A Rejection Letter

An important step.

In my last post I talked about the importance of getting work rejected, and how this can form the basis for making your work better, so long as you’re willing to take it on board.

Today, I’ve been called to follow that advice, as I received an email telling me that my work has not been accepted to the magazine I sent it in to.

It’s not the news I had been hoping for, but it comes with a silver lining that has given me a significant confidence boost: I made it to the second round of readings, and my work was read by an editor. Escaping the slush pile is an enormous hurdle, and it’s one I cleared at my first attempt.

So what can I learn from this? How can I go back to this work and make it better? What about feedback?

First off, I didn’t get any feedback. That’s normal, and shows that my story was likely weeded out fairly early in the proceedings. There’s not much to divine from this without taking more information into consideration.

Secondly, I did make it to an editor, which means that the problems with the piece are not earth-shattering. A first reader, someone whose job it is to pass as little as possible up the chain, passed my work up the chain. If there were any fundamental screw-ups, that would not have happened.

The answer I’ve landed on is a fairly simple one: editing. Reading my story again, there are still some bits of fluff and sawdust hanging around the edges, and that lack of polish is the likely culprit. An editor is a busy person, and has a publication deadline to hit. If they think your work would take too much time to get to a publishable state, they’re going to hit the ‘no’ button and move on.

I think the main reason for that lack of polish, those extraneous words and the odd mangled or confused sentence, is a lack of confidence on my part. I had no idea, other than the kind words of people I love and know well, whether what I had was any good. I wasn’t convinced whether what I had written was a turd or not, so was shy with polishing it.

This was, of course, a mistake. Not one I intend to repeat. Some excellent advice, which I utterly failed to follow, is to get the work finished well in advance of the publication deadline, not look at it for a week, then go in for an edit. If you try to do all your editing whilst you’re still in writer-brain for a piece, you’re going to be blinded to the mistakes that cause work to be turned down at the second round.

So what happens now?

First, I take this morning off and soak in the knowledge that I don’t write turds. I made it to the second round. Then, this afternoon, I’m going to get back to my story, and I’m going to muck around in it. Pull at paragraphs I’m unhappy with until I like them again. Tighten dialogue and play with my descriptions. I’m going to keep doing that until I like the entire story again.

And then I’m going to look for a different magazine, and submit it. I’ll be making a post about that process in the near future.