The Art of Surviving Literary Rejection…

If you’re reading this, you’re probably a writer. That means you’ve got some scars to show that your competitive, or just a glutton for punishment. Those lines can be get blurred depending on how myopic you are and most of all, how you interpret pain. Excuse men, I mean rejection. That was a Freudian slip.

You may know someone in your life other than yourself, of course, who has claimed to put down a sentence or two. Literally anyone can claim to be a writer. All you need is a pen. And if you don’t have one you can borrow one from the stranger next to you, use a little of their ink then give the pen back. There you go, you’ve got all the equipment you need. Then you can jump into the pool and join everyone else hoping to get a lifeline – someone asking for sample chapters or, keep your shirt on, requesting the whole manuscript. One email like that and you’re walking on water.

Writer, actor, financial advisor, self-improvement speaker, consultant, entrepreneur, personal trainer – some people might say these are synonyms for “unemployed” or “Starbucks barista.” No offense to anyone who pours coffee. I love Starbucks and coffee. In fact, this blog is being written inside an actual Starbucks, now that they jerked the chairs out of the cobwebbed corner where they’ve been since the pandemic paralyzed us all.

Aside from these vague titles we use to solidify the foundation of our identity, there are other can-do titles anyone can grasp a hold of at a party to make themselves a bit more interesting. Flight attendant, manager of housekeeping for a large hotel. You wouldn’t think that one would be intriguing but I know someone who once held that job and they got all types of questions. It’s fun to pepper in a little color like you would for a fictional character. Do that and you’re rolling. On the other hand, no one can really claim to be an astronaut. If you do, at least have a few key terms you can toss out there like - microgravity or Tang or jumping into the NBL, then let the other person sit back and feel stupid for a second before asking you the obvious questions. That’s when you tell them NBL is the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory – the largest indoor pool on earth. If you’re also a writer, you can explain that it might be easier getting to the moon than getting an agent or actually seeing your work bound and sitting proudly on a shelf in your local bookshop, assuming one of those still exists where you live and breathe.

Writing is something anyone can do but the trick is doing it well – having something to say in a unique way that others want to hear. I’ve heard people say you need to make the reader think, as if that will keep them swiping right. It might, but none of us are grabbing the baton and writing the next Brief History of Time now that Stephen Hawking went quiet. Sure, we want the reader to think and consider ideas in a new way. Above all though, we want to keep the reader entertained and intrigued. If that means think, then yeah sure, we want a dose of that, too. And by reader I’m not talking about my mom or your mom or your new love interest who still thinks everything you do is perfect including the garden variety paragraph you managed to scribble down while he or she was in the kitchen making you a grilled cheese. No, I’m talking about the only people who matter in the world. Excuse me – this world. Agents and editors at the publishing houses. Some of you may have gotten very creative and tried dating one of these influencers, an interesting loophole to emailing your query letter. Just leave your manuscript on his or her nightstand or something. It may work and even if it doesn’t, the ingenuity is admirable. But for most of us with commitments like marriage and kids and jobs, or for those who us who don’t live within 1,000 miles of a literary agency, we’ve got to resort to the old tried and true query and the uncertainty attached to it that sinks or buoys our hopes whenever we get a reply.

To all you out there who think you’re the second coming of Ernie Hemingway or like to flip through bestsellers for the sheer joy of panning them, this blog’s for you.

Unfortunately, the fun and games are over for now. That word, the ninth one back or first word in the last sentence, is how 98% of rejection letters start. How do I know most letters start that way? I tallied up the 10,000 or so I’ve received and 9,800 started that way.

People like to exaggerate about two things more than any other – their successes and struggles. If Point A is the starting line and Point B is the success they want the journey to seem arduous, painful and downright mystifying. You may know someone, or you may even be someone who talks about your great struggle as writer, even if you are successful you may still exaggerate about what it takes to stay on top. But that’s what we’re here to discuss. The rest of us don’t care about your struggle. Don’t take offense. I know you don’t care much about mine either.

We’re here to talk about something we all hate – rejection. It sucks in all its forms and although we try to avoid it like stepping in dog shit or dodging people we’re envious of, we’ve all felt it one way or the other. We’ve dished it out too, but this is different. This is a whole new ball game because as writers, we’re usually on the BOHECA end - Bend Over Here It Comes Again end.

What Meaning are You Giving that Rejection?

This is an important question that few ever ask. We give meaning to things all the time but it’s almost always reactionary. We never decide how we should feel about something – we just feel it and accept it as the way things turned out. If that’s what you’re doing you might as well pick up a white flag and start waving.

When I first started writing I gave my wife some of my chapters to read. She must’ve used a Costco size box of pens graffitiing up what I thought was a brilliant piece of work. Not just whole sentences were crossed out but paragraphs and full pages! Hundreds of my hard-earned words gone with the cruel swipe of her pen. She might as well have stabbed me with that ballpoint. There were illegible comments in the margins where all I could make out was the sad face or the exclamation point at the end of some constructive but angry comment. I could make out some of her remarks though and wished that they were illegible. Things like “This is painful to read” and “Are you kidding me with this?” were so commonplace I wished she’d used a thesaurus to come up with some other derogatory words. There were moments where I felt ashamed and questioned if she would leave me for a man who could put two intelligent sentences together but those feelings were quickly trampled on by my runaway anger. My wife did care though, she cared more than anyone else in fact, although it didn’t feel like it at the time. I’d get angry and argue my stance while clutching onto the belief that I was a good writer, but eventually I’d see the light and realize that she was right and I couldn’t. If I decided not to get mad and take it so personally it would’ve made things a lot easier on both of us. I knew her intentions were good but I didn’t care. She criticized and rejected my work so what else was I supposed to do but fight back, right? Wrong. There was plenty I could’ve done. I kept at it though and got better while piling up the rejections – hers and plenty of others from the powers that be out there in the pull-no-punches publishing world.

That rejection above was sent in 1928. If that ‘Sir” managed not to kill himself after getting that letter and was alive today, I’d wager that he’d still be smarting from it.

Rejection is the worst, which is why we have those feel good arguments in our mind - my work is professionally edited. Hey, I paid $500 bucks for that “book doctor” to redline my manuscript and change those commas to semi coins so it looks like I know what I’m doing. I’ve flipped through a bunch of bestsellers at Barnes and Noble and they aren’t nearly as good as my masterpiece. My friends told me that my work is The Shit. They may have been drunk but so what, that’s when people are their most honest. My mom can’t stop talking about it and she never drinks! We keep that reaffirming loop going through our mind and think to ourselves, how could anyone ever reject that amazing opening paragraph I wrote – “He barged in the door. Heads turned. Voices hushed. It was so quiet you could hear a cat’s footsteps.” Its gold!

We can argue that later, but there are about 25,000 lines in any book. I’ve got no idea if that’s true, I just made up that number but it sounds good so let’s go with it. One line in a book may stand out but it can’t carry the weight of all the others.

The trick is how do we keep getting up after being pummeled by rejections because no matter how thick that skin of ours may get, our hopes and feelings lay on the surface like a tattoo. So, if you’ve gotten two rejections, or have been trying so long that you’re now being rejected by the grandson of the guy who sent you packing when your hope and dreams were first flourishing, let’s talk.

The bottom line is this - trying is hard. Trying stinks. Sometimes it’s not the journey. Sometimes it is just the damn destination! It’s tough to sit there day after day not knowing if what you’re putting down will ever see daylight. But if you love writing you also know that sitting there day after day and slipping into the zone where the creativity flows effortlessly and you come up with the perfect six-word sentence is pure joy. Even the legendary basketball player Kareem Abdul Jabar said writing and coming up with a great sentence is more exciting than scoring in an NBA game. I’m not sure if I buy that because I’ve never gotten a round of applause after putting down what I thought was a pretty good compilation of words.

Seeing what will come next though, that’s our form of discovery and its beautiful, which is why we do it, despite the insurmountable odds eyeballing us when we stop and think about what we hope to achieve. Writing is also an escape from ourselves, or a deep look into ourselves through the eyes and voices of the characters we’ve created, but that’s for another day and time.

This blog is about rejection but it’s not about writing the best query letter or the “five must know” secrets to getting published. All that stuff is ridiculous. There are no secrets. This is about putting on that Kevlar vest so you can deal with the armor piercing rejection bullets head on and keep marching forward – Terminator style. As writers who are trying to get established, we can live and die by the rejections we receive, or sometimes even worse, never receive from the agents out there who hold out fate in their gentle, caring little hands. Or do you picture those hands as gigantic and callused and hairy, happily crushing your hopes and dreams in a form letter that says thank you but go pound sand!

Rejection hurts because we care so much about our work. And yes, a ‘Yes’ can change everything, lighting up those nerve endings of ours to the point where we’re seeing stars and feeling like we’re floating on air. We’ve all visualized the ‘Yes’ so clearly that we’ve got a sense of that feeling before the facts hastily extinguish them. The trick is to not hand over our sense of self to the replies we get from agents or anyone else out there in the publishing world. We’ve got to care less about getting rejected and care more about something beyond the feeling of getting turned down. When we get rejected, we usually have one of two reactions – ‘They are dead wrong and don’t know what they’re talking about, the jerks.’ Or, ‘I stink.’ The first isn’t true and the latter may be, but either way, we’ve got to roll with the punches.

The wall we need to scale in order to achieve our dreams never seems too high at first. Optimism abounds at the start and why shouldn’t it, we haven’t encountered any obstacles yet. We haven’t made any progress either but why dwell on that formality. Its only when we start the pursuit that we realize how hard and high that wall really is, which is why we need to really give a damn about what we want and be defiant in the face of the odds. We’ll need to climb higher, work smarter, cash in favors if we can, and just keep climbing. If we don’t do any of those things what will happen – that four-letter word that guarantees we’ll never get rejected again will start taunting us. We’ll QUIT. People quit for one reason and one reason only – the pain became too great. Sometimes that’s a good thing and it’s time to hang ‘em up. A lot of times, most times, quitting means you’ve had enough and just want to avoid the pain and go lick your wounds by eating a bowl of cream and watching TV, which let’s be honest, does feel great. However, quitting also means you’ll never get published and possibly never write another word other than some pissed off Tweet.

I saw a comedian years ago who said he was so broke he lived on cigarettes and cheeseburgers, both of which were leftovers from the audience in the club where he was performing. He said, don’t misjudge me though, I’m not a quitter. I try. I’m a failure! It was funny and that’s one way to look at it. It’s true too, if you’re trying, it means you haven’t quit. You may not have that book published yet, but if you’re making constant progress then that’s the surest approach to achieving success. It’s part of the journey. It also helps calm those nerves a little, especially when you’re petrified of opening your Gmail account, unsure if another rejection is sitting there waiting to smack you between the eyes.

Now, that type of fear can be paralyzing. You may have written a legitimately great book, and not just one that your friends think is great. We often like to think of ourselves as our own worst critics but believe me, we’re not – they are. You know who “they” are now. They’re everyone we don’t know. Even books that get published get rejected all the time by online shoppers and traditional store shoppers. How many times have you flipped through a book or two before tossing it down? If that was your book and you were doing a little covert operation standing in a nearby aisle you’d want to go over and slap that shopper silly – say something like, “How can you put this down? Are you insane? It’s fantastic! Have you read that opening line about the cat’s paws? Cats are silent when they walk? Didn’t you recognize the irony there? And if that’s not enough, wait until you get to page fifty-two. That’s when things really kick.”

But that’s life. And this is as personal as it gets. That’s why dealing with rejections is so critical. If we never learn to cope with it, it’ll paralyze us from sending out new letters to agents or ever finishing a book in the first place. If the book isn’t done we can’t submit it and get rejected, right? Plus, the process of tinkering with it is fun. We can fine tune a book until we’re old and gray but at some point, we should push our chips to the middle of the table. Or not, but we must be okay with it that, too. Coming To Terms – that’s another blog on another day. If we stop we’ll be saying that we care more about protecting ourselves than we do about achieving our goal, if that is our goal. That’s okay, if we don’t regret it later, which we might. Most of us regret the things we didn’t do rather than the things we did do.

Don’t Listen to People…

I know, people will say that one rejection just gets you closer to a yes. They say things like this too – ‘All you need is one person to say yes.’ Those comments are right up there with, ‘Sorry for your loss’ and ‘thoughts and prayers.’ They don’t mean shit and don’t help you in any way. When some agent who we would really love to work with tell us our work isn’t right for their list or that their list is full, it’s a giant punch to the gut – no two ways about it. Especially when it seems like our book is exactly what they said they’re looking for in their own words, no less. Those comments are a polite way of killing us softly. If they really liked our work, they’d find a vacancy for us but when they get hundreds of emails like ours every week is it any wonder the rejections pile up? But getting up off the matt is what matters. Looking at our work and taking constructive advice is critical, too. If someone tells you your work is great they either didn’t read it, are indifferent to it and refuse to make the effort to give you any valid insight, or just don’t want to hurt your feelings. The people that care will kill you with criticism and that’s what you need. My wife murdered me because she loved me. Thanks Honey! My dad threw some hard words my way, too. My instinct was to come back and thank him for screwing up my childhood but he didn’t so I never said that, but criticism can back us into a corner quickly.

Time – For God Sake Don’t Take it for Granted.

Writing takes time. Don’t waste time on giving your work to people who don’t respect your time and give you the insightful thoughts you need. It may not feel like it, but they’re rejecting you too. In any creative field - music, painting, acting, writing - rejection and often harsh criticism are the growing pains we never outgrow. I’ve read books by Grisham and King that I didn’t think were good at all. And I’ve read books by both men that were terrific. The same with actors and their movies. I like John Travolta. We all do, right? He was great in Pulp Fiction and Grease and a bunch of other flicks but have you seen Battlefield Earth or those stupid Look Who’s Talking movies? See what I mean?

Write and fight on… Believe in your work and whether you climb that mountain and make the NYT bestseller list or you don’t, you’ll never know unless you keep trying and face those rejections along the way. Just know you’re not alone. I know that last line doesn’t help but I couldn’t help putting it down anyway. I told you not to listen to people.

Good luck!