Dealing with Rejection
By D.L. Winchester
You open your email and there it is: a few sentences revealing the fate of your story.
Dear Writer,
I regret to inform you…
You don’t have to read more; you already know how it ends. The story you put through countless drafts, ran by friends and fellow writers, that even haunted your dreams, was rejected by the publication you submitted it to.
Stephen King famously stuck his rejection slips on a nail in the wall. When the nail couldn’t hold the weight anymore, he replaced it with a spike and kept writing.
That’s a little bit harder to do in the modern age, unless you just like spending money on printer ink.
But it still hurts.
And I know what it’s like. Since mid-2023, when I really began submitting my work on a regular basis, I’m pushing triple digits on my total rejections. My acceptance rate is somewhere between ten and fifteen percent, which means for every acceptance, I see about eight rejections.
It wears on you.
I also know what it’s like from the other side of the rejection letter. Contrary to what some may think, editors don’t enjoy rejecting stories.
It wears on us too.
We’re sending rejections to fellow writers, friends, people we love and value, whose stories just didn’t fit what we’re trying to do. There are always great stories that end up rejected because there are not enough slots in the anthology, and something else is a better fit.
And we know it’s going to hurt, because we’ve been on the receiving end of the letter we’re about to send. We want to write long, effusive emails saying: It’s not you, we promise! It just didn’t fit…
But we know that doesn’t make things any better, so we copy and paste the form email, and move on to the next submission.
Just like you should.
A rejection isn’t the end of a story's journey, it’s a speed bump. As soon as the email comes in (or before, if submitting somewhere that allows simultaneous submissions), get it back out into the world again. If the editor is kind enough to offer feedback, consider revisions.
But don’t linger on the rejection, and don’t let it stop you.
As soon as you can, submit again, and again, and again. Fill up your virtual spike, and start another, and another, and another. Because in spite of all the rejections, there will be some good news along the way, and as you fill up your virtual spikes, the good news will come more and more often.