On Rejection

On January 12, 2026, I posted “I’m Not Writing!” here on Substack and got a nice suggestion from a fellow writer that I talk about how rejection affects me personally. I said I would do it, and then of course for a few weeks I put it off. Because it is a difficult topic.

But here goes.

First of all:

For a long time I did everything I could to keep making a living as a writer. That meant writing to the market. So I didn’t send out a lot of fiction and poems. Also that didn’t pay much. So, to tell the truth, I don’t have a lot of wisdom about how to handle rejection when you write queries or send material out. But if you stick with me here, I will get to a couple of things near the end of this, after I spend some time meandering.

In my writing-for-money life, I worked hard to sound reasonable, thoughtful and compassionate. Even while writing the advice column—which was the only fully successful salaried/with medical coverage longterm writing gig I ever had.

The effort to seem reasonable and competent in print became a habit. I wouldn’t share with the public writing that seemed too off-the-wall. I had a sort of reputation to protect. Sure, you laugh, given some of the outrageously off-the-cuff ruminations I would sometimes get away with when Salon’s editors more-or-less looked the other way, OK, whatever, it’s Cary, let him go on in that somewhat undisciplined way, readers seem to enjoy it and maybe he’s getting at something … and plenty of readers would complain that I was kind of obtuse and strange. yet …

[My bosses had better things to do than try to clean up my meandering prose five days a week …]

Long way of saying that I acquired a habit of trying always to look good in print. Even when I was going off the rails, it was a way of acrobatic performance: Watch this! Can I make this digression, try this intuitive leap in the argument, get into deep water, risk losing the reader completely, and then:

Make a miraculous “save”?

Which I ocasionally did in the Since You Asked column.

One reason was just to see if I could do it. But the main reason was that my governing purpose, my daily mantra was, write something different; never say the same thing everyone else will say. Also, I didn’t have to deal with rejection because I had a daily writing job! thank god for that, because I am no good at handling rejection and only have one practical tip — which I’ll get to if you keep reading.

Never saying what everyone else would say just seemed like commonsense to me; maybe today it would be called protecting and refining the brand. It was partly a personal challenge but also one of the few truly practical rules I had that I hoped would make it possible to continue making a living as a writer: Never just say the same thing everyone else is saying.

So if you look at my compendius volume of Since You Asked columns still archived at Salon and also on my own somewhat dilapidated and outdated website, if you had like a geiger detector that would detect every time I consciously departed from the mainstream view of anything, you would see I was always trying to do that.

It wasn’t just me being me. It was me following a deliberate plan of action: Never just say what everybody else would say.

That admonition forced me to almost always say at least one coherent and thoughtful thing.

Now I’m just winging it, and being repetitive too—like already I know I’ve written lots of things that I would clean up if this was my day job. Like yesterday. I posted a piece of fun nonsense. I’m trying to get over myself, the need to always make it good. The need to be accepted!

But OK, and I should probably have put this right up at the top because here is the useful bit: The smartest way I know of to deal with rejection (and I admit I don’t do this) is the method my friend Sandra uses. She actually puts into practice the adage that you can’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket. You can’t hit the ball if you’re not taking a swing. You can’t get anything published if you don’t submit enough material, and it is really a question of odds. You have to submit and submit and submit because it’s a numbers game.

And if rejection is a problem for you, or whatever is stopping you, you just have to do it anyway. If you really want your material to be accepted and printed by strangers, then you have to just keep on submitting and submitting and submitting.

That’s the whole game. There’s no magic about it. Just submit and submit and submit and don’t stop submitting and don’t think about what rejection means or pay attention to how it feels. Just keep doing the only thing that will get you published.

I’m such a dumbass. I’ve tried. It’s too boring. It’s no fun! But then, I don’t have to. I guess I really don’t care that much about getting published by strangers anymore.

Oh—why do I say “published by strangers”? Because another secret I have is that almost all the work I have published and even the work I have submitted was submitted to people I knew or at least to people with whom I felt an affinity, culturally or artistically or socially. I really only feel comfortable to sending my work to people who I think will get it, based on a shared aesthetic or attitude. And, to tell the truth, I really don’t feel that affinity with the publishing world as it is today. I read a few good novels and I read a lot of journalism but … I’m not in the game! I’m not really operating in the American literary and journalistic culture. I’m 72 years old. Things have changed. No more printing out pieces and putting them in the mailbox. (By the way, have you ever spent much time in a small-town Italian post office?)

So, make of this what you will. I just promised to say some stuff about rejection.

I’ve gone over this text twice now, taken out some really obviously extraneous bits, done a few spelling corrections and that’s it!

Make of it what you will. I’m just a retired guy living in Italy where there’s national healthcare and good inexpensive food.

Cheers.—CT

[p.p.s. Now I’m going to just look over this a little bit and maybe fix this or that utterly nonsensical digression but on the whole going to put it up pretty much like I just drafted it. Which is another thing I never used to do.

Well, Maybe I’ll just like read it over once and if anything makes me wince I’ll think about taking it out, but no lengthy rewriting as that would take me all day.

And now yes, OK, I’ve looked it over, and there are plaes where it really sucks but like I say it’s a lot of work to make it look all professional and also make it look easy so nope, not gonna do that, maybe there are some good parts that will help, and some other stuff you can just ignore.]

Oh gee, damn, guess what? Habits are hard to break. I’m going over it one more time!!—ct

OK that’s it, off it goes as is now. Tomorrow I’ve scheduled a Substack post of an excerpt from “Famous Actress Disappears” … wonder what you’ll think.—ct

p.s. See what I’m doing here? I’m taking forever to finish. One final thing: when I used to work as an editor (yes, I did that too) I would usually cut off the final few paragraphs of somebody’s piece, because people generally took forever to end a piece. Know what I mean?==haha ct.