I might one day write the great American masterpiece, but an editor from Bull Magazine has already written the great American personal rejection note. I wouldn't normally post something an editor had written to me, since I assume words between a magazine and me are private, but in this case, I think the response I got was so excellent, I really just want to praise the magazine.
Bull, if you don't know, publishes "men's fiction," although they don't define in any sense what that means. I thought I had a story that might work for them. It's been close with a few other journals, including placing as a finalist in a Glimmer Train contest last year. Nobody has quite bitten on it yet, though, and I think it has something to do with how they're not quite sure of the story's themes relative to sexual harassment. The story's main character is a lawyer at a large company in charge of keeping the company on the right side of the law when it comes to harassment, but he's got his own past of bad behavior to contend with.
Anyhow, here's the note that came with a rejection from Bull:
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Dear Jacob,
My sincerest apologies for how long this has taken me to get back to you. There's no good excuse I could give you to make up for the sheer shittiness of leaving you hanging. Suffice it to say I'm kind of terrible at being a functional adult who can be depended on and this is a really fucked up thing to be as someone in charge of a lit mag with authors like you putting your work in my hands. Sorry.
As for Collision, I was really torn on this one, man. The absurdity of premise and the voice all the way up to the ...conclusion are really great in a George Saunders kind of way that I really appreciate.
In the end, unfortunately, I just felt like we needed Jenna and some of the other women in here to be able to rise to the narrator's sheer volume. I appreciate that you're going against type with Jenna being sensitive, but I feel like it's a bit too easy for the narrator to have Jenna switch to sensitive so quickly and not beat up on the narrator a bit more to be as interesting and nuanced as he is.
Of course, remember that this is just me and I'm kind of an asshole/know-nothing/lousy shithead who leaves a writer like you hanging this long, so really fuck me and my lousy opinions.
Thank you sincerely for your great patience and sorry that this all ended with such a shitty disappointing low-blow like this email.
Best of luck.
BULL
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I can't believe an editor, as busy as they all are, took the time to write something as funny and thoughtful as that. Getting a note like that is nearly as good as getting published. I don't even really disagree with his reasons for not publishing it. I tend to think all stories have an Achilles heel in them, and a good story isn't so much a story that avoids having a weak point as one where the strengths make the reader not care about the weak point. This editor wasn't quite there. I've had the same experience with stories when I edited for the Baltimore Review, and some stories just flat-out left me feeling there was no right answer. In the case in that link, another magazine took a story I just couldn't decide on. So maybe the same thing will happen with this story.
The greatest service literary journals provide is to promote the careers of developing writers. Obviously, the best way they can do this is to publish stories, but letting writers know whether their stories were even close is nearly as useful. Taking an extra minute to say a story got consideration is hugely helpful for writers. It lets them know whether a story is way off or nearly there. If your journal accepts five stories an issue, you should consider also trying to give feedback on another five you thought were close to getting accepted.
Bull did that. (In fact, this is the third time I've had this kind of feedback from them.) So I just wanted to give them a shout-out and say the editors are doing it right.
I'm going to propose a radically different view: shouldn't it be expected that an editor did his job and responded respectfully and helpfully to a writer, the "worker" who provides content and without whom the editor would have nothing to edit and no magazine to produce? I was thinking the humor and personality was an added value service, but an editor should know how to write, how to take the sting out of rejection, keep a promising writer interested in the litmag, yes?
ReplyDeleteYes, I know, editors have it hard, they either aren't paid or are paid little, and they have a bazillion rejects to write, mostly to writers who send off a hundred copies of a story to anyone with a pulse without regard to whether it might be suitable to the story they've written. So form letters have become the coin of the realm for literature. Uh-huh.
But that's all beside the point. The point is: this is really great feedback - congratulations! And it makes me even more eager to read this story. Hmmm... I wonder if publicizing your rejection could get it published... not sure how to go about doing that, though. At this point, the whole journey is turning into a novel - add a second thread somehow relating to the first and I'd read that, too.
I know when I was an editor, I really could not have handled giving personalized feedback, including a sentence or two about why I rejected it, for each story. But I do really support letting people know when they're close.
DeleteI had an idea that I posted at some point in time that writers could elect to get a 1-10 scale. One would be "I read a page and gave up, because it's not good." Ten would be "we published it." Five would be you read nearly most of it. Seven and above, you probably read the whole thing. Nine means it nearly got published. You wouldn't have to justify your number, just give it. That would at least mean something.
Our mutual friend Andrew thinks it will never get published because editors will just be too unsure about the premise. We'll see. Since it's a shorter story at about 2,500 words, if it keeps on getting rejected, maybe I'll just post it here.
Oh, also...he used "George Saunders" in the same sentence as a story of mine!
DeleteI do agree that writing an honest response is valuable, but I guess I just read this as hipster vulgarity.
ReplyDeleteI can see why you'd say that, but given that most responses are form letters, I'm willing to forgive it for not being perfect and be grateful for the effort.
DeleteI'm going to call hipster vulgarity a personality. I've given up trying to figure out what exactly constitutes a "hipster". Last time I knew what anyone was talking about, it was Yuppies. I was a Yuppie for about 10 minutes, once upon a time.
DeleteLee Klein at Eyeshot (he's still around, the litmag is long gone) used to send bizarre rejections - he published a book of them a few years ago. I think he distinguished between the clueless ( who got insults) and the almost-there (who got suggestions). The shock value got old pretty quick, but it was kind of fun the first couple of times.