The R Word

I don’t tend to use it. The R word. Reject. Reject. Rejection. For me, it carries a weight of emotion that we could simply do without. Being brave and sending our stories, poems or novels out into the world is hard enough without the probability that the end result will be a big red R. In a previous existence, I was an Admissions Manager at a University where a decision had been taken to change the terminology we used from “reject” to “terminate” – and I always thought that was a retrograde step. “Terminate” carries that sense of an ending but a “not-acceptance” is never the end of the road either for a potential university student or for an aspiring (and often perspiring) writer! My thesaurus suggests a smorgasbord of other choices from “decline” to “avoid” to “cold shoulder” to “brushing off.” They are all much of a muchness. Negative words for a negative thing. But for me, finding a better terminology could do so much to help us reframe how we think about these “not-acceptances”, making it much easier to deal with something (whether we like it or not) which is part and parcel of the writing life.

Those of you who follow me on social media might be aware that I recently ended a mammoth run of “not-acceptances” that stretched from February 2022 all the way to November 2023. 622 days without a single acceptance. Fifty-nine “not-acceptances” in a row. These were for short fiction and also for my novel. They were from high-tier journals and places with slightly less prestige. Some of the “not-acceptances” were from venues that had published me before. By the end of those 622 days, I was starting to feel a little down about my writing. But mostly I managed to stay pretty up-beat; and I think this is mostly down to how I treat submitting work and the more-often-than-not negative response that bounces back.

Given that this has been such a big part of my writing year, it felt as though it would make for a good craft article to round things off for 2023. Not in a negative “why does everybody hate me!!!” kind of a way. But in a way that leaves us all better equipped to deal with the “not-acceptances” that will inevitably arrive in 2024. What are my tips for dealing with the nos? How can we prepare ourselves in advance? How do we stay unaffected when they pop into our inbox? And if “rejection” feels too emotionally wrought, what might we call them instead?

Fracturing our goals

If you sit down at the page with one goal in mind and that goal is to get your story published in The New Yorker then there is a high probability that the only outcome will be one of disappointment. Even if your publication sights are set a little lower than that, if you choose just one publication (or for novelists, if you choose one dream agent or publishing house), then the chances are that your single goal will not be met.

But what if we fracture our goals? With any piece of writing, I set myself at least ten goals. A goal might be “have an original idea.” A goal might be “create a lifelike character.” A goal might be “experiment with form” or “practise adding tonal variety” or “write from an unusual point of view.” A goal might be “enjoy the process of writing.” A goal might be “learn something new.” Earlier in the year, I wrote an article that explored different reasons to write, and it feels as though each of those non-publication reasons can be a goal we work towards that is completely in our own hands. The only person that can stop us achieving them is ourselves. Not an agent. Not an editor. Not the nefarious reader number two.

Sometimes, my ten goals don’t even include “publication.” But when they do, it will be 10% of what I’m trying to achieve rather than 100%. The worst-case scenario is that I achieve 90% of what I set out to do.

Abandoning hope, tempering dreams, and throwing common sense out the window

As someone with a long-term health condition one thing I’ve learnt over the years is that hope can be a destructive thing. We see hope as overwhelmingly positive – and mostly it is. We need hope in the world. But the bigger our sense of hope, the bigger our sense of disappointment if what we hope for doesn’t come true. Or to put it another way, there’s a big difference between hope (I hope this thing will happen, but I’m realistic) and expectation (I expect this thing to happen and anything less than this will be a failure). It’s ok to dream of winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. But don’t allow that to be your only dream. Also dream about doing your best “loser face” when you’re overlooked “once again” for the best short story prize at your village jamboree. Also dream about how proud you’ll be when you’re a hundred and you’re looking back on the “smaller” achievements of your life.

One of those achievements might well be getting through a similar run of “not-acceptances” to the one I’ve recently been enduring. Even with my reframed perspective, I have to admit that it was slightly hard-going towards the end. But the thing that kept me submitting was turning the whole thing into a game, seeing how many declines I could stack one on top of the other. Could I get to fifty? Could I get to sixty? Hilariously, I had a small tinge of disappointment when the first acceptance finally came that I’d missed that sixty-marker by the smallest of margins! Other writers often aim for one-hundred “not acceptances” in the space of a calendar year. Again, this turns it into a game and helps shift some of the negative response into more positive territory. Another thing I’ve heard writers talk about is keeping a “not acceptances” jar. The idea is that every time you get a “not acceptance”, you pop a pound or a penny in the pot, and at the end of the year, you have enough money to buy yourself a treat.

Reclaiming the R word

I started this article saying how I don’t personally get on with the R word. But what if we claim that R word as something else? Given that the “not-acceptances” are going to arrive whatever we call them, can we make the R word something positive which is triggered at that point?

• Reminder – I use any response on my writing (positive or negative) as a reminder of everything I’ve already achieved in writing that piece – all those other goals I alluded to above.

• Recognition – I was brave. I took a risk by sending the piece out into the world.

• Regular – this is the standard response. Hey, there’s more people in the R boat with me than there are in that tiny little acceptance boat!

• Reflect – why was it a “not-acceptance”? We don’t know whether a piece is going to get accepted by a particular magazine until we send it to the particular magazine. But once we’ve done so and it comes back with the “wrong” response, what can we learn not just about this story but to help us with our future submissions to that particular venue?

• Re-vision / reset – is this a chance to look at the piece again with fresh eyes? Often we can get too close to a piece and waiting for a response can give us distance we didn’t previously have. Does it need a few tweaks? Maybe this is a time to reset your goals for the story?

• Repurpose – if a piece has racked up a squillion-and-one “not acceptances” then maybe we decide to give up on it. But first think about the possibility of what you can do with all the parts – the images, the unusual turns of phrase, the characters, the narrative ideas.

• Relief – I only want my strongest work out in the world, so in that light, can we reframe it as a relief that there are so many volunteer editors out there fulfilling that role of gate-keeper for our less-than-top-notch stories.

• Resolve – someone (I forget who) used to use the hashtag on Twitter #RejectionsAreFuel (or something along those lines) - can you use a “not-acceptance” to fuel you forwards for your next piece of writing?

Finding a new name

Aside from the emotional connotations of “rejection”, I also don’t like how easily it shifts into its linguistic step-brother “reject” (the noun rather than the verb). A “not acceptance” of a piece of writing should never be a “not acceptance” of the writer and the vast majority of the time, it very much isn’t - but it’s easy for us to think of it that way. Not “my story didn’t fit” or “my story isn’t good enough” but “I don’t fit” or “I’m not good enough.”

Another thing which we often overlook is that “acceptance” / “not acceptance” isn’t a binary. If a magazine gets a thousand submissions and accepts ten pieces then they are mostly sending the same “not acceptance” email to the eleventh-favourite story as they are to the thousandth-favourite story. Sometimes, they might differentiate with a tiered response, but not always.

So, what name would I champion that encapsulates all of that? Throughout this article, I’ve been using “not acceptance” and that perhaps takes some of the emotional sting out of things and avoids the “not acceptance” slipping from judgement of story to judgement of person, but to wrap in the fact that we never really know how close that “not acceptance” is to being an “acceptance”, I like to put the word “quite” in there – a “not quite acceptance” or NQA for short.

Does that make things easier to swallow? It does for me – thinking about that run of 59 not as 59 rejections but as 59 NQAs, 59 opportunities to remind myself that I wrote something, 59 opportunities to reflect on my writing, 59 small sighs of relief or 59 twigs to keep that creative fire firmly burning bright.

New story

And after all that talk of NQAs, I’m delighted to shift into an even more positive note by sharing a new story published over the weekend. I’d love for you to give it a read:

Yellow is the colour of make-believe (Matt Kendrick | Ghost Parachute)

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