I hate rejections.
Nobody likes rejections.
Rejections make you feel like CRAP and you are a lying liar if you read that and say “Well, actually, I view receiving a rejection as a gift because that means I got my work out there” because I say that crap all the time and still calculate the amount of time and college it would take to become a teacher whenever I get one of those gifts in the mail.
LIAR you are lying!
Just admit it.
And it doesn’t matter if it’s a rejection from a huge application you spent hours on or that contest you vaguely remember submitting to when you were drunk, high and at work, it’s still like a paper cut to the heart.
And I don’t care how professional you are, or how thick your skin is supposed to get in this business of words- every time you submit a piece of your writing anywhere you are sending out a piece of your soul to be judged and twisted in the eyes of faceless stranger, and you would be a robot to not feel anything.
Not that robots are bad, they’re pretty cool, the point is they are unfeeling and their work is probably void of heart and spirit.
That’s a whole other discussion.
In order to better cope with rejection, I have created a faceless stranger in my mind. He is a judgmental asshole and looks like this:
You can tell he is judgmental because he has no discernible features and that he’s an asshole because despite having no nose or ears, his glasses are not in danger of falling off his faceless face.
And this is how he reads my work:
OH HOW BLASE
I have read this before, unfair comparison to Tennessee Williams and David Mamet Anecdotal rant about how playwrights are soooo predictable!
Well, that stage direction is just IMPOSSIBLE
There is a number 0 on the first page. Sigh.
I am a playwright, so I’ll be using fancy playwriting terms like “writing a play” or “doing theatre” or they’re not that fancy and pretty self-explanatory. But whatever the genre, whatever the experience, rejection sucks. So I’m going to make something else out of it.
Regected Riter 