Rejection Comes In Only Two Flavors

This is a lesson I'm learning right this very moment.

I’m working on my novella. For those of you just joining us, I’ve been saying this a long time. It’s my standard answer to “what have you been up to?”

People have to be sick of it. I’m sick of it.

I’ve been working on my first scene and it’s been rejected twice. I’m slipping up on the basics, having good story structure, not being clever, and writing a metaphor that isn’t a simile.

My editor/friend tosses it back with a video explanation, and I crinkle up the piece of paper (delete the file) and start again. I outline. I make little drawings. I shake my fist at the sky and I chew on a muse’s fingernail.

But rejection comes in two flavors: on time and late.

First one, one time. It’s bitter, but not terrible.

I’m glad I’m getting rejected on my first scene now. Like right now.

Eight hundred to a thousand words gets tossed out and rewritten. And it hurts—it does—but I only spent, what, an hour on it? An hour. Now I’m better. But I’m back at it. When I get this one right (oh please, muse) I will do the second scene. And then the third all the way up to the magic number: twenty.

The other flavor: late. Like a slug of unexpected Malort.

That’s when you get fifty thousand words rejected. Eighty thousand. Over and over. Manuscripts piled up and burned. The muse flicks a cigarette in your face. And you don’t know why. You don’t know why it didn’t work.

And I’ve been there a couple of times. I’ve written a work and people have nodded with sympathy and pity. Stuff born out of pantsing and Nanowrimo.

I’m not going back to that. I’ll taste the bitter. I’ll eat the small rejection and move on.

I hope you do too.