GENREALITY

Howdy folks.  It’s Satuday again. 

And today, I thought we’d talk a bit about rejection.

This is what Ralph Waldo Emerson had to say about rejection:

Dear to us are those who love us… but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.

With apologies to Mr. Emerson, I suspect most of us do not have such lofty words on the subject when we open up yet another SASE with that folded letter inside.  I suspect, instead, we feel more like this fellow.  (No, seriously.  Go watch it.  I’ll wait.) 

And rejection is a constant companion in the writing life.  And it sucks.  I can’t think of very many places in our lives where it doesn’t.

For instance, have you ever lost a job?  That’s a tough rejection of sorts.  And then, after losing said job, you often get to enjoy the process of finding a new job which is often — yes, you guessed it — fraught with the peril of more rejection.  I’ve done that dance a few times and it’s no fun at all.

And don’t even get me started on the dating life of high school D&D nerds in the 80′s.  I just shake my head and tell people it  prepared me for a lifetime of rejection as a writer.

I got my first rejejction letter at fourteen or fifteen.  It was a form letter from Redbook for a story I’d written.  I submitted more over the next two years and I picked up more rejections.  I kept all of them.  And when I came back to writing in my late twenties, I hung seventy-five rejections on the wall of my writing space before that first acceptance.  I tried to think of them as trophies, but some of them still stung a bit.  Especially if my rejectomancy gave me indicators that I was sliding backward…getting a form letter instead of a personal note from the editor. 

I think there’s a bell curve of how people handle rejection in the writing world.  Some are so rejection-averse that they don’t even  send their stories in.  They spend months or years re-writing the same short story, never putting it in the mail, rejecting it on the editor’s behalf by assumption…or, worse, doing another pass of revision.  And on the other side of the curve,  there are the ones who really could care less…there’s no sting whatsoever.  They probably whistle while they work.   Most of us probably fall somewhere in the middle.

How we deal with rejection is pretty important as writers because it’s just a part of the job.  It doesn’t go away as you progress in your career.  It just changes.

I’m sure that if I were writing short stories on-spec these days, I’d still get rejected but the numbers have flipped for me and acceptances are more frequent.  I have so little time to write short fiction that I pretty much only write what I”m asked to and I’m not even able to do that.  But the rejection just comes in other forms.  Like bad reviews or reader criticisms.  And in some ways, I find it harder than those old form letters where I was told “this doesn’t quite work for me” or “this wasn’t suited for our present needs.”  Because now, more often than not, a reason’s given why the reviewer, critic or reader was disappointed.  Those can sting.

So here’s what I try to keep in mind:

1)  Some of it is objective.  There are some solid reasons why a piece isn’t accepted or disappoints someone.  Market needs are real and you can’t do anything about that.  Craft issues are sometimes real and we have to learn it by practicing it over and over again…not by studying our rejection slips under a microscope. 

2)  Some of it is subjective.  Every reader, editor, reviewer brings their own lens to what they’re reading.  What they like, what they don’t like, and…if they’re writers, they sometimes even bring “the way they would have written it” to the table.  You can’t do anything about any of that.

And…you’re rarely going to know whether you’re dealing with 1) or with 2) unless you get enough information to figure it out.  And really, it doesn’t change anything, because….

3)  Regardless of rejection, you just keep at it.  Learn what you can and keep writing.  Fill your inventory as you practice your craft.  Put your work in the mail.  Keep your spreadsheet up to date and full of stories out to market, queries out to agents, manuscripts out to publishers. 

And whatever you do, if you write a letter like our friend in that video, it’s probably better not to send it.

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