Best of luck placing your work elsewhere

As I posted a few days ago, I finally got a story published again, after about a 15-month slump. It's never fun getting rejections, as I've written about in painstaking detail from time to time on this blog. Someone recently posted a photo of a t-shirt he got from Barrelhouse Magaizine. It says, "Best of luck placing your work elsewhere."

It's a bit of hapless writer gallows humor.  A typical form rejection letter from a literary magazine goes something like this:


Dear Writer,

Thank you for sending us "Greatest Short Story in American History." We are sorry it does not meet our needs at this time. We thank you for thinking of Heartless Journal, and we wish you the best of luck placing your work elsewhere.

Sincerely,

Heartless Journal




When I volunteered for a literary journal working through the slush pile for a year, I hated being the guy who helped hand out those form letters. It's grueling. You can only accept at most about five percent of the stories. You vote down over and over and over, knowing everyone who gets a rejection letter will be as disheartened as you are when you get them.

I've read before that rescue dogs, if they go too long without finding a live victim, start to get emotionally distressed, and it's necessary to stage a "rescue" for them by placing a fake victim that the dog will find and save. I used to think that editors needed the same thing--we need a win every now and again so we can feel good about saying yes.

It's worse with long works

This is my second year co-judging the Washington Writers' Publishing House fiction prize. Every work has to be at least 150 pages long to qualify. Many are much longer. Even if you're writing garbage, a work that long represents an investment of effort. As I read through the submissions, I can see that writers obviously put enormous effort into building their worlds. They care greatly about the stories they have to tell. It's incredibly depressing to me to see a story someone put huge work into, a story so full of intricately plotted detail, and then I am compelled to vote no on it before I'm one-fifth of the way through it. They spent maybe hundreds of hours making it; I sometimes spend less than an hour deciding not to accept it. There's no point going on and reading the whole thing with some of them; there might have a lot good about it, but there are also so many flaws, I know before a hundred pages are gone that it's not going to make it. If I don't want to keep reading, neither would a person thinking of buying the book. This person wanted the world to read his story, and he didn't even get a judge to read the whole thing. I feel awful for the writers.

Everyone will tell you, when you first start trying to write, that it's going to mean a lot of rejection. But nobody can really prepare you for what that feels like. You're going to write good stories that nobody will want. If you're going out of your mind trying to get something, anything published right now, allow me to repeat what you've already heard: this is all part of the process. It's how it works. You're doing it right. Failing is part of it.

This point was recently brought home to me while watching Amazon's Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. The wife-turned-comic bombs. Then she bombs again. She's ready to quit, but her manager keeps telling her that bombing is the only way to get good. It's a painful way to improve, especially for people who aren't used to failing, but it's necessary.

I couldn't find the clip of Mrs. Maisel bombing, so instead, here's Amy Schumer talking about the worst she ever bombed.

And remember: every time you feel like shit you got rejected, there's an editor somewhere dying a little inside with each rejection you get, too.