Dealing with Rejection and Taking Criticism

Build a writing career with a positive attitude

As the author of four published novels now, I remember the step-change in my writing came in the beginning, when I learned to take it on the chin. And more.

I became hungry for criticism, harsh criticism, because I wanted to get better at my craft fast. Taking the blows—in style—was the difference between being an amateur and a pro.

A published book has seen many interventions since the author’s first draft. Better to get these under your belt sooner rather than later and go out looking dandy when you show your work to the big guns—the agents, publishers, and readers.

For that reason, all insults, slurs, and calumnies, particularly from your fellow writers, should be most gratefully received at any point between the second draft and the twenty-second.

Tips for getting feedback on your writing

You’ll collect a lot of feedback before you even think about receiving a rejection slip.

But what channels are useful for receiving feedback, and what order should you explore them in?

Here’s my suggestion:

1. Your critique: The Finished Novel Course. Revise with a coach. After resting that first draft for a month, become your own editor.
2. Peer critique
3. Professional critique
4. Publisher critique
5. Publish—and don’t look back!

Aside from the order of merit, here are some other bits of advice for fellow novelists seeking valuable feedback that might help you avoid getting too many of those dreaded rejection letters or a placement in the slush pile.

1. Choose your moment

You should never show your work to any other living soul at first draft. It is horrible. There’s only one attitude we really hope to get from loved ones at this point: that we are utter geniuses, and the work is completely perfect as is. Unfortunately, that’s unlikely to happen (and if it does, you might question their sincerity...).

What you really don’t want is funny looks (at best), or those you respect to swear off ever reading your work again.

Show it when the second draft is complete. (I only fully understood my story and nailed my title at the end of the second draft this time, on my fifth novel.)

2. Choose your first readers wisely

After the second draft is done, show your work to peers who also love writing, but who are not your friends. Ideally, they also write. That way, their remarks will be inherently constructive, they will know the stumbling blocks inside and out, and they will be avid colleagues/collaborators. They will see the splinter in their own eye while examining yours. (When we cringe and grimace, we sneakily turn to our own manuscript or our dreadful short stories and hit delete too.)

These readers are the best kind at this early stage. They will not look down on you. And don’t feel that you have to stick to people in your genre; a science fiction author can have great insight into major things that are creating plot holes in your crime novel.

Equally, don’t choose your first reader for covert reasons. For instance, if you choose someone who doesn’t read fiction at all, who doesn’t write, it will be all too easy for you to dismiss their critique—well, what does Auntie Maureen know anyway, the daft old so-and-so? A pointless exercise, and now Auntie Maureen suspects your story about a small boy with one leg looking for a magic stone is a cry for help, or she thinks you should stop writing and get a “real job”...

3. Don’t take rejection or bad reviews to heart at this stage

As a general remark, anyone who looks down on your work-in-progress and tramples on it is someone who has not created and completed an entire novel from scratch.

Why ask people who haven’t done this to comment? Do not share your work-in-progress with non-professionals, and by that I mean people who have seen the commitment through.

You need feedback that shows you where the magic of the novel slips and the hem shows. Especially if this is your first novel, don’t share it with people whose negative voice might rattle your confidence, and certainly don’t let the aftershock of rejection slip into your prose.

4. Peer review is golden

I’d prefer my writing comrades at The Novelry to give me a boot up the backside, than be rejected by an agent or publisher or a reader.

At The Novelry, we share a common bond and work together to offer a journey of longer support, rather than quick and off-the-cuff comments on more anonymous websites. Our rules of engagement ask for kindness and a constructive approach to critique, and our workshop forum and playground is patrolled by this old schoolma’am. Rarely do I intervene, since working writers know the pain and play fair: they’re here because they love writing and want to become a better writer.

At our online writers’ workshops, we engage with each other, ask for clarification, and are often given examples and ideas to improve our work fast. The writers at The Novelry give to get the same treatment from their peers.

Etiquette for writers seeking feedback

Here are some guidelines for receiving feedback on your writing. An enormous part of ensuring you can secure equally valuable feedback on your next project is the ability to greet well-intended input with the best reaction: respect and gratitude.

1. Respect your reader’s time

Submit your best work, minimally a second draft, and ensure you have given it a proofread (a program like ProWritingAid can help you do this). Make sure the work is laid out beautifully. (This is all covered in our online course, The Big Edit.)

2. Go less, not more

Build trust. Submit a smaller amount than a longer one. Play fair. 1,500 words is fair enough. One chapter, the first chapter. Submit in order of the story so as not to baffle your poor reader. Once you have your feedback you can submit more with confidence, slowly. Give a week or two between submissions.

3. Every criticism is valid

Tell yourself that and you’ll reap the rewards. Sure, you may not use every criticism, but bear it in mind all the same. Your main task as a writer is to communicate with your reader. If not everyone gets it, you want to know why. Ask questions.

4. Consider your writing at this stage as a product or artefact

Don’t consider it as your child. Have I made this right? Does it communicate? Does the reader want to read more? Those are the questions you’re concerned with. Respond on that basis to investigate how to improve it. Feel free to propose an amendment and ask your reader if that works better. (A paragraph at most—don’t ask them to re-read the entire thing, it’s not fair.) Your readers should not rewrite for you; it’s intimidating. You are the author. Once you see the problems, you can resolve them. So don’t pay attention to their rewrites.

5. Any critique is gold dust

The reader giving it is saving your backside from a kicking elsewhere, and very possibly from future rejection slips that will hurt much worse than anything they have said to you. Remember: they might rather be writing their own story than spending time on yours, so this is a gift.

Professional feedback can help you avoid rejection letters

When a writer comes to The Novelry for feedback on their second draft from our professional publishing editors, they will get tough love.

We want to push our beloved writers up the ladder fast, and ensure they don’t feel like self-publishing is their only choice, or rejection their inevitable fate. So, we give a line-by-line forensic critique of how the story is working or not working.

We understand writers dealing with rejection and critique

We know from experience that it’s hard to take critical feedback, and a day or two must pass before you can see that you can use what you’ve got to move onward and upward.

Generally, a writer will hear the single negative and fail to hear the many positives. The team at The Novelry ensures the positives are communicated loud and proud—and repeated!

Anything is fixable when you know the problem. It’s all simple from there on out.

If you take one of our novel writing courses, you’ll have everything you need in place. In our courses, we make sure the writer’s story is good and holy from the get-go, so thereafter anything can be fixed. You’ve not got a massive dud, you’ve got a cracking story with issues to tweak and tweeze.

Writers take feedback glumly or bravely, peevishly or in good humor. I’ve found it’s in no way correlated to the writing, interestingly. We make sure our authors are settled and happy by checking back in on them, as I simply cannot bear my beloved writers to suffer from the idea that they’re not wonderful and the story’s not wonderful, because by the time we’re nit-picking over the glory details, it is.

Why agents reject stories

It’s a 50:50 thing. Half you, half them. Always. When an agent doesn’t like the finished work and rejects you, it’s half to do with what they like to read.

If you’re getting rejection slips from more than a handful of agents, and you’ve researched their preferences quite well beforehand, the problem with your work is pretty simple. But in most cases, an agent won’t take the time to tell you what that is. They dread getting into a conversation by email.

Here are some reasons why if it’s not them, it’s you.

1. Your storytelling and prose do not fit your authorial intentions

Mind the gap!

The gap widens as you write and the idea changes. Close the gap in subsequent drafts. At draft 2–3, you should have a steely eye on your story expressed in one sentence (otherwise known as the hook) and be swinging that hook with a steady aim.

If the story and prose are wobbling all over the place, it’s because you have not firmly closed the gap, which means you need to rid the manuscript of all redundancies and digressions inherited from former drafts.

2. You are overwriting

There’s really no excuse for this after the first draft. Find out more here on how to deal with overwriting.

3. Your story is weak

The stakes are too low and nothing happens, develops, or gets worse or better.

Understanding how stories really work is a foundational part of being a writer, and The Big Idea, one of our online novel writing courses, can take you by the hand and show you exactly that. Many writers can write, but not all can tell a story.

Rarely will a great story be rejected because the prose stinks. Prose can be fixed with the delete button—the story can’t.

4. The main character is unlikably pitiful

Your protagonist can be a good person or a bad person or many shades between, but if they’re self-pitying for no good reason (or even a fairly good reason), we’re not going to want to spend time with them.

This is because we all know self-pity is the root of all evil and we don’t want to grow that stuff inside of us. It’s abhorrent.

No tears please, not yet. Save them until we can cry them with you. No tears on a first page. So they have lost their leg, dog, mother: what are they going to do regardless?

5. Mistakes

Lazy, vague writing? You deserve to be rejected if you have not bothered to check or clear up historical inaccuracies, typos, or grammatical issues in your work. You’re failing to respect another human being’s most precious asset—time. They can’t trust you not to waste it, you’ve blown it.

And no, they should not be expected to guess at your genius.

What sort of feedback should you not take or accept?

Broad and thoughtless remarks which seem to have a personal edge to them and come with no examples or evidence given. “I just don’t like your writing.” (Yes, I have had that one.)

We defend our writers from this sort of rejection by submitting work to agents we know and trust. If that trust goes, we will not submit on behalf of our writers again.

Feel free to ignore this one and apportion the rejection to the 50:50 rule, which belongs to the reader’s bad day/bad life. Move on. Do not respond. There’s nothing you can do or say to understand or counter such a miserable, high-handed attitude to doling out rejection.

Publishing success does not keep rejection at bay

Contrary to what you might expect, a writer gets more spiteful responses as they get further into the game. After publishing a few books, it can be a cold old world.

There’s a cycle, and when you’re not new, you’re old hat. But luckily your skin’s thicker too, or it should be. It takes a strong person to forge a professional career as a writer, whether you sell short stories or novels.

You have to raise your game every time, and make sure you’re true to your authorial intentions. When you send your manuscript out, you can know it’s not bad, even if you’re unsure whether the first reader will love it or find it good. That’s a comfort in itself, to be able to say this is not bad.

Treasure criticism from your co-writers at The Novelry, and your appointed agent or publisher, because they’re saving your skin.

What you really don’t want are awful reviews in the press. However, publishers favor sales figures over reviews...

More on press reviews

I do read professional reviews in the press, and have not had a bad one thus far having been under the radar somewhat. The Wall Street Journal described me as one of the world’s five most under-rated novelists.

I consider myself bulletproof at my age. I am no spokesperson for any group or kind, and my own life and persona is meaningless to me. It’s writing that has given me the magic cloak of being able to disappear, and age and parenting that have taught me worse things happen at sea.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
—Iris Murdoch

Who review the books? People who never wrote one.
—Mark Twain

Don’t Google yourself!

Don’t read reviews on the web, on Amazon or Goodreads, because the 50:50 rule applies and those are odds that will never be in any author’s favor. You have better things to be doing with your time and emotions, like writing your next novel!

Get perspective on the importance of professional rejection

In 20 years, the things that have most damaged my writing have been unrelated to the work. Personal relationships, domestic crises, sorrows and sadnesses close to home.

In comparison to the havoc wrought by those, even the most curmudgeonly feedback is a tame thing. You learn how to shield the writing part of you from real life, but that has been the thing I have struggled with most.

A carapace, sooner rather than later, is a fine thing and this is why a modest practice—an hour a day for yourself—stands the test of time and tribulation. It’s this method which is at the heart of what we teach writers on our courses at The Novelry. We shall overcome; quietly, and diligently.

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How not to handle rejection

I met the historian Orlando Figes in St. Petersburg when I was researching for a novel, and we had a jolly time ending up in Club JetSet in the early hours of one morning with a friend of mine.

His book Natasha’s Dance is a wonder. But he tarnished his standing when he responded to reviews on Amazon and posted some under a false name. Comments under the alias “orlando-birkbeck” and “Historian” called Rachel Polonsky’s book Molotov’s Magic Lantern “hard to follow” and Robert Service’s Comrades “awful,” while praising Figes’s study of Soviet family life, The Whisperers:

A fascinating book about the interior lives of ordinary Russians... it tells us more about the Soviet system than any other book I know. Beautifully written, it is a rich and deeply moving history, which leaves the reader awed, humbled, yet uplifted... Figes visits their ordeals with enormous compassion, and he brings their history to life with his superb story-telling skills. I hope he writes for ever.

When challenged about the reviews, Figes’s lawyer initially denied Figes was the author and threatened legal action. In a later statement, Figes blamed the reviews on his wife, the barrister Stephanie Palmer.

Figes, a professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London, admitted “full responsibility” for the posts, saying he had been under “intense pressure.” He added: “I have made some foolish errors and apologise wholeheartedly to all concerned.”

Similar controversies of authors writing bad reviews about other books that compete with their own abound on social media every now and then, if you can bear to look.

When you can dish it out but you can’t take it

Personally, if I don’t like a book I won’t review it. I’d only review a book I loved.

Alice Hoffman reviewed Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter rather tartly.

In response, Ford took one of Hoffman’s books out into the back yard, shot it, and then mailed the pieces to her. “Well, my wife shot it first,” Ford told the Guardian, “‘rather proudly.’ She took the book out into the back yard, and shot it. But people make such a big deal out of it—shooting a book—it’s not like I shot her.”

Alice Hoffman’s own novel The Story Sisters was reviewed tartly too, by Roberta Silman. Ms. Hoffman fired off a series of angry Twitter posts which included Silman’s phone number, email address, and an invitation for fans to “Tell her what u think of snarky critics” and “Roberta Silman in The Boston Globe is a moron...”

Who knew writers would have such strong reactions to rejection? But my favorite example of a splenetic response to a review was from Martin Amis, writing here at his best, about the critic Tibor Fischer.

Tibor Fischer is a creep and a wretch. Oh yeah: and a fat-arse.

Gentility in the face of rejection

You know, there is such a thing.

Faulkner and Hemingway went at each other as peers and rivals. When asked to review Hemingway, Faulkner refused more than once but finally relented and had this rather lovely paragraph for The Old Man and the Sea.

His best. Time may show it to be the best single piece of any of us, I mean his and my contemporaries. This time, he discovered God, a Creator. Until now, his men and women had made themselves, shaped themselves out of their own clay; their victories and defeats were at the hands of each other, just to prove to themselves or one another how tough they could be. But this time, he wrote about pity: about something somewhere that made them all: the old man who had to catch the fish and then lose it, the fish that had to be caught and then lost, the sharks which had to rob the old man of his fish; made them all and loved them all and pitied them all. It’s all right. Praise God that whatever made and loves and pities Hemingway and me kept him from touching it any further.
—Faulkner on The Old Man and the Sea

I’d suggest you keep your eyes high. Don’t diss other writers, and certainly not as a reaction to rejection. God knows it’s hard to enough to convey your intentions, and no one means to write drivel or set out to upset, bore, or offend. Quite the opposite.

Content yourself with reading those you esteem, and re-read them. Look up, not down.

Take a kicking and be grateful if it’s not in public once your novel is published, and therefore remains to haunt you. But don’t give a kicking. Only bad writers or burnt-out writers or never-been writers kick other writers.

A great many writers have had their effect on me. The serious ones, I guess, were Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad and Henry James. He was my idol, but to say he influenced me is a bit absurd – like saying a mountain influenced a mouse.
—Graham Greene

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