!

Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. That just means if you click through and buy a book, I’ll get a few cents of profit but it won’t cost any more for you.

Read more

I’m here to fulfill the promise I made a month ago of writing a mini-series on heroes. We’re getting started today with the Classic Hero, the one you can’t avoid if you read anything or watch anything ever, because the Classic Hero is everywhere. Nearly all storytelling revolves around the concept of a Classic Hero! Occasionally we get Anti-Heroes and Everyman Heroes and Tragic Heroes, but rarely is a story built around those archetypes.

(You might be screaming “LOKI IS AN ANTI-HERO AND HE HAS A WHOLE TV SHOW.” And you’d be right! But I’m talking about the number of stories—percentage-wise, anti-heroes rarely get their own shows. And, arguably, Loki’s show transforms him into a Classic Hero, though he’s an Anti-Hero in the rest of the MCU. But that’s for another essay.)

Before we hop in, I just want to remind everyone that there are a bunch of extra perks for being a paid member of Collected Rejections! You’ll get voiceovers of all the essays, writing prompts every Monday morning, and access to extra virtual writing sessions. You can upgrade here:

Subscribe now

Okay onto the show!

Harry Potter.

Elsa.

Luke Skywalker.

Katniss Everdeen.

Spiderman.

Matilda.

Captain America.

What do they all have in common?

• Born with and cultivate abilities or talents that we can only dream of;

• Develop unfailing moral compasses, even when it makes their lives harder;

• Generally selfless and willing to put their lives on the lines for others;

• Start out normal, get placed into extraordinary circumstances, and rise to the occasion.

They’re all—obviously—Classic Heroes.

Who Classic Heroes Are

The most common traits of Classic Heroes can almost go unsaid because we’ve all internalized them so heavily. They’re heroes. I mean, they’re heroes. We more or less know what that means.

It means that they’re uniformly good people. Every one of them is the person you want around in a crisis because they’re generally level-headed, calm, and good problem-solvers. They’re usually smart but not really smart.1 (Harry is clever but Hermione is brilliant, that’s the distinction I mean.) They have over-large senses of responsibility; the weight of the world is on their shoulders. Not only do they have a strong sense of justice but feel like they have the right to enforce that justice (earned or not). They want what’s best for the collective, even if that means sacrificing what they personally want. They’re usually athletic and are experts at some sort of physical skill that regular people can cultivate, just not to expert levels.

And as you can see from above, the Classic Hero is also usually the main character. The skills/traits they lack are filled in by their sidekicks. Harry has Ron and Hermione because Hermione is the brains of the operation and Ron is the guide to the wizarding world. Luke has Leia and Han because Han has the skills to get them anywhere and Leia has knowledge and power as a princess. Elsa has Anna and Olaf because Olaf is innocent and happy and Anna is practical and hopeful.

This is also really necessary, by the way. The Classic Hero might be the best of us, but they can’t stand alone. They generally think that they can (think, every time Harry yells about how Voldemort killed his parents!!!!!, as if Voldemort didn’t kill lots of peoples’ parents) but they’re wrong! They need a support network. It usually consists of their mentor, allies, guardian(s), herald, trickster, and shapeshifter.

What else do Harry Potter, Elsa, Luke Skywalker, Spiderman, Matilda, and Captain America all have in common?

• They’re all orphans.

• None of them “get the girl” on screen/in the book.

Why can’t Classic Heroes have healthy homes or happy endings?

The issue with Classic Heroes is that they’re too perfect. They’re ethical and brave and talented and intelligent. They are the best of the best, the cream of the crop of humanity. Which makes it really hard for them to grow.

Sure, there’s always a training montage, right? Luke with Yoda on Dagobah. Captain America gets the serum and learns to use his powers. But training montages only develop a character’s skills. Teachers might impart wisdom as well, but those are just seeds. Pithy one-liners aren’t the same as the emotional growth a character has to do to be interesting and memorable.

So the shortcut to growth is to make them an orphan. Give them that deep wound, a trauma from childhood that no one else can “fix” easily, something that they need to heal themselves. They go out into the world intending to heal others, maybe to prevent others from being hurt like they were (hello, Batman), but in the process, they heal themselves.

They might still come from loving homes (Peter Parker has a great relationship with his aunt) but those homes are never the same as having loving parents. Alternatively, Matilda is not an orphan but she’d be better off as one because her parents are awful. By the end of the story, she’s adopted into a new family.

There are other traumas you could give a Classic Hero, but being an orphan is sort of the easiest. It’s not a trauma that has to be really explained to anyone. It’s also not necessarily a violent crime against the hero that might turn some readers/viewers off. And it’s not easily solved because parents aren’t easily replaceable, even if the hero is adopted into another happy family. Making them an orphan is the easiest way to achieve this, which is why we see it over and over again.2

It kind of sucks, but Classic Heroes need a place to grow from, an internal problem to solve that goes along with their external problem. When they don’t have that, we find the story really shallow. It’s not memorable.

As for “getting the girl”… Well, Matilda is too young, Katniss is never really happy with Peeta, and Peter Parker’s girlfriend/wife Mary Jane always dies. Luke Skywalker is never shown with a love interest (unless you count that kiss with his sister). Until Infinity War, Captain America didn’t end up with Peggy Carter, but it’s still only barely shown on screen.3

One reason for this is that after all that tension and drama, happiness is, uh, boring. Sorry! It’s not boring to live a happy life but it can be boring to read about one. There’s no conflict! And conflict is what makes a story, well, a story.

I mean, this is where really great fan fiction comes in, right? Really great fan fiction breaks that rule often, giving people long, drawn-out happy endings they didn’t get in their original stories. I can’t tell you how many fics I’ve read that are just two characters puttering around after getting married. But, again, that’s not the story. At least, it’s not a commercially viable story. Can you imagine sitting in front of your TV watching two characters drink tea and make doe eyes at each other and do nothing else? That would be great one time when you’re stressed out or sad, but then never again. It’s not exciting to watch. This is why even smutty romance novels end when the two leads figure out their relationship and whatever angst was driving the story ends.

(Psssst! The way to have a happy couple in fiction is to give them something to team up against, like solving a crime or fighting a dictator. Then the moments of domestic bliss are palate cleansers in between big conflict scenes. And yet we still almost never see this! For example, Han and Leia get together in Return of the Jedi but have separated by The Force Awakens.)

If your Classic Hero “gets the girl,” it better be in the last scene. Rowling did exactly this with Harry and Ginny—we don’t know for sure that they get back together until the epilogue.

One Last Thought

I brought up Hermione when I was talking about ‘smart versus too smart’ and I want to circle back to that. She’s interesting to consider here because she is, arguably, a Classic Hero… unless you consider supreme intelligence off-putting in some way. Which Rowling seems to. All of Rowling’s Very Smart Characters are sidelined, usually for unclear reasons. Hermione, Dumbledore, and Lupin are the most obvious examples from Harry Potter, but it shows up in all of her work.4 They’re all brave and talented and even have traumas equal to being orphans. In fact, Dumbledore is an orphan. They could each be Classic Heroes and great protagonists, but Rowling doesn’t render them that way. Rowling treats their intellect as a flaw somehow, even though it’s never said.

Consider this: Hermione as a Muggleborn actually has a more immediate reason to fight Voldemort than Harry. She is in much more direct danger from his rise to power, and she has the motivation of protecting people like herself. She is willing to put herself in harm’s way and is shown to be both athletic and a decent fighter. And by the time Harry defeats Voldemort, Hermione’s parents don’t know she exists. She is, effectively, an orphan too. She has all the Classic Hero qualities. This is sort of why, from a storytelling standpoint, Harry needs the prophecy and personal murder of his parents to mark him out as the one to fight ol’ Voldy. The magic of their twin wand cores and the magic of Harry’s mother’s protection are also involved, but these are purely MacGuffins. Take them away, and there’s no story reason that Hermione shouldn’t defeat Voldemort except that Rowling seemed to want to sideline her.

Compare this to how Q is treated in James Bond. No matter which actor plays him, Q is a genius and talented, just like Hermione, but he’s never portrayed as particularly brave or athletic (especially Ben Whishaw’s Q) which is why he can’t be a Classic Hero. Q might want to sacrifice himself for others, but he’ll never have the skill set that will put him in a position to do so.

But Hermione, Dumbledore, and Lupin are all physically good fighters, talented, intelligent, and just the right amount of traumatized. They should be Classic Heroes, but they’re not shown that way in Harry Potter. Fans might perceive them that way, but that’s not how Rowling wrote them. She reduces them to allies and mentors. Their intelligence is a flaw somehow, for her, which I think says something about Rowling’s values as an author.

Hope you enjoyed our first installment in the heroes mini-series! Let me know what you thought in the comments. Did I miss anything? Am I wrong about Hermione?

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading! I will have our May virtual writing sessions up soon, so don’t forget to check back for those.

And, since we talked about Star Wars a lot today: May the Fourth be with you! If you’re celebrating by going to Disneyland/world and eating those lightsaber churros, I need photos (please).

Read more

I’m writing to you from New York. I’m staying at a friend’s apartment on the northernmost tip of Manhattan, and it’s a wonderful change of pace from the other times I’ve stayed in NYC. Those times, I didn’t know anyone—or the city—so I stayed in loud hostels, remote hotels, and once (memorably) in a hotel near Times Square that only had sheer curtains on the windows, so the room was bathed in the LED cacophony of Times Square all night long. This is infinitely more pleasant!

I’m here on a research trip. There’s still one more round of edits for UNRULY FIGURES, but I’m feeling mentally ready to get started on the next non-fiction project. And there’s little I love more than diving into archives, which I got to do for two days at the New York Public Library this week.

You might remember that I’m also already about a quarter through a fiction book! I don’t think there’s anything wrong with working on more than one writing project at once, as long as you have the time for it and can keep your stories straight.* There was some light research for it that also benefitted from access to the NYPL archive, which was great.

I used to be a pantser, when it came to writing, as opposed to a planner. But the story I’m working on now has required that I plan everything in detail, which has led me to interrogate** the writing conventions that I’ve long simply accepted. All this got me thinking about archetypes in general, and specifically heroes and anti-heroes. Who is the classic hero in my work-in-progress? Are there anti-heroes in UNRULY FIGURES? (Yes, absolutely.) Why do these archetypes work time after time? Do they actually still work?

So I wanted to do a little mini-series about heroes. Because I think—suspect—that the concept of the hero has changed a little in the last 15 or so years. So let’s go.

*Would an essay on how to balance multiple writing projects be something y’all would be interested in reading someday? Let me know in the comments!

**Interrogate sounds so obnoxious, doesn’t it? It’s academic-speak for “question, wonder about, revisit, and generally think, ‘is this right, should this change’?” Can you tell I’ve been in the archives for too long already?

Hero, protagonist, good guy. These are usually thrown around as synonyms when people talk about fiction, but they’re not entirely. At least, not anymore. For generations of classic literature and storytelling, they were. The protagonist was a hero, who is generally a good guy doing the right thing. Today, the protagonist can be a terrible person (think, The Fuck-Up by Arthur Nersessian) or a little more blurred. They’re still the main character, but calling them ‘a good guy’ would be pushing it.

Personally, I think this is what makes modern storytelling fascinating. There’s still room, of course, for our traditional archetypes of heroes, but questioning them and putting them in new contexts makes them more interesting.

So, for our purposes, let’s dissect two of the terms I mentioned:

• Protagonist: The leading character or one of the major characters in a drama, movie, novel, or other fictional text. (from Oxford English Dictionary.)

• Hero: a person who is admired or idealized for courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities. (from Oxford English Dictionary.)

  • the chief male character in a book, play, or movie, who is typically identified with good qualities, and with whom the reader is expected to sympathize.

  • (in mythology and folklore) a person of superhuman qualities and often semidivine origin, in particular one whose exploits were the subject of ancient Greek myths.

Note that the definition of ‘protagonist’ does not put a moral imperative on the character to ‘do the right thing’!

To me, the OED definition of ‘hero’ is particularly interesting because it’s really the definition of a classic hero archetype. But in fiction, there are actually multiple kinds of heroes. I’m going to break down each in the rest of this series, but here’s a quick overview:

• The Classic Hero: This is the OED definition. A classic hero is the one slaying dragons, saving villages, and generally being perfect. And that’s because classic heroes represent all that we value about humans. They’re generally courageous, ethical, intelligent, athletic, loyal, and good-looking. Sometimes they’re funny, but often they’re not. Not because being funny is bad, but because when someone is perfect and then also hilariously funny, it’s too much and no one believes it! We’ll get into that more when I cover classic heroes in detail.

• The Everyman Hero: This is your good guy. They’re not particularly brave or attractive or intelligent, they’re not a star athlete or super-powered in any way. In fact, their life might have been normal—boring, even—if the story hadn’t put them in a position where they had to act. That’s what makes them a hero. In the face of fear or under threat of death, the everyman hero does the right thing. They’re us. They live their lives, get stuck in a situation where they have to rise up to challenge, then go on to live their lives again.

• The Anti-Hero: This is not a villain, but not a good guy. Anti-heroes usually embody qualities we don’t like about ourselves. They might be intelligent, but they’re snarky or conceited about it. They might be athletic, but a showboat about it. They’re often sneaky, sarcastic, and dishonest when it benefits them. Sometimes they’re very funny, and they’re usually good-looking. They might start out as outcasts, or even on the antagonist’s side, but decide to reluctantly help another Hero. But despite all of this, Anti-Heroes are often our favorite characters, and we’ll go into why when I cover anti-heroes in depth.

• The Tragic Hero: To be honest, I go back and forth with whether a tragic hero is really a subset of Hero. Tragic heroes are arguably Everyman Heroes or Classic Heroes, but their stories end sadly. Every hero has a flaw, but the Tragic Hero’s flaw is their fatal downfall. Tragic heroes never get to live a happily-ever-after. They may not even be remembered by the other characters in the story. We’ll talk more about why this is later.

Now, these are not my definitions, I’ve amalgamated them from several sources, including vague memories of middle school English class. What I didn’t remember as well was that in a lot of classic sources, there are actually two more heroes sub-types! I disagree that these are heroes, but for the sake of discussion, I’m including them here:

• The Epic Hero: Think, superhero. Classically, Epic Heroes are more than human. They are our mythological ideals, our demigod children of gods and humans, and they often come from noble birth. Which is why I don’t think this counts as a hero anymore! To wit:

  • The best qualities of the Epic Hero have already been adopted into the Classic Hero archetype.

  • The Marvel Cinematic Universe has single-handedly made popular the question of whether having super-human strength is even good and has complicated those superheroes enough that many of them qualify as Anti-Heroes (Black Widow) or Everyman Heroes (Ant-Man), not Epic Heroes. Super-human powers are no longer special enough to be enough to differentiate one hero from other types of heroes.

  • And most importantly, that pesky idea that an epic hero has to be born of noble birth. The implication is that only upper-class, wealthy people qualify, which makes many readers cringe today. Going back to the OED’s definition of ‘hero’ as ‘a person who is admired or idealized for courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities,’ the Epic Hero born of wealth doesn’t qualify in today’s world. We are getting rid of the idea that wealth equals moral superiority. The realization over time has been that many people use their wealth to do and cover up terrible things; upper-class people are no longer admired just because they’re upper class.

• The Byronic Hero: Made famous by Lord Byron (hence the name) Byronic Heroes are your prickly, brooding guys. In fiction, he usually ends up being a decent guy, but you have to get past an ungracious, inscrutable, off-putting exterior first. My issue with Byronic heroes is mostly just that, well, didn’t I just describe an Anti-Hero? The Byronic Hero does the right thing in the end, he’s just a bit of a dick about it, and that’s Anti-Hero behavior. Furthermore, you might have noticed that I’m using he/him pronouns here because Byronic Heroes are almost never women! Every other hero archetype is gender-neutral, but Bryonic Heroes are almost exclusively men. (I’m putting ‘almost’ only so no one comes after me, but the truth is I can’t think of a single female character I’d classify as Byronic.) To me, that takes it out of archetype territory altogether. If it can’t be embodied by anyone across time and culture, it’s not an archetype.

I think the key to heroes is that they need to be aspirational in some way. For us to see them as heroes, we have to be able to see what they’re doing as impressive, and we have to yearn to be able to rise to the occasion in the same way. Even Tragic Heroes Anti-Heroes are aspirational in their own ways.

As our values change, what we aspire to changes as well. Over time, our heroes keep adapting to those shifting cultural tides, but certain values remain, like doing the right thing and caring for people. Our heroes move with us, and in some ways help us figure out what we care most about.

UPDATE: Here is the rest of the heroes series:

• Classic Heroes: Why Are They Always Orphans?

• Everyman Heroes: They’re Doing Their Best, Okay?

• What Makes a Hero “Tragic”?

• What Makes an Anti-Hero (And Why Are We Obsessed with Them)?

All right, those are the four hero archetypes (and the two I think we could throw away). I’m excited to dive into these more for the next few weeks! I’ll explore how to write them, what makes a hero work, and how heroes define their own villains. Did I miss anything? Let me know in the comments.

Leave a comment

Last week, an article I wrote for Fresh Cup went live. It’s about mourning and coffee and all the coffee shops we lost during the pandemic. You can check it out here.

Huge thank you to all the paying subscribers that help me make this publication possible! If you’d like to upgrade and enjoy all the features of Collected Rejections, you can do that here:

Subscribe now

Read more

Whew, the last few weeks have seen me hurtling from task to task, place to place, like some firecracker with no sense of directional accuracy. I didn’t even realize today was Wednesday until someone texted me saying, “How is the week only half over?” Meanwhile, I’m thinking, “Wait, the week is half over already? It isn’t Monday?”

I’m stepping out of my usual comfort zone of craft essays with a personal bend to tackle a topic that affects me all the time and also drives me a little crazy: Pitching versus submissions, and how to do each. As a writer, I pitch and submit constantly, and as an editor, I receive both frequently (though I’m usually only asking for one). So let’s crack into it.

If you are a writer trying to make money or get noticed, you’re going to encounter pitching and submissions. Both are ways to get your work in front of an editor and potentially make money from them. But they are not the same thing and should not be treated as such. I’m going to go over what they both are and how to approach each one.

What are Submissions?

If you’re writing fiction, you’ll probably run into calls for submissions a lot. Lit journals and small presses put them out a lot, for instance.

Basically, you write a short story, a creative non-fiction essay, a piece of flash fiction, et cetera. You edit it and polish it up. Then, you keep an eye out for when a publication (a journal or press) opens for submissions. You might write the piece to a specific theme for a specific place, or you might write the piece with no idea of where it will go. When submissions open, and your piece is the right theme and word count, you submit the finished piece.

This is the key: Submissions rely on a finished piece that editors or judges will then read and either accept or reject. Some editing can happen after the fact, but it may not!

If you’re thinking this kind of sounds like auditioning for a movie/tv show, you’re not entirely wrong. You go in, perform something that’s already prepared, and hope they accept you. A good director will direct an actor to change things though, and you never prepare the entire script, so I actually think of auditioning as more akin to pitching.

What about plagiarism, you might be asking. Usually, only editors and judges are reading your piece, and they know better. In cases where your piece is published publicly for open judging, that’s usually enough of a paper trail to deter plagiarism (though, not always). I suspect it’s rare that plagiarism comes up in these cases, though not impossible. But that is always going to be true of publishing your work for others to read! So I wouldn’t say that threat is any higher submitting than it is at any other time.

What is Pitching?

Pitching a story is kind of what it sounds like—you toss an editor a ball (a story idea), but it’s up to them to figure out what to do with it. Pitching mostly applies to non-fiction work published in magazines, with news sites, or on blogs. You don’t pitch Penguin Random House, you do pitch The LA Times.* Think news articles, social commentary, event coverage, interviews, book reviews.

The key phrase here is a story idea. A pitch is not a full story, and you should not attach an already-written story to your pitch. Most editors hate this and often will delete pitches with attachments unread for fear of being accused of plagiarism.

Though I do think pitching is similar to auditioning, as I mentioned above. It’s not a complete story but it’s a mostly-finished idea—your take on a role. An editor will act like a director and shape the story.

What about plagiarism, you might be asking again. I get the fear. I myself got very suspicious recently when an editor rejected several pitches I sent in because she “wasn’t interested in them,” then ran the exact same stories a few months later. Can I prove she “stole” the ideas though? No. They were stories about life in LA, and a thousand people were bound to have similar ideas. Maybe the other writers did a better job of pitching them to her and made her interested. A good pitch does that.

*Technically, you could pitch Penguin Random House if you are submitting a non-fiction book proposal. But proposals are very different from pitches.

Okay, How Do I Submit my Work?

The thing about submitting is that there’s not really a hard and fast rule. Well—actually, there’s one and only one: Follow the submission guidelines for each pub.

Every place prefers to read submissions differently. Some don’t want names, some want 10-point font, and some only want submissions for ten minutes a day. You’ll have to go find each individual place you want to submit to and figure out their specific rules. I know this is a pain, but the more you do it the more you’ll start to remember. It often helps to follow the places you want to submit to on twitter because they’ll announce open submission windows (and reminders).

Okay… How Do I Pitch?

Again, editors also prefer to read pitches differently. A lot of places have pitching guidelines you can check out. Here is a set of pitching guidelines I wrote for Calibration Notes. Here are more pitching guidelines for Gastro Obscura. As you’ll see, they’re different! Despite both being loosely food or food-adjacent publications, we want different things. 🥲

However, there are a few rules of thumb:

• Send your FULL idea in 3-5 sentences.

• A pitch is not is a movie trailer. Your pitch should not leave the editor wondering what happens next. It needs to answer all the key questions and give the editor a solid idea of what a story will contain. I get these pitches a lot—I do not want to be in suspense in my inbox, of all places. (I don’t know if anyone does.) Tell me what you’re going to tell me. If you think that’s boring, start your own publication.

• Make sure you’re sending it to the right editor by finding editors on Twitter or checking their mastheads online. Most places that accept pitches will have how to pitch clearly outlined somewhere.

• Use the editor’s name! Show you aren’t just avalanche submitting this pitch but actually want this story in their publication.

• If the pitch is timely, note that.

• If you’ve never worked with the editor, send a link to your portfolio (or to previous stories) so they can read your work.

• Use good grammar and be polite. You’d be amazed by how many pitches I’ve rejected even though the story was interesting because the person emailing me came off rude as hell. The editor/writer relationship is very close, and no one likes working with an asshole. (And if you’re reading this, you’re probably not famous enough to make up for being a dick.)

FAQ:

If I haven’t written anything anywhere, how will an editor know I’m a good writer just from my pitch? Shouldn’t I pre-write my story and attach it?

Well, first of all, a lot of times an editor can tell from a pitch if you’re a decent writer. A well-written pitch is very different from a badly-written one.

But this is also a very reasonable fear. It’s hard to get your foot in the door. My advice is:

1. Craft your pitch meticulously. Make it sound interesting. (But again, not like a trailer!)

2. Self-publish some work. Sign up on Substack then write your best damn essays, articles, etc. They can be made up (and you can say at the end that they’re a work of fiction). I did this once when I wanted to get into writing profiles; I made one up for a fictional coffee person and sent the editor the link. She liked it so much that she assigned me a profile of a real person.

   Start writing today. Use the button below to create your Substack and connect your publication with Collected Rejections

   Start a Substack

Again, don’t pre-write a real story and submit it. For example: Say you want to write about oat milk supplanting almond milk in coffee shops. Great—it’s relevant and timely. But, they might already have a story similar on their site or in production. The editor might want to hire you to write about the next big alt milk that will supplant oat instead (my money’s on macadamia nut milk). You will have wasted all that time pre-writing the almond milk story, and your editor isn’t going to pay you for that!

Is this also how I get an agent for my book?

I have no idea, I don’t have an agent. (You don’t need an agent to have a book published, it turns out.) I recommend checking out Agents & Books for more info on finding an agent:

Agents and Books

The FAQ on how to find an agent and how to write books, all in one place.

By Kate McKean

When should I follow up?

With submissions, you usually don’t. Maybe with smaller journals or presses you can, but get a feel for them first. In their submissions guidelines, they generally mention what silence means (usually: rejection) and how long to wait for a response.

With pitching, I give it two or three weeks. If there’s still no response, follow up one more time. After that, cut your losses and move on. Some editors can’t or won’t respond to all pitches. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Do not—I’m serious here—DO NOT threaten the editor. “I’m going to place it somewhere else if you don’t respond!” Great, do it, and never email me again while you’re at it. You might think it comes off as playful, but in stark black-and-white pixels, it does not. It sounds rude and manipulative.

One thing you can say is, “Hey, this story is kind of timely [repeat date] and if you’re not interested I’d like to try to place it somewhere else before then. If you can, please let me know by [date].” Editors understand that there are lead times for publishing a story! They still may not respond, but at least they won’t remember you as a jerk.

Wait… Lead Times?

Publishing is so so slow. I’m currently working on a piece that will go live at the end of June. So if you have a story about a holiday tradition that has to go live next week to be relevant, no you don’t. You have a story that can go live in 53 weeks.

Holiday pitching starts around Halloween, Halloween stories are pitched around August, Fourth of July stories are pitched in April… You get it.

You need this lead time because it might take a while for a story to find a home! Then you need to research, interview, write, and edit. You’ll submit the story to the editor, they’ll edit it, you’ll edit it, and there might be another round of edits or two. Photography or art needs to happen somewhere along the line. And this might be the only story on your desk but it’s certainly not the only story on theirs. It just takes time! Take that into account when pitching.

In Conclusion

Pitching and submitting, while they may seem similar, are incredibly different. To know whether your story will be a pitch or a submission, ask yourself these questions:

1. Is it fiction or non-fiction? The first is usually a submission, and the second is usually a pitch, though creative non-fiction pieces vary.

2. Am I reporting on something, doing event coverage, or interviewing someone? It’s a pitch.

3. What does the publishing editor want? Do whatever they say.

If you’re ever in doubt, reach out! I know people think Twitter is dead now, but it is perfect for moments like this. Reach out to journals, magazines, or editors if you ever have any questions about pitching and submitting to them.

Okay, that’s pitching versus submissions. Did I miss something? Do you have any more questions? Drop them in the comments and I’ll try to answer them soon.

Leave a comment

Also, this week I’m in talking about how much money baristas actually make (and other people in the coffee industry). It's a great conversation, come check it out!

BOSS BARISTA

What Baristas Actually Make with Adam JacksonBey and Valorie Clark

Listen now (39 min) | My guests today are Adam JacksonBey and Valorie Clark, two members of Go Fund Bean, a non-profit organization born during the pandemic when thousands of hourly coffee workers—baristas and beyond—were laid off. Go Fund Bean seeks to empower hourly coffee workers through mentoring programs, grant programs, and most recently, through a comprehensive salary…

Listen now

3 years ago · Ashley Rodriguez

Huge thank you to all the paying subscribers that help me make this publication possible! If you’d like to upgrade and enjoy all the features of Collected Rejections, you can do that here:

Subscribe now

Have a good rest of your week, loves! (It’s Wednesday?!)

Read more

Hope you’re all doing well, wherever in the world you are. I’m very excited about the 100 Rejections Challenge that I announced last week. If you missed it, we’re working together to collect 100 rejections in 2023. There will be prizes! And community! Come check it out and sign up by February 12.

Take On the Challenge

I’m going to say a thing, and before I say it I want to say something else: I love Marvel movies. I’m a sucker for the MCU, for the audacious project they did to tell a story across 20-something movies, and I can wax rhapsodic over the character development arc of Tony Stark/Iron man from Iron Man (2008) to Avengers: Endgame (2019). I like Marvel.

Okay. Now, The Thing:

The stakes in Marvel vehicles are BIG. It’s almost always a world ending, half of humanity disappearing, villain destroying a major European city, aliens invading, gods warring type stuff. The stakes are, arguably, too big too often.

As I said, I like that stuff. It’s fun. All I ask of movies is that I have a good time watching them, and I nearly always have a good time if something from the MCU is on. But that doesn’t mean that every story has to have stakes that high. It’s so much. Emotions run too strongly when the fate of the universe is around every corner.

I hear from so many other writers who worry that ‘fate of the universe’ type stories are all that sell now. Whether it’s movies, tv, books, or video games—if it doesn’t go big, it gets sent home. So they think they have to tailor their storytelling to it, making their stories bigger than they originally envisioned to try to fit this trend.

I’m here to tell you: You don’t have to. The stakes in your story can be smaller than this. They have to be big enough to feel important—for instance, it would take a real comedic talent to get me through a story about someone debating whether or not to get the mail for 300 pages—but the stakes do not have to be the size of the world will end if my character doesn’t do this right. If the story you feel called to tell is about a cast of characters deciding the fate of the world, great! Lots of books are about that. Leigh Bardugo’s Shadow and Bone series does this quite well!

But if you don’t feel called to write that, that’s okay too.

I started thinking about this a lot after I broke my rib. Once I was home from the hospital, I realized that my worldview had shifted a little. I was nervous a lot, my anxiety out of control in the face of both being severely injured and taking prescribed opioids to deal with the pain. I’m not saying the last three weeks would make an interesting story (they wouldn’t), but that the shift happened over something relatively small. The stakes weren’t world-ending, it was a broken bone. But it changed me.

Your stakes can be that small because human psychology is that sensitive. Think about the last time you were anxious or scared—was it because the world was ending, or was it smaller than that?

The basic journey of any character is Normal life → Face an obstacle → Adjust → Fail → Adjust again → Figure it out → New becomes normal. The obstacle in Marvel is usually “Bad Guy Wants to Take Over” but it doesn’t have to be. It can be “Broke a bone” or “Failed a test” or “Didn’t get the job.” For the right character, each of those obstacles is big. It’s not ‘fate of the universe’ but it can feel like the end of their life. And getting past that is still a good character arc.

So lower the stakes a little and see what happens. Maybe the story is more interesting that way.

Yesterday I was featured in in a great post on how to promote your book. Check it out here!

Huge thank you to all the paying subscribers that help me make this publication possible! If you’d like to upgrade and enjoy all the features of Collected Rejections, you can do that here:

Subscribe now

Don’t forget to check out The 100 Rejections Challenge! I’m really excited about doing this challenge with all of you—I think we’re all going to get a lot out of it, including some acceptances!

Read more

I still can’t believe the amazing response to my last essay “Who are we conforming for?” You all really showed up for each other in the comments, having an incredible discussion about conforming and creative expression. It was really lovely. If you haven’t yet, check that one out.

Last week I also tried out an accountabilibuddy thread, and it seems like you all loved it. I haven’t repeated it this week, but I will next week in the chat feature. So if you haven’t downloaded the Substack app yet, get on that.

Read Collected Rejections in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Other than that, I’ve just been healing up from breaking my rib on Sunday the 15th. It’s been absolute chaos trying to exist when I can’t pick up more than 1 pound of weight at a time.

How have you all been? Drop what’s holding you back in the comments.

Leave a comment

Okay, on with the show!

Every once in a while, I get an email or a reply to a tweet that is so mean, so unfair, so far out of left field, that I think to myself, "Wow, you sure did this on purpose. You deliberately went out of your way to take what I wrote in the worst way possible."

Twitter is moldering with this behavior. It's nothing new, of course; history is full of exasperated people wondering why their enemies deliberately twisted their every word. It has happened in the past and I’m sure that it will (unfortunately) keep happening in the future.

This behavior is called reading in bad faith.

(It's also called 'being a little bit of a dick.')

Bad faith readers are people who are always going to assume the worst of what anyone writes. They search out ambiguous phrases, hot-button words, and tangential ideas, then twist them into moral or intellectual failures of the author. Sometimes they're just taking an idea out of context; sometimes they're maliciously twisting it beyond recognition.

If you are a human who writes and allows anyone else to read your writing, you will encounter bad-faith readers. It happened to me with my tweet about climate change that went viral. One night I was making a silly little joke about semantics and the next morning I was fending off a flood of tweets disparaging me, my mother, and my mother's mother as stupid idiots who wouldn't understand science or religion or Santa Claus if he and Jesus came down my chimney and beat me to death with a chemistry textbook. It was... astonishing.

Had that happened to me even a few years earlier, I probably would have deleted my whole Twitter and gone into hiding. Luckily I was already thirty and tired so I mostly just ignored them all until they got bored and left me alone.

It could have been scary though. I don't blame people who delete and lockdown when their tweets go viral--the mob is scary.

But sometimes, people live in that fear. It becomes consuming, dominating. They get so afraid of their work being interpreted badly that they don't put their work out there at all.

And we can't have that. Not if we're going to live our fullest lives as our most creative selves.

So, how do you spot bad faith readers?

If you're a human adult, you've already interacted with at least one of these people. It might have been a family member, a boss, a friend of a friend--someone who believed you could do no right. Even your most well-intentioned nicest gesture was taken badly.

Bad faith readers aren’t people who just didn’t like your work. You and your work are not for everyone. And that’s good! If you aren’t encountering people who don’t like your creative expression, you aren’t either encountering enough people, or your work is milk toast and not saying something.

Bad faith readers are the commenters on Goodreads who call you a Nazi because your novel so much as mentions Germany in the 1940s--even if it's set in an alternate reality where Hitler was killed during the Beer Hall Putsch and the Holocaust never occurred.

Bad faith readers are the people who don't follow you on Twitter but suddenly quote-tweet your vague 8 am tweet about feeling sick and use it to call you an alcoholic and a drug addict and a bad parent.

Bad faith readers are the people boycotting your research because it didn't explain in detail the daily lives of enslaved women living in South Carolina in 1830...because your article was about single moms in New York in the 1890s.

Basically, bad faith readers are the ones criticizing your work without actually engaging with it. Their criticism often has little to no ground in what you've actually written. For instance: The daily lives of enslaved women in South Carolina is a good topic and it deserves further examination, but if you're writing 1000 words on single moms in New York after slavery was abolished, that might not be the right place for that other conversation. It’s not on topic, and bringing it up means half-assing two subjects instead of whole-assing one.

You can check if someone is reading your work in bad faith in a few simple steps:

1. Compare their criticism to your work's central idea. Do they even match up? If what they're criticizing is not even the point of what you wrote, you might be dealing with someone reading in bad faith.

2. Check for comprehension. Is it possible that they're confused? Was something you wrote complicated, or unclear? If not, then they might be reading it in bad faith.

3. Consider the venue. Did they quote tweet you? Or did they email you privately? Usually, someone who approaches you privately means well and is saying something because they think it's right. And conversely, when someone is doing it in public, it's usually to score points at your expense. Neither is necessarily an indicator of good or bad faith (the people DMing me telling me to kill myself are not acting in good faith), but it's a quick way to get a base-level assessment.

For the record: I am not saying that every criticism you receive is someone reading your words in bad faith. I have also received plenty of very valid criticism! I, like all humans that have ever existed or will ever exist, make mistakes all the time. Here's what we do when we receive valid criticism: Apologize, fix it if possible, make a mental note of where things went wrong, and move on. That's all. We don't lash out, we don't beat ourselves up, and we don't allow it to stop us from ever trying again.

Subscribe now

What do we do with bad faith readers?

Take a deep breath.

Take another one.

Okay.

Please don't argue with them. Really, you'll tire yourself out. If someone is deliberately reading your writing in bad faith, they're going to read your arguments in bad faith too.

Try to find a way to ignore them. The thing bad faith readers want most is to provoke you, to get you to say something out of hurt or anger or shock that then proves them right. They would love nothing more than for you to respond and say something even vaguely mean that they can twist out of context for their own purposes.

You might think silence is worse. Your sense of integrity or honor or self-protection might be flaring up and saying that this attack on your reputation or intelligence or work cannot stand! And I totally get that, and there’s a time and place for returning an attack. (Hint: It’s mostly when lawyers are agreeing that a statement is libel or defamation.) Most of the time, hitting back is only going to invite the mob in further. It’s blood in the water and they are sharks. With rabies. Who are starving.

(Can sharks get rabies? I simply will not look it up because the imagery is more important. No one answer me.)

On social media, I tend to mute these people. I do not block them unless they keep retweeting stuff and encouraging their followers to harass me. If you block them, they'll be able to tell they've been blocked, and that gives them both satisfaction that they've upset you and more fodder to use for criticism. They can't tell when they've been muted.

It's normal to feel hurt or embarrassed or scared when these sorts of reactions show up in your life. I almost always do. But don't act out of those feelings. Wait until the first flush of it has faded, when you're thinking clearly, then decide what to do.

Remind yourself: This behavior is more about them than it is about you. You are the unlucky person in their sights today, and tomorrow or next week it will be someone else. If you want to, feel sad for them--it must be lonely to move through life so antagonistically.

Next: Count yourself in good company. Literally every famous person goes through this at some point in their life. Distract yourself from these readers by going to see how your favorite celebrity dealt with this. Or, heck, just go look at pictures of your favorite baby animal.

Do whatever you need to in order to self-soothe after dealing with them, then sit down and keep creating. Don't let them scare you off. The world needs your work.

Share

Reminder: These voiceovers will go behind a paywall starting next week, along with a lot of other fun features. If you upgrade before January 31, you can get an annual plan for 20% off!

Get 20% off for 1 year

If you liked this post but can’t commit to a subscription, I get it! You can tip me, as a treat. 

Want more of my work? This week on my podcast, Unruly Figures, I posted part two of the story of Catherine de Medici, the Renaissance Queen of France who has been long maligned by historians as a poisoner. Together, we’re going to reclaim the Serpent Queen.

I haven’t been writing much at all lately while I grieve my father’s passing. But, a piece I wrote last October went live last week on Sprudge: When Coffee Becomes a Religious Experience. It explores the varied relationship coffee has had with religions around the world, and I had so much fun researching and writing it.

Last week I published my first book review here. I’d love to hear what you think:

Collected Rejections

A Tale of Two British Memoirs

Strictly speaking, these aren’t actually both memoirs. But in a looser sense, they both are, and that’s why I wanted to talk about them together. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve read Madly, Deeply: The Diaries of Alan Rickman and Spare, the memoir recently released by Prince Harry. I read these together partly just because they coincidentally happene…

Read more

3 years ago · 10 likes · 4 comments · Valorie Clark

Finally, if you liked this and think your friends might too, please forward it on! That’s how we all discover new fun things, right?

Share Collected Rejections

Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. That just means if you click through and buy a book, I’ll get a few cents of profit but it won’t cost any more for you.

Subscribe now

Well hello there,

It has been a minute since I wrote an essay here. I am so glad to be back. It’s a little uncanny—my time away wasn’t exactly fun or restful, and yet today’s essay poured out of me in under thirty minutes. I had worried about coming back—What if I’m not ready, or don’t have anything to say? But as soon as I opened the page, the words flowed out. It felt good.

Thank you for all the well wishes everyone left on my note about my father’s passing last month. I suspect people often don’t know what to say to an internet stranger about their loved one’s death, but if I’ve learned anything in the last month it’s that saying anything at all is appreciated.

All right, without further ado, let’s crack into this.

A couple of days ago, my friend and I were lamenting that people in LA aren’t weird enough. I mean, people here are weird because this city warps everyone’s sense of normalcy, but it’s a cultivated weird—Instagram weird, come to life. It’s like we all watched Carrie Fisher’s house tour or Guillermo del Toro’s house tour and said “Okay, this is the acceptable way to be weird in Hollywood.” And ran with it.

Then, in her first essay of the year, Anne Helen Petersen talked about reviewing her personal teen archive. As an adult, she could recognize how her teen self was trying to insist on her individuality while still being accepted by her peers. It was a tough negotiation, one that everyone else was making in similar ways, as she found when she posted photos from her archive on Instagram and a thousand people commented “Omg are we the same person?”

Then, in a Twitter exchange I had with another writer, she told me about doing the opposite of binging—purging everything as the new year dawned because she was “burned out on everything being ‘thought leadership’ content.” Everything sounds the same, I complained back, not sure if what I was saying was even fair yet.

Finally, last week I was reading a book that was about witches investigating an Unseelie court member committing a crime in Edinburgh in the 1800s and it felt like I had read the book a hundred times. I felt this feeling strongly, not in a déjà vu sense but in a boredom sense. I felt it despite the fact that I’ve only ever encountered the Seelie and Unseelie in one other piece of fiction—my friend’s (currently) unpublished novel that she let me read a draft of. Somehow that published book that I paid money for wasn’t saying anything new, nor saying it in a new way.

And all of that, hitting one after the other in the first week of the year, got me thinking: It’s starting to seem like everyone’s voices have melted together. I scroll through people’s social media profiles and everyone sounds the same, even when they’re saying opposing things. The New Yorker sounds like The Washington Post sounds like LA Times, and everyone sounds like AP. The History Channel looks like Syfy, and every streaming platform is doing irreverent fictional takes on history.

It’s like after years of struggling to adapt to the internet, we figured out what works, how to package it and sell it, and everyone started doing it. But now, everyone sounds the same. Thanks to facetuning, we even all look the same. Scrolling through quickly, one person’s Instagram and TikTok is indistinguishable from anyone else’s. Just swap out the faces.

Obviously, this isn’t a new phenomenon. Trends come and go in every industry and field. About eight years ago my friends in coffee and I were all complaining that every new coffee shop was a white box with birch wood everywhere. Then the reaction against that rolled around and for a while everyone was doing neon and rich colors and Instagram-worthy bathrooms. Now, something a little more grungy—even goth—is coming back, and everyone has at least one skeleton in their lineup of merch.

Conformity happens because people want the guarantee, they see what works and want to do that instead of rocking the boat. When everything else—in business, in creativity, in life—feels like a risk, why take on one more risk than you have to? Do what works. People make millions doing what works.

The problem is that “what works” gets boring. I can only have so many shirts with sketch-style dancing skeletons before I desperately want anything else. And that’s true of what I’m reading too.

Hell—it’s true of what I’m writing rightthissecond. I am currently falling into the very trap Shirley mentioned of writing thought leadership content, and I didn’t even mean to. This entrapping format, so easy to get sucked into, is part of why I decided at the end of last year that I was tired of writing personal essays. Not only was I sick of having to cut myself open to bleed for clicks, but it sucked trying to conform what I wanted to say into a Chelsea Handler/Joan Didion/Roxane Gay format that isn’t really my format. I am unhitching my wagon from that horse. (It’s not a bad horse! It’s just not the horse I want to follow! Have I killed this horse metaphor yet?!)

That novel I read last week, about a witch being stalked and the witch detective who figured out that it was an Unseelie, should have felt unique to me. I have literally only read one other fictional work that remotely deals with the Unseelie, and my friend’s work-in-progress isn’t a detective story set in 19th-century Edinburgh. But it didn’t—this novel felt like every other novel set in the 19th-century British Isles that I’ve ever read. It shouldn’t have! It had no right to! And yet.

There’s a new writing software that shows up in my Instagram ads every day. It’s called AutoCrit. It touts, among other features, an ability to compare your writing to the great novels in your genre. Want to write a magic-teens-in-boarding-school novel? Cool, here’s how it stacks up to J.K. Rowling’s. Trying your hand at crime fiction thrillers? Great, let’s compare your work to John Grisham’s, sentence by sentence. Ope, historical conspiracy adventure fiction? Yeah, okay, let the algorithm calculate how well yours resembles Dan Brown’s.

I understand the compulsion to want this. I get feeling so close to a project that you don’t know if it’s any good anymore. In a crowded marketplace, I don’t fault anyone for seeing something successful and thinking, “Is my thing as good as that thing?”

But I’m begging people to stop.

Do you know what made Rowling and Grisham and Brown (and every other successful author) successful? It was that their work didn’t sound like anyone else’s. They came along with a unique voice, a unique perspective, a unique je ne sais quoi. It’s popular to shit on them now, when millions have come along and copied them, but when each of their first novels came out, people were blown away. They were unique.

If you’re trying to write, or film, or do anything creative or entrepreneurial, the key to success isn’t making sure your work closely resembles something that came before it. Because even when people want more magic teens solving mysteries at boarding school, they still want something new. Harry Potter, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and Wednesday all exist on the same genre spectrum, but they are very different from one another. They look and sound different, they have unique voices. That’s what makes each good.

You have to find your own voice. Don’t get AutoCrit and find someone else’s voice.

No one can tell you how to be unique. If there was a formula for it, well, it wouldn’t be unique anymore. So I can’t help you there. We all have to find it for ourselves.

People have to be able to be their own version of weird, not Carrie Fisher’s or Guillermo del Toro’s. Stop being Instagram weird, acceptably weird. Be your weird.

This is the first essay I’ve done voiceover for—I’d love to hear what y’all think of the new format. Does it change anything for you? Is it fun? After January, narration will go behind a paywall. If you liked this feature and want to get more of it, upgrade now:

Get 20% off for 1 year

Not ready for the commitment of a full upgrade? I get it. I’m commitment phobic too. But if you like, you can tip me, as a treat. 

Want more of my work? Yesterday on my podcast, Unruly Figures, I talked about Catherine de Medici, the Renaissance Queen of France who has been long maligned by historians as a poisoner. Together, we’re going to reclaim the Serpent Queen.

I haven’t been writing much at all lately while I grieve my father’s passing. But, a piece I wrote last October went live this week on Sprudge: When Coffee Becomes a Religious Experience. It explores the varied relationship coffee has had with religions around the world, and I had so much fun researching and writing it.

If you liked this and think your friends might too, please forward it on! That’s how we all discover new fun things, right?

Share

In April 2019, I challenged myself to go on thirty dates in thirty days.

Every time I tell someone this, they’re appalled. Which is the only correct response, frankly. Thirty dates in thirty days is hell.

But I had an idea that this challenge would do a few good things for me:

• I’d see more of Los Angeles—I’d been living here for a little over a year at the time and had still only seen 4.8% of the city

  • If you get this very obscure The Good Place reference, we might be soulmates

• I’d meet new “types” of people. The last several relationships I’d had were uniformly terrible people, so I knew I needed to not go after my usual type. I thought this might shake me out of this habit.

• I’d feel less frustrated/intimidated by first dates in the future because, hey, at least I wasn’t going on thirty dates in thirty days again!

So I signed up for Hinge, put together a profile, and started swiping. At no point did I expect to actually meet someone this way.

And I didn’t!

I didn’t go on a second date with any of these people. I also didn’t see much more of the city because inevitably I ended up planning almost every date. So I just kept going to the same three bars or coffee shops because, well, I knew that the metered parking situation meant I always had an easy excuse to leave if I needed it.

(This is an excuse I still use today and you are welcome to steal it if you want something in your back pocket for your next first date.)

Here’s the thing about a challenge like this: Inevitably, you’re going out with people you wouldn’t normally because you have to meet your quota. (I tried to be upfront with folks about this without saying, “I’m going on this date to check a box.”) So I didn’t filter for anything that month. As long as I didn’t get a murdery vibe, I met them in person. This was part of the point (see above) but also had an unintended consequence: I got to meet people who I normally wouldn’t have a chance to interact with.

I met someone who had recently gotten out of jail for a drug-related crime. (End the War on Drugs, FFS.) I met someone who had ridden a motorcycle from Anchorage, Alaska to the tip of South America. (The photos were very cool.) I met someone who earnestly believes that lizard people live among us. (Why????) I met someone who had just moved to LA after working in a Vegas casino for ten years. (Asked him how many people he caught trying to cheat and he rolled his eyes.) I met an app developer who had never used a stove. (He went straight from his parent’s house to the frat house to a software company that serves three meals a day.) I met lots of well-meaning soft-spoken writers who I just didn’t click with. (Sorry.)

None of those dates turned into relationships, and I usually knew they wouldn’t in the first few minutes. (Chemistry—you either have it or you don’t.) But I never got up and left when I realized that.

Share

There were natural ways to rationalize staying: I’d already ordered, I didn’t want to be rude, I could be wrong, et cetera. None of those were the reason though.

Recently, I was on a date with a neurologist. Twenty minutes in he asked me, “So why are you single?” Not in a cute, bantering way. It wasn’t, ‘you’re so great, how are you single?’ It was: ‘What’s wrong with you?’

The couple at the next table, who had been previously very engrossed in each other, turned and stared. I, stunned at being asked this, made up some nonsense about moving a lot. Then, suddenly getting annoyed, I asked him the same question, which he dodged.

At the next table, the woman caught my eye and emphatically shook her head. I already knew what she wasn’t saying out loud: Get out. I knew, but I stayed.

I stayed because after my annoyance faded what remained was curiosity. I had to know why this guy was like this. What had happened in his life that this was how he communicated with people? Who had taught him that being confrontational on a date would endear him to someone? Why was he like this?

People have asked me what it takes to be a good writer. I usually tell them I have no idea because I’m not a good writer, I’m a decent editor. But if they press for an answer I tell them this: Good writers—and probably great ones too—are curious. They’re curious about the couple at the table next to them, about why traffic jams knot up, about how a business was started. They know they may never get an answer but they start spinning out possibilities in their heads. Those questions lead to more questions and good writers let themselves fall down those rabbit holes of wondering.

Because a plot, when it’s first coming together, is just a rabbit hole. It’s putting a neurologist in a coffee shop and wondering, “Well what happens if this type of person sits across from him, or that type of person, or some other type of person…?” It’s saying, “I want this woman sitting by this disastrous date to intervene, but why would she? Because she’s been burned before? How, when, why?”

When a good writer does find an answer to their musings, they squirrel it away for later. They use what they learn about human motivation to make their characters seem more real. If I ever write a character who loves a conspiracy theory I know it’ll be because his life is unstable in some way, out of his control, and he’s scared about that. And it’ll ring true because that’s what I eventually realized was going on with Lizard People Guy. He needed the US to have an external enemy, a clear foe we could unite against, because otherwise the reality of American politics in 2019 was too scary for him. And why shouldn’t it have been? Between Trump and Russian interference and North Korean missile testing, there was—is—a lot to be afraid of. Who can say if his belief in the Lizard People is any better or worse than the people who just tune out or the people who become extremists?

I didn’t stay on any of these dates with the intention of becoming a better writer because of them. I stayed because I was curious—am curious to a fault. Even if I never saw them again, I couldn’t walk away without knowing how they ticked. It wasn’t malicious, it wasn’t to “collect” them in some way or check a box. I genuinely wanted to understand.

But seeing people and being open to understanding them, even when I profoundly disagreed with them, has helped me in my writing so much.

Are you writing a book during National Novel Writing Month? Join my virtual head-down writing sessions! We’re meeting up three times a week to make sure you get dedicated time on the calendar to write.

Sign Up To Save Your Spot

I keep these newsletters free by not worrying too much about typos and flow. But if you want to you can tip me, as a treat. 

Want more of my work? Last week on my podcast, Unruly Figures, I talked about Zheng Yi Sao, the famous pirate queen who ruled a confederation of 70,000 pirates in the South China Sea.

If you liked this and think your friends might too, please forward it on! That’s how we all discover new fun things, right?

Share

Subscribe now

Hi friends,

Here we are, back on our normal essay schedule, though certainly not at the normal time. It took me four tries to write an essay today—I have three drafts to finish in the future though. So while Current Valorie is spitting, Future Valorie might be grateful for it.

The Writer’s Notebook challenge was lovely and I’m happy to have done it. I feel like I unpacked some interesting things and got some inspiration for future essays and projects from it. I’m currently working on a novel for NaNoWriMo, which I’m getting very excited about.

If you haven’t been around for long, let me introduce the premise here. Every other week, I publish an essay that is, in some way, connected to the practice of being a writer. Some (like today’s) are only tangentially connected. Some are very focused. On the weeks I don’t publish an essay, I publish an interview with another creative who has dealt with rejection and kept creating anyway. They’re always uplifting and inspiring stories, and I highly recommend you check them out.

This essay is a little heavier than my usual fare—I think people struggle with accepting death and grief in their lives. But let’s hop into it.

This year I’ve lost two of my uncles, one to brain cancer and the other to Alzheimer’s. I was closer to both of them as a child, when I had whole summers free to wile away with each side of my family. But even though I didn’t see them as much as an adult, I remained fond of them. I miss them both.

Grief is a strange thing. There was a lot of discourse earlier this year about how Americans are uniquely bad at processing grief (or any kind of trauma). I think there’s a hell of a lot to that. Both processes require a community of care, a social web that we have largely done away with. Americans demand self-reliance from themselves and each other and that pressure makes grief an alienating and isolating force, even when experienced within a group as large as ‘everyone who lost someone during COVID’.

The result we get is that people don’t know how to be there for each other when grieving, nor are grieving people able to ask for help. We send a few text messages—“hope you’re doing okay” and “let me know if you want to talk.”

I’m not immune to this. A few months ago I was with a friend who grieving and I texted two of my friends, asking them what I could say to her. I actually asked, “Any platitudes you’ve got that I can use?” They reminded me of what I already knew: There aren’t any. No single sentence makes grief easier.

But we want one, right? We want the ease of short phrases like, “they’re in a better place” to actually work, to mean something.

English sometimes catches flack from people who claim that it is not a good language for processing pain. On the one hand, I disagree. After all, according to thesaurus.com there are more synonyms in English for ‘pain’ than for ‘happy’. On the other, I think all languages are inadequate.

More often than is probably healthy, I think about a video from the artist Shirin Neshat, in which grieving women bury something or someone in sand, and the whole time they’re half-singing-half-wailing. It’s words and it’s not, the anguished cries clearly relaying a message that’s meaningful but not always intelligible.

Because grief doesn’t fit into the tidy rules of language.

There are no cards or text messages or gently worded sentences that make grief less painful. You just have to feel it.

But I was thinking today about how death used to be much more integrated into our lives. We were more aware of death, it was a more visible part of life. And not just because a hundred years ago you might have lost 5% of everyone you knew every winter to brutal conditions and the flu—Death had more public ritual to it in general. A poet, Jay Hulme, recently did a long Twitter thread about pre-20th-century Christian burial practices, and I’m just going to quote part of it here:

But then we moved graveyards out of the centers of towns. Society secularized further. Medicine advanced and we started sanitizing more than just our hands—we started sanitizing life. Death became unwelcome, relegated to the outskirts, something we only acknowledged when it showed up on our doorstep.

In the novel that I’m writing during NaNoWriMo, the character is grieving for most of it. She loses her daughter and her husband in quick succession. She makes some pretty intense decisions for her family, and her youngest son dies as a direct result.

Because of this, I have been doing some research about Medieval beliefs around death and grieving. Celtic-influenced cultures in Brittany, Isle of Man, and Scotland believed in a character called L’Ankou, a psychopomp who escorted the dead into the afterlife. There was a unique Ankou for each village—it was the person who died last the year before. That person escorted their fellow villagers into the afterlife, and only joined them after their replacement was installed.

It speaks to how many people were dying per year that they had to clarify that it was the last person who died in a year that escorted people out for the next year. (Most villages have populations of around 500-2,500 people; Medieval towns had populations of around 5,000-10,000 people. I’m not sure what’s between 2,500 and 5,000.) This was the time of enormous plagues—the Black Death first hit Europe in 1348.

So L’Ankou collected dead souls, driving around town in their wagon to pick them up, accompanied by a barn owl. It was said you could only hear the creaking of the wheels if you were close to death yourself. Additionally, L’Ankou protected the graveyard from people and spirits who would disturb the dead. But they had another important role: The promise that death wouldn’t be completely unfamiliar. L’Ankou was your neighbor, your friend, your family member. Even if your death was terrifying, there was going to be a familiar face there to help you through.

And for your loved ones, there was the comfort of knowing you were in good hands after death. Even if they didn’t believe in the Heaven/Hell paradigm of the afterlife (Celtic cultures, after all, had begun to accept Christianity by this point, but it hadn’t fully supplanted all of their pre-Christian beliefs) the knowledge that your loved one would meet someone familiar after death, and that their spirit would be protected by them, was comforting. It made death a little bit more akin to a rebirth than an end.

I say all this because one of the consequences of the secularization of society is that for many people these sorts of beliefs have fallen to the wayside. Without religion, death is final. That’s often too scary to confront and so people have shoved the evidence away until death doesn’t touch their lives at all. When it does show up, we don’t know what to do with it. We don’t know how to deal with it, how to talk about it, how to help someone through it.

What new rituals will we create to help us deal with death next?

Are you writing a book during National Novel Writing Month? Join my virtual head-down writing sessions! We’re meeting up three times a week to make sure you get dedicated time on the calendar to write.

Sign Up To Save Your Spot

I keep these newsletters free by not worrying too much about typos and flow. But if you want to you can tip me, as a treat. 

Want more of my work? Last week on my podcast, Unruly Figures, I talked about Herman the Recluse, the monk who might have enlisted the Devil’s help to write an entire manuscript in one night.

I’ve been writing a TON lately, including several pieces I’m pretty proud of. In Fresh Cup, you can read about a brief history of coffee & revolution. In ROADBOOK, check out my piece about hiking through mountains destroyed by wildfires.

If you liked this and think your friends might too, please forward it on! That’s how we all discover new fun things, right?

Share

I’m back… over a week later than I intended to be. I’ve been having trouble getting back into the swing of things. Since arriving back in LA on September 12th, I’ve been to Carlsbad twice, spent a day at Disneyland, hosted two events, and now I’m writing from a plane on my way to Dallas. It’s been hectic and the complete opposite of restful. I told a friend on Wednesday that I wanted to shut myself inside my house and do nothing for the entire month of October, only to check my calendar and see I’m already pretty booked up for the month.

But I’m starting to find my way back! I posted the first episode of season two of Unruly Figures on time, I’ve whittled my inbox down to 900 unread emails from 1245 (mostly newsletters, I’m not that in demand), I’ve finally signed back into Discord, and I’m ready to tackle a new essay for y’all. So let’s goooooo.

Writing a book took a lot out of me—so much that I haven’t really felt like writing since.

Or, well, it’s more than not “feeling like it.” We all don’t “feel like” doing stuff occasionally only to do them anyway. The frustrating truth is that I’ve been burnt out for the last few weeks.

The burnout has me feeling drained of everything. I used to have a couple-hundred-day-streak on 750 Words that I simply abandoned because I just…couldn’t put words on a page. My brain has felt like mush since I turned in my book manuscript on August 30th.1 On September 2nd, my editor told me she’d have edits back to me in two weeks and I almost cried— “please don’t,” I begged to the computer screen (I did not actually say that to her). Thankfully, it turned out that she had meant two months. A few of my friends even noticed that I’ve seemed oddly blank lately, bereft of emotion.

The problem came from the writing pace I had to keep up during August. I had intended to finish the first draft of the manuscript in June so I could take July off, edit in August, and turn it in before flying to London for my friend’s wedding. But life kept getting in the way until it couldn’t anymore and I was staring down the barrel of writing 9 chapters in 30 days. At 2500 words per chapter, that’s 22,500 words that needed to be written. But not just any 22,500 words—22,500 words that had to be meticulously and deeply researched first. Doable but difficult, grueling, onerous. I made it to the finish line, but I mostly limped across.

If I could recommend anything to anyone—it’s to, uh, not do that. By the end, I began to resent the book, resent myself for agreeing to it, and resent the idea of Unruly Figures for popping into my head in the first place. I’m feeling better now, but it was a dark headspace to inhabit for a few days.

Subscribe now

After turning in my manuscript, I went straight to the airport for my flight to London. Literally—I turned it in at noon Pacific and was on my way to LAX by two pm. After a wedding and a few days in London, I moved on to Paris, then five days later to Denver. It was great at first, but with each day of activities! and plans! and things to do! the high of turning in my book faded and exhaustion crept in.

Since I got back, I’ve been trying to find any spark of energy or joy in writing again. And I wish I could sit here and wrap this up with a nice, “this is how I fixed it!” but I can’t. I had a brief moment of excitement talking with a librarian at NYPL about a project I want to start next, but these days I’m mostly daydreaming about ordering a PS4 and playing Stray.

The irony is that even though I’m feeling exhausted, I’m also too anxious to take more time away. Though the idea of actually writing has filled me with dread for the last 22 days, the idea of not writing has felt just as bad. So I made myself come back to it, hopeful that just getting started would help me feel better about things.

And while just writing here again helped some, it created other anxieties—what if the dread I felt is not exhaustion, but something deeper? What if I just don’t want to do this (whatever “this” is) anymore? More to the point: What if this newsletter is a zombie hobby, a thing I do because I have done it for a while and feel like I still have to?

To my delight, Cole from Cole’s Climb actually wrote about a similar conundrum in his post yesterday. He talked about when he lost all joy in climbing and gave some advice about how to find it again:

There is a veritable apocalypse of zombie hobbies running around these days. Through introspection it’s possible to rekindle lost passion and get that fulfillment back. Ask yourself three simple things:

1. Why did I used to find this enjoyable?

2. Why am I doing it now?

3. What do I hope to get out of this, moving forward?

The answers to at least two of those questions should be in alignment. Here’s a helpful guide to what your answers mean:

• If 1, 2, & 3 are the same — you never lost your initial passion

• If 1 & 2 are the same — you maintained your passion, but want something new

• If 2 & 3 are the same — you are getting new purpose from something you love

• If 1 & 3 are the same — you are re-aligning with your initial passion

• If none are the same — you are seeking something entirely different

I hope this inspires you to do some digging in your own life, because our time here is too short to be bogged down by things we’re only pretending to care about.

If you’re feeling exhausted or burned out, I really recommend doing this exercise!

I took some time on my flight to think these questions through myself and realized that part of my issue is that while I love history and non-fiction, my first love is fiction and I want to get back to that. I also want more of a writer’s community and to feel less like I’m screaming into the void. More than both of those things, I want writing to be fun again.

So there will be some changes around here come November. I’m not sure what form they’ll take yet, but keep an eye out for those developments.

Before that though, I’m going to start a challenge that another excellent writer, Summer Brennan, is in the middle of doing: The 30-Day Notebook Challenge. She’s writing a little something every day for 30 days, and I am going to do the same. Except I’m going to do 28 days because I like that symmetry better.

Every day from September 26 - October 24, I’m going to post something short here on Substack. There might be a few longer essays in there, but mostly it will be short and sweet. I’m just trying to find some joy again.

Want to join me? Here are Summer’s rules:

If you’re a writer, or just like to write, do consider joining in and writing along with me in an informal capacity if you so desire. We’ll write or rewrite something every day for thirty days. There are no word count requirements, and no topical restrictions.

Let me know in the comments if you’re joining in.

Leave a comment

Currently Reading

One thing I have been doing a lot of lately is reading. After reading a ton of academic books for my book research, I also made sure I read a lot of books for fun while I was on my hiatus. One of my favorites from this time has been Strong Female Protagonist, by Brennan Lee Mulligan. It’s about young superheroes with too much on their shoulders, and one supergirl who tries to leave it all behind to live a normal life. It’s a delight.

I haven’t paid enough attention to graphic novels in the past, and that’s something I’m planning on changing. I’m picking up Book Two next week and I can’t wait.2

Speaking of fun and delightful: Earlier this week my friend Elizabeth of What to Read If launched a new project called Notes from Three Pines. It’s going to be an entire series dedicated to Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache books, with tons of different writers with different perspectives, and I am in love with it. The first post will drop next week, I believe, so if this is up your alley, I recommend you subscribe now so you never miss a post:

Notes from Three Pines

A Celebration of all things Louise Penny and Inspector Gamache

By Elizabeth

All right, I think that’s our show for the week! I’ll be back on Monday with the beginning of the Writer’s Notebook challenge, and on Wednesday with the next On Rejection interview with another great writer.

I keep these newsletters free by not worrying too much about typos and flow. But if you want to you can tip me, as a treat. 

If you liked this and think your friends might too, please forward it on! That’s how we all discover new fun things, right?

Share

How’s everyone holding up in this heat? I, for one, have practically become nocturnal to avoid the worst of it. I sleep most days from about 3 pm to 7 pm, eat some combination of breakfast and dinner food that we don’t have a nickname for yet, then start up my work again. I realize this is not a possible solution for most people, but if you have the luxury of setting your own hours I really recommend this strategy.

I wish I had more exciting things to tell you all about right now than my sleep schedule. I’m making slow but steady progress on my book; I still sort of can’t believe I’m writing one. Maybe someday, when I’m holding a physical copy in my hands, it will finally feel real.

But until then, there are these little essays to write and read. Let’s hop into it.

I've been reliably informed that not everyone loves summer. Admittedly, the season is hot and sticky, and part of the appeal as kids was probably that we had the whole season to play instead of going to school. Perhaps my ongoing love for summer is just about that nostalgia, that urge to run outside and play.

Lately, a statistic keeps running through my head: "For each degree above 27° Celsius (80.6° Fahrenheit), productivity decreased by 4%."

Sure, that comes from a capitalist hellscape of an article, one which dictates to bosses how to save money during this summertime "laziness" in their factories, but the core truth at the center of that plutocratic nightmare remains the same: Productivity naturally dips in the summer.

Human bodies aren't made to operate in high heat.

(Actually, a lot of animal bodies aren't made to operate in the heat either. Many go into states of dormancy, like hibernation, during the hottest parts of the day or year. That said, heat stress is killing off more and more animals each year as climate change gets worse. )

There are ways of coping. Humans sweat, and the human body uses vasodilation to push blood closer to the surface of the skin so it can release heat. (That's why you might get red in the face when you're overheated.) But vasodilation isn't easy; it requires a higher resting heart rate and a lot more calories burned. All that extra labor makes us tired. Add to that the uncomfortable truth that most of us are chronically dehydrated and fatigued and, well, the body giving up every day around 2 pm, when the day is hottest (and blood sugar is probably taking a dip after lunch anyway), suddenly doesn't seem like such a mystery anymore. Sleep, which slows your breath and your heart rate down, is a relief.

I think a lot about how, when your core body temperature reaches about 104°F (around 40°C), your body begins to cook itself. No one likes to think of it like that--"it causes damage to the brain, organs, and muscle" is what people would prefer to say. The reality is: Your body is literally cooking. I'd make a dark joke about a low temperature for a long time makes for tender meat for our fatcat overlords, but even I'm not sure I can get on board with cannibalism for laughs, especially when it doesn't feel far enough from the truth.

I keep wondering: If it were more widely known that higher temperatures makes people less productive, would corporations get on board with combatting climate change? I'm a pragmatic problem-solver, is the thing--I'm fine with a bootleggers and baptists argument if it means we all get to a tolerable end goal. If we prove to corporations that a warming climate impacts their bottom line, that it will make labor more expensive because they'll need more exhausted people to do the same amount of work, will that affect change? Will they finally invest in strategies to lessen climate change--a higher investment now for a lower cost later? Or will they just invest in automation more?

(Bootleggers and baptists is a legislative economics theory saying that two wildly different groups of people, like bootleggers and baptists, will support the same legislation if it accomplishes a goal they can both agree on, even if it's for incredibly different reasons, like Prohibition.)

I muse over the myth that children have school off in the summer because of old agricultural schedules. Think about it--with planting in the spring and harvest in the fall, summer was probably the time when kids were needed least on the farm. No, summers off originated in cities, when combinations of asphalt, metal, and glass made cities sweltering, before A/C showed up to make classrooms tolerable again.

Share

I think a lot about Spain's daily siestas, about France's shutdowns in August. When the heat turns up, they take off. They know there's no point sometimes. Why force it? Why make yourself endure the heat? Just take a break.

I've been watching England's heat wave and thinking about that capitalist productivity math. The high in London earlier this week was 40°C, 13° above the threshold where productivity starts to dip. At 4% per degree, that's a 52% loss in productivity. I wonder if any bosses accounted for that change when they set expectations for their teams. I doubt it.

I keep thinking about running through the sprinklers as a child, of entire days spent reading and swimming at the community pool. I'd show up at 7 am for swim practice then ride my Razor scooter home around 5 pm when my parents would get home from work. In between, I alternated reading books with swimming with whichever of my friends showed up at the pool that day. I had Sour Punch Straws for lunch almost every day; the books of my youth are littered with sticky fingerprints that still smell like artificial strawberries.

Eventually, my summer pool days gave way to College for Kids programs, then to a job as a lifeguard and swim teacher. I haven't had a summer "off" since I was 11 or so.

This summer, as I struggle to balance the work that seemed easier in the spring—my book, my podcast, this newsletter, the non-profit—I think a lot about how our bodies and brains aren't meant for this. Whether you believe in evolution or intelligent design, the fact remains that our bodies aren't built to remain at 100% productivity during the summer. Maybe it's a bad system, but it's the one we're stuck with.

This whole essay wasn't just a long walk for the short drink of water that is the sentence, "I'm taking August off this newsletter." Though it is true that I'm mostly taking August off, shutting down everything I do that isn't writing my book. Call it taking into account my limited capacity for productivity during the summer heat. With a daily temperature over 90° F most days, my productivity is down around 40%. I have to conserve whatever productive energy I have left for finishing this book. I'll be back in late September, once my manuscript is turned in and the temperatures have cooled off.

As I said, this wasn't a long walk for nothing. I often wonder if the same people who don't like summer are also the people who measure their self-worth by their productivity. I wouldn't know where to begin measuring such a correlation, but I do wonder about it. Admittedly, I'm guilty of this--I really go into full guilt-trip mode when I don't accomplish "enough" every day, which has made this summer a special kind of heat-induced guilty misery.

I think a lot about how it might make summer more tolerable if we learned to demand less of ourselves in these sweaty months; If we leaned instead into the natural state of slackening and rest that our bodies need; If on days with heat indices over 80°F, we did the math of 4*(degrees over 80) and got comfortable with doing at least that much less work.

What if we cut our days to only work in the mornings during the hottest months? What if we adopted France's strategy of just shutting down and getting the hell out of Dodge? What if we used our growing understanding of science to make our lives more comfortable? What if we just took summers off again?

This is my last essay for at least six weeks! I don’t know exactly when I’ll be back yet, but it’ll be sometime during mid-to-late September.

Until then, you can check out episodes of my podcast, Unruly Figures! It’s about history’s greatest rule-breakers, and it’s available wherever you get your podcasts. It’ll be on hiatus for August too, but there are 17 episodes you can catch up on until I’m back in late September with season 2.

Recently I was also a guest on my friend Jay’s podcast, Blockbusting. We talked about the terrible movie The Other Boleyn Girl. You can listen to my episode here.

I hope you get some time to relax this summer! I’ll be back with one more interview next week, but then I’m out of here.

I keep these newsletters free by not worrying too much about typos and flow. But if you want to you can tip me, as a treat. 

If you liked this and think your friends might too, please forward it on! That’s how we all discover new fun things, right?

Share

It’s July! It’s almost my birthday! It’s also almost August, which is when I’m going to take an entire month off!

I wish I had more thoughts than this right now, but I’m a little brain dead, to be honest. I’ve mostly been gardening and writing my book late into the night. If that’s the kind of thing you’re interested in seeing more of, follow me on Instagram.

No further ados, I guess. Let’s crack into it.

The struggle, I think, with being a woman creating anything today is that we don’t have a rich history of women to compare ourselves to. There’s a medium-length history—Aphra Behn was making a living writing fiction in the 1670s—but there’s not a deep history of it. Aphra Behn’s work was good, but she’s also remembered in many ways just for being an exception, and the first. A woman writer! In the 1670s! I never!

This feels like a struggle because when a woman’s output inevitably gets compared to her predecessors, those predecessors are more often than not men. And that leads to a whole host of problems because comparing women’s output to men’s output makes it seem like women don’t (or can’t) work as hard or publish as much.

(Obviously, this is complicated further when you start looking at trans people and how their output is compared to cis people. But for this, we’re going to talk about cisgendered folks, and mostly hetero ones.)

On Monday morning, I was feeling frustrated and down on myself, wondering why I wasn’t further along in my book. My internal monologue was just a chant of: I’ve been working on it for months, why isn’t it coming along better, why am I not done yet?

And then I remembered this shitstorm on Twitter:

If you missed it, a few weeks ago on Twitter, @PeakTobi made a whole thread about how he was married with 6 kids but had managed to earn his Ph.D. and get promoted to CEO in 10 years. He thought he was giving advice, but what he actually did was highlight the huge gendered gap in home responsibility.

All of his advice was about careful planning and making lists and using organizational tools. I read the thread with horror and incredulity—how does this man not see how privileged he is, and how inherently misogynistic this list is?

Not one item on the list had anything to do with childcare, cooking meals, transportation, or cleaning the house. He never mentioned shopping for groceries, or even getting the car washed. All the labor he recommended was Sunday night planning for the week, morning planning for the day, and how to move tasks around if something urgent comes up or if you don’t finish in time.

And listen, all that is valuable advice, except that it’s not how he got a Ph.D. and became a CEO in ten years while being married with 6 children.

He was free to get his Ph.D. and pursue his career because his wife kept the house.

Subscribe now

None of the tasks on his list are useful to women or people who are raising families. His ideas didn’t include things like, “Get groceries delivered to cut down on time sitting in traffic.” or “Pack a full week of your kid’s meals at once so you don’t have to think about it five times.”

He was able to juggle getting a Ph.D. and getting promoted to CEO because his wife handled all of the life stuff and he got to focus exclusively on his career.

@PeakTobi deleted his Twitter, so I can’t drop a link for you to see for yourself. You can read Dr. Caitlin Green’s response and the many responses to her, which include screenshots of his original tweets, if you want to go fishing:

I followed this obsessively when it was going down. As you can probably guess, the Twitter mob came for him. At first, he was apologetic. He was open to recognizing his biases, and at least said something initially about how this was an enlightening discussion for him about the balance of work in his home. Cool!

And then people started digging back further in his timeline, finding things like this:

I mean, there’s the obvious part: This woman is 37 weeks pregnant and she’s cleaning up this child’s room with no clear assistance. I understand that the impulse to nest can take over, but bro, you can’t help her? Bro, you wrote a tweet instead of helping her?

But also, look at the date. April 13, 2022. His infamous thread came in mid-June. Assuming she gave birth at 40 weeks, she had the baby sometime between—I’m guessing—May 3-10. Meaning that he had a 5-week-old newborn at home when he was tweeting his “how to get things done!” thread. His wife was parenting six children of various ages plus a newborn and he was on Twitter talking about his successful career without mentioning her.

At this point, he stopped responding to people.

And then came the final nail in the coffin: He’d already been called out for this behavior:

If you’re screaming in frustration, me too!

What makes me more furious is that it’s not just the wife doing everything. There are also a million service workers that are invisible here. Maybe they do get groceries delivered every week. Thank that worker! Maybe they have a part-time nanny that comes by so his wife can take a shower. Thank that nanny! So many invisible people enable @PeakTobi’s life, and he’s crediting his success to the Eisenhower Matrix.

I wonder if he’s getting more done at work now that he’s deleted Twitter. Is there some position higher than the CEO? Because frankly, I doubt he’s doing much more around the house with all his new free time.

[deep sigh]

Leave a comment

I was thinking of all of this on Monday when I was giving myself hell for not having finished my book already. When I first signed my contract and received my deadline, my goal was to be done by July 1 so that I could take a month off, revise the book in August, and turn it in.

Spoiler alert: I’m not done!

I woke up Monday morning giving myself hell about not being done because I didn’t understand how I couldn’t be done. I only work part-time, why isn’t this book done?

And listen, yes, procrastination plays a role here because I am an infamous procrastinator. It’s something I hate about myself and am actively in therapy for.

But also? I’m not done with this because I do so much else. This book isn’t the only thing on my plate! I have a part-time job and:

• the Unruly Figures podcast (another part-time job, frankly);

• a lot of freelance writing for ROADBOOK and Fresh Cup;

• I write this Substack and interview folks for it;

• I cook all my meals;

• I take care of a house and large yard;

• I exercise 4 times per week;

• I travel to take care of my parents when necessary;

• I see my friends, especially for big life moments.

This doesn’t include little life things like doing laundry, getting groceries (which I do often order in advance and pick up), going to the doctor, or getting work done on my car. They don’t seem like big things but they’re necessary life tasks and drains of my time and energy.

I do get some help with these things. My trainer and friend, Jesse, is a huge help; my parents help me with the house and yard, not with manual labor but by explaining how to do things; my editors are patient and supportive and enable me to work as I’m able to. But mostly, I do these things alone.

No wonder my book isn’t done yet!

Sure, I could have refused to travel to Texas for most of June to help my folks when they needed it.

Sure, I could stay home and work instead of showing up to support my friends.

Sure, I could let the yard run wild, stop cleaning the house, and skip workouts.

I could make my life all about work. And hey, I might have to in July and August to get this book done on time!

But seriously—no wonder! When I set that goal for myself, I was thinking about the standard production time for a non-fiction book. A standard which is set by men like @PeakTobi who have wives at home taking care of everything else. I bet @PeakTobi could have his job and a podcast and write a book in six months or less, because that’s what @PeakTobi’s life is like.

Creative women often don’t have wives at home taking care of things. Wealthy women, like Kim “get off your ass and work” Kardashian, can pay a staff of people to take care of housework and yardwork and all the other work they don’t want to do. But most creative women are not wealthy women. Most creative women are doing housework and carework (what I’m calling all the parenting, meal prep, and work that goes into caring for a family, to emphasize that it’s work) on top of their creative work.

I cannot imagine trying to do everything I do and spend time with a significant other or parent a child (let alone both). It would simply be impossible.

This is why I was saying that I wish there were more historical examples of successful creative women so that we could see how they did it. Aphra Behn was only very briefly married and never had kids. I suspect that’s the only reason she was a successful writer. In a society where a marriage would have immediately meant that she would have been expected to bear child after child and take care of the house, a husband would have been a risk to her ambitions. He might not have let her write plays and stage them (or he might have let her write them but taken all the credit).

Think about some of the famous women writers we have throughout history:

• Jane Austen: Never married, no kids.

• Mary Wollstonecraft: Married with kids.

• Mary Shelley: Briefly married, but Percy died young. Never married again. Had 4 kids and lots of help taking care of them.

• Emily Brontë: Never married, no kids.

• Charlotte Brontë: Married, no kids.

• Louisa May Alcott: Never married, no kids.

• Gertrude Stein: Partnered, no kids.

• Virgina Woolf: Married, no kids.

• Agatha Christie: Married with kids.

• Harper Lee: Never married, no kids.

• Toni Morrison: Briefly married, with kids.

• Margaret Atwood: Married, one kid.

• Alice Walker: Married, one kid.

• Octavia Butler: Never married, no kids.

• JK Rowling: Married with kids.

• Zadie Smith: Married with kids.

I’m not saying it’s impossible to be a female writer and be married with kids. 6 out of 16 of them did it! But look carefully at the ones who were married with kids—they usually had money to pay servants or assistants to help them.

Anyway, look for my forthcoming thread about ✨the secret to how I get it all done.✨

Currently Reading

A few nights ago I started reading Elektra by Jennifer Saint. I always love a myth retelling, and this is one of the better ones I’ve read.

It follows a few mortal women who I feel like are rarely remembered: Clytemnestra, sister of Helen and wife of Agamemnon; Cassandra, seer and sister of Paris, who foresees the destruction of Troy; and of course Elektra, youngest daughter of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon.

I’m only around 100 pages in as I write this, so I’m not sure how the book turns out yet. But if you’re looking for an easy summer read, I really recommend this one.

I keep these newsletters free by not worrying too much about typos and flow. But if you want to you can tip me, as a treat. 

I’ve been writing a TON lately, including several pieces I’m pretty proud of. In Fresh Cup, you can read about a brief history of coffee & revolution. In ROADBOOK, check out my piece about hiking through mountains destroyed by wildfires.

If you liked this and think your friends might too, please forward it on! That’s how we all discover new fun things, right?

Share

Some of the links in this post are affiliate links! That just means if you click through a buy a book, I’ll get a few cents of profit but it won’t cost any more for you.

Not one of these changes is supported by a majority of the population in the US. This is a rule of a minority over the majority. These decisions are the first steps toward the implementation of a Christian theocracy, one which the first European settlers explicitly came to North America to avoid.

(Do not tell me to vote. We have voted and, obviously, it didn’t work.)

There’s a long and storied history of Americans rioting to protect their civil rights, and I think we can count on seeing more of that in the coming weeks and months.

Over on Unruly Figures, I unlocked the episode I did about the Jane Collective, a group of abortion providers in Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s. They were performing these medical procedures as safely as they could without real medical facilities. They treated thousands of patients. Thankfully, no patients died receiving care from Jane, though some were severely injured—a trade-off that is now the best people can hope for in 22 states around the US.

Unruly Figures

Episode 13: Jane

Listen now (35 min) | Thanks for subscribing! Your subscription helps fund my research, as well as food and coffee. Not a subscriber yet? Subscribing gets you ad-free episodes right in your inbox, and it supports independent research and publication. Subscribe here. You can also listen to Unruly Figures on…

Read more

4 years ago · 1 like · Valorie Clark

They’ll come for contraception, gay marriage, trans medical care, and interracial marriage next.

What will they come for after that?

What will it take to stop them?

If you can, donate to abortion funds. Prepaid gas cards for people who have to travel long distances to the nearest abortion provider make a great donation. And finally, here’s an abortion resource kit for anyone who needs more information.