SURVIVING REJECTION--SUCK IT UP!

“I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.”
Harper Lee

A Midsummer Night's Dream
 To the King's Theatre, where we saw "Midsummer's Night's Dream," which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life.
Samuel Pepys' Diary, September 29, 1662.


William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies'
 20 publishers rejected it. One with the comment: "an absurd and uninteresting fantasy which was rubbish and dull."

Vladimir Nabokov's 'Lolita'
Lolita was rejected by Viking, Simon & Schuster, New Directions, Farrar, Straus, and Doubleday. Called "overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian...the whole thing is an unsure cross between hideous reality and improbable fantasy. It often becomes a wild neurotic daydream...I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years."

One thing I've learned about rejection--you've just got to suck it up and go on.

When one of my stories or novels is rejected I console myself with all the times the experts got it wrong. If Samuel Pepys hated Shakespeare then how can I take any rejection seriously?. I remind myself that someone, somewhere is waiting to embrace my story!

If you are going to offer your writing to the public, and by this I mean to a teacher, in a workshop, to your writing group, or for publication in a journal, online or to an agent or publisher, you have to accept the fact that you will most likely get more rejections than acceptances, at least at the beginning. If you wilt under criticism, your work may never be shared with the one person in the entire universe to whom it may mean the most.

Consider each rejection one step closer to acceptance. Let's say the universe decrees that you have to get a certain number of rejections before your work reaches the right hands. Each no moves you closer to a yes.

Someone will hate what you write, no matter what. But someone will love it, or at least appreciate it, or be infuriated by it...but they will read it and publish it. Just don't be stopped by those who aren't clever or perceptive or joyful or insane enough to "get it." If it comes back, send it out again. Most of my stories were rejected at least 20 times before they were accepted and even won prizes. Don't give up.
Don't give up! WRITE ON!