When The Door Closes (Tara Taylor Quinn)

In our business, the writing business, cliches are a huge no no. Worse than semi-colons in fiction. (Ha ha, I had to say that for Lynn and Pat and Alicia Rasley and mostly Tim who, late at night in a hotel room, had to sit through a two hour debate on the use of semi-colons.) Okay, back to the cliches. Using them in fiction is cheap. Unless you're doing it on purpose and make that obvious, like if you have a character who always speaks in cliches and it's an obvious character trait, a writer who uses cliches usually doesn't engross readers. I've had eight editors in my career. Every single one of them red-lined any poor little cliche that happened to make its way into my work. I started to see them as devils incarnate - worms, diseases, attacking my work, making me less than great. (The cliches, not the editors!)

When really, cliches exist for very good reason. They live because they are true. They speak universal truth. They become cliche only by frequent, vast use. They are used so frequently and vastly because they resonate with people. Because they speak an important truth to huge numbers of people.

My lesson this week wasn't really about cliches in general. It was about one in particular. When One Door Closes, Another Door Opens. Or a window opens. Or...keep walking until you reach the next door. However the thought is spun, it's the same universal truth. Don't give up. Just because you receive a 'no' answer doesn't mean that you have to quit.

I learned this lesson through a painful six years of trying to get published. Harlequin's door was closed in my face more times than I want to count. But I kept finding new doors. Different editors. Different lines. Different stories. Different ways in. Until I found THE way.

This week has been about doors closing. If I want to look at experiences that way. To me, it's been about finding new doors. Exploring. Reaching out. Continuing to walk, blindly trusting that there will be a new door just around the corner.

I saw this in small ways. In a phone call from someone who was disappointed - and then found a new opportunity.

And in our new table. Our new old table. Tim and I are hosting Thanksgiving here. Our brothers and family, our only living parent, my sweet cousin and her family, a daughter. We needed space for everyone to be able to sit down together. You might remember the breakfast bar we've been building. It seats four comfortably. If you read the above list, do the Math...we had a problem.

And if you read last week's blog - you know how we solved the problem. We bought an antique table at a steal because it needed to be re-finished. No problem. We had it stripped and sanded in an afternoon. Varnishing took about ten minutes a day for a couple of days. Sort of. We're trying to match Tim's mother's hutch. And didn't get the color quite right. So we went back to the store. Studied colors. Comparing them on different woods. Settled for matching the base of the table. And didn't manage to do that so well, either. But maybe no one would notice. We bought some expensive top coat - said it was worth 60 coats of polyurethane in one coat. Uh huh. Probably was. In a puddle on the ground. On our table it spelled disaster. The door closed then. The table was just ruined. I had no idea what we were going to do for Thanksgiving. Except maybe put a table cloth on the table and leave it there, filled with crumbs and dinner droppings for the three days we'd have people here.

A not so great solution. I forgot for a second there that it was Tim's table, too. He looked at the mess we'd made of the table. Shrugged. And had me help him haul it back out to the garage. Stripping and sanding took a little longer this time. The first grade of sandpaper said no. So did the second. We were going to have to strip the whole thing. The first coat of stripper we applied laughed at us. Figuratively, of course. In reality it just sat atop the table gooing everything up and pretty much making the problem worse. We went in to eat. And Tim announced that we had to make a trip to a nearby town. We had to get different stripper. Yet another door.

This door worked. Stripper in a gel form. It went on easily. We went away for fifteen minutes. We came back. And goo came off. Two coats later, we were out of stripper. Another day. Another trip to another store, more gel stripper, another coat. Another fifteen minutes. And...we were ready to sand. And three different levels of sand paper coarseness later, we had beautiful, raw wood. More gorgeous than the first time. The new varnish matches the base of the table. It's going to look fine with the hutch. There's a unique spot or two. Character that makes the table ours. And there are plans to tend to them perfectly, too. It's a beautiful, valuable, antique, solid mahogany table. To me, that table looks like open doors. Lots of them. Innumerable. As many as you need. Non-ending.

Another closed door this week- When I was a kid, my mother and I went every year to our church craft boutique. I loved it there. So many wonderful things to choose from. So much hand crafted beauty to see. And goodies to eat. My mother always told me that someday she wanted to have her own boutique. A holiday craft boutique. And a few years ago, after she semi-retired, she posed the idea to her church. They gave her a go ahead, though she was virtually on her own. She recruited a few people and worked all year long. I made some things for her. She made a ton of things. Ladies from the church made things. The boutique was a rousing success. I was there. Feeling the fruits of my mom's dream come true.

Each year, in the three years since, the boutique has grown. More and more people are involved. This year Tim and I helped a lot. Mom was here for six weeks during the summer and we were recruited into several projects. I recruited myself into several more. And then I had to face the fact that if I was going to be home for Christmas, I couldn't be there for the boutique. A shut door that hurt. My heart longed to be there. To share the day with my mom. To help with the loading and unloading. With the paperwork and clean up. To see all of the beautiful things hanging around the room, and laying out on tables.


The boutique was this past Saturday and I was so homesick I could hardly stand it. And then - another door opened. Late Friday night, after Mom and her twenty or so helpers got the room set up, someone took a bunch of pictures with a digital camera and sent them to my mother's computer. She went home and called me. She sent me all of the pictures and we sat on the phone together and went through them all. We talked about all of the pretty things. She told stories about different people who'd put forth heart felt effort. I saw the entire room. Every table. And Tim and I shopped. Mom made a list of everything we bought and the next morning, before the boutique opened, she was there, pulling our stuff off the tables. She took pictures that day, too. Of people who were at the boutique. And sent me those, too. I might not have walked in the church door to get to the boutique. But I got in another door.


The loudest slamming door this week seemed truly irrevocable. And inconceivable. It seemed hopeless. And for a few hours I felt that way. Thankfully I have a husband who doesn't let any shut door slow him down. Or slow me down, either since I'm the other half of him. He reminded me of the video Maggie had posted here a few weeks ago. He and I had watched it together. It depicted a young man with no arms and no legs. Tim reminded me of what that man said. Paraphrased, he said it's not that you fall that matters. What matters is how you get back up. That you get back up. You look for another door.

Within hours of that slamming door, there was another door. Opened by a person I don't really even know. A door I'd never heard of. Didn't even know existed. And yet, there it was. And because Tim had me standing there, looking for the door, I didn't miss it. I'd been giving up. Taking no for an answer after a year long fight. Seeing myself as one who'd lost. Thinking there was no where else to turn. And yet feeling as though a great injustice had been done. This wasn't a situation that you could walk away from with any sense of peace. And it turns out that what seemed like a dead end road was really an entryway.

Maybe this one will shut eventually, too. But if it does, I know one thing. There will be another door. And I'll keep walking until I find it. Because when one door closes, there is always another door waiting to open.
How about the rest of you? Got any open doors you can share with us?