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Posted on May 9, 2011 by dan

Writing Resilience: How To Overcome Fear Of Rejection

As a writer, probably the worst feeling you can experience is when someone reads your work and tells you they didn’t like it.

It’s rejection, and it’s tough, because in writing your screenplay, you feel as though you’ve climbed Mount Everest – it was an enormous challenge, required tremendous persistence and faith, and called upon resources inside of you that you didn’t know you had.

But then, someone tells you the script isn’t good and you feel as though all your hard work has been for naught. It’s like reaching the summit, only to have someone press a “reset” button and take you back to square one.

It eats at your self-confidence, your self-image and your belief in yourself. It simply feels awful.

Okay, so we all know how rejection feels. But what’s the best way to deal with it and to prevent yourself from feeling so awful when it happens?

How can you confront rejection in such a way that it doesn’t crush your spirit, immobilize you, and make you think that you don’t have “what it takes”?

Putting Things In Perspective

When someone rejects you, what does it say about YOU? What does it say about you personally, and as a writer?

Here’s the answer:

NOTHING. It says absolutely nothing about you . The person reading your script has never met you, they don’t know you, and they’ve probably never read anything else that you’ve written.

Now, let me ask you this:

When someone rejects your work, what does it say about THEM?

Well, all it says is that this particular story didn’t work for this particular person at this particular time. That’s it. Period.

Rejection isn’t personal. Sure, it FEELS personal, but it really isn’t. No one is out to hurt you. No one is out to crush your dreams. People are mostly good (yes, even people in the movie business). They don’t have any malice, or evil intent.

You must remind yourself of this all the time. First and foremost, you must look at rejection objectively, the way a dispassionate scientist would look at it.

This leads to another critical concept:

Don’t Add Your Opinion To The Facts

In the book Psycho-Cybernetics, Dr. Maxwell Maltz tells the story of a businessman who came to him on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

“How can I possibly feel okay about this?” the businessman asked. “I just lost $200,000 in the stock market. I am ruined and disgraced.”

“You can feel okay about this,” Dr. Maltz said, “by not adding your opinion to the facts. It is a fact that you lost $200,000. It is your opinion that you are ruined and disgraced.”

What a powerful paradigm shift. For the purpose of this article, let me rephrase Dr Maltz’s words of wisdom:

It may be a fact that someone rejected your script, but it is your opinion that you aren’t a good writer, or that you’ll never recover and write something truly spectacular.

Training yourself to think this way requires discipline. It’s easy to let your mind run away from you and imagine all the terrible implications of even a single rejection. But most of the time, your fears, doubts and worries aren’t real. Often, you created them in your own mind and then you convinced yourself they were real.

Doing this leads to self-sabotage. It jams up your creative faculties, leads to writer’s block, leads to stilted, cautious writing, leads you to questioning and doubting the product of your once-cherished imagination, and so on and so forth in a terrible downward spiral.

Essentially, you place limits on yourself that aren’t real, based solely on the fact that, at a single point in time, someone didn’t like a script you wrote.

It’s Gotta Be The Mindset

In his Hall of Fame speech, Michael Jordan said something that is directly related to this discussion. I think you’ll find it profound if you take it to heart.

He said:

“Limits, like fears, are often just an illusion.”

Today, everyone remembers Jordan as the greatest basketball player who ever lived, the winner of 6 NBA Championships.

Everyone seems to forget that it took him 7 years before he even got to his first championship game. He tried for 7 hard years, and got rejected on each attempt.

Now, how do you think Michael Jordan interpreted this rejection? Do you think he said, “Man, it didn’t work out, I guess I’m just not that good of a basketball player. I guess I should just hang up my shoes and call it quits, because clearly I’m not good enough.”

Um, no.

He didn’t add his opinion to the facts. He viewed the situation appropriately, and kept at it. The facts were that his team was scoring fewer points than other teams. The objective solution was very simple: Score more points.

Jordan heeded the lessons from his first 7 seasons, made the necessary adjustments to his game, and went on to be a living legend. He just as easily could have given up and disappeared from the public stage into oblivion.

His message is clear:

The only limits are the ones you create and choose to accept.

Failure and Success

Success is hardly ever achieved by following a straight line. Though we often act to the contrary, our world isn’t linear, What frequently happens is, while you’re banging on Door A, Door B opens.

But, sadly, most people get so discouraged and so down on themselves because Door A isn’t opening, that they never even see the opportunity presented by Door B.

Writers think linearly as well, and that’s why they view rejection as a crushing failure. However, “Failure”, so to speak, is just an idea…it’s a concept that humans created. It isn’t real – not objectively. It doesn’t have any external meaning beyond the meaning we give to it.

In NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), there’s a powerful precept that goes like this:

“There is no failure; there is only feedback”.

Maybe you’ve heard this phrase before, maybe you haven’t. But I’d like to go in-depth on it, and explain it in more detail.

First, let me give you a quick anecdote that demonstrates this concept in action.

You’ve heard of a little movie called “Jurassic Park”, right? Back in 1993, it made over $900 million at the box office – a hit beyond anyone’s wildest expectations.

Michael Crichton came up with the idea for “Jurassic Park” 10 years prior, in 1983. He first wrote the story as a screenplay, with kids as the main characters.

When he was finished, he showed the script to a handful of his trusted readers. The response was unanimous: Not only did they not like it, they HATED “Jurassic Park”.

What did Crichton do? Did he curse his lack of talent? Decide that he wasn’t cut out to be a writer? Get depressed?

No. He wrote another draft.

And, well, people hated that draft, too.

So he wrote the story again, this time as a novel.

People hated the novel even more.

Seriously, now, as Crichton described it, people HATED, HATED, HATED everything about “Jurassic Park”.

Here’s how Crichton finally solved this little problem of being ruthlessly rejected over and over again:

First, he didn’t add any negative opinions to the facts. Second, he simply asked people to tell him specifically what they hated about it.

Eventually, he learned that they didn’t want “Jurassic Park” to be a story about kids, for kids. They wanted it to be a story for them, for adults.

So Crichton rewrote the book from an adult character’s perspective, and then everyone LOVED it. And today, “Jurassic Park” is considered Michael Crichton’s signature work.

What’s the lesson?

The lesson is that there is no failure, there is only feedback. What successful writers like Crichton understand is that in order to achieve success you must (almost as a prerequisite) experience a certain number of “failures”.

Success and Failure are opposite sides of the same coin. The concept of one cannot exist without the concept of the other. And remember how I said earlier that the world we live in isn’t linear…you can’t just go directly to a big success along a straight line. It simply doesn’t work that way.

The key is to keep yourself mentally agile, creative and resourceful so that you can mine from the “failure” lessons that you can implement in your next attempt. By doing this, sooner or later, the “failure” side of the coin will flip over, and you’ll meet that big success.

With all this in mind, let me stress that it’s better to think of Rejection not as a slight against your work, or a criticism of you personally, or an indication of your lack of talent, but simply as course correction mechanism designed to give you the tools, the lessons and the understanding that help you truly achieve your goal.

At Pixar, they have a company motto:

“Fail as fast as you can.”

By this they mean, go through the necessary failures as quickly as possible, study what isn’t working, and then immediately implement the necessary changes. That’s the fastest, surest way to success.

So if someone rejects your screenplay without telling you why, simply ask the question Michael Crichton asked of “Jurassic Park”:

“Can you tell me what you didn’t like about it, specifically?”

Once you get their answer, the question for you is: Are you flexible and creative enough to make the changes and to execute the rewrites that are necessary to make your story effective?

Don’t get too attached to your ideas just because they’re your ideas. As a screenwriter, your goal is to generate an emotional reaction in the audience (i.e. the reader). In other words, you are first and foremost an entertainer.

If people aren’t responding to your story the way you want them to, you have to be nimble enough to make adjustments and try different approaches until you get the response that you want.

This leads to the most important mindset in dealing effectively with Rejection. The mindset is this:

Take Total Responsibility For Rejection

“Ouch. But I thought you said it wasn’t personal?”

It’s not. But the way you RESPOND to the rejection is entirely up to you. You have the response-ability. Accepting this fact gives you enormous power.

What most writers do is they blame the person (or persons) who rejected them. In other words, they adopt a victim mentality and give away all their power to the rejecter.

This is a bad strategy. Giving away your power is always a bad strategy.

Instead, a far better strategy is for you to say to yourself:

“Okay, my story didn’t get the reaction that I wanted, so it’s up to me to revise it until I get my desired reaction”.

Can you feel the power this perspective gives you? Do you see that with this mindset, you really can’t “fail”? By taking full responsibility, you put yourself in the driver’s seat and, as a result, make your success inevitable.

If you enjoyed this article, you may also enjoy:

Please Stop Writing These Things

The Unity of Opposites

Organic Storytelling in Jerry Maguire

Drama 101

Please Stop Writing These Things, PART II

 

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged how to write a script, How to Write Great Characters, mastery, screenplay, screenwriting, steven pressfield, story, storytelling, writing. Bookmark the permalink.

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