Rejection and revision. These things might seem to be a straightforward (though probably emotional) binary matter of no to this and yes to that, right? But what if no is really an invitation to innumerable possibilities, and yes is actually a tangle of noes to things our imaginations have been holding onto? And what if this is a good thing?
As a writer, looking at rejections and revisions this way has been a tool in my belt I wish I had been able to access much earlier in my creative life — but that’s life, and certainly the creative process. Still, to utilize this perspective requires trust and, maybe, the skills of a good dinner party host.
Being rejected is difficult. (Maybe there’s a writer out there who has built up the armor the rest of us dream of, and the rejections make no sound when they hit, and leave no trace upon them.) Whether it’s a whole manuscript or poem, or an idea within a work being rejected, there’s a sting. We give a little bit of ourselves to each creative endeavor, so, especially when I was a beginning writer, and I heard, “No thanks, not this,” I heard, “Nope. Not you.”
The internal (or outward) retort to any rejection was, “Why?!” A fair question, one I do think we can, to use workshop-speak, “get curious” about. But now, I consider the rejection a question in and of itself, an invitation: “Want to come and look again?”
A rejection — especially if it comes with feedback — can be an invitation to revisit, to find something that may be out of place, something living in our mind and not on the page, some error of judgment in or outside of the work. (Maybe this was the wrong publisher/agent/journal for me; maybe I pitched it at the wrong angle and the work didn’t match the expectation.) The only place we can go back in time is in our writing, and rejections are our chance to do just that. When I have a poem of mine rejected, I try to trust that 1) this is an opportunity, and 2) because I am the writer, I know how to use it. What do I do with this invitation? Extend another … I invite my writing to dinner.
At dinner with my writing, I sit down with my sounds, line breaks, subject, choices, and themes — not because someone told me something might be “wrong” with them, but because I made them and I, presumably, love the work. Like a good dinner party host, I make sure the time we spend is leisurely. I ask questions of everyone, keep the conversation balanced, I listen and watch, I make everyone feel welcome. (Yes, I make snacks, a meal that feels appropriate to the season and the writing, and drinks.) Through this exercise, I trust that I can discover (and write) different things to love, different ways to love, things I didn’t know I loved in my work. Spending this kind of time with my writing has never been a waste of effort — either that poem, improved, has gone on to be published elsewhere (not always!), or I learned more about how to revise myself and refine to an even better place the next time around.
(Side note: We also must remember that every writer, at some point [or multiple points] received more rejections than acceptances. Gertrude Stein, Stephen King, Maya Angelou, George Orwell, Louisa May Alcott, William Faulkner … all of them. Maybe there’s some writer somewhere for whom this is not true, but, for the purposes of this essay, and using the very slightest of poetic license, I want to empathically say, ALL of them!)
Inviting our writing to dinner also applies to noes that come in revisions. This is where I’ll take my writer’s hat off and share a different perspective. As a literary agent, I watch writers engage in this process. One novelist I work with, I’ll call her W, has taught me a lot about this kind of engagement in revision, especially when it comes to character arcs, depth, and motivation. During an early edit of her manuscript, I was nervous about how she’d interpret the kind of character revision being asked of her — even though I thought the feedback was astute and could strengthen the book. W saw the character notes and basically said, “Oh, I’ll get to spend time with them again! I was missing [character name] and [character name].” She saw this as check-in time with her characters, gathered around a table, to see where the missing dots were, and let her time with them guide her toward connecting those dots. She trusted herself and the work she’d already done. She made some significant changes to those characters, some unexpected, that changed the course of the book, and it made a better story that we couldn’t imagine being any other way. I’ve watched this approach to every no, big and small, serve her time and time again.
On to yes. Yes is a wonderful thing — one of the best words a writer can hear. Yes means we did it, we’re published, we’re an author.
But yes takes on a different meaning when we are writing and in revisions — where yes is also no. This sometimes comes as a confusing shock. Yes arises as we are making decisions or answering to editors (or ourselves) …
If, yes, her hair is brown, everything else I’ve written about her screams brown hair, then, no, it is not red or blond, and I can never describe it as May’s first hay-cutting, baled in my bed, even if I can’t shake that line from my head and don’t want to give it up.
If, yes, the character decides he will leave his hometown for good in Chapter 5 rather than 12, then, no, the author can’t explore that story line in which that character connects with his fourth-grade gym teacher still living there, that could have been so gut-wrenching, and now that gym teacher character is moot.
With yes, sometimes we have to mourn all the things we may have imagined for our words, our characters, our plots. We might fight choosing a direction or making a decision, for fear of losing all those possibilities. We have to trust that our writer’s gut — when creating, or when responding to guidance from editors — knows how to problem-solve, that we are following clues that we left for ourselves..
What about everything we leave on the digital or mental cutting-room floor? That’s where we can decide that the no might be a “not now.” Maybe my woman had to be a brunette in that short story. But someday, some woman I’m writing will have blond hair that is “May’s first hay-cutting, baled in my bed.” One day, that author will stumble upon a character similar to the one she cut in that gym-teacher story line who gets to live out a main character arc that’s even more satisfying than the original. And, sometimes, we learn what we can say no to — and that’s a very good skill to have, too. In all cases, nothing is ever wasted.
None of it — the rejection, nor the revision — is as black-and-white as a yes/no. In each case, we need to get comfortable being discerning with ourselves, things we make and things we care about. We need to see the invitation to open, when we’re shut down. When faced with choosing, we must allow the death of the many possibilities and trust that we’ve chosen the best yes. Is this all the same thing as “Kill your darlings”? I don’t think so. Even with darlings, I think we should invite them to dinner and trust ourselves to see what’s what.
In signing off, I want to say I don’t believe any craft to have a one-size-fits-all process. There may be as many ways to write as there are writers. I think, just as art helps us tap into universals — truths and beauty — there are universal threads woven into each artist’s unique process. Some threads we pick up, some we don’t. It’s nice to know what strands there might be for us to weave with.
Adriana Stimola (she/her) is a literary agent and writer who takes a personal and immersive approach to her work. She represents authors across many nonfiction genres, and select novelists. Her poetry has been published in numerous literary journals and she is the current Poet Laureate of West Tisbury.
