How to Deal With Writing Rejections

Did you know that a baseball player with a .300 batting average-the game's standard of excellence-still fails at bat seven out of ten times? That's a 70% failure rate. And like baseball, writing is a negative game. That means that in order to get one article published, you'll need to receive two or 10 or 40 times as many rejections. When these stats get you down, rememember the following:

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

1. Remember that you're in good company: 20 major publishers said that 'Chicken Soup for the Soul' had no commercial appeal, and 'The Godfather' was continuously turned down before it was finally picked up and published. The story on which JD Salinger based 'The Catcher in the Rye' was rejected by the New Yorker because, according to an editor, "we feel that we don't know the central character well enough."
   
   Other books that went through multiple rejections before they were picked up by a publisher are: A Wrinkle in Time, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and All Things Bright and Beautiful. Some authors who were in the same boat as you: Flannery O'Connor, John Cheever, Raymond Carver, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Raymond Carver stopped sending stories to one magazine because he'd been rejected from it so many times.
   
   Rejection doesn't mean failure; it means you're getting closer to that well-earned acceptance.
2. So you get a rejection letter. You tell yourself that you're going to mail the query to another publication within the next week, but somehow two weeks go by, and then three...you wonder if the article isn't good enough after all. Before you know it, it's been several months and you haven't gotten that query out. To prevent this from happening: when you mail out your query to a publication, know who you're going to submit the query to NEXT. Print out the letter, put it in an envelope with a stamp and leave it in your submissions folder. That way, if you get a rejection, you've already got your next pitch ready to go.
3. Commiserate with other writers. Join a writer's group, an online forum, or read a book on writing. Sometimes all that it takes is an encouraging word or an account of someone else's struggles and successes to motivate you. Do whatever is going to motivate you to keep writing and submitting.