Success and Rejection
Writing must be one of the hardest careers to crack and it can take years of successes and rejections before any writer feels like they have made it. But what about celebrating those small successes that you have along the way? Do you take time out to pat yourself on the back and congratulate your creative self on what you achieve? We also know that rejection is a part of the publishing process and it happens to every writer however great they are. By thinking of a negative response as feedback instead of failure, we can learn to feel more positive about the process and move on with our writing careers.
What constitutes a success? When we first start writing for publication, it’s just having something in print, something we have written that is accepted by an editor or publisher. It takes a new physical form and turns into a different format like that of a magazine article, book or online story. Once we’re through that hurdle, we can say we are truly writers and then we seem to get tough on ourselves. I know writers that churn out hundreds of articles but don’t stop to think of that achievement because it isn’t their ultimate goal. Their articles and short stories pay the bills and they are a means to an end, adding to a portfolio and creating an online or magazine presence, but they aren’t truly celebrated.
If this sounds like you, just remember there are loads of beginner writers out there who still haven’t had anything published. What you do is actually amazing, no matter whether it makes you feel successful or not. It doesn’t matter how big or small the success is – what matters is that you have achieved a goal. Can you remember what it was like, right at the start of your writing career, to feel so desperate to have something published or to really want your first book contract and you’d do anything to get it? When we want something really badly, it can seem like it takes forever for it to come to us but once we have had some of our work published, we start to ignore the smaller successes because we’ve had them before.
My point is success can be big and yes, we’ve all got dreams of what that looks like to us, but success can also be small and it is in every article you have published, every story of yours that ends up in print, every competition you win, every interview you give – it’s in all the small things that build us up to be a successful writer.
How often do you actually celebrate your successes? We rarely take time to acknowledge all the successes we’ve had. In chapter six, I talked about having daily gratitudes which you can use to be grateful for the successes that come your way but what about actually celebrating all the times when you have achieved something positive in your writing career?
If it was your wedding anniversary, a partner’s birthday or a child’s engagement, you might have a party to celebrate or you might mark the occasion in some way like going for a meal, having a night on the tiles or celebrating at home with a bottle of the finest wine, but how often do you say it’s been a year since I started writing professionally and I’m going to celebrate that or I’ve just published my third, fourth, fifth book and I think I’m due a party?
Some of us find it hard to congratulate ourselves so here are a few tips from other writers.
For Amanda J Evans, celebrating success is a family affair, “Success is celebrated with all my family. When I published Messages From The Angelic Realms last year, a group of my friends got together and created a special night where I could launch my book and give a talk. It was a wonderful night and all my family and friends were there to support me. My husband is great and loves to celebrate even the smallest successes. He will surprise me with dinner or a nice treat. My children, especially my daughter, like to make me little cards and write me notes that say congratulations. I celebrate by writing myself little letters every time I accomplish one of my goals. It is a little like inner child work where I give myself praise and recognition for what I have accomplished.”
Meadhbh Boyd also finds relationships important. She suggests, “Some decent coffee and yummy cake, or buy a nice bottle of wine, curl up and watch a film with someone you love, whether it’s a girlfriend, boyfriend or relative. You should share the good times when they happen. “
Lawrence Wray thinks you should treat yourself, “Buy something expensive that you and only you really appreciate. For me it’s pens and watches, but whatever you desire as a reward works. Doesn’t have to be a million bucks, just something that takes your fancy, but only when you actually have that success.”
Nik Morton already has a bottle chilling. “Open a bottle of Cava. And then continue work on the next project, which I’ll already have begun even before the last one is sent out.”
The next time you have an article published, receive a commission or a contract, or have any writing success, celebrate your creativity and congratulate yourself for all the work you’ve done. It’ll give you a boost and help you to maintain momentum, pushing you forward to achieve your next goal.
In NLP, success isn’t just about the outcome of your goals and your achievements; it’s about the process that you took to get there. When you achieve success, you take a certain route and you learn what works on the way. Each route is peppered with the steps you took to achieve that success so your creative self has mastered stages that you can utilise again. When starting a new writing project, it can help to analyse what you did at each stage so that you can copy those elements of success and use them again to your advantage. I know in the world of writing, success is often up to fate, luck or the opportunities that present themselves but if you have achieved success just once, you have learnt a pattern that can be repeated and once you know this, rejection cannot harm you!
Think of ways in which you can say thank you to yourself and congratulate your creative self on taking those steps to success. Deborah Durbin celebrates in different ways, “It all depends on how big the success is. If I get a new commission for a magazine or newspaper feature, I take my daughters out for lunch. If I get a new book commission, I go shopping – usually for another diamond ring!“
Joe Griffin also does things differently depending on the scale of the success, “This sounds childish, but when I first got published in The Guardian the first thing I did was ring my mother! Otherwise I celebrate in big ways (going out for dinner and then dancing like a lunatic) or small ways (sticking a Prince song on YouTube and dancing). I guess I like dancing!“
The next time something works well for you, congratulate your creative self in a creative way. Dance around the room like Joe, sing your heart out or paint a picture full of bright, vivid colours. Immerse yourself in your creativity and let yourself feel really, really great!
Some writers fear success. Talking generally, we work in a vacuum, in our own little bubbles, shut away from the world as we work on our masterpieces. With success comes taking a step out into the world and interacting with people who might buy our books, see our plays and films or come to our book signings. It can be a shock to any writer to move into that world when they have been so used to spending their days alone or in solitude albeit with a computer for company.
You don’t have to step outside into the wider world of success and self-promotion – you can stay forever in your bubble if you really want to but most publishers nowadays want their writers to promote their own work and there are so many opportunities to get out there and make a name for yourself, that it’s an opportunity wasted if you don’t. Ultimately you write because you want your work to be read so talking to your readers is only going to bring you more sales.
Take each step towards success as a challenge and prepare for it. Say you are asked to give a talk to thirty people – what is the worst that can happen? We’ve talked before about ways to deal with new challenges and our thought processes around them are the key. Think positively and be open to the other elements of a writing life. And if like me, nerves sometimes get the better of you, have a calming kit at the ready. I have lavender oil in my bag for soothing the jitters, Rescue Remedy to calm my nerves and chamomile teabags for relieving tension. What could you have with you to support you when you step out into the wide world and embrace your successes as a writer?
Failure is a dirty word in life coaching and NLP because it doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as failure only feedback. Every time that you do something that doesn’t seem to go too well, it’s not failure, you are just receiving feedback, no matter how negative that seems to be.
Most of us have been through the rejection procedure and will know that rejections come in a variety of ways from the standard no thank you to not hearing anything at all to getting some kind of comments and er, feedback!
I wrote a fantasy story at the beginning of my writing career and sent it off to a fantasy magazine who returned my manuscript with ‘what’s the point?’ scrawled across it. It absolutely devastated me – did they mean what’s the point of the story? Or what’s the point in me ever trying to write again? I’d actually written the story as part of a writing course and I knew that it was legible and made sense (or so my tutor thought). So I sent it out again and this time it was accepted and published. The editor actually said she loved it. That one piece of feedback could have ended my writing career but I learnt from it. It was just one person’s point of view and another person, editor or publisher could have a completely different perspective.
One of my clients came to me utterly dejected about her manuscript being returned yet again. She had given up hours of her time and worked part-time so that she could fulfil her dream of writing a book but she couldn’t find a publisher. She talked about being a failure. I asked her what she had set out to do. Write a book was her answer. We talked about why she felt that was a failure when she had obviously done what she had hoped to achieve. She had successfully accomplished her goal. The goal was to write a book and, although publishing it was always at the back of her mind, she needed to congratulate herself on what she had done so far. I asked her if any publisher had given her feedback and she did have some comments that she could constructively work on to improve her manuscript. We talked about what she could do next and looked at self-publishing and preparing her manuscript as an e-book as another option.
If you think feedback instead of failure, it opens doors to improvement. Failure is a dead end that leaves you feeling bad and negative about your writing. Feedback is a learning process. So your manuscript is returned, what can you do to make it better? What publisher can you try next? Is there a way of breaking your non-fiction book idea down into a series of articles, serialising your story online in a blog or producing your manuscript as an e-book? With feedback, there are always alternatives and always other options for a writer to try out.
Rejection makes us generalise. We wail things like ‘no publisher will ever publish my book’, ‘all my writing is rubbish’ and ‘no one is ever going to read my work’. All of a sudden everyone is against us, nothing is ever going to go right and it’s the end of your writing career. We do it to ourselves but in truth, you don’t know that no publisher is going to print your book; you cannot say that all your writing is rubbish, especially if you’ve had other successes, and of course someone will read your work somewhere and at sometime. Watch out for the generalisations you make that put you in a bad mood and don’t let rejection get the better of you.
Deborah Durbin has some good advice, “If you’re going to be a writer you have to accept that rejection is part and parcel of the job. I’ve been writing professionally for 16 years now, so it doesn’t bother me anymore, but initially I would question what I had done wrong and why an editor didn’t like my work. The longer you write the more confident you come across in your pitches and you soon learn how to approach different editors and what works and what doesn’t.”
Amanda J Evans says, “Rejection is a part of writing and not everyone will like what I write. It took me a long time to understand this but now I look at rejection in a different way. When I receive a rejection, I realise that the person rejecting it is not rejecting me but the writing and that it just isn’t a fit for them. For many writers rejection is their worst fear but when you realise that it is not you who is being rejected, it becomes so much easier. Rejection is a part of writing and to even receive a rejection is an acknowledgement that your work was read. The more in-depth the rejection the better your writing actually was. We can all learn to improve our writing and rejection helps us to do just this. Every time I receive a rejection I silently thank the person for their help and for allowing me to improve. I don’t see rejection as failure but as a way to grow and learn.”
Krystina Kellingley lets herself feel low for only a moment, “I feel dispirited but make myself get back on track and send my work to another place.” This is something that many writers do. They just send their work out again. A M Dunnewin says, “I immediately rewrite my proposal, and send it off to someone else. I use to be depressed when I received rejections, but now I just see it as a challenge.” Suzanne Ruthven, editor of Compass Books, gives similar advice, “Study the reason for the rejection and then re-jig the article or proposal to send out to another editor or publisher.”
Nik Morton says, “It depends on the rejection. If it’s constructive, I’ll weigh up the comments, they may have foundation. That’s rare, these days, though, as editors and publishers are fearful of making comment as they’re liable to get Internet abuse from a few unprofessional bad apples. Usually, I find an alternative recipient/market and send it out again.”
Yes, rejection hurts and yes, it doesn’t give you a positive feeling about your skills as a writer but as you well know by now there are a hundred and one reasons for a rejection and the opposite of that is a hundred and one reasons why something that is rejected by one publisher or editor can be accepted by another. Every writer I spoke to about rejection just got on with their next project or sent out their writing to a new market. The only way to deal with rejection is to ignore it, don’t take it to heart and keep writing.
Each success brings you closer and closer to your ultimate goal until one day that success is the big one, the thing you’ve always worked towards, the thing you waited for. When your success is so monumental, you might well celebrate it and bask in all your glory for a few days before you begin to think – er, I did that, so what’s next?
At any stage of your writing career, you can stop to appreciate where you are and what you have achieved. If you’ve gained your goals and made huge achievements, you might start to flounder, wondering what you will do in the future. You can always go back to your goals and try some brainstorming or other exercises to see where you’re going next but you can also use a visualisation to get a glimpse of yourself in the future.
As with any visualisation, make sure you are comfortable, warm and in a quiet space before you start. Close your eyes and regulate your breathing by taking deep breaths until you feel a sense of calm.
Imagine you are meeting your future self. You have everything you need; your house is the way you want it, your family are happy and healthy, the car of your dreams is in the garage – all those material things have been achieved and there is nothing in your path except…
You are a writer still and you are living the life you have always wanted. What are you working on? What have been your successes so far? What are you most proud of? What can you show your current self that you have achieved? Follow your future writing self to their writing area – what’s on their vision board? What’s pinned up on the wall? What books are on the shelf? What appointments are in their diary? Are they going to a premiere of the film they wrote, a play at the theatre, an award winning ceremony? Look around to see what they – you in the future – have achieved and soak in what you still have to do.
Let your mind drift around the possibilities that are still open to you and then return to concentrate on your breathing. When you feel ready, open your eyes and come back to your current self. If you have found new inspiration, ideas or possibilities for your future, write them down in your journal or notebook. More successes are on their way.