How To Deal with Rejection: Renee Long on the Shit Sandwich
Every job has some shitty elements to it that we would rather avoid. If you’re in the writing industry, you can take your pick of what those are: late-nights, early mornings, forgotten perfect sentences, deadlines without inspiration, late payments, and/or your sheer brilliance not being understood by readers and editors alike. Elizabeth Gilbert describes these less enjoyable parts of a profession as a “shit sandwich:” the thing you have to get through to get to the parts you like.
For many, the biggest shit sandwich of all is rejection. You finally get through all those other setbacks and hang-ups, only to be told no. It can be disheartening, to say the least, but it’s also part of the job as a writer.
We decided to delve into rejection with a new series of posts because if you want to be a writer, you need to be prepared for rejection. To start us off, we talked with Renee Long about her experience with rejection, how she copes, lessons she’s learned along the way, and what advice she would recommend to other writers.*
How long have you been writing?
Ever since I could speak, really. I’ve always identified as a storyteller and as soon as I knew that there were stories, I wanted to create my own. I would sit at the dining room table with my mom and dictate to her before I could actually write myself. Beyond that, once I was a young adult and started reading Madeline L’Engle and those kinds of YA novels, I started thinking, “I’m a writer too!” and started writing short stories and little novels. I couldn’t imagine my life without some form of storytelling.
What genre or genres do you write in most frequently?
Recently I’ve been writing a lot for my blog, which is focused on helping writers develop holistic habits to show up for writing practice and overcome fear. That’s more instructional, chatty, easy to digest. I got my MFA in fiction, but I publish less in that than I do in nonfiction and poetry. Lately, I’ve been leaning most heavily into lyrical nonfiction, personal essays, and poetry.
If you really care about something being out there and getting published, then you need to just keep revising if you’re getting rejected, or let go of any guilt of putting something on the shelf because there’s no shame in that.
Do you remember the first time you submitted something? What did that feel like and how did it go?
When I was in undergrad as an English major, I took a class called Creative Writing for Publication. This was way before literary magazines and journals were doing things on the internet (well maybe some were). The final project was to send off your work. We had to put our submissions in an envelope with a cover letter and a self-addressed envelope and send it off to the publication. I think it’s helpful to learn it in that analog way because it just puts you in touch with the process.
It’s funny, I remember the process of submitting more than what the heck I submitted. I imagine it was a short story or a collection of poems and I know I was rejected. And I don’t remember who I submitted to. I remembered our professor told us don’t submit to the New Yorker because you’re just going to feel bad about yourself if it’s your first time submitting, and I remember people still submitted to the New Yorker. (No one got accepted there.)
Do you remember what it was like the first time you got a rejection for a piece you really cared about?
It was either my first or second year of my MFA and it was a personal essay and highly, highly lyrical. It definitely bordered that line of hybrid between poetry and nonfiction. And it was very, very personal, and specifically about my family. I remember getting a ton of form rejections but there were also quite a few “this is almost there” types of rejections. I just kept submitting. I probably submitted it to about 50 places and nobody said yes.
I had been revising with each rejection, or with each round of rejections—I’m a simultaneous submitter. If someone says no simultaneous submissions, I typically just move on. Because it was such a personal piece, and I just didn’t feel like I wanted to revise it any further, I finally just put on the shelf and was proud that I finished it, proud that I put it out there, and I moved on to something else.
That rejection specifically, because it was such a personal piece, really helped me to understand what worked and what doesn’t in something like lyrical nonfiction. It was a huge learning growth period just to work on that essay and continue to put it out there for publication, and then come to the point where I move onto something else, and have that be totally fine. I encourage people to know when you reach that point. If you really care about something being out there and getting published, then you need to just keep revising if you’re getting rejected, or let go of any guilt of putting something on the shelf because there’s no shame in that. You’re growing exponentially through that decision and revision process.
How did this piece being personal help you learn things that you might not have otherwise?
As I was going through my MFA program, my mentor made me very mindful of melodrama in my writing. She helped me find and hone in on the difference between resonance, something where you’re physically taken aback by how powerful it is, versus melodrama, like something on a soap opera where it’s histrionic and not quite powerful. You just sense that kind of cheesiness— I kept calling it cheesiness, but she kept saying what you think is cheesiness is sentimentality.
So I learned very clearly how to revise. Sometimes you have to write the melodrama if you’re writing about your family because it’s so energetically charged for you and then you have to learn how to edit it so that that energy turns into resonance, rather than cheese, or sentimentality, or melodrama. It’s so easy when you’re writing about your family or something that’s very close to you to just go all up into your own emotional spectrum. You need to be able to make it accessible to the reader where it doesn’t feel like a soap opera.
Those pieces that feel authentic and like they just flow from the heart have been edited so much more than we realize most of the time as readers, and as writers, I think it can scare people because we get stuck thinking that there’s no way you can edit a piece to make it sound that heartfelt. But in reality, that’s the goal.
I think especially new writers struggle with this because they want it to come out perfectly resonant and polished on the first brain dump. And maybe I think there are unicorns that can do that, but I think the majority of us need to have a shitty first draft. It’s gonna come out—especially if you write about emotionally charged things— sounding dramatic, sounding whiney even, and then it has to go through the revision process to resonate with readers on a powerful level.
Sometimes you have to write the melodrama if you’re writing about your family because it’s so energetically charged for you and then you have to learn how to edit it so that that energy turns into resonance, rather than cheese.
How many rejections would you estimate you receive for every acceptance you get?
If I were just working on my creative writing and pitching cold, it’s probably close to 1 out of 30, but I’m not sure. One of my strategies that I’ve fallen into, because it’s demoralizing to pitch 100 people and get rejected, is to look to connections. For a lot of my writing career, I was an editor and it connected me with other writers and to other editors. Now I’m a regular columnist for Ruminate’s online blog The Waking because I have a standing relationship with that editor and that outlet. So that’s a guaranteed place to publish.
If the feeling of constantly cold-pitching gets you down and you feel demoralized, it’s really helpful to cultivate relationships within the writing and editing community. That way you can develop somewhere where you’re a regular contributor and that just means showing up and giving generously and providing good, valuable content. Small journals are really valuable because you can develop a relationship where you’re a regular contributor. It really helps lessen the blow when you’re cold pitching and it also helps you build a platform. The more you publish, the more your platform grows. It’s helpful to find a good balance between places where you’re guaranteed to publish and can work with the editors because you’re a regular there, and places where you’re cold-pitching.
When you show up for other people and are fans of their work and their publication, it’s going to open doors for you.
Is your submission style based on sending finished pieces or pitching unwritten ideas?
My style has always been write something from the heart, edit it to the best of my ability, and then look around and see who is publishing that style of work. That’s a good reason to read widely too [to know who’s publishing what]. I actually have very little experience with cold-pitching, but it’s something I’m trying to open myself up more to now.
What’s the most valuable thing (or three) you’ve learned from being rejected?
- Read widely in the direction where you want to publish. As a writer, maybe it’s not realistic to expect you to read every issue of every publication you submit to, but you should at least know the kind of work they publish. When I was an editor for Ruminate’s blog The Waking, we didn’t publish poetry at that time and I’d have to reject 10 poetry submissions a week. You don’t need to go through that effort to submit if you just understood that we don’t publish poetry on the blog. So read the guidelines.
- Never be snarky or rude to an editor, even if you’re stung by how they phrased the rejection. Don’t make them wrong for not wanting your work. There could be 10,000 reasons it didn’t work for them. You don’t know, number 1, if you’re going to want to submit to them again or number 2, if they’re gonna go to a different publication or move up in their career and you could be cut off from another potential opportunity because you were rude. So treat your editors kindly. They work really, really hard.
- I would suggest triaging your publications. Submit to your top tier places first and see if they get back to you and then triage from there. Work from your own preference of where you really, really want to publish and then work down from there. There’s nothing more painful than getting an acceptance from your dream publication after you’ve already said yes to a place you weren’t that excited about just to get your piece published.
When a piece gets rejected, how long do you wait before sending it off again? Do you change anything before you do, and if so, how do you decide what you change?
When it comes to my creative writing, I definitely fall into the literary genre, so I’m submitting to literary magazines and typically they allow you to simultaneously submit. If I believe something is ready to go, I submit it everywhere and I do a triage system. So maybe I’ll submit to ten of my dream outlets. If all of those get rejected, which most of the time they do, then I submit to the second tier journals that I want to submit to, and then third tier is like safety schools— not that there’s anything wrong with that because small literary journals keep the world turning!
For my old day job, I was in marketing and one of the rules of marketing is the rule of 1%. It means if you have 100 leads on your email list and you send out an invitation to buy your product, one person is going to buy that. So it’s a 1% success rate, and that can apply across politics, dating, et cetera. And if you have less than that, it’s a mark that you need to change what you’re doing. And actually I think writers have a better conversion write, probably closer to 2%. So that’s a really good way to know when something needs to be revised. It’s not personal, it’s just math.
What’s your best coping skill you’ve learned to deal with rejection?
If you do editing work, you’ll learn quickly that it’s not personal. It’s just math. If you think of it as a numbers game, the more you submit, the more that you write, the better your chances are to publish. It’s only a matter of time before you reach your target audience.
Also recircling back to your work and why you’re doing the work that you’re doing. Why are you writing in the first place? Everyone has a different reason: I think Joan Didion said, “I write exclusively to understand how I think,” which is a really wonderful way to engage with your own mind. If that’s why you write, then focus on the why of what you’re doing. If we’re writing to publish, what we actually want is to impact readers in some way, to have people resonate with our story in some way. It’s not just to have the byline in the New Yorker (or wherever).
You should find something where the shit sandwich is worth eating.
I really love Elizabeth Gilbert’s concept of the shit sandwich. Essentially she says that anything you choose to do in life, whether it’s acting or dancing or carpentry or computer coding, everything comes with its own shit sandwich. That means the dirty work you have to swallow and do to do the thing that you love. For writers, the shit sandwich is rejection. There’s no escaping it. If the reason you write is to connect with writers or engage with the thoughts in your own mind, it should be worth it to eat the shit sandwich. And if those things aren’t worth it, then maybe you shouldn’t be a writer and that’s totally cool too! You should find something where the shit sandwich is worth eating. That metaphor helps me because I know that I can eat the shit sandwich because that’s the only way I can reap the benefits of being in flow and engaging these ideas and being a storyteller.
Do you have a rejection that you’re most proud of?
All of them. If you think of it as a numbers game, every rejection gets you closer to acceptance or that next stage of growth.
An acceptance?
A poem called Echolocation in 2013 was a finalist for a writing competition. I was so proud of it because it came from one of the first batches of writing after taking a year off. That gave me validation that yes, you’re a writer or that your writing is worth something.
Is there anything you wish you knew earlier on that could have saved you from some unnecessary rejections?
Definitely looking at the guidelines. That first class was super helpful. Take a workshop and have someone show you because it’s not intuitive. In the literary world, you mostly write on spec, so write first then submit and hope someone picks it. Other genres or styles of writing you pitch editors one at a time. Find mentors to help you, to show how to do it, to show you the process. That’s probably the best way to avoid little mistakes.
Do you have anything else you’d like to share or say to an aspiring writer?
Every single one of the writers who are publishing today and your favorite writers had to write some shitty pieces first to get better. If you think you’re just coming out of the womb writing like Virginia Woolf, it’s not happening. Those people that have reached success were able to, as Elizabeth Gilbert says, eat the shit sandwich. They were able to take rejection in copious amounts and do the hard work of revision, which is extremely difficult, but also do the hard work, especially for us women, of not feeling like an imposter. It’s all inner work and labor that you have to do way before you get success.
Perfectionism is probably the epidemic of all creatives, especially now in the age of the internet where we’re just bombarded with media. You’re not going to come out of the womb knowing how to write a beautiful perfect essay, so use the rejection process as a teaching tool to continue to grow and get better. Do the inner work. The inner critic work is probably the most important part of being a writer.
Just focus on the why. Understand that whatever you pursue in life is going to have an ugly side to it and you have to decide if that shit sandwich is worth eating to get to the good parts. And if not that’s fine, but find something that is worth it.
Renee Long is a creative writer, teacher, and the founder of the LitHabits for Writers Blog & Workshop. She is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and was a finalist for the Cossack Review October Poetry Prize in 2017. She holds an MFA from Florida Atlantic University, and her work can be found in Crazyhorse, Rock and Sling, Ruminate’s The Waking, and elsewhere. Her mission is to help creative writers who struggle with debilitating fear and procrastination build holistic habits so they can share their soul’s work with the world. Learn more and connect with Renee at lithabits.com.
