Tag: Writing Community

Rejection Hurts

No matter if its a personal rejection or a professional interaction, not being accepted can feel like a punch to the gut. It takes the wind out of my sails more than I’d prefer to admit, but a rejection (or a hundred rejections) doesn’t define a creative. What I do after the punch is what really matters.

Will I shut down the creative process I’ve built up? Should I listen to that nagging voice in my head that says I’m not going to make anything of myself? Does anyone out there really want to hear what I have to say anyway? Those questions have been with me since I started writing again in 2017, and I doubt they’ll disappear with or without more rejections.

The important answers aren’t in those questions or a dozen other negative thoughts that come to mind when I read another rejection email. The important response is to keep writing, to keep reading, to keep looking for inspiration, and to keep sending out stories with characters, themes, and settings that I am passionate about.

I didn’t get in to a writing program this summer.

That really bummed me out, harshed my Zen, and hurt my feelers. The one thing it didn’t do was make me want to quit. I hope that by sharing my response, it may help other creatives who face similar issues. There are only so many seats at the table, only so much room in a magazine issue, and only so many novels published by a given imprint in a publishing cycle. I keep at it till something sticks.

Here is another lesson rejection has taught me, I keep getting better. Nothing causes me to evaluate my work more than, “We regret to inform you…” Rejection forces me to seek out new ideas, to scour my work for flaws, or as my writer’s group likes to say, “Opportunities for improvement.” All of which helps me grow as a writer.

Maybe there will be a few more (or dozens more) rejections between me and my goals. Maybe I’ll be picked up for the next project I write. Either way, I’ll keep my butt in the chair and write. I hope you stick to whatever you’re creating, too.

Writing, like anything else worth doing well, takes practice. Even talented writers have to put in the effort to make their work publishable. Plenty of self-published stories show good and bad examples of this maxim.

My earliest short stories are riddled with terrible examples of what not to do. In my haste to publish, I thought I had done excellent work. Some lessons are best learned the hard way, but there are less humbling ways to learn the craft of writing. Those ways haven’t been my path, and I’d love to help others avoid the pitfalls I created for myself.

Read about writing.

There are so many resources I wish I’d checked into sooner. There are tons of articles, books, videos, and live events that can help new writers. Before I self-published on Amazon, my only writing experience had been work-related or for school. Even in creative writing classes, my teachers focused on the story, not on how to show (instead of telling) it.

Only after I’d found my way into critique groups did I realize how juvenile those stories were to other authors. Thankfully, those two sad Amazon entries made less than twenty sales together (thanks to friends and family). You don’t have to go through that kind of trauma, practice your craft before you push the publish button.

Five years later…

The stories I write now are still not masterpieces of fiction. They are, however, not mangled by my novice voice. I show, I ground my dialogue in the scene, and my descriptions enhance the story rather than trying to take center stage over the characters. I’m as much a work in progress as my stories, but I like to think both are improving.

So find ways to learn about how to write, the details are always up to you, but the methods and structures are there for a reason. You can break those rules anytime you need to, but it always helps to understand them before you ignore them. If you ever have to explain your reasoning to an editor, you’ll be glad to know why breaking a rule works in that instance.

Above all else, my favorite advice still stands: Write.

When I was about 8 or 9 years old, my dad pulled me out of school one day to go flying with a friend of his. I’d never been in a plane before, but I remember how excited I was to fly (and how annoying I must have been to my classmates). My dad worked as a taxi dispatcher at Raleigh-Durham International Airport (before it was international), and he made friends with pilots and frequent flyers who needed cabs all the time.

We went up around noon, flew around for less than an hour and came back to the airport. The pilot, whose name I don’t remember, even let me take the yolk and feel the plane respond to my nervous movements. It was an amazing experience, but it also changed how I looked at the world around me.

The world felt smaller from the air. Moving fast so high above the ground showed me that people and places are tiny compared to the world around us. This was the first shift in perspective I can remember as a child, where I felt different about my place in the world, and the world’s place around me. Once seen, the shift could not be unseen.

New sights make old ones feel different.

After leaving the airport, my dad asked what I thought about the flight. I wasn’t sure how to express my feelings, but I remember saying I felt smaller after seeing people the size of ants. My dad didn’t wax poetic much, but he offered an insight that has stayed with me. He said, “People are as big as they allow themselves to be. If you think small, you’ll be small, but if you let your imagination run wild, there’s no telling how big you can be.” I’m trying to be bigger all the time.

The other change to my view came when I got home, and the next day I went to school. My mother and grandmother asked about my flight as soon as I walked in the door. I gushed about flying the plane, seeing tiny people and buildings, and how fast we flew. At school the next day, I got to tell the story all over again, and it may have been one of the first times I felt like a storyteller. While every word I said was true (as far as I can remember) I did my best to share how the flight made me feel.

In my writing, I try to do the same thing (even if the stories aren’t exactly true). If readers connect with my characters and feel what they do on the page, then I’m at least on the right track with my stories. Amazing settings, powerful adversaries, and complex plots are window dressing to the central idea that people (whatever form they take) and how they feel are the focus of storytelling.