Coping with rejection

On the 5th Estate blog, Daniel Clay recalls coping with years of rejections before an agent finally took on his novel, Broken.

There’s no pretending rejection doesn’t hurt, but some rejections hurt less than others. The slush pile rejections I received rarely offered a specific reason for why I was being rejected, so it was just a case of crossing these agents off the list and sending out my next submission. I tried to look on these as the literary equivalent of a blind date not turning up – not exactly nice, but not exactly personal, either.

The hardest rejections were the near misses, and it’s frightening how close I came to giving up on Broken because of one specific rejection.