As you must know by now, my father worked for the Internal Revenue Service. He hated the job but he needed that weekly paycheck and never thought he could find a situation where he'd get one doing something he liked better. I'm not sure he was wrong about that. He was a lovely, kind, compassionate man but he didn't seem to have any particularly marketable skills. So he spent his life in a job, not a career.
Here's how I'm differentiating those two nouns for the purpose of this article and its sequels to come. A career is something that fits into this sentence: "When I grow up, I want to be a ____." A job is what you do to pay rent and buy groceries if and when you aren't able to become whatever noun you ever seriously put into that sentence.
There are people who are very happy in jobs, especially but not limited to folks who never really put any occupation into that blank. I even know people who had long dreamed-of careers and gave them up for jobs because the careers didn't turn out to be as ideal as they'd seemed from afar.
I have heard people with what I call careers envy people with what I call jobs. Because life can be a lot different if you care passionately about having one particular profession, especially one where the competition is fierce, the hiring is overly subjective and you probably can't work in one place for very long.
My father wanted on and off in his youth to be a writer. He had a few other dreams — like professional singer and professional baseball player — for which he clearly lacked the physical requirements. Eventually, he came to realize that the only one that might at all be attainable was writing. (I do not, by the way, think that was a bad decision on his part. It was probably a very good decision. Dreams are fine but in this world, you have to have at least a little idea of what you can't do well. I have a very long list that could basically be summarized as "Almost everything except writing.")
I don't know if my father had the talent for writing but he sure lacked the thickness of skin and the ability to cope with rejection that the career requires. He could not get past the obstacle of someone in a position of authority telling him his work wasn't good enough. So he spent most of his adult life at the I.R.S. where every day, he came home bruised and nursing an ulcer because of superiors telling him his work wasn't good enough.
Around age six, I began declaring that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. I had no second choices or alternative dreams. A writer. That was it. My father greeted this news with mixed emotions.
He was thrilled at the possibility that his son — his only child, remember — might succeed in that field that had seemed so unachievable to him. But he feared that I was in for the same kind of heartbreak and feelings of failure that stopped him cold.
Several times, he sat me down and without telling me to change my mind about my goal, he cautioned me that it's a rough game full of shattered dreams and disappointment and people who say terrible, terrible things about what you've done. Once in a while, he told me the tale of the one time he and a friend had submitted writing samples to try out for a job at a radio station. He trembled as he told of the know-nothing boss who had told them their work was amateurish and to forget about ever earning a buck that way.
He pretty much did, especially after a friend who knew a bit about the writing business reminded him of something: Rejection for a writer is never a one-time experience. If the guy at the radio station had said yes, that wouldn't mean my father would have become a writer for the rest of his life. It meant he and his partner would have had a few weeks of work. Then they would have been back submitting their work to other bosses, possibly of the know-nothing variety.
That was a chilling thing to consider, especially during the Depression when too much of the population was without employment. It felt then like the most important thing a man could have was something steady — especially if he had the mad, impetuous idea of having a wife and children. Writing, he well knew, would never be steady.
That one rejection was so devastating that while he thereafter toyed at times with writing this or that, he never again put himself in a position where someone could hurt him like that again. Which means, of course, that he never again put himself in a position where he could succeed as a writer. Given his gentle nature, that may have been for the better.
No writer takes rejection well…and of course, when the publishers or producers do accept it and it's published or produced, you face an even more certain moment of rejection. Someone's going to say it stinks…maybe multiple someones. It might be a reviewer in a newspaper or some cluck with a blog or some acquaintance lacking in social skills and/or oozing envy. But someone's going to not like it and they well may wonder aloud how such an obvious incompetent like you isn't running the deep fryer at Hardee's for a living because you obviously lack any talent whatsoever for writing.
This is the first in a series of essays I'll be posting on this blog — one every week or three — about the two kinds of rejection a writer must face: Rejection by the person or persons who hire and rejection by the intended audience. I don't know how many installments there'll be but there will probably be a lot of them. I have a lot to say on these topics.
Please be kind. I have learned how to handle rejection when it happens with everything else I've written. I'm not sure I can handle rejection of articles about rejection. Thank you.