What I've learned about editing and reviewing makes me wonder how good literature ever gets published

I spent a year as an editor/reader for the Baltimore Review, mostly to thank them for being the first journal to publish one of my stories. I've also been the lead fiction reader/editor for the Washington Writers' Publishing House, the co-op publisher that put out my only book a few years ago, for the last two years. As a reader who gets hundreds of entries for a very small number of openings, I often rejected stories after one page. I felt bad about this at first, but it's really unavoidable. We don't have enough readers to get through everything if we're going to read it all carefully from beginning to end. And besides, readers are going to be even more fickle than editors: if I don't want to keep reading after a page, what reader, who has no obligation to keep going, is going to keep going? So we limit ourselves to work that compels reading from page to page.

Of course, you want writing to be compelling, so maybe this is just a quick way of getting to the good stuff. But as I've been doing more serious review/critiques for the last year, it's required an entirely different kind of reading from me. I read every story twice. Often, my opinion of the story completely changes between reading one and reading two. I've frequently been ready to rip apart a story, then something about it opened up upon further reflection, and I ended up writing a very positive review.

In theory, that's how you should read every story. A story written seriously deserves a serious reader. No journal should expect they will fill their pages with stories worth reading seriously if they don't take the time to read seriously. But nobody can really do this.

So how do stories like the ones in Best American Short Stories, stories that don't reveal their secrets until you've poked and prodded at them a bit, get published? I think the answer, for the most part, is that they're written by people who already wrote enough of the kinds of stories you need to write to get past editors, and now are given enough rope that they can write a different kind of story. Yes, there are new writers in BASS every year, but it's mostly filled with established commodities, people who probably got a different kind of reading when they sent work in than others did, a more sympathetic kind of reading.

It's an old realization that readers approach a known commodity differently from an unknown one. If you put a story in front of college literature students and told them it was written by Joyce Carol Oates, you'd get a completely different reading than you would if you told them it was a story by another student submitted for a workshop.

After getting several stories published and then the book, I tried to transition to a different kind of story, one that was a little more at the core of the things I care about. Some of the stories ended up being longer. All are a lot more uncomfortable. I've had some positive feedback from editors, but the things they've pointed out about why they didn't ultimately accept the work seemed to me to be the kinds of things you'd say if you hadn't read very carefully. Two have opined on a story in a way that made me think they didn't read the key passage in the story, the one that (I hope) tied together all the questions about the main character.

This is really at the heart of why I've been in a place for a few months where I just can't even write. I'm never at a loss for words or stories or ideas. It's not that I have writer's block. It's that I don't trust myself as a writer. That's largely because I no longer trust myself as a reader. If I can write a story and put it aside long enough to look at it from the outside, and I see something in it that no editor sees, the problem isn't me as a writer, it's me as a reader. That's kind of an identity crisis for me, because if there's one thing I've always felt pretty confident about, it was that I was a fairly insightful reader.

So what do I do? Write "in the manner of a story that is likely to be published," or write my stories, even though experience should have taught me by now that's not a way to succeed? For the last few months, the answer for me has been to just not write.

Most writing advice websites emphasize how important it is to keep going through rejection. I wonder how many will tell you that at some point, rejection isn't an obstacle to push through, but a sign to be heeded?