It is easy for a writer to feel like Sisyphus, rolling the boulder uphill only to have it roll back down before he can reach the top. You send a story to a lit mag and they reply that your work was a finalist but unfortunately did not make the final cut. Or they tell you that your story made it to the second round of readings but no further. Or you feel you have written as well in a story as you possibly can and all you get is rejection, form letter after form letter without a personal comment. It is only natural at such times to question your ability.
But I say take heart. Rejection does not mean you are wretched, and it should not mean you quit. It should not mean you should throw in the towel and wail, “I never had any talent in the first place!”
Why? Because nowadays there are thousands of writers like you, in your same quandary. Because for every issue of a publication, the editors receive hundreds of submissions, with perhaps only three slots to fill. Because for every issue perhaps a hundred good stories fall by the wayside. Every writer these days is in the position of seven against Thebes—seemingly insurmountable odds. The seven failed, were overcome. But it does not always end that way. During World War II Audie Murphy captured a whole platoon of Germans by himself simply by making them think they were surrounded. And time and again novelists will tell of having submitted their book to every novel publisher and started over again before finally being accepted–some of these books have become bestsellers.
The literary trade is not for the faint-hearted. So buck up. With courage and persistence you, like so many before you, can succeed. Small armies beat large ones all the time, just as a small band of Athenians routed the Persian hordes and destroyed the largest empire ever known to Western man at that epoch of history. Some of the greatest writers in world literature have had to self-publish, including some of the greatest in America (Emerson, Whitman, and Melville, to name three).
If you have been experiencing the grief of too much rejection, just clear your head, and take a walk in pleasant surroundings, or listen to music, or take your significant other out to dinner, and on the morrow renew your campaign with vigor and resolve. This, I swear to you, is the only sensible way to take rejection.
David Massey has a Master’s Degree in English Literature After 1660 from The University of South Carolina and while there studied creative writing under George Garrett and James Dickey. He turned belatedly to a serious engagement with the art of fiction but has made progress of late, publishing a half-dozen short stories in the last two and a half years. Before turning his attention to other pursuits, he had a long career in journalism.
