Submission, Silence, the Long Wait and Rejection

Right then lovely people. Picture this. You spend months, even years, making something. You sit at the desk when you’re tired, stay up late. Every day for absolutely ages, you obsess about the story and the words in your head. You cut and reshape and doubt yourself and carry on anyway. Eventually, after all the drafting, redrafting, dead ends and new starts, and editing and second guessing, it’s time to search up agents or publishers, magazines, opportunities that would suit. In my case, I pore over the details – am I right for that person, is my work going to land there? I sweat it every time. So here you are - you send the work out into the world.

Tumbleweed. Absolutely nothing happens.

No reply. No clue. If you’re lucky, there will be some sort of automated acknowledgement. But beyond that, there’s no reassuring sign that your carefully attached document has even been opened by human eyes. Just silence.

I think people outside publishing often imagine rejection as dramatic. A crushing email. A slammed door. In reality, a lot of it is waiting. Long stretches of uncertainty broken up occasionally by a form rejection that lands in your inbox while you’re feeding the dog or standing in the rain outside yet another sportsball training with the kids – well in my case. If you get a response at all. Sometimes the 8 or 12 week window has just come to an end, and with it the only thing that arrives is the realisation that one is going nowhere.

There is something oddly dislocating about sending work out. Until then, the writing belongs mostly to you. Once it leaves your laptop, it enters this slow-moving current where you no longer have control over the timing or outcome. Editors are busy. Publishers are busy. Competitions receive hundreds, sometimes thousands, of submissions. Everyone is reading around other work, around life, around exhaustion.

I know this from both sides now. I’ve submitted work myself for years, but I’ve also sat behind the editorial desk reading submissions for Stewed Rhubarb Press. I know the dry itchy eye feel and the blur of words that mesh. I also know the buzz when something connects through all that, when you read something that just grabs you. That experience has made me more patient in some ways and more sympathetic in others. Agents, publishers, editors are not sitting there gleefully rejecting people. They are usually overwhelmed, trying to give work proper attention while balancing impossible workloads and tiny budgets, hoping to find that spark. A lot of sparks get lost in there too.

That doesn’t make the waiting easier when it’s your own work involved.

There’s a particular kind of hope that develops during submission periods. At first, it’s fairly sensible. You send the thing off, congratulate yourself for being brave enough to hit submit, and move on with your day. Then, slowly, your brain starts attaching little stories to silence. Well I do anyway. I wonder if they’re discussing it, perhaps no news is good news. Hoping the delay means it’s made the next round.

Then the opposite feeling kicks in. The point where silence starts to feel ominous. The Fear sets in: the work was embarrassing all along. The work wasn’t good enough, you didn’t give enough time, or maybe it all took too much time. Shouldn’t have spent so much time watching my kids’ activities.

Does everyone else secretly understand something I don’t? How is everyone else doing it? I know deep down we are all in this same process until a certain point. With agents and publishers, the wheel of announcements keeps turning, but when there’s been a competition or a residency, I watch who got it. If it’s local-ish, a Scotland thing usually, I may well know the writer. Then I’m often pleased for them, and to be honest, also a bit jealous. What did they do, what did they say, can I see their application, I know they’re good, then… what am I doing wrong? Immediately, I start mentally retiring from literature forever. What is the point of my writing? What is the point of Charlie Roy?

This is, unfortunately, very normal. Not just for me. For everyone in writing. I think it’s because the emotional side of writing is rarely tidy, because writing itself comes from a place that is rarely tidy no matter how organised you are about it. Full disclosure here: this is my instinct, I have no hard data! I have given up countless times. However, when I don’t write, the wheels come off a little, so I go back to it, seven minute morning writing sprints, the poems come back, then the stories and I’m back in.

People talk about resilience as though it’s a switch you flip on. In reality, it’s usually much less dignified than that. It’s carrying on while occasionally being quite melodramatic in your own head.

Over the years, I’ve learnt a few things. One thing I try to do, for the sake of my own sanity, is start the next project before I hear back about the previous one. Be a skipping stone over the turmoil of giving up my dreams on the inside while still getting the laundry done. Turns out, I like having something else in motion. Another idea to flesh out, a bit of work asking for my attention. It stops all my hope attaching itself to one outcome, some of it gets directed to the new draft. Or at least that’s my theory.

Sometimes it works brilliantly. The new piece takes over and I genuinely forget about the submission for a while. Other times, I am very obviously pretending to concentrate while quietly checking my emails every seventeen minutes. Writers are still people. We are not serene artistic beings floating above disappointment. We are fragile little creatures with laptops and caffeine habits.

The danger with long waits and repeated rejection is not really the rejection itself. It’s erosion. The slow wearing away of confidence. You begin to question whether your work deserves space at all. Whether you are asking too much by continuing to send it out. It would be a bit of a downer to end this piece here, right? It’s ok, I have another tactic to share with you.

Over the last few blogs I’ve talked a lot about the small creative scene in Scotland, about pamphlets and launches and counting chairs in tiny rooms. I keep coming back to the same image because I genuinely believe it. Creative communities work like coral reefs. They survive because lots of smaller lives hold the structure together.

Most writers are not moving through this process alone, even if it feels solitary while you’re sitting at your desk. Someone else is waiting on a reply too, they’ve had a rejection this week and is trying not to overreact to it. They know what it’s like to sit staring at Submittable convinced your entire future depends on one status update.

When the community is healthy, people keep each other afloat a bit. They encourage one another to send the next submission – “How is that piece coming on? What are you working on now?” They celebrate the acceptances properly because they understand how much silence came beforehand. They remind each other that rejection is often about fit, timing, taste, or sheer capacity. In my case, being among other writers helps with the imposter syndrome, being met on the level of “we are all writers” is powerful It’s damn hard to sustain yourself in a void.

I’ve had work accepted that I was convinced would go nowhere. I’ve had work rejected that I still believe in deeply. Both things can exist at the same time. The difficult part is learning not to build your entire sense of worth around external responses. Easier said than done, obviously. If you care enough to spend years making something, of course you care what happens to it.

But I think there has to be something underneath the submission process that survives regardless. Your reason for doing it. In my experience, unless somehow you struck lucky on round one of your first piece, it’s not something you can stick at for gold or glory, those may never come. For me, that usually comes back to the work itself. Even after all the waiting, all the stalled replies, all the hopeful inbox refreshing, I still want to write. I still find myself turning over sentences while walking my dog Fidra or standing in the supermarket queue. I still feel better when I’m making something. That doesn’t magically protect you from disappointment. Rejection stings as the silence stretches. There are days where the whole thing feels faintly absurd.

And perhaps that’s the real test of whether writing has rooted itself properly in your life. Not whether you avoid rejection, because nobody does. Not whether every submission succeeds, because it won’t. It’s whether, after all the waiting and wobbling and occasional heartbreak, you find yourself opening the document again anyway.