Handling Rejection

I could give you the cliche, ” it’s not the end of the world – there will be more opportunities.” But how do you handle rejection? It feels like the whole world just doesn’t appreciate my effort, that creative work is not viewed as work without non-creative results.  I put all this effort into making something special/unique/good, why isn’t it embraced?

I can’t say much about publishing from experience other than many situations are unsatisfying.  That people in the creative and publishing world have big egos and big dreams. The small-time writer who reads the large body of work and is able to put his or her own work in context of a larger body of seeming giants can feeel intimidated when publishers/grant donors/fine arts programs reject such an individual. If you are informed enough to put your work in context of literature and history, then you need to develop a skill of putting your work in social context. Writing and reading are social phenomena. Putting a grain of salt where a big pillar stands will help you see how petty and unenlightened the industries that support artists are.

Three questions must you answer about the seemingly esoteric work you do:
1. What is the value of your work?
2. Who are your audience?
3. Who will help me find or reach my audience?

These are the important questions of the craft of creative work. The rest is shit. Money, fame, honor are all banal considerations that may be good for mainstream rock professionals, but not for someone who wants to work to create and seek truth, honesty and beuaty. The value of art can never be measured in dollars. It can be approximated in dollars on a given market, but effort that moves the soul is invaluable. Ask Plato. Art is analogous to sophistry. In terms of quantitative application, the terms are extremely negotiable. You still need to eat. You still need to pay rent. The trick is towing the line. Rejection is not failure should be the first lesson to learn. If we hide in a bubble all our lives, we never learn anything about life, the world, ourselves. Rejection is a very arbitrary imposition that seems like an objective evaluation. It is not. If I apply to med school after studying mathematics and get rejected, am I a failure? This might seems like a ridiculous analogy, but it’s not far from the truth. Publishers have different goals than writers. If you get rejected, remember that the evaluation is very subjective. When you read and appraise literature, you are setting a very biased opinion of the work. This doesn’t mean you are wrong in your evaluation, but the standards you apply to judge quality may vary greatly from the standards the author set to reach the audience.

When people read something, if the application or relevance is not clear, the first question is always “why should I care?” This reflects our selfish culture which always wonders “what’s in it for me?” Unlike collectivist cultures which read out of curiosity in order to make sense of the rigid order, individualist cultures which feel isolated want the work to coddle them and show them something greater. The more fast-paced the culture, the more the culture demands up-front. And in an editorial reading, the same is true, but on speed. Rhetoric is what convinces editors, not wisdom. TS Eliot made a career from bitching and moaning about how America does not appreciate the arts (we do, but not in the same way as he may have supposed). As you linger in the room where women come and go/ talking of Michaelangelo, consider this: the bulk of your career as an aritst is defending the value of art. This is the only profession ambiguous enough to have the primary pursuit of your work as defending and explaining the value of your work. Doctors don’t need to do this. Lawyers don’t need to do this. We turn to these professions in times of crisis -aaaand- we turn to the arts in times of crisis to make sense of our lives. Why do artists need to justify their value if equally ambiguous professions such as clinical psychology, medicine, law, and PR don’t need to?

It’s easier to shape the rhetoric of these professions by drawing on quantifiable results. But how can your quantify a book that convinced an alienated girl that there are infinite possibilities in life and  suicide is not a good option? How can you quantify the value of a poem that makes a black girl in the Bronx believe that her talents are meaningful and needed in the larger society? How can you quantify a product that has been on the forefront of every social movement from the beginning of history, yet has had little evidence to show its role in shaping history? Writers manufacture inspiration. Writers manufacture lucidity and enlightenment. That is the primary value no matter what any other person tells you. Books, stories, poems are never good if they only last for a nice fifteen minutes of hip, you-should-have-been-there platforms. You will forget a book that only has a good hook a thrilling and engaging plot and a stirring conclusion. The book that makes your read twice because you couldn’t believe what you were reading, by the principles of psychology has bored deeper into your memory than the book that was hip today, but will be so yesterday tomorrow.

Remember when you get rejected that hip sells. And selling the book is the editor’s primary goal. Editors are good at what they do: analysing trends, marketing within trends and making a profit off of trends. Writers mainly think in terms of universals. Think about James Joyces, who wrote Finnegan’s Wake mainly as a piece of literature that would keep the critics busy for years on years. And he did. To this day, few people have analysed or even read more than half of the damn thing. How did Joyce get published? Simple he laughed at rejections and kept submitting until he found an editor with the audacity to publish his outrageous work. He waited for the editor that by chance was on his last line and needed the super-edgy, out-of-this world work that would stand out on the bookshelf, much risk involved, yet would catch reader’s attention because it was unique, because it was seductive, because it was the next logical step in the development of literature and because the editor was either clever or desperate enough to see past the now and look at the future that writers seek to create in constructing a voice unique from the others.

The value of your art can be put on a sales pitch, on a unique idea for targeting a market, or can be burried within the deep catacombs of your manuscript which editors will never find. Take time to read your rejection notices. Note the language. Remember the maxim that will make you a better writer:  good writer must first be a good reader. Read the note. Don’t look for yes or no. Look for how they say yes or no. If the editor says “not what we’re looking for, ” it means you are in the wrong market and you need to look at your work and think long and hard “who would read this? who would -want- to read this?” If the editor says “unfortunately, this work does not reflect the standards of quality we look for in our publication.” Think about what they might possibly mean about standards. Compare their standards to your standards. If you don’t use punctuation as a point, if you purposefully misspell words, if you piss on meter or rhyme or repeat the same words over and over for a droning poem, perhaps your standards are different than their standards. Perhaps you need to seek standards that meet you on your terms.

The one advantage of writing is that editors need you to live. You don’t need editors. You could conceiveable DIY your work and sell it at a gallery crawl or at a punk rock  concert, but learning the art of book making, paying for materials and promoting may not be the best for your productivity. Editors are not above you. You are offering editors something. Editors are but a gatekeeper, a facillitator in publishing and drawing profit from publishing. As soon as you realize that publishing poetry in the New England Poetry Review is the same as publishing poetry in Anarchy on Canvas, you will start a career in writing. Not everyone in automaking works for BMW and an auto worker is an auto worker, wheter it’s Ford, Mazda, or Mercedes Benz. In the end, it’s a question of “do we like you?” Does your work fit our publishing company’s culture? Markets are rarely certain so stable branding ensures a stable market. People expect certain things from certain companies and books are no different. Try ordering a burger at Taco Bell. Try pitching an ode for Oliver Cromwell to a publisher run by the IRA.

Think about your work as identity. You are rarely rejected because your work flat-out sucks. Unless it’s boring, unoriginal or reads like an illiterate blonde without a hope or a clue. If you view the work as representitive of a voice, an idea or a lens that may intentionally or unintentionally  illuminate identity, you can see that rejection is often a question of do we like you, what you say, how you say it. In that case you should keep your confidence because people are judging you via your work not your work. Your effort is not in vain because someone is making a judgment about you. In other words, there opinions about your abilities are based primarily on their reading of your utterance. And this means if they don’t understand, if they feel condescended, or if they don’t feel engaged or challenged, they reject you because editors need to form their tastes and evaluations based on reader expectations. This doesn’t mean their opinions are not genuine. The culture of a publishing company needs to match the culture of the readers, the audience, the market. Have you tried talking about Passover in a room full of Nazis? It’s difficult to reach people with different values.

Know thyself and thou shalt know thy audience. Think about your friends. Why are they your friends? What are the most important things you have in common? Why does your friendshipt work. A book is a good friend. And as you write, you should think about your friends (assuming that your writing is genuine and reflects the real you and your real voice). How did you meet your friends? What did you start talking about? What kept you there? Look at your book as an extension of yourself in communication with a friend you have not met. This is the conversation you will have. Form your context around this thought. Entertain the idea that writing is a first impression. It’s one you get to rehearse, edit, perfect, but still a first impression that leads to an engaging conversation that should make your acquaintence go home and ponder everything you say for hours on end. What good is a book that only has a beginning, middle and end? If you read it once to find out what happens to the charecters from the last book and it sits around and collects dust, why buy it? Why not pirate the electronic version off the internet? Why not borrow it from a friend or buy it and return it the next day?

Why are you still friends with your friends? These questions will help you evaluate the value of your work and who would love to read this work and where there might be people organized to promote this type of work and support you so that you might make more works. Keep this in mind: editors need writers to stay in business. The beauty of the postmodern, 21st century world is the nearly infinite variety that marks the publishing world. There is even an unprecedented variety of media to publish on. But editors need writers and they sift through large stacks of papers to find the writer that will keep them in business. You are offering the editor a favor and don’t you fucking forget that. Rejection is not like getting turned down for a date. Rejections do not define your reputation. You will never be called a literary whore or a literary tease. When you send a manuscript, you show a part of yourself and ask if the reader might be interested. It’s for a friendship. Editors who are rude are not worth listening to. After all, mean people suck. But editors that say, “I don’t think we can be friends because we can’t relate” are good to pay attention to. Ask yourself how you met your friends and how they introduced you to other friends. The answer will help you search for the most appropriate place to look for publishers. Would you submit an article about stamp collecting to Rolling Stone? Read the books any prospective publisher releases. Are these the kinds of books you’d like to read? Rolling Stone has a very distinct and identifyable image and set of conventions. When you read, look for that current. Look for that image, no matter how much less pronounced it is than the iconic magazine.

Rejection should serve as a warning sign. Be open to it. Laugh at some of the comments editors make. Take the time to realize the value of negative reaction. These poor bastards are telling you what you are not, which can be infinitely more useful than saying what you are. Do you need to really revise your work after rejection? I say HELL NO!!! Flat-out rejection should not serve any basis for revision. Unless you dream of working with this particular, changing yourself, living a lie, being fake cannot possibly be sustained. If you want to turn right on the road and there is a wrong way sign, it’s never a good idea to go on that road. You can try to turn around, but it’s not the point. Your life is shaped more by the nots than the yeses. It is not the road -less- taken, but the road -not- taken that will make all the diffence. What good is it for you to feel dissonance because the ego stimulators are tempting? It would be nice to be at the top of a big slushpile for a broad, mellow, mainstream audience, but that goal, while having some merits is not what will make writing valuable. Being a brain surgeon at Mayo Clinic is an admirable goal, but being the best brain sureon is the highest of goals. Being a brain surgeon at a specific hospital does not make you the best, no mater how great the hospital. And being rejected from a great hospital does not mean you are a bad surgeon.