“The Rejection Game”

by Waverly Fitzgerald
September 10, 2004

I’ve been thinking about rejection a lot recently, partly because my goal is to sell my writing and that means submitting it and that inevitably means rejection. Now I've spent most of my life avoiding rejection and I think I'm not alone in this although perhaps I've taken it to extremes.

For instance, when one of the 8th grade boys complained about having to dance with “Fitzgerald” after I asked him to dance at a graduation party, I vowed never to ask a boy to dance again and kept this vow for almost thirty years. This was difficult because I love to dance and in fact I went out dancing at least twice a week for all those years, finding ways to get asked to dance and dances that didn't require a partner. But now I'm madly in love with tango dancing, a dance form that absolutely requires a partner, and where there were lots more women than men. So I’ve had to learn how to ask.

Asking was a skill I had never developed as a child. At my house, we were discouraged from asking questions because all direct requests had to be honored. In my polite and repressed middle class family, “No” was considered one of the rudest words in the English language, right behind “Shut up” and “stupid.” So we all learned how to intuit when the other person did not wish to meet a request, and thus avoided making one.

Luckily I experienced few writing rejections in my early career. I do believe that most writers need a safe and supportive environment in which to create, especially at the start of any writing process. Criticism or judgement if delivered too soon can drain the hope out of a writer's soul.

I had one student, a talented and prolific novelist, who won first prize in the PNWA writing contest with the first chapter of her fourth novel. One of the New York agents attending the conference that year asked her to submit it to her agency, then rejected it when my student queried her after six months of silence with a curt dismissal and a bill for her reading fee. My student hasn't written a novel since. Why this particular rejection stopped my student, I don't know. Perhaps the sudden rejection coming so close on the heels of her greatest triumph was too deflating.

I guess I can appreciate her shut-down because I went through a long spell of not writing (almost ten years) after my fifth novel was rejected by my publisher. Although I told myself I was researching a new novel, I never actually wrote a word (I did accumulate four file drawers full of maps, notes and photocopies), handily saving me from presenting my work to anyone who might reject it.

Even scarier to me than rejection is silence. I once spent six months revising a non-fiction book at the request of the editor of a small publishing company who had been so excited by my idea that she called me the same afternoon she got my proposal. But after sending her the revised manuscript, I heard nothing. Because I feared the worse — when I was growing up, silence always meant disapproval, in fact, a disapproval larded with disgust so comprehensive as to be unspeakable — I never called or wrote to ask what had happened. Five years later, I still don't know.

To my credit, I sent the book out again, to an editor at another small publishing company who had been emailing me daily until he got the manuscript. Then not a word. And again to my credit (although I never followed through with that editor) I went outand found an agent who sent it out to ten major publishers. In spite of a promising nibble from Time Warner, there were no buyers. My agent stopped submitting my book and I stopped calling her to ask about its progress. Humiliation and doubt sent me scuttling back into my writing cave where my usual reaction is to start revising, even though I know that revising in the absence of specific feedback is a thankless and senseless task.

This behavior went on for years — venturing out hopeful and confident, retreating in pain and confusion, nursing my wounds for a while, maybe revising on the assumption that something must be wrong with the work, and then the whole cycle would begin again.

But some time last year, I realized that my attempt to avoid rejection was not working for me. Just like not asking men to dance meant I spent most of my time at tango dances sitting on the sidelines. If I wanted to be a professional writer, I needed to get used to rejection. Just like if I wanted to dance tango, I needed to ask men to dance.

I've taken plenty of classes on how to write, but none on how to deal with rejection. And I think that's what I need. Like those desensitization programs for people with phobias. I started fantasizing about what the perfect class on rejection. What would be the correct order in which to proceed? What small rejections would prepare me for the larger ones? What buffers could I create to make the rejections less painful? I began to study my own responses to rejections and noticed that I could toss off a rejection with ease if I had another prospect but if it was my only or my last query a rejection devastated me. I began to study other writer's techniques as well. Here are a few that I might try:

• making a long list of places to submit, sending out queries in batches (of at least 5 at a time) and sending out a new query every time one comes back
• arranging a submission party and inviting a group of writers to get together to send out queries, making a feast
• treating rejections as feedback opportunities
• writing thank-you notes to editors and agents who send rejections, knowing that in the future they might be important allies

I’d love to hear about any methods you’ve developed for dealing with rejection. Meanwhile the beauty of my new approach is that I’m now seeking out opportunities to test my theories and reactions. It's all an experiment instead of a series of failures.

Waverly Fitzgerald
Supporting you in meeting your writing goals
206.325.1452
waverly@waverlyfitzgerald.com

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More articles on writing by Waverly Fitzgerald:

Finding Your Readers

My Life as a Publisher

Getting the Most Out of Summer Writing Conferences

Networking for Writers

Imitation: Conscious and Unconscious

Talking as a Tool for Writers

Filling the Well

The Rejection Game

Time and the Writer

Writing Rituals

Writing the Summer Novel

The Rejection Game

Writing Heresy