Coping With Rejection
Rejection is part of being a writer the same way depression is part of being married.
You can’t be a writer without facing an element of rejection, but the sad fact is the vast majority of writers only ever get to see the rejection side of the coin. I was in the same boat until Jonny Geller picked my debut novel, Broken, off the slush pile at Curtis Brown.
Had he rejected it, I’d probably still be in the same boat today: more than thirty agents rejected the same submission he picked up on, so who’s to say everyone else wouldn’t have rejected it too?
There’s no pretending rejection doesn’t hurt, but some rejections hurt less than others. The slush pile rejections I received rarely offered a specific reason for why I was being rejected, so it was just a case of crossing these agents off the list and sending out my next submission. I tried to look on these as the literary equivalent of a blind date not turning up — not exactly nice, but not exactly personal, either.
The hardest rejections were the near misses, and it’s frightening how close I came to giving up on Broken because of one specific rejection.
I was just putting the finishing touches to the original manuscript when an agent asked to see the whole of the previous novel I’d written. She rejected it pretty quickly, saying it was too slow, too dark, and too depressing. She did say, though, that she loved my writing and would be really interested to see whatever I wrote next.
Her rejection didn’t come as a surprise. Nor did her reasons. I’d had the same criticism about my writing before, so had done everything I could to make Broken as fast-paced and vibrant as possible. Thinking I was in with a great chance of representation, I sent her the whole novel and tried my best not to get my hopes up. Even so, I was stunned when she rejected it for exactly the same reasons.
I wasn’t just stunned, I was disgusted with myself for making the same mistakes again, so stuck Broken in a drawer and started to write something else. If I hadn’t finished that next novel a few weeks ahead of schedule and decided to read Broken through one more time to see where I’d gone wrong, it might still be sitting there now. Not the best way to cope with rejection.
On the whole, though, my reactions were much more balanced, especially on two occasions when I was told I was wasting my time with Broken – in 2005, a literary consultant at a writers’ conference ripped the overall plot to pieces and said it would never work. I ignored her and continued to write it.
The following year, another agent at another conference looked at the opening page and the synopsis and said publishers would never go for a novel like this by an unpublished writer. I ignored her and carried on sending it out. In each case, I listened to what they said, then decided I knew better. Why? Because I loved the plot and the characters in Broken while I was writing it and there was no way I was going to stop writing before I knew how it all turned out. Then, when the writing was done (and I’d recovered from my psychotic over-reaction to that first rejection) I knew it was good enough to be published and wanted to make sure every relevant agent in the country had the chance to reject it before I finally gave up.
Even if that had happened, I would still have written a novel I’d taken a huge amount of pleasure in writing, and I think that’s the best way to handle rejection as an unpublished writer. Write what you believe in and what you care about, and take your pleasure from writing rather than how your writing is received. You might only be pleasing yourself if you follow this outlook — but at least you’ll be pleasing someone.
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