Rejection

The hardest thing to remember when you get five rejections on your birthday in the middle of a rainstorm with the damp pages of your novel slipping out from under your arm and shuffling themselves randomly on the post office floor is:

You must always be on your side.

This above all else is key. You are the only person who will be with you your entire life; the better you get along with you, the better. In the team sport of writing, every part of you is the team: your mind, your spirit, your soul. Alienate any of these team members and you risk ruining the game.

Worse, it won't be fun.

Follow these guidelines for handling rejection:

• The numbers are ludicrous.
• A rejection is nothing personal.
• Don’t add meaning to a rejection.
• Take what you're told with skepticism.
• Consider each rejection a badge of honor.
• Respond to a rejection by writing.
• Never stop.

The numbers are ludicrous.

Most magazines receive hundreds (if not thousands) of submissions a month. A student intern (working off a past life as a guard at Treblinka) flails in the story slush pile getting paper cuts and eye strain looking at thousands of stories.

Your story is only one of them.

We all know your story is the best; there's no denying that. Wit, style, verve: it's all there.

The only problem is that the intern has to finish reading one entire stack of submissions by the end of the day. It's already quitting time, and the gang is gathering at Chi-Chi's for two-for-one mixed drinks and scathing publishing insider gossip.

The intern does what you'd do: read as little of every story as possible. Look for any anomaly, any error, any indication that the story isn't worth reading. Sometimes it's a spelling error on page one. Sometimes it's a horrible first line.

In any case, the reader might not even read your whole story.

The odds are ridiculous. The good news is that much of the slush pile includes:

• Weirdly inappropriate stories for the market: S&M stories at Cricket, drug fantasies at the New Yorker.
• Stories written on a long sheet of butcher paper in crayon.
• Stories by kids writing for school assignments.
• Stories by people ignorant of the genre hoping they can break in to the "easy” genre markets.

You’re in the top twenty percent at least. But that’s still hundreds of stories.

A rejection is about the numbers more than anything else.

A rejection is nothing personal.

Because of the numbers, a rejected story is more likely than not a competent and engaging story. It’s just in the wrong place.

Subjective taste ensures that a significant portion of the population will not find your work engaging.

For my sanity, I pretend these people are merely idiots. I suggest you do the same.

However you choose to view it, remember that the story has been rejected: not you. You can keep sending to that magazine, you can keep writing, you can keep pressing forward.

Don’t add meaning to a rejection.

A rejection means only one thing:

The editor does not want this particular story for this particular magazine at this particular time.

It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be a writer. It doesn’t mean the story is bad. It doesn’t mean the editor is a moron.

It means that this is not a good fit at this time. That’s all.

Take what you're told with skepticism.

Sometimes editors send personalized messages with your rejected manuscript to give you a personal flair. Often, these are autotext entries pasted into a standard rejection letter to give you a warm fuzzy to soften the rejection.

Unless the advice is very specific and meaningful, don’t take these messages to heart. Usually, they’re things like “Needs more characters” or “I didn’t feel anything.” This might be great advice, but you’ll drive yourself mad following every small word of wisdom from an editor. Stick to your guns and make changes only when they make sense to you.

Consider each rejection a badge of honor.

A rejection is not a sign of failure. It is a sign of success. It is a sign that you continue and persist no matter the odds or opposition.

You’re an unstoppable force of nature, and these puny rejections merely make you laugh.

Respond to a rejection by writing.

Don’t settle into a funk after a rejection. The only cure for a rejection is to keep writing. Never let them doubt yourself. Never let them scare you away.

Never stop.

This is the most important of all. You can never stop. You can never doubt. You can never surrender. Every day, you write one hundred, three hundred, a thousand more words so that the five thousand that an editor rejects is but a small piece of the total work.

You cannot stop for any reason. You cannot fail the voices within you for something as trivial as the taste of another human being.

No matter what, you write. Like for Andy Dufresne in Stephen King’s “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption,” all it takes is time and pressure. Keep chiseling. Keep tunneling. One day you’ll break through to the see the stars.