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Dealing with Rejection
1) Say to yourself: 'It's true! I AM utterly and irredeemably talentless!' and fall down a pit of despair for a few minutes/hours (depending on the magnitude of the rejection).
2) Eat far too much comfort food/wallow in other non-fatal self-indulgence, after which you can distract yourself either by a) feeling sick or b) thinking 'I'm terrible!' for a whole new reason.
3) Do something practical so that you don't default on the mortgage/drown in washing up/get abandoned by spouse etc.
4) Thanks to stage 3, feel you are coping jolly bravely and start to feel indignant that the universe is not rewarding you for this. Why isn't there a Rejection Fairy, who goes around sprinkling joy and consolation on the heroic silenced scribbling majority who try and try and yet are spurned??
5) Contemplate what a Rejection Fairy would actually be like. Realise that you would probably want to headbutt it on sight. Feel restored to sanity by this consideration.
6) It's time to go back to the actual work – but only for a couple of hours at most. Stare at it in horror, realising its manifold inadequacies (beware of slipping back to stage 1 here, but if you do you can always work through the list again).
7) Either fix the easiest of the inadequacies, thus giving yourself a renewed feeling of empowerment, or if the project is beyond hope, do something easy but constructive on another piece of work, e.g., renaming a character who has never quite gelled.
8) Dump writing for a few hours or a day and pay attention to the spouse/friends/pet dragon who heroically did not abandon you. Fuelled by stages 6 and 7, your subconscious will churn away in the meantime.
9) Think: 'Hey, I really am dealing with rejection well! And I've got all these new ideas, too,' and experience a self-esteem boost.
10) And now it's finally back to the serious work of making the next submission the one that does not lead you back to stage 1.
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"We wished we had more projects to give you, because you just did them so well!"
Sue Parish, former Head of Editorial, Egmont Publishing
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