by: Martha Anne Toll
I still can’t make it through The Wizard of Oz. Watching the film as a small child, the Wicked Witch of the West traumatized me for life.
However, I love the phrase, “there’s no place like home,” and I adore Dorothy’s ruby slippers and what they signify.
One part of Dorothy’s journey is about learning to trust herself. Through a series of unpredictable, hair-raising moments, she relies on inner strength to comfort the Tin Man, the Lion and the Scarecrow. Yet if Dorothy had been interviewed mid-adventure, she would have denied that she carried the means to her own rescue. It took a journey through Oz to realize she owned the power to return home; she just needed to trust her instincts.
Dorothy inspires me because, at its core, writing is about trusting our writerly instincts. That trust must co-exist and grow in the face of rejection, writing’s older sibling. Every writer gets rejections, and most writers get a hell of a lot of them. I will never learn to let rejections roll off, but I have come to understand they’re an integral member of my writing family. Rejections challenge us to trust our writing. And let’s admit it, they can offer sensible editing suggestions worthy of attention.
It was 16 years between when I signed with my first agent and when I sold my debut novel. During the interim, I had plenty of publication acceptances, thankfully, but I could not sell any of the several novels I had been writing. During those long years, I developed new and creative ways to worry about publishing: I never got an MFA (never mind that I graduated law school); I didn’t know the right people. But those concerns were too facile. The worst kinds of worries are the ones turned inward—I can’t do this; I’m not good enough. Those worries are insidious and debilitating.
Vacillating between foolhardy optimism and despair, I went to hear the great Irish novelist Anne Enright speak. She said (I paraphrase): “Ask any debut novelist what number novel their debut really is. For most of them, it’s their sixteenth.” That sounded right to me. Between drafts, revisions, and novels in the drawer, I easily topped that number.
Armed with Enright’s wisdom, and the support of friends, family, and my writing community, who told me not to give up, I began to realize I was wearing Dorothy’s ruby slippers. The rejections didn’t stop coming, and I didn’t sell a novel for a long time after that. But I started to trust my writing instincts. And I stopped looking for rational patterns in my rejections.
I flipped the script and began to discover that I might already know how to make my manuscripts stronger, that I owned the means to critique and revise my work. I started following my favorite writing advice: aim for 100 rejections a year. Although I continued to benefit from feedback from others, I started to acknowledge (to myself) that not everyone knew more about my book than I did. I had opinions, and I was entitled to them, and they might strengthen my work if I could learn to listen to them. Maybe I did have the means to figure out how to bring a manuscript home.
It may take longer than we can imagine, but sometimes if we click our heels, we realize that we are there already.
Martha Anne Toll writes fiction, essays, and book reviews, and reads anything that’s not nailed down. Her debut novel, Three Muses, won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction and is forthcoming from Regal House Publishing on September 20, 2022. Martha brings a long career in social justice to her work covering BIPOC and women writers. She is a book reviewer and author interviewer at NPR Books, the Washington Post, The Millions, and elsewhere; and publishes short fiction and essays in a wide variety of outlets.