Dealing with Rejection

Trying to make a living as a writer is a tough gig. It always has been. Sure, there are plenty of exceptions, John Grisham, Dan Brown, Sandra Brown, and JK Rowling. Even among "indie" authors, there are stars such as Hugh Howey, Joe Konrath, Bella Andre and HM Ward.

Before I tried my hand at fiction writing, I worked as a newspaper reporter. I was in the field for about a dozen years and never made more than $40,000 in a year. For the vast majority of my career, in fact, I made $20,000 - $25,000. I looked upward to journalists at the highest levels of the "game" at newspapers like the Detroit Free Press, Chicago Tribune and Washington Post. They made double or triple what I did.

After striving to reach their level for years, it became demoralizing and seemingly unattainable. So, I moved on. Now, I haven't exactly set the world on fire in terms of salary since then, but I am making more. Better yet, I don't have to live with the feeling that I'm somehow lacking, or that I'm not good enough to make it to the Big Leagues (to use a bad sports analogy).

The reason I say all of this is that I am fighting many of those same feelings of rejection and failure as a fiction writer.

To date, I've only published a short story and a pair of novellas. So, if you said I shouldn't even be thinking in terms of success and failure right now, you'd have a point. After all, there are very few one-hit wonders in indie publishing - Darcie Chan's Mill River Recluse comes to mind.

Okay, I know, I get it. I'd have a lot more to whine about if I had published a dozen novels and still only saw trickling sales. Still, at the moment, I feel a lot like I did years ago. Truthfully, I'm having a really hard time finding the motivation to write. 

It takes a big investment of time and energy to put a story together. I can deal with that, and I still enjoy the process of writing. It's the investment in hope that, perhaps, this will be the one that sets me on my way, I'm lamenting over.

Because I know, going in, the odds are steep. I know, despite my best efforts, my next "little darling" will likely languish somewhere around a million in Amazon's Kindle store after a few months of being on its virtual shelves.

There's a line from my favorite movie, The Shawshank Redemption, which seems apt here:

Remember Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.

Anyway, I would really love to hear how you, my writing colleagues, deal with this issue from day to day. How do you push past it and keep churning the words out?