Nope-ity Nope, Not What We’re Looking For at This Time

tumblr_lf94jgSu0q1qeo67fo1_400Rejection? *pulls up a chair*

I used to deal in rejection quite a bit. When you’re sending out short stories, that’s just part of the process. It doesn’t feel good. I once got a rejection to an emailed submission so fast, I’m pretty sure I hadn’t yet stood up from my computer since I’d sent the thing.

Ouch.

Yet somehow I had picked up a healthy attitude about rejection from my MFA program or someone who had come to talk to us there. The idea is this: You’re looking for the *right* publication for your story. Editors who reject you—especially those who do it quickly, actually—are helping you narrow the field so that you can find that *right* publication. They’re saying nope, and sitting down, so that you can better see who’s left standing.

Yeah, it didn’t always work.

I do think rejection can be useful. Let’s be honest. Sometimes people need to hear no. Sometimes YOU have needed to hear no. Before your work is at its best, before it deserves all the time and loving attention a book going through publication gets, you need to hear the truth: “It’s not ready. You’re not ready.”

Back last year, we asked for thoughts from “veteran” writers, and my friend Christopher Coake (author of You Came Back and We’re in Trouble) said something then that I want to re-share now. What’s his best piece of advice? He said:

Learn how to hear the word “No.” And I don’t mean this in a toughen-up-and-learn-to-ignore-the-haters kind of way. (The use of the word “haters” is a tactic of the egomaniacal and insecure.) I mean writers need to HEAR it. They need to accept that it hurts, and why. They need to learn to be hurt constructively (without turning bitter and twisted). Writers have to be tough, they have to persevere, it’s true, but “No” is often a message they NEED to hear. So when a writer you admire is speaking at a conference and says, “I had to learn to accept rejection,” she’s not saying, “I kept producing the same stuff, convinced of my genius, until at last an editor recognized how I was a precious unique snowflake and gave me all the money.” Instead, you have to hear what she really means: “For a long time, my work deserved to be rejected, and when I was rejected, I went back to the work and tried to see both the good and the bad, so that I could remove the bad as best I could.” In this manner, publication is earned.

Rejection isn’t easy, but it’s not impossible to live with. Keep your head on straight. It’s not personal, and you can beat rejection—by writing better and stronger stories. But you have to earn it, just like Chris said. You can’t wish your way into better stories. In fact, you have to go through this part, the part that hurts, to get to the part where you know better how to say what you want to say.

 

Author: Lori Rader-Day

Lori Rader-Day is the author of the mystery THE BLACK HOUR (Seventh Street Books, July 2014). She grew up in central Indiana, but now lives in Chicago with her husband and very spoiled dog.

13 Replies to “Nope-ity Nope, Not What We’re Looking For at This Time”

  2. So good and so true. Rejection isn’t fun, but it comes with the territory. That quote from Christopher Coake is right on the money.

    Wow, look at that. I used two cliches one right after the other! Lol.

  3. This is SUCH great advice, Lori! Especially as I get ready to query my first book to agents! Just trying to remember that whether it’s this book, or the fourth one, I know I have a book in me that deserves to be read by others (just like I know I may have to hear ‘no’ a lot first 🙂 )

    Can’t wait to dig into yours soon!

  4. I love this. Especially Chris’s advice that publication is earned. Too often people think publication is earned by having written…when in truth it’s earned by writing and rewriting and listening and revising.

  7. I think the key is what’s in your headline up there. Not what we’re looking for at this time. It’s not a judgment from on high about your quality as a writer — it’s a statement that your story or novel is not what’s wanted right now. The New Yorker magazine used to reject stories that were racy or had cursing, for example. If you wanted to sell to The New Yorker, you learned what they wanted. That’s part of being a professional.

    I always think of Henry James (I may have used this example here before). Would any major publisher accept The Portrait of a Lady today? I doubt it — and yet it’s every bit as sublime as it was back in the 1880s. What about Les Miserables? Or, though for different reasons, Lolita?

    Oh, and I agree about “haters.” It’s a way to appear to dismiss those who dismiss you, while actually (obviously) obsessing about them. It’s schoolyard stuff.

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