Benefit from rejection
© Josh Zach
As a poet, in the space of around three years, I’ve probably had well over 100 rejection notes, meaning around 500 poems have been rejected.
Initially this was hard to take, because I worried that I’d nothing to offer and had simply made a rather arrogant mistake in aiming for publication.
However, two things happened quite early on: I identified a couple of magazines that, I thought, it would be very easy to publish in, providing my material was of the right kind. These, I would say, were not quality magazines, but they weren’t quite vanity publishing either. They were very easy to write for and get published in. That gave me confidence that at least somebody could find something in my work.
Learn from your successes
And then I had one success in a magazine I thought of as a good one, and it happened to be a poem that was both derived from my personal life and imaginatively extended, which suggested to me that the way to go was not to be too self-indulgent, but try to find subjects that others would recognise and appreciate.
So I decided on a strategy of constantly keeping my poems on the move. Each time a batch was returned, I sent them out as soon as I could, sometimes even the same day. I created a list of magazines I thought my material might appeal to, and kept circulating the work amongst them. I’ve continued to do this.
I usually review the poems each time they are rejected, to make sure I’m not fooling myself about their quality (sometimes I am) and to give myself the chance to make amendments if I can see any that would improve the poem.
Know when to leave work in a drawer
It’s surprising how often a “finished” poem turns out, after two months, actually to have one word out of place, or one too many adjectives, when you see it again six months after its creation.
I also try to be clear with myself about how good each piece is. It’s clear to me that some of the things I write are inferior to others: in fact, I sometimes write rubbish. Rubbish is unpublishable, and shouldn’t be published, of course, because you’ll regret it later.
The question is: what do you do with material you know is not your best but nevertheless has some strengths? Some well established poets would tell you that you should learn from your mediocre pieces, improve them if you can; but if you can’t make them good enough, you should leave them in the drawer. I think the best poets probably do behave along these lines.
Select your target audience
I had a serious health scare just over a year ago, nearly died, and came to realise that life is finite, possibly extremely finite. So I decided I wanted to publish as much as I could while chance remained, which means all of my work that I feel has some virtues, even if it is weak in some respects.
For example, I sometimes write verse that is a little too sentimental; rather too traditional; or has no value apart from being merely quirky, fun. The best magazines reject such work, but some smaller magazines enjoy them - and there are magazines that thrive on sentimentality or weirdness.
In this way I’ve built up quite a strong portfolio over a relatively short period, with publications stretching across a wide range of different magazines and anthologies (and several prizes), mainly, I would say, by being a poet of moderate skill with a high level of determination.
Write, edit and get your writing out into the world
My approach now is to be as creative as I can in the writing, as disciplined as I can in the editing and revision, and as businesslike as I can in getting the work out. I have careful records which tell me when I wrote things, which magazines or competitions they went to, how I fared, what feedback I get (if any - useful feedback is rare), a list of potential magazines to send work to, and a set of ambitions that I’m working to (e.g. to make sure I get a certain number of poems into quality magazines in the year).
All of this means that I treat my work something like managing a business, once the creative me has been satisfied that it’s as good as I can get it.
This approach motivates me and helps me to be persistent. I can see easily how many poems are waiting, how many are with particular magazines, where I’m succeeding, where I’m failing…
In particular, my system means I often don’t feel the sting of rejection too much, because it’s only a matter of an hour to send them out again, and I know that I’ve always other work out there that might, just, at this very moment, be in the process of acceptance.
Understand your target editor
You can help yourself a great deal, though, by being clear about what you’re doing. The more you understand about what a particular magazine is looking for, the more likely you are to send the right material. This is especially important to me because I write quite a range of different things.
You’d be surprised how different poetry editors can be: some like personal material, some hate it. Some desire international or multicultural material, some are much more colloquial. Some have a strong lyric bent; some favour experimental pieces; some only really print non-rhyming work; some prefer the colloquial and every day voice; some favour short pieces.
So the short answer to managing rejection is: Take it in your stride, be businesslike, and be as persistent as you can.
Noel Williams is a poet, prose writer and the resident artist at the Bank Streets Arts Centre, Sheffield. For more on Noel please visit http://noelwilliams.wordpress.com
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