The Beast Of The Rejection
Sunday 13th March 2011
Rejection.
Hurts, doesn't it? We know, we've been there.
Although, seeing as about half of the sitcoms we received this year were about characters who'd been made redundant, been rejected from job interviews, split up with girlfriends and boyfriends or been thrown out of their homes, writers seem to know a lot about rejection. It fuels our writing, it informs our art, it defines our suffering.
We spend our lives being rejected. People do the Lottery three times a week, more if you include scratchcards, and only a tiny percentage win the millions. The postman comes to my house six days a week, and six days a week rejects my pleas to bring a letter from Premium Bonds to tell me my mortgage worries are over. We're so used to it, we hardly notice.
But, as writers and artists, we hold a special place for rejection. We dream, struggle, sweat, fret, rehash, polish and package our art, and then willingly place our hopes and fears into the hands of those people in positions of authority that we criticise on a daily basis for their strange choices and inability to see things the way we do. We shout at the television or radio because these people in power have unbelievably given our broadcast slot to someone with lesser ability. We put our souls into our art, and then send our art and soul to the slaughter.
We make rejection into a big, scary monster that threatens our very existence. As people with developed imaginations, we create a dark and destructive enemy that can only be slain by other people. We claim victim status. We stop being the protagonists of our own story. We willingly put the weapon of this beast's destruction into the hands of people we've never seen, don't like, don't respect and whose judgements we constantly question. If we were watching our own story, we'd be shouting at the television telling ourselves not to worry about the final outcome and concentrate on the journey. It's as though we want to watch Dorothy wake up back in Kansas without having the adventures in Oz, to enjoy the rainbow and not the rain.
I'm tempted to say this need for publishing and broadcast validation is primarily a male thing, as we boys are supposed to be more concerned with the outcome and less with the process. Still, the number of sitcoms we receive that are written by women and are concerned with the sisterhood being unromantically dumped by a brute of a male suggests that rejection is something deeply felt by all and sundry. And I know of many women writers who feel frustrated at their lack of success and opportunity.
One writer who didn't take rejection lying down is Julie Bower. A Sitcom Trials finalist in 2009 with The House on Cedar Street and Sitcom Mission quarter-finalist in 2010 with The Honeys, Jules took those 'rejections' (some would be happy with those achievements) in her stride and continued pursuing the dream. She's been repaid with a half-hour broadcast pilot of 49 Cedar Street, an extended version of her 2009 script. We're incredibly proud that we spotted her spark and potential and gave her work a platform, and wish her all the best for the future.
So how do we conquer rejection? There are plenty of glib answers: 'make rejection your friend', 'every no means you're closer to a yes' and the oft-quoted dismissals of Fred Astaire, The Beatles and Colonel Sanders' chicken recipe. You could defeat rejection by never bothering to attempt anything again, as my Homer Simpson boxer shorts remind me, "You tried and failed. The mistake you made was to try." But successful people have a better way of dealing with failure (because that's what we think rejection is) - they don't recognise it as failure. The word isn't in their vocabulary: it becomes an experience, a challenge, an obstacle or a hurdle. When was the last time you saw Richard Branson, Sir Alan Sugar or Donald Trump hold their hands up and say, "That's it. Nobody loves me. I quit"?
It hurts, but only when we concentrate on the prize and not the process. And we need to define what the prize is and why we want it. A year ago I lost a very dear friend who had well over 100 rejection slips from writing agents and publishing companies. He desperately wanted to be published, but could never say why he wanted to be accepted by an industry of which he was highly dismissive and critical. Sadly, he never made it, but I'm so honoured and grateful to have taken the journey with him.
So if you're the proud recipient of a Laughing Stock and Sitcom Mission rejection email, congratulate yourself for having the guts to take up arms and go on the journey, and keep going. Nobody achieved anything by giving up. And remember, Dorothy thought that she'd come such a long way when she met the Tin Man. Why, she'd just begun.