No one is neutral on the subject of rejection letters. Most writers I know relish them, save them, take a weird pride in them. They make us feel like real writers: the struggling kind. I put out a call to friends and lovers, asking for their favorite rejections. Of course there is the standard form letter. My friend Ray says, “Thank you for submitting _blah_. Although we really enjoyed your writing, we felt it wasn't quite right for us. Please consider submitting again in the future. Run off 20,000 copies, mail one to yourself every week for the rest of your life.”
This is true. Those form letters sit in our inbox, cold and dead as a cursed monkey’s paw.
But consider this email I got last week from an editor of a journal I really respect:
Thank you for your submission. This piece caught the eye of our other editor and I agreed with her it had a lot of strengths. Ultimately, however, we are not able to accept it for our upcoming issue. With this one, we enjoyed the voice, but not the story progression in the later scenes.
He goes on to tell me parts of my cover letter confused him and gave suggestions on Things Not to Say to future editors. I got this email at 10 at night, one lonely writer to another. He didn’t have to take the time to tell me that others were rooting for me, or to give me advice for future submissions. And no, this wasn’t TinHouse or McSweeney’s. I doubt very much he was “on the clock,” so to speak. It’s precisely because our work seems so thankless at times that I am heartened by letters from editors who really seem to care.
Another letter, from Kate: This story's not right for us. It's fun and entertaining and my daughter liked it a lot, but it's not really doing anything interesting on the language front, which is what I really like to see in things.
So many unanswered questions! Kate said: “his daughter really liked it? This could be taken in many ways. Is his daughter four years old and learning how to read? Is his daughter 22 and a Philosophy major at Bucknell? Is his daughter thirteen and a fan of Dracula in the Moonlight series?”
I replied: “what I find weird about that is that your language is particularly interesting. I mean, it's a particular thing with your writing, the rad prose. It would be like, "Molly, while we like this story, we feel there's not enough drugs, sex, alcohol, and/or awkward threesome relationships. My 7 year old daughter in particular finds you prudish."”
In the end, if the daughter of the editor liked your story, you would want to know, wouldn’t you? Of course you would. And this is my overall argument: these odd touches really soften the blow.
Again, we get weird things. Nathan told me about a rejection letter for a story that he didn’t write. Sarah has gotten form rejections with her name filled into a space provided with frantic, careless marker.
[Mackenzie, Emily, Adam: I regret to inform you that I was unable to work your rejection stories into my piece. Your rejections are rejected. Keep sending me work in the future!]
Once I sent a submission to an editor named Roxane. She rejected the piece based on my awkward and obvious shift from second to third person. I wrote back brazenly with the second person version. I said, “Read this other, better version, Roxanne.” She said, “I don’t know who Roxanne is.” So there’s a lesson there as well. Don’t get too cocky about personalized rejections. Or if you do, don’t get the editor’s name wrong.
Take comfort that editors want to showcase the best work they can get their hands on, that quality still matters. It matters the most. Let me end on a happy note.
Thank you for sending us “Kristen Doesn't Like Surprise Parties”. We love it and would like to publish it in the next issue of [Awesome New Journal.] We will be in touch shortly with a more formal letter and details.
As an added note (the above being boilerplate, really), I just want to say that I'm real impressed with this piece, they way it manages to be brutal and sentimental at the same time, without overstepping on either count. Really wonderful.
Thanks again.
Sincerely,
[A great, great man.]
Letters like that = what we live for.
Keep trying, everyone. If you have any awesome rejection stories, I’d love to hear about them. Leave a comment. Sequel, maybe? Rejection 2: This Time, It Continues to be Personal!
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MOLLY LAICH lives and writes in Missoula where she is completing an MFA at The University of Montana. She also teaches, walks dogs, and rides a bike.
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