It's hard to face yet another rejection, and I'm not talking about boys.
That dreaded email that begins "Dear Ms ______, we have read your manuscript/submission and we regret to inform you that..."
You try not to die, and go back to your manuscript wondering bleakly if this one is any good either, you didn't think it was as good as that one, should you even bother working on it?
You want to rewrite the one that got rejected, try to salvage it. You hack it up, frenziedly cut and paste, mercilessly delete all the description because several people once told you you had too much description. At the end of it you don't recognize it at all, it looks like a blank verse poem written in pseudo Hemingway with a dash of discount Faulkner and some angst a la Dostoevsky.
There was a reason why you sent it in, though you've forgotten it now. Ah, what made you choose this one? So many flaws--so obviously unpolished--why couldn't you have hung on to it a little longer, done more editing, changed the ending, rewritten the narrative voice, put in some edgy contemporary social issues--
You comfort yourself by googling 'what to do when you get rejected' and having to add hastily, 'publisher writing author' so that Google won't give you pages of breakup advice and pyschology websites. Not that you don't already know what to do. What used to be a battle hymn and motivational slogan now fades into a dreary refrain: keep on going; keep writing, keep editing, keep sending, keep accumulating rejection emails...live, die, repeat, that's what aspiring writers do.
You repeat encouragingly to yourself that maybe that piece just wasn't the right fit for that publisher, this editor here says that's the reason behind 50% of rejections, after all. You have to keep going on, collecting rejection slips like trophies until your skin is diamond hard and you've achieved the 100 rejections that precedes success, according to popular writer's myth.
And you go back to your manuscript and try not to remember that there's a 90% chance you might end up a failed would-be writer that scrapes by financially, uncomfortably aware that you're fulfilling all the speculations of skeptical relatives. Maybe you should go write celebrity news articles and devote your powers of description to coming up with catchy clickbait titles. After all, you presumably get paid for it...
Cynicism has almost always been a part of writing. It's a coping mechanism, I suppose--and it balances the innate idealism in the foundational belief that what we have to say matters, that other people may want to hear what we have to say...the reason why we try to get published at all.
But there. I just need a good dose of furry animal cuteness (another reason to adopt a guinea pig) and a cup of tea, and then I'll get back to work editing...