Brendan O’Meara – Page 49 – Home of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast

The One Rejection Delusion

A Note from Brendan: I’m trying to get posts synched up through Mail Chimp, a newsletter service. I totally botched the first round and for that I’m sorry. Hopefully this one works better.

Standing up, because it's the right thing to do. — Standing up, because it’s the right thing to do. Great pants.

Written by Brendan O’Meara

In this game, you have to be delusional. Total and unequivocal delusion. I have been rejected so many times it’s embarrassing, or noble, depends on your stance. I think the current book I’ve been trying to shop has been rejected 20 times or so. I invoke the follow message from my good friends in pessimism, Despair.com. I own this poster, among others:

At some point, hanging in there just makes you look like an even bigger loser.

I feel this way just about every day. Most days, I feel like I’m walking into a wall and I’m too stupid to change directions. To my left could be my budding donut business, Donutarium: Crazy Good Donuts. Sadly, or maybe not so, I get so much engagement from any donut chatter I start on Facebook and Twitter. Writing related topics: Zero. That tells me something. People love donuts, especially well-made ones.

(As an aside, so many of writer’s blogs/twitter feeds, etc., are only followed by other writers. There’s a failure to reach out to readers, the people you hope will buy your work. This blog post, for instance, would bore the snot out of a reader looking for story. When I talk about donuts, it engages people, because they eat them and love them. Reading a book takes most people a week. Eating a donut takes 60 seconds, 10 if you’re a barbarian like me.)

I don’t know if that’s just life as a writer or MY life as a writer.

What’s kept me going, besides The Dark Knight Trilogy and Maker’s Mark bourbon and my delectable peanut butter and jelly donut, is when I get a rejection, I stop adding them up. They are isolated events. Sure, The Last Championship has been turned down by 20 agents or so. But I’m gearing up for another round of submissions—one very promising to a publisher, sans agent—and when the rejections stream in I’ll tell myself it’s only one.

Then head to the fryer and work on my crazy good donuts.

Track Life: Images and Words

Perhaps a more accurate naming of Juliet Harrison’s Track Life: Images and Words is Words and Images as that was the process behind this beautifully rendered book of prose and art.

Harrison approached writers and, in essence, said, write what you want. At that point she paired an image. I lifted a scene from the end of On the Backside, an unpublished book I wrote a few years ago. Here’s an excerpt from that piece titled The Athlete. It’s the opening essay in the book.

“I can’t think of a better reason to stay at Phil’s barn, so I exit and head out to my car, my boots clunking down the path, leaving a trail of waning footprints. I wave to the security guard and pull out onto Race Track Road. I put my head down and adjust my seating. I look up. To my left, on the Bowie Oval, a scene somewhat faded in the afternoon sun. And what do I see? Running off the turn is a horse in full stride, dead even with my accelerating car. He’s white with a grayish mane and the rider has him in a hold, the reins taught in his hands. The white horse isn’t gaining on me I’m not pulling ahead of him. We’re breezing in company, matching strides, and I only notice I’m pulling away when I surpass thirty-five miles per hour. His is stride swift and elegant, clopping away at a relaxing clip. I smile. I can’t help it. What an animal. What an athlete.”

The images are beautiful and words match Harrison stride for stride. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

The book is published by Paper Trail Press, the first book by Melaina Balbo Phipps, its publisher.

Better Than You Found It

I haven’t written here in a while. Probably a bad thing. J.D. Salinger would have approved, but, let’s face it, he’s probably the only one. Him and maybe J to the Franzen.

I’ll get to the point: You need to watch the above video of Bryan Cranston. He talks about Breaking Bad, of course, but, more importantly, he talks about the craft of acting. What? You don’t act? Pish posh, the principles he speaks of are universal, which is why I found this interview so inspiring.

Love,

Brendan

Breaking Bad Season 5: Our Great Punishment

Written by Brendan O’Meara

I watched an interview a few months ago with Matthew Weiner, show runner and creator of Mad Men. In it he spoke of his time writing on The Sopranos and how much he loved the ending. He said something to the effect that the most famous cut-to-black in television history was a big “fuck you” to the viewers. Reason being we had rooted for this monster, Tony Soprano, all these years but as the show reached its climax, we wanted to see the bloodshed. And David Chase was just the guy to make us feel like our cable went out instead. That was our punishment. Continue reading “Breaking Bad Season 5: Our Great Punishment”

Really, another split season?

Written by Brendan O’Meara

Breaking Bad’s final season was broken up into two eight-episode mini-seasons. It has worked to great fanfare. Namely, it allowed people to catch it on Netflix (like me) and then attack the cages when the show began airing its final eight episodes in August (I don’t have cable, so I bought the season on iTunes, the best way to a la carte your TV experiences). It has worked brilliantly for them as the first episode of Season 5B, as Vince Gilligan, the show’s creator, calls it, was the most-watched episode of the show’s history.

Now Mad Men, the golden child of AMC, has adopted the same strategy for its final “season.”

It’s one thing for a show with action, drama, and suspense, like Breaking Bad, to adopt this strategy. A cliff hanger in Breaking Bad is watching [spoiler alert] Jesse Pinkman shoot Gale in the face, or stop an episode mid-gun fight while Nazis rain bullets on Hank and Gomey. But for Mad Men? The brooding drama set in the 60s? What’s our cliff hanger? What brunette will Don Draper throw it in in the final six? Last season’s ending when Don brought his kids to the whore house he grew up in was a nice scene, but no cliff hanger. This show isn’t built on that. And as my friend and fellow writer Richard Gilbert once wrote, the arc of Mad Men should have ended long ago.

Perhaps they want people to binge-watch Mad Men on Netflix to similar a outcome from the Breaking Bad camp. One Mad Men a week is fine by me, but I can watch 16 straight Breaking Bads as blood pours out of my eyes and ears.

Frankly, this is a stupid move especially since, at this point, it is so unoriginal. AMC’s goose-laying-the-golden-eggs is about to die so they’re making sure they squeeze out every last egg before the time is up.

Hashtag #CNF Episode 5—Sheri Booker

Written by Brendan O’Meara

Sheri Booker’s memoir Nine Years Under: Coming of Age in an Inner City Funeral Home chronicles her near-decade long experience immersed the culture of death. Everything from picking up bodies to preserving them in the inner sanctum of Wylie Funeral Home.

In it Booker learns that death knows no age and that a funeral home is every bit a part of a community as a church. She also answers the age-old question of whether bodies move on the embalming table or not.

Hashtag #CNF Episode 4: Harrison Scott Key

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By Brendan O’Meara

I get to interview some pretty cool people doing this humble little podcast. In this latest episode, I speak with Harrison Scott Key about his award-winning essay The Wishbone. The Wishbone won Creative Nonfiction’s Southern Sin essay contest. It is a wildly funny essay about his father bending the rules to win a football game … a pee-wee football game … in which he recruit’s his 14-year-old son—Harrison—to suit up as the team’s integral 11th player.

In this interview we talk about comedy writing and where Key developed his comedic sensibility. Enjoy and share!

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Stay wild, CNFers!

What the NFL Draft Can Teach Writers

Written by Brendan O’Meara

Yes, the NFL Draft, the annual meat market where football coaches and general managers look to project a human being’s value, has come and gone. The lessons of the Draft are so valuable to the writer. Take Geno Smith.

Smith was the quarterback for the West Virginia Mountaineers. He was projected to be a slam-dunk first-round pick. But his name was never called. He dropped and dropped. At last he went early in the second round. At least he wasn’t Tom Brady who didn’t get drafted until the sixth round as the 199th overall selection.

Think about that for a moment. Tom Brady, Super Bowl hero, super model marrying, Ugg-endorsing playboy was deemed the 199th best player in the 2000 draft. In writing terms, he was rejected 198 times. He then saw owner Bob Kraft and told him he was the best decision he ever made.

As the rejections mount for your book, or your essay, or your love life, just think every no is one step closer to a yes. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve let the ‘no’ devalue my worth. One ‘no’ ended my baseball career. I can’t begin to tell you how many rejections I’ve received for the three books I’ve written. My first, unpublished, has probably 20 rejections. My second book, Six Weeks in Saratoga, was rejected 15 times or so, and The Last Championship is, let’s say, getting up there, a career-high even.

One agent went so far as to bash the writing. Let’s excerpt that for comedic effect:

Thank you for the chance to read your proposal for The Last Championship: A Memoir of My Father and Baseball, and please accept my apologies for the time it has taken me to get back to you. The father-son relationship at the heart of this story is appealing, but, ultimately, I didn’t find the characters or the scenes as engaging as I’d hoped. Without the necessary enthusiasm for the writing, I’m just not confident that I’d be able to sell the book effectively. I’m sorry that this wasn’t a match, but I’m grateful to you for the opportunity to consider your work and wish you luck in finding representation.

Trust me, I was licking my wounds after this one. I came close to hitting the EJECT button on the cockpit of my career using a promising love of donuts as my parachute. Usually agents don’t go so far as to say they don’t like your writing. I appreciate the time he took to write this and to address that it was a total bomb.

What did Tom Brady do when 198 players went before him? He out-worked everyone, took advantage of Drew Bledsoe getting injured, and took his team on a 13-year run the NFL has never seen.

The diamonds are the ones who slip through the cracks. Your job, my job, is to make all those people who said no wish they hadn’t.

That then begs the questions: When might it be time to give up/retire? But that’s for another blog post altogether.

The Eroticism of ‘No’

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Written by Brendan O’Meara

When I need a dose of motivation, I watch Don Draper in action. When a fire lights under his ass look at how he burns.

At the beginning of this scene, Don enters Roger’s office and grabs a drink right away. Even Roger is taken by this “drinking with a purpose”. Don doesn’t want piddly business, he wants big fish. Screw bagging a few marlin; he wants Moby freakin’ Dick.

Don laments how his letter denouncing Lucky Strike has effected his mojo with potential clients. Rogers throws it right back at him, “You used to love no. No used to make you hard.” He goes on and I do hope you watch the entire 5:20. After all, it’s what we do.

What?????!!!!!

All we are are salesmen. We are always on the clock.

All publishers, magazines, newspapers, are are customers/clients looking to benefit/profit from our services. At every turn you need to give them reasons to say yes, of course, but you need them to question why on earth they would even consider saying no.

Now, imagine you go into a meeting, or a phone pitch, with any editor and you pitch cold the way Don does in this scene? Can you imagine facing rejection? Can you imagine the gall should they say no?

So. Go on. Say no. I want you to say no in my face so hard that spittle gets on my sunglasses. I also want you see the face of doubt in your own reflection.

Because ‘no’ … ‘no’ is one step closer to yes.

Have a great week, I’m on the road.

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Hashtag #CNF Episode 2—Author/Nonfiction Editor Tom McAllister

Written by Brendan O’Meara

If you thought Hashtag #CNF was just a one-and-done kind of podcast, you’ve got another thing coming. I’m at least giving this thing a shot at a sophomore slump. Suckers.

To quote Ren from Ren and Stimpy, “Hark! Hark!” I’ve got a fun one for you today, and every day, so long as you click play.

Let’s face it, it had to be since author and Barrelhouse nonfiction editor Tom McAllister joined me to talk about Bring the Noise: The Best Pop Culture Essays from Barrelhouse Magazine.

McAllister is the author of Bury Me in My Jersey: A Memoir of My Father, Football, and Philly. He is also a professor of creative writing at Temple University and, most recently, is the editor of Bring the Noise. As McAllister riffs in his hilarious introduction, BTN is a treatise “on the the stupid things we love”. Yes, there’s the stupid things we love, but BTN shows how beautiful these stupid things are when in the hands of seventeen artful storytellers whose personal stories elevate popular culture to the adult table.

In it you’ll find professional wrestling, roller derby, Barry Bonds, stalking Aaron Grenier, and the “never-ending reality of The Hills” and, in true Barrelhouse style, the Patrick Swayze question.

I allowed myself one book purchase at AWP Boston. This was it. Best $15 I spent all weekend.