Weike Wang
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Weike Wang is the author of the novel Chemistry (Knopf) and her short fiction has been published in Glimmer Train, the Alaska Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, and Redivider. She has taught at Boston University, and Gotham Writers in New York. She holds a BA in chemistry from Harvard University, an SM and SD from the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, and an MFA in Fiction from Boston University. |
A 100% Rejection Rate |
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If I were to describe my twenties, I would have to say that they were busy. The years before that were busy as well. I moved around a lot. I was born in China but had immigrated to Australia and Canada, before arriving in America at eleven. In America, I moved between two different states, three different cities. I transferred elementary and middle schools. For high school, I attended what was then America's number one high school, according to USA Today, a newspaper my father read religiously. Then I went to a college where I don't think I slept more than four hours a night. I was premed and went down that path so far that I had taken the MCAT, gone on the interview circuit, and was considering offers before taking a much needed year off. During that year, I slept, worked for a crazy boss, and discovered tequila. I also wrote. I read somewhere that a writer writes even when there seems to be no hope for the writing itself. That year, I wrote some terrible stories. I sent them out and made an Excel spread sheet of all of my rejections. I had a 100% rejection rate. This essay is supposed to be an essay on craft and I'm getting there. I thought for months about what is most important to me about the writing process and for me, that is discipline. The older I get the more aware I have become of my race and background. So is it stereotypical of me, an immigrant Asian American scientist, to say that discipline is crucial? Now that I have typed that, I realize I am starting to sound a lot like my father. After my year off, I went into a graduate program for biostatistics. When this essay is published, I will have (hopefully) defended my doctoral thesis [she did!] and put that degree away in a drawer. I took on the biostatistics degree because I wasn't confident enough in my abilities as a writer. I envied others who were, but years ago I could not see myself becoming a writer. I just felt that that wasn't in the cards for me. Also I was doomed by my own pragmatism. I needed to eat, pay the rent. Ironically, a doctorate in biostatistics didn't scare me as much as trying to make it as a writer. Yet I kept coming back to writing. I kept writing. So in the middle of my doctoral program, I applied to an MFA program and, miraculously, got in. For reasons that I won't go into here, I could not leave my doctorate program and pursue the MFA. I was given an ultimatum: if I truly wanted to be a writer, if I loved it so much, then I could do it at the same time as finishing my doctorate. This ultimatum was also driven by pragmatism, but it did something interesting. It lit a fire under my butt. I wrote more terrible stories that year than any year before. But I also wrote some good ones. Because neither program paid a stipend, I was also tutoring MCAT students eighteen hours a week. I took my PhD qualifying exams and squeaked by. Then for my MFA thesis, I wrote what would become my debut novel. I suppose my lack of self-confidence as a writer came from constantly comparing myself to the image of the free-spirited, artist type. In comparison, I was so high strung. Though what I had learned from my upbringing and educational ‘journey' is how to manage my time (now I really sound like my father). To write, I knew I couldn't spend hours on end for each project. So I set aside 5 hours of time every other day from 9 am to 2 pm to write. I told myself that I would not stand up from my chair until I had written 1000 words. I could go to the bathroom of course, and eat, but not too much. The 1000 words didn't have to be great. Actually, they could be really, really bad. But I found that once I got something down, I had a much easier time revising it to something better. On the days I wasn't writing, I did my doctorate and teaching. I also used my time in commute to read the work of writers I admired. What I learned quickly was that writing, like any field, like medicine or biostatistics, takes labor, planning, and continuous effort. I knew that this was something I could do even if I couldn't come up with the brilliant ideas, so I focused my efforts on doing what I knew I could and sticking to it every day. Interestingly, with time, the better ideas came. My stories weren't always terrible. My rejection rate went down to 98.9 percent. If I could go back, I don't know if I would want to do the simultaneous graduate programs again, but I don't know how else I would have gained the confidence to write. My confidence came from realizing that I would write no matter what, and I was happy doing it. For scientific papers, it is always encouraged to leave the reader with a take home message. These are usually in a few bullet points. Here are mine.
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