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On the first day of class with his advanced art majors, artist and professor Marc Dennis walks into the classroom and slams a stuffed manila folder as thick as a phone book onto the drawing table. “This file is filled with rejection letters,” he says. The students stare, wondering if he’s serious. “This is what you need to get used to if you want to be a successful artist,” he says. “Being an artist is about getting your work out there and being able to handle the hard hits from rejections. Not everyone is going to understand or appreciate your art.”

He tells his students that the harder they work, the more they’ll want to get their work into the public eye, and each time they do, the risk of being rejected increases. But he assures them, “Based on my experiences, with hard work and rejection also comes desire, and with desire comes confidence, and with confidence comes perseverance, and with perseverance comes success.”

Nothing worth anything comes easy.

​How to Handle Rejection and Thrive

Rejection comes with the territory. It’s part of being in business. Sometimes you ask for something and the answer is “no.” In fact, the answer is often no. If you aren’t getting rejected many times a year, you aren’t applying for enough grants, or you aren’t pushing your boundaries. Rejections are a sign that you’re working your edge.

Artist and professor Melissa Potter, who teaches grant writing nationally, receives about one grant for every five she applies for. That’s four “no thanks” for every “yes!” All that rejection can be hard to take. It often feels personal, even if it never is. None of what I tell you here will make any difference when you get rejected, but remember that until you ask, you don’t know why. (See “Practice the Sacred Art of Follow-Up” in chapter 10, this page.) So refrain from relentless inner monologues as in, I never win anything, I’ll never amount to anything, and I’m just a third-rate loser artist. Even if it’s true, it won’t help—it’ll just stall your progress even more.

Sometimes a rejection isn’t “no” but “not now.” I know an artist who applied seven times for the same grant. Finally that eighth year, it all came together—the right project and a panel that loved her work—and she received the grant.

Remember that the panel that reviews your work is composed of people, and because they’re human, they have quirky tastes. Maybe they just didn’t like watercolors or first-person narrative or cement murals this year. It isn’t personal; it’s just bad luck.

I don’t advise dwelling on your disappointment, but I do recommend that you let yourself feel disappointed for a minute or two—a couple of days at most. When I’m rejected I don’t want to feel sad or mad for even a millisecond. I shove my disappointment aside, but the rejection ​sticks in my throat and can lodge there, unmoving, for days. Ignoring it takes enormous energy away from what I could be creating next.

To move on after a rejection, call one of your buddies and share your disappointment. Remember your team? Call someone who can say, “I’m sorry. What a disappointment. Those jerks don’t know what they’re missing.” No matter what, don’t let rejection keep you from returning to work after you’ve felt the sting. You’re a prizefighter. Rejection knocked you down. Get up again. Don’t quit. No matter what.

In his essay Go the Distance, in Poets and Writers (Nov/Dec 2009), author Benjamin Percy bragged that “whole forests have been pulped to print the rejection letters sent my way.”

“I wasn’t offended. I was inspired,” wrote Percy, who taped the rejection letters to the wall near his desk. “The wall of shame, I called it. The way I saw it, everybody thought I was a bum, like Rocky. And every morning, when I woke up to hammer the keys, I would stand there, coffee mug hot in my hand, staring at those comments. My thoughts were somewhere between I’m going to get you and I better do better.”

Percy writes ten stories for every one that gets published. “Each SASE that arrives in your mailbox, I know, is like a fist to the face,” he wrote. “But you’ve got to see through the blood—you’ve got to keep breathing raggedly through those broken ribs.”

​“There are so many reasons the SASE might have shown up in your mailbox … Regardless, you must develop around your heart a callus the size of a speed bag,” he wrote. To ease the blow of rejection, aim to have many proposals out at one time so that “no” to one proposal is only one loss. It doesn’t mean your whole career is down the drain. Just as financial advisers counsel diversifying investments and businesses thrive by having several income streams, you the artist need to have many proposals in the pipeline. If you don’t win one, there’s always the next one, and there’s always next year’s deadline.

Rejection helped musician and sound artist Ethan Rose expand his notion of his audience. After being rejected on his first grant application, he followed up with the granting agency and found out that they wanted to know not only who his audience was but also how he planned to expand his reach. Until that rejection, he hadn’t thought much about his audience at all. The next time he applied for the grant, he worked hard to define his audience, describe his marketing plan, and explain how he planned to expand beyond the usual crowd.

This rejection led Rose to not only prepare a stronger application but also to consider his audience more during the creative process. Questions of audience forced him to ask, How can I not only invite them to attend but also affect them more profoundly during my performances? Rejections are a “subjective reaction to what you’re doing. Some people won’t like it. You’ll never make anything that’ll please everyone all the time. If that’s your goal, you’re dooming yourself from the beginning,” he said.

Don’t be doomed. Use the rejection to learn. That’s what professionals do.

Surviving Your Own Jealousy

I ran into a neighbor—somebody I didn’t think had one creative bone in his body—who told me he just landed an agent for his novel. The next time I saw him, he reported that two New York publishers were in a bidding war over his work. Meanwhile, a distant cousin with no prior art training takes up painting and calls to tell me she’s selling her ​paintings for $300 to $500 each. “It was so easy,” she purrs into the phone. “I just did them for fun, called a gallery, and they sold.”

It shouldn’t be so easy for these people, I think. Look how much I’ve suffered for my art, and she just picked up a paintbrush and checks arrived in her mailbox. We’ve all been there—everything’s going fine until you hear about someone else’s success. If you looked at the roots of your hair, you might see green. The feelings of envy are monomaniacal; you can think of nothing else.

Try to do something creative when in a state of envy and you’ll find it’s almost impossible. To be creative, you have to go back home, back to yourself. In a state of envy you’re focused on everyone but yourself: If I can’t have it, nobody can. When you find out a friend received the grant you wanted and the jealous monster threatens to bar you from your studio, call another friend to rant. Ride through the storm. The more I let the envy rock me, the faster I move through it.

If none of your friends answers the phone, take notes. Describe the physical state of intense jealousy. When I’m in a state of envy, my body is on fire. I don’t want to do anything. I don’t want anyone else to have what I don’t have. Often when I dig down to the root cause of my envy, I’m frustrated. It turns out, the neighbor who landed the agent wakes up at 5 A.M. to work on his novel every day before heading to work. The cousin selling her paintings takes a joy in the work that I don’t feel right now. She seems in love. She’s spending every free minute at the easel working. She doesn’t care about rejections; she just wants her work out there. She’s free in a way I’m not.

​My envy shows me where I’m not being true to my artist: I’m not spending the time at the writing desk. I’m not letting myself love my writing like the painter loves her painting. If I loved it more, made it more fun to do, maybe I’d spend more time doing it. My envy makes me ask, What do they have that I want? Am I doing everything I can to get out of my own way?

Let your jealousy remind you of what you want. After it runs its course, take what you learn and reclaim the work that is important to you. Let your envy guide you to a more fun way to work, to treat your artist with respect, and to design your creative life so you can’t wait to get back to it.

What would it take to do that? Learn from successful people. How did they do it? What can you learn from how they work that will help you? And remember, no matter how much you’ve evolved personally, envy always lurks. You probably won’t grow out of it. Best case, you’ll become faster at moving through it.

Recently, I made a rule: No checking e-mail before writing. I was following this rule until one day, for some reason, I checked my e-mail first thing. I had received a mass e-mail from a writer I don’t know very well announcing the launch of her latest novel—her third. (Her first two had been received to acclaim.) I sat at my computer, my skin turning green. I felt sick with jealousy at the thought of the writer at her desk, writing, like I should be doing right now instead of reading e-mail and tending to a jealous fit.

Crawling around in the dank basement of my jealousy, I thought, I want what she has. I felt myself at a crossroads. One way descended into more jealous rage. The other way was lined with questions: Can I use the image of this writer at work to spur my own writing? Can I transfer the energy of this envy back to my own work? Can I use this jealousy for creation rather than destruction?

Yes.

​That was he answer that came to me. The jealousy wasn’t clinging to me; I was clinging to it. The jealous monster helped me close my e-mail program and open up my latest essay. He flew off, and I went back to work.

Surviving Other People’s Jealousy

After she landed her first book deal, author Ariel Gore noticed another form of jealousy, this kind from her friends. “I had always heard about fair-weather friends, but now I saw that there were ‘stormy-weather friends’ as well. A lot of my friends only liked me when we were all drunk and bonding over our poor luck. The first flush of dreams coming true, and they bailed,” she said.

If you thought your own jealousy was the only kind you’d have to contend with, you may be surprised when you discover that the more you and your work come into the world, the more you’ll encounter the jealousy of others, even people who are now your cronies. Did you make a silent pact that none of you would succeed, even though it’s all you ever talk about? If you’re the first one to gain a measure of success (win a grant, for example), then you may find that your old friends don’t want to be friends with the new, successful you.

You need to find new friends.

The most shocking jealousy will come from people you presumed were more successful and secure than you. Sometimes teachers, even mentors or consultants you’ve hired may express their jealousy in subtle or blatant ways. You’ll call to tell them the good news and their response is limp. They remind you of pitfalls or warn you of the downside. A friend of mine calls this being “slimed.” You’ll know it when it happens because you’ll feel worse after sharing the good news. Or the news won’t sound so good anymore. You’ll feel too big for your britches.

Once after I’d received a prestigious assignment, I was chatting with a former professor and successful artist, someone who’d not only supported me but promoted my work to his colleagues. Since I’d been his student, I had grown into my own career as a writer. ​After I shared my success, he was suddenly full of gloom. He reminded me of all the ways the assignment would be hard, if not impossible, and said he’d heard that my new colleagues could be difficult to work with. Fortunately, after this encounter, I spoke to a trusted friend who helped me recognize my former professor’s possible jealousy and I realized that my relationship with him had changed. I was no longer his student.

Witnessing someone who previously supported you transform into a roadblock (or a wet blanket) can be surprising and bewildering. If it happens, recognize it for what it is. We’re all human—susceptible to jealousy. It’s an occupational hazard for some teachers that they feel most supportive of students and underlings. Sometimes when the disciple matures into a colleague, the mentor feels threatened and can’t be supportive. I’ve heard of famous artists who discourage talented students from pursuing a career in the arts because they want to quell the competition.

It’s an awkward transition when the student becomes the colleague. If your once-enthusiastic mentor or teacher doesn’t take it graciously, it may be best to avoid this person now. It’s a sad loss. But to grow means to change, and to change means accepting some losses along with the gains. Don’t let the sorrow of loss hold you back.

Resisting the Grandma of Resistance

Sometimes my resistance to starting a project feels like cement shoes. When I’m stalled, all I can think is, No how. No way. I don’t want to make that phone call, write that e-mail, begin that grant application. And nobody’s gonna make me.

I have many tricks up my sleeve to break my own inertia. I set a timer for ten minutes (or five, if ten’s too long). I ask myself, Can I suffer with this task for ten minutes? Usually I can. Then, after I start, I can barely remember how much I didn’t want to start.

My resistance shows up dressed in many guises. The scariest one is the dark figure of the old-world grandma, wringing her hands and singing her worries, “What if your writing is bad? What if you’re the laughingstock?” She’d like me to get a real job, stop rocking the boat, stop lifting the rug. She tells me,

She wants me in the group, the family, the circle, at all costs.

The common self-help remedy for dealing with resistance is hand-to-hand combat, no matter how she’s dressed. Fight dirty. Fight hard. Fight fast. Once she has one black, lace-up shoe in your door, forget it—it’s over.

I’ve tried this. Ignoring her. Telling her to shut up.

And it’s never worked.

The harder I shove her away, the more incessantly she taps at my window. “What if” begins her every sentence, always a question of doubt or fear. The harder I push her, the harder she pushes back. She stops me dead in my tracks. Which may be the whole point.

So one day, I let her in. To do this, I grabbed a pen and pad and wrote out my conversation with her. She entered slowly, shaking off her umbrella, scanning the room, looking at how I live. “I want you to be comfortable, to fit in, be safe,” she said, her eyes wandering across the sculptures atop the upright piano, the paintings and drawings on the walls, the dust breeding under the sewing machine.

“Safe is the same as everybody else,” she said. That was safe for her, back in the old country. A country that no longer exists.

“Artists break down the status quo,” I told her. “We peel back the rug, dig up what’s been buried, poke at taboos, paint paintings that make no sense, write cacophonous symphonies. We ask the questions everybody’s thinking but afraid to voice. That’s what artists do.”

“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t know.”

She stayed a little longer. I listened to her worries. I thanked her for her concern. I told her that I know she just wants me to be safe. ​She suggested I put up a pot of soup. I complied. The more I listened to this grandma of resistance, the more I felt her protecting me from something I didn’t want to see. What was it? It took a long time to discern.

When I show up to the studio to make something, I leave home for good. I abandon my jobs as mother, wife, daughter, sister, friend, teacher. I arrive as inspired, angry, ecstatic, miserable, irritable, wretched, blessed writer.

What’s hiding is what I’m looking for.

I’m not waiting to have had a happier childhood. I accept that I didn’t get everything I wanted. I didn’t even get some things I really needed. But I’m not waiting for anything to be better or different or more acceptable. I make art out of the losses.

I find it touching that this grandma is trying to protect me. She doesn’t want me to feel alone, maybe even bereft. But what she doesn’t know is that until I feel the loss, I can’t write the harmony or the sonnet, or stage the performance installation. And that’s what I’m here to do: to paint this painting, taking all of what I did get and leaving behind what I didn’t want. I’m here to tell the story of the leaving, of the taking, of the letting go.

Grandma is my grief for all that was lost or never found. When I ignore her, she rises up. The sooner I sit her at my table and let her speak, serve her a bowl of soup, the faster I can get back to work. When I haven’t heard from her in a while, I think, Well, good—she’s gone. Then, the next morning, grandma arrives bright-eyed demanding I stop writing, right now. Her fresh presence used to depress me. I’d think, Uh-oh. If she’s still here it must mean that I’ve made zero progress.”

No.

As a counselor once told my future husband and me when we were wondering if getting married was a good idea: “It doesn’t matter how many problems you have. What matters is how well you handle your problems.”

So, the same advice translated to this situation is: It doesn’t matter how many times Grandma shows up demanding I stop writing. I won’t shove her away. I let her speak. And I keep writing.

​Some days, she quiets down. Some days, she won’t shut up. I notice that the more riled up she is, the closer I am to the hot white center of whatever I’m writing. No matter. She begs me to stop and I keep on.

The next time you show up at your studio to work or sit down to dig into a grant application and your resistance rises up, stop. Grab a pen and paper and write down your conversation. Let that negative voice have its say. Answer her as best you can. Then, thank that voice for its concerns and dive back into the work at hand. Repeat as often as necessary.