Why & How To Live With Rejections

Benjamin Schaefer's All of My Accepted Stories Started with Rejections (Electric Literature) is another of how rejections

A few years ago, the writer Matt Bell posted a series of tweets about a phenomenon he had observed among emerging writers, which he referred to as the “despair of almost there.” “I often see people quit right on the precipice of some goal,” Bell wrote, “after being a finalist for a few dream jobs, or getting full requests from agents but no yes, or being waitlisted for residencies/MFAs, etc. Those are signs you’re on the path, not that you should step off. And yet.” By then I had been around the literary scene long enough to have witnessed this trend myself. I had watched writers in the early stages of their careers, writers with far more talent and promise than me, flame out and quit prematurely. I began to wonder why this happened. Why did some writers quit writing before their careers had even begun? At what juncture did writers yield to the despair of almost there? Over time I concluded that, more often than not, the answer is a relatively simple one: We quit when we lose our tolerance for rejection. How we arrive at that precipice, however, I believe is a bit more complicated.

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Aurelie listened, and when I had finished, she offered me a piece of advice that would forever change my understanding about the relationship between writing and rejection. She said, “When it comes to the career of a writer, there is the creative mindset and the business mindset, and it is nearly impossible to inhabit both mindsets at the same time. So my advice is to spend as much time as possible in the creative mindset and as little time as possible in the business mindset.” 

***

The application and submission economies are by nature unpredictable. Editors and readers come and go; mastheads change. Juries and selection committees rotate. But every editor who has ever published my work sent me an encouraging rejection for a previous submission first. “Not this one,” they said, “but please send us something else.” So I did. One submission at a time, I sent them everything I had. At some point I learned it was appropriate to ask if I could submit directly to these editors instead of submitting to the slush pile. I also learned to submit new work to editors with whom I had previously published because their past support was an indication of warmth. These strategies eventually led to a history of acceptances. Similarly, one residency program sent me a form rejection the first time I applied. The second time, I was waitlisted. That waitlist indicated warmth, so I applied a third time and received a fellowship to the program.I still regularly submit to places that have only sent me form rejections—because if I’m using templates, why the hell not? But now when I receive an encouraging rejection from an editor or program, I make a conscious decision to believe them. I separate the encouragement from the rejection because I understand the encouragement is feedback and the rejection is not. When I do, the way forward becomes clear. I stay on the path, like Matt Bell suggests. I continue to go where it’s warm.

At the turn of the century, I took up writing again; albeit in a less than half-hearted way. At the time, I counted among my friends Larry Sweazy, who was just getting published at the time. He told me about rejections, and that I would have to learn to accept them. I had been doing appeals for several years by then. I told him losing an appeal - and that was common for criminal cases - probably had me prepared for story rejections. After all, a lost appeal meant someone had lost their freedom. A story rejected is just a story rejected.

I do wish more of my rejections gave me some hint of why I missed the final cut. Two of the many, many rejections have done so, and for that, I am very grateful. Mostly, I get the feeling of having walked the date to her door and not getting a goodnight kiss. As I wrote Joel C recently in response to an email encouraging me to keep on writing, I am still plugging along. 

You should do the same - keep writing without regard to publication.

 

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