Sorry We're Prosed: How to handle hope
Hope is a hard-working commodity
Hello again,
For a while, I have wanted to write a newsletter about rejection. It is a constant theme in the life of any writer who is submitting their work, and strategies for handling it are vital to persevering.
But no matter which way I tried to organise my thoughts, they always seemed a little too obvious.
Rejection has been covered extensively by creatives, business people, and life gurus of all kinds, such that it feels like there’s very little new to say.
In fact, there has emerged what I think of as a kind of ‘failure industry’, around the aggrandization of rejection and other setbacks.
This manifests in everything from formulaic LinkedIn posts about overcoming adversity to a cottage industry of conversation podcasts themed around failure.
Sometimes these can provide fascinating insights into the ways people have picked themselves up again, and the steps they took to ultimately succeed.
But at other times, it can feel like someone trying half-heartedly to answer the ‘what is your biggest weakness’ question at a job interview with only the safest and most mundane flaw they can muster.
Whether these stories contain useful lessons or not, they usually have one thing in common, which is that the person telling them has already achieved some benchmark level of success. For writing, that might be a published book. For music, a record deal. For a business, a high valuation.
This means that, alongside the fetishization of failure, what these stories hinge on is hope. Hope that one day, those rejection letters will be an interesting artefact of the time before you had made it. Hope that the rhythm of trying and failing will work its alchemic magic and, eventually, produce results.
These hopes aren’t unreasonable, by any means. But what I have realised lately is that hope is also a factor in how badly rejection affects us. Hope can lead you to ascribe too much mental weight to certain goals, and make it harder when they don’t work out. Hope can grow outsized and become a fixation.
So instead of talking about rejection today, I am going to talk about my experiences with hope, both the times when I have found it helpful, and the times when it has held me back.
The pain of hoping
Let me tell you a bit more about what I mean.
Not winning, or being accepted, is a normal part of the writing submissions process. It’s repetitive, even. You start to learn the common phrases used in a rejection letter.
But each rejection has its own power. And, for me, this doesn’t necessarily correlate with how important each opportunity may be.
If I’m rejected – or, more likely, ignored – by a prestige publication that receives hundreds of submissions a day, it means very little. That’s because I’ve allocated only a small amount of hope to this submission. It’s a lottery ticket.
The ones I get most worked up about tend to be the ones that sit just between being realistic enough that I’m in with a shot, and just lofty enough that winning a contest of being published would – at least in my imagination – be a significant step forward for me.
There are probably five or six of these a year that I get very invested in. It can be quite hard to describe why, exactly, but I think it comes down to a combination of excitement about the opportunity, thinking my work’s a good fit, and fantasising about an acceptance.
I have spoken before about how I think getting excited for an opportunity is always a good sign, and I’ve rarely had an acceptance where the process didn’t start with me feeling this kind of excitement.
But there are definitely occasions when that feeling has turned into a form of stress for me.
For example, for the past two years I have entered a prize that is fairly prestigious amongst certain circles, and which rewards experimental writing in particular.
While I have never been under any illusions about the ways in which my writing is a little bit less experimental than they usually like, I have nevertheless put forward my work that most closely aligns with what they’re after, and put in the time to read previous winning pieces and analyse what makes them good.
I’m usually quite good at putting competitions out of mind once I’ve entered them. But in this case, I was thinking about it frequently. That hope of placing on the longlist had me distracted and angsty.
I think one reason for this is that the competition is quite a ‘serious’ one, and would represent a stamp of approval on the quality of my writing (if not necessarily its commercial potential).
Another is the way this particular competition announces its longlist: by posting each name one at a time on Twitter at a particular time. The organisers don’t email anyone beforehand to let them know they have or haven’t made it, so if you’re plugged-in enough as I am, you end up sitting at a computer, refreshing a bloody Twitter thread until it’s obvious your name isn’t going to be on it.
While I would really rather they used a different announcement method, the way I feel about this is also on me. I could choose not to follow it so closely.
But this is a kind of toxic hope, which sees you convincing yourself that you need to know straight away, that this is a big inflexion point for your career, and that this is your one big chance. I don’t think that feeling is uncommon.
The hope economy
Hope is a hard-working commodity. Not only does it keep us working on and sending out our writing, it keeps writing competitions and courses afloat.
This is why I think it’s so important to be careful how we use our hope.
Too much of it spread around too many places is a good way to accidentally spend hundreds on contest fees. Too much focused on a single goal is a great way to end up beating yourself up if you fail. And not enough in the first place is a surefire way to end up keeping your work under wraps.
The answer, I think, is something of a hope budget.
This isn’t a normal budget because there isn’t a red line that marks the end of your funds. But, as with keeping finances under control, the idea is to be careful about where the pennies are going - by which I mean how much you are tying your aspirations up with your submissions.
One way of doing this is to put eggs in as many baskets as possible. I am very good at doing this in one respect, which is that I tend to have work out at several places at the same time. However, I think I could improve when it comes to how much work I have finished and submission-ready at the same time; often my hopes are mostly riding on just one or two pieces.
As I said above, I think toxic hope is a common occurrence, and I see it most when writers are discussing the results of a big competition. And I expect this is because the big, tentpole competitions are the ones that attract entries from people who don’t submit anywhere else.
This is exactly how I used to approach submissions, sending my work to a couple of competitions a year and feeling completely dejected when I inevitably didn’t win. So I get it. But I think this is an example of where your hope needs to be spread a little more thinly, with other projects and possibilities to get excited for.
Another way to spend your hope wisely is to have a back-up plan for every piece of work - especially if it’s been produced with a particular opportunity in mind.
Writing something specifically for one place can really enhance the feeling of dashed hope. Earlier this year, I sent a piece in for a regular magazine slot, having written it with the format in mind. When it became clear that it hadn’t been selected, I was left feeling adrift. What was I going to do with it now?
I have written a little about this before when I talked about whether we should be writing for competitions. Expending energy creating something for a specific opportunity is a double-edged sword, giving you a better chance of meeting what judges/editors are looking for, but also making it more difficult to see how your work could fit elsewhere.
This is why I try, in my submissions spreadsheet, to add to a column labelled ‘Plan for next move’, whenever I send something out. This is where I put an idea for somewhere else to try if it gets rejected, which stops me from feeling aimless and allows me to replenish the sense of anticipation and optimism that comes with waiting on a submission.
Wishing/Hoping/Praying
To finish up, let me just say that I’m not trying to be too pessimistic here. I can’t be, I grew up watching too many Disney VHS tapes to think there’s no value in wishing upon a star.
All I’m saying is that I think there’s a lot of focus on coping with rejection after the fact, but not so much about how to brace yourself well before a decision is even made, and how to keep those creative fires burning consistently. Keep hoping for that one thing. Just don’t get hung up on it.
And in case you were actually feeling in the mood for some more discourse about rejection, and I’ve failed you with this slightly skewed approach, allow me to point you to a few other Substack posts on the topic that I’ve enjoyed recently.
And as a final thank you for reading all the way to the bottom, here are a few bonus writing opportunities for the month that didn’t appear in my last round-up, and will be closed by the time I send out the next one.
Popshot Quarterly, which published a story of mine last year alongside a gorgeous original illustration, is open until 1 June for its ‘Haunting’ issue.
Free submissions finish at the end of the month at Split Lip Magazine.
Hachette UK is seeking unpublished fiction writers from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic backgrounds for the third Mo Siewcharran Prize until 31 May.
The Offing wants your hybrid work in list form for its Enumerate section by 1 June.
And, most appropriately for this edition, the Lucent Dreaming contest has the theme of ‘hope’ and is open for short stories and flash until 31 May.
As usual, an excellent post, Alys. Great that there's no 'toxic positivity' in here, just plain, straightforward, common-sense stuff. Let's keep that thing with feathers flying x