I finished and mailed out a story called “Red & Blue” – a short-short story (500 words) covering the birth, life, and passing of two civilizations.  So far I’ve gotten 3 rejection letters and 1 e-mail saying “not reading at this time.”

Replying to an earlier post, a friend of mine pointed out Stephen King’s method of dealing with rejection letters:

As a young writer, King nailed a long, railroad spike into his bedroom wall, which he proudly hung all of his rejection letters from.  Years passed, and he had stacked rejection letters all the way to the edge of
the spike, until, one day, one of his stories was published.

From then on, for each story that was published, he would remove a rejection letter from the spike.

I think you can pretty much guess what happened next for young Stephie King.

I was thinking of doing something similar, but I think that the technique above may only work if you become a full-time writer.  My original story was actually accepted by a fiction magazine after being rejected by 6 others – using King’s method I would need to publish 6 more short stories to clean off the spike.

My technique is much more simple – recycle the rejection letters into scrap paper.  If I need to print a Google Map, no problem – just grab a letter and print on the back of it.  I think seeing the stack of letters would only dishearten me, rather than encourage me to keep going.

Right now I’m looking at the back of a letter from an assistant editor saying that “Red, Blue” didn’t grab him.  On the back I’ve written a to-do list with several tasks, with the last one reading: “Blog about recycling rejection letters.”

Mission accomplished.  Time to throw out the to-do list and start writing a new story.