They said no. Write it anyway.

So you got denied.

Maybe it was a publisher. Maybe it was an agent. Maybe it was somebody you respected who read your work and came back with a response so lukewarm it could have been served at a bad restaurant. Maybe it was not even a formal rejection. Maybe it was silence. If you have ever submitted anything to anyone, you already know is somehow worse than a no.

Silence is rejection with no return address. Very rude. Very common. Very much not the end of your story.

Here is what they did not tell you when they said no. They told you nothing about the quality of your work. They told you nothing about your potential. They told you nothing about whether your words have the ability to change someone's life. All they told you is that on that particular day, for that particular opportunity, it was not the right fit.

That’s it. That’s the whole message. And somehow we take that and turn it into a doctoral dissertation on why we should stop writing forever.

We are dramatic. Writers are extraordinarily dramatic. I say this as a writer. We feel everything at full volume and then we sit down and process those feelings in document form at midnight. It is a gift and a burden but it is also exactly why we cannot let a rejection letter be the last word on our career.

Every author you have ever admired has a rejection story. Not a little one either. A big one. The kind where somebody looked at genius and said pass. The kind that would have ended everything if the writer had let it.

They did not let it.

Stephen King's first novel got rejected thirty times. Thirty. He stuck the rejection letters on a nail in his wall and kept writing. That nail eventually needed to be replaced with a spike because there were too many letters for the nail to hold. Think about that. The man needed a bigger nail for his rejection collection and he still did not stop.

Now I am not saying you are the next Stephen King. Maybe you are. Statistically unlikely but stranger things have happened and I am not in the business of limiting people. What I am saying is that the pattern holds regardless of the genre, format or platform.

The writers who made it are not the ones who never got rejected. They are the ones who got rejected and wrote the next thing anyway.

And here is something to think about. The rejection did not happen to your writing. It happened to one submission, on one day, in front of one set of eyes. Your writing is still yours. It is still sitting there in that document, fully intact, completely unharmed, waiting for you to decide what happens next.

A no from the wrong door is not a no from the God. It is directions to a different door. One that was built specifically for what you are carrying.

So what do you do with a rejection? You do what writers do. You sit down. You open the document. You write the next line, the next page, the next chapter, the next book. You let the rejection remind you that you are in the game, because you cannot get rejected if you never submitted anything and you cannot submit anything if you never wrote anything and you wrote something.

That already puts you ahead of everybody who is still waiting for the perfect moment to start.

Write the book they said no to. Write it better. Write it louder. Write it with the energy of someone who has something to prove and all the time in the world to prove it.

The no was not the period at the end of your sentence. It was a comma. Keep going.

Go enjoy your weekend. Rest up. Come back Monday with your pen ready and your feelings filed appropriately.

And whatever you do, do not stop writing.

They are going to need a bigger nail.

Marlon Dean, WhiteHause Publishing | The Writerz Block