A Blog Post by Sophie Allen
As an emerging writer, I’m used to form rejections, personalized rejections, and the worst kind of rejection of all: no response. Getting rejected is incredibly demoralizing, and I’ve dealt with it in a lot of ways, ranging from healthy to damaging to unreasonable. Normally when I get rejected I can take a deep breath, remember that rejection has little bearing on the quality of my writing, and move on, but sometimes those emails hit me where it hurts. I do not recommend crying in public as a pastime, though I have partaken in it before and probably will again.
In some ways, it can be nice to get a rejection. It’s a sign that someone is out there, reading your work, and you should keep pushing forward until the person who reads your work decides it’s right for them or their publication. It still hurts to know that a person sat down, looked at what you wrote, and didn’t want it, but at least you know you’ve been considered. Not hearing back at all can be devastating, especially when it seems easy to press a button and send a form rejection.
It’s difficult to see the value in one’s effort if there is no payoff, whether it comes in the form of recognition, readership, or money. Yes, I write for myself, but it’s still work, and it’s gratifying to have that effort noticed by other people. This could also be due to the fact that I was brought up under an economic system where people’s value is determined by their output, but that’s a different blog post.
It’s a comfort and a burden to know that there’s no objective measure of talent in creative areas. I try to remember this when I doubt myself; I have no guarantee that I’m actually skilled or doing anything right except what meaning I can take from my own experiences. It’s up to me to decide what effect other people have on my morale and perception of my own work. I would like to think that every poem I’ve revised again and again, that I’ve cried over, that came to me in the middle of the night was worthwhile and intrinsically valuable, but part of me only believes the published ones have merit.
I had a poem published recently that I wrote in July of 2017. I’m very proud of it and I’d been sending it around for just shy of a year. Despite the numerous rejections I racked up since last summer, I still think this poem is pretty good and I think it deserved to be picked up; I’m extremely grateful that it was. But there are other poems of which I’m equally proud which might never be published at all.
For instance, I sent work to a journal recently and was told that a poem came “close” to being selected for publication. I still think the piece is pretty good and will continue sending it out, but it’s a little disheartening to see that someone liked my piece, but still didn’t think it was a good enough fit.
Still, it’s hard not to think of rejected pieces as bad poems, or at the very least, as not good enough, even if I know that a significant portion of the reading process relates to a publication’s aesthetic and its editors’ preferences. I think what I’m trying to reckon with as a writer with virtually no career experience is the idea that yes, I write because I love it, but loving something doesn’t pay the bills. There are a lot of things about this industry that need to change, and I’m not sure how to change them, but for now I need to accept that sometimes, everyone gets ignored. Everyone gets rejected. All I can do is work harder.
Sophie Allen is an English major at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is an Opinion/Editorial columnist at the Daily Collegian, the independent student newspaper at UMass. In her spare time, she enjoys reading murder mysteries and writing poetry. In the future, Sophie hopes to write for late-night television.