Navigating The Sea of Rejection

She submitted. She persisted.

When I was ten, I marched down the street and fed my first manuscript into the creaky mouth of this mailbox:

Inspired by Allan Jaffee’s Funny Jokes and Foxy Riddles, I’d spent the summer toiling over Humor My Mother Doesn’t Appreciate. This memory is in “Guide to Buying, Serving, and Storing Rejection,” part of Pen & Pulse: Essays on Writing, Craft, and the Writer’s Journey, an anthology published by Unsolicited Press.

… The day the letter arrives, it is raining. Or maybe it is sunny. You will only remember standing in the kitchen, your father watching as you rip open the envelope addressed to you. Turns out, like your mother, Penguin Books, or maybe it is Putnam, doesn’t appreciate your humor either. A kindly refusal is typed on letterhead with a bird or a moon or both at the top. Smudged in the left corner margin, along with your hopes, is a handwritten note: Keep writing! ...

In the Pen & Pulse collection, Josh Rank also addresses rejection in his witty and wise essay, “Set to Fall.” Rank says that when a writer faces this inevitable part of being a writer, “… the only thing you can do is say thank you, pull the arrow from your chest, and do it all over again.”

Speaking of arrow-pulling, not long after yanking out the fourth arrow slung at me by Tin House, I sent the editor another submission and along with it, this letter:

Dear Mr. Spillman,

When it comes to rejection, your words have inspired me to keep plugging along. I read your insightful post a few years back about how female authors, in the face of rejection, were less likely to submit work than their male peers. So you really have only yourself to blame or congratulate for receiving my fifth submission to Tin House. …

Tin House had noticed that when they rejected men with encouragement, the men would resubmit about 99.9 percent of the time. When they did the same to women, women were only half as likely to send them new work. Why was that? I wondered. Was this just a Tin House thing?

Venture beyond the literary world, and similar gender differences in reactions to situations of failure and rejection show up in other environments. One study — focused on the academic setting — found that when faced with rejection, women are more likely than men to give up on submitting a paper in the following year. These findings are in line with other papers that show that after being rejected, women shy away from competition at higher rates than men. However, Gneezy et al. (2009) discovered that women raised in a matriarchal society and women who self-select into male-dominated environments are more likely to be confident/competitive.

Giving up can be an avoidance strategy, a way to manage the expectation of rejection. I expect rejection, therefore, why bother trying again?

I bothered to try again with Tin House. Fifth time was sure to be a charm, plus, they had sent me two personal responses and that is gold in the literary world. A few months later, I wrenched the fifth arrow from my quivering heart.

I’d rather spend time arrow-pulling than spend precious energy censoring myself. Choosing to self-reject by not sending out work only buffers the status-quo. For those of us who dare to try to share our brilliance with the world, it’s helpful to keep in mind these three T’s:

1. Try paying (and not paying) attention

2. Track submissions

3. Toughen your skin

Try paying (and not paying) attention

I say “try” because it takes practice to both notice and not notice. Over the years, I’ve learned that it’s helpful to put some distance between myself and my work. One way to do this is to pay attention to language. Upon receiving either a rejection or acceptance, listen to what you are telling yourself and others.

If you hear I got rejected again/They rejected me/I got accepted, these are signs you’re tangling your identity up with your work. You are not being rejected or accepted; your work is, and you are not your work. As Sylvia Plath notes in the unabridged edition of her journals, receiving an acceptance or rejection “is no proof of the validity or value of personal identity. One may be wrong, mistaken, or a poor craftsman, or just ignorant—but this is no indication of the true worth of one’s total human identity: past, present, and future!”

Give yourself permission to feel whatever the rejection stirs inside you. Notice, learn from it, and let it go. When Kerry Donoghue, author of MOUTH, was doing her author takeover of Unsolicited Press’s social media, she shared this about rejection: “I give myself a day to feel it. (I let myself get jealous/mad/frustrated … but only for a set amount of time.)”

Notice and move on.

Track submissions

Using a system that works for you, track your submissions. I have several writing friends who use index cards. A few use notebooks and others rely on Duotrope and Submittable to record their submissions. Since 2009, when I got serious about sending my work out, I’ve been using Excel to track my submissions.

I also like tracking comments an editor may make. If a rejection is accompanied by a “We hope that you will consider sending work to us again in the future,” jot that down and seriously consider it. Editors are busy people. If they thought your work was crap, they won’t want to wade through more of your crap just to be nice.

Keeping good records provides honest information and enables you to mine rejections by asking, What am I learning? What patterns am I seeing here?

Here’s a pie chart capturing my submission results from 2010:

I sent out 70 submissions that year. Let’s unpack these no’s, shall we?

Of the 54 submissions rejected that year, ultimately all but three of the pieces would eventually find a home. Two former no’s even garnered Pushcart nominations. So how did I turn the no’s into yeses?

It took lots of reflection, time, and work. I eventually resubmitted to five of the 54 places that originally rejected my work. Of those five (two had sent personalized rejections and encouraged me to submit again), four accepted my work.

In looking over the data, I realized I was sending a lot of my work to the wrong places. Some of my titles also needed work. “Fourth Grade Boobs “ and “Meconium” just weren’t cutting it. (What the hell was I thinking?)

By 2019, I learned lessons about getting my work published.

Compared to 2010, I sent out way fewer submissions in 2019 and yet the acceptance rate was higher. Sure, my writing was getting better because I’d had nine more years to practice my craft. But I was also doing a better job of identifying the right places to send my work. I took the time to familiarize myself with various publications and then only submitted to those places that spoke to me.

The acceptance rate, which started at 9% in 2009, now hovers around 40%. I don’t know how that compares with other writers and frankly, I don’t care. What I care about is that I’m getting better, and that’s because I’m working smarter, not harder.

Toughen your skin

Okay, this is the part where I was going to weave in a metaphor, encouraging you to be just like the animal with the toughest skin in the world. But then I googled to see what animal had the toughest skin. It’s a sperm whale.

As much as I love whales, the sperm whale wasn’t what I was going for, but maybe the metaphor still works because, like much of the whale world, sperm whales form matriarchal societies, with a line of grandmothers, mothers, and their calves living together as a clan. Researchers have discovered that these groups of females make democratic decisions on where and how to travel. It can sometimes take them an hour or longer to decide which direction to turn.

You might think that I’m now whale off topic, [winking emoji here] but when it comes to navigating rejection, you aren’t alone. We’re all swimming in this same literary sea littered with rejections. Brushing up against a no (or an almost) isn’t all bad. I’ve grown far more from the no’s in my life than the yes’s.

“Rejection,” Maya Angelou once said, “can simply mean redirection.” Listen to what direction a no might be nudging you in: You need to revise further. You need to change the title. You sent it to the wrong place. You need to send it out again, as is. You sent it too soon. You need to let it simmer. You have more work to do.

So polish up your piece until it’s as shiny and smooth as the black skin of a Right whale. Then suit up, sister. Slip inside the thick, loose skin of a honey badger or strap on the leathery shell of an armadillo. You will notice the stings and bites and arrows that are sure to come your way, but they will not slow you down. You can do this.

Take a deep breath and dive in.

(Whale image by Decokon of Pixabay)

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Jennifer Clark is the author of three previous poetry collections: A Beginner’s Guide to Heaven (Unsolicited Press), Necessary Clearings, and Johnny Appleseed: The Slice & Times of John Chapman (both published by Shabda Press). She is also the author of the children’s book What Do You See In Room 21 C? and the co-editor of the anthology, Immigration & Justice For Our Neighbors (both Celery City Books). Her most recent book, Kissing the World Goodbye, ventures into the world of memoir, braiding family tales with recipes. Published by Unsolicited Press, it made their list for “Top Selling Books of 2022.”