About a year ago I was at the best sushi restaurant in Toronto. It was my birthday. I was there with my family, and the unagi was so good my mouth is watering as I write this sentence, and I was absolutely miserable.
For four years I’d been submitting my writing to literary magazines. And for 3 1/2 of those years, I’d been getting a steadily growing number of acceptances to put next to my steadily growing number of rejections. But I’d hit the driest of dry spells. Six months of nothing but form rejections and I felt so embarrassed. I felt like a fraud. Obviously no one else thought I could write, who was I to call myself a writer? Eventually I withdrew from the online writing community. I stopped attending writing workshops. I stopped reading other people’s stories. I stopped writing new stories, because every time I tried the mean voice in my head reminded me of the Everest of rejections I’d collected.
So there I was, eating the best sushi of my life with my two favourite people, and I was very busy trying not to cry. I whispered, “Maybe I’m not a writer after all.”
My family said, “Sage. OF COURSE you are a writer.” The waiter came over. I ordered green tea cheesecake. My partner said, “I’ll make a bet with you. If you can collect 100 rejections in a row, we’ll come back here.”
“Easy!” I said, “I’ll be back here in a month!”
The next day I started the official rejection count. For the first time in a long time, I started sending work out every day. I cannot express HOW GOOD the sushi is at this place, and HOW MUCH I wanted to go back there. I signed up for the first writing workshop I could find. I burst into tears telling author Lindz McLeod (The Unlikely Pursuit of Mary Bennett) that it turned out I wasn’t a writer, and Lindz immediately challenged me to write a story that began, “I’m not allowed to say this,” and I collected ten rejections in a row and then to my great surprise the Baltimore Review accepted that story. I started being part of the online writing community again. I started reading stories in literary magazines again.
And over time, I was able to see that absenting myself from the writing community had been a large part of the problem. Even though I’m a massive introvert. Even though I’m deeply shy. Being immersed, taking writing workshops, reading other people’s writing — all of that showed me what I COULD do. When I was isolated, that inspiration vanished. And my writing suffered. I mean, IT. SUFFERED.
After a year of the Sushi Rejection Project, I’ve had great days, I’ve had terrible days, the numbers have climbed and then they’ve been reset by an acceptance. But no matter what, I’m chasing a goal every time I submit my writing. Either to get an acceptance, or to get one step closer to that mouthwatering salmon oshi sushi.
I asked author Finnian Burnett (The Price of Cookies, Red Shirts Sometimes Survive) about their rituals in dealing with rejections.
I don’t know that I’d say rituals. But I do allow myself to be sad for a moment. If I have an idea of where else it might fit, I might immediately send it somewhere else so I can postpone thinking about it – whether it needs revisions. For the most part, I’ve become somewhat inured to rejection at this point in my life so unless it’s something I was absolutely dead sure I was a perfect fit for, I tend to have a moment of “oh that sucks” before moving on.
Yes! This. I was so terrified of rejections before I started sending my writing out that I put it off for over 40 years. (I wish I could tell you I’m exaggerating, but I’m not.) After my first rejection I cried for two hours and lay in bed for the rest of the day. But every rejection stings less than the one before, until now I can shrug most of them off. It’s part of the process, just like acceptances.
I asked author Ani King (2025 SmokeLong Quarterly Emerging Fellow) how they dealt with rejections.
The thing I’ve had to consider over the years in dealing with submission rejections is having some pretty intense rejection sensitive dysphoria, which is pretty normal for folks with certain types of neurodiversity to experience, in my case, ADHD and cPTSD. While leaning into rejections in various ways might work for other people, I’ve found if I make it a big focus it can really impact not just my submission volume, but writing in general, because I will start to spiral from feeling terrible about a rejection until I’m layers deep into why my writing is terrible and I should never do it again. Bad times! So my approach is simply to clock the rejection, skim the feedback if there is any, and then delete the notice. Sometimes I will do a quick re-submission if I feel like the story is particularly strong, which can break the mental rejection hold for me by way of quite literally moving on, and if I find that I am feeling especially sensitive after a few rejections in a row, I’ll take a submission break and only focus on writing until I feel a bit less tender.
Absolutely — learning to make the rejection a thing that happened, rather than the focus of the whole day changes everything. When I do a quick re-submission like Ani, I feel like it’s a message I’m sending to the crummy part of my brain that loves to tell me I’m no good at writing. “AU CONTRAIRE,” I’m saying, “This IS a great story!”
I asked author El Rhodes (“The Woodwose Wedding” on BBC Radio 4) about the way she deals with rejections.
A cognitive bias known as the Ikea Effect suggests we invest greater worth in things we put together ourselves over things we buy pre-made.
This describes exactly my feelings about the four identical bookcases that line one of our walls. It’s not just because I followed complicated instructions (and still bodged number four), or because they look good, or even because it was me who made them.
It’s because of how I paid for them.
When I began writing, I was warned that the path to publication was full of pitfalls. But, my first four pieces were picked up. That’s not so bad? Right? Then I was ghosted. Then got a form decline. And then saw a longlist published with no one notified in advance.
Sod this, I thought, and sulked for half a day. But I’m an activist rather than a re-activist, and decided declines should work for me too.
I nabbed a glass jar from our recycling and added a pound coin each time a piece was declined. When I got to £50 I bought a bookcase. Then a second, third, and fourth. Alongside the pleasure in an acceptance, it took the sting out of any rejection. Every pound in the jar and every new bookcase gave me a thrill.
Halfway to bookcase five, I still think about what they mean. That they help me get work out there, that they stop me being afraid of my email, that they help me see writing (and declines) as a journey rather than a destination.
Ultimately, they help me understand that everything I write is a piece of DIY that might be subject to the Ikea Effect and it’s OK if, like bookcase number four, it needs to be taken apart and put together again. So the story, poem or piece of nonfiction eventually, finally, oh… this way up, does the work it’s meant to do.
The idea of being able to look around the house and see all of those bookshelves, the tangible evidence of working so hard, of the rejections and the acceptances, it’s brilliant. I’d never have thought of the Sushi Rejection Project without El.
Want to make your own Sushi Rejection Project? Think of a thing you want — excellent sushi, a bunch of bookshelves, an armchair just for reading — and decide how many rejections you must collect before you get the thing. Super easy.
Why read alone when you can read with friends?
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