Inspired by rejection?
“There is nothing to
writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
- Ernest
Hemingway
Every writer knows what a rejection is.
It’s that proverbial knife to the heart – the slap to the face. But worse, it
is the moment when a writer begins to second guess themselves, to wonder if the
path they have chosen was the wrong one.
As a writer, ideas float in and out of
your brain like boats in a harbor. The voices in your head will not cease, and
the only way to get them to quiet down is to place fingers to keyboard and
write. Over time you produce articles, essays, short stories, and possibly a
novel. Hours, days, months, and sometimes years go into perfecting your
masterpieces. Plot, sub plot, and characterization, are all over analyzed.
Sentence structure, spelling, and punctuation have been checked, re-checked,
and checked again. It isn’t until you finally feel a sense of completion with
your piece that you decide to move onto the next step; searching for a
publisher.
You dust off your Writers Market, wipe down the keyboard and spend countless hours
reading and re-reading submission guidelines. Every detail is memorized until
you’ve narrowed your search down to a list of potential prospects. The next few
weeks are dedicated to writing the best damn query letter ever. The guidelines
have been followed. You hold your breath and email your letter. If you’re lucky
you will receive a confirmation email, but sometimes this isn’t the case, and
so you’re left to wonder if the editor got your query at all. At last you wake
one morning to find a reply. With shaky fingers you click on the message and
read “Dear Writer.” You have been rejected. Your query was not even good enough
to require addressing you by name. Smack.
In the beginning of the rejection process
you can understand a publisher’s plight. You are a new writer with little or no
other published pieces, and minimal experience. However, as a writer you should
know, there will always be rejections. The question is will it be easier to
take? Will the knife only venture in a little bit, just grazing the skin? Will
there be no more slaps to the face, your pride staying intact? The answer is
no.
As a writer you do not put fingers to
keyboard without depositing a sliver of yourself. And so, because your writing
becomes personal, a rejection will hurt. Some may go deeper than others, but
they will all cut just the same.
It
is a ritual for me, after receiving a rejection, to find myself at the
bookstore. Reminiscent to Time Square on New Year’s Eve, the bookstore is my
happy place. I feel exhilarated when I walk through the glass doors and anticipate
what my next new read will be. But I often find myself amongst the tall shelves
and smell of paper for another reason. There is something else – something
deeper. And maybe you have to be a writer to understand, but the bookstore is
the one place I can go and be surrounded by those who trudged the “writer’s
path” long before me. It is a place void of judgment. No one here knows about
my battles as a writer, my scars invisible to all. I can walk through the
aisles and run my fingers down the short and tall bindings playing refuge to
the words written by some of my favourite authors. It is here I take Charlotte
Bronte’s Jayne Eyre, and read her
words as if she is standing right before me. I can clutch Ernest Hemmingway’s A Farewell to Arms and know he revised
every word a hundred times. I wonder
if Charles Dickens felt the burst of emotion I do when I’ve completed a piece
of literature. I sit cross-legged and thumb through Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice knowing she felt the
same pain I do with a rejection. And
in my private moment of self-pity, my eyes are opened. I have not been the only
one to labor over pages and pages, trying desperately to make them perfect. I
am not the only one whose dream was squashed with the words “I’m sorry” or
“Dear Writer.”
I am not alone. I will never be alone as I
carve out my small niche in the writing world. I am surrounded by the best. The
“greats” I aspire to be—the authors who have all been there, and still
prevailed. They survived amongst the piles and piles of rejection letters. They
picked themselves up, and pulled the knife from their heart, sat down at their
desks and started all over again. They carried on. And so must I.
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Title: HAZARDOUS UNIONS
Genre: Historical Romance
Authors: Alison Bruce & Kat Flannery
Publisher: Imajin Books
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Kat Flannery’s love of history shows in the
novels she writes. She is an avid reader of historical, suspense, paranormal,
and romance. When not researching for her next book, Kat can be found running
her three sons to hockey and lacrosse. She’s been published in numerous
periodicals. This is Kat’s third book and she is hard at work on her next.
