Hi Creatives,
In Let Me Tell You What I Mean, Joan Didion shares a series of rejection letters her agent shared with her in 1965 for an essay she wrote.
“As you know, we’ve been submitting WHEN DID MUSIC COME THIS WAY? CHILDREN DEAR, WAS IT YESTERDAY? to the magazines, and the following is a list of places where it’s been seen.
Saturday Evening Post: ‘Many of us read it and a great many were excited and insistent in their admiration of it. Others…also admired it but felt that it was wrong for the Post, not so much because of its subject matter, but also because of the oblique method of narration.’
The New Yorker: ‘as a whole it just isn’t effective enough.’
Ladies’ Home Journal: ‘too negative for us.’
McCall’s: ‘I feel very bad about rejecting this story – not because I think it’s a really well worked-out story but because the writing is so awfully good. She has a very special way of involving the reader…but I’m turning this down, reluctantly, because I don’t think it’s a successful story in the end.’
Good Housekeeping: ‘marvelously written, very real, and so utterly depressing that I’m going to sit under a cloud of angst and gloom all afternoon…I’m sorry we are seldom inclined to give our readers this bad a time.’
Cosmopolitan: ‘too depressing.’
There were eight other rejection letters, but you get the idea.
I can imagine that getting a slew of rejections all at once might have felt defeating or demoralizing, no matter how funny some of them are (“we are seldom inclined to give our readers this bad a time”). But obviously they didn’t stop her! Joan went on to write five novels, 10 nonfiction books, a play, and likely received countless rejections in her life.
What’s your relationship with rejection like?
Has a rejection ever influenced your behavior?
Imagine it’s many years in the future. How do you think you’ll feel about past rejections then?
If you were to compile your rejections, as Joan has done here, what would the effect be?
In a strange way, seeing all of these rejections together makes them feel less powerful. Or perhaps it’s that Joan’s nonchalance about sharing them makes them feel less heavy. What do you think?
I still vividly remember the first real rejection (actual, typewritten) letter I received. It was from Little Golden Books, and I had submitted some work to them as an elementary schoolkid in the Philippines with my mom's help. They very kindly suggested I finish school before sending them more of my work. I don't remember whether they even commented on its quality, but the mere fact that they had REPLIED, via airmail, resonated with me and encouraged me to keep writing (which they also did in the letter).
More recently, I keep a couple of rejection emails because they contained solicited critiques (at extra charge -- totally worth it) of a short story and a flash fiction piece. They too were universally kind but honest, and I believe my work has improved as a result -- although I may not be cut out for fiction :-p. The other emails are archived in the Writing folder of my Gmail account. I never received anything as funny as Joan Didion, primarily I think because Editorial staff these days are trained to be polite: "We received [insert large adjective] number of quality submissions and can't accept them all..."
On receiving those Submittable emails, I'm always a little nervous, and experience a brief letdown when rejected, but I've gotten used to them. They are in a way less traumatic than rejections of my academic work (manuscripts or grants) -- those reviewers never pull any punches.