Another bad thing about rejection

The other day, I wrote about how rejection can be actively good for writers, can really help teach us important, vital things about our work.

That’s the new place I’m in, for the most part. I’m learning all the time from my previous rejections. I feel like, in a way, I’m suddenly learning, seeing big lessons that I wasn’t open to (for whatever reason) earlier,  about what makes stories work or fail. I read books that I know were rejected a lot before publication and now I sometimes understand why. At least, a little better. As opposed to a year or so ago, when all I could see was the good stuff in the manuscript, and I was fuddled as to why it got rejected so much, when it had so much worthwhile going on.

Although I still think, as I wrote some time ago, that one of the worst things about rejection is that they can rob you of the fun.

But rejections also confuse me. Perhaps they always will. And I think it’s one of the very worst things about them, they can throw you off, throw you so hard that it’s painfully difficult to get back up.  When you’ve written something you know has a lot of merit, and agents or editors even tell you it has a lot of merit in various ways, and it gets repeatedly rejected while mediocre manuscripts get published, it can be confounding in a damaging way.

And THAT’S when you have to turn your blind eyes. All the old saws about perseverance– that’s when you need them handy. Keep going, keep writing, keep submitting, but if you aren’t learning anything from your rejections–ignore them. Because this is a publishing business that says it wants page-turning, compelling fantasy stories with a fresh, inventive world, and characters you care about, that then repeatedly rejects something like Cindy Pon’s SILVER PHOENIX  . . .

…WHICH HAS ALL THOSE THINGS.

And I’m picking that title almost at random. We all know many stories of compelling manuscripts that struggled to break through the publishing gate.

So learn what you can from your rejections, be open to learning from them. But if they make little to no sense, try to tune them out. And above all, keep writing.