Hello, Wonderful Writers! Not too long ago, someone in the Electric 18’s group shared a video by Brene´ Brown, Ph.D. I majorly LOVE this woman’s work. In case you’re not familiar with her, she’s a researcher who focuses on studying shame and vulnerability. If you haven’t read her books, I really recommend them all. She talks about how being vulnerable is one of the most courageous things we can do, that vulnerability comes with great rewards, “because vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, trust, empathy, creativity, and innovation.”
 
That’s right.
 
What she’s discovered through her research is that without vulnerability, we cannot create. If we’re going to make art, or put ourselves in the “arena,” as Teddy Roosevelt called it, then there is “one guarantee. You will get your ass kicked. If courage is a value you hold, this is a consequence. You can’t avoid it.” And who does this ass-kicking she speaks of? The critics. There are many kinds of critics (and I highly recommend you hear her talk or read her books for the full discussion), but today I want to focus on one—the worst critic.

The worst critic, she tells us, is ourselves.
 
I’ve always loved doing art. Drawing, painting, crafts. You name it. Back in my teen years, I did a lot of sketching. There’s nothing like a perfectly-sharpened pencil and a blank sheet of paper. There’s nothing, alright—nothing scarier. I’d sit there, thinking about what I wanted to draw, the tip of my pencil hovering over the page, and I’d be stuck. What if my drawing was a ginormous failure? What if the image I had in my head didn’t match up with what I achieved on the page? What if my subject was sucky or corny or boring? And of course, even though there was no risk of this happening—like ever, because I was never taking my sketch pad out of the safety of my house—but what if someone saw this sucky, corny, boring hot mess of a drawing? In my head, even if I locked up my pad in a steel safe, I could catastrophize until I ended up at school with the sheet of paper somehow magically glued to my butt, unbeknownst to me, out in the world for all to see.

Yeah. It gets scary in there sometimes.

So, what did I do in response to these “gremlins?” I armored-up. I still put pencil to page, but I didn’t draw my own creations. I copied photos or book covers. Someone else already decided those pictures were worth making, so I played it safe and copied them. Sure, I was practicing my skill, and I got better at drawing, but I wasn’t creating. I wasn’t making art. Thinking back now, it would have been better if I had made a terrible version of the awesomeness in my head, even if the outcome was cringe-worthy. Better because it would have been mine. I would have made art.
 
Now, I’m creating a new kind of art with my stories, and I can’t help but wonder if this is the same process that causes us to get stuck. That causes us to stall partway through a work in progress. Are we so afraid of making a sucky, corny, boring hot mess of a book that we can’t create? Is our fear of vulnerability causing us to armor-up so securely that all we do is cut off the natural flow of our wondrous imagination? And all this even before a single soul has laid eyes upon what we’ve written—all except for ourselves. The worst gremlin of them all. 

Hello, wonderful writers! Welcome back to my blog series, It’s a Writer Thing. Today I want to spend some time talking about the dreaded r-word, rejection.
 
some of you may know that back in May I signed with my agent (which you can read about here), and just about a month ago, we received our first offer for the publication of my debut novel (which you can read about here).
 
In the midst of all this, I wrote my 9th short (a silly, horror story), for an anthology. Long story short (no pun intended), it wasn’t selected. (Boo!) But, my dear friend, G Marie Merante’s story was, and you can check out the book, UNLEASHED: MONSTERS VERSUS ZOMBIES, right here. Of course, like any dedicated writer, I sent my piece out to a different market, another anthology. Well, two days ago, that second press rejected my poor little story. So, I sent it right out the next morning to a horror lit mag. A few hours later, I had my third rejection for this piece. That was 2 rejections in about 15 hours. (BTW, I recently counted up my total number of rejections, and I won’t share that tally here, but trust me, it’s a healthy sum.)

In response to this news, my hubby asked, “What’s rejection like now that you sold your first book.” I pondered that for a moment. My answer was: “It sucks just as much today as it did the first time.” And that’s the truth, 100%. But, I also want to suggest a cognitive reframe, because I also believe 100% that rejections really don’t matter. Not at all.
 
How can that be?
 
In THE ART OF WORK, Jeff Goines defines “The 7 characteristics of a calling,” which include Apprenticeship and Practice. How do these concepts translate into rejection not mattering? First, one quote from Viktor Frankl: “What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him…the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.”
 
No, I’m not trying to say that it’s the suffering and struggle that we should embrace, but in some regard, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Back to Goines: in THE ART OF WORK, Goines talks about how we need to remember that Apprenticeship and Practice are essential steps in any road to any goal. Thinking about Gladwell’s “10,000 Hours to Mastery” principle, it really takes us a long time to get good at anything.

When I first started writing, I had a lot to learn, and not just about the craft. Practice is also necessary for all the other skills we need to master. Skills like perseverance. I’ve sung in various choirs on and off since grade school. I had one conductor who’d give us hell when we’d finish a run-through of a piece then immediately break into chatter. He insisted we practice freezing and smiling. “We have to practice that part too,” he’d say. Totally true. On concert day, we’d need that habit to be well ingrained so as not to look unprofessional to our audience.
 
I think of perseverance in writing the very same way. We need to get used to the dreaded r-word because rejection never ends. Even if we become huge successes (and I hope we all do!), we’re still going to face rejection in the form of poor reviews and readers who dislike our work. So we need to practice that part too—sticking with it even when rejection happens.
 
Rejection is just one of the normal, natural, expected, and even necessary steps to reaching our goal. We can’t avoid it, and we shouldn’t fear it.

did comparisons, I learned that 1 full/partial request for every 10 queries sent is actually a really good ratio. In other words, just to get an agent, we can expect approximately 90 passes for every 10 send-me-more’s.
 
And I know what you’re thinking: What about those authors who hit big with their first book? Yes, those folks exist, but they are total outliers. Good for them! But for every story like that out on the internet, there are probably 100 stories about the long, slow slog toward success. The good news is, during that slow slog, we’re doing our Apprenticeship where we’re accumulating those 10,000 hours of Practice. 
 
Back to Goines: He actually calls Practice “painful practice,” and says if you’re not feeling at least a little bit of pain, you’re probably not doing it right. Does this remind you of that Frankl quote? Now, I really don’t wish suffering on any of us, but I think this is immensely powerful because it normalizes the painful part of this journey. It’s normal to feel the sting of rejection. Discouragement will happen. Even tears. (Okay, a lot of tears.) And they’re okay. They don’t mean anything about our chances of success. Or, to turn that around, they mean everything about our chances of success because we’re practicing stamina and perseverance, and we’re “in it.” In the game.
 
This all boils down to my motto: The only way we won’t succeed is if we stop trying. As long as we don’t quit, we can’t possibly fail.

​There are two main reasons:
 
1) Outcomes aren’t always behaviorally-driven. In other words, the thing we’re trying to accomplish isn’t directly under our control.
 
We can cut calories at will (even though that’s frickin’ hard too), but we can’t lose weight at will. Whether we shed or gain pounds is due to many complex factors, including our behaviors and processes inside our bodies; we can’t predict exactly how much we’ll lose or how fast.
 
In the writing realm, there is a mind-boggling number of uncontrollable factors, like what others think of our work. We can (and should) always practice to get better, but we can be the best writer the multi-verse has ever seen, and someone will still call our book very bad names. We can’t control when the agent will read our query or whether that editor will request the full.
 
Another challenge of writing is, we can control the number of words we write, but we can’t control how those words will come together to form a story. Or, to be more specific, we can control how the words come together, but it takes many passes to get it right.  That brings me to number two.
 
aviors to be successful. 

​steps, and sub-sub-sub-steps) that are needed to become a published writer. 

If our jeans are still tight after a week of effort, or if that book doesn’t simply pour out of our fingers onto the computer screen, it’s easy to quit, to say we’re not cut out for success, or—worst yet—to say bad things about ourselves for not being successful.
 
If, however, we focus on behavioral goals, we stay tuned-in to the small but steady ways we are making progress toward our outcome every single day. If I hit my calorie count, even if my jeans are still making my feet go numb after a week, eventually they’ll fit better. They have to, as long as I don’t give up. If I get my 1k, that book may not be done this week or this month, but it will get done as long as I don’t give up.
 
We need to celebrate our goal-achievement every day. And when we nail it, we have more motivation to hit it hard the next day.