On Rejection and Not Giving Up

Or, on how the only way to stay afloat is to keep writing

Photo by samsommer on Unsplash

I love writing. I love creating something from nothing; like building a whole world from a blank page. I love the magic feeling when the words keep coming and your fingers skitter faster and faster across the keyboard to keep up with the unspooling story in your mind.

I also love rewriting. I love opening the floor to my inner perfectionist and letting her tell me all the ways what I've written could be better. I love scribbling notes over a printed draft, love calculating how I can fill the gaps to make the story on the page closer to how I imagined it. I love the moment when a solution to a problem suddenly becomes obvious, or when your character reveals something that takes the plot in an unexpected direction.

I love all of this. I love it so much that the idea of just not doing it anymore fills me with a kind of bottomless horror. More pertinently: I love it enough to put myself through the endless rinse and repeat cycle of writing, redrafting, polishing, then sending it out to await judgement.

The unfortunate truth about writing is that — if you want to make it your career — rejection is an unavoidable part of the process. For every yes you receive as a writer, you'll likely receive countless more nos. Sometimes this is because the thing you have written is not good enough, sometimes it’s because it needs more work, and sometimes it's really not very much to do with what you’ve written at all.

I write this from the crest of a wave of rejection. In the past year, I've heard so many nos that I've lost count. Maybe it's true that the more passes you receive, the less they sting. Maybe. Though even if you manage to become somewhat numb to them, they still chip away at your optimism. There have absolutely been moments when I've wondered why I keep on trying, but I always come back to the bottomless horror of being a person who doesn't write. In other words, being a writer who hears no after no after no still seems infinitely better than not being a writer at all.

And so I keep writing. When my multiple-timeline, post-WW2 manuscript didn’t sell on submission this time around, I kept writing. When it became clear that my agent and I had very different visions for my next manuscript about an aspiring fashion designer adapting to life with chronic illness, I kept writing. When we acknowledged that we had a commercial/literary mismatch and parted ways, I kept writing. And now that I'm back at the stage of querying, form rejections and general silence, you guessed it: I keep writing.

I’m usually the sort of person who's inclined to keep my disappointments to myself. But it felt disingenuous to skirt around the edge of the inevitability of rejection in a newsletter about writing. These stories are important, but we often don’t hear them at all — or at least, not until the rejected writer in question has accumulated enough yeses to ‘cancel out’ any shame they might have felt about the nos.

In the past few months I’ve found a lot of comfort in listening to the podcasts Write-Off with Francesca Steele and The Rejected Writers’ Club from Anna Britton. Perhaps one day I’ll be interviewed about rejection and will be able to tie the whole thing up with the shiny bow of later successes. I hope so: but only if I don't give up.

Because, of course, us writers have to accept that there are always going to be more nos than yeses. It’s simply a statistical reality that there are always going to be false starts and disappointments. But there's good news too! There are also always going to be new opportunities. There are always going to be more paths ahead. There are always going to be new ideas and exciting stories to tell.

And so: I keep writing because I love it, and because I always have hope that the next answer might be a yes.