Masochistic Tendencies

So for a while there I was thinking about living under my bed and only leaving for brief bathroom necessities. I figured if I dragged a pile of books and comics and blankets under there, maybe put in a bar, couple of pinball machines… The kittens were totally on board with this plan.

Rejection sucks. As a writer you should expect to experience this a lot. All the time. Forever. Even after you’ve had one thing made, one thing published, it still happens. That tiny death of your soul. That unspeakable blow that rips your self-confidence to shreds with complete uncaring disregard. It happens a lot.

Part of why it hurts is that we put so much of ourselves into our work, our creations, our substitute babies. We have to. If we didn’t then what would be the point? That’s the catch: we have to put our soul into our work but also be able to discuss it objectively. Gin helps with this. The trick is to remind yourself that it is one piece of work that is getting rejected, one piece of writing that you can easily fix. It’s not you as a writer that is getting turned down not you as an actual person, okay? Put that sharpened ice cream scoop down. It’s going to be okay.

The other reason why it hurts is that we have a tendency to put unreasonable expectations on the difference in our lives that one piece of work will make should it be successful. So when we get turned down by a publisher or a funder, it’s not just that our hard work wasn’t good enough. It’s the dashed hopes of escaping a day-job, of critical acclaim, of getting invited to all the cool parties, of getting laid. This one manuscript was going to do all this, seriously, if we only believed enough. If we were kind to strangers. Tidied our room without being asked.

Another trick is to leap-frog submissions. Stagger sending work out, have multiple opportunities pending. That way when something fails then you still have other hopes out there. It becomes almost a masochistic game. The risk here is that unfortunate timing can mean you have a truly epic Bad Day. If that happens then yeah, living under your bed seems like a very sensible idea. Take snacks.

When I ran the NZWG Seed Grants part of my job was to send the rejection emails. Usually around fifty of them. It was not a fun job. I learned fast to ignore any emails that came back within the first 40 seconds. Just… no. Pro tip: if you have an alert on your inbox that makes a cheerful wee bing whenever you get an new email, switch that fucker off. Kill it. Kill it with fire.