Handling Rejection

chillibreeze writer — Sangeetha Iyer

Tips for Indian Freelance writers: How to Cope with Rejection

So you got one more rejection letter from your editor? What next?

One of the most difficult things to do is to deal with rejections and move on. Unfortunately, the term ‘rejection’ is a more commonly used word in the writing world than acceptance. Every writer– unpublished, published, even seasoned – knows the baggage this word brings along. Still, it can be quite tricky to push past a writing slump and carry on with writing. Thankfully, there are ways to turn round this downside of writing.

The most complicated thing to do when a rejection slip comes along is to continue writing. One of the sure-fire methods is to write inspirational letters to family and friends. While this lets you keep in touch with writing, it also allows you to take a break from the business of writing and helps you to concentrate on the other aspects of the craft. It reinforces faith and confidence in you, the writer.

At the same time, it helps if you don’t take it personally. For this reason, it is important to understand and distinguish between you and your work. Editors don’t reject you; they simply reject your story. This might help in dealing with rejection and analyzing why the story has been dumped in the first place.

Try to identify the reasons for rejection. First, it may need some improvement. It is possible that the story has ended in the slush pile because you didn’t care enough to clean it of typos and other grammatical errors. Rejections of this kind can easily be avoided. All it requires is a sincere attempt at editing your article till you’re completely sure that it is your best.

Second, perhaps the story is beyond the range of what the editors can accept. That is, it exceeds the prescribed word limit. For example, if in the guidelines, it was clearly mentioned that the maximum word limit is 1000 words and you’ve submitted your 1400-word article, there’s no reason to wonder why your article got rejected. Writers’ guidelines are meant to be taken seriously and should be strictly adhered to.

Third, an editor might reject your article simply because it didn’t fit into the upcoming schedule. If s/he has requested ‘how-to’ type articles on parenting three-year-olds and you’ve submitted a generic article on parenting, it must be obvious why it ended in the trash bin. A well-written story can also be rejected if the editor has one on similar lines. What’s more important is to learn from them and not repeat them.

Many of us have heard the remarkable story of Marie Curie. She harbored the dream of a scientific career—a concept inconceivable for a woman in the 1890’s. She made huge sacrifices, both financially and health-wise to fulfill her humanitarian wish and discovered natural radioactivity and determined the atomic weight of radium. Thanks to her we have remedies to treat malign cancers today.

Likewise after years of struggle and rejection, Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has come to be seen internationally as a symbol of heroic and peaceful resistance in the face of oppression from the Burmese military regime. Even after her release from six years of house arrest, she has restrictions on her freedom to move and speak. A case in the point is if Marie Curie and Aung San Suu Kyi had let rejection rule their lives, they wouldn’t have seen the pinnacle they have set for others to measure up to.

Once again, the only way to reject rejections is to keep submitting your work and not giving up. Divine defiance is what a writer must strive to achieve, a phrase that means defying a preordained rejection. And to be able to do that, keep submitting continuously. The more you send out submissions (assuming your manuscript has done the regular rounds of self-editing), the greater the chances that your work gets accepted. Then a rejection here and there won’t dampen your writing endeavors. Rejections happen and are just part of the many facets of writing!

The other ways you can turn your rejection into submission are:

Study the market and read a copy of the publication you are intending to target.
Join writers networking group.
Read as many books as possible and try to develop your own style.
Be your biggest critic and try to get your work evaluated by other writers (ensure they are mature enough to handle it).

Last but not least, never give up. Success comes easily if you keep writing. And if you don’t get your work accepted for a long time, be on it till you get it. After a while, it will become second nature to you. The most important thing is to know that you can write and the ability to ideate and turn that into a well-written story. Editors want quality articles and original ideas and they don’t see beyond that – even if you are a beginner.

So, if you’re questioning yourself as a writer, remember your toddler days when you fell many times before you learnt to walk. You’ll be surprised how quickly you progress!

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—About our writer:

Sangeetha is very proud of her multiple identities –a magnificent mommy, a wondrous wife and an ardent writer. She lives in the joy of ‘now’ and loves reading almost anything, fashion, travelling to exotic places and making a difference in the world.

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