How to Deal with Rejection

Journey to Publication - Week 3

Today, I got my first rejection. 

It’s week three of querying my novel THE LILAC ROOM. I was mentally prepared for rejections after querying my previous novel, MAN A MUSEUM, and receiving 60 rejections before deciding to retire the project entirely, yet rejection is never fun no matter how strongly you brace yourself. As writers, we probably face more rejection than any other professional in any other industry, and it’s important to develop a strategy to persevere because the reality is that most writers don’t make it—or decide to self-publish—because they decide that the market is too hostile and give up entirely. While it is true that the publishing market is becoming increasingly hostile to new writers, my hunch is that it is a myth that it is impossible to break into it entirely (though I have yet to verify this hypothesis through personal experience). To me, the publishing industry is, in a way, like dating: you might be rejected by tens or hundreds of people, but you only need a vote of confidence from one out of those hundreds to succeed. 

Which means that you better be damn ready for rejection—and lots of it. 

To understand how we can best cope with rejection as writers, let us first consider why rejection is so ubiquitous in the writing world. 

Writing, like acting or painting, is an art form. Each agent will have his or her own subjective opinion on your work. I started Pens and Poison Lit Mag, for instance, several months ago, and as we prepare for our first issue, I’ve rejected many talented writers for extremely subjective reasons. I am not a huge fan of stories that center around sex, for one; I am also somewhat critical of poems that consistently use expletives, no matter how well they are written. This is a personal preference and has nothing to do with the quality of a writer’s work—similarly, I imagine many editors and agents at the other end reject my own work for similar frivolous reasons. (One day, for instance, I will figure out what on earth Iona Italia is looking for and land a piece in my dream publication Quillette.) I always keep in mind that different editors and agents have different priorities—especially when it comes to something as subjective as a favorite novel. 

The second reason an agent might reject a novel is because they don’t believe that it will sell. I suspect, for one, that my previous novel, MAN A MUSEUM, might have fallen into this “unsellable” category. The novel was somewhat abstruse, dealt with a niche subject, and lacked a clear plot. I consciously attempted to strip THE LILAC ROOM of these elements so that I would not run into the same problem, all while preserving my artistic integrity. While this was a somewhat difficult line to tow, I believe I pulled it off well: the novel contains fewer abstruse literary allusions that I would have liked and grasps with straightforward life questions over abstract philosophical musings. After my experience with MAN A MUSEUM, I wanted to be mindful of reaching a broader audience and writing a story that a greater number of people would relate to. Contrary to popular belief, this can be done without fully compromising artistic integrity, so if your primary grievance is that capitalism has ruined the literary market, I invite you to play around with your work until you attain a happy medium that will satisfy both you and the market. At the end of the day, you can rage at the market, but it is simply a reflection of its people—and either way, your goal, presumably, is to be read by an assortment of people and to be recognized for your work. 

On a similar note—and this is the one that no one likes to talk about—your novel might be rejected for failing to tick a certain number of petty political boxes. In my article Leave Literature Alone, I chronicle the overtake of the literary world by ideologues who use literature as an excuse to promote a fringe political agenda that has no tenable societal application otherwise. Because this plague has so decidedly set over English literature departments across the country, many English lit graduates—especially in recent years—emerge from English departments sharing these far-left political sentiments and promote the idea that an author’s worth is contingent on the oppressed identity categories that he or she (or xe, as such people will have you believe) belongs to or that the quality of a particular manuscript depends on the degree to which it honors minority characters or stories from these historically underrepresented communities (I borrow the politically-correct terms that I have heard thrown around by agents on Manuscript Wish List and elsewhere). Because many—if not a majority—of agents graduate from English or creative writing programs, their ideologies unfortunately dominate the publishing industry and can be hard to navigate. I suspect that it is absolutely no accident that the first agent who expressed interest in my novel was a middle-aged male agent who was likely taught to judge a manuscript on its own terms. I also expect to receive some pushback in constructing a novel with primarily Jewish and Asian characters, but here I am with a novel based on my experiences with the upper echelons of New York society, and as an author of literary fiction, I would like to stay true to reality. As I said above, I really only need one agent, so if one or more agents chooses to reject my novel because of some inherent antisemitism (also a popular one these days), so be it.  

Finally—and no one wants to talk about this one either—you might just be a lousy writer. This does not mean that you should give up, however! I queried a novel when I was fifteen, and that one was most certainly rejected because I was a lousy writer. Instead of cursing the world, I continued to write and honed my craft. If your writing simply “isn’t good enough,” then there is only one way to go, and that is up. Your best bet is to read as much as possible—and to write as much as possible as well. 

Until about six months ago, I used to be one of those writers who was hypersensitive to rejection. This hypersensitivity has been one of my greatest insecurities since the age of fifteen, when I first started sending my high school novel out to agents. I received so many rejections back then that my ego took a semi-permanent hit, and for the next ten years, my writing became a deeply private endeavor. My worldview back then was too myopic to realize that I might have been a good writer for fifteen but I was nowhere near as good as to be competing with fifty-year-old ladies who had been writing their entire lives. I took each rejection personally back then, and after a handful, I hurt myself more than any outside rejection ever could have affected me—I stopped putting my writing out there. The antagonism I experienced at the hands of my college professors (see Leave Literature Alone) did not help my case, either. While I continually submitted my poems to lit mags throughout college and got several publications out of that grueling process, I stopped trying to be a public-facing writer and wrote solely for myself. When querying MAN A MUSEUM last year and receiving over sixty rejections, I almost gave up my dream of becoming a writer after ten long years of nothing but rejection, and this, again, was one of the worst things I ever could have done to myself. I can only imagine where I’d be now if I were as aggressive with sending out my writing over the past ten years as I am now, yet, as they say, there is no use crying over spilled milk. 

All this is to say is that rejection should be nothing more than your sign to keep on going. I realized too late that rejection by sixty people did not mean that the sixty-first would reject me as well. When I got my official first online publication in Kveller this past spring, I knew it was my sign to keep going, and because of this motivation, I have not only grown my Substack to almost two-thousand readers in just six months, but I have also placed my work in a wide array of journals and magazines and risen to prominence as a writer. I still receive the same amount of rejection as before—if not more—but I am now more confident, and I use rejection as an opportunity to continue working on my writing and delivering the highest quality work to my readers. Rejection is never fun, but even the best writers in the world were rejected by someone. Rejection, to me, is now nothing more than motivation—I am proud to say that I have found a home for the vast majority of the pieces I have written in the past six months, and that is all because I keep going. I will keep spamming Iona Italia with my work until I land that Quillette publication, and I will keep sending out my novel, THE LILAC ROOM, until I land my dream agent and get the novel out to you guys. 

Journey to Publication - Week 3 Updates

So where are we at now, three weeks into submitting THE LILAC ROOM? Last week, we were putting the finishing touches on my novel synopsis. This week, we’ve begun querying agents who are looking for a synopsis in their query packages, bringing our total to 46 agents. I know I said that we would rest at 20-30 agents, but we threw in an extra 15 or so for good measure. We have over 100 total on our list, so hopefully we won’t run out from there. 

Now that it’s been three weeks, we can start following up with some of the first agents we queried on October 23rd. I imagine that some of these will be rejections—I have read in a few places that, typically, agents will respond within two weeks if they are interested in seeing a full manuscript—but once again, I like to stay optimistic. Only one rejection out of 46 so far. Optimism!

We’ll keep querying in the weeks to come and hopefully hear some more good news. In the meantime, don’t forget to subscribe to follow me on my weekly installment Journey to Publication, where we document my adventures to getting THE LILAC ROOM paired with an agent and on its way to bookstores in (hopefully) the near future. 

See you next week!