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A Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community
About Me :
I'm a grownup nerd living in the Boston burbs. I write computer programs for a living and plays for fun.
I'm married to a wonderful woman, and we share a nice little house with our daughter and our cats.
I'm a humanist, a technologist, an artist, and an idealist. I believe in reason, freedom, love, equality,
and democracy. (Did I mention that I'm
an idealist? I did, OK.)
I'm also a pragmatist and an empiricist. I reject ideology and dogma, especially when they conflict with
practical facts (i.e., pretty much always). I particularly hate willful ignorance, which tends to go hand-in-hand
with ideology and dogma.
Like the alignment of the planets, this blog gets updated as I have the time, inspiration, and inclination to do so.
Like the alignment of the planets, this blog gets updated as I have the time, inspiration, and inclination to do so.
Thursday, March 11, 2004
So You Got Rejected
So you got rejected, too.
We all know the feeling. You worked hard on that script. You poured your heart and soul into it. And you were justifiably proud of it. You thought it was one of the best things you'd ever written. You sent it out, and you were sure it had a really good chance to get in this time. You didn't dare to actually hope, much less count on it getting accepted. Somehow, that doesn't make the sting of the rejection letter any less.
On the other hand, it shouldn’t sting all that much, and you should get over it pretty quickly. After all, if you’re not getting rejection letters, you’re not sending your material out, and you are sending your material out, aren’t you?
So you got rejected. Welcome to the club, playwright!
The first thing that every beginning playwright has to learn is that rejection of your material comes with the territory. The second thing to learn is that it’s not personal. It doesn’t even mean you’re a bad writer. Even if you’re the best writer in the world, you’re still going to get rejected a lot. There is no correlation between the quality of your writing (assuming that we could objectively quantify that, which we can’t!) and the number of rejections. The only quantity that correlates with the number of rejections you receive is the number of submissions you make! When I submit, I assume that no more than one out of every 100 submissions will get accepted. (But that’s me. Your mileage may vary.)
The business of being a playwright is all about playing the numbers, which means sending out a lot of submissions. The process of reading scripts, and selecting them for production or publication, is extremely subjective. Not everyone is going to see the merit in your script. In fact, most people won't see it, even if they're looking carefully, and even if you’re an especially gifted writer, which I’m sure you are. To be brutally frank, your script stands only a modest chance of being read at all. However, every once in a while, someone will pick up your script, and read it, and be excited by it. And the best way to maximize your chances of having that happen as soon as possible is to keep writing, and to absolutely paper the world with your submissions.
By the way, you may not believe me now, but it will make you feel better if you take the time to see the plays that were selected, because nothing is better proof of the process’s utter lack of objectivity than to witness some of the entries that were chosen over yours. (Besides, there are sure to be lots of other playwrights there who also were rejected, and you can all go out and dish afterward.)
So all right, you got rejected. So they didn’t get it. Well, to hell with them anyway! ( – until next time, when we will all package up our best work and send it to them for another round.) The only thing left to do is to keep preparing your submissions, and to keep writing. The other alternative is to give up on writing altogether, and I don’t think you want to do that.
In the meantime, what do you do with that rejection letter? Some people just throw it away, but I could never bring myself to do that. I collect them, actually. I’m not bragging or anything, but I have personally amassed a file of hundreds of rejection letters. I used to paper my home office wall with them, as a testament to the sheer volume of publishers and producers who have so far shunned me (and will be sorry some day). However, eventually my wife felt I should take them down. (She was concerned that they might be a fire hazard.) Therefore, they went into a special file, which I peruse from time to time, and in fact over the years I have become quite a student of rejection letters.
Rejection letters come in many varieties. They're usually very simple, professional form letters. Sometimes, they'll merge your name and the title of your script into the letter, so it looks individual enough to assuage some of the hurt. Often, though not always, they will bear a real person’s signature, and occasionally, the literary manager or the artistic director will be gracious enough to write a personal note on the letter (to soften the blow a bit, I suppose). Still, that's nicer than the average form letter. The worst kind of response, something I get about 5% of the time, is a photocopied form letter with a space for your name to be scribbled in. (In case I didn't get their point, one theater company even sent me one of these without bothering to pencil in my name!)
You can do what you want with your rejection letters, of course, but the whole point of the essay is that you should be getting them, and you should be getting a lot of them. Being a playwright means you’re playing a sort of lottery, and every submission is a ticket. You can’t win if you don’t play. So: here’s to rejection!
So you got rejected, too.
We all know the feeling. You worked hard on that script. You poured your heart and soul into it. And you were justifiably proud of it. You thought it was one of the best things you'd ever written. You sent it out, and you were sure it had a really good chance to get in this time. You didn't dare to actually hope, much less count on it getting accepted. Somehow, that doesn't make the sting of the rejection letter any less.
On the other hand, it shouldn’t sting all that much, and you should get over it pretty quickly. After all, if you’re not getting rejection letters, you’re not sending your material out, and you are sending your material out, aren’t you?
So you got rejected. Welcome to the club, playwright!
The first thing that every beginning playwright has to learn is that rejection of your material comes with the territory. The second thing to learn is that it’s not personal. It doesn’t even mean you’re a bad writer. Even if you’re the best writer in the world, you’re still going to get rejected a lot. There is no correlation between the quality of your writing (assuming that we could objectively quantify that, which we can’t!) and the number of rejections. The only quantity that correlates with the number of rejections you receive is the number of submissions you make! When I submit, I assume that no more than one out of every 100 submissions will get accepted. (But that’s me. Your mileage may vary.)
The business of being a playwright is all about playing the numbers, which means sending out a lot of submissions. The process of reading scripts, and selecting them for production or publication, is extremely subjective. Not everyone is going to see the merit in your script. In fact, most people won't see it, even if they're looking carefully, and even if you’re an especially gifted writer, which I’m sure you are. To be brutally frank, your script stands only a modest chance of being read at all. However, every once in a while, someone will pick up your script, and read it, and be excited by it. And the best way to maximize your chances of having that happen as soon as possible is to keep writing, and to absolutely paper the world with your submissions.
By the way, you may not believe me now, but it will make you feel better if you take the time to see the plays that were selected, because nothing is better proof of the process’s utter lack of objectivity than to witness some of the entries that were chosen over yours. (Besides, there are sure to be lots of other playwrights there who also were rejected, and you can all go out and dish afterward.)
So all right, you got rejected. So they didn’t get it. Well, to hell with them anyway! ( – until next time, when we will all package up our best work and send it to them for another round.) The only thing left to do is to keep preparing your submissions, and to keep writing. The other alternative is to give up on writing altogether, and I don’t think you want to do that.
In the meantime, what do you do with that rejection letter? Some people just throw it away, but I could never bring myself to do that. I collect them, actually. I’m not bragging or anything, but I have personally amassed a file of hundreds of rejection letters. I used to paper my home office wall with them, as a testament to the sheer volume of publishers and producers who have so far shunned me (and will be sorry some day). However, eventually my wife felt I should take them down. (She was concerned that they might be a fire hazard.) Therefore, they went into a special file, which I peruse from time to time, and in fact over the years I have become quite a student of rejection letters.
Rejection letters come in many varieties. They're usually very simple, professional form letters. Sometimes, they'll merge your name and the title of your script into the letter, so it looks individual enough to assuage some of the hurt. Often, though not always, they will bear a real person’s signature, and occasionally, the literary manager or the artistic director will be gracious enough to write a personal note on the letter (to soften the blow a bit, I suppose). Still, that's nicer than the average form letter. The worst kind of response, something I get about 5% of the time, is a photocopied form letter with a space for your name to be scribbled in. (In case I didn't get their point, one theater company even sent me one of these without bothering to pencil in my name!)
You can do what you want with your rejection letters, of course, but the whole point of the essay is that you should be getting them, and you should be getting a lot of them. Being a playwright means you’re playing a sort of lottery, and every submission is a ticket. You can’t win if you don’t play. So: here’s to rejection!
