A friend of mine wrote to me in distress after getting a rejection from a magazine editor to whom she had submitted an article. “And he said he wanted to see it!” she groused. “Ouch. Now what do I do with it?”
How do writers handle rejections? I want to write not only about what we can do with the actual piece that was rejected but how we can cheer ourselves up.
We have to first decide why we’re writing. If we’re writing for ourselves, just for the fun of it, then we can write the article or the story, send it out, and if it gets rejected, we can remind ourselves that we were writing for the fun of it, anyway.
But if we really want it to get published somewhere, then we have to take a hard look at our work. Ask ourselves the following questions:
Did the article fit the format of the magazine or website we wrote it for? Every place has its style. A clothing designer wouldn’t try to sell a neon pink T-shirt with rhinestones and fringes to a shop that only sells minimalist black-and-white clothes. Every journal has its tone, its voice, its vibe. Some go for quirky, others for cynical, still others prefer inspirational. Did your piece match?
Re-gift the article. I confess to passing on a gift that I have received (only on very rare occasions, I promise) to someone else. So we can fix up a story and change it to meet another journal’s needs. I did this with an article that got rejected one place; I repackaged it and published it in The Huffington Post.
Check your query letter. Did what you deliver what you promised? Remember the rule: Under-promise, over-deliver.
Did you read a lot of pieces the magazine published before you wrote your piece? I mean, did you really do your homework on this? Did you make sure your style matched theirs?
Are you making excuses about your work? The old, “Yes, but…” doesn’t get you out of looking at your piece honestly. It reminds me of my neighbor who bought a table that an artist made from a trunk of a tree. It’s lovely to look at, but the table is on a slant and if you put a glass of water on it, the glass slides right off. “Yes, but…” my neighbor told me, defending her purchase. OK, it’s a lovely piece of art but it doesn’t work as a table. So, does your piece really work?
Finally, let it sit for a while until we can see our writing more clearly. We can show it to a trusted reader. We can put it away while we lick our wounds. But sooner or later, we have to decide if we’re in for writing in the long run. “I really don’t think life is about the I-could-have-beens,” Nikki Giovanni says. “Life is only about the I-tried-to-do. I don’t mind the failure but I can’t imagine that I’d forgive myself if I didn’t try.”
That’s the message we can tell ourselves. The messages we give ourselves are the most powerful voices in our head. After getting rejections, I’ve sulked for a while and told myself I’ll never pick up my fountain pen again. But then I remind myself of all the writers who’ve been rejected. Writing is like preparing for a running race. We have to clock in a hundred miles to run ten miles. Writing is a discipline. It’s practice. It’s Harrison Ford saying, “Some actors couldn’t figure out how to withstand the constant rejection. They couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
I talked with my friend about her piece. She said that after she got over her discouragement, she was going to try to send the article to somewhere else.
That’s all we can do. We are only responsible for the effort not the outcome. But we have to do our best. If we want to write, that’s what we have to do. Write and rewrite and keep going. That’s the journey.
As Richard Bach said, “A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.”
As I would say, “Put your tuchas in that chair and keep writing. No matter how many times you get rejected. Just keep writing.”
DIANA BLETTER 
How to Keep Writing No Matter What: The Novelist Who Learned How to Beat Writer’s Block
How satisfied can one gal be? This is me getting my first look at the ARC OF ARK — the Advanced Reader’s Copy of A REMARKABLE KINDNESS.
This is a post for all those writers who want to give up. Don’t. No matter how long it takes, keep going.
I was so disappointed when the novel I now hold in my hands, A Remarkable Kindness, got rejected by more than a dozen publishing companies in 2006.
Because I was hurt and dejected and feeling a bit sorry for myself, I stuffed the novel in a drawer and refused to even think about it. Then, in 2013, I was at the Jewish Book Council promoting my memoir, The Mom Who Took Off On Her Motorcycle, and it hit me in one of those epiphanies (if it were a Hollywood movie, there would have been a bolt of lightning): REWRITE THAT NOVEL.
That was in the spring. I reworked it through the summer of 2013. Reworked is putting it mildly. I had to rewrite almost each sentence. I polished it the way a guy might polish his first car – with a toothbrush. I originally had the point of view be a third-person narrator. I decided to make each of my four main characters write in her own voice. I had to change every “she” to “I” and every “her” to “my.” Changing the point of view was important because I had to really get into each character’s head and see the world through her eyes. Would Lauren think in this kind of metaphor? What simile would Emily use?
Still, there were some days when I thought, this is crazy, what are you doing I did not have writer’s block – I had writer’s neighborhood. Why are you wasting your time? But then I told myself,
IF YOU GIVE UP, YOU WILL NEVER FORGIVE YOURSELF.
I felt like I was writing in a cave, scratching away at a dirty stone wall. But I kept going. When I was ready, I gave it to some trusted friends to read. Then I sent it out to literary agents. One kind agent told me that it’s really hard to get the voice right and the characters sounded too much alike. So, I rewrote it all again, changing every “I” back to “she” and every “my” back to “her.”
Can you see how tough this all was?
The first time around, my novel was called, The Dead Can Never Thank You. (My daughter, Amalia, said that it sounded like a ghost story.) When I resubmitted it, I called it The Women’s Burial Circle, which sounded too much like an anthropologist’s look at a weird ritual in Papua, New Guinea.
Then I stumbled upon literary agent, Steven Chudney, who accepted the novel. Like an architect able to envision a house in his head, he was able to envision how the book should be. I reworked it again using his guidance. He sold it to Rachel Kahan at HarperCollins within a few months.
So, if you are reading this and feeling the blues because if you haven’t sold your novel yet, keep working. It took me a lot longer than I thought it would – about eighteen years longer – to sell my second book. But don’t smash your computer. Keep moving your fingers over the keyboard or (as in my case) using a trusty fountain pen.
Right before I opened the box containing A Remarkable Kindness.
If you’re stuck, here is one exercise you might try:
Write a story in which one character has a secret that she/he has to tell someone about. Begin right at the moment she or he tells the secret, and then work backwards. Here’s a sentence to start with:
“What do you mean, impossible?” I said. This is based on the sentence I used to start me writing my story, “One Kiss, One Baby, One God,” for Commentary Magazine.) You can mix it up:
“What do you mean, impossible?” my boss/my best friend/my lover/my son/my priest said…
Set your timer. Give yourself however long you think you can stand sitting and writing fast. Write as much as you can in thirty minutes, let’s say. Do this a little at a time and you will have a story. Then put it aside for a while. Take it out to show your ideal reader. Do not send it out to magazines until you have had it read and edited. Take your time. As Malcolm Gladwell says, we have to put in our 10,000 hours.
And remember – if we write to get approval and admiration, then we’ll always feel slightly dissatisfied. We have to write for the joy of writing, just for the pleasure and the abandon and the free-fall feeling we get putting words together. Approval is an inside job. We have to fill our own wells.
We have to do the thing that calls us.
My husband, Jonny, wrote me:
“It is yours; you did it. You NEVER gave up. You got knocked down but you got up. You have guts. When I think of the word perseverance, your name heads my list. You experienced ups and downs and near crises but diligently continued no matter how many rejection letters you received. I am sitting back enjoying your success – so well-deserved.”
Proving myself – to myself – is the best feeling around. So all I can say to you, keep going. I really believe that the universe supports our dreams.
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