Jennifer Brown

Just a few of my rejection letters...

...and I don't even burst into flame when I touch them!

Today I've done a lot of thinking about when I started writing. Waaaay back when I was still only a mom of one and all the gray hair was in the back of my head where I couldn't see it and I could conceivably do the Booty Pop without actually popping something (Oh. Yeah. That's right. It was also before the Booty Pop existed).

Back then, I wrote for my eyes only. Writing was deeply personal for me. A way for me to sort out my feelings and say things that were important to me. Not to be shared.

I remember my mom suggesting, "You know, after that baby's born..." (because I was roughly a zillion months pregnant at the time), "You should join a writer's group and read your work out loud. It's what my friend at work does. You could join his group."

My response: "NO WAY, DO YOU THINK I'M INSANE?!"

Like most writers, I was scared to death to show my work to someone else. Because when you write down things that are in your heart and on your mind... if your readers reject it... it hurts. It took me a long time to work up the courage to show anyone -- even Mom! -- my work.

But writing has a way of making you get past having your ideas rejected. In fact, there've been many months of my life where I considered myself a success ONLY IF I'd received a set number of rejections. I never threw a rejection letter away (I still have them all). Some of them hurt more than others. Many of them made me curl up on the bed and cry real tears. But eventually I got to a place where I realized... something may have been lost in the translation, but it doesn't make my thoughts flawed. It just makes my writing flawed. It's not like I'm a bad person.

And then I got into humor writing.

There's something about humor that, quite honestly, brings out the worst in some readers. I've never had an experience of reading a humor column that I disliked so much I felt the need to write to the writer and call her a worthless human being who deserves to be smashed by the nearest semi. I've never had an experience where I felt like I needed to cuss someone out, call her a bad mother, call her ineffective, call her a bad writer, a crap person... all kinds of things... just because I didn't laugh when I read her work.

I can't even imagine what it's like to live in a world where you do have those experiences, quite honestly. Where you're so driven by a need to hurt someone you don't know just because they failed to make you giggle. Weird. And, honestly, sad.

Humor writers get hate mail. It's part of the business. And in some weird way you do eventually get used to it. It hurts less and you think to yourself, Well, I guess that guy didn't get what I was saying, but you don't take it personally. You develop this thick, thick skin, where you're forced to believe that it ain't about you. Honestly, believing that it ain't about you is the only way you can put your fingers back on the keyboard sometimes.

But sometimes someone goes too far. Or maybe you're just having a vulnerable day. Or maybe you had doubts about a particular column. Or whatever. And it still hurts. And... damn it... you're brought back to that place you were in when you began. Back when you swore you would never show your work to anyone, because it's just too vulnerable.

You're tempted to quit. To hide away. To Never Write Humor Again.

But if you did that... the mean people would win.

So you slather on your thick skin, you get back to the keyboard, and you type. Even if your fingers are slick from wiping tears out of your eyes, you type. Even if you're sure you're a fraud and you don't deserve anything good, you type. And you say what's in your heart and on your mind and you notice that you're maybe just a little less vulnerable than you were before and that's okay, too, because you couldn't NOT write if you tried.

And you realize... this skin... this new skin... this new thick skin... it's part of you, too. And, damn, it's sexy.