The 5 Stages of Rejection

That’s a great motivational quote. Except it’s a lot easier to share it on social media than to internalize its meaning.

Rejection is a horrible experience, especially in the publishing business. To authors, their books are practically their children. For years, they brainstormed, wrote, revised, worried, cried, nearly chucked the drafts into the trash, and finally—finally!—felt confident to send it off to the world. Yet the world sends it back. It stings, especially for new writers entering the publishing game with big dreams and thin skin.

Frankly, after a rejection of my own, I’m not the mood to preach why rejection is a good thing and why writers should embrace it as a way of life. This post exists to validate the emotions of a publisher’s rejection. Like therapy, except free and more entertaining.

Step-by-Step: How to Write a Book

“Becoming an author is easy. You write a story, send it to a publisher, and boom! You’re an author,” said my seventh-grade self.

I was eleven when I decided on writing as a career. I began many stories and didn’t finish them. I was waiting to create the book, the ultimate masterpiece, that I will send to a company and become famous. This misconception stayed with me for years until I left high school and became serious about my career. I researched the field and was stunned by how much I didn’t know.

“What are these beta readers everyone’s talking about? How many rounds of edits do you need? What’s an author platform? Do you need one? Is self-publishing better than traditional publishing? How do you query agents? What’s this? How do you do that? Is that needed?”

Why You Should Write Tropes

What are Tropes?

Tropes are cliches, common themes, or trends in books.

Take the murderous butler, for example. So many detective thrillers have used ‘the butler was the killer all along’ plot twist, it has become a comedic gag. There’s also the ‘she woke up and realized it was all a dream’ cliche. As far as I know, Alice in Wonderland was the first book to do this. In my opinion, this trope is lazy storytelling; the author couldn’t think of a good ending, so he says it was all a dream. Yet this trope caught on to other stories, unfortunately.

Writerly Beginnings

The beginning is always hard, especially for writers. We tend to spend our days thinking about writing, and dreaming about being alone with our computers or notebooks. When we finally sit down with a cup of coffee and position our hands over the keys, we write… nothing. We stare at the cursor, willing the words to appear. The idea is clear in our minds, but we can’t describe it.