Melvin Durai
Rejection is part of life. I’ve been rejected so many times, I should be in the Guinness World Records. But Guinness would probably reject me and I’d have to settle for Limca.
I don’t keep a list of my rejections, but each one has left a scar on my brain. I’ve been rejected by women, employers, publishers, credit card companies, colleges, and mosquitoes. Yes, sometimes mosquitoes fly right past me and bite someone else.
You’d think I’d be used to rejection, but I’m not. It still hurts. The fear of rejection is what keeps me from aiming high and submitting my short stories to top magazines, my novels to top publishers, and my scripts directly to Mani Ratnam.
But the only way to be successful in many areas of life, including writing, is to develop a thick skin and not allow rejection to get you down. It doesn’t matter if 50 publishers reject your novel — as long as the 51st accepts it, you’re in business. You can call yourself an author and dream about the advance you will earn, an advance that might even be large enough to allow you buy another author’s book.
It should be comforting, perhaps, that even an author like Avni Doshi, whose debut novel “Girl in White Cotton,” has been shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize in Fiction, is averse to rejection. That’s partly why it took her seven years to get the novel published and why she isn’t keen on reading reviews.
“I definitely suffer from imposter syndrome – I believe I will wake up one morning and everyone will tell me that actually I can’t write, and that I shouldn’t be spending my life doing this,” she told Hindustan Times in a recent interview. “Being reviewed is tough. I don’t read any of my reviews until they have been vetted by my editor, my agent or my husband.”
In other words, she doesn’t read any reviews that haven’t been approved by her editor, agent or husband. If a review is particularly negative, it probably won’t reach her. This is a great arrangement. I wish I could get my wife, Malathi, to read any reviews or rejections I receive, but I wouldn’t want her to know what people actually think of me.
Being a new author, Doshi can be forgiven for not simply brushing aside rejections or negative reviews. But even a veteran author like Salman Rushdie, who once had a fatwa over his head from Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, has been known to let negative reviews get under his skin, even taking swipes at a book critic on Twitter. It’s like surviving an explosion, but being upset that your shirt got crumpled.
What it shows, of course, is how personal it gets for many of us. We get too attached to our work and want everyone to love it. But even the greatest book, movie or song will not be universally loved. That’s what I try to tell my wife whenever she makes me watch a movie she absolutely loves, only to find me snoring in the middle of it.
It’s important to realise that almost every successful person has overcome rejection of some sort, sometimes many years of rejection. If you want to be an actor, the fastest way to get yourself a movie role is to make sure that one of your parents is an actor or director. But if nepotism isn’t on your side, you’ll have to audition for roles and face rejection. Of course, once you become a big star, you can turn the tables on movie producers and reject some of the roles they offer you.
And then, like Ranbir Kapoor, you can watch Ranveer Singh accept the roles you’ve rejected, turning movies such as ‘Gully Boy’ into blockbusters and making you wish that you could reject your rejection.