Handling Rejection - A Crucial Aspect of a Writers' Life

Ok, you don't write for the fun of it. But that doesn't mean you need to suffer for it, either.

One of the biggest challenges to being a writer, at least for me, is to get rejections. Projects you've worked on for a long, long time, polished until they blinded you, and that you have dared send into the big bad world... only to come back to you with an automated rejection letter. "Thank you for your interest in publishing with us... Unfortunately..." Every writer will recognise this. And even outside of writing, rejection is something that everyone will have encountered.

Depressed yet?

It's easy to let those rejections get to you. I know, because I did. I got depressed, started to doubt my skills, my ability, my passion. Started to feel as if I was rejected, not just my work.

If you google 'how to deal with rejection', the list of advice is endless. How you shouldn't do this, shouldn't let them make you go crazy. Fair enough. But I'd rather hear what I should do, instead of things I shouldn't do. Replacing a destructive habit with something constructive is easier than simply having no more habit.

So... I started reading. Reading autobiographies of writers who had struggled through this. Reading blogposts by writers who had somehow dealt with this. Not the type of reading that tells you how to get published, but on how to deal with this desire and the push back from the world.

Making lists and raising your goals

One of the first things I found was that it is good to make lists. Get insight into what is going on. And, most importantly, set higher goals. This might sound counter intuitive, as depression will make you roll up in a corner and cry and sleep. Sure. But the trick is to set a personal goal and stick to it.

What kind of goal? Well, a specific number of rejections. Or unique submissions. The idea behind this is quite simple. If you have only one submission somewhere, the stakes are high - everything depends on the response of that one publisher or journal or this one person who might not even have the greatest day, needs a cup of coffee but might be glancing over your stuff and decide to just reject because he feels like it. Or, as is probably most often the case, you may have sent something wonderful to a place who doesn't publish that kind of writing. Publishing is complicated, and you need a lot of trial and error to find out the right place for your manuscript, your short story, or whatever it is you write.

Isaac Asimov

So, there is some wisdom to increasing the amount of submissions... simple maths will tell you, especially when some luck is also involved, that this will simply spread your chances. But this is also important for another reason, something Asimov has written about. You know, that prolific writer of science fiction, finishing so many short stories and books per year. In fact, writing a full novel every TWO weeks, for 25 years, someone calculated! He also faced a LOT of rejections. But, as he relates, the rejection all of a sudden is much less important when you first have to remember what story it was again, that was rejected this time. Ow, yes, that was three stories and two novels ago, sure it is rejected, it is old stuff...

By the time a particular book is published, the [writer] hasn’t much time to worry about how it will be received or how it will sell. By then he has already sold several others and is working on still others and it is these that concern him. This intensifies the peace and calm of his life. - Isaac Asimov

Asimov also wrote some nice poem called 'rejection slips'... And if you want to read a much better post on advice from Isaac Asimov, I'd recommend this article on Medium

It might sound cheesy, but so far it has worked for me. I have set my goal at 12 unique submissions per year (so, resubmissions of the same stuff that was rejected before doesn't count). I get many more rejections than ever before. But last year I got two publishers interested in my work, and so this year two of my manuscripts will be published. But I don't think that's the reason for me not being depressed any more.

“I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.” – Sylvia Plath

Yesterday I got another rejection, for a short story I worked on for a long time, a very personal story about friendship. I poured my soul into it, and it was rejected. But I hardly felt anything. I ticked a box, filed the letter in the folder called 'rejection'. I don't really know how many submissions I am stil waiting to hear back from. And it is that renewed focus on creative production instead of a focus on hearing back from the people who judge me, what makes it possible to cope with rejection.

Photo Credits: Caro Wallis Flickr via Compfight cc and By Weird Tales, Inc. (Scanned cover of pulp magazine.) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons