DON’T JUST “HANDLE” REJECTION. WORK WITH IT.

I’m teaching a course on writing process through Women on Writing next month, and WOW asked me to write a blog post for them. Because a strong writing process goes hand in hand with a confident submitting process—and a process for handling rejection with resilience—I did a writeup on how to handle rejection. I’ll share the introduction to that post here. Link to the full text below!

I’m writing this post as a reminder to myself as much as to you. Because yesterday I got a rejection email. The day before, I got three. One day last month I got six in one day. This year? I stopped counting after I reached 100. And each was as hard as the last.

Isaac Asimov called rejection letters “lacerations of the soul.” Me? I don’t feel lacerated as much as hit in the gut. Rejection makes me feel terrible, & terrible about myself. Jealousy, loneliness, self-doubt: to my lizard brain, a simple rejection is a threat to my human need to belong.

But rejection is also a constant, immovable companion: Alexander Chee calls it “the other medium of writing.” I have periodic mini-crises where rejection makes me doubt whether I can go on as a writer. But if I am to be a writer at all, rejection is part of it. That’s the choice: write, and be rejected, or don’t write. Don’t believe me? A Wrinkle in Time was rejected 29 times. Ray Bradbury got 800 (yes, eight hundred) rejections before selling even one story. The Tale of Peter Rabbit was rejected so many times that Beatrix Potter decided to self-publish.

At the end of each mini-crisis, I come to this: the writing is worth it. The readers and students I have are worth it, the ideas that sometimes well like bubbling water in my gut, pulling me out of bed in the morning, the satisfaction of work completed, the challenge of improving a piece: worth it. Knowing that I’ve tried is worth it—or at least it’s better than just not trying.

I’m not here to tell you that there’s a way around rejection. Or that it’s easy, or gets easier. I’m here to convince you that rejection is worth getting to know. So, how do you let rejection move your work forward?

1. Submit again.

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Want more? Check out the rest of the blog here. And if you enjoy what I have to say, I hope you pass the word along about my upcoming class, here.