Some excellent advice on writing and rejection
Blake Butler over at htmlgiant has some marvelous advice on how you should approach rejection as a writer. There’s a lot of advice about rejection, and a lot of it strikes me as macho BS about powering through and whatnot, which is helpful to some degree, but also makes those of us who are hurt by rejection feel like we are doing something wrong. Yeah, shake it off is the right advice, but you do need to think about what it is you are shaking off.
Rejection does hurt, and some rejections hurt far more than others. Butler’s advice helps you think about submitting work differently–nailing outlets where you read, and picking targets according to the places where you’d like an audience. My favorite quote:
18. Want to restate: this submission/publication thing is ephemeral. Yeah it’s nice and fun that it exists, and to get somewhere you need to go hard. But keep your head on. No one on Facebook cares. Keep it yourself most of the time, the struggle. Eat the struggle. It’s meat.
