And in many ways it was a death, my novel had died, my characters were stillborns, and I, worst of all, had been deemed "talented, but ..." In my worst moments, I saw that term as the death of the writer-me.

I began to ask big questions. I began to reevaluate my life and myself as a writer. Could I call myself a writer if I wasn't getting published? Was I just fooling myself? What kind of "talented" person could spend five years on the same 500 pages, revising and editing, reevaluating and recasting, without ever once realizing that it might not work? For months I felt stupid and naive and incredibly ashamed, the way I felt after coming out of a long, bad, emotionally tortuous but sexually satisfying relationship, where everyone but me had recognized about three years earlier that Mr. Right was sinister and unstable and totally, completely wrong. And no one had had the heart to tell me.

"But I loved this novel," I wanted to say to these agents, my family, my husband. You don't understand! I was blinded by love. Or ambition. Or need. Or whatever it was that made me spend five years believing in something, making efforts every day to make that something work. I just kept writing, sacrificing my social life, an income, the well-beings of my new husband and dog. I wrote to finish and I wrote for love. And in the end it was all wrong.

But there was another reason I was writing, I now see, and that was to get the thing published. (Here I think of Steven Spielberg accepting his Oscar for best director this year, when he tipped the microphone toward his mouth almost shyly and said, "Is it wrong to say I wanted this?") I never realized how ravenous I was for publication, and how modestly certain I was that this would happen, until it didn't. And my hopes and dreams and needs fell far and hard.

"Relax," was the advice that came from a writer friend I admire. "Don't beat yourself up about this. Your only competition is you. Go out and write another book and make it the best book you can write."

"But I can't write," I said. "I haven't written, since, you know."

"So go out and immerse yourself in the arts," he said. "Go to movies and museums. Listen to music, read the classics. Do whatever you can to get your brain going again. And trust that it will."

Because I could do nothing else, I did this. Every day I'd venture out to dark movie houses or obscure museums, studying the chain mail on a suit of armor or the way the sunlight passed through a panel of stained glass. Any time my stomach started to flutter and my brain started to whine, "I'm not a writer, I'm not writing," I'd plug it up with another Kurosawa video or blast of the Smashing Pumpkins, full volume, channeled straight into my ears.

Slowly, but surely, I began to miss the act of writing -- especially because I was reading good books. I read Cheever again and Fitzgerald and Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." I remembered what it was like to read these stories for the first time in grad school -- that feeling of inspiration and discovery. That feeling of awe followed by, "maybe I could try that, too." I remembered why I loved reading in the first place, and why I loved writing in the first place -- because it's the best possible way for me to spend my time.

So I'm back, still wounded and slightly chastened, but back writing again. It's a new story, and each time I sit down to the computer I still feel shy and nervous, as if I were going on a date after a long hiatus from love.

Another former writing professor -- not the one who cried -- always used to say to us: Success comes from 10 percent talent and 90 percent applying the seat of the pants to the seat of a chair. I always liked that saying and, in the best of times, always want to believe it. Because it says, quite obviously, that even if at the beginning you are just a little bit talented, you can still mold this and shape it and develop it into a greater thing. I've realized that what I've come away with in the end of writing my first novel is not the disappointment of not having sold it, but the memory of five wonderful years spent doing what I love best: writing. It was my little bit of talent that took me there, and I wouldn't trade that for anything.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"