by Six polite passes, each with its own specific reasoning. Reading them all together tonight, after finally getting a yes, taught me something I could not have learned any other way.
Got the genuinely wonderful news this week that a cookbook proposal I have been shopping around for close to eighteen months now has finally been accepted, by the seventh publisher I submitted it to, after six previous rejections that I have, for reasons I am only now fully understanding properly, kept carefully filed away rather than simply discarding as I moved on to the next submission each time.
I reread all six rejection letters again tonight, properly, for the first time since actually receiving each one individually, and the exercise turned out to be considerably more illuminating than I expected going in. Read individually, spread out across eighteen months, each rejection simply felt like its own isolated disappointment, absorbed and set aside before moving on to the next submission attempt. Read together, tonight, in sequence, a genuinely clear pattern emerged that no single rejection letter, taken alone, had made visible to me at the time.
Four of the six rejections, reading them again carefully tonight, raised some version of the same underlying concern, that my original proposal leaned too heavily on straightforward, traditional recipes without enough of the personal, narrative material connecting each dish to my own specific family history and immigration story, material I had actually included in the proposal but had, I now recognize clearly, buried considerably too deep within the more technical recipe-focused sections rather than properly foregrounding it as the proposal’s actual emotional core.
I did not fully absorb that specific, repeated feedback until reading all six rejections together tonight, because each individual rejection had arrived spaced out enough, and worded distinctly enough, that I had processed each one as a separate, somewhat different critique rather than recognizing the genuine, consistent pattern running underneath four of the six. The proposal that the seventh publisher finally accepted was, I now understand clearly, a considerably revised version that pushed the personal narrative material to the actual front of the proposal, a revision I made roughly a year into this whole process, after finally, belatedly noticing the pattern myself rather than through any single publisher explicitly spelling it out for me directly.
I think there is a genuinely useful lesson here about the specific value of actually keeping and periodically revisiting rejection material rather than simply absorbing each individual disappointment and discarding it immediately, since the genuine, useful pattern across multiple rejections is often considerably more visible in aggregate than in any single instance taken alone. I suspect I would have arrived at the same eventual revision considerably faster had I actually sat down and reread my accumulated rejections together after the third or fourth, rather than waiting, as I apparently did, until an entire eighteen-month process had run its full course before finally doing so tonight.
The seventh publisher, in her actual acceptance letter, specifically praised exactly the personal, narrative material I had originally buried and eventually pushed to the front, confirming, about as directly as I could ask for, that the revision genuinely addressed the underlying pattern the earlier rejections had been quietly, collectively pointing toward all along, even though no single one of them had stated it quite this explicitly on its own.
I am keeping all seven letters together now, properly filed, the six rejections alongside the one acceptance, a complete record of the actual journey this specific proposal took rather than simply celebrating the final yes in isolation. I think I owe those six rejections real credit for the eventual success, considerably more credit than my own initial, purely disappointed reaction to each one individually ever allowed me to properly recognize at the time.
I have already started drafting an outline for the actual book, working from that same, now clearly identified emotional core, each recipe anchored properly in the specific family story or immigration memory that gives it real meaning, rather than treated as a standalone technical instruction floating disconnected from the actual life that produced it. I think this whole eighteen-month process, rejections included, has taught me something genuinely important about my own writing more broadly, a tendency to bury the material that actually matters most underneath more comfortable, technical detail, a pattern I suspect extends well beyond just this one specific cookbook proposal.
I called my editor today, the seventh and finally successful one, specifically to thank her properly and to ask, honestly, what had actually made this particular version work where six prior attempts had not. Her answer largely confirmed what my own rereading tonight had already suggested, that the personal narrative material was what made the proposal genuinely distinctive rather than simply another competent, technically sound collection of recipes among many similar submissions she reviews regularly. I am carrying that specific lesson forward into every page of the actual manuscript now, determined not to let the same instinct that buried this material six times over quietly resurface once the harder, more exposed work of actually writing the full book properly begins.
I plan to call my grandmother again this weekend, this time specifically to tell her the cookbook news properly, and to ask whether she would be willing to let me include some of her own actual words, the specific stories behind each dish, rather than simply my own secondhand retelling of them. I think that would honor exactly the lesson these six rejections eventually taught me, keeping the real, personal source of this material genuinely present in the finished book rather than filtered too thoroughly through my own voice alone.
More from this author at Stephanie Curry, prat.uk.
