12 Steps of Literary Rejects Anonymous (LRA)1. We admitted we were powerless over literary rejection, and that our lives had become unmanageable (and our manuscripts unpublishable).
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than Publishing (our own Muse) could restore us to hope, healing, and sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of a gentle and loving Muse.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of all our writing to see if any of the rejections we'd received so far were at all accurate or in any way useful.
5. Admitted to the Muse, to ourselves, and to another literary blogger, the exact nature of our self-pitying flaws and bad attitude.
6. Were entirely ready to have the Muse remove all these defects, so that we could create a clean revision and start anew.
7. Humbly asked the Muse to remove our literary shortcomings (and to please stop the onslaught of rejections, if at all possible).
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed in the process of writing, or getting rejected, and became willing to make amends to them all, including friends, family, agents, editors, and other writers.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them, ourselves, or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we wrote something horrible promptly admitted it. When we got rejected, we shared the experience. We have no more dirty little rejection secrets.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with the Muse, as we understood the Muse, praying only for knowledge of plot, character and metaphor according to the Muse's will for us, and the power to carry that will out on the page.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other writers, and to practice these principles in all our literary pursuits.
7 comments:
Spot on, my friend.
This is so uplifting. When is the first meeting--or rather the second. Didn't I already introduce myself to that poor Anonymous soul. And will you be my sponsor? I love the Muse as our higher power. I am proud to be a part of this historic beginning. And, on the more serious side, the world of literati could sure use a dose of the humility and egalitarianism of the Twelve Step groups. There is so much pretense and condescension it is sickening. In LRA everyone is free to join, of all social classes, whether they have a free blog or bought one, right? (I still can't believe there are people who actually make that distinction).
In the time it took you to write this, you could have been working on your novel...just saying.
It took me 15 min to cut, paste, revise and post these 12 babies, slave driver. And I think I deserve a little break from the novel once in a while (since the damn thing is going to be the death of me).
Just saying.
Whoah! I hope C.S. isn't your Muse. That would be one harsh Higher Power!
CS: will you NOT be my sponsor?
Very cute and worth every minute! Even though that higher power thing eludes me, I think the Muse might be my answer. I'm going to get down on my hands and knees and see what happens.
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