Writing Tips 22: Dealing With The Inevitable Rejections – (Part One)

All writers who put their work out into the world experience rejection.  It’s such a big part of every writer’s life, we’re going to take a couple of posts to cover it (it might take more than that to do it justice!)

I’m a great believer in celebrating every achievement, big or small, when it comes to writing (and life actually). The flipside of that is, of course, the R-word

A comforting hobby of mine (and don’t say I don’t know how to enjoy myself!) is reading about famous literary rejections. Among my favourites are the publisher who called Lord of the Flies an ‘absurd & uninteresting fantasy’; a rejection of The Colour Purple because it had too many exclamation marks; and the publisher who said, ‘You’d have a decent book if you’d get rid of that Gatsby character’ (I don’t think I need to tell you which book that was for). All of these, whether they’re entirely true or not, show that not everybody ‘gets’ or loves the same things, and that rejection is an inevitable part of the writing and publishing world.

As I was writing this piece, I decided to peel open my rejections folder from when I was first trying to get a literary agent. As a bit of context, I should tell you that I completed four previous novels before the one that got me a publishing deal, plus several that I didn’t finish. I sometimes liken my unpublished back catalogue to a relationship history – there were the books that were great fun but probably never going to work out; the books that really seemed as if they were going to be ‘the one’; the rebound novels written very quickly after finally letting go of a previous one. But all of them taught me something, and I fully believe my published book wouldn’t exist without them.

So, back to my rejections folder. When I re-opened it, I found 17 email rejections in there, but they were just the agents who responded. And there must’ve been more rejections than that overall, because when I first started submitting to agents, in 2010, many of them still asked for postal submissions and a stamped addressed envelope.

Some of the rejection notes were very brief, some were kind but obviously stock replies. But there were a few that I actually promoted from my rejections folder to my achievements folder – which I had, and still have, to keep track of any successes. Because although they were rejections (and there was no mistaking that), they were more personal and constructive, and if I hadn’t received them, I probably wouldn’t have kept going. So they’re actually a really important part of the story.

One of the agents had sent me back my printed submission, saying the book wasn’t right for her list at that time, but she’d written some encouraging words in big scribbly writing all down the margin. I actually met her a year later, at a ‘How to Hook an Agent’ event, and she remembered rejecting me, which somehow I managed to turn into a compliment! She also gave me a load more advice, particularly about the importance of knowing what kind of book I was writing. By then, I’d had some similar responses from other agents, and I later shelved that novel entirely, but I’d gathered enough feedback to help me write another two books. One of those was a definite rebound book, but I started submitting the second one to agents again, and was amazed and thrilled to get an offer of representation.

So of course I thought, ‘this is it! All my dreams are going to immediately come true!’ After I’d done quite a bit more editing, my agent sent my book out to twelve different publishers prior to the London Book Fair in 2014. And I remember she asked me, ‘Do you want to see the rejections as they come in, or would you rather wait till the end of the process and I’ll collate them?’ And I thought, ‘rejections? What?! You said my book was BRILLIANT and everyone would jump at it!’ What I actually said was, yes, I’d like to hear the rejections as they come in. But I didn’t quite think about the reality of that. My agent was trying to get an auction going during the week of the book fair, so that produced a steady stream of rejections, one or two a day, while I was at work trying to concentrate on my day job. And each one was accompanied by my agent’s reassurances that ‘these are actually very complimentary rejections!’ And they were – but they did all, ultimately, say no.

So I had to take stock again after that had happened. I was briefly convinced that it was game over, but my agent was fantastic; she highlighted everything positive the various publishers had said, and she pointed out something vital: that anything negative had been about that book and its marketability, not about my ability to write. And I think that’s an important lesson for any writer trying to get published in any form. A rejection is always of that individual piece, at that time, not of your writing as a whole and certainly not of you as a person.

Contributed by Helen Cooper