Living With Rejection

(It's the Writing Life)

In my last two years of college I was an unofficial double major in theater and English. I loved reading plays and had been going to see live theater from junior high school on. There in New York, I got to see amazing productions like The Cherry Orchard featuring James Earl Jones in an all-Black cast and the revival of Threepenny Opera with Raoul Julia.

I had definitely caught the acting bug and my brief foray into acting was exhilarating and educational. It was a thrill to be cast in a production of Measure for Measure, for example, but being passed over in auditions was rough. I had grown up with a lot of shame and didn’t need additional sources,

I realized that even if I could develop my acting skills, it wasn’t a life for me, given how brutal it was to be rejected face-to-face. I continued with my longer-term goal of being an author, not realizing that rejection would be my constant companion for a very long time.

I’ve now published 27 books and hundreds of essays, stories, book reviews and blogs—and lost count a long time ago of the rejections. They stung even when they were just boiler plate, and today’s “sensitive” rejections expressing sympathy aren’t a whole lot better. You know the kind I mean: they tell you how courageous you are to submit, they understand the disappointment, and so on. They can can often across as smarmy.

But I’ve learned long ago to take it in stride, and my college writing mentor who I still talk to regularly has brought that to my attention more than once. She said after a major disappointment of mine, “I’ve seen you over the years—you don’t retreat, you get right back out there.”

This week an essay I’m very fond of came back from one lit mag and within an hour I sent it out to two more that I had scouted for exactly that possibility. I need to be prepared for rejection—even though I’ve had close to fifty flash, memoir, and travel essays published or accepted in the last two years alone (which includes some reprints). I don’t mourn or gripe or anything like that. I’m ready with alternative submissions, and back the essay goes as soon as I can.

All this would be impossible without Submittable, Chill Subs and Duotrope, of course. They help make turnaround time fast.

Do I make changes to the essay after a handful of rejections? Sometimes, and that might depend on what my target lit mag is looking for and what I’ve read in it online. I often change a title because a new one has occurred to me or because I want to give the piece a different feel.

But I don’t give way to despair or even anger. I believe that the piece will eventually find the right editor. One of the best essays I’ve written during the pandemic, something experimental in form, found a very good home after over a dozen form rejections.

And the beat goes on. . .

Lev Raphael is the prize-winning author of twenty-seven books in genres from memoir to mystery and one of them has sold 300,000 copies. With almost twenty years of teaching at the university level, he launched his editing, coaching, and mentoring website for writers in memoir, fiction, and creative nonfiction in 2017: writewithoutborders.com. You can contact him there for a free consultation.