Hello submitters, dreamers, strivers, resiliencers, determiners, rejectors, and rejectees!
This week’s episode is inspired by Grant’s recent rejection journey. Yes, listeners, Grant’s book about rejection has been roundly rejected—so we’re taking an excursion into the world of rejection, how we deal with it, and what some options might be for a book that doesn’t get picked up by a publisher. Grant and Brooke explore their relationship with and to rejection—and unpack all the ways in which rejection is interconnected to the publishing journey—and not just for authors. This goes for publishers, agents, editors, and other publishing-adjacent folks too. This week’s Substackin’ gets into self-pity, which we might take straight up, or neat, or on the rocks with our rejection. Grant and Brooke are drawing from their own Substacks and others for these features, and we invite you to find us at grantfaulkner.substack.com and brookewarner.substack.com.
Well-known authors who have faced rejection:
James Baldwin
Sylvia Plath
Judy Blume
Jack Kerouac
Octavia E. Butler
Yann Martel
Gertrude Stein
Maya Angelou
Agatha Christie
Partial transcript from the show
Grant: I’m Grant Faulkner, and I’m a writer whose book was just rejected, so that puts me among maybe millions who have had their book rejected. My book was titled Rejection’s Fire, and it was actually a nonfiction book about rejection, so the irony is that it’s a book about rejection, and many of the editors who rejected the book made a little joke about rejecting a rejection book in their emails. But I still believe deeply in the book because it’s meant to help people develop a constructive mindset so that they can be better creators because I believe that one of the things that defines us most on the page and in life in general is how we react to rejection. If you think about it, we face so much rejection of all sorts in our lives, from romantic rejection to rejection at work to rejection from family members, so how we respond or react to rejection really shapes us and our futures. So we’re going to delve into rejection today. I’m here with my co-host Brooke Warner, who knows a little bit about book rejection from the publishing side, and perhaps other sides as well. Rejection is the one common experience that all writers have and they will continue to have, unfortunately, yet it still seems to be taboo to talk about.
Brooke: First, I’m sorry that your book got rejected because I, for one, was looking forward to reading it. I feel like this is one of those places where the industry is missing the boat because a book about rejection, I feel, would be one that so many writers and authors would want to get their hands on. You say that rejection is still a somewhat taboo subject for writers, and I’m sure it’s the case that most people don’t talk about it because it can be so painful—and then there’s a stigma to it, right? Which is all the more reason to have a book on the topic—so you can find solace and understanding. But if you’ve been rejected, you can feel that something is wrong with you, you’re not good enough, and most writers don’t want to advertise that to the world.
Grant: You know, Brooke, I feel like the one bit of advice that writers all get is to grow a thick skin because they will face rejection. And it’s true: to be a writer is to be rejected—a lot—just as to be a baseball player is to swing and miss the ball—a lot. My question in the book is how do you grow a thick skin? Are some people born with a thicker skin than others, as if they’re genetically wired for resilience? Can you do mental exercises to thicken your skin? Does a writer’s skin toughen with each rejection—or thin? Or does successful publication provide a salve for past wounds—and a shield for future assaults? I think that how we respond to rejection determines who we are as writers and what we can accomplish. Every writer faces a potential marathon of rejection with every book, whether it’s self-rejection, rejection from an agent or editor, rejection from a book reviewer, or rejection from a beta reader (or even one’s mother). Or all of the above. Sometimes a rejection can send a writer into a tailspin of self-doubt. Sometimes a rejection can motivate a writer to bare down and try harder. Sometimes a rejection can open up an opportunity to see a story in a new and better way. But sometimes a rejection can also lead a writer into self-destructive behavior and bitterness and envy. So every rejection journey is different, which is why I thought that we could explore the topic of rejection today to help our listeners who are submitting or getting ready to submit—funny how “submit” as a word even plays into rejection, as if writers have to be supplicants and deferential to be considered. One way or another, we hope to offer a small rejection primer today.
Brooke: I know you got the idea for this book several years ago and you did a lot of research on the psychology of rejection. I also know that you’d planned to feature the stories of 13 different writers and their rejection journeys—to essentially offer rejection mentors or peers—so I’m curious if your research into the topic of rejection shaped your own reaction to rejection?
Grant: That’s so interesting because, you know, I think of what I learned from the book often when I get rejected, and I do have a sort of meta view of myself going through the rejection process—which keeps my emotional spiral downward in check. In my case with this book, rejection didn’t happen all at once. I think my agent sent it out to 25 or so publishers of all kinds, small presses and large presses and university presses. And the book came close so many times. Three different editors wanted to acquire it, so I had meetings with them, and then they took it to their editorial boards to get it greenlit, and each time, the editorial board voted no. In the case of the University of Chicago, they even sent my book proposal out for peer review, and it got great reviews. I thought it was a done deal, but that wasn’t enough. Each editorial board didn’t think it was quite marketable enough. I think because it was a different book, which made it a more needed book in my mind, but publishing can be very conservative, and they like to publish what’s similar to what’s been published before. I received a couple of offers from smaller presses, but the advance was so low and the amount of work this book was going to require was just too significant that I couldn’t do it. So the rejection happened over the course of a few months, and I kept hoping the next editor would take it—so hope helped me for a long time. But then, when I reached the end, I did what I tend to do when rejection: I went into a cavern of self-pity for a day or two, and I felt like the unluckiest writer in the world, and I envied all of those writers who seemed to somehow find all the doors open for their book projects. This is actually a common response, and it’s called the “appraisal stage,” and this is where people’s fate is formed because they might fall into the pits of self-loathing or self-destructive behavior, or they might plant a seed of resilience and determination. I slowly started searching for a plan B. I’m actually still searching for a plan B for the book, and maybe there won’t be a plan B, but this book is important to me because there actually isn’t a book about rejection, and I think it’s an important topic on so many levels.
Brooke: I hope there will be a plan B, and what you say about publishing being conservative—it’s also just so risk-averse. Since you mentioned that you did psychological research for the book, I’m curious what you discovered?
Grant: One of the interesting psychological things I learned is that when we’re rejected, we don’t only feel emotional pain, we feel physical pain, as if we’ve literally been injured. And rejection affects us on so many levels. If you think about it, we’re creatures wired to seek love and belonging and recognition—which is important on an evolutionary level, right, because we’re stronger and more likely to survive when we’re part of a group. When we’re rejected, we feel like we’re being kicked out of the group. We feel ostracized and insufficient, and I think on some level we actually worry about our survival on a primal level. To develop a mindset of resilience and grit, it’s important not to overgeneralize or catastrophize—as I did in my pity party—but to respond to rejection more intentionally and strategically so that rejection becomes a moment of constructive reckoning and possibly a springboard to future action. I hate to say it, but my creative process often needs a certain level of rejection for me to go deeper into my work, so one of my responses is gratitude, because I remember past works of mine that got better when rejection forced to consider my book from a different angle. That’s a good psychological lesson: to try to flip the script and to trust that something good can come out of rejection. What about you, Brooke? Do you have a particular rejection story in your life, especially your writing life, that has shaped you or given you insight into your own patterns of rejection?
Brooke: My rejection journey in book publishing has been coming at it from other angles. I haven’t personally had a book rejected because I’ve only ever published my own work—but I have rejected thousands of books, and I have lived through rejection vicariously through authors I’ve worked with as a coach or an editor whose books have been rejected. So I’ll share about rejection that it’s not easy or fun to be the one who rejects. And in a way, you get rejected vicariously when you’re an editor, and this extends to agents as well. When you hold these roles, you’re out there really trying to get books made, trying to push manuscripts through our committees, or in agents’ case to get editors or publishing houses to buy these projects. So when editors and agents have manuscripts rejected, they do feel that sting of disappointment too, even though they’re not the author. And Lisa Leshne talked about this when she was on the podcast. It’s an important insight just so authors don’t feel like they’re so alone in it, and how much championing others are doing in this process. So in some ways, Grant, my entire existence is shaped around rejection. I still feel it in my role today because I accept and reject manuscripts for She Writes Press, for instance, but then sometimes we’re rejected because authors we accept choose another publishing route. There’s a lot about book publishing that feels like dating, another arena of life that is rife with rejection. Rejection is tough because it centers one person who wants a specific outcome and doesn’t get that outcome, and I guess that’s part of the human experience. And I will say that I’ve gotten better with rejection over time. I still feel the pang of disappointment sometimes around projects I lose, or when an author I’m close to doesn’t get something they’re really pining for—but I’ve come to understand that the rejection doesn’t speak to anything that’s fundamentally flawed either about me or She Writes, or about a given author and their book, but rather that we all have to make choices, and sometimes in that choice-making, not everyone can or will come along.
Grant: Rejection is part of the human experience, and it’s pervasive, for everyone, but one thing that is interesting about rejection is how we feel like it’s only happening to us, not others, and that the game is rigged. But literary history is full of famous authors whose work almost never made it to the light of day because of rejection. It’s worth remembering some of them. Celeste Ng kept a color-coded document called the “Spreadsheet of Shame” for the hundreds of rejections she received before publishing her first novel. Madeleine L’Engle received 26 rejections before getting A Wrinkle in Time published. Alex Haley’s epic Roots was rejected 200 times in eight years. “Nobody will want to read a book about a seagull,” an editor wrote to Richard Bach about Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which went on to sell millions of copies. I interviewed Booker Award winner Marlon James for my book, and his first novel was rejected 87 times. It’s an amazing story. But I figured rejection was behind him after he won the Booker and became such a literary figure, but he told me that he still gets rejected in different ways, no matter his success. Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen committed to the book, and his book The Sympathizer actually went through a gauntlet of rejection. I really wanted to tell Kwame Alexander’s story, because not only was he a “23 year” overnight success, as he liked to say after getting books rejected for 23 years, but after his breakthrough novel The Crossover was turned into a TV show and was nominated for an Emmy, Disney actually cancelled it. And then it won the Emmy. So, again, it’s interesting how the threads of rejection weave themselves into an author’s career. On that note, one cool thing about my book is my agent asked me to tell the rejection side of things for agents and editors—and it’s a side of things writers should know for all of the reasons you just mentioned, Brooke. Writers tend to focus on their own rejections, forgetting that the publishing process is a minefield of rejection that affects agents and editors, and most writers don’t see or understand how agents and editors might have just as much emotional skin in the game for a book’s publication—and have to develop their own thick skin. But it’s not just emotional skin in the game. Paychecks are at stake as well. In fact, agents are essentially working “on spec” just like authors, putting in sweat equity on book edits, book proposals, and book pitches—time that might not turn into any financial compensation. In a sense, when an agent receives a rejection, it’s the equivalent of not getting paid for work that’s done. I’m curious if you have a particular rejection story from the editorial/publisher side—about your feelings or fears of rejection from a book you either wanted to acquire or did acquire?
Brooke: Well, there are many, but I’ll share the one that’s the most infamous because it hit me so hard that it ended up being one of the reasons I left traditional publishing. And I center this story in my TEDx talk. But it’s the story of wanting to acquire S. Bear Bergman’s book about trans families. It was a great book and it would have been a perfect fit for Seal Press, because we were doing a lot of LGBTQ titles at the time, and I was specifically building out the press’s trans list. So when I got word that my boss really didn’t want me to acquire it, that was a form of rejection. What happened here is that I felt that I got the rejection because I really wanted to acquire the book, and then being the rejectee, I had to go and reject the author. So there’s like a chain of rejection going on. I was super disappointed, and more to the point, this was when I felt that something was broken with corporate publishing, and it was one of the dominoes that fell for me on my journey away from that space. But let me share an accompanying story because the other kind of rejection editors face is when you want a book and you make an offer on the book and then the author chooses another publisher. So that happens all the time, too, and I would say my biggest disappointment here, while inevitable, was losing Jessica Valenti to the Big Five. We published her first three books, and I felt as editors will that she was my author, she was Seal’s darling. But for her fourth book, she got a giant offer and it was time for her to leap to a bigger pond. Still, that was a rejection, too, of her saying—I’m moving on. I’ve outgrown you guys. And it was the right thing to do for her career. And if you’re an editor who loves your authors, you really are gracious and supportive and want the best for them, so the rejections are hard, but they’re part of the job.
Grant: One cool thing I see going on is that writers are finding a healthy response to rejection. For example, I see many writers making the goal to get 100 rejections in a year, and then they post their running tally on social media. That’s great for two reasons: one, they’re destigmatizing rejection by publicly talking about it, and then, two, by flipping the script to seek rejection instead of publication, they’re opening themselves to more acceptance by submitting more often. It’s a resilience strategy. Likewise, I’ve heard of rejection collectives, where groups of writers make rejection goals, individually and as a group, and they keep a public spreadsheet together and regularly report out, celebrating rejection milestones along with successes.
Brooke: That shows how we really can essentially train ourselves to take a constructive approach to rejection. We all face trauma, adversity, and other stresses, but strengths such as gratitude, kindness, hope, and bravery have been shown to act as protective factors against adversity, helping us adapt positively. Cultivating positivity helps us become more explorative and adaptable in our thoughts and behaviors, and I know you dedicated a section of the book to resilience exercises to help people develop a “rejection mindset,” as you put it. Can you share a bit about that?
Grant: I think developing a “rejection mindset” is so important to being a writer, and it is something that we can cultivate and practice. When faced with rejection, our instinct is often to recoil with self-loathing and sometimes to avoid risking rejection at all. But we have to ask ourselves whether rejection is the end or a new beginning. Despite the stings of rejection, you have to find a way to make rejection your friend, your teacher, and your coach, and to find a way for your hope to live and grow within that wound. So rejection is actually an opportunity to look at your work and analyze it from the point of view of an editor or agent. Rejection teaches a writer that valuable skill that every writer needs to know: to listen, to consider, to re-evaluate, but also to know when to say “To hell with you, this is how I want it!” So one thing I ask in the book is to think of how lacking you’d be as a human being if you’d never risked failure and been rejected. I like one called “Doors Closed Doors Open.” It’s a reflective exercise designed to show how the end of something is also the beginning of something new. I ask readers to examine a past rejection through guiding questions: What led to the door closing? What helped you open a new door? What were the effects of the door closing on you? Did it last long? How long did it take you to realize that a new door could open? Was it easy or hard for you to realize that a new door was open? What prevented you from seeing the new open door? And what can you do next time to recognize the new opportunity sooner? The more we explore our own rejection reactions, the more we can develop a constructive mindset and hopefully reduce the pain of it all.
Brooke: This sounds like a necessary book for writers, Grant, so I hope you’ll come up with a plan B for your book so that all of this can be shared more widely. As you said, thick skin doesn’t just happen. We need to work on ourselves, kind of like going to the Rejection Gym to strengthen those muscles. And listeners, we’re going to break, but we don’t have a guest today, so during the musical interlude, maybe consider how your own past rejections have gotten you to where you are today—and we’ll be right back.
This week’s Substackin’:
This week’s Substackin’ gets into self-pity, which we might take straight up, or neat, or on the rocks with our rejection. Self-pity gets a bad rap, but I think wallowing in it can actually be a good thing, and a necessary and vital stage in the creative process.
Check out Grant’s Substack on the topic here!
ABOUT BROOKE WARNER & GRANT FAULKNER
Brooke Warner is publisher of She Writes Press and SparkPress, president of Warner Coaching Inc., and author of Write On, Sisters!, Green-light Your Book, What’s Your Book?, and three books on memoir. Brooke teaches memoir intensives online and in person. She is a TEDx speaker, weekly podcaster (of “Write-minded” with co-host Grant Faulkner), and publishes a weekly newsletter, Writerly Things, on Substack. Brooke is the former Executive Editor of Seal Press and writes a regular column for Publishers Weekly.
Grant Faulkner is the former Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and the co-founder of 100 Word Story. He has published three books on writing, The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story; Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo; and Brave the Page, a teen writing guide. He’s also published All the Comfort Sin Can Provide; Fissures, a collection of 100-word stories; and Nothing Short of 100: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story. His stories have appeared in dozens of literary magazines, including Tin House, The Southwest Review, and The Gettysburg Review, and he has been anthologized in collections such as Norton’s New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction and Best Small Fictions. His essays on creativity have been published in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Writer’s Digest, and The Writer. Find Grant online on Facebook, X, Instagram, and Substack.