Last year, I learned that ducks poop every fifteen minutes and immediately thought of the writing life—with how often we deal with rejection, it sometimes feels like being a writer involves as much crap as being a duck. Of course, we can react to that crap in ways that ducks cannot.
The following is a list of things you might do after receiving another rejection, which may or may not have been inspired by things I’ve actually done:
1. Cry into your cereal and wonder why other writers are allowed to be happy and you’re not (spoiler alert: hundreds of other writers will cry today too, they just might not be eating cereal)
2. Imagine dumping aforementioned cereal over the head of an author you dislike, then wonder if you’re a bad person for using revenge fantasies as a coping mechanism
3. Tell yourself you’re going to research new places to send your work and end up researching whether spiders are capable of dreaming (they might be??? That’s wild)
4. Briefly consider faking your own death so your work will seem rare, tragic, and appealing
5. Realize that “My best friend’s dying wish, before she was eaten by giraffes, was to have this poem published in your magazine” is not an effective cover letter and decide not to fake your own death
6. Sing Mitski’s I Bet On Losing Dogs in the shower while pretending you’re in a movie, then realize what a cliché it is to imagine yourself in a movie while singing in the shower and wonder if you’re not published because you’ve never had an original thought in your life
7. Try to come up with an absurd plot for a short story to prove that you DO have original thoughts—what if there’s like, a time-traveling lawn mower??? Or something??
8. Use the decade-old nail polish you found under your sink to paint a picture and remember how good it feels to create something without worrying about who’s going to see it WAIT NO IT SMELLS SO BAD THIS WAS A HORRIBLE IDEA
9. Submit a new piece (this is also known as trying again, which is something your elementary school teachers would be proud of you for)
10. No, seriously, try again—if you’re reading this post, it’s only because I kept trying new ideas when my first couple weren’t a good fit. Maybe your next idea will be the one that works (or maybe not, but at least there will be animal facts to distract you in the meantime)