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THE JOY OF LIFE - 08/06/2008
(by Gene Myers - Features Editor - August 06, 2008)
Rejecting the rejection slips
My occupation as a journalist guarantees that I will be published each week. Unfortunately, my poet alter ego can pretty much expect the opposite fate.
As any creative writer knows, the three R’s that stood for Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic in school actually stand for Rejection, Rejection, REJECTION!
To that end, I recently hired a company called Writer’s Relief to do market research and help me find my target audience. Along with a list of magazines that the company recommends I submit my work to, it included a sheet of suggestions on how best to handle rejection.
In case tips on dealing with rejection might be useful to anyone else in this world, I figured I would share some of their suggestions as well as my own process of dealing with rejection that I’ve been perfecting for years.
After your manuscript finds its way back to your mailbox the first thing the people at Writer’s Relief would like you to do is check your reaction. “Do you wail and thrash about?” they ask.
The correct answer is, of course, “not until I get back inside.” This allows you to throw yourself about on a carpeted floor out of view from the neighbors who are also resisting the urge to cry at their mailboxes. (They could have their own reasons: credit card bills, dear John letters, but I like to assume that they’re also poets.) The other reason flipping out indoors is a good idea is that you can practice sneering at editors in the mirror.
After you nail the perfect reaction to the rejection, the folks at Writer’s Relief recommend another safety valve, “release.” If my initial reaction doesn’t provide enough release, I like to take it out on my friends or go for ice cream.
It’s this last step that usually does the trick…cooler heads prevail, as they say. Since I am usually in a blind rage, I have whatever friend I’ve just unloaded on do the driving. At the local ice cream shop, tension melts away amongst the soft serve and whip cream. This is when the important work can begin. Venting turns into a sort of recapping, which allows us to gain some perspective.
It’s not until all of the hot fudge is gone that I realize that--unlike the kid who made my Sundae-editors are not gods. They don’t necessarily have a higher knowledge and they don’t control my fate. More likely, they rejected my poem because they were too embarrassed to ask for another copy after they spilled hot fudge on it.
As I work on the sprinkles, I can’t help but feel happier. As I chase the little rainbow bits around the bowl only my successes come to mind. I’ve been published before. It’ll happen again, I tell myself.
By the time there’s no more soft-serve, no sprinkles or cherry left, I’ve usually realized that this is all just part of the writer’s life and now I am in a new moment. There was the me before the ice cream and the me who was venting with ice cream. But then I became yet another person.
I looked around I realized that the newly enlightened me was the only one sitting in the ice cream shop without ice cream. So, I got back in line to place my order. And then it hit me-how did so many writers die so skinny?
For more of The Joy of Life, visit genemyers.com.
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