Rejection letters, or Anything but ‘Yes’ is still ‘No’

Form Rejections: Back in the pre-internet days, when I was a callow newbie, I assigned monumental significance to every form rejection letter I received. At one level I was right: I’d had the courage to query in the first place. But then I mistook that action as requiring an equal gesture from the universe.

At one point I was insane enough to contact big mainstream publishers and ask for samples of their rejection letters, so I could build a database of standard rejection phrases. Some of those publishers even responded. I tied my brain in knots trying to cross-reference every phrase and variation.

Did literary agents and publishers have scales of form rejections, using phrases most relevant to the mms at hand? Were some of these macros higher up on the food chain than others? How far were they from that all-important ‘Yes’? How could I take advantage of this ultra-secret hidden code?

It was a ritual made possible by the human drive to find purpose and meaning in everything. It took away time I should have spent writing. And it was complete bullshit.

Then I worked as a summer intern for a literary agent, and learned: Anything but ‘Yes’ is still ‘No’. Not ‘Maybe’. If the agent saw potential she’d send out a lovely little thing called a Revise and Resubmit letter. (Still not a guaranteed sale.) In form rejection letters, I discovered, the filler was most often there to be kind, or to deflect troublesome responses from writers who had not figured out the aforementioned truth. Often, those phrases had no precise connection to a story’s shortcomings.

By the time I started hanging out at online writing sites, and narrowed down my favorites to those that seemed more professional, I saw many new authors still getting stuck on Rejectomancy: The Game. And being told over and over, Anything but ‘Yes’ is still ‘No’.

Understanding that is a big step toward developing the aplomb that lets writers read a rejection letter, shrug away the sting, cross that market off the list for that story, and send it out to another market. We even have a name for it, depending how sulky we are at the moment: revenge query, or rebound query.

Personal Rejections: Some of us struggle for years, still grounded at the form rejection level. Other writers may garner personalized comments from agents and editors almost immediately, getting valuable critiques and establishing a kind of relationship with professionals. Still not a paid relationship – but much closer, and prone to yielding some type of the phrase ‘If you have anything else, I’d like to see it.’

Even though these personal comments might sting far worse than bland form letters, they can actually shift the odds toward publication. But we have to learn from them, and apply what feels right for our stories. A lot of that means checking our egos at the door. Paying attention to what we actually wrote, and not what we thought we wrote.

I have a great example of this, in an old fantasy story that I sent out years back to the major short fiction markets. I thought I’d written a subtle but intense tale of betrayal, compromise, and self-discovery. The editor of my all-time-favorite market found the story and the world interesting, but told me ‘No’. And why:

The opening was quite vivid, but I didn’t feel as emotionally connected with the story there as I was hoping.  I think that may have been because of (Protagonist’s) seemingly non-plussed attitude initially at his wife’s transformation, which I felt in his dialog, and because the narrative didn’t give me much of a feel there for his emotional reaction to it all.  I liked the emotion later in that scene, like him saying “I wish you had told me,” but I also wanted to feel that guilt or remorse rebounding off the page, and it didn’t quite reach that level for me.

I shelved that as a ‘No’ and set the story aside, still too close to it. Over the new few years, I gained more experience in successfully bludgeoning readers with intense emotional arcs.

Last week I looked at the old story again with clearer eyes, finally understanding why the editor might have wanted to see ‘guilt and remorse rebounding off the page’. My protagonist was meant to be a tightly-controlled intellectual. He came across as dull and emotionally stunted. I needed him to be passionate, conflicted, on the verge of challenging everything he knew about his world.

I gutted the story. Focused on the emotions. Let the poor guy feel something, then made him feel too much. Then I began rewriting until 4700 words of dry prose became 11,000 words of (hopefully) stronger drama. I’ll know, once I either send it out on the professional rounds again, or decide to self-publish it.

But it took time, distance, and the willingness to accept that what I had first written wasn’t the story I wanted to tell.