I had a long, lovely email last night from a writer who reminded me of the time I told her that I received seven rejection letters in one week and, while holding the last one, I tripped and fell down the stairs, collapsing into a heap of misery (with a very sore ankle). She writes: the temptation was there to give up, but you didn’t. You went back to the computer and kept writing. I think of this story often, and it inspires me to keep writing. 

If you’re feeling fed up with rejection letters and worn out with the quiet disinterest of publisher after publisher, remind yourself that rejection is part of the job.  Any writer you admire (and probably some you don’t) will have received their fair share of rejection letters. They will have hoped for something that didn’t come to pass, dreamed of an ending that never happened. Someone smarter than me once said: Fatigue is a symptom of effort. Yep, you’ll feel tired, hopeless, frustrated.  And sure, the first few days after a particularly galling rejection aren’t, perhaps, the days you feel like reworking anything. You are, of course, allowed to wallow in misery. A little.

Then it’s time to get over it and get on with it, because from rejection comes the opportunity to rewrite, recreate, rejuvenate. Remind yourself of that when you feel like giving up. Sit back down in your writing space and write. Write more. Write something new. Write something better. Never let something as ordinary as rejection stop you.

I just finished reading, and enjoying, The Girl Who Chased The Moon by Sarah Addison Allen. I flipped over to her website – which is really well done – and thought I’d share this with you. It’s one of her answers to a FAQ and it’s very true, definitely worth keeping in mind.  Click on the paragraph below to explore her writing further.

How long did it take for you to get published? Can you give me advice on writing a book?

I’ve always loved writing, but I didn’t start writing seriously, with the goal of being published, until I graduated from college. It took twelve years writing as close to full-time as I could manage to finally make a living from it. Twelve long years, folks. This is what I know: There’s no shortcut. There’s no secret handshake. You sit down, you write. YOU FINISH IT. You revise and make it the best you can make it. You do your research on where to submit and you submit it. Then you start writing something new. It’s all about the rinse and repeat. I wrote over a dozen completed manuscripts before Garden Spells.

It seems to me that I have great ideas (or not so great, who knows!) when I’m driving the car. I remember when I was a teenager, I used to get in my car and drive through London, deliberately trying to get lost. Getting lost in London is pretty easy, I’d just have to take a few wrong turns, then I’d spend time trying to find my way back home. Now, when I’m stuck in a story, trying to figure out motivations or specific trouble spots, I get in the car and drive. Here in Saskatoon, the landscape is very different from the landscape of London. I’m on a grid system here and I’d find it really hard to get lost. Instead, I drive out into the prairies. Those long straight roads that disappear into the horizon, populated by nothing but wheat and grass, give me space for my imagination to get to work. Big, empty skies and empty roads let my mind wander.

Where do you go when you need to think over a story?