THE MORE YOUR MANUSCRIPTS COME BACK
TO YOU, THE BETTER YOU’LL FEEL ABOUT IT.
TAKE HIS WORD FOR IT.
June 1990
During a recent stay in New York City, I had occasion to make two visits to New York University. On my first visit I delivered three pieces of artwork. A week later I returned to retrieve them. My wife, Lynne, had produced the three pieces, and I’d entered them at her request in NYU’s annual Small Works show, and they had been rejected.
I had forgotten how painful rejection is.
Lynne has been making art for a while, but only in the past year or so has she allowed herself to take it seriously. The encouragement of other visual artists and the sale of a few pieces to acquaintances led her to the belief that she might try to do something with her work. The Small Works show was her first real attempt in this direction, and when she didn’t get in she was devastated. The rejection seemed to confirm every fear she had about herself as an artist and a human being. She decided she was an untalented dilettante and that her work was superficial and meretricious. If she hadn’t been a vegetarian, she would have gone into the garden to eat worms.
From a distance, one could see her reaction as excessive. More than 2,000 artists had entered this particular show, and fewer than 200 made the cut. Accomplished artists, friends of hers, entered every year and never got a piece accepted.
So what? She’d taken a chance, had stuck her neck out, and she’d been rejected. And it felt terrible.
I felt for her, of course, and it struck me how far removed I was from the sort of thing she was going through. I had certainly had my share of rejections over the years, but that was then and this was now, and I’ve been an established professional writer for quite a few years now, and I hadn’t had any work of mine rejected in ages, had I?
But wait a minute. Of course I had.
During the preceding summer I went on a short story spree and wrote eight of the little darlings. I rejected one of them myself, but the other seven struck me as promising and I sent them off to my agent. He placed three of them almost immediately, two with a top magazine and one with a prestigious anthology. All of that made me very happy indeed, but the other four stories, along with one I’d written in the spring, have been bouncing around ever since, garnering rejections wherever he sends them.
Some of these rejections have been of a kind and gentle sort, resulting from the fact that a couple of the stories are categorically hard to place. One, for example, is a very dark and violent story with a female narrator; it’s accordingly not right for the men’s magazines, and too stark a proposition for any of the women’s magazines that have seen it thus far. “We liked this story very much,” I was told more than once, “but it’s just not right for us.” Well, OK.
On the other hand, another story with which I was very well pleased seemed right on target for another magazine, one that had published a considerable number of my stories over the years. They rejected this one, not because it wasn’t their kind of material, but because everybody in the office found it heavy-handed, predictable and offensive. They said just that in a note my agent was kind enough to read to me.
“I guess they didn’t like it,” I said.
So of course I’ve had rejections. As I look back over the years, there’s never been an extended period of time during which I haven’t had efforts rejected, proposals spurned, projects aborted. It’s part of the game and comes with the territory.
What’s significant, it seems to me, is that it hardly ever seems to bother me much. Sometimes it’s disappointing, but it’s hardly ever devastating. And often it’s not even disappointing.
A few years ago, for example, the British publisher who had brought out my last eight or ten books suddenly rejected my most recent effort. My immediate response was surprise, but close on its heels came a wave of pleased optimism. “Good,” I said. “They’ve been a lousy house all along, and we’ll sell it someplace better.” This was not a matter of whistling in the dark; they were a lousy house, and we did place the book with a better publisher right away. But that’s not really the point. More important is my own reaction. I wasn’t crushed. I wasn’t even dismayed. I’d had a rejection, but I didn’t feel rejected.
And that’s the good thing about rejection. You get used to it, and eventually it really doesn’t hurt all that much.
What changes things? What takes the sting out of rejection?
Experience, first of all. The experience of rejection, and the experience of living through it. Only by sending things out, time and time again, and by getting them back, time and time again, can we truly learn what rejection does and doesn’t mean. It means that a particular publisher has declined to buy a particular story on a particular occasion. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the story’s bad. The story may be bad, most stories are, but that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the fact that it has come back like a well-hurled boomerang. Most fiction markets receive thousands of submissions for every one they buy. Many receive tens of thousands. Sometimes months go by during which they reject everything submitted to them.
You can know all of this intellectually and it’s a help, but it’s nothing compared to the bone-deep knowledge you acquire gradually and painfully by having your work rejected. With time you begin to understand that all any rejection means is what it says on the rejection slip—the manuscript does not fit the publisher’s current needs.
Another big help is acceptance. The more sales you make, the less pain rejection will bring when it comes. Why? Because the acceptance is proof of a tangible sort that your work has merit, and the worst thing about rejection is its capacity to make you believe that your work is worthless and so are you. If one editor supplies validation with an acceptance, it’s a lot easier to shrug off the next batch of rejections that come your way.
(And I can see this applying in my own case, incidentally. I might have been a lot less sanguine about the four stories I can’t manage to sell were it not for the three that sold right off the bat.)
Acceptance, let it be said, begins at home. To the extent that we accept ourselves, we immunize ourselves against rejection. A writer who accepts himself entirely, who has not the slightest doubt of the worth of his work, is invulnerable to the sting of rejection right from the start. He doesn’t need to get used to rejection, doesn’t need to be validated from without by having work accepted.
Now I’m not altogether certain someone all that confident has ever existed; if he did, he’d probably go into business or politics instead of choosing our particular path anyway. But, if he did exist, the slings and arrows of rejection couldn’t harm him. Publishers might not buy his stories—for that you need talent, too—but failure would not destroy him. Because the pain of rejection owes a lot to one’s own suspicion that the person doing the rejecting is right, and that the story and the person who wrote it are awful.
Unless you’re a masochist, rejection is never fun; unless you’re profoundly neurotic, you don’t send out your stories actively hoping they’ll be returned to you with a form slip attached.
But you learn to live with it. And, if you can’t stand the heat, you’ll have to get out of the kitchen.
And some people do. Every year many men and women try for careers in sales, and some of them drop out early on because they can’t stand being rejected, can’t stand having phones hung up on them and doors closed in their faces. The ones who stay learn to shrug off that kind of rejection. They know that the best salespeople in the world get rejected time and time again, and they just plain learn not to take it personally when one prospect after another turns them down.
We have it a little easier than salespeople, a lot easier than actors and models. Our work is rejected at a distance, through the mail. We don’t have to come face to face with the people who seem capable of reinforcing our own deepest fears about ourselves.
It still hurts. No question.
But you get over it.