the Empathy List #73: Stick-to-it-iveness, AKA what I've learned from 350+ writing rejections

There's no shortcut to resiliency.

Hello friend, Liz here.

Let me ask you: how comfortable are you receiving rejection?

Any career in the arts is full of it. When I tell friends how often I’m rejected (weekly), they balk. I could never do that.

I disagree. I always want to say, you can’t do it because you aren’t doing it.

For myself, I meticulously track my rejections.

I have a service I use to track all the times I’ve submitted my writing to a publication, and over the past 12 months, I’ve sent my work out 57 times and so far, I have also received 30 rejections, along with a small handful of acceptances.

That high number of rejections doesn’t count the number of book publishers who’ve passed on my memoir manuscript when my literary agent has come knocking. (We’re knocking now, btw, and no one’s yet cracked the door yet.)

If I go backward in time, to 2010 when I first started meticulously notating all the times I tried to get published, in all, I’ve submitted my writing to 406 times to hundreds of outlets.

That means, I’ve…