A writer’s guide to rejection
Rejection: The thing that makes you dismiss every good thing that’s ever happened and makes you feel like you’re a failure and always will be.
At least that’s what rejection does to me. Oh, you too?
A little while back a pile of rejection letters forced me to face the shittiness of rejection head-on. I had left a good job to be a writer, and I’d been working on a book for about a year. I had begun looking for an agent. Then a crop of rejection letters made me feel like a failure.
Amid my rejection gloom I wanted some assurance. I wanted to know that rejection wasn’t something to be ashamed of.
More to the point, I wanted to know that rejection didn’t reflect my worth as a person.
So I started thinking back on some of the bits of wisdom about rejection that I’d read over the years. And after collecting them all together, it turned out that these little bits of wisdom told a story — a happy story, in fact.
For starters, remember that the great ones got rejected — a lot
Ever wondered why the “22” in the classic Catch-22? You probably haven’t, but I’m going to tell you anyway. That book’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, was the twenty-second publishing house to consider the manuscript. That’s right. Joseph Heller received rejections from twenty-one publishers before he was accepted. And we’re talking about Catch-22, that classic of the English language.
Meanwhile the best-seller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was rejected by 123 publishing houses. That’s right, a mere 123. I didn’t even know there were that many publishers out there. (If you think I’m full of baloney, my source is the useful book How to Get a Literary Agent by Michael Larsen.)
Then there’s Saul Bellow, a writer who eventually won a Pulitzer and the Nobel Prize for Literature. He dealt with plenty of rejection in his early career, and here’s what he had to say about it: “Rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, ‘To hell with you.’ ”
Since Saul Bellow and Catch-22 and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance all earned piles of rejections, it’s safe to say that rejection is not a sign from the gods that you’re no good.
Rejection is like not having toilet paper
Of course, whether it happened to all the greatest writers or not, rejection is still unequivocally shitty. Actually rejection is a lot like the rite of passage at the free-to-be-you-and-me college my husband attended, where students do a three-week trip in the Arizona desert without cushy amenities like toilet paper so that, forever afterward, they’ve accessed a deeper centeredness and oneness with the environment. Rejection is like that — and not only because it’s shitty.
Rejection takes you to a deeper place. It makes you want to quit, and that, in turn, forces you to look at the reasons you’re doing what you’re doing.
Are you writing for someone or something else, or for yourself? If you’re writing because you simply have to write, then you’ll keep on going.
What you should actually *do* after a rejection
From a friend of a friend who’s an actress — meaning that she’s constantly auditioning for parts and raking in her share of rejections — comes this nugget of wisdom: Give yourself a day to feel shitty. Otherwise the bad feeling festers. So allow yourself that. You get to feel shitty.
Then do two very important things, courtesy of the Bible-like resource The Artist’s Way. First, give yourself a small gift. This is a way of acknowledging that rejection is a creative loss, and that you’ve got to heal from it. Then — this is very important — do something creative. Even if it’s just writing a paragraph, or a sentence. That’s a way of affirming that you won’t quit.
Triumph after rejection
Some eat-your-vegetables wisdom is useful in the wake of rejection, too.
John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead, writes, “Take your bad writing and work diligently to make it better.” That makes my face do the twisted sour expression, but I know it’s good advice.
Because doing the work *does* pay off. (A month or two after I got that pile of rejections, an agent from a well-known agency contacted me. Hooray! At least until I start getting rejected by publishers…) It turns out that the only answer is to keep on truckin’. Diligently take your writing and make it better, yes — and the only way to do that is to write more.
And that brings me to the best nugget of wisdom I’ve found. I have it Sharpied on a Post-It note and stuck to my computer screen — so it’s always here, just a few inches below my blinking cursor. From Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, it goes like this:
The only thing to do when the sense of dread and low self-esteem tells you that you’re not up to this is to wear it down by getting a little work done every day.
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This post first appeared in a different form on my blog This Life After Loss. If you Tweet, let’s tweet together.
Have you found any good nuggets of wisdom on rejection? Please share them in the comments, or contact me.
