Stop Self-Rejecting: How to Get Past Self-Doubt and Start Submitting Your Novel
Once upon a time, I was an unpublished author with a story that meant a lot to me, but wasn’t getting any traction no matter how many places I submitted. Then one evening, my mother handed me a page she’d torn out of a magazine, which contained an advert for a competition that was closing the next day. As long as the entry was postmarked before the closing date, it would be accepted.
(Side note: yes, I’m old enough that this story takes place in a time before online submissions were a thing.)
There was one problem: the theme for the competition was “freedom.” Was my short story about freedom? Well… it wasn’t not about freedom, put it that way. So I sent it in — and it won.
And after that, I was no longer an unpublished author.
My point is this: I could have self-rejected. The short story in question, Long Anna River, is about a father and son reconnecting a decade after the devastating loss of the youngest member of their family. While Luke and his dad do manage to break free, ultimately, from the pain and anger that’s destroyed their relationship, if you’d asked me the day before I submitted if this was a story I’d written on the theme of “freedom,” I would’ve had to think for a bit before I answered. But I decided to let the people in charge of making that decision decide whether or not there was enough “freedom” in this short story to meet the competition’s rules — and they decided that there was.
I could have self-rejected, but my rejection would have been the only one that counted in this scenario. I’m very glad I didn’t do that.
But I bet you’re familiar with the scenario. It’s super common among emerging authors: you pour your heart and soul into completing your story — be it a short, a novel, a screenplay, or whatever format you write in — and, once it’s polished and ready to start sending out into the world… the fear creeps in. It’s probably not what anyone is looking for right now, you reason. And why would anyone take a chance on you, a brand new author with no publication credits to your name, whose only qualification to write this thing is that you actually… you know… wrote it?
Yeah, I’m here to talk you out of that mindset. So come with me on a dive into the concept of self-rejection in creative writing as you and I explore how it manifests and how it keeps talented writers — like you — from sharing their stories with the world.
Understanding Authorial Self-Doubt
If you’re a writer — at any stage of your career — there’s an excellent chance that you have more than a passing acquaintance with imposter syndrome. I’ve got a whole other blog post about how that never really goes away (sorry) and how it tends to undermine our willingness to own our identity as Author. I’m going to be the worst kind of pretentious show-off here and quote my own blog (I know, I know…), but I feel like I kind of captured something when I wrote:
“I’ve been writing since I was old enough to grip a pencil. I’ve been traditionally published for more than 20 years. I make my living exclusively from writing. And I’m still continually insecure about my right to call myself a writer. […] I used to think I’d be sure I’d “made it” if my work got recognised by a major award. In 2021, I was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award, one of the most prestigious awards in science fiction literature. Do I now feel like I’ve “made it”? No, because I didn’t win.”
Okay, so I didn’t self-reject with Long Anna River — but the kind of authorial self-doubt I’m talking about above is just a different manifestation of the same anxiety that’s getting in your head when you talk yourself out of submitting your MS. It’s the nagging feeling that makes you question everything about your abilities as a writer once you’ve finished a project. It’s the snarky little internal voice that asks whether what you’ve created is truly good enough or worth anyone’s time.
And it gets really loud once your MS is polished and complete and ready to go.
The Ways You Talk Yourself Out of Submitting
I’m going to do my head-melty thing here and tell you what you’re thinking. This comes from (a) years and years of being a writer and (b) almost as many years of working with emerging writers as a tutor and mentor. Also, I’m told I’m pretty scary quite a lot of the time when I do this, because I’m very often right. That’s because I’ve walked this path for decades and I’ve learned a thing or two about all the many and varied ways we self-sabotage — but if I happen to swing and miss this time, and you don’t feel like you recognise yourself below, I’d ask you still to keep an open mind about the advice I’m going to suggest.
I reckon your self-reject script probably sounds something like one or more of the following:
- “But I’m not a real writer!” Well, actually… yes. You are. You have written a thing; therefore you are a writer. I don’t know why this one is so difficult for us to own, but we tend to get really weird about adding all kinds of random qualifications into the mix. You might not be a published writer, but you’re a writer. You might not be a professional writer, but you’re a writer. You might not be a well-known writer, but you’re a writer. Every published, professional, well-known writer in history started out without those three adjectives prepending their title. The reason they achieved the adjectives at all was because they were writers.
- “My writing isn’t good enough!” For… who, exactly? Who is this imagined audience for whom your writing isn’t good enough? Because, without even trying too hard, I can list a good dozen-or-so authors who have been excoriated for their work by one section of the literary world, while being lauded and adored by their readers. In fact, I can almost guarantee that we’re thinking about some of the same authors right now. There are also writers routinely hailed as geniuses whose novels I find subjectively unreadable. So… how do you know your writing isn’t good enough? Keep reading, keep writing, keep polishing, keep seeking editorial feedback, and keep learning — because if you’re worried about not being good enough, that’s a great sign that you’re well on your way.
- “I just need to make one more round of tweaks…” If this is Draft 5, then, all right, I’m probably with you. But… be honest: it’s not Draft 5, is it? It’s Draft 25. Or Draft 55. Or maybe you stopped numbering them a while back because you felt like your loved ones were likely to stage an intervention if they knew how many times you’d revised this manuscript. I say this with love and respect, but… you are never going to feel as though this MS is completely “ready.” Endlessly revising your novel is kind of the same thing as when you spent six weeks researching the thread composition of eighteenth-century cotton instead of starting to write it in the first place. It’s a thing that we do, as writers, when we want to tell ourselves that we’re Working On Our Novel without doing the difficult bits.
- “What if I try… and fail?” I mean… yeah. You might. A lot depends how we’re defining “failure” — but I know this isn’t the time or place for semantics. This is a very real fear that’s rooted in some unpleasant realities about the writing and publishing industry. The stats are so depressing I’m not even going to quote them here, because I refuse to fuel your creative self-doubt. Chances are, you are going to get a lot of nos before you get a single yes — and that’s going to feel bad. But here’s the beautiful thing: the path to publication is actively endless. No matter where it takes you, you are never going to run out of options. It would take a very, very long time to run out of agents or publishers to submit to — and the key difference, in my experience, between a published author and an unpublished author is tenacity: the single-minded determination to keep going until you hit an acceptance. And even if you did, eventually, come to the end of that particular road, the self-publishing route is always available. Success in this business may not end up looking exactly like you planned, but that doesn’t make it failure. And maybe success will end up looking exactly like you planned. You’ll never know if you don’t try.
“Endlessly revising your novel is kind of the same thing as when you spent six weeks researching the thread composition of eighteenth-century cotton instead of starting to write it in the first place.”
Strategies to Overcome Authorial Self-Doubt and Start Submitting
Remember when your novel was just a vague, half-formed idea fuelled by an absolute need to write? Remember how hard it was to break free from the voice of self-doubt that insisted you had no idea what you were doing and had no business writing a novel? Remember how you stared it down, picked up your pen, and just did it anyway?
Do you have any idea how many odds you defied just by doing that?
I really want you to realise how far you’ve already come. Because you didn’t come this far to only come this far. So let’s look at how to break the self-doubt paralysis and take action.
- Embrace the idea of “ready enough”: I have a whole other article about how to tell when your manuscript is ready to send out — but please know that it will almost certainly never feel completely ready. There will always be another round of revisions you could make, paragraphs you could trim, dialogue exchanges that you could tweak. But the same is true of literally every novel in existence. And remember that “ready enough” only means that you’ve stopped revising. It’s very likely that your future agent will want to give it their own final polish before sending it out to publishers, and your future publisher will definitely be bringing in a professional editor before it goes to press. Your job at this stage is to do enough — it’s not to make it perfect. There’s no such thing as perfection here.
- Abandon the succeed/fail mindset: It’s not serving you. This is not a binary succeed/fail situation, because a “no” result from any submission is simply another step on the road — it’s not the end. Plus, there are a million and one reasons why you might be rejected by an agent or publisher, and a million of them have nothing to do with the quality of your work. My agent rejected the first novel I sent to him and accepted the second. I found a different home for the first novel, in the end, and it became my debut — the novel itself was fine; it just wasn’t the right fit for my now-agent at that time. There are so many different ways to succeed in this business, and the vast majority of them involve a little bit of so-called “failure” first. On the rough days, read up on the rejection counts for some of the most successful authors in modern literature — most of them are well into the double figures before they got a yes. This is a rite of passage, and we wear our rejections as a badge of honour.
- Find the smallest unit of action that feels possible: If that internal voice of self-doubt is extra loud and even the thought of sending your novel to an agent sends you into a tailspin of anxiety… don’t. Don’t push yourself to do that; it’s going to be counterproductive — you’re just going to end up avoiding everything to do with your novel, and that’s no good. You break the tailspin by taking action, but it has to be an action that feels possible. So instead of saying, “Today, I am going to send my novel to three literary agencies,” say, “Today, I am going to come up with a list of three agents I could send my novel to.” Or if even that feels impossible, say, “Today, I’m going to create a spreadsheet where I can capture the names and contact information for the agents I could send my novel to.” Or “I am going to find out who represents [name of your favourite author].” Or, “I’m going to sign up for a subscription to Writers & Artists.” Or whatever task feels possible for you in the moment. The trick is to take action — any action — and prove to your amygdala that action is possible.
Final Thoughts: Taking the Leap
I’m going to finish up with some tales from the submissions trenches, and I’ll start with my own. Edge of Heaven was rejected more times than I can count by both literary agents and publishers before it found a forever home with NewCon Press and ended up on the shortlist for the Arthur C Clarke Award. As I write this post, a short story that I wrote in the early 1990s has finally appeared in print for the first time, after enough rejection slips to paper a small room. Another short story from the same time period didn’t get its “yes” until 2022.
Chicken Soup for the Soul was rejected 144 times before it became an international bestseller. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was rejected 121 times. Still Alice broke 100 rejections before author Lisa Genova opted to self-publish — after which, it was acquired by an imprint of Simon & Schuster, spent almost a year on the NYT bestseller list, and was adapted into a movie starring Julianne Moore. Kathryn Stockett’s The Help has sold more than 7 million copies, but it got 60 nos from agents before it got a yes. “After my five years of writing and three and a half years of rejection,” says Stockett, “an agent named Susan Ramer took pity on me. What if I had given up at 15? Or 40? Or even 60?”
And what if she’d never sent it out at all?
In her speech to the One Story Debutante Ball in 2019, multi-award-winning author Kelly Link had this advice for emerging authors: “Don’t self-reject. You know what I mean.”
I know what she means. And I’m pretty sure you do too. Now… smash that “send” button and let your writing soar.
What’s holding you back from submitting? Let me know in the comments how I can help you find the confidence to send your work out into the world!
Read next
Stop Self-Rejecting: How to Get Past Self-Doubt and Start Submitting Your Novel
The Final Read-Through: A guide to catching sneaky typos before hitting “submit”
