Rejection Season

4/10/2012

It’s that season.

Book contest rejections are rolling in, and I spent yesterday in a funk because I got not one but two rejections from publishers. Although intellectually, I know that I should just keep on working on the manuscript and sending it out, emotionally, I felt really low. hence a couple of “Woe is me” Twitter and Facebook statuses. Back to the salt mines, I suppose.

Still, I can’t help wondering where the line is. If the manuscript is continually rejected and if you’ve worked and worked on revision after revision, do you continue to send it out or do you scrap it? Is it time for me to write a new book of poems? I don’t think that’s the case, but when I get hit with two manuscript rejections in one day, I tend to meditate on these thoughts.

I read once that Larry Brown had written two entire novel manuscripts (which he trashed) before he wrote Joe. I cling to the fact that Wallace Stevens didn’t publish Harmonium until his 44th birthday. I’ve read that it took J.D. Salinger ten years to write Catcher in the Rye.

So, keep writing, right? Keep revising. Keep sending it out. I’ve got work to do, and I continue to keep working. Some of the wind’s out my sails, but I’ve not yet drifted into a Sargasso sea, but the winds are calm, and I’m caught in a current. Who knows where it will lead?

1 Comment

Anthony Robinson link

4/10/2012 04:01:46 am

Hi Jeff,

I suppose I should say "hang in there," though I suppose in some sense it would be dishonest.

I did the whole contest thing with two of my manuscripts. (There are two others I've never really sent out at all.) After a lot of rejections and a couple of near-misses, I shelved the whole project.

Why? I had a hard time justifying for myself what winning a contest would do for me, for the world. I don't need a book for tenure (and what a horrible reason to have a book) and well, most people who like my poems already know where to find them. So winning a contest suddenly seemed to fall into the "not unwelcome but not particularly sought after" category. You know, you're sitting around the house in the middle of summer and it's hot and the AC is broken but you are, for the most part, pretty content. Then your wife walks in with a bag of popsicles and tosses you a red one. You weren't thinking about a popsicle, and it IS refreshing. So it's nice for a few minutes. Then you go back to being content without a popsicle.

That said, we all need reasons to keep doing what we do. If a book contest win is one of those things for you, then it makes sense you'd keep doing it.

An old friend / semi-mentor of mine, upon hearing that a manuscript of mine had been a finalist for a contest, and upon noting that I was a bit unhappy about not winning, said to me something like "maybe this means you need to get rid of that manuscript. Maybe you need to simply give it up. Do something else." Another old teacher told me the same thing.

I don't know if they were being serious or not. But a few years later, I heeded their advice.

Tony

jeff newerry

Rejection Season

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