On Rejection: Simon K. Jones
I’m excited to bring in Simon K. Jones to talk about his work writing fiction on the internet. He is the author of Welcome to the Triverse.
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Hi Simon! Tell us about a time you experienced rejection.
I've had publisher rejections and have failed to make even the longlist for competitions over the years, but when you asked the question I was transported specifically back to my teens. At that stage, I was all-in on writing for film and had spent a summer writing a movie script. On the surface, it was a science fiction alien abduction thriller, which was really a coming-of-age story about its teenage protagonists. At the time, and this would have been the late-90s, I heard about a script submission and feedback session with professional editors and producers happening near to where I lived. It was an opportunity to get the screenplay I'd written in front of industry people! Big break time!
The editor I talked to was very kind. She gave me lots of excellent feedback, both about the script itself and the industry, and let me down gently. The realisation I had on the drive home was very clear, though: it wasn't a good script. The rejection was disappointing, but what really hurt was recognising that I was a long way from being a good writer.
How did you get over it?
Although I continued writing after that, it was most often for my own enjoyment. Projects remained in a drawer or on a hard drive. I didn't send them out into the world. My career post-university went in a different direction, down the tech route, and writing for a long time became a background hobby - something I'd done as a teenager. The dream of getting into movies, or my earlier ambition to be a novelist, drifted away. I'm not saying that all of that can be traced back to that script rejection, of course, but I certainly hadn't developed the confidence or thick skin required to be a creative person at that point.
If you could go back and tell yourself anything right before that experience, what would you say?
Keep writing! Stay focused! Courses and university degrees and formal training can help us be better writers, but the most effective way to improve is to simply keep writing. I lost track of that at some point and became a dabbler. Poking at this and that, but never finishing anything and continually being distracted. That definitely delayed me becoming a writer. It's easy to know this in retrospect, and as someone in their early-40s. When I was younger I thought I had all the time in the world; it's only as I got older that I realised I had to get on with it.
My son was born in 2012 and that for some reason focused me back on my writing, and specifically novel writing. I think the experience of having a child made me appreciate my own mortality, which in turn lit a fire under me. If I wanted to achieve anything creatively, I had to make it happen and stop waiting for some theoretical perfect time.
How has serializing your work on Wattpad and Substack changed the way you think about rejection? Does direct contact with your audience have an impact?
It's absolutely had an impact. I started writing on Wattpad around 2014, initially treating it as a fun experiment. The notion of writing and publishing a chapter of a book each week sounded fun and I thought I'd do it for a month-or-two and see what happened. Eight years later and I've completed three novels and I'm in the middle of writing and publishing my fourth. My debut, A Day of Faces, won a Wattpad award. Those first three books have had 329,000 reads. I've spoken about serialised writing at festivals and at the National Centre for Writing here in the UK. I like to think that it's proof that if you do the work, if you put the effort in, people will come.
And going back to my earlier point, writing and publishing every single week for eight years has been the best possible education in writing fiction. It's a very public way of writing, which I know terrifies some people, but for me it's been transformative. I've been fortunate in that my readers have always been very kind and have enjoyed the work, but there was still a fear of rejection to get past in the early days. What if people didn't like what I was writing? That's far less of a concern for me now. My novels aren't hidden in drawers or on hard drives: I put them out into the world as works in progress, so I get a very quick feedback loop about whether a project is working.
What are you working on now?
I started writing on Substack in 2021. I was curious about having more control over my publishing, rather than relying on obscure algorithms of other platforms. It was also an opportunity to write more regularly about the writing process. On Fridays I publish a new chapter of my latest novel Tales from the Triverse, which is a science fiction crime thriller. On Mondays I send out a newsletter with writing tips and insights. It's all free to read, though readers can become paid subscribers if they want to support the project, which also gets them additional behind-the-scenes author notes. I always think of my readers as being the literary equivalent of people who watch all the 'making of' extras for movies. They actually like to know how the sausage is made.
It's the first time I've had people pay to read my work, which is a very new experience. It brings with it new concerns around rejection, in fact - suddenly I have 'customers', whom I really don't want to disappoint! It's a slightly different relationship to giving people content for free.
The thing I learned retrospectively about that early rejection is that it's OK to not be very good when you start out. Most of us aren't geniuses and don't get everything spot-on right from the start. Everyone is a beginner at some point, and the only way to get past that is to not worry about early rejection and simply keep working at your craft. Eventually, you'll get to a point where you're satisfied with the quality of output, at which point you'll also attract an audience. Keep going until you make it.
