How to Maintain Motivation Through Rejection
By: Hilary Gan
Tags: Motivation, Rejection, Process, Writing, Creativity

Photo by Gemma Evans on Unsplash

I used to cope fairly well with rejection, as it seemed part of the process of becoming a writer. But fifteen years into trying very seriously to learn the craft, an MFA, and multiple publications later, I’m finding rejection harder and harder to deal with. It’s hard because each piece is a regarded as a brand-new offering to the world no matter how much experience I have; it’s hard because my identity is even more wrapped up in my success as a writer than it ever was because I’ve been doing it so long; it’s hard because I’ve had some success, but my main goal is still out of reach; and it’s hard because in writing it turns out there’s no such thing as an expert, only older students. Slowly, I’m re-learning that the success of the work is truly a separate thing from my creative practice, and that dealing with rejection is a matter of re-centering my values around my creative practice rather than the success of the work.

So here are some thoughts I’m hoping I can come back to in those moments I feel despairing, and I hope they help some other people along the way, too.

My art is not actually me

Yes, it’s an expression of me. But if an entire person could be summed up in a five-page creative essay then we wouldn’t need therapists or election campaigns. I write because I am always changing, always learning, and have new things to say and express, but my work is not even just a piece of me. It’s something I made to represent that piece of me. My work is not me, and other people’s rejection of my work is not a rejection of me as a person. And even if it was, not every other person is going to like me. That’s impossible, and, frankly, unwanted. Who wants to be so palatable that literally everyone likes them, like water? I’d be bland and invisible.

All a rejection is telling me is that this piece is not going to be published at this particular time with this particular publishing company. That’s it. It doesn’t mean it’s not good. It doesn’t even mean the editor didn’t like it. I had one piece get rejected and then, years later, the (now former) editor e-mailed me out of nowhere saying he had never stopped thinking about it, here was a potential edit, and I should resubmit it to the magazine and the new editor. So I did that, and they took it. That circumstance let me get some time and distance from the story so that I could be more open to edits, and it was honestly more amazing to hear that someone had thought about my work for that long than it would have been to have gotten it published right away.

So remember that sometimes a rejection opens the door for a better situation later. If the piece is already published, it (usually) can’t get published somewhere else with more readers. A rejection might be the reason for success later.

And if the piece is really rejected, like I have 100 rejection letters in my hand and it really is time to throw in the towel, then I learned something. I can either rewrite or work on something new. But it is not a judgment of my ability or me as a human being. It’s just a judgment of that piece.

Publishing is not writing

Getting work accepted by a publisher or magazine is a matter of skill, but on top of that it’s a matter of timing and the opinions of other people, neither of which I can control in the least. Judging the quality of my work by the outcomes of things I can’t control is an exercise in stupidity, much like judging my worth as a human being based on where the leaf I threw into the water lands on the shore. (I don’t know why all my metaphors are water metaphors but here we are).

Output, however, I can control. Deliberate practice is something I can control. I want to measure my success by whether I produce, by my own judgment of what I produce, and whether or not I am deliberately pushing myself to overcome my personal weaknesses. One of my weaknesses is plot. So my metrics have become: did I write today? Did I analyze the plot of something I read or watched this week? Am I improving at my ability to create the plot bones of my work to hang my characters on?

I need to keep my eye on what I can control, and measure my abilities by that. Not by whether the twenty-something intern at a publishing house fell asleep trying to read my memoir on the E train. (For all I know, she stayed up way too late last night and hates memoir and it has nothing to do with my work).

Don’t submit until there’s a new work going

The same way Hemingway advised writers to stop work for the day only when they know what they’re going to write tomorrow, I’ve begun to submit my finished pieces for publishing only when I’ve started a new piece. It eases my disappointment and anxiety about rejections of the old work to have a new work to be invested in, and then I’m still meeting output goals for myself. Basically, it’s a way to mitigate rejection and keep moving forward.

Judge publishing success by personal effort, not outcomes

This year I made it my goal to get 100 rejections. (I got this idea from my friend Melissa Goodrich who is a fantastic writer and has two books out, go read her stuff). Really, this is a goal of 100 submissions, but it incorporates rejection into the fabric of the idea so that you’re not secretly hoping for 100 acceptances.

But the key to why I think Goodrich’s method is a good one is that it’s a goal whose metric is the writer’s effort, rather than the subjective decision of an editor or the timing within a zeitgeist. Aiming for 100 rejections means deliberately submitting, accepting rejection as a likely outcome, and committing to doing it long-term. It puts meeting the goal in the writer’s hands and measures success by effort rather than outcomes. And measuring success by one’s own efforts means that success is always possible, and it makes a writer so, so much less likely to give up.