It can be difficult to determine whether multiple rejections are a sign that there is something wrong with a story, or if you have simply conceived a misfit that is waiting for the right editor to come along and fall in love with it.
I’ve blogged in the past about ‘An Odd Man in Opal Creek’, a story I loved but which – little did I know – was so unoriginal in its concept that it might as well have been plagiarised. ‘The Stag Night’, which will appear later this year in Blood in the Rain II, was the opposite. It got rejection after rejection not because there was anything wrong with it, but because it was a romance/horror/literary mongrel in a publishing showring that mostly prefers purebreds.*
Any response that is more than a form letter can help guide the writer in deciding whether a story is broken. A personal reply to ‘An Odd Man in Opal Creek’ allowed me to permanently retire the story without a qualm. Conversely, some time ago I received a rejection for a story (which I won’t name) that is ostensibly sci-fi/horror but is, in truth, a literary piece that utilises some common tropes of those genres to make its point. The editor’s critique was courteous and well written, so I gave it due consideration, but he had zeroed in on the horror elements and dismissed the story as derivative when, in fact, those elements were nothing but window dressing. Had this editor been one of the Pulitzer judges in 2007, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road wouldn’t have even made the shortlist.
Perseverance is compulsory if a writer hopes to be successful, and submitting a story over and over again in the face of ego-crippling rejections is part and parcel of the process. But a writer also has to be a realist.
On August 15, Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing co-owner Max Booth III wrote a piece titled ‘5 story opening clichés that need to die’. It was a typically sardonic and compelling rant from Booth, but what struck a chord with me was this observation:
The moment you start reading slush you will immediately learn a very important truth: most people should not be writers. They will try, and some of them might grow wise and give up, but others will be stubborn. You will see stories from them every month, and there will never be any signs of improvement.
As I wrote in a blog post of my own many years ago, the first step to becoming a good writer is realising you’re not one. It hadn’t occurred to me, before reading the above paragraph, that some wannabe authors never arrive at this conclusion (or perhaps they are resistant to it). They have faith in their abilities to the point of delusion, and I can’t imagine what it must be like to toil at a keyboard for years (or decades) without a single nugget of meaningful affirmation from anyone whose opinion matters. What we’re talking about here is pathological optimism; the literary equivalent of unrequited love.
So yes, have faith in your story – but remember also, a newborn baby that looks like a skinned rabbit to everyone else is beautiful in its parents’ eyes. If enough people say your baby is ugly, you should probably start paying heed.
*It received fewer rejections than my memory alleged. I checked my subs history and found that in seven years I had sent it to just half a dozen markets. In 2013 it made it onto the shortlist of another thematically appropriate anthology called These Vampires Don’t Sparkle, only to fall at the final hurdle. Its long and lonely trudge towards acceptance reinforces my belief that sometimes a story just needs to wait for the right market.