Dreaming big means hurting big

Notes on rejection

I had a session with an author I coach recently, who I just wanted to hug. They were on the cusp of submitting their fifth novel to agents — their fifth after four rounds of rejections. The author was terrified: ‘I just don’t want to get rejected again.’ 

It’s hard to help authors who are going through this part of the journey, in that it’s impossible for me — or anyone else — to provide any meaningful comfort. The likelihood is that rejection will come, if not now then at some point. It will always come in some shape or form if you are a writer. That is a hard message to receive, though, even when you already know it and think you’ve made accommodation with it. It doesn’t lessen the feeling of fear, and that fear can be fatal to creativity. 

The problem with the goal of having a book published is that it is not a science. One can work incredibly hard, and be very talented, and still not achieve the seemingly simple goal of having a book come out in print, let alone earn a living from it.  It is not a calculated risk; it is thoroughly, maddeningly incalculable. Multiple hurdles stand in your way, and many of them are fallible humans, mostly underpaid and always overworked. The person on the other side might seem like they have all the power, but like you, they are trying to make a living in a society that commodifies creativity and says the only valid marker of success is money in the pocket. 

Rejection is such a fascinating choice of word. So personal; an aggressively active verb that denotes a kind of social outcasting. Which is probably why we use it. Because it does feel personal. It feels a bit like you’ve been on a first date you thought was perfect, only to receive that text: the ‘I didn’t think there was a spark’ text. The difference being you’ve been preparing for this date for two years, and it would take you two years to prepare for another. 

But, as someone who’s been on the other, acquiring side, it’s really not that personal; or rather, it’s not about you, it is about the book, and the book isn’t you (even if it feels like it is). You must try with all your might to stop equating your book with your value as a person. If you completed a piece of work for your manager that they didn’t think was good, you might be upset and angry, but you wouldn’t decide that it meant you yourself were worthless. As hard as it is to do this mental trick with your book, it is the truth. Plus there is always scope for betterment. If your manager didn’t like your project, the likelihood is you’d be aggrieved and then you’d work on it. Many now-published writers have contacted me since my piece on creative writing MAs to share that before they did theirs, they’d had three, six, eight rejections. They later realised they had room to improve, and that like any job they needed to spend more time on the craft in order to cross that threshold from ‘good writing’ to ‘potential to sell well’.

Most of us aren’t born Hilary Mantel or Marian Keyes. And even if we aren’t and never become a writer as talented as them, we still have worth and value intrinsically as a person. We are not our creations; they are something we’ve created. 

We all have different ways of coping with future rejection. Those with positive cognitive biases, otherwise known as the optimists, seem to have an easier time in the publishing world, rolling with the punches of rejection and moving to the next with great hope. I’ve worked with some writers whose optimism verges on a kind of narcissism, and there’s actually a benefit to that when it comes to coping with the harshness of life as a jobbing writer. But I’ve seen many overly optimistic authors send out manuscripts that are entirely unpolished with great self-belief, only to be knocked back. There is merit to pessimism too; when good news comes it is unexpected, and the sweeter for it. It too protects you from hurt. It pushes you to be better. Just be careful that your negative cognitive biases don’t prevent you from trying. 

The madness of sending out your novel into the world could be compared to the act of having children. You know they will, inevitably, encounter disaster at some point in their lives. Even if they live a life relatively free of trauma, they will still, in the end, die. But you do it anyway, because without children life wouldn’t regenerate, there wouldn’t be hope, there wouldn’t be joy. You do it despite it being a terrible risk. You trust that you’ll overcome adversity. You hope. 

‘I’m kind of over it by now and done with the despair. I know my experience is a fairly common story.  I’ve started on a new book and a new approach so I’m not giving up on the whole novel-writing lark.’

These are the words of someone I’ve worked with recently, an incredibly talented writer who, through a set of so-unbelievable-it-must-be-real circumstances, didn’t get her first novel published, despite representation and much excitement on submission. It is the healthiest response I can think of. Acknowledging that it’s happened and allowing yourself to feel the despair, before going through a process of decentering yourself/ the ego from the equation, even getting bored with it, and then looking to the future, re-finding the spirit of writerly rebellion that made you write in the first place. Her words have the truth of mantra, and I can’t think of a better way to describe it myself. 

It took her some time to get there though, and this must also be remembered: you will feel terrible when (not if) you get rejected, and it will hurt, for a short time or a long time, depending on what else is going on for you and who you are as a person. But it won’t hurt like this forever. The bigger the hurt, the bigger your dream was. And big dreams are the essential ingredient of every great human endeavour. Don’t give them up.

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash