I submitted a short essay to an online magazine the other day. Three days later they sent me a rejection message:
“Thank you for sending us “Blah Blah Blah”. We’re going to pass on this story right now, but we encourage you to send other stories…”
No explanation, no reason is given. Just, no. It hurts every time. I’m not hardened enough yet. I don’t have callouses on whatever part of me it is that this kind of rejection stings. As I look into what I need to do to ultimately publish a book, I am realizing that I need to publish smaller, single essays along the same subject matter (motherhood and rock climbing) in a lot of other places. I have to have a platform. I have to have followers. A lot of followers. Hundreds of thousands of followers. Some part of the world needs to already know who I am in order for a publisher to even consider my book idea. I need to send out essays to a whole lot of different places, which I haven’t spent much time doing in my “writing career” yet (as you can see if you ever look at my puny publication list), so mostly I receive rejections. And that makes me not want to send out anything else, maybe not write anything else. It kind of makes me want to crawl in a hole. I think, maybe I’m not cut out for this vocation after all. Maybe I’ll just go get a job at the Rite Aid around the corner.
No. I need to change my perspective. I think about what it means to fail in other parts of my life, like in climbing.
In climbing, if you don’t finish a climb, route, boulder problem without falling, it is considered failure. I’m a huge failure as a climber, then, and somehow I’m okay with it. I’m not okay with it every the time, but I accept that for every successful “send,” there are a multitude of failures first. I just posted a picture of me on a climb called Creature on social media, and I have said that the route has been in my life for a bunch of years now. It’s true. For years now I have been falling on Creature every single time I have tried it. (Of course, I only get a few days on it a year, so that needs to be taken into account.) At the beginning, when I was figuring out the moves on Creature, I expected to fall. I expected failure. Since then, there have been moments when I have really thought I was going to send the thing, but still didn’t, and those times of failure were definitely much more disappointing. Once, I cried. But in climbing, somehow the failure just motivates me: to do better the next time, to get stronger the next time, to hold on longer next time.
So how can I as a writer similarly take failure and rejection to motivate me to work harder and write more, be more determined, send more of my work out into the world, to expect more rejection?
I don’t know yet, but it’s either get motivated or quit. And I’m pretty sure I’m not a quitter.
