I have various friends who have various careers. Child psychology, chemistry, teaching, sales, horticulture, carpentry, plumbing. They go to work and at the end of each week or each month, they receive a check. They themselves would admit that they probably don’t achieve perfection every single one of those weeks or months. Often, they’re a little preoccupied or clumsy or forgetful or inattentive or just plain tired. But there isn’t somebody there at the end of their pay cycle to say, “Sorry, bud, no check this week. You dozed off for thirty seconds at the Wednesday afternoon personnel meeting.”

Writers, on the other hand, who can spend hours, weeks, months, years writing one story, one article, one novel, and quite a good story, article, or novel, for that matter, face the slimmest chance of acceptance, let alone payment.

Rejection. How do writers deal with it? WHY do writers deal with it?

For some, that first rejection is also the last. For others, it becomes a kind of routine process – shock, depression, anger, new resolve. I mean, what did that editor/agent/publisher know, anyway? And eventually, the rejections themselves may become something of a prize. Some, almost a kind of acceptance. I actually felt elation the first time a New Yorker editor penned something on my rejection letter. That “Sorry” made me ridiculously happy. I never did get accepted at the New Yorker, but the letters I eventually received on a regular basis, expressing regret, asking to see more, signed with the editor’s first name, came to seem just as good. I hadn’t climbed K2, but I’d gotten to Base Camp. Should I have expected more? Was I being toyed with?

There are all sorts of games writers play to avoid rejection. Not writing is one. Slow writing, another. Never finishing, the most common of all. Writers live on hope. Hope only gets dashed if the writer receives a rejection. If one puts the chance of rejection off as long as possible, then hope continues to exist. Besides, what does a writer DO once the work-in-progress is done? Start another? Does it seem reasonable for a contractor to spend another five years building a house when the one he just spent five years building won’t sell? Or might he consider a secure job at Home Depot?

There’s got to be something wrong with us.

We spend ten years writing a novel, and then we acquiesce to agents and editors who make unreasonable demands. No multiple submissions. Proposals that used to be their job to create. Proposals complete with dust jacket blurbs, market strategies, and pre-arranged reviews from known writers. If I could come up with a guaranteed market strategy, I’d be doing it for a living. And how am I supposed to meet known writers when I’ve been at my computer for ten years? As for no multiple submissions…if it takes an agent two months to respond to a query, a writer can get nowhere very fast in a year.

Years ago, there was a movement to give agents and editors some guidelines; and writers, some respect. It didn’t take. And I suppose most agents and editors are aware of the fact that they’re dealing with egos and feelings, not just nuisances. Still, the advent of e-query seems to have made things a little bit worse. Now, e-responses are often sent only if there’s interest. “If you haven’t heard from us in six to eight weeks, we’re not interested.” And it’s rumored that there’s a higher percentage of rejections to e-queries than to paper queries. As if a writer can become even more faceless, more anonymous, more disposable?

Don’t give in, get assertive. Send out thirty queries at a time. Experience tells me you’ll get three positive responses. If you get a negative response that comes back so fast and in such pristine condition you know it was never even looked at, send the entire manuscript and thank them for asking to see it. Enter lots of contests. They’ve certainly taken the place of the short story market. Self-publish. There’s something strangely exhilarating about it, even though there’s no advance.

Take the sting out of your rejection by remembering the famous ones…Hemingway, Nabokov, Faulkner, Rowling…who received dozens and dozens of rejections before someone actually read what they’d written. And then there’s always that final thing—posthumous fame. If it’s good enough for Shakespeare and Melville and Bronte and Emily Dickenson, then it’s probably good enough for me, too.