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Monday, May 31, 2010

Your Rejection Collection: A Invitation to Persevere

"Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before." —Jacob A. Riis
A number of writing friends received rejections on their manuscripts ranging from:

Rejection 1: No response.
Rejection 2: Generic response, “Thanks, but no thanks.”
Rejection 3: “Thanks, but it’s not a fit.”
Rejection 4: “I liked (your dialogue, your proposal), but no thanks.”
Rejection 5: “Too much tell, not enough show. Here are some areas to work on.”
Rejection 6: Nothing fresh or new here.


An Invitation or Rejection
What do you do when you receive a rejection? 


  • Feel anger towards the editor? 
  • Spiral into a pit of depression?
  • Shoot off angry emails?
It’s okay to grieve. However, how you handle rejection effects your writing future. Wannabes give up. Writers view a rejection letter as an invitation to revise and resubmit elsewhere. 


No wordsmith escapes rejection. It just makes us more grateful when published. I apply Dolly Parton’s quote to my writing outlook, “The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.”



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