It’s a landmark moment in every writer’s life when he receives his first rejection letter, and it can affect him in a number of ways.

Possibly,

If he is foolish enough to believe that his work was actually as good as he felt it was—to chew the very truffles he dug up—the letter comes with humility. It is the recognition that it is not a perfect work, that he is not infallible. That some people just don’t jive with everything he writes, lean on every word, enunciate the last phoneme of every sentence. That nothing is ever finished as long as there is someone who disagrees with it. That if everyone agrees with something, it must not really say anything.

This man—he, who had been foolish and ignorant—can either learn his lesson or he can become a brick wall, believing the rejection is no fault of his own; the publisher simply has bad taste and it is to his detriment that he rejects such a fine piece of literature.

Or,

If this man lacks the confidence to withstand criticism, a rejection might mean the end. Some people take resistance as a challenge; others shy from it, choosing instead to live safely within their limitations. Why risk failure when the alternative is so comfortable? There’s regret, sure, but regret is for the feeble. Regret only irks those motivated enough to do something about it. And if one is willing to do something about regret, a challenge should have been of no consequence in the first place. In which case, we are talking of cowards and misers.

To whom criticism is of no consequence.

For it is their nature.

But,

If this man is realistic enough to realize that even the smoothest roads need to be repaved from time to time—that achievement is relative to what one is capable of—he will see rejection is a rite of passage, something every author experiences, a yardstick for measuring miles.

* * * *

Which is interesting, because:

An author will go back on his previous works and read, utterly embarrassed.

The work is alien. Commas are not where they should be. Too many superlatives. What awful, contrived dialogue.

The embarrassment is not that it is poorly written; rather, the embarrassment is that, at one point—maybe not even that long ago—the author had been convinced that the writing was very nearly flawless.

Writing evolves.

Like anything worth doing, it gets better the more it’s practiced.

But the feeling upon completion never changes.