A long, long time ago, when I was in my 20s, in grad school, and then living in Paris, I tried for a while to publish my short stories, poems, essays and one academic paper on the grotesque that my professor thought worthy.  (I gave up on the research paper after five tries – a number my prof thought reasonable.)

It was a lot harder in those days: You needed to purchase special postage for the SASEs, but even before that, you had to deal with messy carbon paper, ink on your fingers, smelly “white-out,” or erasable bond paper, typewriter keys that you needed to keep unsticking and so on.  Rewriting didn’t become something I did for a long time.  When my professors would ask me how I approached revising my work, I would mutter something – in reality, I sat at my typewriter and the first draft was the final draft.  My revision process involved erasing the second half of a sentence when it didn’t match up with the first half and trying again!  One professor kept begging me to use regular bond paper that didn’t smudge as much.  Of course, I had to pretend I didn’t hear him.

Years later, with the advent of word processors, rewriting became a joy and something I actually delighted in.  If I wanted to change point of view, a character’s name, move whole sections around, as you know, it was a snap. Then too, living back in the States, mailing off my manuscripts was no longer a burden.  But I still faced the dictum of the times that mandated no simultaneous submissions.  So I’d wind up submitting a story, waiting months for that rejection slip before being able to ship the manuscript out to another journal.  (I used to joke I would paper my bathroom with rejection slips.  I never did follow through on this threat, but I could have!)

And so it was that my career as a fiction writer and poet came, early on, to an abrupt abortive end.  Not to be completely thwarted in my writerly ambitions, I turned to journalism, a first love, loving the instant gratification it provided.  I started writing for a local county paper, whatever they needed: features on female boat captains, college professors, real-estate moguls who were two timing as writers and news features on talks in nearby venues on Title IX, women and religion, home-grown neighbors who “made good” in one way or another.  Soon, I was writing for a religious newspaper and eventually I segued into 10 years of writing career articles for major newspapers and trade journals.  Do you know I had to rely on a listserv to research these articles?  But then in the  ’90s, I had only to stretch out my fingers to enter the World Wide Web – easy street!

An article in the New York Post attracted attention; I was asked to write a nonfiction book.  By the time I finished with that (four months), I had nothing further to say, or that I wanted to say, on the subject of careers.  But I still wanted to write.  So I found gigs online, began reviewing books and movies, and finally, finally, turned back the way I had come.  I rediscovered the joy of making stuff up and composing short stories and poems and a novella that’s just been reawakened after spending about 20 years in the bottom drawer of my desk.

We all take the Internet for granted, don’t we?  Well, as an old-timer, I can tell you it’s amazing for writers.  No longer do I have to go to the post office, weigh my manuscripts, get the correct postage for the envelope and the SASE and wait and wait and wait.  With a flick on my finger, I “send” my darlings out into the world — I’m “allowed” most of the time to submit to multiple outlets — and voila, if I’m lucky, as I have been lately, amid the crush of rejections come e-mails of acceptance, telling me they liked my work or they didn’t, but they want to see more, more, more.

Funny that in quite a few cases, I’m now publishing stuff I wrote ages ago.  Case in point: The first long short story I published at the end of last year, I wrote 20, 30, no, 40 years ago.  I never wanted to give up on it and took it out every so often to polish it up a bit.  Same fate for a short poem I wrote, I believe, while still in grad school.

Where am I going with all this?  Reminiscence just for the sake of reminiscence?  Not really.  I want to deliver the message to my fellow writers that perseverance is as important as talent and way more important than luck.  A young woman who works for me in my “real” life paid me a compliment recently.  She said, “I know you’ll accomplish what you set out to do because you never give up.”

I hadn’t thought of that.  The truth is that the desire to have my creations read and hopefully enjoyed by others, to share my vision of the crazy universe, to “see” people laugh at my turn of phrase or image or character, that trumps everything else in my life.  That brings joy.  It will do the same for you.  So don’t give up!  Discovery is waiting just around the corner.

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Janet Garber is a human resources executive in New York City during daylight hours, but at all other times, a freelance journalist, publishing articles, essays, poems, book and movie reviews, and a how-to book, I Need a Job, NowWhat?  Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Post, Wall Street Journal, trade journals and many print and online magazines. She has recently published fiction and poetry in Bohemia Journal, Caesura, Contrapositions, Heyday Magazine, Minerva Rising, Up, Do Anthology and Writing Tomorrow. She lives in what New Yorkers consider “the country” with her husband and two cats.