Yesterday I found out that a short story that I’d submitted to a fantasy magazine had been rejected. As with virtually all rejections, there was no associated list of reasons why the piece had been rejected.  There are a couple things that writers typically feel when they get these letters that I want to write about:

First, don’t blame the publication. I know we’ve all heard stories about how ridiculously famous authors have had their books rejected and most of us have heard the stories about how, to see what would happen, people submitted a NY times bestseller to a publishing firm and it got rejected. Say what you will about the system or the man or whatever, but they’re just doing their jobs. The system isn’t there to coddle you, stroke your ego, or put you down humanely. It’s there to make money. Bottom line: if they don’t think your story/book/poetry/whatever will sell money, you get rejected. Writer self-help step #1: Accept this fact. It will never change.

Second: the Kick in the Face. If you have read this blog before, you may have seen this post I wrote previously about handling rejection like a true writer. I’m going to say something that a lot of the writing self-help books don’t say. When you get that rejection, you’re going to be pissed off. You’re going to be mad and you absolutely, positively will feel like giving up. Writers, when we get these rejection letters, will say and feel all kinds of  crazy stuff ranging from “my writing sucks” to “nobody’s ever going to publish my stories” to the absolute worst of them all:

Why do I even bother writing if nobody’s going to publish my work?

This is where the kick to the face comes in. It’s perfectly fine to feel these things and you should feel them – let yourself go through the range of anger, sadness, and dejection that comes with that rejection letter. Then kick yourself in the face. Slap yourself out if it. Realize that all of that crap is just that, crap. You write because you’re a writer and if you do it long enough and hone your craft enough, you will eventually find some success. You may not get on the NY times bestseller list, but there will be small victories.

If you can’t slap yourself out of it, then get a friend to kick you in the face. Last night I was babbling on about how I was going to give up writing and I quit and life sucks and why should I bother yadda yadda yadda. A friend of mine slapped me in the face and told me to knock it off (you know who you are…thank you!). What I intend to do is write tonight… write until I can’t take it anymore.

What I failed to remember, and what we may need friends to kick into our thick heads (hard!), is that we write because that’s who we are. We write because we tell stories, and we gain some satisfaction from telling and honing a story. Publication is secondary to writing, and every writer gets rejected.

So I’m taking my own advice: sucking it up, getting back on the horse, and moving on from yet another rejection and realizing that friends who can slap you around a little bit after a rejection are probably more valuable than friends who can proofread your stuff before the rejection.

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So I’ve received my first rejection letter. Note that I said “first” and not “a” or “the”. This is an important distinction. Throughout the career of any writer, the reception of rejection letters is going to be commonplace, with a few notable exceptions for people who are lucky and talented enough to strike a hit with their first book.

Even though I knew it was going to happen and I knew it was coming, it still hurt. I’ve written or contributed to 14 different books that were all published and sitting on shelves in Barnes & Noble, Borders, etc. They were all technical books but they were published books nonetheless. As a result, I’m not particularly accustomed to people telling me they don’t want to publish my work.

This is where the courage part comes in. As soon as you open (either the physical envelope or the email) a letter containing a rejection, your brain starts doing all kinds of horrible things to you.  It tells you that your story sucks, it tells you that you can’t write and that you have the writing skill of a four year old. Your brain will tell you that you should’ve given up before you started, why should you even bother if your stuff sucks and nobody wants to read it? Then, when your brain has thoroughly beaten you and you are on the ground bleeding and positive you don’t want to get back up, your brain then asks you the most dangerous question of all. Be careful – it’s a trick question:

Why do you want to be a writer?

This is where you will get tripped up. If you answer this question, then you might as well give up now and seriously not bother trying to write any longer. This is a trick question because you don’t want to be a writer, you are a writer. Whether your writing is good, whether you can get published, whether the only person who ever reads your writing is your dog – you are a writer and there is nothing you can do about it. It is in your DNA and your soul as surely as any other immutable part of your anatomy and who you are.

This is the suffering that all writers go through. A writer doesn’t come up with stories, he or she is plagued by them. The stories and scenes and characters and ideas come unbidden at random points throughout the day and they quite literally cannot function properly until they have vented those ideas; given them release and physical form on paper or computer. Whether a person ever writes a single word for publication is irrelevant to whether or not they are a writer.

And so, with my self esteem in the gutter, I open a new blank word processor document and start anew, knowing that I will continue to be rejected and knowing that there is nothing I can do about it. I don’t want to write, I must write. It is essential to my sanity and the completion of a story is a therapy that I can buy from no clinic. This is my curse and my gift: my brain is full of stories and these stories are screaming to be given form and it is my job, my responsibility to do just that.

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For people who blog all the time and for people who are used to writing a lot, the idea of cramming something meaningful into a mere 10 sentences can seem pretty daunting. To see if I could really condense a meaningful thought down to 10 sentences, I submitted a work called “Hands” to them and today it was published on their blog.

Click here for the link to the publication.

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