I received my first rejections of 2023 this week: from two contests sponsored by a literary magazine. This is not unexpected, as my writing tends to fall through the cracks: too genre for literary magazines but too literary for genre magazines. Ah, well.
When I first started out, I was devastated by rejection. The first time my work was rejected, I didn’t send anything out for another six months. Alas, you cannot build a literary career that way. In fact, you have to take the exact opposite approach: the more you put your writing out there, the more likely it is that it will find an editor willing to take a chance on it. So, over time, I have had to thicken my skin.
I have developed a couple of strategies to deal with rejection. On the one hand, I always try to have a lot of material out there (at the moment, two or three more short stories, a short story collection proposal and a pair of anthology proposals); if one project doesn’t work out, maybe another will. On the other hand, I try to focus on the project or projects I am writing at the moment, which doesn’t give me much time to fret about the ones that aren’t succeeding in the market.
Years ago, I heard that you can’t truly consider yourself a writer until you’ve had at least 100 rejections. By this yardstick, I am now a writer three times over, and quickly approaching my fourth. If nothing else, I have found that rejection is easier to accept the more you experience it. Thank Gord!