Justine Manzano Hello all! This post is a retread of an earlier post on rejection with a little added content for entry in ‘Writing Contest: Overcoming Writer’s Doubt’ held by Positive Writer.” – See more at: http://positivewriter.com/writing-contest-doubt/#sthash.DlvrCK6w.dpuf. Check out the post for a little inspiration and check out the contest to see how you can enter and discuss how you’ve overcome doubt as a writer.
A writer’s life is filled with rejection. It takes a lot of hard work to become a J.K. Rowling or a Stephen King, and even they received rejection after rejection before they became household names. So when you decide to be a writer, you sign yourself up for the mother load of rejections. You know it’s coming, no matter how hard you work. No matter where on the scale the quality of your work falls, it may not match the vision of the places where you are submitting your work.
So, when that email pops up – the one that comes from the place you really wanted in on, it breaks your heart.
It happened to me. In the middle of a normal work day. How do you concentrate on anything when something like that happens?
I read the rejection email. I reread it because I just couldn’t have seen that right. And then I went to the bathroom at my job and cried away half of my lunch break. I swore the editors wouldn’t know a good piece of writing if it bit them (which was ridiculous, since I read and loved previous issues), and I swore I would never write again.
And then I took a deep breath and saw things as they really were. My vision and the magazine’s vision of the story didn’t match up. And that was okay. There would be other magazines, there would be other stories.
The first cut is the deepest, as they say. I opened up a chat window and reached out to my Allegra-shaped friend, one of my two dearest friends. I said, “I can’t lose my mind over this. This is what the rest of my life is going to be like.” Clearly, I was a masochist when I chose this profession.
Did I want that? Could I live a life where these children of mine, these tales birthed from my brain, personal emotions spun into art, could be rejected…often?
I wasn’t sure I could. I got on the train to go home that night and there was a weight on my shoulders, a question on my mind.
And instead of thinking about it like I had sworn to myself I would do, I took out a pen and my notebook and I started writing. A new short story, a rejection-gatherer of its own (it already has three!)
So why write?
Because I can’t not write. Because a simple train ride home that was supposed to be spent in quiet contemplation became the seed of an idea. Because when I try not to write, I write anyway. Because nothing interests me the way telling a story does.
Because for every hundred rejections, there has got to be an acceptance. And that acceptance feels incredible. I know. I lived that one too. So I will keep dreaming and keep writing. Because it’s not the publication I’m writing for.
It’s the feeling of creation I’m writing for. No discouraging moment can take that away.
You know that rejected piece that had me so down in the dumps? Well, a few weeks ago, it got accepted for publication. And you know that little rejection-gatherer I wrote on the train? In a completely wacky twist of fate, it got accepted to a different place the following day. So keep at it. Keep writing. Keep sending. It may tear you down sometimes, but it can also build you up. It’s the writer’s life, and we weren’t built to function any other way.
What keeps you pursuing your dream despite the rejections? Share below!