Rejecting Rejection with author Deborah Underwood

It’s another Monday at The Writing Barn, which means another uplifting post about dealing with rejection. Whether your piece still isn’t quite working,  or it’s working perfectly but just hasn’t found the right home, rejection can sting. Deborah Underwood shares her experience with us in this week’s Rejecting Rejection, and shows us how rejections, in any form, may just be blessings in disguise.

 

 Rejection is a Pathway, Not a Dead End

by Deborah Underwood

 

Rejection! The word brings up so many conflicting thoughts and feelings, I can barely keep track.  Sometimes a rejection rolls right off my back; sometimes it knocks me off course for weeks. Sometimes a rejection is no reflection on my manuscript; sometimes it indicates that my manuscript needs substantial revision. And sometimes, a rejection means that a manuscript is so out-of-the-box that the editor just can’t see how it could work—but maybe a different editor will understand and love it.

How do we wade through the murky Sea of Rejection? There are no easy answers, but here are some things that I’ve found helpful.

First, I remind myself over and over again that rejections are part of this business. For everyone. We all know this, right? We really do!

Yet when Jane Yolen posted matter-of-factly on Facebook about getting a rejection, I was stunned. “But she’s JANE YOLEN!!” I thought. It was a good reminder that rejection is a constant in every writer’s life. (Even Jane Yolen’s!)

Here’s another idea I’ve been mulling over lately: The problem isn’t the actual rejection. It’s my own response to the rejection. If I’m in the middle of an exciting project or getting good reviews on a recent release—if I’m coming from a place of confidence—a rejection doesn’t faze me.

But if my writing’s going badly, or if I’m worried about income or career direction or any manner of other things, a rejection may blast away my two remaining specks of confidence and utterly devastate me. After one such rejection, I wrote my agent a mewling email saying, “I’ve just been feeling discouraged lately, like I’m never going to sell another book.” (In the following months, both Here Comes the Easter Cat and Bad Bye, Good Bye sold.)

So what’s the good news here? It’s that my response to rejections, unlike the rejections themselves, is something I have at least partial control over. I don’t have to let a rejection sideline me for weeks.

Even if a rejection hits me when I’m down, I can try to look at the big picture.

My experience over the last 13 years has shown me that some rejections are pathways, not dead ends.

An example: in 2002, I sent a picture book manuscript to Kate O’Sullivan at Houghton Mifflin. She sent back my very first personal rejection—an encouraging one that invited me to try her again. So about once a year, I’d send her a new manuscript. She would politely reject it, but tell me to keep trying.

After I wrote The Quiet Book in 2007, I submitted it to a number of editors. I got many rejections. Finally the phone rang! Kate said she loved my manuscript and wanted to acquire it. All those rejections from her ultimately led to the three-book Quiet/Loud series, numerous foreign editions, and our latest book, Bad Bye, Good Bye. Good thing I kept trying!

Would I have liked it if she’d made an offer on that first manuscript? Of course. But I suspect that my submitting manuscripts over the years showed her that I was serious about this writing thing, that I was in it for the long haul.

Hindsight has also allowed me to see that rejections can be blessings in disguise. What if I’d sold The Quiet Book to another editor? Would she have picked Renata Liwska to illustrate it? Not likely. And I can’t imagine another illustrator doing such a spectacular job with that text.

Another positive thing about rejections: they prevent subpar stories from getting into kids’ hands. When I read over some of my early picture book manuscripts, wow am I glad they’re not out there in the world with my name on them. Because they’re not very good. One has no plot. One has seven main characters. Totally understandable: I was learning my craft. But I’m grateful the gatekeepers did their job. Kids should be reading our best work, not our first tries.

But what about the rejections I get today? Do the manuscripts I’m submitting now need more work, or just time to find the right editor? One of the trickiest things for us as writers is to discern whether a manuscript was rejected because of external circumstances or because it’s lacking in some respect.

This is where critique groups are invaluable. You need people in your life who are willing to tell you when you can do better. And you need people to believe in your publication-ready stories when you can’t.

As rejections for The Quiet Book piled up, I kept flashing back to the image of a critique partner at our monthly meeting. I can’t even remember exactly what she said, but she strongly believed in The Quiet Book. Her faith in the manuscript helped carry me through. And that’s a lovely thing we writers can do for each other: we can each be that person, the person who believes in a manuscript even when its creator loses faith.

If you’re in critique groups, especially picture book ones, you see a lot of good manuscripts. But every once in a while, there’s a really special one, one you’re dying to see in print. I can think of three or four manuscripts by friends right now that I love, that I have great faith in, that need to be books. I make sure to tell my friends that. And when the manuscripts are rejected, I tell them again. And again. Because my encouragement may well be the thing that sustains them, that keeps them submitting, just as my friends’ encouragement sustains me.

I’ll leave you with my own writerly revision of the Serenity Prayer:

 

Grant me the courage to continue to submit the manuscripts that work,

the skill to fix the ones that don’t,

and the wisdom to know the difference.

Also, chocolate and coffee would be good.

 

Happy writing. Happy submitting. Keep the faith.

 

Deborah Underwood’s books include Here Comes the Easter Cat; Bad Bye, Good Bye; A Balloon for Isabel; Pirate Mom; and the New York Times bestsellers The Quiet Book and The Loud Book!  She co-wrote the Sugar Plum Ballerina chapter book series, and she has written over 25 nonfiction books on topics ranging from smallpox to ballroom dancing. Her magazine credits include National Geographic Kids, Ladybug, Spider, and Highlights. Please visit her online at DeborahUnderwoodBooks.com.