I’m not tenacious enough. At least historically, I haven’t been. Tenacity is the drive to push through something when it’s hard. It’s the intrinsic motivation you feel when you want to succeed regardless of the obstacles. Don’t get me wrong, I want to succeed, but I’ve had a hard time pushing through obstacles in the past. At least, I have when there has been an alternative available to me that doesn’t require that same tenacity. Let me explain.
When someone is talented at many things—which if you’ll allow for a potentially egotistical moment, I consider myself to be—they have options. If this type of person struggles or fails at one thing, they can move onto another thing. This is especially true if the person enjoys the other things they are good at. When you have optionality, the need for tenacity is not as strong.
For me, this manifests itself in many ways. In my non-writing life, I work in the software industry. I learned to code late in life, but when I did I was suddenly exposed to options. I could write code for employers or I could start my own companies. What this meant for my writing was that as much as I loved it, I didn’t HAVE to persevere through rejection after rejection. At any moment, I could pivot to doing something else.
However, this doesn’t just apply to writing. As I mentioned, I could start companies because of my work experience and my coding experience. I did this. My companies failed, and that’s fine. That happens more than it doesn’t. The problem, though, is that when I’ve tried to start other companies, I’ve struggled to find the tenacity to push through the early disappointments and troubles that come with starting a company. If the company or product wasn’t getting much traction, I could just pivot to a new product I would build.
As you might imagine, this is a surefire way to avoid success.
Circling back to my writing, I want to talk about how this lack of tenacity because of optionality manifested itself. I received my MFA in 2017. During the program, I wrote a novel. After many edits, I started querying the novel. I received many rejection letters for it, but looking back now, I realize I didn’t actually query that many agents. I didn’t have the tenacity to push through the rejections and keep trying. I didn’t have the tenacity to try to improve the manuscript or the query letter or both.
Contrast this to the early part of my MFA program, back before I felt like I had optionality, back before I knew how to code. I would submit to literary journals, and I had a yearly goal of 100 rejections. This goal meant that I was putting myself out there, and by putting myself out there, I gave myself a chance to be published. Through that process, I had over a dozen stories published. I had tenacity.
Where does that leave me now? I have rededicated myself to writing for two reasons:
I love writing and reading and books
For my mental health, I need an escape from traditional “work”
This means that after seven years of letting two novels sit on a shelf and nearly five years after my short story collection was published, I am writing in earnest again. This requires tenacity. Reviews, critiques, rejections and more will require me to fight through the desire to run to something else. I need to recapture the same tenacity I had when I was writing short stories.
I think I’ll do it, but guess what? You all get to follow the process as I work on it publicly.