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decided that the fear had been
silly, so Margie befriended others who were bullied and tried to
make them feel better.
    The story character Margie made it through
the persecution to graduate from high school and became an
acclaimed writer and everyone who had ever hurt her was ashamed
because of her glowing success. And after the graduation, she and
her bullied friends all went to dinner to celebrate and they all
ate ice cream for dessert.
    Maggie liked that story. So left her pen and
paper on the desk. In the following months she reached out to
everyone she saw who was bullied and compared experiences. They
were all unhappy and she tried to encourage them and told them it
was not their fault. Sometimes they listened.
    She was able to endure the bullying better
because she felt obligated to take the advice she had given them.
She told herself the encouraging words she said to them: It is not
your fault.
    That was hard for even her to remember
sometimes: It is not my fault. At school she put on a brave
face. She thought she had to because the bullied kids were now
looking to her for morale and guidance.
    But as soon as she got home, she would drop
her book bag on the kitchen floor and head to her room. There she
would lean against the wall while taking short quick breaths and
let herself slide to the floor where she muffled sobs into her
palms until her fit of emotion had run its course. Then she would
rise, make herself a sandwich, and write.
    Maggie decided to apply her insights to
writing. Her fictional character Margie weathered her abuse
although, when alone, sometimes she cried. At school she bore the
abuse with as much dignity as she could. She graduated and
afterward, she turned all of her attention to becoming a
writer.
    Maggie liked that idea, about becoming a
writer.
    After Maggie graduated, she wrote story
after story and sent them off to publishers. She would wait with
happy anticipation, until one by one, her stories came back to her
with form rejection slips that said, “Not what we are looking for,”
or “It is not right for us,” or “it does not fit our editorial
style.”
    All her life she had heard that writers got
rejected. But experiencing rejections from faceless industry
experts was a different matter entirely. They hurt. She had always
gotten effusive praise for her writing in school.
    But the guardians of the publishing world
were playing a different game than the one she was used to. Some of
the rejections were caustic: “self-indulgent” or “trite” or
“tedious.”
    She read magazines with titles like “Current
Marketing Trends” or “What Publishers Like,” or “Ten Ways to
Impress an Agent.” She followed their advice and looked at the
magazines to discover the editorial styles of the publications in
order to mimic them as much as she could.
    She tried writing about topics from a list
of “What Publishers are Looking For” or “What is Trending This
Year.” Many of the suggested topics bored her, but she tried
writing about them anyway, because writing what she wanted to write
was considered “self-indulgent.”
    She became blocked. She could not write
anything anymore without thinking “self-indulgent,” “trite” or
“dull.” The power that she had used to understand and change her
life had abandoned her.
    Writing was no longer a way to cope;
instead, it was painful. She had never in her life felt so
helpless. Being unable to write was worse than being bullied; worse
that being accused of having come along, worse than being glowered
at, because she had no defense against them now.
    For many months she went through life in a
daze. She had experienced so much rejection in her life, but she
could not get over being rejected by writing , her one power
and the thing she loved most in the world.
    For the first time since she had discovered
the power of writing, she had no story. She could taste her meals
and do her chores and read. But her activities had no context. It
was