You\u2019ve just poured your heart\u00a0and soul into writing a book. You got to the computer every day, you suffered\u00a0your inner critic nagging in your ear and you finished what you started. Seeing\u00a0the completed manuscript is exciting and satisfying \u2013 until you start sending
it out to agents and publishers and getting rejected. Holding onto your self-esteem\u00a0is extremely challenging during this process, but we have to learn how to do it\u00a0because that is a large part of being an artist..<\/p>\n
I know a highly respected poetry\u00a0teacher who encourages his students to submit their material to as many\u00a0publications as possible. \u201cIt\u2019s not about acceptance or getting published,\u201d he\u00a0says. \u201cI want them to get used to being rejected.\u201d<\/p>\n
When I was trying to get an\u00a0agent for my first non-fiction book about the Philippine healers, one nasty agent\u00a0stands out. She called me and yelled into the phone, \u201cYour topic is not\u00a0believable and your writing is unsophisticated. Why on earth did you write
this? Everybody thinks they’ve written a bestseller.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have to believe in\u00a0ourselves,\u201d I said. \u201cHow else can we keep writing?\u201d<\/p>\n
I hung up the phone and climbed\u00a0into bed. I spent a day feeling sorry for myself and the next morning, I got up\u00a0and kept on going. After several years of getting form letters or not hearing\u00a0back at all, I finally got a deal with a major publisher. I submitted another
book in the late eighties about the agony of losing my friends to the AIDS virus\u00a0and I and an agent told me, \u201cYour book is a little odd. If you changed AIDS to\u00a0cancer, that would make it much better.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some of them just don\u2019t know\u00a0what they\u2019re talking about. Writer Barbara Kingsolver said, Don’t consider your precious manuscript rejected.\u00a0Consider that you’ve addressed it \u201cto the editor who can appreciate my work\u201d\u00a0and it has come back stamped ‘Not at this address.’ Keep looking for the right\u00a0address.<\/p>\n
Being sidelined by someone else is\u00a0painful but there\u2019s nothing you can do about it. Rejecting yourself is\u00a0excruciating, but you can do something about that. You can give yourself a\u00a0break. It\u2019s just so easy to judge your work and stash it away. Celebrated\u00a0author, Isaac Asimov said, \u201cNever let a manuscript do nothing but eat it\u2019s head
off in a drawer.\u201d You have to be your best ally and refuse to stop sending out\u00a0your work. You just never know how things will end up.<\/p>\n
Rejection occurs in so many areas\u00a0of our lives. Have you ever been to a high school reunion where the kids who\u00a0were popular and gorgeous look ordinary and the outcasts have ripened into
extraordinary beauties and successful business people? Supermodels talk about\u00a0how awkward they felt in school. They were tall and skinny and they were\u00a0bullied. They felt like misfits, they hid in the shadows in the schoolyard, but\u00a0eventually, they grew into strikingly beautiful people, wealthy and sought\u00a0after. If you value what you wrote and give it a chance to grow, you just might\u00a0be able to watch your ugly duckling transform into a graceful swan as it makes\u00a0its way out into the world.<\/p>\n
When he began writing, Stephen\u00a0King was a janitor, a gas pump attendant, and a worker at an industrial\u00a0laundry. In his book, \u201cOn Writing,\u201d he said that he pinned every rejection\u00a0letter he received to his wall with a nail. \u201cBy the time I was fourteen, the nail in my wall would no longer support\u00a0the weight of the letters so I replaced it with a spike and went on writing.\u201d<\/p>\n
His first novel, Carrie, was turned down by thirty publishers. He was living in a trailer with his wife and two kids at the time, and he was so discouraged, he threw the manuscript into the trash. Luckily for him, his wife, Tabitha, retrieved the book and encouraged him to keep working on it. Publisher number thirty-one gave him a book deal and we know what happened after that.<\/p>\n
My sister sent me a book of\u00a0rejections and bad reviews. These are a few of them:<\/p>\n
Vladimir Nabokov who wrote Lolita, got the following letter:<\/p>\n
\u201c. . . Overwhelmingly
nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian . . . the whole thing is an unsure\u00a0cross between hideous reality and improbable fantasy. It often becomes a wild\u00a0neurotic day dream . . . I recommend it be buried under a stone for a thousand\u00a0years.\u201d<\/p>\n
Louis L\u2019Amour\u2019s first novel was\u00a0rejected 200 times before a publisher took a chance. When he died in 1988, he\u00a0had sold three hundred thousand books.<\/p>\n
The\u00a0Tale of Peter Rabbit\u00a0by Beatrix Potter was rejected so many times, she decided to self-publish. It\u00a0has sold 45 million copies to date.<\/p>\n
Mystery writer, Agatha Christie,\u00a0got turned down for five years before she found a publisher for her first book.\u00a0Her subsequent books went on to sell in excess of two billion copies.\u00a0<\/p>\n
One of the most surprising of\u00a0all was J. K. Rowling who wrote the Harry Potter series. She was rejected by\u00a0twelve publishers and now, she makes between fifty and a hundred million\u00a0dollars a year.<\/p>\n
The above examples are extreme,\u00a0it\u2019s slim odds that any of us will enjoy that kind of success. No matter how\u00a0good the writing or how compelling the plot, no one knows what will get under a\u00a0reader\u2019s skin. But if you give up, there\u2019s no chance of finding any kind of
success. While you\u2019re trying to find a home for your book, celebrate your wins,\u00a0no matter how small, be kind to yourself and become your own cheerleader. As\u00a0annoying it may be to hear this, the reward has to be in the doing. If your\u00a0writing hits the mark, that\u2019s great. If it doesn’t, if you got into the writing\u00a0zone and expressed your thoughts and feelings, that can make you happy, no\u00a0matter what happens next.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You\u2019ve just poured your heart\u00a0and soul into writing a book. You got to the computer every day, you suffered\u00a0your inner critic nagging in your ear and you finished what you started. Seeing\u00a0the completed manuscript is exciting and satisfying \u2013 until you start sendingit out to agents and publishers and getting rejected. Holding onto your self-esteem\u00a0is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":2354,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2355"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2355\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2356,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2355\/revisions\/2356"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}