acceptance – Investigating the writing process

Working With Rejection- part one.

My previous post on this blog discussed the role of self-compassion in the writer’s life, especially when we’re overwhelmed, blocked by inner or outer obstacles such as ill health, or experience rejection. Since then, I’ve started working as a writer for the Positive Psychology blog. My first piece has already been published on the application of ACT to group work. I have another piece written which will be published soon. Researching and writing these articles has delayed me posting here, but it’s returned me to a disciplined writer’s life. My main focus has been coaching and editing for the past few years. Now, I’m back in the saddle as a researcher and writer facing similar issues to my clients. Given my changed circumstances, I have decided to postpone the app and focus on bespoke one-to-one coaching for the time being. I’ll continue to post here about the common issues challenging my clients and my own writing process, but they’ll be snappier shares, rather than longer articles.

I promised to explore the issue of rejection in this post in more depth, so think of this as part one. I’m certainly familiar with the discomfort of having my writing rejected, and I have also rejected the writing of others when peer-reviewing for journals, reviewing book proposals for publishers, and editing for blogs. Neither side of this divide is pleasant, but it does give me a useful overview of the whole process of rejection. When you’re on the receiving end, rejection can often feel random and arbitrary.

I experienced a rejection of some fiction I’d written recently. The reviewer congratulated me on the quality of my writing but explained that ‘it didn’t grab me enough to want to take it further’. Fair enough, but what to do with that feedback? I took some time to process the rejection. I wasn’t upset. I didn’t take it personally. I even expected this response deep down. Why? I knew the beginning wasn’t sitting right with me and I just hadn’t summoned the patience to rewrite it. So, I decided to try again.

I’m now using some of the material I cut out of a previous version that I’m confident drops the reader straight into a gripping situation on the first page. It’s going to take a while to get it right, but I’m already much happier with it, and especially happy to include the writing I’d been advised to cut out by an editor of a previous version. It was well written he’d said, but not necessary. Now I see it was actually in the wrong place. I eventually stopped working with that particular editor as his advice was 100% market and sales driven, so we ran into a clash in values. Perhaps this clash in values is at the root of a lot of rejection, in one way or another. As writers, these clashes with publishers confront us with choice points. I’ve referred to choice points in earlier posts. Here’s a quick reminder.

The choice point facing me when my editor’s values clashed with mine was between reaching my goal of becoming a published writer in the near future, or choosing to adhere to the values driving my writing process. I took the latter option as integrity is the primary value driving my creativity. Different writers will have different values. For some, commercial success will be all important and there is nothing wrong with that. Nothing at all! However, in my case, compromising to reach a cherished goal was one thing, but ditching the values driving my writing process was not an option. I’ve discussed the difference between values and goals in previous posts, but here’s a quick reminder.

In short, if I’d prioritised my goals over my values, I would have been rejecting myself to try and capture a market. Out of self-compassion and a longer-term view I chose in favour of my values.

This type of rejection experience is specific to fiction writing. A publisher’s or agent’s acceptance and rejection of fiction is somewhat subjective, based on taste, and of course, markets. If you are suffering a growing pile of rejections, then be assured you’re in great company. One of my favourite writers, Kurt Vonnegut, received the following.

“Dear Mr. Vonnegut, We have been carrying out our usual summer house-cleaning of the manuscripts on our anxious bench and in the file, and among them I find the three papers which you have shown me as samples of your work. I am sincerely sorry that no one of them seems to us well adapted for our purpose. Both the account of the bombing of Dresden and your article, “What’s a Fair Price for Golden Eggs?” have drawn commendation although neither one is quite compelling enough for final acceptance. Our staff continues fully manned so I cannot hold out the hope of an editorial assignment, but I shall be glad to know that you have found a promising opening elsewhere. Faithfully yours, Edward Weeks.”

You can read more of the harshest rejection letters received by great writers here.

These days, one easy way to avoid rejection is self-publishing, but then marketing becomes the author’s responsibility. New writers with no platform will find marketing their work very difficult without a great of time and money to invest. I’ll discuss this option in another post. However, when academic writing is rejected, the considerations are very different. I’ve spent many years editing academic writing for publication. I’ve also participated in the peer-review process. My next post in this series on rejection will discuss this process in detail, and how academic writers can maximise their chances of publication. Until then, remember rejection provides you with an opportunity to revamp, re-evaluate, and improve your writing. It may even be setting you on course for something far better than you imagined.

Setting Intentions and the Art of Self-Compassion

This blog has been dormant while I’ve been recovering from an eye infection- a complication of my periodic computer vision syndrome (CVS) that causes dry eyes, irritation, light sensitivity, and tearing up. I treated the problem with Ayurvedic eyewashes, rest and taking a break from the screen. The swollen eye also prevented me from videoing the content for my new app, but now it’s cleared up filming begins next week. This got me thinking about the impact of our health on our best intentions, and how an increasingly screen-based working life may be impacting many of us.

I had to consciously choose to take a break from working, despite another internal commentary blaming me for my eye infection and failing to meet my goals on time. In an effort to appease my inner critic, I even tried the compromise measure of one-eyed research and writing, but after ten or fifteen minutes, realised this placed a terrible strain on my remaining vision. There was nothing else for it, I had to stop and take care of myself properly. I remembered Kristin Neff’s work on self-compassion and reminded myself that we all deserve care and concern during periods of suffering. I visited her site and plugged in my TV monitor to listen to her again.

I wasn’t struggling with an internal obstacle such as procrastination or avoidance, this was my human vulnerability to illness preventing me from meeting my best intentions to meet my goals. I needed some self-kindness.

I pulled her book off the shelf and re-read her exercise that suggests writing yourself a letter as if you were writing to a friend in need. I didn’t write myself a letter, but I did choose to be kind to myself, slow down, and spend more time off-screen than on-screen while my eye healed. I even postponed some client appointments explaining my situation and received messages of care and compassion from them too. This led to reset my intentions to include self-compassion during difficult times when unexpected events derail my best-laid plans. While my intentions always include remaining aware of subconscious experiential avoidance strategies, it’s also important to remember that unexpected suffering requires attention and psychological flexibility.

This very concrete experience of physical illness led me to reflect on the impact of other unexpected events on our writing lives. What other situations might crop up in the life of a writer that require a resetting of intentions and a period of self-compassion? A common experience for most of us is rejection from a publisher, blog, agent, or journal, or getting a poor grade for a written assignment, which may or may not be accompanied by criticism and discouraging remarks.

Unfortunately, many decisions made in the publishing industry are notoriously subjective and even nepotistic. There’s also a lot of competition and bad writing out there. Getting attention is hard. Many choose self-publishing as an antidote to ‘the old boys’ network’ syndrome that haunts many major agencies and publishing houses. Others sign up for writing courses, join writers’ groups, get a writing coach, or even give up in the face of repeated rejection. The fact is that rejection is part of every writer’s life, and rejection takes its toll on us psychologically. An article in The Cut entitled ‘Rejection Is An Enormous Part of a Writer’s Life’ offers some tips on handling rejection by seven established writers who have accepted it as part of their working life. Samantha Irby writes

“Most people don’t tell you why they don’t want your thing. They just say, “Oh, thanks, but no thanks.” I find it soothing to think about how much of this is out of my control. The only thing that I can be sure of is what I’ve made. I wrote this thing; it made me laugh; I’m happy with it. Why they didn’t buy it, I’ll never know.”

The keyword for me here is ‘control’. So many of the factors involved in decisions to publish are not in a writer’s control. Meanwhile, Akwaeke Emezi recounts how rejections that hurt at the time have sometimes been followed by other opportunities offering something better.

“… one of the things I’ve learned is that, a lot of the time, rejections are like doors that close because there’s a path somewhere else that I’m meant to be on. I don’t really feel bad about rejections anymore because I’m like, Okay, that’s cool. I’m not supposed to go there. I can’t wait to find out where I am supposed to go, because that’s going to be awesome in a way that I didn’t even imagine.”

This attitude embraces the acceptance that is key to cultivating resilience. One strategy for managing disappointment is resetting your intentions in line with your values. When you meet a roadblock in one direction, try again using another route. Meanwhile, Alexander Chee takes a deeply pragmatic approach.

“Rejection is something that, in some ways, you have to work with as much as you work with language as a writer. It’s the other medium of writing, which is to say: Learning to work with rejection, learning how rejection can propel you forward, whether you’re deciding to get better or you’re deciding to move on — you just can’t let it be an obstacle.”

I find this the most useful suggestion given my commitment to continuous creative development in face of ongoing challenges, especially when coaching other writers. Language may be the medium that lights our path ahead, while rejection is the shadow that helps us hone and define it. One requires the other, like yin and yang, or as Thich Nhat Hahn put it ‘no mud, no lotus’. Every edit is a form of rejection, and yet editorial revisions are always necessary to refine our writing, blossom and grow. Rhonda Douglas recommends regular doses of self-compassion as essential to our craft.

“Can you see how this can help us as writers to weather the incredible amount of rejection that most of us are naturally going to experience in our artistic lives, no matter how hard we work or how talented we are? Rejection is just a fact of the writing life, and self-compassion can help us keep moving forward in the face of it.”

As writers, perhaps the key to working with rejection is cultivating the capacity to separate our writing from our sense of personal identity through acceptance combined with cognitive defusion. Of course, self-compassion when we feel the twinge of disappointment is always a good move, while judging ourselves as a failure or giving up may be rooted in a misunderstanding of the reality of the writer’s life. What do you think? Let me know in the comment section below. I will also explore this more in my next blog post. Meanwhile…keep writing!

Writer’s overwhelm and the power of acceptance

Photo by Eugenio Mazzone on Unsplash

This week I have been busy with my Focused Flow app development tasks and learning how to make videos to promote my app when it’s finished. Therefore, the blog hasn’t been updated. I’ve thought about it often, but each time I sat down with the laptop and opened the page I experienced the common problem of overwhelm- that experience of having too much to do, too little time, and the temporary jamming of the cognitive processing required to write. This hasn’t been made any easier by my seasonal problem of hay fever that drains my energy and leaves me feeling unmotivated.

This week I’ve also been working closely with two academic clients who’ve reported a similar problem with overwhelm clogging up their cognitive gears and leaving them with a sense of dread. So, overwhelm seems to be this week’s issue all round, and is a common problem for academic writers who have to filter through piles of notes, references and ideas, focus them down into a coherent narrative and structure their research into a written paper.

While working with my coaching clients I’ve discovered one size definitely does not fit all when managing writer’s overwhelm. As I develop and refine the Focused Flow model, managing overwhelm appears to be key to overcoming procrastination and dissolving writer’s block too. In my short promo video, I focus on the problem of overwhelm that strikes when we’re faced with piles of notes, our mind is firing off in all directions with lots of ideas, focus deserts us and taking action by writing seems almost impossible.

One strategy for overcoming overwhelm is ‘snack writing’- making a pledge to jot down around 200-300 words a sitting, using cognitive defusion to stay on track should the inner critic emerge and start trying to edit what you’re writing. Another is to use acceptance strategies to make space for the discomfort of overwhelm and stop struggling against it. My recent experience of overwhelm led me to experiment with some acceptance strategies by leaning into the uncomfortable sensations I was experiencing in my body right around my lower abdomen- a sense of restlessness coupled with dread- and then once I had a clear visualisation of it, I stepped back from my thoughts about it using defusion strategies- specifically ‘I notice I having the thought that I can’t do all of this’. In the video below from ‘Therapy in a Nutshell’ a multitasking mother, therapist and writer discusses her strategy for overcoming overwhelm.

I did something similar, by making a list of tasks for the day and taking action, despite the feeling of dread I was experiencing deep in my gut. Overwhelm was blocking my productivity just as it had with my clients. I had too much to do in too little time, but really the timeline I had imposed on myself pointed to unrealistic goal setting. The solution was to review my goal setting, prioritise my tasks, and set more realistic goals that I could manage- not so challenging they’d cause anxiety and not so easy I’d get bored. This is key to dropping into the flow state, establishing focus, and optimising productivity.

I also bought a special journal to help me reorganise myself and record what I learn on a daily basis… including doodling and mind mapping my creative process and noting down what helps me to drop into my flow state. The pathway to the flow state is unique to each individual. I have discovered that leaning into uncomfortable sensations and emotions, defusing from my thoughts about them, while making bite sized daily short-term goals helps me to dissolve overwhelm and reorientate to the values driving my writing process. I had to remind myself not to underestimate the power of taking small steps to completing what appear to be formidable tasks- like building an app for the very first time.

In the video below, Russ Harris describes the ‘chess board metaphor’ to explain how acceptance and defusion combined can unhook us from inner struggles like overwhelm or anxiety and give uncomfortable feelings the space to move. When we become like the chess board rather than the chess pieces, we step back and observe our inner state rather than freezing in the face of overwhelm and the sensation of dread that accompanies it. Instead, we can embrace the power of the witness state and make space for the overwhelm to shift and dissolve.

Today, I’ll return to building the Focused Flow app after taking a short break to reorganise myself. The experience of overwhelm has receded but I’m aware it has the potential to return if I lose my focus. Finishing this blog post is one item crossed off my list for today! Without my experience of overwhelm the past few days, it’s unlikely it would have been written. As ever, I turn to my inner experience to guide my investigation of the writing process. I hope you find my reflections and the video resources I’ve shared useful. I look forward to any comments below or email me on info@focused-flow.com if you have questions you’d like to discuss in private.