100 Rejections

In fall of 2024, I attended a session at a writer's conference that changed my life as a writer.

It was called "The Year of 100 Rejections," and in it the author, a prolific romance writer, said that she made it her goal to get 100 rejections in a year. She said that inevitably her writing would get accepted somewhere, and that it was almost counter-intuitively annoying because it meant she had to work harder to reach the 100 rejections. She shared a bingo card with squares like "rejected within 24 hours" and "rejected with personalization" and encouraged us to see if we could get four in a row.

The perseverance in this undertaking, and the desensitization it provided, were inspirational to me.

With each of the first two novels I published, I queried only around six or eight agents and publishers. I was devastated by every "no." I received the last rejection, an envelope addressed to me in my own handwriting, on my bed recovering from the birth of my first daughter.

And I spent the next four years absolutely unable to write.

Nothing. Not a short story. Not a poem. Certainly no more novels.

Despite my clarity now that I had only just scratched the surface of querying my first books, it took a long time to feel confident enough to put pen to paper. And thank goodness this session came before I had completed my next manuscript and shoved it under the bed in terror.

The idea of going after rejection--of making it my extravagant goal, of gamifying the process--gave me the emotional fortitude to take on the gauntlet of querying my latest novel and working toward my dream of traditional publishing.

Come to find out, this idea has been explored by many writers over the last decade, all of them experiencing similar positive effects.

If you're writing now, I encourage you to join me and other writers in making 100 rejections your goal (and celebrating them along the way!) because rejections mean progress. And rejections are part of being a writer.