Either They Do or They Don't: Lessons Learned from Artist Friends

Will your friends like what you’ve written? Will literary agents? Will publishers? Will the big world of readers?

It’s easier to deal with potential rejection, if you can internalize the perspective my artist friend Bill Turner taught me one day when I rode along with him as he showed his canvases to a prospective art gallery.

Bill was visiting me in Asheville as he traveled between open-air art festivals one summer. I told him about my favorite gallery downtown so we stopped in one afternoon and just happened to catch gallery owner Chris Haen there.

Chris invited Bill to bring in a few of what I think of as Bill’s ‘lonely road’ canvases to show him. While he appreciated Bill’s technical skills, Chris ultimately took a pass, feeling it was not art he could successfully sell in his gallery. I was devastated but Bill just thanked him politely for his time, picked up his canvases, and headed for the door.

“I’m so sorry,” I said to him as he put his artwork carefully back into his van. “I thought that would be a sure thing for you. Are you disappointed?”

Bill shrugged his shoulders and said, “No, not really.”

That surprised me. But Bill had a mathematical logic to it all.

“Either they like it or they don’t,” he said, actually upping his odds to a 50/50 chance of success. “It’s that simple.”

Now that I’m in the querying phase of my memoir, I’m channeling Bill’s “either they like it or they don’t” perspective. It really is that simple. You have a 50% chance of success with each person who takes the time to look at your work. Either ‘they’ – meaning publishers/literary agents/friends/followers – like it or they don’t.

And it’s not worth the time to read anything else into it.

[photo of Bill taken by me in Asheville in 2010]