The bitter sting of rejection…
Posted by bencooper | Filed under General, News
Dramatic I know but,yep, that’s right, I’ve finally heard back on a couple of my stories and the outcome was as expected…well not entirely.
I received a very nice email regarding one of my stories from the fiction editor of a ‘zine. He liked the story but felt that a couple of issues needed to be addressed. He offered some advice on what he felt needed to be changed or tightened up and said that if I was willing to attempt a re-write he would strongly consider it for inclusion in his ‘zine.
That buoyed my spirits somewhat. It wasn’t a firm acceptance but the acknowledgement that the story had some merits and could be published felt good. So I’m tackling a re-write at the moment, it’s coming along OK but having to take a back seat to my dissertation and essays for my degree.
Two of the other stories came back rejected. It’s an odd feeling and I went through a strange cycle of emotions.
Firstly a tinge of anger mixed with indignancy…huh so my story’s not good enough for you huh! Well what do you know! This then quickly gave way to a kind of depression…I’m never going to be a writer, who am I kidding? What’s the point of even trying if I can’t place a couple of stories, might as well give up now and save myself some time and disappointment.
This depression phase lasted for a day or two. To try and lift myself out of it I trawled some websites about writing, rejection and success. It made me feel slightly better and some of the advice out there really did give me the strength to get back at it, particularly rules from the late Robert Heinlein ( you can read them here). Having read this page, along with Robert J. Sawyer’s own take on the rules, I decided to have a look at the two rejects.
One of them I can see why it was rejected. It’s an older piece, more than a year old, that I submitted on a creative writing module and earned a 1st for. I hadn’t looked at it since getting it back in the second year, other than a brief check over for any grammar or punctuation cockups before submitting. Having re-read it I can see all the weaknesses in it. Crucially I think I sent it out to the wrong market. I intend to do some serious editing and re-writing on this one and send it to a more appropriate magazine at a later date.
The second one felt stronger to me, a recent effort that I had spent plenty of time on. I read it and re-read it. I had received no advice for this story, just a form rejection – thanks but no thanks. So I decided to follow Heinlein’s fifth rule – get it back out on the market. I hunted around and found a magazine that could be a perfect market for the story and emailed it off to them the very same day.
So it’s been an interesting learning experience. I think I’ve acquitted myself well and definitely feel better for having come out the other side of rejection hell! I can see now that this is going to be a really hard slog, with absolutely no guarantee of any success, but hopefully I can learn from it all and make myself a better writer.
Later,
Ben
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