Rejection isn’t final until you quit

Back when I began trying to become a published author, I embarked on an exciting new hobby—collecting rejection slips.

I’d clickety-clack short stories using an ancient device called a typewriter (these were the dark ages before texts and emails), slide the pages into manila envelopes, lick a bunch of stamps to paste on the envelope, and send my creations by U.S. Postal Service to any magazine I thought would buy them. In about two stomach-twisting months, the mail carrier would return my manuscript with a shiny new form rejection letter clipped to it.

While my official goal remained getting published, unofficially, I set a goal to see how many magazine letterheads I could collect. And to wallpaper my room with the collection. And maybe, just maybe, start receiving handwritten brush-offs, which would mean someone actually considered my story before deciding “it’s not right for us” or “doesn’t meet our current needs” (which to my mind, meant, “You stink. Stop sending us this junk).

Years later, I am a published author. Of course that means now I never, ever, ever get turned down. Ha! I wish. Nope, there still are more rejections in the mix of success than I care to admit. Getting published, confirming that you are, indeed, good enough does not bulletproof you from yet another (dozen or two) dreaded rejection letter(s).

Back in the dark ages, I made several attempts to land clever whodunits in the pages of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. I added by EQ and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine to my collection of rejection slips. One day, I picked up a copy of EQ to see that the magazine had published a short mystery written by fellow-Ohioan Phyllis Diller. Oh, sure, easy for her to get in, I groused. She was a very famous comedienne, one of the biggest names on the planet at the time. Of course, she makes it.

Later, as part of my “real” job as a newspaper reporter, I landed an interview with Diller. Instead of just chatting about her upcoming comedy show in the town where I worked, I confronted her about how unfair it was that I’m a writer and can’t get published, but she waltzes right into the pages simply because she’s famous. I still can hear that big laugh of hers. She assured me that fame didn’t guarantee a thing in the writing game. She assured me that even she received far more rejections than successes.

Apparently, publishers are only interested in the best stories no matter who you are, and most of us only learn the finer points of that craft by trying, trying, and trying again.

So what do we do with all those rejection letters? Sulk and pout? That’s what I did. But then I mailed my stories to other magazines. And when I moved up to personal rejections, I paid attention to the critiques so I could figure out what the issues were with my work and how to fix them.

Dr. Seuss was turned down twenty-seven times for his book And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. He was ready to burn the manuscript and quit writing. But 28^th publisher said yes, and our bookshelves now also contain characters such as Horton, a Cat in the Hat, and the Grinch.

C.S. Lewis racked up 800—that’s eight HUNDRED—rejections before he got his first book published. Had he quit, we’d never have had The Chronicles of Narnia. (I never found out how many wardrobes he papered with his rejection slips.)

Here’s what some other authors said they learned from publishers telling them that their work wasn’t good enough—yet.

“To ward off a feeling of failure, she joked that she could wallpaper her bathroom with rejection slips, which she chose not to see as messages to stop, but rather as tickets to the game.” —Anita Shreve

“I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.” —Sylvia Plath

“By the time I was fourteen the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.”—Stephen King

“I wasn’t going to give up until every single publisher turned me down, but I often feared that would happen.”—J.K. Rowling.

“Every time I thought I was being rejected from something good, I was actually being re-directed to something better.”―Steve Maraboli

“You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you’re working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success—but only if you persist.”—Isaac Asimov

“I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.” —E.B. White

Yes, rejection hurts. Rejection made me cry. But collecting rejections means you’re still in the game, you’re still trying. Keeping learning, honing and refining your craft. And keep submitting. You can’t succeed if you don’t.