Rethinking rejections

Why, I had the gift of a rejection just this week, as a matter of fact. And, you know what? It’s fine.

Today, I want to talk about rejection. It’s a whole thing. And, the path to success or something like it can often be paved with the stuff. 

Photo by Daniel Herron on Unsplash

The lure of questioning ourselves in moments of rejection is almost too great. It’s easy to wonder if a rejection means our ideas are not any good, doubt whether or not we have the writing chops we think we do, or, wonder if it’s a reflection on our message and our thought-leadership. Tempting as that may be, fight that. Please. 

Sometimes rejection is a “no,” and sometimes it’s silence. But, I also invite you to consider this: we never have any idea what’s going on at a given outlet or in the lives of a given editor. Maybe we can guess because it’s a big day for news, but maybe a personnel change happened that we have no idea about, or maybe an editor is overwhelmed with life and email that week, or has a migraine and went home, or wants to focus less on politics with the space they are allotted that day, or they accepted a similar piece seconds before your piece came in, or hell, maybe they have a new love interest and are totally distracted by thinking about them all day. You. Never. Know.

But also, often a “no” is an insight, and it behooves us to read it accurately and well. By understanding that none of us are owed an explanation, it becomes easier to realize that any reply at all from an editor is a gift.

More to the point, having been on the receiving side of a firehose of daily pitches myself, the ones that were just too far afield or not even close simply got deleted. The only ones I could realistically personally reply to were the ones that I was either accepting/assigning, or ones that were nicely done and very close but not quite what I needed that day.

When I would write, “please pitch me again,” I meant it. And in my entire time of that, only three writers ever pitched me again. Out of hundreds. I was holding the door open for hundreds of perfectly good writers and only three grabbed the handle.

Once, a few years into that role, I ran into a writer at a networking event and she sheepishly mentioned that she’d pitched me before but that I’d “hated” her work. “I mean, you asked me to pitch you something else, but I know you were just being polite,” she said.

I assured her she’d misread my meaning and we parted with her promising she’d pitch me something else. Later, I looked up her pitch and what she’d pitched me was a really great piece, but it was about a topic I’d just covered earlier that day. Her writing was great, I just wasn’t going to run two pieces on the same topic.

The point, however, is that she’d walked around for over a year and a half believing I “hated” her writing and that she didn’t have a way into that publication. When in reality, I just wanted something else from her.

My point is this: if you get a personal reply from an editor at all, consider it an invitation. And if the reply doesn’t come with a specific invitation to pitch again, write back and thank the editor for their reply and close by saying, “I’ll pitch you something else again soon.” And, then actually do it.