first play, first rejection? If I printed out my email rejections and combined them with the mailed rejections, I could send you enough rejections to completely cover your Mr. Big Ben.
You can have some diet coke and sympathy from your old friend Swann. Look, you entered. You made a start. You remember the TV show The Play's the Thing - when a certain actor told the playwrights to get used to rejection. He was right.
Look, I think it's one of the hardest vocations/avocations you can even attempt and I think you have to give yourself a little credit - cut yourself some slack. It's a start.
My upstairs neighbor is a RADA instructor and he always goes into peals of laughter when I recount my brave plan to give up law in Washington and become a playwright in London in the space of a year. It's a real hoot for him.
Look, people study drama, play writing, dramaturgy for years. They get degrees in it. You have a day job that isn't writing. You have a life first. So you didn't get this one. So what? You got lots of good feedback on this site.
You have other plays to write. In a few years you probably won't love Zorg so much anyway. Argh, why do we do this? It's temporal, circumstantial, tentative, solitary, communal and just so bloody difficult.
Keep banging your head on that keyboard playful - they clearly dont know a good play when they see one.
I got my own taste of rejection a couple of weeks back - I sent a small group of lovingly crafted poems off to a literary magazine on friday morning. On monday I got home to find my Self Addressed Envelope lying on the doormat - talk about taking an instant dislike! The editor was kind enough to include a short note along the lines of "Enjoyed reading all of these ... just not enough."
I also did my own bit of judging last week - reading short stories to select a shortlist for a competition. It opend my eyes to how much random luck goes into these things - depending on my personal taste, my mood and the order I happened to read the stories in people either got a chance with the final judge or they didnt.
Commiserations, of course.
But, as the previous posters observe, this is par for the course.
Time for Plan B – the next project.
So, what if family and friends think you’re wasting your time – they may be right – [Question: Why is everyone I know a critic?] or the next piece of work may find an audience- and boy – the rapture of having all of them in the front stalls on opening night!
Me, I’m writing as much as ever, but revising more and submitting less and less.
I’m only grateful I had the foresight to buy a house with lots of storage – the archive boxes are stacking up – they go back to my Uni days and beyond.
I’m beginning to be reconciled to posthumous fame.
Btw: “Enjoyed reading all these; just not enough” – I have about six variations on that particular line.
Oh, and Playfull, heed Swann’s advice:
Don’t you dare give up!
You got one rejection from your very first play, and you're ready to bag the playwrighting and seek out another genre? Bit premature, don't you think? People routinely run up dozens (often hundreds) of rejections, regardless of genre. Keep submitting your work, and when you hit a HUNDRED rejections, then maybe rethink that one piece. Miss Snark (snark.blogspot.com) a literary agent, says that if you get 100 rejections, all of them form letters, then the work probably needs to be put in the shelf. Until then, your piece is still in the game, so keep submitting!
D-OHH! Yes, a very cunning plan on your part. And you almost got away with it. Methinks I've spent too much time over on the NaNoWriMo forums, where people post stuff like that and actually MEAN it. :-)
Last edited on Sat Sep 2nd, 2006 03:39 pm by steveg144
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