This has nothing to do with dealing with romantic rejection (I can’t say I would be necessarily overly helpful on that front), so if that’s what you’re looking for you’ve come to the wrong place. It is about dealing with rejection with your writing.

Personally, I have not been rejected many times, not yet. I have only just started to put my writing up for judgment. Still, this post must have a reason for being written and that is because I just recently received notice that a short story I submitted for a contest was rejected. To be perfectly honest I was not hit particularly hard by it. I knew how I was supposed to feel because I have been rejected before but I noticed the email, took a quick look at the content, and moved on. There was so much going on in all of my classes (two exams and three-plus papers), that I just pushed it into the unimportant category of my mind. Now that things have settled down I have decided to analyze it.

I have been rejected quite a few times up to this point in my life. I will be rejected an innumerable amount of times more by the end of my life. Whether it is romantically or whether it is a generic letter informing you that there were so many good articles submitted yours just wasn’t good enough, getting rejected hurts. For many writers it feels like a confirmation of something that they already knew. I have spent many nights writing until three AM because I was feeling so good about what I’d written that I wanted to keep going; only to reread what I’d written when I woke up to find that I hated it.

There is a certain amount of self-loathing and self-doubt that comes with being a writer which is probably tied in with the fear of rejection.  There are times when nothing you write seems to come out right and when you show it to someone else they tell you it’s good, but you can’t believe it because you know deep down that it sucks. You constantly worry that people are just telling you they like your writing to make you feel better. Sometimes you’re glad for it but other times you wish people would just tell you that you are terrible so that you can confirm what you’ve always known. Sound familiar, or am I the only one?

These feelings are multiplied when someone does tell you that you aren’t good enough. The pieces that you select to submit to contests are those that you believe are your best works. You are proud of being the person to have written the story or paper or whatever it happens to be. Then you get a response telling you that it wasn’t as good as you thought it was. You’re not sure whether to give up or to try harder.

The fact is that you will be rejected. Stephen King, he’s a fairly popular writer, acknowledges this in his book On Writing stating, “By the time I was fourteen…the nail in my wall would no longer support the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and kept on writing.” We’ve all heard stories of these greats getting rejected and then proving everyone wrong. Stephen King made his rejection slips a symbol. For the rest of us it might not be that easy to move on.

So, how do you deal with being rejected? For me this time around it was simply being too busy and too worried about everything else to let it bother me. I wouldn’t really recommend this approach, because it is just more stressful. I think one important thing is to have people around you to encourage you. It’s more difficult to deal with things alone compared to being able to complain to someone else.

Another important thing to do is to acknowledge the rejection slip, which it took me a while to do but I’ve finally gotten to it. Ignoring the fact that you were rejected and just continuing like nothing happened is not necessarily the best thing to do. They picked other stories over yours for a reason and even if it hurts you have to confront that fact. Each rejection slip should be a prompting to improve your writing.

At the same time you also shouldn’t take the rejection to heart. In The Writer’s E-handbook Jotham Burrelo says that as soon as you’ve finished one project you should immediately move on to the next one. This is partially because the writing world is not exceptionally lucrative but also because you won’t improve if you don’t keep writing. The rejection should be noted but then you shrug it off and just keep working.

I also think there should be some outlet to channel your frustration into. When I am upset I do one of three things: I play hockey, I play music, or I write (hence this post). The writing doesn’t even necessarily have to be an important project, just something to keep you going. It doesn’t have to be writing or reading or any of the things I listed. Everyone has their own hobby to help them get away.

It’s hard to work up the willpower to do anything after being rejected. The most important thing for me is to make sure it doesn’t hold me back. Rejection will always hurt but it can restrain you or it can propel you. Whether you nail your rejections to the wall (though I think most rejections are through email these days) or whether you do anything with them at all, you have to be aware that not everyone will always like everything you write.

So maybe that wasn’t so helpful. To put it concisely all I really said was to acknowledge it, accept it, and move on. That probably doesn’t make anyone feel any better about being rejected but to be honest the most important thing about being a writer is that you love to write. If a rejection slip is the end of your writing career than maybe you didn’t really want it that badly anyway.