Tag Archives: writing tips

Personal Reflections, Writing

Eight Tips for Coping with Writing Rejections

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SheepWriting is hard. I know you already know that.

Reading is hard too, especially if you have to read bad writers, which is why I hope you haven’t already started thinking, “Reading this blog is hard. . .”

My point is that putting words on a page and hoping they pile up and turn into clear, coherent, and meaningful prose (or poetry) is so difficult that it creates self-consciousness and worry and other neurotic thoughts and emotions linked to being judged and rejected. And just in case you feel tempted, you don’t have to tell me that good writers never write, “My point is. . .” because my other point is that I’ve been getting lots of rejections lately.

I’d rather not admit anything about my writing rejection rate; I’d rather have you think that everything I write gets published. There have been thousands of pages, eight books, and 100+ professional articles—all published, but that’s NOT the point (I also know that using ALL CAPS is bad form, like shouting while writing, and that no one but Dave Barry, former humor columnist, GETS AWAY WITH ALL CAPS).

This summer, not unlike last summer and the summer before that, and other ad nauseam summers of my life, was a summer of writing rejections. I like to say, “There were a plethora of rejections” because I like the word plethora. But let’s not go into the details because one year I tried to count up all my rejections and it was like counting cloudy days and I got depressed and I vowed to never count rejections and instead to only count acceptances and publications and successes and smiles and sunshine, and I also vowed to write long sentences if I feel like writing long sentences, because as far as I can tell, that’s what Sigmund Freud did, and he got a couple things published.

Instead of numbering the rejections, let me share just one.

This summer I wrote a proposal for a trade book on Suicide in American. It was supposed to be a proposal for a trade book on Suicide in America. But the first version of the proposal managed to include an extra “n.” How that typo slipped in there after 43 readings, including my traditional oral reading before submitting—I cannot say.

Anyway, just remember this, Suicide in America is not the most fun topic, but it’s even a worse topic when you make a typo in the first line. After experiencing the horror of seeing the typo and correcting it, I sent the proposal out to a dozen or so agents and got a dozen or so rejections. Not the most fun outcome. However, not to be deterred, I stole some of my sample chapter material and used it in a continuing education course that I DID GET PUBLISHED (notice the ALL CAPS, BECAUSE, YES, I AM YELLING).

I thought about sending all the agents who rejected my book proposal a copy of my first check from the CE company, along with a photo of my finger, but that belongs on this list of tips and sage advice for all you writers who will inevitably need to cope with rejection.

  1. Even though you want to, don’t write a snarky email or letter back to the person who rejected your wonderful work. No doubt, the snarky email will feel good in the moment, but you could regret it later. I speak from experience. Being at conferences with people who have received photos of my finger is awkward. Instead, vent to your friends and colleagues, and thank the person who rejected you for considering your work.
  2. Listen—sometimes. Lots of trade book agents and publishers tell you in advance that they plan to ghost you, so sometimes there’s nothing to hear. But on occasion, there’s this thing that happens called feedback. You can take it or leave it, but if you want to develop your writing skills, take it—or at least take some of it sometimes. The corollary to this is that reviewers can be nasty. This is especially true of academic reviewers, many of whom have come to believe that it’s their responsibility to shame fledgling writers. My advice on that is simple: Ignore the reviewer’s tone because he/she/they likely have poor social skills and are compensating for their loneliness by trying to make you feel bad, or something like that. Ignore the tone, but listen to the content.
  3. Go Big or Go Home. Being that you’re an amazing person with fantastic ideas, don’t, as former President George W. Bush might say, misunderestimate yourself. Feel free to submit pieces to the New Yorker or the New England Journal of Medicine or other fancy publications that begin with the word New. Then, get ready to be ghosted, rejected, and humiliated. If—odds are low here—you get something accepted, you’ll be like Rocket Man.
  4. Find a Small Pond. Going big or going home is a broken philosophy, unless you finish the guidance with go home and find a small pond where you can submit your work, become a big fish, and find the positive reinforcement you crave. Publishing a short comment in your neighborhood newsletter is better than having nothing published. Look at me. I’ve got a blog. I publish here all the time. The best part of the deal is my publisher loves my work.
  5. Turn it Around. Rita and I have an academic friend who says we academics should live by the turn it around in 24 hours rule. He says that as soon as he receives a rejection letter/email from a professional journal, he starts his timer and submits the manuscript to a different journal in 24 hours or less. Never having achieved that, Rita and I try to live by something more like a 24 day rule. Either way, push yourself to revise and resubmit to someone, like my blog publisher, who’s likely to love your work and publish you yesterday.
  6. Mingle. If you’re sitting around feeling sorry for yourself, you need to get out more because, duh, you’re not alone. If you find them, you’ll discover that most writers are mostly sitting around feeling sorry for themselves most of the time. So mingle. Share your sorrows. Maybe form a writing group or a book club or a knitting clutch. Embrace the Hegelian dialectic that, although you’re plenty special, you’re also simultaneously not really all that special.
  7. Write More. There comes a time when you need to get right back on that bus that bucked you off. Nobody becomes a better writer without writing. Visualization is good for golf and relaxation, but not so much for writing. Reading is good for writing, but only if you’re also putting fingers to keyboards and digits on screens. Somebody said this already: Read, write, repeat.
  8. Practice CBT on Your Neurotic Writer-Self. Albert Ellis liked to say, “Don’t be a love slob.” What he meant was to not be too needy. He would ask his clients things like, “What the holy Hell are you thinking?” He drove home the idea that you can perform badly at lots of things, get rejected, fail, and still have, what he called, “Unconditional Self-Acceptance.” In other words (which is another phrase my editor hates), Ellis is saying you shouldn’t confuse your performance with your SELF. Let’s say you get rejected. You’ll likely feel sad and disappointed. That’s normal and healthy. But don’t use your Vita to measure your SELF.

I’m hoping you find this list of tips for handling rejection helpful. If it’s not, feel free to let me know. I’ll be sad and disappointed But I’ll get over it. I plan to keep writing anyway. I hope you do too.

Personal Reflections, Suicide Assessment and Intervention, Writing

Professional Writing 101: Dealing with Rejection

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This is how it goes.

You read, gather background information, do research, and carefully write a manuscript. You put in so many hours or days or weeks that you lose track of how much time you’ve put in—which is a good thing. You re-read, edit, get feedback, revise, and do your best to produce an excellent manuscript. You upload it a portal where it magically finds its way to a professional journal editor. Then, because you can only submit a manuscript to one journal at a time, you wait.

A month passes.

You keep waiting.

If you’re lucky, you hear back from the journal editor via email within two months. You click on the email with a mix of anticipation and dread. Then, ta-da, you learn your manuscript was REJECTED.

The editor is polite, but pointedly informs you that this particular journal doesn’t recognize the magnificence of your work. To add insult to injury, your rejection is accompanied by critiques from three different reviewers. These reviewers were apparently named by Dr. Seuss: Reviewer 1, Reviewer 2, and Reviewer 3.

Some rejections are worse than others. Maybe it’s because your hopes were too high; or maybe it’s because the journal’s impact factor rating was so low. Getting rejected when the journal has an impact rating of “0” can bring down your self-esteem to a similar level.

And then there are the reviewers.

It’s important to remember that reviewers are busy, fallible, human, and unpaid volunteers. They’re also purportedly experts, although I’ve had experiences that led me to question their expertise. Many appear to have a proverbial axe to grind. Perhaps because they experienced scathing critiques in their professional childhood, they feel the need to pass on the pain. Sometimes they just seem obtuse. I’ve wondered a time or two if maybe a reviewer forgot to actually read the manuscript before offering an off-point “review.”

If you sense bitterness, it might be because over the past several years I’ve experienced an extra-large load of rejections. When the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) rejected my manuscript in less than a week, I was disappointed. But because the NEJM is the most prestigious journal on the planet, I didn’t linger much on the rejection, because rejection was expected. But when a decidedly less-prestigious professional group rejected all my proposals to present at an annual conference, I was deeply hurt, saddened, and angry. Reading the reviewers’ comments didn’t help.

At one point last summer, in a fit of self-pity, I decided to count up my two-year rejection total. I got to 20, had a flash of insight, and stopped. It was like counting cloudy days. My advice: Unless you’re especially serious about depressing yourself, don’t count up your rejections. If you’re into counting, put that energy into counting the sunny days.

One time, back when I was immature and impulsive, I received an insensitive and insulting rejection from a low tier journal. My response: A hasty, nasty, and indignant email lambasting the editor and his single reviewer for their poor decision-making process and outcome. Sending the email was immediately gratifying, but, like many immediately gratifying things, not reflective of good judgment. I never heard back. And now, when I see that editor at conferences, it’s awkward.

More recently, I responded to a rejection from a high-status conference with humility along with a gentle inquiry about re-consideration. Less than 24 hours later they discovered “one more slot” and I was in! It was a paid gig, for an excellent conference, and at a convenient venue. Bingo. Let that be a lesson to me.

Last month I received a different sort of journal rejection. It was an invitation to “Revise and Resubmit.”

Put in romantic terms, revise and resubmit is lukewarm and confusing. The message is, “I kind of like you, and you have potential, but I’m not ready for a commitment.” But if you’ve been casting out and reeling in a raft of rejections, revise and resubmit is a welcome flirtation.

I had submitted a manuscript focusing on suicide risk assessment to a reasonably good journal. It was a good manuscript. In fact, Reviewer 3 recommended publication. But Reviewer 1 spoiled my day by offering 23 substantial and picky suggestions. The editor, who wrote me a long and rather nice email, decided to go with Reviewer 1’s opinion: revise and resubmit.

Given that I’ve been reviewing the suicide risk assessment literature for a couple decades, I assumed I was well-versed in the area. But when I read through Reviewer 1’s suggestions I was surprised, humbled, and eventually pleased. Reviewer 1 had many excellent points.

Looking back and forward, I think this is what I like best about submitting manuscripts to professional journals. Basically, you get a free critique and although some reviewers are duds, others are experts in the field who provide you with a fabulous educational opportunity. There’s always so much more to learn.

The moral of this story and blog post is that the attitude we have toward rejection is far more important than our fragile egos (at least it’s more important than my fragile ego). In response to the revise and resubmit verdict, I’ve graciously accepted the feedback, engaged a co-author to help me, and we have now systematically plowed through the 23 recommendations. The result: Last week we re-submitted a vastly improved manuscript.

Now we wait.

Although I have hope for success, I also realize that Reviewer 1 may have a bit more educational feedback to offer. But this time around, I’m looking forward to it.

 

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Clinical Interviewing, Counseling and Psychotherapy Theory and Practice

Paper Writing Tips for Grad Students in Counseling and Psychology

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I recently had the honor and privilege of reading the first set of papers submitted to me by graduate students this semester. The papers were generally of good quality, but a few repeating patterns inspired me to provide the following list of basic tips for graduate students seeking to become mental health professionals.

  1. There’s nothing quite like a clear and concise topic sentence in academic writing. The topic (or focus sentence) introduces the content included in the paragraph. When used well, it’s a beautiful organizing force that brings joy and comprehension to the hearts and minds of many a reader (especially moi).
  2. Although I absolutely hate the saying “More is less” (because, in fact, “more” is always “more” even though “less” can better), it’s a good general rule to make your sentences shorter rather than longer because all too often I find students, like myself in this particular sentence, trying to fit too much information into one sentence when it would be clearer and better to break it up into two or three sentences. A corollary to this rule is that fewer quotation marks and exclamation marks are better than more of those particular “Marks!”
  3. A transition sentence or two that describes what you’ll be covering in your paper and placed at the end of your opening paragraph or in your second paragraph is very helpful to your reader.
  4. Unless you’re a Brit, you should put your commas, periods, and ellipsis inside the quotation marks, “Like this. . .” Think about it this way: commas and periods like to be on the inside; they don’t like to be floating outside the quotation marks because, unless they live on the British Isles, it increases their existential sense of isolation.
  5. You don’t need to use a comma when you have a short list of only two thoughts because all you need in that case is the word “and.” For example, notice the absence of a comma in the following sentence: Max was feeling quite spry and decided to post a smiley face to his Facebook status. In this case we do not need or want a comma after the word “spry.”
  6. Keep in mind that in most cases it best to maintain consistency between singular and plural within the same sentence and paragraph. For example, if you write: “The counselor should work to have empathy with their client” it will cause me to wonder why you didn’t go with: “Counselors should have empathy with their clients.” Note: There is also a good reason to use what is now commonly referred to as the singular “they.” Using they or their as singular (representing an individual) is perfectly acceptable–especially when referring to individuals who are averse to the gender binary. However, in most cases, it’s easier and IMHO maintains better grammar-flow to shift to plural-plural whenever reasonable.
  7. Remember that your professor really likes the appropriate use of the Harvard comma. What this means is that when providing a list of more than two items, you should place a comma after the first item, second item, and before the and. An example: John very much enjoys running, walking, and dancing. If you leave out that last comma, it seems like the final two items are somehow joined together. Remember also, that although journalists don’t use it, the Harvard comma is consistent with APA style.
  8. When you’re quoting someone you should use the past tense; this is because the person whom you’re quoting has already said it. For example, in his book Working with challenging youth, Richardson stated: “Yada, yada, and yada.” Although it’s tempting to write, “Richardson states” the past is the past even though Gestalt therapists might want us to bring everything into the here-and-now.
  9. Please include the page number or numbers when you’re quoting someone so your reader, if so inclined, can confirm the accuracy of your quotation. This is also APA style. Always avoid anything that might be viewed as plagiarizing.
  10. In contrast and opposite of how I’m writing in this list of writing tips, APA style doesn’t like contractions. Instead, just like Commander Data in the Star Trek series, you do not use contractions when writing in APA format and you will see a little red mark on your paper if you write with the casual contraction.
  11. You may recall that Michael Jackson sang: “A, B, C is easy as 1, 2, 3.” Well, APA actually thinks that (a), (b), (c). . . is better than 1, 2, 3. . . when it comes to in-paragraph list-making.
  12. If you use capital letters when you don’t need to, I will think you’ve freshly arrived from Germany. Words like counselor and psychologist should not be capitalized and even though specific mental disorders like major depressive disorder are often capitalized, we shouldn’t privilege particular words just because we feel like it or just because the American Psychiatric Association would like those words to take on greater significance.
  13. My old statistics professor always used to say that you write numbers just like you write words. What he meant by this is that justlikeyouwouldneverwritelikethis, when writing an equation you should always put a space between the operation and the integer. For example, it’s always n = 1 and never n=1.
  14. Although corporations are people (according to SCOTUS, not me), people are not corporations. This means you should use “who” when referring to actual people and “that” “them” or “it” when referring to non-people. When it comes to addressing corporations, make no reference at all, just bow your head in deference.
  15. Although it’s very cool and good form to cite your professor’s work in your paper, you should do your best to spell his name correctly.