In case you’re wondering where I got the post title, it comes from this speech at the Golden Globes:
EJAE is one of the songwriters for the hit animated film K-POP DEMON HUNTERS (read my review here!) and also performed the singing voice for Rumi. She is accepting the Golden Globe alongside her writing peers, winning for the incredibly catchy self-love anthem “Golden.”
I had heard the story about her tireless years training to be an idol, only to be rejected after a decades’ worth of hard work. She has an incredible, unique singing voice and sadly, that hurt her when it came to becoming an idol (which, is their loss). Anyway, fast forward to now, and she’s an award-winning songwriter, and now people can recognize her voice thanks to her singing for Rumi.
What really struck out to me from her speech was her phrase, “Rejection is redirection.” I don’t know if she coined that originally, or if it’s been around, but it really spoke to me.
All artists, writers, performers, athletes, etc. go through something like this in their career, where they’ve worked hard for years and face rejection. As a writer, I can tell you that rejection is par for the course in publishing. You face rejection the first timer querying agents to represent your work, and I was rejected 37 times at this for Son of the Siren. Then you face rejection from publishers when your work goes on sub (I lost track of how many said “no.”). Then you face rejection again when your book is released, because either your book finds its readers, or it doesn’t.
While Son of the Siren has had amazing things happen to it (like being a finalist in the YA Fiction category of the American Writing Awards), it has faced rejection multiple times, and it hasn’t found its audience despite getting some incredibly positive editorial and reader reviews. Sometimes I want to call the book a failure, and sometimes I can’t bring myself to because there have been other successes with it. It was my first published book. Lots of lessons to be learned from it. We just went wide with it, too, so the book’s story isn’t over yet!
The Name and the Key got rejections in its initial stage, too. My peers at graduate school read it, and although a lot of people liked it, I also got students who told me it wasn’t quite there “despite having lots of potential.” “Lots of potential” became my most hated phrase, because the agents I queried used that in their rejections, too. I couldn’t figure out what it meant, except I interpreted it as “close, but no cigar.”
I ended up pulling The Name and the Key from submissions for very good reasons, which you can read about here. So not only agents rejected it, but I rejected it ultimately, too.
But I couldn’t give up. After Son of the Siren, I didn’t know what to work on next, so I threw myself back into my thesis and decided to develop it into a trilogy. Then my publisher heard that I was working on it, and I got the book deal right away.
Rejection is redirection.
While I am still working on The Name and the Key in some iteration of the original, the book has morphed into its own thing, and again, a story so big that it spreads across three books. I have completely redirected the work from a culturally appropriative graduate thesis into a more commercially viable and appealing story that I can be proud of.
It may have an audience, and it may not. I think it does–I just need to go out and find them. But I have a good feeling about it.
Readers, have you changed directions after facing rejection?
Kristina Elyse Butke 
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