Like a lot of young writers, when I first started out, I kept all my rejection letters. For the past 8 years, whenever I got one, I put it in a file. By now, as you can imagine, that file is getting kind of thick.

Lately I’ve been wondering what the point of keeping them is. It’s starting to seem more like habit than anything else.

At one point, I had romantic and unoriginal ideas about my rejection letters. Like many people, I thought about wallpapering a room with them when I finally “make it big” as a writer. Now I ask myself: Would I really want such a negative and depressing room in my house — A veritable shrine to all the people who told me no?

Not really. In fact, that seems like a stupid idea.

And it’s not as though the rejection letters are that interesting. At least 90% of them are form letters that politely say “thanks, but no thanks.” I don’t even have good rejection letter stories. Only one or two were actually sort of insulting. Once, for example, a person tore the bottom of my cover letter off and wrote, “No thanks” in pencil before stuffing it back into my envelope. But even that seems more like laziness than insult. No one ever wrote “You suck!” on one of my rejection slips.

When I was a beginning writer, everything was a precious icon on the path to eventual success. Now rejection letters are just part of the job. And I know that a lot of writers save them for the same reasons I originally did, which makes the whole endeavor seem pathetic.

Maybe ReadyMade Magazine should have a contest for what to do with old rejection letters.

UPDATE: I went to throw out the file, but when I started going through it, I realized it was a pretty thorough history of my early  publishing attempts. I would never have remembered that I ever sent anything to Guide Magazine, or that I actually sent around my terrible terrible poetry, or that someone at Zoetrope told me that I’ve “got the goods.” It was oddly encouraging and not depressing, like I thought. So I kept the file. Just because.