Rejection can be disheartening, but it is an important agent for us to learn and improve our work. I am delights to have K. M. Allan on The Creator’s Roulette with me today to share about rejections during her writing career and how she has evolved because of them. A little bit about her first:
K.M. Allan is an identical twin, but not the evil one. She started her career as a beauty writer and now powers herself with chocolate and green tea while penning novels and blogging about writing. She is the author of the urban YA fantasy series, Blackbirch. Book 1, The Beginning, and book 2, The Dark Half, are available here. When she’s not creating stories, K.M likes to read, binge-watch too much TV, and take more photos than she will ever humanly need.
I hope you find this guest post informative! Enjoy! 🙂
6 Tips For Handling Writing Rejections
– K. M. Allan
Just as a writer and words go hand in hand, so does writing and rejection.
You’ll encounter it at every level of the creative life. From the self-rejection of your own talents, to submission rejections from agents, publishers, and reader rejections for any work that makes it into the world.
Rejection can be so soul crushing that non-writers might question why you’d want to be a writer. But as all writers know, the act of writing is (mostly) enough to counter the negative, and writers have to write.
It can be a lot to handle, regardless of whether you’re querying for the first time or are already a few rejections deep. For either case, here are some tips to handle whatever rejections the writing world throws at you.
View It As A Lesson
Rejection may be a lesson you never want to encounter again, but that’s not realistic. It will happen to you in the writing game when you’re a novice, a professional, a success, and a failure. The key is learning from the lessons it gives you.
Sure, it will be devastating getting that first rejection, but once you know how it feels, it’ll be easier to handle. It might get tough again around the twentieth, and you may feel you’ll break around the one hundredth rejection, but you won’t. You’ll keep pushing on and hopefully move ever closer to that elusive ‘yes.’
Use It To Strengthen Your Writing
Multiple rejections are usually a sign something isn’t working. If your pitch is getting requests for more pages or a full submission, but you’re getting rejected after that, it might be time to reassess your work.
Sometimes rejections come with feedback that will help you understand where your writing needs to be stronger, but (frustratingly) most of the time, it won’t. That leaves you to the not so fun game of guessing what’s wrong yourself.
If you can’t see what might cause a rejection, run your work by beta readers. Fresh eyes on something you’ve read a million times will most likely pick up what you can’t.
If your work doesn’t need to be improved, and you’re one hundred percent happy with it, reassess your whole submission package (query, synopsis, samples pages, etc). If everything is on track, the most likely thing is that you queried the wrong person, and the only option is to keep trying.
Be Prepared
Once your submission is out there, you need to be prepared to handle the rejection, and to move on when you’ve been rejected.
If you’re not mentally ready to accept that it might take multiple rejections over months, and even years, then you need to prepare yourself for that outcome.
It’s also an excellent idea to have options organized for when you receive a rejection. Make sure you’ve got a next person/place to send to, so you get straight back on the submission horse.
It also won’t hurt to be working on a different/new manuscript to keep you excited about writing, and to have plenty of chocolate on hand.
Pause Temporarily When Necessary
When you’re sending out submissions and getting no response, or nothing but rejections, it’s very easy to fall into negative thinking. When it gets like that, do your mental health a favor and take a break to reset.
Set yourself a deadline to get back to querying and let the break in pressure reinvigorate your passion.
Reassess Your Goals
Just like writing your book turned out differently to any plan or plot outline you had before penning the first chapter; rejections can shift your goals.
Before you query, your only goal might be to get an agent, or a publishing contract. As you get into the reality of querying and being rejected, that goal may morph into just one full submission request, a first three chapters request, or any rejection that isn’t the standard “Thank you, but it’s not right for my list.”
Reassess your goals for rejections and remember your reasons for wanting to get published in the first place. Is it because it’s your lifelong goal? Because that’s was why you wrote the book? To see your book on store shelves? Or because you’ve never wanted anything more?
Hold on to those dreams, reassess your goals to suit, and try to think of rejection as eliminating the people that can’t help you, while moving closer to finding the person who can.
Have Faith In Yourself
One final tip for handing writing rejections is to have faith in yourself. No one will ever champion your book harder than you. No one will ever care about your book more, and no one will push harder than you to see it published.
Only you can overcome the obstacles and keep going, so have faith that you and your story can push beyond the rejections and keep going.
What have you learned from rejections, whether in writing or something else?
You can visit K. M. Allan on her website and discover the mysteries of the universe, or at the very least, some good writing tips. You can also find her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Banner image from Unsplash.
[…] or fellow students will tell you. Which means you get to go back and write it until it does! Each rejection or question is a lesson, and when you can view your writing as something outside of yourself, the faster you can improve […]