#Throwback Thursday | Winning the Mental Game

It’s a new year, the time when a lot of people (including writers) set resolutions or think about how they want this year to be better than or different from last year.

For many of us, last year wasn’t great. Nor was 2020. So we’re a little apprehensive about what 2022 might hold (and we all want it to be different to 2020 and 2021). Will we be able to get back into the writing groove? Will we be able to win the mental battle of writing when rejection is always around the corner? Will we get to go to a writer’s conference?

Christie Craig (who also writes as CC Hunter) is a New York Times bestselling romance and YA author, and was the keynote speaker at the 2017 Romance Writers of New Zealand conference. She’s not a Christian writer, but she’s an inspiring speaker and gave us an object lesson I’ll never forget.

Towards the end of her speech, she reached down and pulled a large envelope out of her suitcase.

She asked if any of us had ever had our writing rejected.

Many people raised their hands. As she spoke, she pulled handfuls of letters—rejection letters—out of the envelope, and sprinkled them on the floor.

Christie talked about how she dropped out of school after tenth grade because she was dyslexic. She talked about how she married at sixteen, and how her mother married at thirteen.

She picked up another envelope, pulled out more rejection letters, and sprinkled them on the floor.

Christie talked about pursuing her writing dream, even though her spelling isn’t always that good, and she doesn’t know how to use commas.

She picked up another envelope, pulled out more rejection letters, and sprinkled them on the floor.

Christie talked about how much she wanted to be a published writer. Enough to keep writing. Enough to never give up. Enough to keep facing rejection.

She picked up another envelope, pulled out more rejection letters, and sprinkled them on the floor.

Christie asked how many rejection letters we thought she had. Fifty? No. One hundred? No. Two hundred? No. Five hundred? No.

All this time, she is still sprinkling rejection letters on the floor. She told us these weren’t all the letters—some were still at home. She said if we don’t believe that these are all rejection letters that we can come up to the front and put them back in the envelopes. No one volunteered, although several people took photographs.

She picked up another envelope, a yellow envelope that was thinner than the others.

She didn’t open it. I thought this was her acceptance letters, or maybe her first contract. No, the yellow envelope held more rejection letters—ones the cat peed on before she could file them.

Christie Craig got more than 600 rejection letters before she was published. Six. Hundred.

Now she has thirty or more books from major New York publishers. She claims she still doesn’t know how to use commas—but boy, can she tell a story that packs a punch and has everyone in the room blinking back tears.

She says if a high school dropout from the back end of Alabama can become a New York Times bestselling author simply because she has the guts to keep going because she wants it so much … then I can win that mental game.

So can you.

We can’t control what’s happening in the outside world. But we can choose how we react. So let’s choose to keep writing.