On Rejection: Kat Lewis

Video game narrative designer & fiction writer

Welcome everyone to another edition of On Rejection, an interview series where we talk about rejection. Today I’m pleased to have Kat Lewis join us, a video game narrative designer and fiction author. Her Substack, Craft with Kat, is all about the craft of writing fiction well. If you’re interested, I really recommend “Staying In Love With Your Writing”—it’s excellent.

If you’re just discovering Collected Rejections, welcome! In this world, writing is still fun, rejection is not a bad word, and we’re all here to grow as writers. If you’re into that, subscribe to this newsletter here:

Hi Kat! Tell us about a time you experienced rejection.

In August 2020, my agent and I put my book out on sub. By February 2022, it was rejected by 36 publishers. At this point in my life, I had been writing and publishing short fiction for nearly ten years. Rejection was not new to me at all. It was so common that I genuinely felt nothing when I received a rejection from a literary magazine. So, when I went on sub, I thought, how bad could it be? I’ve already been doing this for a decade.

There was something about how much time and strategic planning I put into my book that made the experience especially devastating. Sometimes, a short story can take me a year to finish, but I’m not actively working on that story during that entire year. When a story takes that long, I just need distance to see the narrative possibilities before I can finish it.

Novels, however, are very different. I started casually writing my book in 2015. By 2017, I was actively working on the novel every single day until I queried in 2019. Over the next several years, I went to great pains to make sure that the novel was truly the best thing I had written, that it was actually ready to query, and that I only queried agents who would be the exact right fit for my work. In addition to dedicating all of my free time to this project, my entire academic life and two degrees revolved around working on this book. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been so surprised that I wasn’t able to get out of bed when the rejections rolled in. Since the pandemic was in full swing, it was easy for me to work from my bed and wallow in self-pity. 

This was obviously a horrible, depressing time in my writing life, but hindsight also makes it kind of funny. Today, I went back to read what I remembered being the meanest, most venomous personal rejection from a publisher, but it actually wasn’t that bad. None of the passes were. But at the time, I was so caught up in my own emotional turmoil that I couldn’t see my experience for what it was: common and temporary.

How did you get over it?

The bulk of the rejections hit my inbox in early 2021. I had hope for most of 2020, using positive self-talk to remind myself that the book just needed to find the right reader. But all my hope and patience eventually wore thin. By the end of January, my confidence as a writer was completely shattered. I had never really struggled with self-esteem or imposter syndrome in my writing life before. I had known since I was about fifteen or so that I wanted to be a professional writer. Every day since then, I woke up knowing that writing was the only skill I had, so I might as well believe in it. But all this rejection on sub made me question whether or not I knew anything about writing at all.

Luckily, around this time, Leigh Hopkins recruited me as a fiction writer for issues 5-8 of Khôra. For four months, our cohort worked on a tight schedule, generating new work every 3-4 weeks and preparing each piece for publication. I’m incredibly grateful for this experience because our fast-paced schedule didn’t leave time for me to second guess every craft decision I made in my stories. Our cohort’s last issue came out in May 2021. Two weeks later, I was able to start the first draft of my current WIP because writing for Khôra helped me find joy in my writing again.

If you could go back and tell yourself anything right before that experience, what would you say?

Before submitting to the first editor, my agent asked me if I wanted to read the rejection letters. Although she gave me the option, she strongly recommended that I read them. She explained to me that since it was my first time on sub, it’d be useful to see as much of the process as possible. She also said that the letters could help guide a revision if we chose to step back and revise again. 

That said, I’m torn between two answers. Part of me wants to tell my past self, “Don’t read the letters.” I want to say this because I know the next time I go on sub, I don’t want to see the letters. I also don’t want to know if the book is going on to second reads or an acquisitions meeting. I only want to hear if the book gets an offer or if an editor wants to speak with me. I don’t want any updates along the way because the submission process destroyed my confidence and made it difficult for me to write anything new. If it weren’t for Khôra, I’m not sure I would have recovered from these rejections as quickly as I did.

At the same time, I can’t ignore the fact that I grew a lot as a writer because I read those letters. Most of the feedback was on plot and pacing. Up until this point, I always thought that I knew how to pace a story well because I was a strong scene-level writer. I wouldn’t have learned that I needed to closely study macroscopic story structure to improve if it weren’t for this experience.

In the end, I don’t think I would say anything because I needed this experience to grow. But now that I know what to expect on sub, I don’t want to see letters moving forward unless my agent thinks it’s absolutely necessary.

You're a professional video game narrative designer and are working toward publishing your debut novel--how does narrative design in video games impact the novels you write?

This job has been so important to my writing life because it taught me how to write an external plot. In my experience as a literary fiction writer, it’s easy to focus too much on internal conflict and not enough on the external plot that actually makes a story well-paced. In a game, you can’t hide behind pretty prose or witty banter. The player always needs a concrete objective to fulfill, and the story needs to highlight the game features related to that objective.

When I first started this job, I had to study screenwriting again because I hadn’t written for visual media since college. I started with YouTube videos, and I stumbled across Eric Edson’s Film Courage lectures. For most of my writing life, I identified as a discovery writer and hated the thought of outlining anything. But I was awestruck watching Edson’s lecture because the outlining structures he explained completely aligned with my own storytelling instincts. In that moment, I realized that there was a pattern to what I was already doing in my work, so I might as well capitalize on that pattern with an outline to save time. I immediately watched every one of his videos on the channel and read his book, The Story Solution. In the book, he describes a structure called the Hero Goal Sequence Paradigm, and I use this structure for everything I write at work. This structure also improved my novel writing. The day I finished Edson’s book, I went home and threw out the 200-page draft I was working on and started over from scratch using the Hero Goal Sequence Paradigm as an outline. I finished this newly plotted draft of my novel in October, and now I finally feel like my book is on track.

What are you working on now?

I’m currently based in Seoul, and I first moved out here in 2018 on a Fulbright Creative Arts grant for my novel. My book is a literary novel about a Black folklore anthropologist in Seoul who must cure a 1,000-year-old man’s immortality before his step-daughter kills him and takes his eternal life for herself. 

While working on my book, I also recently launched Craft with Kat, a weekly newsletter with practical lessons on writing. Once a month, I post craft lessons from the novel writing course I taught at the University of South Florida. During the other weeks of the month, I document my novel writing process and share advice that has helped me as a professional fiction writer and narrative designer.

You can follow Kat on Twitter.