You see, I only took notice of the refusal. That was it for me. The editor/publisher didn’t want my work and had returned it. End of!

 

What I didn’t realise was many of these so called rejection letters had golden nuggets of information in them. They weren’t the standard rejection slips that I imagined sat in toppling piles waiting to be stuffed into the stamped addressed envelopes that all writers had to send with their work.

 

Some of my rejections had hand-written words of advice on them. And I took no notice! A no was a no.

           

And then, one day, at a meeting of my local writers’ group, a Proper Writer – one who had real books published – told me that I was being encouraged by the editors who bothered to scrawl those words. If they said, ‘We would like to see more of your work’ they weren’t simply being polite as I had assumed. They actually meant it! If they told me a story wasn’t quite right and suggested I change the ending, they wanted me to do so and resubmit the revised story.

           

I was a learner-writer and had kept all my rejection letters. Once home I took out my beautiful folder and went through all the letters I’d received. Yes, I had been encouraged by several magazines and one book publisher had told me that my writing was powerful. Could the Proper Writer be correct? Did these unknown people really mean what they had typed or written? Wow! If they did, then my writing showed promise. I wasn’t the failure I thought.

           

All the standard rejection letters got ditched and I vowed to act on the ones that were no longer telling me the answer was an outright no. And eventually I became a Proper Writer.

           

My advice to new writers is to get rid of all the negatives. Don’t collect the No, Thank-Yous. Put them in the recycling bag. Keep the positives and act on them.