99 Letters of Rejection on the Wall...

(Okay not physical letters -- who uses snail mail anymore?)

I read that J.K. Rowling was rejected twelve times before the first Harry Potter book was accepted for publication. I read this, and I think I actually laughed out loud. Twelve. Oh you poor thing. That must have been horrible for you, to have been rejected twelve whole times.

It's probably not exactly advised for a screenwriter to talk about how many times they've been rejected until after they've had a fantastic success or two (at which time it becomes one of those super cool success/encouragement stories that the rest of us can read and cry some more over, since it's not about us...).

But I'm gonna be real with you here for a sec, you one or two not-really-faithful readers of mine: my writing has been rejected literally more times than I can count. It would be impossible for me to get an accurate count since this endeavor goes back about eighteen years (no, I'm not actually super old. I tried to get my first novel published when I was twelve. So many things to say about that: yes, I was a hardcore nerd; no, I did not have any friends; no, it was not ever published; yes, it was absolute crap; no, self-publishing wasn't really a thing twelve years ago like it is now, and I am eternally grateful for this because it was embarassingly bad).

After trying to get that first novel published for years, I also had several short stories rejected in my teens. I wrote a few more novels, most of which I actually recognized were not any good. Then I managed to get an early draft of what way later became my published novel Sydney and Calvin Have a Baby sort-of accepted for publication (conditionally -- I would need to do some revising!) at a tiny publisher. But they nearly went under and, oh cool look, one more rejection.

In the screenwriting world, where I've been focusing my efforts for the last *coughs* years, rejection doesn't always work the same way.

Okay, how do I actually calculate rejections here? Failing to advance in a contest? Sure. An industry contact never gets back to me about what they thought of my script? Yup. A queried manager tells me he didn't think the script was a good fit for him? Absolutely.

But how about the hundreds of queries I've sent that are met by nothing but silence? Can I count those? Because if so, I've gotta be up to over a thousand rejections by now.

I admit that I go through phases of excitement and discouragement when it comes to "marketing" myself and my scripts. I might have a script place in a contest or get some good feedback on one from a friend in the industry and think to myself, "This is it. I can totally get repped now. Time to query up a storm." And then the defening silence hits in response. Oh wait, did someone reply? Nope, that's just my email service telling the address I've sent to is no good.

Even though I've had requests for reads through queries, it can be very difficult to motivate myself to do them because the percentage of actual responses (even "No thank you" ones) is so very small. So when I happened upon a tweet from some random fiction writer who claimed she had a goal for reaching one hundred rejections for her work this year, I was intrigued.

It was a novel way to look at rejection (and trust me when I say that I've waded through many stages of grief over them in the past). Could I benefit from treating the whole issue as a sort of contest to see how many rejections I could wrack up?

This was at the end of September that I was having these thoughts. I thought it might be lofty, but I was considering trying for 99 rejections over the course of the next three months.

Well, here I am at the end of just one month. And if you count queries met by pure silence, and don't count the two people I have a legitimate hope to hear back from yet, I am already over one hundred rejections. Fun stuff.

It can definitely feel like bashing my head against the wall. And the intended comfort from people in the industry who say things like, "It's just so hard to get in that damn door," don't really do much to make it sting less (probably at least partially because you'd kinda think my writing credit on a produced feature would go a ways to prop that door open at least a little, and it totally does not).

But this challenge to myself to see how many rejections (as opposed to those rare successes) I could wrack up did actually help a little. This way I can feel like if I bash my head against this metaphorical door long enough, it will have to give way eventually.

(Also, please ignore the cat in this stock photo of a door. I hate cats and would never have chosen it if the rest of the pic didn't look so fitting and lovely.)