If you can’t take rejection, freelance life isn’t for you.
Insight from someone who hasn’t always got their shit together, has made pretty much all the mistakes, and still has "cringe pitches" a decade on.
If you don’t take rejection well then freelance life isn’t for you. This is a piece of advice I’ve given many times. I can say with 100% certainty that I didn’t take rejection well when I started out, but after a time it became a part of everyday life. When I say after a time, for me that was years not months.
I’m sharing this as part of a semi regular strand that will look at what I do in a more practical sense. Draw from me the insight of someone who hasn’t always got their shit together. I’ve made misjudged pitches, and sometimes failed spectacularly. There’s work that I’ve done that I look back at and wish that I had a universal delete button. That’s just part of writing for a living. And on a wider level, I’d say it’s true of most things we do in life.
I’m often asked how things work, whether that’s by aspiring freelancers, by staff writers eager or forced to make the jump, or by those who are curious about how things work. So, for this first, erm… lesson… confessional… I’m looking loosely at pitching. Doubtless there’s many in-depth pieces out there about structuring pitches but there isn’t, I believe, a one size fits all.
You start out pitching pretty much everything you do and then the balance starts to shift, and you're being pitched by editors rather than constantly coming up with the idea yourself. It’s refreshing as the cycle of pitching can be a drain not just on time but on energy. It is however essential. In those early days it can feel like dating, unsuccessfully. Often you won't get a response to your pitch, and when you do you might get a it’s not you it’s me, or just the brutal unvarnished truth. The latter being the most useful.
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