“Creative greats have the resilience and drive to not get beaten down by ‘losing’ at a creative challenge. Just like athletes, they have the tenacity to get up, dust themselves off and refuse to quit. This mindset of determination is key to the creative process.”
—CHRISTOPHER BERGLAND, FROM PSYCHOLOGY TODAY BLOG, “THE ATHLETE’S WAY”
Let’s not sugarcoat it: Rejection hurts. Sometimes it has the power to steal your breath, jamming a fist into that tender part of your creative confidence. At its worst, it can convince you that you should give up—who were you to think that you knew what you were doing anyway?
So you may have to suspend disbelief when I tell you that rejection is an important part of cultivating a writing practice.
Rejection means that:
Remember, if you can change the way you view rejection, you’ll fight off discouragement and put your energy where it needs to go: into your writing practice.
Like grief, I find that writers go through “stages” of rejection, and it’s helpful to know which stage you are experiencing so that you know there’s an end in sight.
At some point every writer is faced with a choice: either to let the rejection continue its lethargic hold on your writing life—inviting inertia to take over—or to seek inner resilience to spring back. The writer with a writing practice sees rejection as a hash mark on the wall of the cell: another attempt at success made but not a reason to give up. The writer who believes in overnight success or instant gratification will feel these setbacks most keenly and struggle to overcome.
Don’t be that writer. Be the resilient writer.
Resilience is the ability to bounce back after rejection and is the opposite of inertia. Like everything else related to the craft of writing, it can be learned and strengthened through practice.
The first stage of becoming resilient is embracing rejection. I know writers who’ve wallpapered their offices with rejection letters, writers who’ve framed their first rejection letter, writers who have used a rejection as motivation to get back in the game. These writers have learned to be resilient.
You can see rejection as a message that encourages you to take action in one of two key ways: Go deeper, or go elsewhere.
Often rejection is an exhortation to take your work deeper, to do more. You have to learn to step off the “good-bad” axis when judging the merit of your work. If someone rejects your work, that doesn’t make it “all bad.” It doesn’t make you a bad writer, either. But it may mean that you need to refine, focus, or fix a specific part of your work. Why? Because writing is a craft, and your writing practice is the act of improving your craft through practice, polish, and persistence.
Europe has a long history of apprenticeship in the arts. Music, theater, and literature were all so valued that artists could obtain a “patron” who paid the artist solely to make his art. Over time this attitude toward apprenticeship has morphed into a culture of respect for the process of art making that acknowledges that no success happens overnight.
Here in the States, we like the arts, too. But, perhaps thanks to Hollywood and entertainment culture (oh yeah, and capitalism), art is more often linked to profit. That’s largely why the independent or “indie” movement has risen in prominence in nearly every art form. Indie music, indie moviemakers, and indie authors are people who have all said, at one point or another, that what they create isn’t just about money—it’s also about love and purpose and creative control.
As long as you subscribe to perfectionism or instant gratification, or are driven only by making money, you will feel the sting of rejection far more than your compadres who shrug it off and then return to their deeper reasons for making art, such as expression, joy, and connecting to others through words.
There are hundreds, even thousands, of sources where you may decide to submit your work. Between literary agents, literary magazines, small publishers, and other online markets, where you choose to submit your work may still only represent your best guess, even if you do thorough research. This means that, inevitably, you’ll sometimes pick the “wrong” place. The decision of whether your work “belongs” in a certain publication or is “worthy enough” for literary representation contains a huge element of subjectivity. Don’t ever forget that every agent, every editor at a publishing house or literary magazine, is just one person. While she is certainly representative of a tone, a style, or a brand of writing, she is still but one filter your work passes through. To be rejected, therefore, may simply mean that you submitted to the wrong-for-you place.
If you feel you’ve gone deeper, if you know that you’ve achieved your vision and honed your craft, then there’s no reason to stop after a rejection—or several. You just need to pick up and keep moving.
It’s a lot easier to bounce back from rejection if you set up your writing practice to reap some reward that has nothing to do with the approval or praise of others. In other words, when you determine what value your writing has for you, you become less susceptible to the gamut of feelings that rejection can bring.
How do you do this? Ask yourself: How do I feel when I write? What does writing do for me? What do I give others through my writing? Most writers I know feel something between the euphoria of a good glass of wine and the endorphins of a runner’s high after writing. And that’s not just when “inspiration strikes” but even after you’ve sat blinking at a white screen for two-thirds of your writing session. I know people who struggle to express their feelings verbally until they’ve committed them to ink or pixel on the page and others for whom writing snippets of story ideas during the day at work is enough to hold them over until later writing sessions. Writers write, right? Even if you write for income or to promote your cause, you write for the deeper meaning or reward that writing brings.
Most famous writers are known for a “breakout” book; while this was the author’s first published book, it might actually have been the third or ninth or twentieth novel the author had written before success came to perch on the windowsill. My friend Caroline Leavitt, author of such best-selling literary novels as Is This Tomorrow, Pictures of You, and seven other books, experienced a series of mishaps in her early years of publishing that nearly made her give up hope of ever publishing a successful book that would launch her writing career. And then she found her current agent, who took her work to the small publisher Algonquin Books and turned Leavitt’s novel Pictures of You into a bestseller, changing the direction of her publishing career.
Or take the story of Kathryn Stockett, whose novel The Help hit the New York Times bestseller list in its first week of publication and spawned a movie starring Emma Stone and Viola Davis. Her manuscript received sixty rejections from agents before number sixty-one accepted her and sold her novel to Amy Einhorn Books. This is all to say that if your first book doesn’t make magic, I beseech you, by the mother of all holy things, keep writing! And even if you get sixty agent rejections, keep at it.
The moral of the story is: Overnight success comes after walking a road over time of practice and determination. No effort is ever wasted as a writer; you’ve just walked another step in another mile in your writing life. Anything else is rushing, and you know what your mother taught you about what haste makes …
When writers are given advice on rejection, they’re often told they need to “get over it” and “toughen up.” I don’t actually want you to become so tough, however, that you become jaded and grumpy, which can lead to creative block and far too much time spent “on the ledge.”
What you can do is think statistically. Submitting and publishing is ultimately a numbers game, and you have to play that numbers game in order to be published in mainstream venues (and frankly, even to be self-published—you still have to find an audience to sell to, and that’s often a trial-and-error process). Tell yourself, Okay, that’s rejection number five, which means I’m in the game, baby, but nowhere near done! In the end, the more you submit, the greater your chances for acceptance. So you can train your mind to see those rejections as greasing the way for future acceptances. The only surefire way to avoid rejection is to never submit your work—in essence, giving up on your dream, and you’re not about to do that. Your life would be dull without your writing, after all.
I don’t know too many people who stand up proudly and shout for joy when they experience a failure, whether they are accused of doing something wrong or poorly, or a creative experiment doesn’t go the way they’d hoped (or a thousand other examples). When you “fail,” the more people who are aware of it, the more you may want to burrow away in a dimly lit cave until all memory of it has passed.
But what if I told you that you should celebrate and share your failures? That failures are signs of experimentation and creativity, of stretching and pushing yourself bravely toward the unknown?
The kind of failure I’m talking about is the result of attempting something big, new, or challenging that doesn’t go as you planned. And with all creativity, attempts are required, and “failures” are inevitable.
Stop trying to hide your failures.
Fail publicly, and often.
When I teach a writing class, I always ask my students to share their struggles in the public forum. What’s hard for one person often strikes a chord of another. When a student shares one of her failures, a new understanding is created, and she sees that it’s okay to be viewed as imperfect or inexpert. For instance, one of the students in my plot class once shared her frustration that her novels always sagged or grew boring in the middle. Another student in the class pointed out that she had a tendency to make things easier for her character, rather than more difficult, and that doing so diminished tension and drama. It was an epiphany for her that changed her writing process. Often an outside-the-box answer from a fellow student offers more insight than I alone could give them. I come with a limited set of experiences and knowledge, whereas my students, who range in ages and backgrounds, can provide information I can’t. Once, for example, a student who worked as a nurse was able to correct inaccurate details about another student’s character’s hip surgery. Another time, a younger student gave an older student tips on how twentysomethings really talk.
There’s vulnerability in admitting to your imperfections and your gaps in knowledge, which in turn allows others to connect with you on a deeper level. Think of those times you saw a stoic parent collapse into tears over his child’s illness or the moment someone you love revealed painful wounds you didn’t know were bleeding behind the scenes. That sort of vulnerability brings us closer together.
I did an internship at a bodywork institute in my twenties when I was pursuing massage therapy as a temporary career. My teacher always used to say, “I highly recommend you fail in public and as often as possible.” He meant that as long as your individual ego is attached to the mantra “I’m bad and wrong,” your growth and change are limited. But the moment you stand before others, laid bare and uncertain, the story changes. Others often express compassion and empathy, and solutions that you couldn’t have dreamed up alone flow toward you.
Failure seems a patently American quality—we of the entrepreneurial mind-set, of the bootstraps that must be pulled up alone, of the iconic image of the rugged individual. We’re fed subtle messages of doubt: that if you don’t do it yourself, alone, and correctly or perfectly the first time, how will you succeed?
You’ll succeed the way that artists and innovators have for centuries, by learning from your “failures.” You will begin, in essence, to “fail up”—a concept defined by New York University psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman about resilience in the face of failure. To fail up means to see what doesn’t work as a lesson to learn from, not a reason to whip yourself into a shame corner. It means you understand that there is both great wisdom and necessary humility in letting others see you learn from your failures.
More important, when you admit to your failures, you discover several key things: that your failures are more universal than you thought, that others have compassion for your errors, that there is room for improvement, and, ultimately, that failure opens the door to greater, deeper, and more honest connections with others.
If you have a rejection letter of some kind, pull it out and read it. Or imagine the letter you are afraid to get if you haven’t yet received one. Now, write a short note to the person who sent you the letter (not to be sent).
“Thank you for rejecting this [story/novel/idea]. It made me realize that I need to go elsewhere/deeper. It allowed me to figure out: ________________________________________________.”
And sometimes a little humor helps. A friend of mine and I both received what we felt were fairly harsh rejections from the same editor of a coveted publication. Comparing letters, however, we decided this editor simply had a blunt style. To vent our feelings, we wrote our own absurdly harsh letters in the voice of the editor to fictional rejection recipients to make ourselves laugh. We were surprised by how much better we felt afterward.
Since rejection has a way of weighing down the body, sometimes you need to assertively move that feeling out of yourself. If your physical health allows, do one of the following things.
by Jessica Inclan, author of How to Bake a Man, Her Daughter’s Eyes, and other books
A story I wrote twenty-one years ago was published in December 2013 in a literary journal. It’s hard to believe that I not only remembered this short story existed but that I was able to dig it up in my hard drive, buried as it was beneath layers of computer portals and folders.
But when I read the call for stories about loss, well, my mind flashed to this story I had written about a woman thinking about her life as she watches her youngest daughter die.
I dug around (click, click, click, voilà!), opened the file, and went at it with an editor’s eye. And it was accepted, over two decades after I’d started it.
I’m not one to give up. Well, maybe there are hours of despair … for instance, the time I got twelve rejections in a row, in one hour. (Have you ever made the connection between holiday weekends and rejections? Editors are at home, too, and they get back to you really quickly.) And I felt pretty bad when my second agent fired me via e-mail. (“It’s not me, it’s you”). I also thought about throwing in the keyboard when my third agent was unable to sell the YA novel I revised many times (during the course of countless revisions, the setting changed from the year 1977 to 2184!)—especially when the novel almost sold twice. But, no dice.
And there was the time I worked on a novel with my second agent for a while—and that might have been what made him want to dump me. Take note when agents pass you over to their assistants. In any case, I left that relationship with a novel draft of a story I really loved.
So recently, when I read about a very small publisher who wanted novel manuscripts, I decided to dust off my story about a young woman who decides to quit business school and start her own baking company. I thought, What the heck? A few weeks later, I received the e-mail stating they would love to publish the novel: a small print run and a digital edition. This isn’t the mega contract of my grasping dreams, but it is an acknowledgment of my work and persistence. And more important, it’s a testament to my stubborn nature and penchant for closure. Eight years later, my story is almost ready to launch into the world.
My advice about this writing business is to remember it is a business. What wasn’t working twenty-one years ago may work now. What didn’t work in 2008 might work in 2015. The market shifts. Tastes change. The best news? I’m a better writer now than before. I can fix things I didn’t know were broken all those years ago. My writing practice combined with my refusal to give up has helped me assess my own work.
My last bit of advice is about your hard drive: Make sure you save all of your documents. And label them better than I did. It will save you a lot of clicking.
I just might see who wants a novel set in 2184. Or maybe I need to wait twenty years. Trust me, I can do it.