Don't Let Rejections Bring You Down

(Keep On Climbing!)

There’s no sugar-coating it: rejection stinks. We work our butts off perfecting our craft, reading for inspiration and guidance, going to conferences, taking workshops in person or online—sometimes with famous editors or writers at a hefty fee. And then when our essays, short stories, or poems return with any kind of form rejection, bland or condescending, it hurts.

I’ve publishing 27 books in many genres and hundreds of essays, short stories, book reviews, and blogs. I’ve seen my work appear in 15 languages—including Chinese and Romanian—and I’ve made a good living as a writer though speaking gigs, workshops, and royalties. But rejection is a never-ending undercurrent. How can it be otherwise? Taste is subjective. Many of my best memoir or travel essays of the last two years were rejected by easily ten and sometimes more editors before finding good and even prestigious homes.

My college writing mentor—who I’m still in touch with—once gave me an unexpected compliment: she’d noticed that even if I griped after a rejection, I never gave up. I guess I hadn’t thought about it in those terms, I just barreled ahead as a matter of course, but I was glad she helped make that reaction conscious for me.

I was reminded of her observation recently when my longest-running rejection streak of the pandemic was broken. The essay was about a freakish accident that happened to me a few years ago on a highway in eastern Michigan: my sunroof exploded. That’s right: it exploded due to an invisible stress fracture—and this is more common than you might think. Check Google. It’s not an urban legend. It’s real.

I was unharmed because the inside cover was closed, but I was shocked, not least because I’d had a more serious accident on that same highway a few years earlier. That previous accident left me with a concussion and I required therapy to find the courage to get back in my car and back on any road, let alone a highway.

This seemed like a worthy subject for a memoir essay because it was bizarre and writing about it would be cathartic for me. I thought people could relate to my experience, and when journals I submitted it to required a trigger warning, I always provided one. My title? “Boom!”

Despite my high hopes, the essay was rejected week after week, month after month for a full year without a comment by any lit mag reader or editor. There was no real response beyond the rote “not for us at this time,” which is a pretty annoying comment. Does that mean it might have worked if I had sent it in a few weeks earlier—or if I’d waited till some time in the future?

Now and then I got a smarmy version of “We know how difficult it is to submit your work.” To which I imagined snapping my fingers and saying, “Hey, are you for real? What the hell is difficult about clicking some keys? Spare me your pity.”

I fussed with the opening every few rejections to change the music that was playing when I heard the explosion. And I occasionally altered the title, too, but the biggest change was adding what I thought was a good closing line: a quote from one of my all-time favorite novels, Play It as It Lays. None of that made a difference, though, until just last week when editors at a Canadian magazine said they “admired” my essay and would be “honored” to publish it. What a relief.

So I’ve now had sixty flash, memoir, and travel essays published or accepted in a little over two years—my best career run ever for creative nonfiction.

Perseverance has paid off.

(Photo by Petr Slováček on Unsplash)

P.S.: My apologies for the typos when I first uploaded it over the weekend. I was distracted by current events.