Over the past year and a half, I’ve been engaged in a back and forth with a new agent I hoped would represent me. Every few months, I’d send off a revised version of my novel, and every month or so later, that revised version would come winging back with another round of edits.
Nothing about this process was easy. The edits always felt impossible, and it would take me weeks to figure out how to implement them. And every time the manuscript landed in my inbox, it felt as if I was starting from scratch.
Toward the end of September, I finished what felt to me like a final draft, and sent it off. Four weeks later, an email arrived in my inbox.
I’m very sorry to have to write this, it said, but I don’t think I’m the right agent for this novel.
My first impulse was to call the agent, remind him of all the good things he’d had to say about my book. But if there’s one thing my meditation practice has taught me, it’s that my first impulse is usually a really bad idea.
Instead, I called all my writer friends and let them tell me that the agent was clueless, and wrong, and would probably come to regret this decision.
Which is exactly what you want your writer friends to tell you.
But I still felt awful.
This is where I’m supposed to say that the next thing I did was open up one of the many Buddhist books scattered around my house, or that I listened to a podcast of a Dharma talk, or that I just sat down and meditated for a while, and miraculously, some piece of wisdom popped up to make me feel better.
But it doesn’t work like that.
What did happen next, was I remembered something I’d once heard Vipassana teacher, Sharon Salzberg say in an interview.
You can’t pick a fight with reality.
Which didn’t make me feel any happier about getting that email, but did make me stop resisting it.
In When Things Fall Apart, Pema’s Chodron says…
The Buddhist teachings are fabulous at simply working with what’s happening as your path of awakening, rather than treating your life experiences as some kind of deviation from what is supposed to be happening. The more difficulties you have, in fact, the greater opportunity there is to let them transform you. The difficult things provoke all your irritations and bring your habitual patterns to the surface. And that becomes the moment of truth. You have the choice to launch into the lousy habitual patterns you already have, or to stay with the rawness and discomfort of the situation and let it transform you, on the spot.
Which is all very wise, and not uncomforting.
But, in the end, it was something my own teacher had to say that made me feel better.
It’s not about you.
Which was a revelation, because up until then, I’d been thinking it was ALL about me. That I was a terrible writer. Or a lousy story-teller. Or that maybe I was 1) too old, or 2) too mid-list, or 3) too something else out to be publishable.
It’s not about you sounds like ordinary advice, but at its heart, it’s fundamentally Buddhist. Matthieu Ricard, who’s served as translator to the Dalai Lama, has this to say about taking things personally…
We will want to protect…our so-called self, from everything that rejects it, hurts it, threatens it. We want to please it. It is a mental construct used to simplify relations with the world, which can be good. But it leads to "me" and "mine", to an excessive separation from others, which causes suffering. The greater the ego, the more vulnerable one is.
I still have no idea why, after a year and a half of working together, the agent decided not to represent my book. But I am getting better at keeping my ego out of the equation.
Meantime, my novel is in the hands of another agent. And I’m already thinking ahead to another book. Because next to a good piece of Buddhist wisdom, there’s nothing like a new project to make a writer feel better.