“ABC”

Or: An Idiot’s Guide to Dealing with Rejection

I had a couple of tough rejections last week.

That’s nothing new. I’m a disciple of the CV of Failures. I have folders crammed full of subfolders crammed full of sub-subfolders, containing materials for applications I’ve made, residencies I’ve gone for, awards I’ve sought. I almost never get them, and that’s fine. That’s the game.

At The Other Palace with Zizi!

But last week was hard, maybe because I felt like both opportunities were within reach. The first was the Stiles & Drewe Best New Song Prize Final. Twelve finalist songs were selected out of about two hundred entries, and performed live at The Other Palace in London. I flew back to the UK, grabbed a few hours’ sleep and made my bleary-eyed way to the theatre for a brisk rehearsal and tech. Our song, “Time Slows Down”, was performed by the splendid and splendidly named Zizi Strallen.

It was a wonderful night, masterminded by the celebrated British musical-writing duo George Stiles and Anthony Drewe and hosted by the fabulous Rob Madge. I was touched that a dozen or so friends shlepped out to support me. I met some phenomenally talented writers and said hello to some industry fixtures. 

But as far as the competition went… no dice.

So you smile graciously and congratulate the winners and inwardly seethe a bit and go home to lick your wounds and get some sleep. Onwards and upwards. Next up was a chance to pitch an as-yet-unwritten musical to a large musical theatre institution, in the hope they’d wanted to commission it for their company of young actors.

Eliza and I had made it to a shortlist of five, and our interview was coming up. We were pitching a musical we’ve had on the backburner for a couple of years. It’s called The Debutantes, and it’s about the forgotten female codebreakers of Bletchley Park. We’ve developed it at the Leeds Conservatoire and the Johnny Mercer Songwriters Project, but it’s the kind of musical you can’t really finish without institutional support.

So… we prepared like hell. We designed a pitch deck, replete with a synopsis, character list, sample songs, development history and bios. We wrote out our pitch, anticipated questions and prepared answers. We prepared videos of our sample songs, sent everything to the panel in advance and printed hard copies of the pitch deck and lyric sheets to distribute in the room.

The time came, and the interview was terrific. It went just as well as we could have possibly hoped. I left walking on air, then made the long journey from Mountview to Heathrow to JFK to LaGuardia to Bangor, where my brother and wife picked me up and drove me to my godparents’ house, arriving in the early hours of Thanksgiving.

The email came later that day. They’d loved our interview and congratulated us on a great pitch, but they were going to give the commission to a different team.

So you write a gracious thank-you email and wish them luck with their upcoming season and inwardly seethe a bit and go on a walk to lick your wounds and eventually get some sleep.

How do you deal with rejection? Writers swim in rejection as fish swim in water, but that doesn’t make it easier to deal with. You can’t convince yourself that oh, it didn’t matter anyway or I don’t care about their opinion. It did matter; you do care. That’s why you tried!

There’s really only one psychological strategy I know that mourns the loss, honours the intent and boosts the spirits. It’s known as ABC: Always Be Closing.

It’s a salesman technique. A technique that involves always scanning the horizon for new prospects while trying to close on the current sale. Then, if the sale falls through, you think not only, oh well, onto the next thing, but also oh wow, isn’t this new thing exciting?

On the same day (Thanksgiving) that I got rejected from the NMTA commission, I got an email from ScreenCraft. Over the summer, I’d written a 30-minute TV pilot and submitted it for a couple of competitions. It’s a story about the GameStop short squeeze of 2021, when a basement-dwelling dropout catalysed a coalition of internet weirdoes to save their favourite video game store and raze Wall Street to the ground.

Anyway, the email informed me that, out of 2100 entries, my pilot has advanced to the semifinals.

I don’t remotely expect to get any further, but it was a welcome relief. And it reminded me to see the bigger picture, rather than wallowing in the immediacy of rejection. When I was back in the UK, I didn’t just get rejected. I also worked on other things. Aaron and I did a flurry of writing for Come Dine With Me and had semi-advanced talks with a producer. I met twice with a new collaborator – an animation director interested in adapting our short musical into an animated film and pitching it to some major streaming institutions. And I had funding discussions with a producer friend about realising a short film based on a screenplay I wrote in grad school (which itself made it to the shortlist of, but got rejected by, the BFI Short Film Fund). 

I have zero doubt that many of these projects won’t come to fruition, but some of them will. (It’s usually the unexpected ones.) And in the meantime, ABC is the best self-help I know. Rejection is only harmful when it breeds resignation.