Fear of Rejection

Teresa Nielsen Hayden has written a wonderful piece about why writers receive rejection slips and how writers react to them. She profiles a website where visitors enter the content of their rejection slips and how they felt after reading them. Most of the responses reveal fragile egos and distorted perceptions of one’s own talent. There’s a certain sense of entitlement in some of these reactions that is mystifying. You see the same thing on a show like American Idol. They’re stunned when the judges bluntly tell them they can’t carry a tune. The saying goes that everyone’s a critic, but the same high standards we apply to other people seem to dissolve when we look at our own works of art. Maybe it has something to do with the Warhol-ization of American culture, especially the American publishing scene. All you have to do is go into any major bookstore to see that everyone and their accountant is publishing a book. So how hard can it be, right?
I’ve collected a few rejection slips over the past year. I keep them in an envelope in my desk. And I’ll probably get more once I finish my book. I guess I see each rejection slip as a challenge to be a better writer. I like to think I’m slowly improving, but someone else will have to be the judge of that.