When I was growing up, I used to think of rejection as being an individual phenomenon. The people who were rejected were the ones who “showed up” with their hurt and fears. To me, it always felt incomplete until I had been rejected. This kind of psychological thinking perpetuates the cycle of hurting that must be stopped before the creative process can really begin. It’s a feeling that comes as part of our human society, which is why many of us take solace in connecting with our dogs – they love you unconditionally. The key to dealing with rejection is to work through your feelings of anger or hurt in order to gain perspective about the rejection and move on from it.
Rejection is a part of publishing, more than any other facet of publishing. This is why it is important that publishers spend some time with each writer under contract to understand how handling rejection helps to grow the writer and marketability of the writer’s work. Rejection is one of the first things that every publisher understands when they are reading manuscripts for potential contracts. For many writers this is where most of the confusion comes from, especially if they have been rejected multiple times before. By understanding how the process of rejection impacts the writer, one can see how easy it is to stop being discouraged and allow the experience to help propel them into a direction that will help them grow.
When you consider how to deal with experience rejection, it is easy to see that there are three steps to doing so. First, you need to step back and take a look at what was done wrong. Second, you need to evaluate what it is you did to cause the writer to be rejected. Finally, you need to make changes so that you do not continue to cause the same thing to future writers.
The first step is the hardest. Realizing that being rejected does hurt can be difficult. Most writers experience rejection in one of the following ways:
- Being too confident – If you work on becoming overly confident you could become too confident that you know what you are doing and getting rejected won’t change anything. If you feel that you are skilled at everything then you may not be convinced by yourself or others that you can do it. You may push forth articles about your favorite hobbies such as food, rather than those ideas that connect with your readers. that This can cause you to do some damage to your writing career. If you feel that you can’t be rejected or that you are better than everybody else then you may get stuck on a plateau. Instead of seeing yourself as a complete beginner you might instead start to focus on how you can improve your skills. Becker-Phelps has said that improving your skills is much easier to do if you focus on improving one small part of your game instead of becoming a master at it all.
- Lack of self-awareness – Another reason why people feel that getting rejected can hit you hard is because of how low most of us place their feelings on what others may say, how other people may look at them, etc. Many authors have said that learning to “write with no emotion” helped them a lot in overcoming the “writer’s block.” The key here is for you to realize that what you’re really worried about is not the actual writing part at all. The key to this technique is to stop focusing on the negative emotions that you have going on when you get rejected and instead try to focus on how well or how little you know about the topic at hand. Becker-Phelps has also said that this can help you overcome writer’s block as well.
Cassy is a teacher and writer. She is an advocate of self-love, so she makes sure always share about it. Currently, she is doing freelance writing and lives with her dog.