Writing Prompt
Emily J. Smith on rejection
Hi friends. We made it. My kids went back to school this week, which means a bumpy road into new routines and a few tears of astonishment for how time passes.
Big thanks to everyone who participated in our fun little community survey last week. Give me about a week to go through it and then I’ll make some announcements.
In the meantime, I really encourage you to sign up for this Parents Solidarity Fast for Gaza. Here’s why. I’m signing up for the East Bay Families for Ceasefire team, but working with some other author folks to get a team together for another week. Will share news about that as we pull things together. If you’re hesitant about this because of ED history, check this out.
Today, I have a very good writing prompt for you all from guest author
, whose novel I am currently gobbling up. Paid subscribers to the newsletter get full access to prompts like these, to our Reading Group, to author salons, and more. And don’t forget, paid subscribers get 20% off my podcast , which is blowin’ up. You can access the pod and claim your discount here. This week we released an episode on summer pop music, and we even made a playlist for you to listen to this weekend.
Our guest author
This week’s prompt comes to us from Emily J. Smith, a writer based in Brooklyn. Her debut novel, Nothing Serious, is out now from William Morrow (HarperCollins).
Emily discovered writing in her thirties, after a career in tech and nonprofits. She holds a B.S in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell, and an M.B.A. from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. She also founded Chorus, the matchmaking app where friends swipe for friends.
You can find her essays and stories in Vice, Slate, The Rumpus, The Washington Post, Hobart, Catapult, Curbed, Romper, and elsewhere.
Follow her on Instagram or subscribe to her newsletter, Unresolving, for semi-regular essays and updates. She teaches a month-long workshop, From Corporate to Creative Writer, for professionals who are interested in creating writing but don’t know where to begin.
The title of my debut novel, Nothing Serious, is a nod to my most common dating rejection. For most of my adult life, I was single and miserably enduring the dating apps. Throughout my thirties, I tried to find someone I enjoyed being with more than I enjoyed being with myself or my friends, not an easy task for a (mostly) hetero woman. On the rare occasion this felt possible, the person of interest would usually offer a version of the all-too-familiar refrain, “I’m not looking for anything serious.”
I wrote the first draft of my novel when I was thirty-seven in a sort of fever dream of rage. I’d noticed how increasingly hard dating was for women my age, compared to our male counterparts who seemed flush with options, oblivious to aging and its biological limitations. And it wasn’t just dating. As I inched towards forty, many of my guy friends' lives seemed to get easier, whereas typical trajectories of “success”—staying motivated in a capitalist system, contemplating the reality of children, accumulating wealth—seemed more complex for women.
Writing about rejection, shame came first, as it often does. No one likes to feel as if they’re lesser than. But as I allowed myself to look more closely at the ways in which I felt rejected, I became fascinated by the transformations it offered. When you’re not able to move in the direction you want, when someone shuts the door you’d hoped for, you’re forced to move another way. The endless spin of online dating and its fallout made me feel insane, but in many ways it freed me. Eventually, I spun my disappointments into the story of a 35-year-old woman who, rejected by her newly single long-time crush, goes into an obsessive spiral, seeing him more clearly, and in doing so, seeing herself more clearly in turn.
Prompt: Write your rejection