I recently delivered one of the bonuses to my BWW students: a Publishing Workshop. We discussed query letters and how some of the published students placed books and stories. Perhaps the most important thing I talked about at the Publishing Workshop was . . .drum roll . . . rejection.

We keep talking about having a Rejection Acceptance Party over at the BWW. Rejection is part of the road to success for writers, as it is for people in relationships, people in any career, people with children, people who’ve won awards. Rejection is part of life.

The word has an ugly tone to it, though, doesn’t it?

Think instead of the children’s game of “duck, duck, goose.” Each person is tapped (ideally gently) on the head and is either named as “duck” or as “goose.” Whoever is tapped as “goose” must chase the tapper around the circle and tag him or her before the tapper reaches the goose’s empty spot and sits down. If the original tagger is tagged before sitting down, s/he ends up in the mush pot in the middle of the circle. If s/he makes it all the way around, s/he’s safe. The tagged becomes tagger and the game begins again.

That’s the submission process, except that the submission process is slightly less democratic in the immediate moment. Most of the time, you are tapped “duck.” You have to be ready to run, alert, invested in the game, but also prepared to sit this one out. “Duck. Duck. Duck.” You have taken your place in the circle and the rest of the game is to wait, prepared. If you are tagged in publishing, it is likely that one way or another, you will be the tagger down the road, judging a contest, sitting on the submissions committee of an MFA, editing a magazine, working as an agent . . . and you will be choosing who will run and who will stay seated this round.

You know who never, ever gets tagged?

The kid not sitting in the circle. So you play the game, and the gamier your attitude, the happier you are sitting there.

To get into the BWW Rejection Acceptance Party, you have to bring 50 Ducks. If you have a Goose, you bring the drinks.

One more reminder about rejection and acceptance to guarantee your success:

We are all readers, right? I feel fine about saying that because I believe that anyone who is lit with the desire to write got that way from reading. What else on god’s green earth would make anyone suspect that sitting at a desk creating imaginary characters and events out of words would be entertaining, let alone worthwhile?

Yes, we readers imagined it because we picked up this magic object called the book, sailed away over a day and through a year, and got hooked. And the next thing that we imagined was this: if being transported to other worlds and lives was this thrilling and absorbing, then creating these worlds and lives must be ten times more thrilling and absorbing.

And guess what? Sometimes it is.

But the rejection starts way, way before the editorial interns scroll through their in-boxes. It starts in our own heads. That’s not good enough. That’s terrible. What’s wrong with you? Why did you write that? Why didn’t you write something more and better? We fill the activity with judgment.

The rejection continues. We’re only playing Duck, Duck, Goose, but our internal committee is berating us: Why didn’t you get chosen? Were you slouching? Were you not paying attention? This is your fault for not being worthy of being tagged. We make it personal.

If we give up our dreams, this is the final, the worst rejection of all.

But remember this—the magic is always there, and it is utterly dependent on those other Geese. What I mean by that befuddling statement is this: Every time someone else is tagged, there’s a chance that that person has or will create something miraculous, life-saving, transporting. They are other writers, after all, and we are still hungry readers at heart. And so each Goose that is proclaimed over someone else’s head has the chance to serve up to us the most delicious, magical treat of all: wonderful writing for us to read.

And this in turn will inspire our writing–it always does, doesn’t it? We should know better but that itch to do it too is still there, and we bend back over the page and let it roll. Maybe this time we’ll begin by saying yes to ourselves, and then Duck or Goose, we’ll know we are on our way.