It’s Not You, It’s Me.
October 3rd, 2006 by Guest
Rejection.
We’re told rejection is all just part and parcel of being a writer.
We’re also told that constructive rejections will help us improve as writers.
In fact we’re told or have read about a million different things about the submission-rejection-repeat process that are designed to make it a little easier to cope with.
And as such I think we’ve probably all got our own ways of dealing with rejection.
Mine are pretty straight forward. First of all I accept that not everybody likes everything, and as such it is entirely possible you’re going to run into editors who don’t like what you write. I also try to remember there’s more than one reason for a rejection, that it doesn’t necessarily mean ‘your manuscript sucks’, though it might.
I think the best thing I can do to help me cope with rejection is to cultivate confidence in my own work. This is a fairly new thing for me, in the past I’ve written stories and sent them without being completely happy with them, and of course it only takes one or two rejections for my fragile confidence in these stories to be shaken enough to relegate them to the bottom draw. Having learnt from this process I now make sure I’m completely happy with a story before I send it anywhere, the plot ties up nicely, the characters behave in a consistent manner, and there are no questions left hanging over the story. This way it takes more than a few rejections to shake my confidence and I send them straight back out whenever I get a knock back.
I never thought this would ever be possible, but I’ve been rejected so much, it ceases to hurt anymore. I’m astonished when I’m NOT rejected. The good thing about it is that I can look at the “feedback” objectively and know when the critique is real or when it’s a canned response because the editor doesn’t have time or energy for a more personal rejection.
One good thing about being on the end of serial rejections is that it frees one of the fear of rejection. If that makes sense.
Multi-pubbed/award winning author Jason Starr has some interesting things to say regarding rejections. We start part one of our interview with him on Friday. Very enlightening.
The hardest rejections for me haven’t been the impersonal form letters but rather the “sooooo close, nice job, send more” notes. They make me tuck my head in my lap and rethink the meaning of life…or at least writer-hood. Though don’t mistake: I have plenty of form rejections–probably enough to paper my office. Seriously!
I think I’m shielded from this by the fact I plan to self-publish. Although that may mean rejection will hit a little harder in the form of lost sales.
At least I won’t have to go through the submission process though…
With my last book, I was actually expecting it to get rejected because I instinctively knew it wasn’t yet “good” enough to get published. Although I got requests for fulls, etc., it still gave me a great learning experience.
Now with the novel I’m working on, I think it’s MUCH better than my last book. An agent has had a partial for two months and I haven’t heard a thing. I’m on TETHERHOOKS.
“cultivate confidence in my own work”
If I didn’t have confidence, to some degree, in my work, I couldn’t submit it. And wouldn’t.