Let us Lose and Be Glad in It

I write about rejection because it's just too prominent in any artistic pursuit to ignore. There are so many of us trying to find our audience, gain some notoriety or validation that someone understands and values the way we express ourselves; we can't all be winners all the time. However, the majority of my posts are effectively crying out to whatever powers govern the subjective preferences of literary agents and magazine editors, sitting with failure and unpicking every rejection for something more substantial, something I can work with.

To be frank, you'll drive yourself crazy if you only do that. Sometimes sharing, even gamifying rejection provides a sense of solidarity that you just can't get from an open mic night. This is why my friends in the Oxford poetry community created The Biggest Loser.

No, not the atrocious weight loss show. Our Biggest Loser is, functionally, a WhatsApp group chat where we post our rejections. There are about 20 competitors, all writers either based in Oxford or elsewhere, who we've met on our own silly journeys to put words into the world. Each month, the two organizers tally up the rejections in an impressive spreadsheet, then announce who was the biggest loser of the month. This will all culminate in a to-be-determined prize at the end of the year.

What The Biggest Loser has quickly become is a motivator to submit. The more you put yourself out there, the more rejections you're likely to get, lifting your position on the leaderboard. Of course, any submission could lead to a success, and there's always that part of you that prays it will. But either way, you win something.

Qualitatively, a rejection competition has not only gamified our writing submissions but offered some relief that we're not all terrible writers. I've heard these people perform, watched them receive awards and run successful workshops; they are talented. So if they're receiving just as many rejections as me, perhaps I'm not so terrible.

It's a necessary coping exercise. Sometimes, you discover who else submitted to the same magazine or competition (just this past week four people in the chat were rejected by the National Poetry Competition). Sometimes you send three messages in one day and two in another (as I did last week).

This game is not meant to coddle; a rejection still stings, both in your heart and in your wallet. After that barrage of five slush pile emails, I sent a message to the group chat admitting that I felt awful, even if it meant I was scoring high. The responses weren't just empty assurances about the quality of my writing, but far more heartfelt. Whatever masochistic determination I have to keep screaming at this wall until someone hears, to keep submitting because I believe in my writing, is encouraging my fellow writers to do the same. We're screaming more often, and louder.

And I have this delusion of grandeur (what artist doesn't) that in time the Oxford poets of the 2020s will be remembered for something like this. We not only published books, edited each other's work, won awards, ran festivals and workshops and cabaret nights, but also celebrated our failures. What my friends have created is something wonderful. If you're based near Oxford, I strongly recommend you come to any of the writing communities and events this city has to offer.

If you're based elsewhere and have a burgeoning poetry community, why not start your own Biggest Loser competition? Turn the rotten, isolating capitalist enterprise writing has become into something daring. Learn to love losing.