How to: Deal With Rejection

In this series, we interview our tutors about poetry and its place in their world. These interviews will cover creative writing tips, excelling in a poetry workshop, building a literary career, and finding your poetic voice. Here’s Rachel Bower on how to deal with rejection.

Can you share an experience where you faced rejection of your poetry? How did you cope with the emotions that came with it? 

This is a great question. The field is incredibly competitive and rejection is an inevitable part of the process of submitting work. All writers have faced rejection, however experienced or established, and I think learning how to deal with this (and come back from it) is one of the most important things we can do as writers. My very first rejection set me back for a number of months, but then I read an article by Kim Liao on aiming for 100 rejections a year. Although this seems like a strange concept, it really does pay to submit more work.

I started submitting my poems and stories far and wide, and gradually (very gradually) the acceptances started to come in. Having said this, I still have a lot more ‘red’ lines on my submissions’ spreadsheet than ‘green’!

I now see submitting work as a really helpful way of completing it, getting feedback and building a network of writers. That’s not to say that rejection doesn’t still sting sometimes!

What strategies do you use to keep writing after having faced rejection? 

I keep a spreadsheet record of all my submissions. This is super useful anyway, for keeping track of submissions and avoiding simultaneous submissions where journals do not allow this. I now use submission deadlines as opportunities to get a piece ‘finished’, and use rejection as an opportunity to re-look at a piece. When I do this, I ask myself whether it could be better (often the answer is yes, in which case I will edit before I send it back out), whether I sent it to the right place, and whether I am happy with it (in which case I will often proofread and send it out somewhere else). Another strategy is to have multiple pieces out on submission at any one time – that way it is a little less painful when one of them comes back!

Do you have any advice on turning rejection into an opportunity? How do you evaluate and learn from rejection letters or feedback from editors? 

Often editors get so many submissions that you simply receive a standard ‘I’m sorry this piece is not for us’ response, but if an editor does send you feedback saying that they enjoyed the piece, or that it was shortlisted or near the top of the pile, then please do believe them!

Any feedback is always very useful, and I think it’s important to approach feedback with openness and curiosity, rather than defensiveness. Having been on the other side (as an editor and competition judge), I think it’s useful to say that it is often very difficult to make decisions about which pieces are the ‘best’, that this is very subjective, and that numerous pieces of brilliant writing inevitably get rejected. As an editor, I always want the very best for all of the writers who submit – everyone is in it for the love of the writing, and if there is an opportunity to learn from any specific feedback in a rejection letter, then I’d say please grab it!

Sometimes, rejection happens because your work is not a good fit for a particular magazine, journal, competition or press, and in this case, rejection is also a good opportunity to pause for reflection. You can ask yourself – am I sending my work to the right places? Is this the right fit/ home for my work? What would I need to do for my work to be accepted in this particular place, and is that something I want / am willing to do?

What role does self-care play in handling rejection, and are there any practices you recommend for poets dealing with disappointment? 

Having a writing community is really valuable. I think it’s important not to rely on the submissions process as the sole evaluator of your work – competitions, for example, are so subjective (and competitive!), that you can’t use the outcome to decide whether a piece is ‘good’ or not. It is much healthier, and more productive, to work on becoming a good editor of your own work, and sharing your work with other supportive poets and writers: this enables you to keep working on your craft and makes rejection feel less all-consuming. This also helps you talk realistically with others about their submissions (and inevitable rejections) which can really help!

Rachel is running Prose for Poets, Poets for Prose with us this Autumn. This course is currently full, so if you would like to be added to the waiting list please contact [email protected].

Rachel Bower is the author of two poetry collections and an academic book on literary letters. Her debut novel, It Comes from the River will be published by Bloomsbury in January 2025. Her new poetry collection, Bee, is out with Hazel Press in May 2025, and she is currently working with Buglife on a collection about endangered insects. Rachel was awarded second place in the Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year 2024, and her poems and stories have been widely published in literary magazines, including The White Review, Magma, The Rialto and Stand. She had a poem Highly Commended in the Ginkgo Prize 2023 and was shortlisted for the Best Poem of UK Landscape 2023. Rachel won The London Magazine Short Story Prize and the W&A Short Story Competition in 2020. Her work is represented by Cathryn Summerhayes at Curtis Brown.