When I first began taking my writing seriously over twenty years ago, I wrote a short story based on my grandfather’s funeral, stuffed it in an envelope, addressed it to Redbook, the top short story market at the time, and send it off. Aiming for the top made sense, I reasoned, figuring that after the editor rejected my submission, I would market it to smaller magazines that didn’t pay as much.
My hands were shaking six weeks later when I read my letter from the editor. She said that she liked the story and loved my writing, but the ending didn’t work. Would I consider rewriting it? After four rewrites, during which the editor displayed inordinate patience, the ending paragraph finally passed muster. Within months my story was on the magazine stands and family members called to express their delight with my success. One aunt even sent a congratulatory telegram.
One part of me jumped for joy and vowed to write more stories. That part envisioned seeing my name in The New Yorker and writing the great American novel. The other, more "sensible", part of me knew all about beginner’s luck. That was what my other Grandpa had called my good fortune when he taught me how to play checkers years before and I’d beaten him in the first game we played. Once my confidence in my newfound skills had soared, he’d repeatedly skunked me. It didn’t take a genius to realize that beginner’s luck was him letting me win. He’d thrown the game.
The joy jumping part of me egged me on to write two more stories. I sent one to Redbook and received a rejection. The editor said it wasn’t right for them, but to definitely try again. The second story I sent to The New Yorker. They replied with a form rejection slip on which an editor had scrawled, "Please send us another story!"
My anxious, "sensible" self, always eager to protect me from defeat and disappointment, just knew that both editors were throwing me crumbs in order to spare my tender, young feelings. It urged me to toss the rejection slips in the trash and find a writing path with less risk. I listened and I aimed low, convinced that in addition to being a victim of beginner’s luck, I was a victim of dumb luck. I hadn’t known what I was doing and didn’t have much talent, my sensible side counseled, so selling my first short story must have been a fluke, a cosmic joke.
Many writers seem to be cursed by good fortune. They are called one book wonders, and their company includes Harper Lee (To kill a Mocking Bird), Margaret Mitchell (Gone With the Wind), Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things), J.D. Salinger (Catcher in the Rye), and Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man).
In 1637, Jesuit priest Baltasar Gracián, author of possibly the first European self-help book, The Art of Worldly Wisdom, advised readers: "Be able to stomach big slices of luck." In other words, when fortune smiles our way, we need to notice the first signs of queasiness and reach for the psychological equivalent of Pepto-Bismol before we sabotage our writing careers.
One of the best ways we can attract luck into our writing lives and keep it there is to understand its nature. Psychologist, Richard Wiseman believes unlucky people are so anxious that when opportunity knocks, they get caught up worrying that the doorbell must be broken and looking for a repair person in the Yellow Pages that they never answer the door. He has studied luck for years and teaches people how to become luckier by thinking and acting like people who consider themselves lucky. (To learn more about his luck project, visit: http://www.luckfactor.co.uk/home.html).
When Wiseman, author of The Luck Factor (Century Books, 2003), studied why unlucky people don’t encounter the lucky breaks that lucky people do, he gave a newspaper to both unlucky and lucky subjects and asked them to count the photographs inside. Unlucky subjects took two minutes to count the pictures. Lucky subjects took only seconds because they saw the half-page notice Wiseman had placed on page two of the paper that said "Stop counting – there are 43 pictures in this paper," in two-inch high type. The psychologist also placed another notice in the center of the newspaper: "Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $250." Lucky people were hands-down winners in the finance department.
(Give lucky and unlucky writers Writer’s Market and guess who finds the markets.)
According to Wiseman, "My research revealed that lucky people generate their own good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectation, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good."
I’ve figured out that the joyful part of myself who approaches writing with a playful sense of adventure is my lucky side. She also happens to be my creative side. She doesn’t dither her way into paralysis by worrying about whether she deserves and can handle success or about what other people might think. She kicks her shoes off and jumps into projects with beginner’s mind. (So that’s what beginner’s luck means. Interesting.) She lets her intuition guide her and knows that whether making a speech, painting a picture, or writing a book proposal, mistakes in execution are springboards to something better than she could have imagined in the first place.
For example, a bad luck career move just might be the focal point of a newsletter. A detour from fiction writing for a few years might actually give a writer more life experiences on which to build fiction, give her time to ripen and mellow. And certainly it seems like bad luck that Redbook no longer publishes fiction, but new magazines have started up in the interim that do.
Write about a time life gave you lemons and you made lemonade.