No matter how good you think you are, how many people tell you that your work is fabulous, eventually you will start to submit your work to agents and publishers. It’s then that you find out that perhaps you aren’t quite as good as you think, and the rejections start to arrive.
It would be easy to get dispondant when your hard work is rejected, but you have to power through the dissapointment and look to the next opportunity.
Stephen King, in his seminal book “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft” describes how he took pride in nailing his rejection strips with a spike (yes, even great writers like King got rejected too!):
By the time I was fourteen (and shaving twice a week whether I needed to or not) the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing. By the time I was sixteen I’d begun to get rejection slips with hand-written notes a little more encouraging than the advice to stop using staples and start using paperclips.
King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (pp. 41-42). Hodder & Stoughton. Kindle Edition.
I decided that this was a good method so have implemented it myself using modern technology (big bulldog clips). In the image above, the rejections are on the left, and the acceptance letters are on the right – position currently vacant.
My advice is not to worry too much when you get a rejection. It doesn’t mean you are a bad writer, just that your work might not yet have found the correct niche in a saturated market.