On Wednesdays, I share posts, fables, songs, poems, quotations, TEDx Talks, cartoons, and books that have inspired and motivated me on my writing journey. I hope these posts will give writers, artists, and other creatives a mid-week boost.

In a recent post on the Writer Unboxed blog, award-winning author Greer Macallister shared advice on accepting rejection. Here’s an excerpt from that post:

If you don’t learn to accept rejection gracefully early in your writing career, you’ll end up fighting a lot of unnecessary battles later. Which is bad for you on many different fronts.

Because while there are some battles worth fighting in publishing–fight for the right editor, for marketing, for the right cover and title–there are a lot more that you can only win by not fighting at all.

Editor doesn’t want your book? Accept it. A major bookstore isn’t stocking it? Accept it. Your friend’s book seems to be getting all the book clubs and TV options and buzzy-buzzy Most Anticipated coverage? Accept it, and wish them well. Bad Goodreads reviews? Accept them and move on (or don’t read them at all.)

Does this bent toward acceptance fly in the face of the wisdom that persistence is the writer’s most important trait? I’ve thought about it, and I don’t think so.

Persistence, after all, is not just pushing forward. It involves flexibility. Adaptation. Persistence doesn’t mean you send your first manuscript to 100 agents, and then another 100, then another 100. It means you query widely to agents you’ve researched, take a look at the responses, and decide how to move forward from there. Maybe you edit that first manuscript, or maybe you write a different one. Folded into that process is acceptance. You explore, you try, you fail, you accept, you adapt, you try again, and if everything comes together just right, you succeed.

You can read the rest of the post here.