Best of DCWYTBMA: Blogging About Rejection

Thanks to the revised I Help U? tab, there’s been a recent influx of help-seekers. As a result, I’ve been more actively cruising aspiring writer blogs, which reminded me of the following (slightly edited and updated) post from the old Ning site.

A reader writes:

I’m wondering what the consensus is for the writer/bloggers out there about dealing publicly with rejection. I feel like it’s weird to keep blogging about querying and just pretend like rejection doesn’t happen, but then I always hesitate. I don’t want my blog to have a negative vibe, and what if an agent looks at it that day and sees “received another rejection today”?

The first decision you need to make is whether or not your blog is for your friends or for your career.

If the purpose of your blog is to amuse and inform your friends, then by all means blog away about searching for an agent, querying them, and receiving the inevitable rejection notices.

If the purpose of your blog is to build your audience; however, then you might want to skip talking about the road to publication. And the reason why might not be what you’d expect.

First, you are in no danger of violating the positive-thinking tenets of The Secret. Wonderful things happen to vile, negative people all the time.

Second, an agent isn’t going to see that you’ve been rejected and automatically think, “Hey, I need to reject that person, too!” Any agent worth his or her salt knows how to think for themselves.

No, the reason not to write about the process of getting published is that the process of getting publishing is incredibly boring.

For me, there’s nothing worse than reading a well-crafted, intelligent, funny comment to a post by Moonrat or Nathan Bransford, and then clicking on the writer’s name and having my curiosity punished with ramblings about where they are in their draft, or how they just sent a batch of queries out, or how they’re debating between Conference X and Symposium Y.

I’ve yet to see a single trying-to-get-published post where anything actually happened:

• A pack of ninjas never fights the author for control of her query letter as she tries to put it in the mailbox.
• The rejecting agent never sends a minotaur to claim the heart of the author he’s decided not to represent.
• The unpublished author who completes his word-count goal by July 1st is rarely (rarely) transported back in time and given the chance to kill Hitler and avoid WWII.

Rejection (and acceptance for that matter) has no drama, no flavor. Even if I’m rooting for you as a person, when I visit your blog I want to be entertained and/or informed. How is writing about the mundania of publishing going to accomplish that?

Exceptions:

1. To my knowledge, no one in our culture currently owns literary rejection. If this is indeed true, then you could become The Most Rejected Writer in the World. You would inhabit the role of the loser, the reject, the pathetic worm who doesn’t even deserve to be read, much less become published.

Your mandate would be to get your ass rejected as many times, and in as many different ways, as humanly possible, and then obsess about it until it almost destroys the rest of your life. You would become a stand-in for our collective disappointment and frustration with the literary world, and we would love you for it.

2. Another option would be to thinly fictionalize the rejection process. Turn your ups and downs into an mock epic battle or a faux mythology or a grandiose fever dream.

Both of these exceptions hinge on your ability to turn the publishing process into something more than it is. If you can transform rejection (as opposed to merely documenting it) then you might be on to something. Otherwise, hit me with something else.