More on rejections
We spend so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection. But regret is the thing we should fear most. - Trevor Noah
If you’re a writer who submits work for publication, then you deal with rejection, maybe on a regular basis. Some of you take rejection in stride and some of you let it ruin your day. Some of you are somewhere in between.
I appreciate Kim Liao’s take on rejections. Lord knows we all gotta deal with it. I know writers who hated rejection so much they stopped writing—or at least stopped trying to publish. Some stopped sharing their writing with their writers’ group, discouraged by the criticism, however mild (IMHO).
Does rejection help you to grow a thick skin? In Grant Faulkner’s Substack post, he writes, “The story goes that the writer Nathan Englander was once at a dinner with Philip Roth, and he asked Roth if being an author gets easier. ‘My skin will get thicker with each book, right?’ he asked ‘It’ll get thinner and thinner until they can hold you up to the light and see through,’ Roth said.”
It does get easier because when you’ve submitted hundreds of times, you believe that every so often, a yes will come through because it’s happened before and it happens more often. But when you’re starting out, you don’t know this because you’ve hardly submitted. One submission—and rejction—can feel monumental.
When rejection gets to you, read, The War of Art, Stephen Pressfield’s brief but powerful reminder that publication is the gravy but not why we write.
"For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business." - T.S. Eliot
Thank you, Barbara, for writing on the need to be fearless. I pity the spouses and children who live with a writer. The desire to write, to publish and to reach an audience is like an addiction: exhausting, all-encompassing and only occasionally euphoric.
Great picture, girl. Big publishing it's all about the money. I'm a nobody, but I'd rather have a good beer with friends than write crap to hook people. It all depends on what you are willing to do... and not do. And I think Eliot would agree.