Hope for Handling Rejection #Rejections, Reasons for

Feeling down from being turned down too many times? Read on.

Writing students and friends wail, "I could paper my walls with rejection slips."

I tell them, "I could probably insulate my house with the pesky things--and I've been a self-supporting author for more than forty years!"

So how do we beat the rejection slip blues? The Bible says, "Resist the devil and he will flee from you," James 5:7.  

Determining not to let rejections get us down is step one. Step two?  As a long-term secretary, I found filing boring, but it was part of the job. Rejections are part of the writing job and cannot be ignored or avoided. 

 

Among the Reasons for Rejection

 1. Too similar to other submitted material. We often consider our work unique. The trouble is, other writers will have the same ideas. That's why beginning writers see an article or story in a magazine that resembles theirs and feel the magazine ripped them off. In all probability, the printed article was in the works long before ours was submitted.

2. Wrong market. Church magazines receive crime stories. Men's magazines receive kids' stories. How-to magazines are bombarded with fiction. The convenience of email submissions is no excuse for not knowing our target markets. Studying submission guidelines lessens the chance of rejection.

3. First drafts. The height of conceit is to dash off a manuscript and send it out filled with the brands of a beginner. No matter how passionate you feel, your work is not ready to be submitted until you can view it as if someone else wrote it, and make corrections. Spell and grammar check aren't perfect, so in addition to those tools, print out and visually edit.

Take heart. There is hope for handling rejection.

 

Been there. Done that. Here are some of the wisdom I have gained.

1. Wait. What goes around comes around. Book and story and article popularity goes in cycles. It took several years to sell some of my titles. 

2. Consider a story from the Old West. The biggest, baddest, outlaw could only be defeated by a silver bullet. The hero fashioned the perfect one. He shot, missed, and slunk away--his chance for fame gone forever. 

3. A modern parallel. We spend hours, days, even years, creating the perfect book and tailoring it to the publishing company for whom it appears to be an answer to prayer--theirs and ours. We meticulously follow their guidelines for submission. It is rejected.

4. Crossroads. We stand at diverging paths. Wounded beyond belief, we can fade into the literary sunset. Or pick ourselves up and go on, submitting over and over until our manuscript is accepted or we run out of publishers and wait for new editors to be hired. 

 
5. Scatter gun approach. "If you fire off enough buckshot, you're bound to hit something!" In addition to my 160 book sales, I have over 1500 magazine sales. Unless you are committed to a "silver bullet" project, diversify. Personal experience, how-to, humorous, and life-changing stories are always in demand. In addition to earning money, the more items you keep submitted, the less it stings when something is rejected. ("Returns" is a nicer word.) At one time I had 60 or 70 short pieces out. When one came back, I immediately sent elsewhere. 



Things I learned the hard way

• A rejection is not the end of the world. Nor a reason to turn off computer and throw away typewriter, pens, pencils, and notebooks. Instead of Rest in Peace, let it stand for Return it Pronto (to a different place).
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  • The more of "me" is in a manuscript, the harder it is to accept rejection. Patterning lead characters after ourselves caries the risk of feeling personally rejected, instead of just having a manuscript rejected. The same is true for using family members or dear friends as integral characters. It is difficult to feel Uncle Henry or Cousin Lucy is not as dear to the hearts of editors as they are to me!
    
    
    
    And so, Dear Readers, as they said in the Olden Days, keep in mind the school of thought that says, "Each of us has an unknown number of rejections. Each brings us closer to a sale. The important thing is to not  stop submitting manuscripts. How sad that the very next try 
    could be the one for which we long and wait."
    
    

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