One of my New Years resolutions last year was to be rejected 100 times. Although I have a pretty thick skin when it comes to receiving critique, I’d gotten out of the habits of submitting my work and being turned down–both of which are important to maintain when you’re writing for publication.
It’s easy to view rejection as a mark of failure, no matter how optimistic you usually are. I definitely have. But after stumbling across this post, I was inspired to change my attitude toward rejections by seeking to collect as many of them as I could in one year. My hope was that treating each rejection like a badge of honor or a step on the way toward achieving a larger goal would help me take them less personally. That seeking to turn the often intimidating querying and submission process into a contest against myself might give me the encouragement I needed to keep putting my writing out into the world.
Surprisingly–or, perhaps, not so surprisingly–it worked.
As I mentioned in my 2019 Wrap-up, I was rejected 31 times before the year was out. Some of those rejections stemmed from the months long process of searching and applying for a new day job (which I’m totally going to count). The vast majority of them stemmed from submitting and pitching my own writing.
Near the beginning of last year, I compiled a spreadsheet of possible paying publications both online and off where I could send some of my completed short stories. I researched short story cover letters and drafted a template of my own, in addition to a short author bio I could include as needed. And by the end of January, I had already begun to submit a few of my short stories.
Those first few submissions were nerve-wracking, I’ll admit. I knew that my odds were not great, and I asked myself more than once why I was wasting my time–the submission process alone was more time-consuming than I would’ve guessed–and my money on a project that likely wouldn’t lead to any success. But once the rejections actually started showing up, my feelings about the whole process changed. My first rejection came on March 4th, and it was far less painful and less upsetting than I expected it to be. If anything, I was almost . . . pleased. I would’ve been thrilled if my story had been accepted, but knowing that I’d thrown my metaphorical hat in the metaphorical ring was its own kind of victory. And at the very least, that rejection was the first tally mark of many I could add toward my goal.
By mid-year, I’d stopped feeling especially disheartened by each new rejection, and sitting down once a month to take stock of which stories I could send out and where had become a simple, straightforward part of my routine. I was able to appreciate the wonderful personalized rejection I had received rather than moping about all the form letters cluttering up my inbox. And when my efforts finally did result in some success–a new job, a short story accepted by an anthology, an article sold–I was jubilant.
It isn’t as though I’ve built a fully-fledged career off twelve months of rejections, but I have taken significant steps toward several important goals. I was able to shift from full-time work to part-time plus freelancing, which felt like a Very Big Deal. I placed a couple of pieces with non-paying markets. Someone PAID me for a piece of writing for the first time in my life. And none of those things would’ve been possible if I hadn’t forced myself to re-acclimate to rejection.
Although I haven’t set any definitive rejection goals for 2020, I do plan to continue submitting my short fiction and pitching additional nonfiction articles throughout the rest of the year. I plan to track my rejections the same way I did before–in a handy dandy spreadsheet and a simpler, more straightforward list.
In short, I plan to be told “no” a lot, and to embrace it as much as I can.
How do you handle being rejected? Have you ever–or would you ever–deliberately attempt to collect rejections? Let me know in the comments.