The Power of No

I remember once taking my mother with me to a book signing at Barnes & Noble. We had lunch first, and in the course of our conversation, I mentioned that I would be giving a speech at a local liberal arts college and my mother said, “I always hoped you’d go there.”

I stared at her, speechless, remembering how she and my aunt had sat me down when I was beginning to think about applying to just such a college and told me that I could not be a writer because I would “starve to death.”

All I had ever wanted to be since I was nine years old was a writer. Since I had set my heart on that, I had wanted nothing else. I had been specifically forbidden from applying to colleges for creative writing because the purpose of my education, as my father told me, was “to get a real job.”

I reminded my mother of these conversations, only to hear her say, “Well, if we hadn’t put obstacles in your path, you wouldn’t have fought so hard to overcome them, now would you? You should be thanking us for making you tougher.”

In the span of five seconds, I burned through emotions like a chameleon on acid. I didn’t even know how to respond except to laugh bitterly and tell her it was time to go. She sat next to me during my signing talking me and my book up and even going into the shelves and trying to hand-sell to customers there. But the entire time I was so incredulous at the strangeness of it all that I could barely do more than mumble my thanks and sign my name in shaky silver Sharpie.

I find it so easy to remember every no; there were so many of them and they were so often devastating. My father laughing at my carefully drawn maps of my fantasy world and making fun of my desire to write science fiction and fantasy — “Why do you want to hang around with a bunch of freaks and weirdos?” The poetry tutor — yes, oddly though I was told I could not be a writer, my mother took me to a poetry tutor for a while — who told me she wanted “to take the dream out of my writing.” (Back then, I was writing a lot of poetry inspired by a combination of martial arts training and reading too much DragonLance). The refusal to allow me to apply to any college on the basis of my writing skills — not even when one of my AP College professors, our local Yale representative, wanted to help me go to Yale.

And when I went to an in-state technical school and struggled for two years with Wildlife Management until I finally transferred into English, being told in my very first fiction workshop, “If you write genre fiction, you will never receive an A in this class.” The professor in my MFA who said, “If I’d known what kind of fiction you were going to write, I never would have allowed you in my workshop.” The colleague who upon hearing that I was writing a YA fantasy series said, “Why would you want to write that shlock?”

So many no’s. I have stewed and marinated in an ocean of no’s for most of my life.

Which makes me all the more grateful for the strategically-placed yes. They have come along when I needed them most. My only college scholarship was from a local sci-fi convention. I was critique partners with someone who would eventually recommend me for a new series that became my first young adult series. I won a grant that allowed me to travel to London for research. I was invited to give a speech at the selfsame college I would have loved to attend. An agent said yes to a very weird book that ultimately garnered an award. The professor who had forbidden me from writing genre, upon hearing me read a published story of mine, said it was “one of the best stories he’d heard all year.” And so it goes…

Every time I’ve been down for the count, something has always come to save me. As I mentioned once in a previous essay, I will never forget hearing Gene Wolfe telling his own publishing story, of how it had been much like boxing for him, and that when “…publishing has you down on the mat, you must answer that bell.” You have to get up and start again.

These days, though, my something isn’t coming.

There have been many, many no’s this year, and I’ve kept silent about them. There have been things that fell into silence. And that silence, that withering, is worse than all those no’s in my youth. Back then, stubbornness and — let’s be honest — not a little spite sustained me like nothing else. As well as the belief that the next yes was just around the corner.

Somewhere in the last decade, my body broke. My heart was already broken and mended many times over. But I think my spirit never quite broke so much as it quietly, softly eroded away. Perhaps it was the emotional roller coaster of motherhood delayed until my 40s. Perhaps it was watching my husband’s spirit for the work he had chosen slowly but irrevocably crumble under the pressures of a world that barely pays lip service to true environmental conservation. I know for certain I was worn to a thin edge by working a job where I gave my all initially, but as it became clear that I would never be enough, gradually my integrity corroded into apathy. The anger and betrayal when the job finally was taken from me, despite the promise that it never would be. My father’s death. My mother’s death. Perhaps it was all of those.

And then came the silence. It seems these days everything I touch falls there. A project of my deepest heart — that carried me through the last years of my humiliating job, the perils of our second adoption and the major medical emergencies that followed, the continual slide of government into something I didn’t recognize, a pandemic — came to nothing. Another proposal for a large intellectual property for which I auditioned and worked hard on for a year…silence. Rejection after rejection on every story and novella I submitted, trying to write myself out of the quiet.

Deeper silence.

I decided at the beginning of this year to make my own yes, that I needed no one else’s validation for what I knew was good. I decided this, and I made moves in that direction. But for whatever reason — the excuses are many — I find myself here at the end of July, drifting. Silent.

I believe I have used no as fuel for so long that I don’t know how to use yes. The twin boosters of stubbornness and spite might get you out of the atmosphere, but they only last so long. Once those fall away, you are all that is left. And when so many people have made sure you know that you aren’t enough, well…the drift through the void of space is pretty much a given.

But maybe there is a different kind of no I haven’t yet explored. The no of refusing to give in. The no of accepting an end. The no of refusing to fear the drift, of leaving behind old tactics and visions that no longer serve.

The no of refusing all those no’s that came before. The no of bending to the dictum so many people have tried to hand me that as a mother I will never be a creative, that I’ve thrown away my potential, that I can only do one thing, be one thing, forever. No to being stuck. No to the temptation to let it all go because no one seems to be listening.

And if there are no voices singing me along in the silence, at least there is mine, cracked and broken and off-key as it may be.

A thing I’m holding to these days is Miyazaki explaining the Japanese concept of ma. Emptiness. “If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it’s just busyness…” Miyazaki-san said in an interview with film critic Roger Ebert. “The people who make the movies are scared of silence, so they want to paper and plaster it over. What really matters is the underlying emotions — that you never let go of those…If you stay true to joy and astonishment and empathy you don’t have to have violence and you don’t have to have action.”

And perhaps that is where I am, perhaps that is what the use of this negative space, this silence and emptiness is for. All the things that no longer serve me are falling away. I have feared a thing that is the only thing that matters, this endless ocean that surrounds us, through which we have our being, and with which we must find a way to make our own fuel. Be our own sun. Our own sails.