Rejection is the Best Feedback You’ll Ever Get

I know, that subtitle didn’t make any sense, so I’ll clarify. Life gives us shit circumstances sometimes as humans, as creators, as vehicle owners, etc. Once thing I’ve learned in the past two years from practicing mindfulness and reading stoic philosophy and going to therapy and generally becoming Amy the widow versus Amy the happily co-dependent human is that we are in control of how we perceive our circumstances. We decide if they’re good or bad or how we handle them.

For example…going to jail? A lovely 20-hour hiatus from reality to absorb new experiences and hilarious stories to tell my friends.

That jerk who ripped me off for $2500? Inspo for a character who will die a horrible, gruesome and satisfying death in a work of fiction (or a memoir, whatever.).

Losing my wonderful husband to a cancer caused by workplace chemical exposure? Okay, there’s nothing funny about that, and it still hurts every damn day, but Sean’s life gave me the courage to be fearless, and widowhood inspired a novel. He’s in everything I do. While his death is a tragedy, his life is a gift that inspires me to be creative and strong and to challenge myself every day to be the person he believed in.

It’s a creative flex requisite for survival. Life gave me a bucket of lemons, but I got creative. So, when I say “when life gives you lemons, throw them in the juicer and add vodka” I mean take what you have and make it work for you.

How one author got creative after rejection (or objection)

Rejection letters are among those things. In this curation of Catherine Baab-Muguira’s post “One thing I’ve learned about creative selling” on her Poe Can Save Your Life Substack, Catherine talks about what she’s learned from publisher rejection letters. She said that a couple of years ago, she and her agent went through all of the rejections. There was a file of all of the agencies that were like, “Thanks but no thanks” along with the reasons (ugggghhhh) for the rejections.

It sounds painfully uncomfortable, and it probably was a miserable experience, but just as pearls don’t form without pressure, neither do pearls of wisdom. I’m not saying you need pain and discomfort and unpleasantness to thrive and succeed, but I’ve yet to meet someone who hasn’t had to at least work hard for what they have if what they have is worth having.

The gift of looking back over what feedback you have tells you exactly how to refine your work and your approach relative to what you actually have control over. Catherine gets more into that in her article from the angle of the publishing industry noting that landing an agent is hard; landing a publisher is harder because as she points out, the acquisitions editor is only a part of the entire publishing process. Finance (yes, the publishing industry is a business and thus business decisions including the marketability of you and your book), marketing, publicity, etc. along with their overall brand and client list and lineup of publications impact whether or not your book will get picked up.

Basically, stop thinking that you’re being rejected because you suck or there’s something wrong with you. Maybe your query or angle is a little jacked (Catherine hits on that some) or the market analysis guy had indigestion and just said “no” because he was trying to hide the fact that he spent half the day in the john instead of looking over proposals (I mean, people are people and people sometimes half-ass it and phone it in, unfortunately).

Have your feelings, but don’t be your feelings

When I was 20, I wrote and illustrated a children’s book that I still very much believe in. I naively, blindly, and hopefully (at this pre-internet point in my young life, my only publishing resource was Writer’s Digest magazine) queried about 10 agents. I sent letters with SASEs and waited weeks for what ended up being rejections.

I experienced every emotion from insane optimism (the book would be picked up, I’d write the series, and Nickelodeon would take the cartoon show option) to suicidal depression (this is the stupidest, worst, most horrible thing ever written).

When I later shared some of what the letters said with my writing professor, a veteran published author who achieved great success writing under a pseudonym for Harlequin Intrigue, she said that the letters were optimistic and the agents were even seemingly inviting me to revise and resubmit. Oh.

I’d taken the rejections to mean that was it—game over, no extra lives; my rejections became dejection. For me and my fragile, youthful ego, the rejections meant “stop”, not “pause and push harder”.

I could not see that rejection was just part of the challenge…yet another challenge to overcome. I thought writing and illustrating was hard. Sure, it was, but after you overcome a challenge, there’s another one. Rejection is thus not only the best feedback you’ll ever get, but it should also be your biggest motivator.

Now, even though I still feel a plethora of emotions, I know they’re emotions. I also know that the worst is yet to come, but I’m prepared for that. I’m absolutely ready to get my ass kicked by rejection and to get back up again.

The last thing I’ll say is that if you haven’t read James Clear’s Atomic Habits, you should. The whole damn thing is a gem, but a key takeaway I have is his true AF point that the people who succeed are the ones who don’t quit. They grind away one day at a time and finally, finally, it happens. It clicks. And they become the ones who succeed, the ones others look at and wonder…why not me? It’s because you quit, Janet.

Stephen King had a spike on his wall to hold all of his rejection letters. He started writing and seeking publication in magazines and such as a teen. Look at him now. What if he’d quit? (In fact, he almost did…he threw the first draft of Carrie in the trash. His wife found it and made him keep going and now he’s Stephen f—king King.)

Keep going. Rejection doesn’t make you feel good, but lots of delicious and amazing things can be made from lemons. Remember, rejection isn’t a bad thing…it’s just a thing that happens. You’re in control of how you handle it.

What Other Writers Have to Say about Being Rejected

For further inspo, read LitHub’s list of “20 Famous Writers on Being Rejected”, which was also published today, January 19, 2022.