Recently, I decided to aim higher with my submissions and send them to better-known publications that paid more. I chose my strongest pieces and submitted them to several journals – ones that regularly appear on lists of top literary magazines. When I finished, I sat back, elated to have demonstrated such confidence. I’d decided my writing had gotten to the point where it was worth a little bit more money and a little bit more prestige. Glowing with positive self-regard, I fantasized about opening my email one day and finding an acceptance: “SmokeLong/Split Lip/The Kenyon Review would be delighted to publish your work!” A thrill of excitement flushed through my body. It could happen; maybe it would happen. Then without warning, my mind turned on a dime and reminded me of the far greater likelihood of opening that email and finding a rejection. 

The American military’s basic training is known for its propensity to grind a person down; rejections are the boot camp of writing.

I don’t exaggerate when I say there are days when rejections have as much impact on a writer as if a drill sergeant is yelling inches from their face that they’ll never amount to anything and should quit. I’ll go one step further and suggest that dealing with rejections is even slightly worse than basic training in one regard. True, boot camp employs a systematic rigor meant to take a person down to the studs, a military program that can include name-calling, exertion, exhaustion, and being hounded to push beyond what a person thought they were capable of. But boot camp also offers something writing doesn’t: clear, attainable goals.

For most military candidates, boot camp leads inevitably to achieving what they’ve set out to do. Not so writing.

A writer can strive and strive without truly understanding why this piece was accepted and not that one. Basic training isn’t that ambiguous. You either run the ten miles under the allotted time or you don’t. If you do, you’re one step closer to graduating from civilian to soldier. Writing, on the other hand, has its own rigor and discipline without the clear ending point. We’re all aiming to publish and so we strengthen our writing muscles by taking classes, writing, writing, writing, reading, improving our skills – all of which we can do and still never be published in The Paris Review.

Please don’t hear that last sentence as a drill sergeant’s pronouncement on anyone’s writing aspirations. The situation for writers is one of toil and delight and work and failure and elation and more toil and gloom and exhilaration – without any guarantee that these will add up to being published or paid. Once we understand this, we can shift how we think about it.

Friends and family consider me a successful writer because they only hear from me when work has been accepted. My Submittable page tells a more sobering story. In the last two years, my acceptance rate hovers around 2%. I have yet to make two hundred dollars – total. I’m getting a lot of practice being rejected. In fact, all this experience contributed to me thinking I had something marginally useful to share on the topic. If external confirmation is only going to show up 2% of the time, I, and other writers, need to reclaim the definition of what constitutes success. 

When I set out on this writing-in-order-to-publish journey almost three years ago, it took time to recover from each rejection. The carefully-worded rebuffs knocked me down pretty hard, convincing me that, rather than write that morning as planned, perhaps I should wander aimlessly around my yard instead. 

Clearly, I had to relate differently to these rejections or I wouldn’t be able to persist. Rather than orienting toward the much-preferable giddy fizz of someone wanting to publish my writing, I gradually oriented toward the rejections themselves as evidence: evidence that affirmed I was actively involved in pursuing my aspirations. As long as this confirmation existed, I was succeeding.

I’ve already received the first rejection from that flurry of aiming-higher submissions I mentioned at the beginning of this essay. I was disappointed – of course I was – and then I also remembered, here was proof that I was in my own corner, taking the only steps that might lead to my goal of publishing. When I look at the 143 rejections on my Submittable page – now 144 – I’m seeing evidence of my effort and my belief in myself.

Short story writer Raymond Carver famously told students, “No one asked you to be a writer.” I think what he meant was, rather than homing in exclusively on external validation – from people who hadn’t asked for your essay or short story in the first place –, writers needed to cultivate self-approval. This inner landscape is the only thing we have any control over. Sometimes (most of the time?) we might be the only one who knows that we finally scaled the wall or climbed the rope or beat our best running time, so we better find a way for that to count for more than whether or not the drill sergeant – or in our case, the editor – appreciates that. It needs to count that the writing life and steady growth are what we want for ourselves and that we’re doing what we can to get there – one rejection at a time.