Waking Up to Rejection Letters
Eating rejection letters for breakfast? Here are a few coping strategies.
You would think that I, a person with generalized anxiety disorder, would be sensible enough to steer clear of hobbies and activities where I’d be beholden to someone else’s judgment and scrutiny. Yet here I am, writing fiction and submitting stories to publishers, most of which often respond with the proverbial “Unfortunately…”
Waking up to at least one rejection email in my inbox every morning is practically par for the course nowadays. Each rejection stings, and they don’t necessarily get better over time, especially if a piece that I absolutely love and poured my heart into gets declined. But I’ve been learning to cope with the rejections more pragmatically as they come, and I do this by reminding myself of five key things.
The odds are not in anyone’s favor
The acceptance rates of most literary magazines and journals are no more than 5% — most even hover at the 1%-2% range. That’s a lot of material that ends up in the digital garbage bin and may never see the light of day.
So when I send out my pieces to publishers, despite my unwavering belief in my stories, I practically tell myself to expect a rejection, only because the odds are against me. This softens the blow a bit because I know that there is hard evidence to back up the high chances of my receiving a rejection.
It’s not a rejection of me as a writer
When a piece gets declined, I find it helpful to remind myself that it’s not necessarily a rejection of my writing abilities. It is the piece that is being rejected, not me as a writer. And the reasons for a piece being declined vary across publishers in any given moment in time.
I’ve had rejections indicating that my piece was “not a fit” for the publisher, rejections explaining that my piece was similar to recently accepted work, rejections mentioning that they’ve received a high volume of submissions and had to decline many excellent pieces because there’s only so much real estate in a quarterly issue, and so on.
So I try not to take the rejections personally as a writer. I roll up my sleeves and either find another publication that could be a potential fit or I just continue writing.
Editors are humans
Even in this age of booming artificial intelligence, I am glad and relieved that writing pieces are still subject to editorial review by humans, not robots. And because it is humans that work behind the scenes, reading and reviewing submissions, one cannot expect that there will be a tried-and-tested formula to hit just their right spots.
Humans are flawed and complex. Apart from obviously having different editorial tastes, humans can be irrational, unpredictable, and subject to bias and mood swings. We have our own opinions, perspectives, and principles we live by. So even if many publishers say that they “read blindly,” i.e. reading a piece with zero knowledge of the author and their credentials, they still have viewpoints about the world that may impact their decisions.
If I were to submit a piece of subversive writing about women’s reproductive rights, but the editor is a conservative white man, we have two very different lived experiences, and no matter how empathetic this white man can be, he would lack the deep understanding of the issue to understand the urgency and necessity of the writing compared to if it were a liberal woman reading the piece.
Not a rejection, but a redirection
This piece of advice holds true across any rejection — not just in writing. I find it useful in so many other contexts, like applying to graduate schools, job-hunting, even dating!
The world is abundant with options, overwhelmingly so. And yes, it can get discouraging when one receives one rejection after another. But I’d like to frame it more positively and trust that the universe knows a lot better than I do — that there’s a reason for these rejections. It only means that a particular publication, university, company, person, etc is not the right one for me. It’s the universe’s way of redirecting me and getting me closer to the right answer.
When I do finally get that highly anticipated acceptance, it feels like magic and ultimately offers clarity in hindsight as to why it didn’t work out with the others. The thing or person that ultimately said “Yes” was the right match, and I would know it in my bones because they feel like home.
Who am I writing for?
Last but certainly not the least, I could always use a reminder that I write primarily for myself.
Writing for me is an act of agency. It’s a means of reasserting control over the thoughts and narratives in my head, especially when my anxious mind is desperate for attention. I find writing to be an enjoyable and cathartic experience when I am able to project some deep-seeded emotions and perspectives on the world through the lens of character/s in a make-believe story. When I complete a piece, I feel lighter and more satisfied.
Sure, there’s always that nagging temptation to seek external validation to know if my writing is good enough, but quite frankly, that’s a bonus at this point — a cherry on top of the cake. What matters most is the writing itself, and the ability to use creativity to reclaim my stories.
Much like any of my other writing pieces, I wrote this particular article for myself. But if you are a writer who has received countless rejections like I have and happened to stumble upon this post, I hope that you found it to be comforting, even in the slightest bit. And more importantly, I hope you keep writing. Because your stories matter.
