The Five Stages of Rejection Grief

Most people are familiar with “the five stages of grief” introduced by renowned Swiss-American psychiatrist Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her groundbreaking 1969 book, On Death and Dying. As a writer, I often think about death, dying and grief—to, you know, cheer myself up. And it recently dawned on me that the way Kübler-Ross described how humans deal with the loss of a loved one is quite similar to how writers deal with rejection. The thing is, though, loved ones die only once, where a manuscript can go on to die several dozen deaths.

So, yeah, being a writer is more tragic than being a human.

Now, I’m definitely not saying I would cry less over the death of a loved one than I would over my fiction getting rejected. And the reason I’m not saying that is some of my loved ones read this blog.

I’ve made my point. It’s time now to lighten the mood by taking a closer look at writerly death and pain. Below I apply the famed Kübler-Ross model to manuscript rejection and describe how the totally unbearable devastation a writer experiences upon being rejected eventually gets processed to become only mostly unbearable devastation.

STAGE 1: Denial. Upon learning their work has been rejected, the first thing a writer experiences is a strong sense of “there’s no way that actually happened.” This usually entails convincing themselves the agent or publisher they submitted their work to suffered a stroke in the midst of reading it, resulting in moderate to severe brain damage and rendering said agent/publisher susceptible to wildly irrational decisions. Denial may also take the form of the writer pretending they never even submitted their work to the person or entity in question, chalking up the whole rejection to the fact that the publishing world is undoubtedly conspiring against them.

STAGE 2: Anger. Once the denial starts to subside—which generally happens within a day or two of receiving the rejection but can last until the end of time—feelings of anger, resentment and even blind rage will move in and spoil the writer’s drinking binge. Most of this ire will be aimed at the person or publishing house that issued the rejection, but it’s not at all uncommon for the writer to (mis)direct a lot of anger at family, friends, neighbors, former English teachers, pets, traffic, anyone ahead of them in line at the supermarket, and, last but certainly not least, the universe.

Fortunately, such anger rarely if ever escalates into violence—unless the writer remains conscious during this stage.

STAGE 3: Bargaining. The anger following a rejection usually lasts only a day or so before the writer realizes all is not lost, so long as they remain desperate for validation and willing to blatantly lie to regain a sense of control. A typical scenario might feature a recently rejected writer promising God or the universe or their favorite stuffed animal that, if the manuscript in question is accepted soon, she or he will be a better person going forward—one who doesn’t alienate friends and family to write; one who doesn’t drink or do drugs or watch The Bachelor to escape their writing failures; one who does start to bathe regularly and occasionally wear pants. However, as with all psychological bargaining, such promises are innately impossible to keep.

STAGE 4: Depression. This stage can be difficult for friends and family of the writer to spot, as 97.3% of writers are depressed regardless of whether or not they’ve recently been rejected. Still, the depression that descends upon a writer following the bargaining stage is generally a big one—the kind that makes most writers consider giving up writing for good and taking a job at a sewage treatment facility as an unpaid intern, which, oddly enough, pays triple what fiction writing does. Additional telltale signs of rejection-based depression include:

• sleeping in the same pajamas for weeks … in a public park;
• folding each page of the manuscript into pill-size and using them to replace previously prescribed antidepressants;
• pretending to have friends, then refusing to answer their calls.

STAGE 5: Acceptance. Rejection grief finally comes to an end during the acceptance stage—that is unless the writer gets confused and thinks the acceptance stage refers to their manuscript finally being accepted. Those writers—following several hours of intense joy and elation before learning the truth—are usually dead within a week. Fortunately though, such confusion occurs with only about 48% of writers, thus the majority of scribes survive the agony of rejection and go on to live long and unsuccessful lives.   

I look forward to receiving your comments and thoughts about this piece, and to rejecting any that don’t perfectly align with my views.