by Bobbie Christmas
I devoted an entire chapter to my Bill of Writes for writers in my seven-award-winning book on creative writing titled Write In Style: How to Use Your Computer to Improve Your Writing. Special to WPN, I have agreed to list and explain each item. Below you’ll find numbers eleven, twelve and thirteen in my Bill of Writes. For all twenty-one items, refer to Write In Style, published by BookLogix and available on Amazon.
You Have the Right to Spend Money and Time Mailing Submissions
Every job has its good parts and its less-appealing parts. Let’s imagine you manage a store and love to greet customers but hate ordering supplies. If you diligently welcomed customers but avoided the paperwork necessary to order new inventory, your store soon would be out of goods and out of business. You would have no customers to greet. You kill the good part of a job if you do not tend to the parts you do not like.
The same is true of writing. The act of writing is only one part of our job. We must edit, rewrite, print out, and submit our work. Fiction and nonfiction writers who don’t want to self-publish must research their markets; follow guidelines; make copies; sometimes create self-addressed, stamped envelopes; write cover or query letters; sometimes take the packages to the post office; track their submissions; and always look for more markets. No matter what you write, you also have work that has nothing to do with writing. To see your work reach the public, you must not be stingy with your time or money. We can be thankful that some markets now let us submit via email or submission forms on the internet, but no matter what, submissions take time and are far from the creative part of writing that we all love.
If you hate the editing, rewriting, or submissions part, pay for professional help. Many companies edit manuscripts and even revise electronic files for authors. My company, Zebra Communications, is one of them. Other companies also research markets, locate guidelines, and submit manuscripts to agents and publishers for authors. My company is not the only one in America to do some of these things. Look around, ask around, and get help with the parts you hate. You’ll have to pay for the service, but you can get back to the parts of writing you prefer, without ignoring the other parts.
You Have the Right to Feel Sad—For a Specified Length of Time
Must writers suffer? Everyone has moments of suffering; some writers, however, turn those experiences into literature. The fact that writers suffer, though, does not mean we have to drink to excess or self-destruct.
While we learned to walk, we sometimes lost our balance and fell down, but we kept getting up and trying again, until we mastered the art of ambulating. When we send out our precious babies, our manuscripts, we must accept that we will sometimes fail—we will fall down—but we must get up and try again and again. Rejection is a part of our lives as writers, but it does not mean we will never get published, just as falling down did not mean we would never walk.
When we locate a market for our short story and get a ”nice” rejection letter that says our story is almost good enough but not quite ready for that magazine, it hurts. We must admit we hurt, admit that we feel sad, and then shake it off.
Set your own statute of limitations. I allow myself three hours to feel bad whenever I get another rejection of my work. After years in the trenches, I rarely need all three hours. I have gotten adept at moving on. Some of the rejections have been big ones, too, such as the time I thought I had sold a magazine article to a new market I wanted to reach, but in the end, someone nixed it. I said a few words that I won’t repeat here, and I moved on. Did it hurt? Yes. Did I dwell on it?
No.
When you receive a rejection letter, before you send the submission out again, reread it and rewrite it, if you spot ways to improve it. If you can find nothing to make it stronger, submit it elsewhere as is.
One of the best ways to avoid dwelling on rejection is to have several items out at once. When one comes back rejected, you have others still out there, so you still have hope.
Each rejection means you can send that piece on to the next market and keep it circulating. Feel sad, but keep submitting manuscripts, and soon you’ll feel fine again.
You Have the Right to Get Help if You Feel Depressed
When I was in my late forties, several life stressors piled on me at once. Some were mental; some were physical. Some were internal; some were external. Some were environmental; some were self-made. I had quit a well-paying corporate job, sold the house I’d lived in for sixteen years, and moved to a new city to start a new business without knowing if it would support me sufficiently. I had gotten engaged, but found my relationship floundering and experienced a heartbreaking breakup. In the middle of it all I was going through menopause and my aging mother was hospitalized. You get the picture.
I knew that stressors—not just bad events, but good ones too—pile up, and if too many happen in too short a span of time, a person can become ill. Even though I knew about the harsh effects of stressors, I could not stop my downward spiral.
Previously when I had felt blue, I rose to my usual level of positive thinking within a few days and moved on. That time, though, things grew worse by the day. I no longer wanted to get up in the morning. I forced myself out of bed, only to find myself lying on the sofa within a couple of hours. After about a month of being immobilized, I had a realization: “I’m not just blue, I’m depressed.” I visited a doctor who put me on antidepressants, and within weeks I was functioning at my normal level. Less than a year later, my business was up and running, my relationship had ended, but at least it had closure, and I had adjusted to living in a new city. I felt fine. I asked the doctor to take me off the medication, and the transition worked well. I have not needed antidepressants again, but I was thankful for the counseling and the medication that helped me see my way through a storm.
Recognize the difference between being a little down and being chemically depressed. Get help, counseling, or medication when you need it, and be thankful it is available.
Bobbie Christmas is a book doctor with twenty-five years of experience and is the author of Write In Style: How to Use Your Computer to Improve Your Craft, winner of seven awards. Her website is www.zebraeditor.com.