The Value of No

By Marjie Alonso

I’m taking a course on how to get pieces published. I’m doing this because the longer I’m a full-time writer, the less I write. Though I claim no expertise, this seems bad. I recognize I have a problem to solve.

In my previous life I was an expert in animal behavior, and in that world we understood something called a rate of reinforcement. This refers to the number of rewards per a given unit of time, usually minutes, or even seconds.

When training a dog to sniff out contraband, or a rhino to follow a keeper to a pen, a training plan is formed with a clear end goal. The steps toward that result are then broken down into successive approximations of the skill: The rhino moves his head slightly in the keeper’s direction; the rhino shifts his body toward the keeper; the rhino takes a step toward the keeper; the rhino takes three steps toward the keeper etcetera until the entire sequence is successfully completed.

At each of these increments, the animal is reinforced with something he values: food, or a head scratch, or play. These reinforcers are plentiful, and a high rate of reinforcement garners happy, engaged learners and instructors both, and serves to send a message loud and clear.

Do this thing. It results in things you value, and the more you do it, the more valued things you will receive.

I’m not sure who’s in charge of writing, but the whole goals and reinforcers concept has clearly eluded them.

I suppose, like with goodness and flossing, the mere act of writing should be reinforcing. It is, to a certain extent. If I don’t write at all, after a while I itch and need to express myself in ways that simple conversation won’t allow, at least without eye rolls or the threat of tranquilizer darts from those around me.

It’s also harder to edit the spoken word. One rarely gets a second chance at the “pineapple on pizza” conversation, for example, if one’s initial words on the subject were, “What is with people putting canned fruit on anything, never mind pizza? Were they dropped on their heads as babies, or are they just stupid?”

“I mean, I really prefer a fresh bufala mozzarella on mine, but I’m glad you enjoy it that way,” never quite lands after the first pass.

But at least you’re getting feedback.

And so we write into a void, and we join groups of other writers who all share in the joke that writing is a singular, entrancing torment. If we’re really lucky, people will appreciate us when we’re dead. They’ll appreciate us most if we died by means of self-injury, physical or mental disease, or at least something isolating and congenital.

Some intrepid souls write a lot, completing piece after piece from op-eds to essays to entire books. Some of those people even get them published, and they do so by submitting their work to publishers and agents with the full expectation that, in all likelihood, they’ll be turned down. Most of the work most people submit is turned down.

What, my trainer behaviorist brain cries out, the fuck is this?

In what universe do tens of thousands of people devote hundreds of thousands of hours of hard, careful work, and then muster up the courage to present it for approval, only to be usually told no? And then go do it again?

This outlook might be a clue to my waning productivity.

So I’m taking a course on how to submit, and hopefully get pieces published. The instructor doesn’t tell us to write pieces to publish, she tells us to write pitch letters for those pieces, real or imagined. Though massively talented, she’s not someone who in my previous field would have been called a “positive trainer.” She says things like, “no” and “cut it” and “stop talking.”

And we hang on her every word, and hope she’ll vaguely mortify us, next. She gives no-nonsense marching orders. If she rejects our assignment, it means she’s looked at our work.

I submitted something to a publication yesterday, and I’ll submit this when I’m done with it. Deciding to take this course has resulted in me writing more in the last week than I’ve been able to write in the last six. 

It’s given me the courage to stop avoiding rejection, and understand the value of no. It means that someone’s there on the other side of the page

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Marjie Alonso is a former executive director of small international nonprofits, where she promoted evidence-based education, developed professional standards, and acted as a “civilian-to-scientist” facilitator in all things animal behavior and training. Recently retired, she now writes full-time, which means spending her days telling the stories she loves to tell.