Do different kinds of writer experience rejections differently?

Here’s a Guardian article by Bob Brody about rejection as a writer, suggesting ways to stay positive about it when it happens. When an editor declines a text, as of course they have to do far more often than they accept, it’s hard for the author not to see it as a rejection. Which of course it is, although I think the term ‘declined’ sounds less negative. Most editors are also writers, and the regret that is typically expressed is always likely to be genuine. Further, because of the wretched economics of the literary publishing sector, they are also highly likely to be volunteers keen to promote good writing as they see it while considering numerous texts in borrowed time.

One fundamental question that Brody doesn’t confront in his article is that rejection may be quite a different experience for different kinds of writer. If being a writer is a choice of profession and therefore the main source of income, disappointment at being frequently declined can easily be felt bitterly. This is the category to which Brody himself appears to belong. A second category, surely far larger since the advent of creative writing courses and writers’ groups, comprises those for whom writing is more like a choice of serious pastime, with or without aspirations. But if writing is a kind of compulsion – you know this if you find it very hard to not have something to write about – then being a writer is perhaps not a way of life but a way of being, and rejection may have different effects. After all, it’s a specific symptom of the impulse to communicate. (In an email to me a couple of years ago, the writer John Morrish helped me to appreciate this by distinguishing between those who write because they want to, and those who write because they have to). I wonder if those who see themselves in this category tend to regard their output as art and themselves as artists.

Personally I have a clear position on this and will try to set it down here. First, I do not know and cannot know how good or mediocre or bad my work is, although I benefit from the comments of a few friend-readers whose responses I trust. Secondly, I like to share my output with several friends who seem to enjoy it. I don’t have strong ambitions for a wider audience necessarily, and I certainly wouldn’t want to be famous (horror, utter horror). But I would like it to be the case that when I’m dead (which can’t be very far off now, though I’m not as old as Bob Brody) a few people will still be able to discover my stuff and enjoy it. Who knows if it will mature well enough to be half-well-regarded? To that modest end, I don’t feel I can simply clog up a hard drive full of texts and expect someone else to take on some kind of legacy custodianship. If I made no effort to get some pieces published, it would put unreasonable pressure on the one person who doesn’t yet fully realise he’s volunteered for the role.

So I try to keep a renewable focus on doing the best writing I can, irrespective of whether or not an editor finds it worthy; together with a responsibility to accumulate a modest published oeuvre – mostly comprising the more digestible, accessible items – to facilitate the legacy options.

Postscript: I'm reminded that I posted some similar thoughts here some time back, in a comment on a Trampset article about rejection.

PPS: An editor's observations on rejection: 'However, on this occasion...'