I spent last week as a participant in Coaching The Artist Within, a course taught by Eric Maisel. It was intended as a self-coaching course and the principles also apply to being a creativity coach to others. It is one of several courses I have completed with him, including a course specifically on coaching writers.

As a commitment to our respective creative practices, we were all asked to fill in the blank in the sentence “By this time next year, I will have_________. Among a number of things, including re-establishing a practice of writing daily, I also decided to say that I would have “an admirable number of rejections.”

It is an ironic phrase but carries significant implications for creative work. Publishing is typically the outcome sought by writers. Having an article accepted for publication is confirming and seeing it in print is exciting.

Having submitted work rejected can be personally painful and often discouraging, putting writers at risk for approaching their writing with negativity and even discontinuing it for periods of time. I had a university colleague many years of ago who admitted that he did not write because he could not face having his work rejected.

Being published is the primary way of getting our written work out into the world for others to see. However, rejections are an important part of a writer’s life as I have learned in the creativity coaching courses I have completed with Eric.

Accepting rejections (an interesting turn of phrase) and celebrating them are important steps in the writing process. Not every piece we write is a publishable work of art but is necessary to continue developing and nourishing our creative process that then leads to our best work. And no matter what, not everyone will like what we like to write.

I read once about Pearl Buck, late in a highly successful writing career, announcing in an interview that she had just gotten a rejection letter. The surprised interviewer asked how it could be that someone like Pearl Buck would have her work rejected. She shrugged and said, “I’m a writer.”

Having an admirable number of rejections implies for me, a intrinsically motivating devotion to the work of creating that involves putting my work into the world as a way of saying, “I am a writer.”