Resilient Writers: Bouncing Back (Or Crawling Back) From Rejection

Photo by Jordan Whitt on Unsplash

We hear a lot these days about resilience in children, how to encourage it, how to make them stronger, as if there is a magic spell to be woven. After a lot of research on over-protectiveness and anxiety issues in children recently, I concluded that growing resilience is a long-term endeavor, perhaps even life-long. It grows through testing, through meeting challenges rather than avoiding them, through feeling the fear and doing it anyway (which was the topic of a lot of self help books a few years ago).

It’s hard for parents to let go, to let their kids make mistakes, feel afraid, fail, be a loser sometimes. Of course kids will stuff up. We all did, and we all do now. To use another well-worn phrase, that is nevertheless true, the only thing worse than failing is never trying in the first place.

I keep this in mind with all of my writing students. It’s not up to me to decide who is a ‘real writer’ and who isn’t. Why should I judge a writer’s dreams? If I were a magazine editor (which I have been, of a poetry journal) or a book publisher, I could only make decisions about the manuscripts in front of me, the ones I have to decide will or might sell. I still couldn’t make a decision on whether the writer was a writer or not. Because people learn and grow and improve their skills, and what might not be…