In Warren's Words

Handling Rejection

You’ve spent months, perhaps years, composing your novel. You’ve read and reread it hundreds of times. You’ve rethought it, rewritten it, revised it, changed characters, dialogue, plot lines. Writing it is the most important thing in your life. The writing of your novel has absorbed your attention, almost exclusively. Both your conscious and your subconscious mind have been obsessed with it. You have read parts of it to your friends, family, former teachers. Most think it’s wonderful.

You have finally considered it finished. Armed with optimism and self-confidence, you obtain a list of agents on the Internet and begin to canvas agents. You agonize over whether to send your precious manuscript to one agent at a time or to a number of agents. You choose the first option.

You spell check the manuscript and send it out in perfect printed shape on letter-sized paper. You have, you believe, created a beautiful, easily read package. You send a cover letter. You have high hopes.

Weeks go by, then months. They are, you believe, reading it in the office, passing it around, deciding to take it on. You live on such hopes. Finally you call the agent’s office. They haven’t a clue as to who you are. Somehow they are reminded and search the piles of manuscripts in their office, find yours and send you back a form letter, perhaps made to look like an original out of politeness.

I suppose you are awaiting some prescription offering a magic coping pill. Sorry, there isn’t any available at Walgreens or your corner drug store.

Well then, you tell yourself, it is only one agent’s opinion. You send it off to another agent. A letter comes back swiftly, similarly worded. You get bolder send your manuscript to two agents at a time, then three, then every agent you can find. Nothing happens. Good luck on getting published, they tell you. Not for us. Sometimes there is a personal scribbled note which says something nice and you live in its glow for days.

Years go by. You start another novel, but you are less optimistic now, less confident, unsure. You tell yourself you have not paid enough attention to the marketplace. You begin to analyze what is selling, what is not selling, what is being published. You read books on the best seller lists and are certain you can do a lot better. You try to use these books as a guide to what is selling and you write accordingly. Nothing helps. You are continuously rejected.

You begin to read various pitches on the Internet about how you can publish your own books and get them marketed in bookstores, sent to movie producers, be a successful career novelist. For a price, you can have a nicely published book. For more of a price it will be sent out to movie producers. For more of a price you will be told how to market your book. You debate the idea and as your pile of rejection letter mounts, you give it a try. You spend money. A beautiful book is produced. Your family buys copies and sends them to friends. It is even reviewed in publications that review self-published books. Actually, a newspaper somewhere prints a review. You are elated. Nothing happens. There is no afterlife.

Deep in your gut you are vastly disappointed. Despite your confidence in your ability, despite the fact that your novel is certainly worthy of publication, knowing that you have the desire, the discipline and are certain of your talent, you have been rejected. Still you are determined to get up from the mat and fight back. You write another novel. Perhaps a third. Perhaps more. You go through the same process. Again and again you are rejected. You begin to question your ability, your ideas, your talent. Is it a fantasy, an exercise in unrealistic aspirations? You are becoming embittered. Your dream is crashing.

You will require obsessive focus, singleness of purpose, a draconian ruthlessness and total devotion to a belief in your artistic ability.

If you are fortunate, your wife, husband, partner, and family stick by you, continue to encourage your dream, help you keep it alive. Other realities begin to chip away at the dream. You have financial obligations. Your kids are growing up. You are losing out in the job market. Others are moving up in their jobs, while you are falling behind.

You feel lost, adrift. Rejection after rejection has beaten you down. You see this as the end of your world, the end of your hopes and dreams. Your high hopes and self-confidence in your own talent is petering away.

What now?

If you’ve read this far without your stomach congealing, I suppose you are awaiting some prescription offering a magic coping pill. Sorry, there isn’t any available at Walgreens or your corner drug store. And you won’t find it here. Luck—that strange, illusive, heaven sent, burst of good fortune–has not fired a missile in your direction.

Not yet. 

You have three choices. The first is personal surrender. You’ve been on a fool’s errand following an adolescent dream. Time to throw in the towel and concentrate on your day job. At least you tried.  The second choice is postponement. You weren’t ready. You needed more experience of life. You haven’t made the zeitgeist yet. But it will come. Some, like yourself, are late bloomers. Give the dream a rest. Wishing won’t make it so. There are enough popular clichés to give you courage. Some day your Prince, or Princess, will come.

Whistle the old tunes.

Now for your third choice, the clincher. It is not recommended for the faint of heart. Never give up. Never, never, never. It may be impractical, unwise, foolish, pure madness, but if you truly believe in yourself, your talent, your ideas, your calling, your personal mission, why not, as Lewis Carroll wrote, go on until the end, and then stop.

To do this requires a monumental ego, total self-confidence in your talent, and an unshakeable belief that you have been anointed with the right stuff. You will require obsessive focus, singleness of purpose, a draconian ruthlessness and total devotion to a belief in your artistic ability. Fancy words, I know, but with the absence of luck, you will need these attributes to sustain you through the process.

What this means for the true novelist is that he or she must continue to soldier on, keep writing, keep trying, taking the increasingly painful hits of rejection after rejection until… Well, until someone out there catches on…or doesn’t.

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