On Rejection
Trying to write fiction for money means a lot of people tell you that the things you’ve written aren’t very good. I’ve gotten many more rejection emails than acceptance emails. They hurt.
I think the process of doing anything creative, whether it be writing, singing, game design, what have you, necessarily involves exposing a little bit of your vulnerability to your medium. I think you have to put a little bit of yourself into whatever it is that you’re doing or else it wouldn’t be yours. It also takes time and effort, whatever it is, time that one could have spent doing something else, so there’s a cost associated with being creative. When you then go and expose that vulnerability to somebody else, there’s a sense that in judging your work, they are also judging you, personally.
It’s hard enough to even cross that bridge by itself. For several years, I would write things and then lock them away. I had an urge to create something but absolutely no desire to see it once it was finished. I couldn’t bring myself to look at my own work for fear of judgement. Showing things to other people and getting their feedback and actually incorporating it is really hard, or at least it was for me.
The first time I paid somebody to edit a book for me, I was absolutely terrified of what they were going to say about it. Several times leading up to getting the edits back, I said to my boyfriend, “What if she thinks it’s so bad that she decides you and I have to break up, and then we do?”
I do tend to catastrophize things, but that was basically where my head was at. That an editor, somebody I paid a lot of money, would read my book and find it not only bad, not merely unsalvageable, but so horrendously awful as to require real world consequences for the author.
As it turned out, she really liked it, and made a few very valid points, which I incorporated into the next round of edits, and I consider it money well spent.
This is a roundabout way of saying that I am utterly terrified of rejection, but have chosen a path in life that requires me to face it on a fairly regular basis. It’s all part of life’s rich pageant.
It takes me somewhere between fifteen minutes and two hours to get over a rejection letter, depending on how personal the subject matter was and what kind of day I’ve been having. I have a system now.
Open the email. Read far enough to see the rejection. Immediately close the email.
Do something else. Read twitter, do dishes, make a phone call I’ve been putting off. Literally anything else.
Circle back to the email in about five minutes and read it in its entirety.
Play “Edelweiss” from the Sound of Music soundtrack. Several times if necessary. Remind myself that it’s a business decision and nothing more.
Move on with my day.
I think most of this is pretty standard stuff, but step 4 really stands out. I haven’t got the slightest clue why I picked that song, out of every song in existence, as my go to “It’s okay! You don’t suck!” song. Especially considering that in high school I worked on a production of Sound of Music that had a three or four week run and I grew to hate every single moment of that musical by the end of it.
I truly hope that some day this will all get easier for me, and for anybody else who has the same problem. Until then, I’m going to just keep chugging along and doing my best, because the couple of times that the email starts with “Congratulations!” have made it all worth it.