Something every writer has to deal with — and I do mean every writer — is rejection. Creative work is subjective to the Nth degree, and no matter what you will be rejected when you pitch ideas or submit work. In fact, I’ve experienced so much rejection in my own career success actually feels ominous to me. When I get turned down I sleep like a baby. When someone wants to buy a story I go on a bender and find myself at the bus depot, weeping and tearing at my clothes.
Infinite Variety
Rejection comes in many forms. There are, of course, those delicious rejection notes telling you with aggressive politeness that your work isn’t quite what the editors are looking for. There are the rejected pitches, which is usually an implied rejection in that the editor simply chooses not to buy it instead of explicitly rejecting it. There’s the peculiar joy of edit letters, where a story that was ostensibly not rejected gets such a heavy edit it’s almost the same thing. And then there’s the worst possible rejection — rejection after the fact, when you sell something and then the editor kills it for any number of reasons.
This is all great fun. But it’s part of the deal. When you try to put your work out there for money, you open yourself up to rejection. Learning how to deal with rejection is as important a skill as you can master in this business. You can’t let it get to you, or slow you down. Because if you do, you won’t get anything done.
Here’s how I deal with rejection. Your rejection is your own. You should give it a name and hug it to yourself when you sleep at night, and your way of dealing with it may be quite different — that’s okay.
1. Don’t linger. When I get a rejection — and again, I get a lot of them — I just mark it down and move on. I don’t think about it. At all. I don’t wonder why, I don’t analyze it, I don’t drink a bottle of whiskey and stare into the abyss. Or, yes, I do drink a bottle of whiskey, but for totally different reasons.
2. Get back in the saddle. When a story, novel, or pitch gets rejected, I immediately put it back on my list of things to submit. I aim to get it back into circulation as quickly as possible. I don’t care how many times something’s been rejected, because it only takes one person to buy it.
3. Wait a beat. Often, rejection comes with feedback. It’s tempting to read and digest that feedback immediately, but I recommend you wait. Reading feedback when you’re still upset from the rejection itself usually means you won’t be able to absorb whatever advice is contained in the rejection — or be able to tell good feedback from bad.
4. I drink. Heavily, sometimes.
Get used to rejection. The key is to realize that being rejected doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer, it just means you haven’t found a home for that particular piece yet. And maybe you never will, but that’s okay. Learning to keep moving forward in spite of rejection is probably the most important skill any writer can master.
That and appearing to be sober on Zoom calls when you’ve been drinking since 6AM. Of course.