The only rejection that will kill you as a writer is the one where you reject yourself and your work. That's what you have to guard against.— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) June 17, 2015
This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. This is also something I've been doing for many, many years.I have a line I tell people when someone new asks me about my writing. "I've written fifteen books," I'll say, followed immediately by "Don't be too impressed; most of them sucked." The joke makes it easy to hide my frustration at spending so much of my life trying to make the one thing I want most happen and getting nowhere. But there's another side to it, one I didn't realize until I found the above tweet from Mr. Wendig.
By saying that most of what I've written sucks, I'm rejecting myself. And this has probably kept me from getting anywhere with my writing more than anything else I've done.
Out of those fifteen books, at least five of them I've never shown to anyone. Books I trunked as soon as I wrote the last sentence, or reread after a month or two and decided they didn't work, or any of a number of other reasons. And all but one of the rest are stories I gave up on at one point or another. Maybe I lost faith in them, or got some less-than-positive feedback and decided they sucked, so on and so forth. There are good reasons to let books go, I think; querying BoLR for six months and ~100 agents showed me that, no, this thing was not going to happen. But that's the farthest I've gone with any book.
Because there's always a point where I just plain give up. Where I decide that no, this isn't worth it, this isn't good enough. I can do better on the next book, I tell myself. And so I start the same process all over again.
Part of the problem with this is that it makes it much easier to quit and start something new. Hell, I've had to convince myself multiple times to keep going with STARWIND at least far enough to get it to readers, rather than just shrug it off as another failure and try again. Getting rejected so many times makes it a lot easier to start doing it to myself.
And as much as I know that won't get me anywhere, it's very hard to stop.
I don't know of any good way to fight against this. There's only so much positivity I can try to generate, and my reserves of that have been growing lower and lower over the years. Stubbornness works sometimes, but it's far too easy to slip from that into grumpiness, and that does no good. Tenacity seems like all I have left sometimes, but even that coin has two sides - "Keep trying with this book" easily flips over to "Try again with a new one".
Thus, we've reached the part where I ask for advice. Have the rest of y'all dealt with this sort of thing? How do you handle it? And how did you overcome it?
You need your test readers and critique partners to keep you accountable. They know Starwind is coming and they can help you see it through to the end.
ReplyDeleteI understand that, but the problem is that if I've rejected something myself already, there's no way I'm letting anyone else read it.
DeleteI'm standing behind Alex on this one. If it weren't for my CPs and Betas, I'd never get anything out there. They shove me when I don't want to move..sometimes they don't even know they do it, but rather I don't want the work they put into something to go to waste.
ReplyDeleteThat's a reasonable point. I'd like to think I'd be less likely to reject something if others have told me it's good. Then again, I had more readers for BoLR than anything else I've done, and... yeah.
DeleteYes, I've dealt with that discouragement. You need a win. Try a short story and win a contest or get a quick publication credit with an ezine. Shannon Lawrence lists a whole slew of opportunities every week. I find it's easier to believe in myself when someone else also believes in me.
ReplyDeleteOog. That's a good point, but I hate writing short stories. It's very, very rare that I can fit anything I want to write into a few thousand words.
DeleteI don't think all the external advice and encouragement in the world will change the way a person thinks about themselves. But acknowledging that you do discredit yourself at least means you can be on the lookout for when you put yourself down and make a conscious effort to stop and give yourself deliberate praise. It'll be a long process, and likely feel insincere, maybe undeserving and a little silly at first. But if you keep at it, you'll start to believe. And you deserve to have confidence in your work because it is good.
ReplyDeleteThank you. And you're right - if I can't get past what I'm telling myself, nothing that anyone else says is going to matter. I've been working on some of this with my therapist, but it's a long process.
DeleteIt's tough to know when to stop and when to keep trying. It's also tough sometimes to go back and rework old stuff. It might be tempting to just move on to the next thing, but a large part of the learning process in writing--the part that makes us better writers--is the rewriting and editing.
ReplyDeleteThere have been many projects I've abandoned. The ones I stuck with... I don't know what made the difference, really, except a feeling that they were special enough and worth the extra time and effort. Of course, having writing friends helped me sort that out, too. They could tell me when something was working and when it wasn't. And they can give me a positive outlook when I'm feeling down on myself and my work.
But yes, you absolutely have to stop the self-deprecating talk. Focus on the positive, no matter how small. Psychologists tell their clients to list only good things that happen on any given day in a journal. This trains the mind to focus on the positive. People who do this have been shown in studies to be happier in general. So think about what you *do* like in your writing. And then do more of that. You won't ever like all of it. But you can like most of it, with practice.
I'll give that a try, thank you. A lot of my self-rejection comes from me saying the work as a whole is bad, so it could help to look it over again and see what works well.
DeleteHi,
ReplyDeleteStop trying to be positive and go with your tenacity. Tenacity doesn't mean that I have to be positive or that I am always positive. It means that no matter what I am going to stick at what I am doing until I see the light of day. That's tenacity. You keep on keeping on regardless of what others are saying. You keep sending out your manuscripts until an agent or a publisher says this is the work I am looking for. One of the short story writers that I admire deeply said in a online conference that I participated in that he got ten thousand rejections before he got his first acceptance. After he got his first acceptance, the world lay at his feet. Now, he had contracts that are unbelievable. Hearing him say that gave me courage to keep going. I haven't received ten thousand rejections and hope that I don't have to but if I must, I will keep going until it happens.
So hang in there and take your tenacity and move forward with it.
All the best.
Shalom aleichem,
Patricia
I've been trying to get published for fifteen years. I understand tenacity. ^_^ But it has its own issues, as I said.
DeleteMaybe they don't suck. Have you ever considered letting others be the judge? I can't believe out of 15 mss that there are none that are worthy. Just writing that many, you're bound to have improved as a writer.
ReplyDeleteI know I've improved, judging by the cringing I do when I look back at some of my old work. :P But as I said to Alex, a lot of it is that if I think something's bad, I'm not going to show it to anyone else. That probably counts for a lot of it.
Delete