Your Baby Is Ugly And You Dress It Funny

 

I know middle aged people who are paralyzed at the thought of changing jobs simply because of the chance they’ll experience rejections. This is completely understandable and for someone who persevered at writing and submitting enough to be published, almost unbelievably cowardly.

You see, I’ve talked a lot about having the knowledge and the craft and studying and getting better, but you can do all that and still never be published, unless you conquer one thing: the fear of rejection.

Oh, you don’t fear rejection? Yes, you do. We all do. Let’s face it, unless we’re just dirtying paper on one side, the story we send out is our baby, part of us we send out into the world. It’s hard not to hurt when it comes back even with the kindest of rejections. “What do you mean it doesn’t suit your needs at the time? It’s pure genius!”

My story with rejections started on the first story I sent out at twenty two, two months after I was married and moved to the US. In retrospect it wasn’t a bad little story, though perhaps very derivative. (I no longer have a copy of it.) Unfortunately I labored under two illusions: 1) I was raised on the idea of genius. Genius was something you got for free and which was indefinable, but which everyone else recognized. If you had genius in one of the arts, even your apprentice efforts would be so amazing people would love them even if they hated that sub genre, style or form. 2) It didn’t much matter what a magazine published. If a story was good enough, they couldn’t help buying it.

Now, I wasn’t completely stupid, so I aimed in the general direction of fantasy and science fiction. And I got back, within three weeks a page long handwritten rejection explaining what they liked about the story and what didn’t fit with their magazine and why. They asked me to submit again and, because they thought it might help me “aim” better, they included a free copy of their magazine. This was a professional magazine. Now, only seven years later, I’d have been dancing on the streets at this rejection. At the time I just thought “It didn’t have enough ‘genius’” and stuck the letter and magazine in the bottom drawer of desk and decided my genius was in novels. (No, you can’t beat my 23 year old self. I have dibs, if time machines are invented.)

So, for the next six/seven years I wrote novels and sent them out when I had money (which wasn’t often. Sending a novel out cost about $8 and we were so close to the bone we had to budget buying saline solution for contact lenses.) I sent them out maybe three times in the seven years. Mind you, I used the same brilliant “aiming” I’d used with short stories, so the miracle is not so much I got rejected, the miracle is that no one got really harsh with me.

Meanwhile we had a kid and moved and I decided, as I’ve explained before, that I must write short stories and break in that way. The problem with short stories is that I didn’t have the excuse of “not enough money to send it out” and therefore I started getting rejections regularly. And with short stories, I really couldn’t afford to sulk for three months afterwards. For the next four years, I got mostly standard rejections for my short stories.

The exceptions were – a four page, handwritten rejection where the editor took exception to everything, from my writing style to the color of the character’s eyes. (Apparently characters aren’t allowed to have brown eyes. Who knew?) A rejection for a novel which had followed me through three addresses and in which the editor (for whom I worked some years later, btw) informed me she loved my style and I had the makings of a very good writer, but she hated my characters, my world and my magic system. (Whee.) Oh, yeah, and a novel that arrived on a Saturday morning, one day delivery on UPS and I had to sign for it. Inside was a letter apologizing about five or six times for not being able to buy it. (But it still ruined my weekend.)

Then eventually I started getting personal rejections again, and this time I wasn’t stupid and followed through by writing more for those magazines and engaging in correspondence, until eventually I sold to them.

At one time I was circulating sixty short stories and hadn’t sold any. There were at least three days when I opened my (industrial sized) mailbox and rejections poured out on me – everything I had sent out came back rejected. The same day. There were days when this happened and I was tired or sick or something major in the house had broken, and this was the final straw that got me depressed for a month.

I used to reach a hundred rejections by March, every year.

So, what have I learned – because this sounds like bragging of cutting myself – from all this?

– I don’t have a particular resistence to rejection. In fact, I might feel it more than most people.

– No matter how published you are, some stories or novels, when they get rejected it breaks your heart. Even if you understand why they’re rejected.

– It helps if you remember that it’s a business decision. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your work is, if it doesn’t fit what they’re looking for at the moment. Put it in the drawer and send it out again in a year or two. You’d be amazed what a difference a year makes.

-Keep sending the stories out. You can’t sell them if you don’t. Also, it helps if you have a lot of stuff out. Yeah, one day they might all come back at the same time, but most of the time they don’t. And when you get a rejection it helps to think “Oh, I still have another one out.”

– Take note of publishers that send unwarrantedly nasty rejections and consider not working for them if you have a choice. No, I’m not joking. Look, there’s never a reason for a nasty rejection. There’s never a reason (and yes, I’ve had this happen at all levels of my career including now) to tell someone that they don’t have enough craft to know what they’re doing or that they clear don’t know what makes a novel. And there DEFINITELY is no reason for anything nastier than that – and, trust me, I still get those. That’s unwarranted nastiness, it’s not a business interaction, it’s personal. Either something in your story flicked the editor wrong, or they know you and don’t like you. Consider removing them from your list of potentials. There’s ABSOLUTELY no reason to put yourself through that. If they’re that nasty at the hiring stage, imagine what it will be like working for them. Most editors will just say “doesn’t suit our needs” no matter how much they hate it. And yes I know, people get toothaches and boyfriends who break up with them and sometimes they can’t behave professionally. But they should do what writers do in those cases and write the pithy rejection note then NOT send it. It’s business. Not personal.  (This doesn’t mean they can’t tell you “this doesn’t make sense” or something, though if they’re rejecting you, one wonders WHY they bother.  [I actually considered the “I like your style, but not the world, the characters or the magic” a GOOD rejection.  It gave me perspective and hope.] But there are levels.  To put this in perspective, my husband has been in computers for almost 30 years.  NO ONE would reject him with “you just can’t code.”  Even if they thought that was the truth, they’d mumble something about not meeting needs or they might say “your program knowledge is out of date.”  BUT NOT “you can’t code.”)

-Write. Submit. Repeat. Allow yourself a day to mope around, eat too much and act like your cat died. (A week if it’s one of your very favorite novels and the rejection was unprofessional and nasty.) And then… Put your gloves back on and get back in the ring, writer. You lose some, but if you keep trying, eventually you win some.