What To Do After A Rejection Letter?

It’s that time of the week – Tuesday Discussion.

For those new to my blog, each week I post a topic (relevant to my WIP) and try to unravel the mysteries and perspectives of it. I haven’t posted in a while but I want to stay on the topic of rejection letters.

Here is last weeks post, My First Rejection Letter and today I want to question:

What did you do after your rejection letter?

Don’t panic. Everything is okay. If somebody has taken the time to read your submission and considered what is wrong with your book, you should also take the time to consider that criticism and learn from it.

So if a rejection letter says your prose is ponderous and pretentious, or your story is tedious and byzantine, you might want to take a hard, critical look at what you have written.

What did am I doing after my rejection letter?

Editing and reading.

Editing your work is a skill that can be learned. To rephrase sentence structures and using simple easy words to convey meaningful and flowing paragraphs; editing is the final strokes of the paintbrush.

I believe reading novels, for pleasure and also to see what other writers are doing. Keep a note on how they introduced characters, protagonists dealing with conflict and close scenes with a smooth transition to the next scene. We learn to recognize good writing by reading.

The reality is that we’re going to receive more rejections than acceptances, and that’s okay.

Here are some good things you should remember about rejection.

1) That rejection letter means you are a REAL writer.
2) You completed a manuscript. A whole story.
3) You wrote both a query letter and a synopsis; something that can be harder than writing an entire novel.
4) When you were done, you looked through guidelines and found a publishing house that handles your kind of story, or an agent who accepted the genre you write in.
5) With dreams overflowing, you addressed that envelope and mailed your baby, sending it out into the cold, hard world.
6) You used up more patience than you even knew you possessed, watching that mail box and waiting to hear something, anything…probably for months at the least.
7) When you got that rejection, you didn’t give up, or you wouldn’t be reading this.

What was your process after your rejection letter?

Post your comments and answers below. If you think someone has an interesting point of view and answer, please invite them or share this post with them.