In defense of petulance (sort of)

Following a lot of literary journals online as I do, I sometimes see their editors post about the bad behavior of writers. Often, it's writers angry about being rejected lashing out at the journal. Past posts by Roxane Gay and a local journal called Barrelhouse stand out in memory for the way they called out (anonymously, I think) writers who had responded with pique when they'd been rejected. In Gay's case, I think she posted the words of a man who'd responded somewhat condescendingly when he'd been rejected, words to the effect of how nobody would ever pay attention to whatever journal she'd responded on behalf of if they didn't publish work like his. In the case of Barrelhouse, they'd had a writer approach them at a conference to tell them that a story they'd rejected had later been accepted by a better journal.

In both cases, those posting about the responses were holding up this behavior as a cautionary tale of how not to behave. And it is, it is. The correct response when you get a rejection, any rejection, is to not think about it and move on to the next journal. If I get positive words to go with the rejection, I will keep those in my inbox, but anything else, I immediately delete and don't give a second thought to.

At the same time, I understand those writers' reactions. There are three options here:

1. The stories did not merit publication.
2. The stories did merit publication, but the editors erred and picked other, less deserving stories.
3. The stories rejected were roughly the same level of quality as those selected for publication, but the editors chose the other ones for difficult reasons to explain, but which include personal preference and what kinds of other stories had already been picked for publication. 

If it's numbers two or three, the writer's disappointment is at least understandable. This disappointment shouldn't bubble up into a treatise on how wronged the author is lobbed at the editors, but every hundred or so such disappointments, maybe a writer is entitled to such a reaction. If you happen to be the editor who suffered, maybe you could act like writers are supposed to act and just ignore it and move on. It's quite possible the writer, having vented his spleen, later feels sheepish about having done so. There's no real reason to remind the writer later of what he did, or to flog the writer in public, unless the moment of frustration was so over-the-top as to be openly violent, sexist, or racist. 

Let's say, though, that the editors got it right. The work wasn't as good as the writer believed it was, and it didn't deserve publication as much as the stories selected. I still think editors ought to give writers a little slack when they blow off steam. Believing your garbage is good is part of the natural evolution of a writer.  As Octavia Butler said, "You don't start off writing good stuff. You start off writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it."

I've never fired off an angry letter to an editor. But I did once blog about something a reviewer I paid to look at my stuff wrote, and I later regretted it. Moreover, every time I get a rejection, my instinctive reaction is, "Fuck you, you ingrates, that's a brilliant story." I just had that reaction twice this week, even though I'm only a week removed from the best news I've ever received as a writer (more on that soon).

Over the last seven years, I've eventually gotten over my anger enough to "gradually get better at it," but the anger is part of that process. To write anything is an act of enormous chutzpah. It's saying that with all the thousands and thousands of stories being published every year, the world really needs your story, because it's different and it's important and needs to be read. We all write because the story we want to read hasn't been written yet, so we must write it ourselves. That means we're all going to be partial to our own stories, because they're the thing we wanted to see nobody else made. If you don't think your story is better than the ones that do get published, what on Earth are you sending it in for? And if you really think it's better, which you should, then you ought to be angry every time it gets rejected. The world is wronging you. 

That may not be the truth, but if part of you doesn't feel like it's the truth, what are you writing for?

Writing as a business in America is now so much about authors building a brand, we no longer tolerate misanthropic, mean drunks who lob insults at their editors, readers, or the public (unless it's at the politically inclined the writing world has deemed worthy of our disdain). We like our writers humble, Tweeting about the normal people things they do that make them seem approachable and not at all aloof or weird or egotistical. I think we're missing out on something with this as the new cultural norm for writers. We shouldn't always be trying to break writers of their habit of reacting with anger when they're rejected. We should be encouraging them to write something even better so that the world literally cannot miss how good it is. We should tell writers to use their anger to get better, even if what they sent in wasn't good enough to get angry about rejection in the first place. 

It seems to me that if you take a writer who naturally wants to tell a story and then put that writer under pressure over time from the frustration of not getting to tell it, you're more likely to get a diamond than if you encourage writers to smile and enroll in the next class by the journal that rejected them. Getting an angry letter from a spurned writer should be to editors what getting a canned rejection letter is to writers. 

But still, writers, seriously: for you own sake, turn the anger toward the next story, not toward your missive on why you were wronged. If you can.