Well of course rejection hurts.

[truepenny]

Okay, yes, everyone and her dog is linking to Teresa Nielsen Hayden's brilliant post on rejection letters. I'm being a good lemming partly because the post is completely brilliant and partly because I just want to say, not all authors react like this.

Now, it's perfectly true that I take rejection personally. Can't help it. Anne Lamott, as usual, has the perfect comparison (even though I don't have or want kids, and even though she's talking about critique rather than rejection letters); she says it's "as if they had said that Sam [her son] is ugly and boring and spoiled and I should let him go" (Lamott 166). That reaction is always there, and I've accepted the fact that I'm never going to be good enough and kind enough and virtuous enough to make it go away. But the thing is, the duration of that reaction has lessened dramatically. It used to be I'd be depressed for the rest of the day and maybe the day after. Now, it's mostly just a flinch when I see the perfectly recognizable SASE in the mailbox, and maybe a moment of agony--like having someone stab you in the gut and then twist--as I read the letter itself. And then I'm done.

And while I take it personally, I never imagine that the editor takes it personally--except on those reassuring occasions when they've taken the trouble to explain why, or to say something nice.

(In a moment of stunning serendipity, the mail just arrived--with a rejection letter. And, to prove my point, I am now sitting here with a big goofy grin because the editor said something really really nice.)

And here's the other thing. I did the math a couple days ago, and discovered that my batting average is .100. 10 stories sold vs. 100 (now 101) rejections. (Which matociquala tells me is pretty much industry standard.) And with those kinds of numbers, it's just too tiring to get worked up about every individual rejection.

In Misery, Annie Wilkes gets angry at Paul Sheldon for describing writing as a business. And it's true that if you think of it only as a business, then you are--to be polite about it--not someone I want to spent any amount of time with. But it's also true that if you want to (a.) stay sane and (b.) be successful, you have to treat it as a business. Not the writing itself, but what happens to the story once it's finished. If you want to be a professional writer (i.e., you want to get paid for it, which is, after all, the point of submitting things), you have to behave like a professional. When your ego takes a knock, you have to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and go back in swinging. You have to let go of any sense of entitlement you may have, and you have to let go of the pain. It's fun to wallow in self-pity, but it is not, in any sense of the word, productive.

There may be people who can get their first story accepted at the first market they send it to. [And every story thereafter likewise. --Ed., because melebeth's response pointed out that that first story may not mean anything about the second, and what I meant was "There may be people who never get rejection letters."] These people are probably not human, and I do not want to meet them, because I do not want my envy and bitterness to cause my head to explode. The rest of us had better get used to the idea that the universe does not love us. Go here to watch me dig myself in deeper.

Comments

[lizardek.livejournal.com]

THAT was an excellent, thorough, extremely thought-provoking essay on the whole rejection question/writing life I've ever read. Thanks.

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[truepenny.livejournal.com]

You're welcome.

Um, me or TNH?

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[lizardek.livejournal.com]

I was talking about you, actually :) (I read hers earlier today, and hers, too, but in a different way)

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[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh. Well, thank you, then. *blushes*

[robling-t.livejournal.com]

LOL, yeah, I confess to some foot-dragging on a new version of a cover letter to send out with the First Novel Manuscript after target #1 sent it back with the "not economically viable for us" form letter (well, at least it wasn't the "not to professional standards yet" letter, otherwise known as the "go away, kid, ya bother me" letter) -- but, spelunking plumbers willing, today is the first day of the rest of my career, and I am going to have another go at organizing my thoughts for another try at it...

Just as soon as I can pry myself away from LJ. :)

[melebeth]

I was reading my friends of friends list when I came across your extremely timely post (it has been a week of rejection letters - one of the very nice and encouraging sort the other less so), and it prompted in me a stunning revelation. In theater, although not in writing, I court rejection. I woo it by going on auditions for plays that I have no interest in performing in in the hopes of tricking the gods into counting those rejections against my allotted total. I use it to toughen my skin against the times when I really care. It has, actually, helped to some extent, but I've been trying to think of a literary corollary to "plays I don't want to be in" for years with no success. :)

Elizabeth
Who sold her first story to the first professional market she ever submitted to... and who has been unable to sell anything else since. A fact not to envy or be bitter about, since it seems to be just another way for the universe to laugh at one of its children's expense

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[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I was actually thinking when I wrote that of a professor I had once who told us all how his first article got accepted at the first prestigious journal he sent it to, and the complacency with which he said it made it perfectly clear that he had never hit the compensatory dry spell. Yes, that still rankles.

When I was a teenager and active in the community theater, the best role I ever got was one I didn't especially want. Because the fact I didn't care about it meant that I auditioned well, whereas with roles I wanted, I was always so nervous that I flubbed things completely.

Which is why writing is better for me than acting, because the nervousness is divorced from the performance.

But, yeah, I can't think of any way to translate that from one art to the other, either.

[srallen.livejournal.com]

Ah to read this just as I'm picking up the book I've been neglecting writing for the past month due to Life Events. It makes me feel better for the times I was disappointed for about a half an hour at being rejected. Mind you, I can spend most of a day being elated when something I write was accepted.

Actually...

I was about to write "when I'm accepted" up there. Little wonder take it so personally *heh*

[libskrat]

I sorta wonder how much of this is a function of the same ignorance that landed me on the wrong side of the grad-school door the first time.

How many of the takes-rejections-personally people actually know a working writer? (Comments to TNH's post suggested that aspiring writers get to know editors, which I can certainly also get behind.) Getting autographs at a signing doesn't count; that, if anything, is only going to romanticize the profession further.

How many of them realize how many others just like them there are? How many go to writing workshops or seminars that manage to amount to something more than ('scuse diction) circle-jerking? How many of them hang out in libraries, for Pete's sake?

I mean, I write, but I'm not a working writer and never shall be, in part because I do understand the process and I know perfectly well it isn't for me. Would that such as I could hand out some more clue...

On that note, I think it's immensely valuable that truepenny and matociquala and papersky and all the other working writers with LJs have LJs, talk about their writing lives, the good and the bad, on LJs. Demystifying the process might well lighten some slushpiles, as well as dampening the fear and resentment that accompanies rejections.

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[(Anonymous)]

I used to take rejections much harder a few years ago than I do now. I never thought the editors were doing anything but their job, but I would nonetheless writhe in mental agony over every "overwritten" and "cliched" and be convinced that I was a bad writer and worthless human being for days later.

Now I toss them in a file so I don't accidentally submit the same thing to the same person twice, and occasionally call up a friend and rant if they use words like "unpublishable." Then I let it go. At least, I let it go more than I used to.

I can think of two reasons for this change in attitude. One is that I started studying karate and came to view criticism as a thing that you can take impersonally and that it can be something to look forward to and want more of, and that perhaps that attitude on the floor rubbed off on my self off the floor. The other is that I got older and more thick-skinned.

Rachel Brown

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[larryhammer]

Expecting the rejections to all end up in the right folder would be too much to ask of me. I keep a log for each work (usually written on the back of a file copy of the first page) of when it went where and when back, in a tracking drawer.

<waves to Rachel>

---L.

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[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I have index cards, fastened into a packet with a small binder clip, and then left to scull about the top of my desk more or less as they please.

[deepad]

just wanted to pop in and say thanks, both for linking to that lovely essay on rejection, and for your own thoughts about the process. As someone who writes, i am very grateful to you and other such open souls who put their experience of the writing process out in the open for others to share in and learn from.