by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

I saw her for the first time on the playground.

The sun was shining, and her hair, so blonde it was almost white, glistened in the light. She turned and looked at me with eyes as blue as the sky above the smog line in Los Angeles. And I felt something in my chest, a burning of some sort.

I was only in third grade, but I knew I was in love.

Now the question was what to do about it.

I did not get the impression Susan was at all interested in my amour. I was not adept at talking to girls, having only two older brothers. I did, however, know how to show off. I was a great kickball player, so I tried to impress her on the kickball diamond.

She was not impressed.

I walked to school, entering and exiting through the front gate. She also walked to school, but entered through the back gate. So I came up with a plan. After school one day, I waited for Susan to head out and strolled along so I met her—what a coincidence!—at the back gate.

We went out together, and I started walking with her. I made some sort of comment, though I can’t remember what it was. Maybe it was about the book our teacher was reading to us, a Henry Huggins book by Beverly Cleary.

Anyway, we were halfway down the block when she turned to me and said, “Just because I’m walking with you doesn’t mean you’re my boyfriend.” The way she said that last word was a killer. She was mocking me. She reached in my chest and pulled out my heart, and said, “You won’t be needing this anymore” and tossed it in the gutter.

“I know,” I said, in a bid to salvage a shred of dignity. I endured the whole walk to her house. Then began the lonely march back to the school, through the back gate, across the playground, through the front gate, and home. I drowned my sorrows with drink. Chocolate milk, I think it was.

I didn’t know it then, but I was being prepared for the life of a writer.

Rejection Has Always Been Part of this Business

Before the self-publishing era, all writers got rejection slips and letters from magazines, agents, editors. We got used to seeing lines like, This does not fit our current needs.

The Peanuts cartoon strip had a bunch of strips where Snoopy was trying to be a writer. In one, Snoopy is reading a letter he’d just received. “Dear contributor, thank you for submitting your story to our magazine. To save time, we are enclosing two rejection slips, one for this story and one for the next story you send us.”

Then self-publishing came along. Free from editorial rejection, many a writer put their book up on Amazon, and faced another kind of rejection—from the marketplace.

We all have to learn to deal with the Big R.

I knew of a writer who got one of those wild, big fat 1990s contracts. But his thriller failed to catch enough fire to make back most of the advance. Thus, the next book in the two-book contract received no support. The author was dropped, and could not get another contract from a major publisher. He was, in my opinion, a very good writer. He handled the Big R by turning to the bottle. But he battled out of that and last I saw he had done a few books with a small publisher. And good for him. 

What you have to do is accept that rejection is perpetual aspect of this business. It will happen to all of us. You must be ready to deal with it, and the best way to do that is by writing your way out.

When my son was first pitching Little League, he had a tendency to let a bad play or a home run upset him. So early on I made this rule. “You are allowed one ‘Dang it!’ And you can hit your glove as hard as you want. But that’s it. Then you go back to pitching to the next guy.”

That’s what he learned to do, and in fact won a championship game that way.

So you get a rejection. You can have one “Dang it!” (or its adult equivalent). I’ll let you feel it for fifteen minutes. But that’s it. Don’t hang onto it. Don’t go moaning all over the Internet. Don’t yell at your spouse or kick your dog.

Instead, turn that energy into action. Get back to your keyboard.

Any further advice on handling rejection?

And Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there!