The Rejection Game

A New Angle On Failure

This quote is from “Art & Fear” by David Bayles and Ted Orland:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

This is true of pretty much anything you want to learn. Writing, art, cooking, music, sport, sewing, language skills, whatever. The more you do it, the better you will be. For some reason, we don’t apply this to success. We don’t say ‘the more times you try and succeed, the more times you will succeed’. Maybe because it’s really awkward to say.

Speaking from personal experience, when you try and create a new recipe from scratch, the first attempt almost always fails. You must make the same dish over and over, in slightly different ways, binning the results in between, before you get what you were trying to create.

That is exactly what you must do when it comes to querying publishers and agents.

When it comes to writing, it’s not just about writing all the time to get better. You also must pitch all the time to get better. But that is very scary, because it’s very binary. Someone says ‘no’ or they say ‘yes’ and if we think of the ‘no’ as a very negative, painful thing, we avoid it. Sometimes we even think we’re doing something wrong.

After all, the people we aspire to be like got ‘yes’. Or they wouldn’t be published. But they also got lots of ‘no’.

To trick your brain into looking at rejections differently, you must think of them differently. Imagine rejections are XP and you need to get a certain amount to level up. 100, to be exact. This is the rejection game.

You must fail 100 times before you succeed.

100 is an arbitrary number. I think humans like it because we have ten fingers and it takes ten people to make 100 fingers. If we had cartoon hands, we’d like the number 64 a lot more.

So maybe you must gather 70 rejections or maybe you must gather 400 rejections. 100 rejections is a great goal to start with, either way. Your goal is to imagine that when you hit 100 rejections you will magically be handed success. Rejections are objects of power you are trying to collect, not obstacles you have to climb over.

If your goal is just to have a short story published, it may only take 20 rejections. But if your goal is to be a best seller, you’re looking up around the 900 mark, because there is going to be dozens of publications, perhaps even hundreds if you sell a lot of shorts, between you and that goal.

So, don’t resist getting rejections, get as many of them as you can. You are a hungry, hungry hippo and they are delicious marbles.

Which brings us to rule 2 of the rejection game.

They must be different failures each time.

Let’s say you send out a query, synopsis and blurb to a publisher and three months later you get a rejection. Firstly, three months is pretty quick, so that’s nice. Secondly, if you send out the same query letter, synopsis and chapter to the next publisher, it’s the same failure. So, when you are tallying your 100 failures, both submissions count as one failure. If you send it to 50 publishers without editing, it’s still one failure, not 50.

Get your goddamn shit together and learn from your mistakes. Improve between submissions. Get feedback, do research, take a workshop, re-write, whatever.

They must be real failures, not failures you imagined.

Sometimes when someone is freaking out about something, I ask them to describe the worst possible outcome in as much detail as they can. People usually find this quite easy. Unless they are too ashamed to admit it, then they sort of faff around.

Ninety percent of anxiety is directed at things that will never happen. Ninety percent of your anxiety is wasted energy. Anxiety is a function to stop us killing ourselves. Like if your five-year-old climbs up onto the roof with a superhero cape, that anxiety has a function. You tell them to get down, your heart is in your mouth, you probably saved them a broken leg. Good job, anxiety.

The job of anxiety is to protect us and the people around us from dangerous situations. But getting a story rejected ISN’T DANGEROUS. Despite what you have heard, it’s not a Jumanji situation, where you open a rejection and a tiger leaps of out of your computer screen and chases your family around the house.

It’s just a step in the path to success. One you feel unfounded anxiety about. It’s not saying ‘you’ll never be published’ its saying ‘you have to work a bit harder’. And you must be okay with that to make it in publishing.

Sometimes we imagine rejection so vividly, it feels like it’s already happened. We’ve convinced ourselves it’s real. But it’s not. I’ve had this conversation with people over and over:

Them: “I keep getting rejected.”

Me: “How many rejections have you had this month?”

Them: “I didn’t submit anything this month.”

Me: “What is your tally this year then?”

Them: “I don’t know exactly.”

Me: “Twenty, thirty?”

Them: “I haven’t really submitted anything this year.”

Me: “What is the last rejection you remember getting?”

Them: I submitted a short story to X.”

Me: “The one I gave feedback on four years ago?”

Them: “Yeah, I’d submitted that before I got feedback from you. It got rejected.”

One rejection in four years is not ‘keep getting rejected’ territory. You must submit things and be rejected, before you can be rejected. This is basic stuff, but so many people are stuck in this loop of reliving one or two rejections over and over like they have rejection PTSD.

Win The Rejection Game!

If you only get ten rejections a year, it’s going to take you TEN YEARS to get to 100.

If it takes 100 rejections to succeed, then you need to get your goddamn ass into gear.

Write shit, submit it, edit it before you submit it again. Repeat. Tally your rejections. You’re aiming for 100. Ready, set, go.

You can be rejected multiple times a day if you follow me on twitter! Maybe. Depends what you ask me, I suppose. If I reject you for a date it doesn’t count toward your writing rejection tally. Maybe you have a dating rejection tally. I don’t know your life. Follow me on twitter anyway.

How I Plot My Novels

A friend requested I do a blog post outlining how I plot my novels and write synopsises. This is not a ‘how to’, rather just an explanation of what I do, which may or may not be practical for everyone else.

First, I should note, I have two slightly different processes, depending on if it is a co-authored novel or a solo novel. I will outline my solo novel process first, then explain how I plan co-authored novels second, as the latter is the more nonsensical, confusing method of the two. As co-authoring requires a lot of organic development of plot and characters, whereas when I work solo I prefer logic and structure.

Solo Book Plotting:

Firstly, I come up with the very barebone plot idea. One or two sentences that encompass the story in the broadest sense. For example, Lifesphere: Acquisition was something like: ‘People bond with a creature/monster and compete in an arena.’

Usually, mentally, I will have a much greater idea of what I want to do, who the characters are and what will happen. I don’t normally start writing anything until the idea is mature in my mind. However sometimes idea come to me in an instant—an entire world, all the characters and the entire plot, in a few minutes. They hit hard and fast and often leave me with a blinding headache, during which I try and write as much down about it as I can. More often, ideas form and build slowly, developing over weeks and months until I decide they are formed enough to start working on.

After I have the basic premise written down, I write the genre, target audience and an estimated word count goal, alone with the number of chapters I want and how long I want those chapters to be. This is just a guideline, but it’s a guideline I like to have in place, as it helps with the development of the plot.

If you know how long the book is and how many chapters it will have, you can get a rough idea of how many scenes you will need. For Lifesphere, I had 1-2 scenes per chapter and 4-7 plot points per chapter, so I could see that everything was moving along at a nice pace and there weren’t any areas the story lagged.

Once I have the basic premise and the word and chapter count, I make a note of the major character roles. In Lifesphere, it was Eli, Squall, both of their meka, Aquillis, Kalex and Aeryn. They didn’t have names yet, just roles. Main character, villain, etc. I made some notes about them, such as that Eli lived in a shanty on a rubbish tip and Squall was in a wheelchair. I gave them all things they wanted most in the world, things they were willing to fight and die for. I usually name them at this stage, though often the names are placeholder names.

Then I write out a list of things and scenes that I want to happen in no particular order. All the possible scenes I have in my head, good, bad, confusing. I just write them all in bullet points. I keep going until I have no more ideas for scenes, however often writing one will lead to ideas for more. So, I may end up with between 20-50 scene ideas at this stage.

I then start looking for a logical order to the scenes and form them into a narrative arc. Some will be cut at this stage, as not all of them will fit. By the end of this, I should have a rough skeleton of a plot.

Usually then I go back to the character profiles and add a lot more detail and any new characters I need. I make sure everyone has descriptions so they stay consistent, last names, first names and I name their family members so I don’t have to try and think of a name while I am writing.

This is also when I tend to do world building, though when I am writing my own novels, world building might happen randomly at any stage in the process. Worlds come to me very easily and quickly and stay with me a lot longer than other elements. Because I have SO MUCH world building in my brain, it actually rarely makes it to the page. For example, I can’t remember the names of any of the characters from the first novel I ever wrote (I, Aratika), but I do remember extensive details of how they farmed quails and how male and female quails were used in separate dishes and what those dishes were and when it was appropriate to eat them. That information never even made it into the book.

Once I am happy with the character profiles, I go back to the bullet point plot. I make headings for every chapter number in a new file (or page on scrivener) and I start placing my plot points in chapters. I write in where I want cliff-hanger chapter endings and flesh out the plot and add any bridging scenes as I go. I am pretty good at estimating how many words each scene will need to be, so it’s easy for me to space the scenes between the chapters and end up with a reasonably consistent word count.

I then spend a few days fleshing out the plot, so that there is as much detail in each chapter as possible and I know everything I need to know. Then I can start writing.

Plotting Co-authored Books:

If my solo plotting method is painting with a fine brush on a canvas, my co-authored plotting method is firing paint at a wall with a cannon.

Somethings are the same. Firstly, there is a premise. EG: ‘A figure skater and an ice hockey player fall in love and they’re TOTES GAY AS BALLS.’ Which I then have to convince my co-author to write with me. However, I usually find the words ‘gay as balls’ will entice her to write almost anything.

Secondly, I work out the character roles.

Thirdly, the character roles are assigned to myself or my co-author.

Fourth step is me plotting the first section of the book—usually the first third—with bullet points for the major scenes.

Fifth, world building. Buckets of it. If you’re going to play in the same world, you need to know what that world is like. Sometimes part of this is done verbally and with comparisons to other settings. Usually there are floating islands. I love floating islands.

That is pretty much all we do before we start writing. Which means I must do a lot of tracking and adjusting as we go. Because of the way we write, the plot course can change dramatically, so I usually reassess when we finish the first third of the plot points, then write the next third—another 20 bullet points or so—then depending how they play out, I plot the end.

Our co-authored ideas need be a lot more flexible in terms to structure and direction. Which often means a lot more editing when they’re done. However, given they only take a month or so to write and they’re usually over 100k, the extra editing time still makes them time efficient. They’re also a lot of fun to write, because we’re both constantly being surprised by the twists as we write, even though there is planning and structure in place.

So, there it is. The two, slightly insane methods I used to plot novels. Maybe this was helpful or insightful. Maybe I just look slightly crazier in your eyes now. Either way, is fine with me.