Writing is such a solitary pursuit and activity, and yet, for many of us, the goal is to share that writing with the world. How inconvenient!
I’ve been thinking a lot about rejection lately. I realized some of my non-writer friends did not realize that for every place a piece of mine gets published, it’s likely been rejected by at least ~5-10 other outlets. It’s been a pretty standard experience of mine to write something and start to submit to to a few places and have it be rejected (sometimes within days; sometimes months to…never, because there’s no response). Some places have submission periods that you have to keep track of, putting it on the calendar along with “preschool application period” and “Swim registration, must log on at 6am!” Others are rolling, but you may not hear from them for 6 months.
In this age of electronic submissions and responses, it’s very common to get a rejection without feedback. Since many places allow simultaneous submissions, it’s also common to submit to so many places that you forgot where you already submitted. I learned from writer friends pretty late in the game that many of them were keeping spreadsheets, tracking which agents they queried, which platforms they submitted to, which places rejected them. This mimics part of the utility of a platform like Submittable, which many magazines and journals use, which allows outlets to charge you a submission fee, and tracks the status of everything you’ve submitted through that site.
So I started to keep a spreadsheet, too. I hate spreadsheets, in particular since this tabulated my rejections neatly, grouping them visibly rather than shadowy occurrences that I had banished. But it was helpful, because I did not want to accidentally email the same pitch to the same place again!
Most writers have a few pieces in their computer writing folder dungeon, the ones they’ve submitted to many, many places, edited and reworked, submitted again, and then finally lost steam, and moved on. The pieces live there, and sometimes never resurface. I put two such pieces in my spreadsheet, listed out the rejections, and thought, where else? And started to submit again, in earnest.
I recently was talking to someone new to writing who had submitted her piece to one place and had it rejected. “I’m not sure what to do with it now,” she said.
I realized with a shock that she did not know how common rejection is. She thought that because it was rejected once, her piece was bad.
And I realized that for better or for worse, I had subconsciously almost completely divested my personal opinion of the quality of my writing with how easily it got accepted, or rejected. There were so many reasons it could get rejected—something similar already published in that outlet, that particular editor did not happen to connect with it, no great time peg, niche subject matter that maybe did not fit with that reader or audience, a random twist of fate. Or yeah, maybe it was bad! But maybe I needed the rejection to motivate me to edit it?
I am a notoriously bad editor. (I mean, to myself. Like I’m not sure anyone else knows much about my editing expertise). I love to overwrite. This post, for example!
I loathe going back to edit. I am in awe of people who are good editors, even more if they are good self-editors.
But I also know it sometimes really is a numbers game. And that’s what I try to tell new writers—if you’re happy with your pieces, you’ve edited it, you’ve incorporated feedback—keep trying! Don’t expect that it will get published in any place that you had envisioned it. That’s a perk, but not a given. But trust that it’s worth reading, and keep trying.
And at the end of the day, there will always be some graveyard pieces. Every so often you’ll revive them. I have one I revive every few months, a 4,000 word meditation on generations of caregiving. It may never be published—4,000 words is an awkward length. But I’m still glad I wrote it. When I reread it, with the view of editing, I instead get lost in the stories I tell in it. I feel connected with some essence of who I am, who definitely lives on that page. And even if it never gets shared, I know that capturing that essence was my ultimate intent all along, anyway. I think loving the craft of writing has meant accepting the mercurial nature of publishing, understanding that rejection stings but that it is part of everything.
Some of those pieces may make their way into this newsletter, at some point. But I’m still plugging away down my spreadsheet.
Would love to hear from other writers—do you edit a piece after every rejection, trying to improve it? Or do you just save it under a new title and submit it again somewhere else?