Introducing Darwin's Razor...

... or, Rejections Aren't Personal, They're Just That Person

Have you got work on submission at the moment? Are you bracing yourself to send it out? Dodging sending it, doing one-more-tweak, or calculating it’s not enough weeks since Frankfurt (or LBF or Bologna)? Licking your wounds and wanting to give up? Huge sympathy - it’s so, so hard.

Today’s thought is not that you ‘shouldn’t’ feel that way (the Itch doesn’t do ‘shouldn’t’), because you do feel that way, of course you do: your heart is stapled to the page. But here’s a thought which might help a bit.

Some years back, I was booked to teach at a writer’s conference, and as I navigated the venue an attendee stopped and said, ‘Hello, you’re Emma Darwin, aren’t you? I was in a workshop with you a few years ago.’

I smiled and said how nice it was to see them again, which is always is. Then they continued, ‘Of course, if I’d remember you were coming, I wouldn’t have put your book into the recycling last week.’

After a disconcerted moment, I smiled more and said I hoped they’d enjoy the conference, we’d surely bump into each other, and now I must find my room and get sorted out.

As I trotted off I might easily have felt dashed and saddened, perhaps even shamed: here was someone who took writing seriously, but my teaching hadn’t been useful or memorable enough for them to care that I’d be at this conference. And clearly my writing wasn’t compelling enough - maybe not even interesting enough, not even just plain good enough - to keep. If on that day my own writing life had been full of rejections and un-lovedness (to be honest, I can’t remember) I could easily have felt the participant’s words as yet more proof that I was silly and deluded to think that I could write things that people want to pay to read.

Or I might have been mortally, or furiously, offended. First, she’d forgotten I was coming: one of the tutors at a conference they’d paid to attend, running one of the major four-day courses! And then, not only did they not like The Mathematics of Love enough to keep it; not only did they not hand it on to a friend or even a charity shop for some stranger to read … they’d actually sent my brilliantly-reviewed, highly successful debut novel - possibly the only novel ever to be nominated simultaneously for both the Commonwealth Writers and RNA Novel of the Year! - To. Be. Pulped. And the final insult: not only did they hate my book that much, they wanted me to know they had hated it !!!!!

But though I was disconcerted, I wasn’t offended, or saddened. In fact, as I unpacked I found myself laughing.