Glass Maze Every jumbled pile of person

The Best Rejection Ever

Hidden among the catalogs and complementary real-estate magnets and supermarket circulars in yesterday’s mail was a little envelope addressed to me, in my own handwriting. I have, over the past couple of years, come to dread these little envelopes. They’re always bad news.

Whenever you send a short story to a magazine, you’re supposed to include a self-addressed stamped envelope along with it. After the editor or sub-editor or sub-sub-editor or sub²¹-editor finishes reading it, he sticks his response in the envelope and mails it back to you. And by “response,” I mean rejection.

Most of the time, these rejections are simple form letters. We have received your manuscript, we read it, it’s not for us, thanks for trying, good luck. That kind of thing. I’ve amassed a small stack of these things over the past couple of years. You can’t blame the editors for not sending personalized responses, of course: they get hundreds of stories a month, and there just isn’t time. But still, it would be nice to know how much they didn’t like it, how close you got.

Part of the problem is that I actually did get a personal response for the very first story I sent in, to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. The editor, Gordon Van Gelder, typed up a very nice note saying that he liked the individual elements of the narrative, he liked the writing, but he didn’t feel it really ever came together as a story. He wished me luck. At the time, I didn’t realize what a boon this was. I was instantly spoiled. I didn’t even send him a thank-you note.

The next twenty rejections were form letters.

So when I opened yesterday’s envelope, I wasn’t expecting much. I was already thinking about where to send the story next, when my brain started spinning around and bouncing up and down and banging against the sides of my skull, like an excited toddler, sending jets of pure neon adrenaline into every part of my body. I looked at the note. “It’s not a form letter!” sputtered my brain. “Not a form letter!“

It was short and sweet and wonderful. The editor said she found the story’s idea interesting, the story itself “gripping”, but, nevertheless, didn’t feel like it was quite good enough for her magazine. She wished my luck.

So, still a rejection, but the best rejection I’ve gotten in a long time. When I first started sending out stories, I never would have thought that I’d get this excited over failing to get published. If nothing else, writing teaches you humility, and that some kinds of failure can be, in their own little way, as good as success.

Well … almost as good.

actually, i would take it as a sign that your writing is genuinely improving. the only reason why editors write personal letter is to show their appreciation (as well as their rejection!). i know this because my creative writing class teacher came to our final class with dozens of rejection letters she had accumulated over the past three years from editors. the ones that were really bizarre for me was how the editor of the atlantic monthly was writing all these personal notes on her stories…of course, he never ended up using them, but that is more by the by.

That’s a very cool idea. And – you’re right – it’s pretty astonishing that the editor of Atlantic Monthly would take the time. The NYT and Atlantic Monthly probably get more stories than anyone.

My last writing teacher brought in all the drafts of a story she got published in an anthology a while ago: her own first couple of drafts, and then the changes she made at the editor’s suggestion. It was very cool to watch the story develop and cohere into the final product. Ever since then, I’ve been consciously trying to save off drafts, instead of working steadily on the same document. Nice to be able to got back to the history. It’s like old family pictures, or the little height marks etched on the wall to mark your kid’s growth.