Rejection: Essay by YA Author Elba Luz

We are excited to have author Elba Luz on our blog today with a personal essay for us. Read about her path to publication, persistence and how it relates to her new YA, Build a Girlfriend. 

Rejection
By Elba Luz 

Rejection is inevitable in any career or stage of life, and it comes in various forms that tangle themselves in our paths. For me, the most gut-wrenching way it manifested in my life was in the literal form of rejections from agents. I started writing when I was a teenager, and only after graduating college did I snag an agent to try and sell my books. Foolishly, I thought it was the last time I’d have to deal with it, but when I failed to sell my first project, I learned I could never be rid of it—so I had to learn how to work through it.

Amelia, the main character in Build a Girlfriend, has been rejected by every partner she’s had—along with her family of women, cursed with the same bad luck. Unlike me, who often opts to eat a pile of French fries and cry while playing video games until my best friend does a life check on me, Amelia decides early on to push through her rejections. She does so by facing them head-on. With the help of her family, she decides to do an “ex-retrospective,” re-dating her exes to try to figure out what went wrong in order to become the perfect girlfriend.

You’d think that it would be too humiliating a task, going back to past relationships to dive deep into yourself and pick out flaws, but Amelia pushes through despite it all. It’s not that Amelia is without embarrassment—she feels it quite often. She’s just brave enough to continue moving forward.

For me, it was much harder. With each rejection, I grew more humiliated by my growing failures, causing me to doubt whether I should be a writer. I thought something was flawed within me. I didn’t have the skills to be on this path; therefore, I didn’t even have the right to try. Instead of realizing that even the greatest of artists did not succeed immediately, I only let myself wallow in my failures.

With the help of her family and ex, Amelia can build herself up, focus on the things she is good at, and magnify her great qualities. It’s not a shield against her rejections; nothing can block them from piercing us fully. But it’s a weapon against them—something to combat the misery rejection often brings.

Eventually, I realized that my writing and my words mattered. Even if I kept getting rejections, even if there were thousands of better artists than me, I mattered too. Just by living, you hold value. My stories had value, and so did I. So even when the hurt followed after rejection, I didn’t let it stop me from doing something I genuinely loved. Maybe I needed to take a break, eat some ice cream, and touch some grass. But as long as I came back to my writing, I became stronger than I was before. Rejection is natural, but pushing through it makes us resilient.


Elba Luz is a Puerto Rican author and a lover of stories, whether in the form of anime, manga, video games, or, of course, books. Speaking of books, she should be writing her own. Instead, you’ll probably find her replaying Final Fantasy, listening to classical music, or cuddling up with her adorable pit bull, Stormy. Learn more about Build a Girlfriend here.