The dreaded rejection letter. The writer’s equivalent of a dear john letter.
They’re a necessary evil that goes hand in hand with being an author who’s continually writing and submitting their work.
I’ve had my share of them and once I even received two in one day. Ouch! Another time I received someone else’s rejection.
Then you get published and you think they’ll stop, but they don’t. Even when you’ve got a couple of published books under your belt, you get rejected again.
The thing I hatedmost about opening up an envelope and seeing dear author, this story isn’t right for us, blah, blah, blah, was not knowing what was wrong with it. Was it the plot, the characters, and was I repeating the same mistakes with each story I wrote?
When I was asked to come up with some new workshop ideas I thought back to these times. I remembered my frustration and how I wanted to know what I could do to make my story better so that rejection letters didn’t come sailing through the letterbox again.
I came up with an idea for a boot camp style workshop with a limited number of students so I can give each of them more of my time and we’ll work one on one rather than in a group setting. The My Story’s Been Rejected Now What? was born. It launches next month and the kind people at Outreach Chapter made this flyer for me to share with everyone.
If you’ve had a story recently rejected and what some help to rework it and figure out what’s wrong, this is the workshop for you.
Hope to see you in class.
Feel free to pass this along to other writers and groups!