What You Should Learn (And Not Learn) From Writing Rejection
Rejection can teach us a thing or two, but it often teaches us the wrong lessons. Here's what to learn and unlearn.
Rejection as a writer is like death, taxes, and spam texts offering you lucrative work-from-home opportunities: utterly inevitable.
Every writer deals with rejection throughout their career. And I mean lots of rejection.
In comedy writing, rejection includes the obvious things:
you send your writing to a publication and they don’t accept it.
you audition to—or apply for—a specific comedy gig or job, and you don’t get it.
you try to find an agent or a publisher, and it doesn’t work out.
etc!
But it also includes how audiences react to our work:
you put some work online—maybe some comedy you think is really good—and you get no reaction: crickets.
maybe you put some work online, and you get haters, or just some rando who slides into your DMs to tell you, “I hated this thing you wrote! You suck.”
you try to build an audience on some platform, but your audience isn’t growing. You work and work, but you don’t get traction.
etc!
All of that is inevitable if you put yourself in the game.
We never stop thinking about rejection because it’s ubiquitous and frustrating.
The rejection won’t ever completely go away, so it’s not exactly the right question to ask, “how do we prevent rejection?” Answer: stop ever trying!
The better question is: given that rejection is inevitable, what should we learn and not learn from it?
Here are some thoughts on what I’ve learned from my own numerous rejections in comedy over the years.
Avoid indulging in anger or negative emotions
It’s normal to be upset when our beautiful work doesn’t get the reception we wanted. A little upset is okay and normal.
The problem comes when we indulge the upset and turn it into anger and wallowing. This is bad for the obvious reason that it causes unnecessary suffering.
But it’s also bad because it takes time and energy away from actually writing and accomplishing something useful. And it spends that time and energy on self-hatred, wallowing, blaming audiences/gatekeepers for not acknowledging our “brilliance”—and all the nearby, inbred cousins of those emotions.
I’ve found a few cures for this.
One cure is to have a lot of irons in the fire. When you get one piece of writing rejected, it stings far less when you have other exciting pieces in the works. You’ll shrug and think, “okay, that one didn’t land. But I have five more where that came from.” Having multiple ideas, pieces, drafts, and projects takes your mind off the rejection and onto “okay, what’s next?”
A second cure is to remind yourself that your rejections are all transparent to you, while everyone else’s are private. Everyone is getting rejected all the time, all over the place. But you don’t see that. Instead, you only see your rejections, and you look out into the world (social media mostly) and see all the successful things that make it into the world. Well, all those people are getting rejected too, they’re just not posting about it.
A third cure is to take that energy you get from a rejection and transmute it into working on your craft. Use disappointment as positive fuel. A little bit of “I’ll show you, you son of a gun” energy isn’t a bad thing, as long as it stays kind of positive and doesn’t turn into some bizarre revenge fantasy. Lots of great artists have used rejection as fuel. So, why not you?
Can we learn something positive from rejection? Yes, I think we can learn from patterns of rejection.
What’s dangerous is overgeneralizing from slim data.
Look for rejection patterns, not one-offs
Imagine you’re having coffee with single friend of yours, and this friend is regaling you with amusing stories from their dating life.
Then the friend says this: “I went on a date last Thursday, and it seemed to go okay. I liked the other person, and we had a good conversation. But afterwards they ghosted me.”