It’s a fact—writers get rejected a lot. We work in a subjective business where there are people who don’t like our work—at every level. In the beginning it’s agents, then it’s editors, then there are reviewers and eventually readers. They all reject us sometime or another.
Yet some rejections hurt a whole lot more than others. Sometimes it’s just the day they come to you, that it happens to be a day your skin is feeling thinner. Other times it’s all about hope—that you were really really hoping to hear a yes this time.
But if you weren’t expecting much and you are having a normal writer’s day—aka thick skin appropriately arranged—they sting a quick second and then they’re gone.
But what about hope? Can you really go through all this without hoping for much? Why would you do that?
For me it’s a constant ying-yang. I know—in my blood—that over the many years of working at it, my writing has grown strong. That I’m writing at a publishable level. Yet I’m still in the trenches of working to get published and it means sending out constant submissions—both for short fiction and my most recent novel—for which I’m expecting about 99% rejection. Because it only takes one yes to make it all worth it.
But so many days it feels like looking for that proverbial needle in a whole field of haystacks. Whether or not it’s really that way, it feels that way.
Especially for a novel, where someone who wants to take it on is making a significant investment—so he or she has to love it. And what does that really mean? Is it anything I can really do anything about? Other than write the best book my skill allows me to write? To not cut any corners or rush any pieces of the process? Other than those things, all I can do is search for my literary soul-mates. And search and search and search some more.
So is there any comfort to be found? Some days no, but many days yes. It’s a fine thing, I’m thinking, to feel strong and flexible—knowing that nights I go to bed feeling despondent, I’ll wake up with new energy that will make me feel better. It’s the discipline of someone who’s fallen so many times that it’s routine to get back up. We writers don’t have the option to crawl off and lick our wounds and never go back out there again. If we did, we wouldn’t be writers. We’d be one of those people who talks about writing—but never actually does any.
And my own greatest source of hope? At the moment it’s the feeling that I’m learning this game. That when I write a cover letter or a bio, I speak with the voice of someone who’s been at this a while. Who writes with a certain confidence born of experience—not expecting much, but not asking for much either. It comes across, I think. You start to sound smarter. More wise. Less desperate to please or impress.
Will it get me the yeses I want? Will I find my readers? Who knows. There’s no money-back guarantee on this massive investment of time and the greater part of my heart.
All I do know is that I’ll keep on getting back up.
