Rejecting Rejection

Rejection letters are one of the great staples of the literary narrative, being both a coming-of-age ritual that must be passed, and a continuing endurance, like being forced to retake your driving test.

The famously successful authors offer their tales of rejection as both encouragement to those behind them in the sausage machine, and as a badge of authenticity to show to anyone who doubts that they have paid their dues.

Some flippantly wallpaper their toilets with them, showing not exactly disdain, but placing them more as a ritual to ward off any bad vibes emanating from the ancient dismissals. And they do have power. Every new submission is a wish, and every rejection letter is its denial. They can be devastating. They shouldn't be, of course. That's why people line their loos with the things, putting them in their place with respect to their psyche.

I received one yesterday. It was unexpected, as I'd submitted back in February and assumed that it, like many submissions, wouldn't receive a response. I won't say who it was from. That's unimportant, and furthermore it was a typically courteous and professional reply. It's not you, it broadly said, it's us. I mention it because I didn't take the rejection personally. I could never submit anything if I did. There's so much involved in making a submission in the first place, from finding a prospective agent who is interested in my genre and also accepting submissions, to making sure I follow their guidelines, to actually sending the thing. I can only imagine how much harder it was before email, but then again that might have been a big enough filter to give agents more time to consider everything that crossed their desks. Either way, if I thought too hard about the submission's chances, I probably wouldn't bother at all.

So what do I do with my rejection letters? When I first started this long and so far fruitless road, I used to print them out, inspired by those who have gone to greater things before me. Would I also wallpaper my toilet? Frankly it's arrogant to even contemplate. I stopped printing them or otherwise saving them a long time ago. Now I just make a note of when it was received and move on. But if I was of a mind to do something with them, here are some ideas:

• Make a book out of them. I would continually update it with its own rejection letters in an act of recursion almost as pointless as that picture of a picture of a picture (and so forth) that appears in the RA Summer Exhibition every year.
• Turn them into jigsaw puzzles that I sell on Etsy. I anticipate this being more profitable than my books, so I should get cracking with the idea.
• Make paper aeroplanes out of them and crown the one which flies the furthest the winner. I would then have it framed and sent to the rejecting agent with a book token as a prize.
• Feed them all to AI and ask it to write a submission letter that will avoid getting any similar rejection letters.
• Buy a REJECTED stamp so I can reject the rejection letters and post them back to the agents.
• Turn them into a papier-mâché kidney which I will surgically Cronenberg into myself so I can experience my body rejecting the rejection. This would probably be followed by death, which is in many ways preferable to making any further submissions.
• Write new stories on the blank side of each rejection letter. Oh god, this is far too positive. I'm so sorry, it won't happen again.