Hey everyone! Can you believe that we only have one more post after this before the new year? And the last post will be on Christmas! It will be my Christmas gift to you all and I hope that you can enjoy it. It might be going up a little bit earlier than the last few months because I want to get it out of the way so I can spend time doing things with friends and family. But todays post is a good post for nearing the end of the year and the end of projects. So, without further ado…
A Relationship With Rejection
As the end of the year is a time of reflection on the past, I wanted to make these last two posts reflective. So, this week’s post is a reflection on my relationship with rejection and hopefully through this reflection you can find some useful advice on where you are on your journey with rejection and if you know you are a few steps ahead of me, let me know what the next possible step is ahead of time, so I am prepared. Haha.
I first began writing when I was in the third grade. I loved writing. I began writing because my third-grade teacher had us do a writing prompts every time before our English lessons. At first, I thought it was weird because I had never had any person ask me to write my own ideas and put them into a story but after the first few months, I absolutely loved it. I have a rare few memories from that early age of my life but how I developed my love for writing was one of them. The first story I ever wrote was a short book called The Cave. I had just spent time learning about high tides and I was obsessed with mythological monsters. I was also a very morbid child so death and death scenes in stories fascinated me.
The Cave was a story about three girls (who I think were supposed to be modeled after me, my little sister, and one of my cousins) who sneak into a cave they have been told not to enter. It’s a sea cave near the ocean and as high tide comes in, they are trapped. They decide to explore further in the cave because they are trapped. By the end of the story all 3 of the little girls are dead, each having been killed by a different mythical monster after being chased and they aren’t found for a long time until an even higher tide than the one that trapped them washes the bodies out of the cave and into the sea.
It sounds cooler than it actually was. It was not some great literary masterpiece. It was written by a 7-year-old. But all in all, it had a good plot for a story designed and thought up by a 7-year-old. My third-grade teacher loved it and told me it was the best thing she’d ever read (an exaggeration but appreciated). I was a talented writer from a young age. I was told this countless times from the time I was 7 until about 12 when I had my first rejection. I entered a short story into a writing contest. It was my best piece of writing. I didn’t win. I didn’t get second. I didn’t get third. I didn’t even get honorable mentions.
What did I do with my first rejection? I was so pissed off and angry that I swore I was never going to write again because people can’t see talent when its right in their face. But then my awesome dad suggested, off hand, that maybe I should read the other entries before I decided that the judges were just blind. And so, I did.
They were amazing. They were miles above my own writing and even the honorable mention stories were better than mine. It was a very humbling moment. I thought about it for months afterward as I tried to decide what to do with the new information. I finally decided after a lot of thought that maybe the problem didn’t lie with the judges, as I had thought in my pride, but rather in my writing.
What did I learn from my first rejection? That there is a difference between talent and skill. I had talent. My best talent was always in how I presented the voice of my character. But I never had any skill and because I was told I had talent I assumed that meant I had skill and didn’t need to learn to improve. So, from the time I was 12 I not only continued to write but I continued to learn more about writing. I began attending writing conferences, reading books on writing, going to writing groups, making writer friends, and doing everything I could to learn and grow.
My next series of rejections – and the last ones I’m going to mention in this post because there are LOTS more – were for a yearly contest at a writers’ conference I attended every year. I had never won a single contest. But I learned from the previous rejection every time. I took what I learned from those rejections and became a better writer and continued to attend the conferences and enter the contest again the next year. The best part of that contest for me was when you received your packet at the end of the conference it contained notes, comments, and suggestions by the judges who read and judged your entry. I continued to work to improve myself.
My last year attending the conference (because I was going to be too old for the age range) I wrote a new entry for the contests and I used all the skills I had learned from other writers and my previous rejections and I wrote a piece. I won second place. The first time I had ever placed in a writing contest. I was in shock. My rejections had paid off.
Rejections are sad. Rejections hurt a lot. They hurt your pride, they sometimes can feel like personal attacks, they make you feel inadequate, and they can make you never want to write again. But the point I am trying to make by using my own experiences as illustrations is that rejection is part of the writing process. Rejection is part of becoming a better writer. If you give up every time you are rejected, you’ll never write that amazing book everyone knows you can write. Don’t give up. Learn from it. Be humble enough to recognize that you are an amazing writer but that there is always room for improvement. And eventually you’ll succeed. That’s not to say that there won’t be more rejection after your success but growing from failure is what leads to more success. So, keep going! Don’t stop!
As we near the end of this year we only have one more post. It’s coming out on Christmas as my last present to you this year! I hope you enjoy it. I will also be announcing the new series which will also be the first series of next year. I am excited to not only have made it through a whole new year but also to have had a good time getting here. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, become a blog page member, share, and follow me on social media through the links at the bottom of the page. And remember,
Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!
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