Admitting to yourself it's never going to happen without sounding morose

Is hope a good thing? Saint Paul listed it, along with love and faith, among the three heavenly things that abide here among us. The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which has been one of the biggest influences in my life, seems to hold in low regard those who abandon hope, even when despair seems reasonable, as in the case of Denethor. That doesn't mean we must maintain an unrealistic view of our own hopes, only that we have to keep trying until the last possible ember of hope is extinguished. Gandalf is the architect of the plan that ultimately defeats the greatest evil of his day, in spite of his own admission that "there never was much hope....just a fool's hope." 

On a practical level, it's hard to imagine our society surviving long without it. While the engine of capitalism can run even if few people have a truly realistic chance at achieving their dreams, it can and will run as long as most people have just enough hope to believe they might achieve them if they only keep going a little further. Hope is so strongly grounded in Western culture and so necessary to maintaining our way of life, questioning its value might seem sometimes like questioning whether murder is bad. 

There is another tradition, though, one that views hope as ego getting in the way of our own growth. This is the tradition embraced by Canadian author Steven Heighton in his article "Hope is Good. Disappointment is Better."Heighton recalls how his own buoyant faith in his bright literary future retarded the very growth as a writer necessary to achieve that future. Heighton discusses the two terms "disillusion" and "disabuse," suggesting that the second is better, both because it lacks the confusing double-negative equaling a negative of "disillusion," and also because it suggests that sticking to hope involves abuse the way an addiction does. 

Heighton cites Buddhist teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh, who teaches that hope is harmful because it's based on an illusion. Although hope has a biological basis that is essential to survival, this biological urge can, over time, train us to avoid any type of discomfort. Most elite athletes, Heighton writes, learn to stop thinking in terms of hope, because hope is a distraction: 

As every athlete finds out, action contaminated by hope (If only I can nail this next serve . . . I’ll win if I nail this next serve!) usually fails. Hope is a fatal distraction. It creates a kind of skip, jitter, or satellite delay in the nerves. Where there’s hope, there’s fear, their relationship an alternating current. On the other hand, a play or movement executed in a fully present, fearless frame of mind—without hope—often succeeds.

Worst of all, hopefulness—that “if only!” state of mind—becomes a mental habit that does not just go away once things improve a little or a lot. The relief of every hope realized creates a new hope, new fears. So we go on, slinging ourselves ahead of ourselves toward death—in fact hastening its approach, our actual lives left uninhabited.

Easy for you to say

Heighton was discussing hope in terms of his own development as a writer, tracing how his early novel lacked necessary focus and refinement, because to have kept working on it then would have felt like admitting his own shortcomings, something that would have conflicted with his internal narrative of himself as a rising literary star. He argues that failure is often the only thing that will teach us, because we are so resistant to admitting we need to improve we will deny and deny our weaknesses until undeniable failure makes us unable to continue to live with our own illusions. 

My own experience from a life not quite as long as Heighton's is that he's right. My life has been a series of waves of unearned confidence that I would transfer my reasonable but not unprecedented talent into easy and unprecedented success. Those waves of confidence have been successively broken, which forced me to reevaluate. The greatest developments I've made, both personally and skill-development-wise, have almost invariably come at my moments of greatest humility. 

Yet there's a difference between what Heighton is writing about and what I'm facing as a writer. Heighton is looking at it from the perspective of someone who's published eighteen books. He may have had to grow as a writer, but that's just it--he's growing as a writer. People identify him as a writer, whereas most people--the few who are even aware of my existence--would identify me as something else. Writing is something I do on the side, but it isn't who I am. The difference between Heighton and me is that he's had enough signs in his life that writing is the thing he ought to be concerned about getting better at in order to know he's probably in the right place. When he's thinking of the balance between hope and disappointment, he at least has a reasonable certainty that writing is the place where he should be seeking that balance. 

I have no such reassurance. I've had about fifteen stories published, along with one book. I've won two awards. All of what I've done has been on a pretty small stage, within a field that is among the most glutted on Earth. When Heighton writes, hope is a threat that, left unchecked, could keep him from passing through the uncomfortable refinement needed to reach greater excellence. For me, hope is something without which I couldn't write a single word, because I have no reason to believe the odds are in my favor that more than a small handful of people will ever read anything I write. 

To return to the image of the athlete, if I discipline myself to focus on the present and not to lose myself in fantasy, but all it helps me accomplish is that I go from eighth place to fourth place in my local rec tennis league, does it even matter? Isn't this level of mental focus, this ruthless plucking out of hope, only for pros? For the rest of us, isn't it kind of harmless, or even necessary to get us through the day-to-day humdrum of our otherwise unremarkable lives? 

I don't want to play rec tennis

I write because I believe I have things to say worth saying that aren't being said by others. I write because I think those things I have to say are important. If I'm wrong--if all I am is really nothing more than one of the better players in my local league of writers, then I'd rather not be spending time on it at all. 

A lot of people tell me that's the wrong approach, that I should write because I love it and only focus on being the best writer I can be and enjoying it and if I happen to also have success getting published and winning awards and being discussed seriously by serious people, to take that all as a bonus. They tell me I should write the same way some people play guitar or paint miniatures or participate in a tennis league or sing in the church choir--for the pure love of the thing. 

That's probably a healthy attitude if the goal is happiness. It's also something I'm unable to settle for. Anything other than "going pro"--being able to support myself as a writer, being known widely as a writer, having what I've written become part of public discourse--seems so unsatisfying to me, I'd rather not write at all. 

But it looks like I really am a rec player

Of course, the world doesn't care about what I wish were true. At this point, it looks like the level I'm at is the level I'm going to stay at. There have been a few thrilling moments when it looked like I might be able to break through, at least enough to be in the show if not to be one of the stars, but those never panned out. Assessing my prospects as a cold and impartial third-party observer, I'd say my chances of achieving what I want to achieve are maybe better than winning the lottery, but still so unrealistic that continuing to hope for it is almost a pathology. Reality is that I either need to become okay with writing at the rec league level or quit writing and find something else to do, maybe something I don't mind doing as a mere hobby. 

Of course, writing and tennis aren't perfect analogies

In tennis, the best players tend to win the most, because the winner of a tennis match is almost a perfectly objective matter. There can be some influence from judges (although instant replay has reduced that influence), and certainly bad luck can be involved. In any particular match, the lesser player might prevail. Over time, though, the best players tend to show themselves. Federer and Djokovic really are some of the best to ever play. 

Writing is much stranger. It isn't completely subjective, as some people rather recklessly claim, but it's not close to objective in the way that tennis is, either. Those considered our best writers today probably are in a meaningful sense worth reading more than many others who don't make it. There's a meaningful difference between a good writer and a bad one. That doesn't mean, though, that there is a meaningful distinction between one good writer and another. I know this not just as a writer, but as someone who's spent time as an editor whose job it was to pick the best writing to publish out of a huge pile of possibilities. I had some sense of what I considered good, and I could explain the contours of that aesthetic sensibility somewhat, but in the end, picking a winner always had a little bit of a darts-at-a-board feeling to it. Which means there is always some luck involved.

In an article about how Sally Rooney's success is a symbol of a new aesthetic of the "pose" over the "voice," Stephen March discussed how much the potential for success in writing has shrunk in the last fifty years. He compared it to a children's party game called "shark," similar to musical chairs, in which the space to land on keeps shrinking, until only one child can fit on the final spot. The only problem with that analogy as it relates to writing is that while the space available for writers to succeed in finding an audience, fame, relevance, and fortune is shrinking as print culture dies, the number of writers trying to cram into the few remaining spaces is actually increasing greatly. It's like if the PGA tour had cut its number of possible spots for golfers in every tournament by eighty percent since 1960, at the same time as the sport was undergoing a change from being primarily something wealthy white Western people did to something people of all kinds of backgrounds from all over the world do. 

Which means I'm in a game of musical chairs where there are eight chairs every time I play and six thousand people playing. To make it worse, the people who get the chairs aren't simply those who got there first, but those who got there with the most style, according to a style manual the judges can only partly explain. And for some reason, I'm not just playing for the love of musical chairs; I'm playing because getting a chair has somehow taken on life-or-death significance for me. 

Hope block

I've never struggled with writer's block. There's never a day when I woke up and didn't have things I wanted to say. It's been months, though, since I've really sat down to write those things, not because they aren't still queued up in my brain waiting to come out, but because every time I start to write something, I am overcome by a feeling that there's no point. Either I'm mistaken about the worth of what I want to say, or I'm just not one of the lucky elect. Either way, writing for me is, unless I'm holding dearly onto hope, an exercise in onanism. 

It's too much trouble to go back and count, but I've probably intimated on this blog a dozen times that I intended to quit writing, only to get back to it after a break. This is easily the longest break I've taken, so long that it no longer feels like a break. It feels like I'm really done, and in the end, I didn't even really decide to be done. The necessary impulse to write just sort of left me. 

It's possible to look upon this as a necessary, if painful, shattering of hope, of being, at last, disabused of my fantasy. It could be a good chance to go focus on something else. There are a couple of reasons, though, that I find it hard to just move on.

First, yes, it is possible I could live with the realization I'm not the writer I want to be. I'm also not the chess player I want to be, nor is my Korean as good as I'd like it to be, nor can I lift as much weight as I wish I could. None of those failures keeps me up at night or keeps me from doing the activity, so I should similarly learn to live with writing as another thing in which I wasn't born with the talent to match my ambitions. The only problem with that is that while I could live with being a less-than-stellar writer, I have absolute faith in my ability as a reader. If I'm wrong about my perceptiveness as a reader, then I literally know nothing. And the whole reason I've kept writing is because when I looked at my own writing as objectively as I could, it seemed to me to have worth. Failure as a writer, then, isn't just failure as a writer, but failure as a reader, which is a far more fundamental hit to my identity. 

Secondly, there's the question of what I do with the work I've done that never got published. I'm especially thinking here of the novel I wrote about the work I did for seventeen years, the novel I thought would help make sense of the otherwise senseless direction my life has taken. The novel I can't believe I couldn't find a publisher for, the novel whose failure to get published calls into question my soundness as a reader more than any other failure. Do I suffer the indignity of self-publishing, or do I keep my two unpublished novels and dozen unpublished short stories that comprise what I consider to be my best work in a drawer, to be brought out ceremonially to remind me of the perils of unmerited hope? 

Third, if I'm not a writer, what animates me? What gets me through the endless hours of my day job, a job which, while better than I deserve in life, is, as it is for almost everyone, not really what I set out to do in life? I've talked with more than one writer in similar circumstances to myself who has said he writes because if he didn't, he doesn't know what he'd do with himself and would probably just end it all. 

I know the title of this post has to do with confronting the end of your dreams without sounding morose, but it wouldn't be honest if I didn't at least admit that suicide is part of the equation for a lot of people when they hold onto the illusion of hope. The end of that illusion can be fatal, which is why many people continue holding onto the increasingly false hope their dreams will come true, or they keep themselves distracted with the endless noise and narrative that a connected age makes possible. 

Of all the illusions I've found it difficult to shake, the one I've had the hardest time overcoming is that I'd like for life to have a purpose. It would be best if it had a purpose generally, but failing that, I'd at least like for my life to have a purpose. I'd like for my own life to make sense in the way a satisfying narrative makes sense. Writing has always seemed like the way to make that happen, perhaps in too obvious a sense, which is maybe why it's such an illusion. 

Since I first abandoned religion about twenty-five years ago, I've always been struck by how much braver life without God requires one to be than even that required of a saint. When I read Sartre's Nausea, for example, I felt like nausea wasn't just a literary trope. It's how I really felt thinking about living a life without a higher power making sense of it for me. I felt rudderless and lost and a little bit terrified. I never really got over that feeling, even though it hasn't made me recant the "disabusing" of the notion of God. That feeling of being lost is a lot of what I've always wanted to express, the thing I thought made what I had to say worth reading. Not that it's a new concept, but that it's an idea that always needs to be made new, and I wanted to try.  

As brave as I've tried to be, I've never really gotten over thinking, without admitting it, that maybe life had some meaning I just couldn't see. I kept that feeling hidden away in a part of my brain somewhere, because I honestly needed the hope. If I'm now to finally be disabused of this last illusion, making me  fully live like a Sartrean Saint without hope, do I have it in me to do that? Do I have the strength to be definitively disillusioned? 

The story that was rejected fifty-two times, accepted four times and what I've learned about being a writer

We're often told as writers that getting published can be a question of luck as well as ability. You could write "The Cask of Amontillado," something centuries of readers and critics alike will treasure, but if you get a reader at a journal who isn't really up to snuff, or who has a thing about stories with violence or revenge in them, or who isn't having a great day, you'll strike out. I'm fully aware of how human readers for journals are, having done a year or it myself. You will, of course, make your odds better by writing something good, but that just gets you in the door with hundreds of others. Getting published sometimes comes down to giving one particular editor the story she was looking for on one particular day.

That said, as my 9th grade science teacher always said, "The harder I work, the luckier I get." When I first started submitting stories to journals a little over seven years ago, most ignored me. All of the higher-tier journals completely ignored me. (What do I mean by "higher-tier"? I don't want to get to much into it, but I guess the journals from tier five and above on this list, although the list is a bit dated now.) After nearly a year, I got an acceptance from a good, but not elite, journal. Another year went by, and then I got a second, then a third a month later. I've kept getting an acceptance or two a year from the non-elites since then. 

I'm happy when anyone likes what I've written. I really am. It's gratifying for even the humblest of journals to publish a story I wrote, because there's no journal so small my story didn't have to get picked over a lot of others, stories whose authors loved them as much as I love mine. 

Still, I've had a longing to see if I could make it into one of the higher tiers. There are two reasons. One is I'd just like to have a somewhat broader audience. Secondly, a friend of mine told me when she got a story in the high-tier New England Review, she got publishers asking her if she had a novel ready. Since I've had a hard time getting people to look at either novel I've written, I'd love a short cut.

A few years ago, I started getting more than just form rejections from some of the higher-tiered journals. There's actually a rejectionwiki someone keeps that helps you to know if your apparent "encouraging rejection" was actually meant to be encouraging. Most of mine were.

One of the most incredible string of encouraging rejections I got was from the now-defunct Glimmer Train. I somehow managed to make the finals of contests they ran three times in a row, without winning any of them. At the time, I was somewhere between excited and completely demoralized. I didn't feel like I could possibly write a better story than those, and even though I'd gotten closer, it seemed at the time like that was as close as I was ever going to get.

There's a reason I've written more about rejection on this blog than any other subject.

I decided I'd try to at least get over it enough to try to find a home for those three stories. Once I did that, I'd think about hanging it up for good. 

One of the stories, "Collision," I think I might never get published anywhere. A number of journals other than Glimmer Train have said they liked it, but I think they're all a little nervous about publishing it. One writer friend of mine who read it said immediately that it would never get published anywhere. Essentially, it's within the "#metoo" sphere of influence, and I think it's too hard for editors to tell where the story's allegiances lie. One editor said as much. I've tried rewrites to make it a little clearer, but I think it's too ambiguous a treatment of the subject for nearly any journal.

The second of that triumvirate of stories, called "Jajangmyeon," will be published this winter by The Chattahoochee Review. I'm really excited about this. The editors suggested a few changes that I think made it a lot better. I thought highly of the editors at this journal during my interaction with them. They were prompt to reply and insightful, and I couldn't like the journal any more if it had the clout of The New Yorker. 

Finally, my story "Love Hotel," I can now announce since the journal has, recently won the Robert Day Award for fiction at New Letters. If you believe in tiers, New Letters is the highest-rated journal that's accepted me yet. It may not get me Nate Silver asking me about novels in my desk drawer, but it's a big breakthrough for me. Mostly, I'm just happy someone saw in this story what I've seen all along. Some writers say they can't pick a favorite story they've written, that it's like asking them to pick a favorite child. I don't feel that way. "Love Hotel" is my favorite.

Even a strong story can have a twisted path to publication

Actually, New Letters wasn't the first to see something in it. It's the first story that ever earned me more than a form rejection from The New Yorker. The Georgia Review, and Hopkins Review each told me I'd made it to the final round of cuts before falling out. A number of other elite journals gave me my first non-form rejection: Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, Granta, The Missouri Review, The Common, and and a few others. Each time I got one of these, again, I'd be stuck between elation and the most abject feelings of dejection.  

I decided to just start sending it out to whatever journal and resolved that anyone who wanted it could have it. About a week after I did that, I got an acceptance. It was from a brand-new journal. Part of me wanted to just let them have it, just so the story landed somewhere, but at the last second, something stopped me, told me that I'd already placed stories in okay places, but this story was worth believing in enough to keep trying for something bigger. 

So I told that journal it had just been snatched up right before they got to it, which, strictly speaking, isn't good writer behavior. A few weeks later, New Letters told me it was a finalist in their contest. While I was waiting for them to pick the winner, another journal said they'd publish it. I hadn't pulled it yet, because I wasn't sure it would be published in New Letters. This third journal agreed to wait to see if it won the contest. I pulled it from everywhere else then.

Or at least I thought I did. I forgot about one journal, because I'd submitted it so many places, I missed when I had to withdraw it. Also, because I was on the road and not working from my home computer when this all happened, it was hard for me to see where exactly I'd pulled the story from. This last journal happened to also accept the story, meaning I had to explain to them what had happened. All the editors I had to turn down were gracious about it, which was probably more kindness than I deserved.

What I learned from all this

There are two lessons to this. One is that there are just some editors who are never going to like my work. I'm looking at you, Colorado Review. I'll never get so much as a "we liked your work and would like to see more" from some places, so matter how strong the story is. "Love Hotel," which moved the likes of The New Yorker and The Georgia Review, got form rejections from some journals that don't appear on the list of 500 I linked above at all. Finding the right audience is a little like finding a romantic partner. The fact that everyone isn't into you doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. 

The second lesson is a little harder for me to absorb. Of course, I edited "Love Hotel" a lot before I first sent it out to journals. But after a year of near rejections, I looked at it closely for the first time in a few months. I made one major change to it, one which shortened it by a thousand words and made the main character's motivation clearer. (In fact, I had edited it so many times, I had to name one version of it something different just to keep it separate from all the other versions. This one I called "Lobu Hoteru," after the Korean pronunciation of the loan words "love hotel." That's the one that won, so now I'm stuck with "Lobu Hoteru" for all time.)

I hate waiting. I like to write stories, edit them, and send them out. It takes long enough waiting for a response, I don't want to wait forever to put something out. But even though I've written a few stories in a short amount of time that worked and were published, I think the main thing I've learned as a writer is that there's no substitute for time on your work. Writing a story, re-writing it, putting it away, re-writing again, and then putting it away even longer before re-working it yet again, is the surest way to make sure your story's putting its best foot forward.

In my day job, I'm always pushing people to not let making a perfect product be a reason to never produce anything. And at work, that's the right attitude. I have to learn to separate my work from my writing, though, or I'm going to continue to get close-but-not-quites. 

I just re-learned this lesson last week, when The Missouri Review gave me such an encouraging rejection on a story I wrote post-"Love Hotel," I thought they were actually accepting the story for a paragraph. Ultimately, though, they let it go, because they felt it got a little too windy. I looked at it again, and sure enough, after being away from it a while, I found 500 words to cut pretty easily, words that the story was better without. The editor also suggested I give the reader a little more of the main character's internal struggle, which I think I did with two sentences.

So while I'm elated by the success of "Lobu Hoteru," I'm also kicking myself for not waiting to send out my latest story, which might challenge "Lobu Hoteru" for favorite child status, a little longer. I'm wishing I'd made it just a little harder for The Missouri Review to turn it down. I won't get that chance again. 

What I've learned about writing is that it's extremely unfair. You can write a story that's 98% gold, and that two percent you didn't quite iron out is somehow making the whole thing not come together. There are so many elements to keep track of and pay attention to and be sensitive to, it feels impossible. But it won't do any good to either be in denial about that two percent, or to complain about it. The only way to cope with crippling depression post-rejection is to act like you're not depressed and work harder.   

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.  

"This is not our customary rejection letter"

Writers trying to get journals to publish their work are always trying to read tea leaves. Does the fact they've held onto my work so long mean they're seriously considering it? Will I have a better chance getting published if I change my cover letter to something more personal? One of the things writers who get rejected a lot (which is everyone) often find themselves wondering is this: "Is that rejection letter I just got a standard rejection, or an "encouraging" or personal rejection, one that means I was close and should try again?"

There's a whole wiki dedicated to the rejection letters of literary journals, trying to determine which are the form rejections and which mean they actually liked your work but just couldn't use it. It's kind of a big deal to get one of these personal rejection, especially from a higher-prestige journal. They don't give them out like candy. (I know, because I've gotten a lot of the form rejections before I started getting the personal ones.)

Some form letters are easy to identify. The formula goes something like, "Thank you for submitting, but it's not right for us at this time." If that's all it says, you got a form rejection. But there are some letters that leave you guessing. The contain phrases like "but we encourage you to submit again," or "we enjoyed your work." Those could be form rejections or they could be meant as the encouraging kind of rejection. (And of course, even a second-tier rejection that encourages you to submit again is often still going to be written using a template, so that might be why some of these phrases are still impersonal.)

One magazine, however, makes it completely clear if you got the other kind of rejection letter, as I've just discovered. Agni just sent a rejection that said this: "Thank you for giving us the opportunity to read X. The manuscript isn't right for us just now, but please consider sending other work in the future. The is not our customary rejection letter. We hope you'll keep us in mind."

What an excellent response! Rather than leave the writer guessing if her work resonated at all, they make it very clear. I wish every journal did that, or something similar to it.

I've had over a year now of getting these personalized kinds of rejection letters, after many years of mostly only getting the standard rejections from everybody. It's nice to know I've gotten better, but I think I've already made the big improvements that allowed me to make easy improvements. From here, it's all going to be greater grinding to make increasingly smaller gains in order to make it over the hump to get into the better journals. It's so insanely competitive. And for the last few months, I've really been leaning toward feeling like it's not worth the effort. So I'm simultaneously encouraged and discouraged. But it's not even a bad form of discouragement. It's more like I've been far enough down the road to know what the landscape is really like, and I'm kind of thinking it's not for me. That's different from the kind of giving up that leaves you with regrets. It's the kind that's informed. It's more like a 26-year-old semi-pro tennis player with bad knees giving up his dream of joining the pro circuit than it is like a high schooler giving up after not qualifying for state one year.

Flab-Bull-Gasted: A response from an editor from Bull Magazine just floors me

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:

----------------

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
-------------------

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.

This has now gotten ridiculous

From the Georgia Review, received today:

"Although your manuscript engaged our attention through several screenings, it was not ultimately selected for publication."

This is the Georgia motherhumpin' Review. One of the best journals on the planet. It now joins these other fine journals in having told me they were very close to accepting this particular story, but not quite there:

• Carve
• The Iowa Reivew
• The Common
• Shenandoah
• Nashville Review

That's six journals, any of which would have been a tremendous breakthrough for me, all of whom said they found a lot to like in it, but it wasn't quite there.

I just don't know what to do anymore. As a reader, I look at this story and feel like I just nailed it. I think it's the best thing I've ever written. It's much better than the stories I've published before. It's on a topic that's in the news, and I quite likely have more insight into this topic than any writer out there. If there's a story I really have to tell the world that's worth a damn, this is it. But it's a long story, which means there are a limited number of places to send it to, and I've sent it to almost all of them by now. I have a few more to try, but why would I expect anything different?

I gave it another look this week. I see I had two sections early on where I messed up sentences during a prior edit. That might have hurt its chances, although anyone who got past those enough to read the whole thing probably didn't say no because of those. My judgment as a reader is that the thing is pretty much right as it stands. There doesn't seem to me to be anything more to do with it.

I talk a lot about giving up, but I really don't want to. I love this story. It deserves readers. But if I can't get this one published, what chance do I have of ever having any kind of real audience as a writer? If I'm wrong about this story, I literally have no idea what's worth reading.

I can't believe a story can be considered good by so many journals of sound judgement, but not good enough by any.

Jesus, if I ever have some kind of definitive breakthrough and am looking back through this blog for moments of despair where it didn't look like it was ever going to happen, this is about as dark a one of those moments as I've felt.

I...might need a break

Late last summer and early fall, I put everything I had into writing six stories I thought were good enough to get published in one of the stronger literary journals. As I've said before, I'm honored when any journal, however small, chooses something I wrote and gives it a home, but I've been at this for five years now, and if I'm every going to get anywhere with this other than it just being a hobby, then I need to get something published in one of the larger journals soon.

I've had a number of positive responses since then, which is way better than I'd ever done before. But none have quite made it. This morning, I got the most expansive response to a rejection I've gotten yet:

We'd like you to know that overall, your piece was well-received by our reading committee. They have some comments and notes listed below. We hope you find them helpful as you continue to revise or resubmit your piece elsewhere.

--COMMENTS--
“This is a moving, engaging story. I cared about the main character, her story, and her well-being right away. The pacing was appropriate: doesn't drag but it's not a race either. Secondary characters are introduced at the right times and their purpose felt meaningful each time. The dialogue read very natural. Despite my lack of cultural context, I understood exactly what the writer meant. The writer chose great moments to explain details to outsiders but to leave enough mystery to place you directly in the cultural setting. It felt like a story that really cared about its characters.

“The ending might need a rethink - the revelation at the end is a bit forced I felt. But I like the sense of dislocation.”

That's really, really kind feedback. It's way more than you get from most publishers. And most of it is quite thoughtful and also answers a lot of the questions I myself had about how the story might be read: mostly, is it too slow? 

I wasn't quite sure what "the revelation at the end is a bit forced" meant, because I didn't think there was a revelation at the end, really. The main character thinks she might have learned something about another character, but she isn't sure, so rather than take action, she decides to keep watching in a state of hyper-vigilance. That seemed to me to be the natural outcome of a story in which the main theme probably had something to do with surveillance, and the similarities and differences between state surveillance and neighborly looking out for one another. 

But if the readers who obviously paid close attention to the story saw something differently, then I must have failed to communicate it correctly. Which means going back and ripping at this story yet again, and I am so deflated and tired, I can't even think of doing it. 

So here I am, for the umpteenth time, thinking that maybe the hard fact is that no matter how good I do it, it will never be good enough, and I'm just going to go on being unhappy until I accept that and do something else with my life. At the very least, I think I need a break, and that includes this blog and reviewing Pushcart. So it may be a while before I'm back. 

I hate to think that posts like these come off as whining. I don't mean them that way. Anguished, I'm okay with. It's okay to communicate that this stuff is incredibly frustrating, so much that it might not really be worth doing. But I don't hold the world responsible for it. The game I'm playing is very hard to play, and if it's too much, I need to stop playing. I mean only to communicate that the value of playing the game is not always so self-evident to me that I think I must keep playing it at all costs. 

More of the discouraging kind of encouragement

I've been submitting to Glimmer Train longer than any other journal. I even submitted to them a few times before I got serious about giving writing a go in late 2013. They're one of the few journals I've ever subscribed to. I love that they're just a thing two sisters dreamed up and then made happen. I haven't loved every story they've put out over the years, but I've liked many of them, and I really love that they pay writers and that they always publish a list of not just the winners but also the top 25 for every contest. It's nice to get that little clue that even if you didn't make it, you're on the right track. To make the top 25 is to make the top 2-3% of about 1,000 people, which is about what they usually get, give or take some depending on the contest.

I submitted maybe ten times without ever cracking either top list. Then a few months ago, I made top 25. Just last week, I got a notice that I'd somehow managed to make the top 25 a second time. The editors told me they got over 1,000 for that one, so I was in the top 2% of a ton of people.

I ought to be happy. Maybe I sort of am. But also not. Mostly not. I had a project I really wanted to dive into a week ago. I wrote for a day and then just stopped, not because I was stuck but because I just couldn't see the point. I feel like I took my best shot with this last round of stories, and I'm coming up just short all over the place. This last near-miss with Glimmer Train feels like it has some finality to it.

Maybe that's because Glimmer Train is shutting down after 20 years. This was my last chance to get into it. I realize there are hundreds of other journals out there, but for some reason, I feel like missing out on my last chance to make it in Glimmer Train is somehow my last chance to make it, period.

I am, of course, enormously grateful to Glimmer Train for letting me know I was close. I wish every journal gave you some idea whether you were close. I have a scheme I would use if I ever ran a journal.

Side note: this is all random

That same story that just placed me in the top 25 got a form rejection after a week from a much lower-prestige journal.  You might think that if a really strong journal was close to taking it, a lower-prestige one would snap it up. But it doesn't work like that. Sometimes, it takes the stronger editors at a bigger journal to even realize what they have. I can personally testify that at lower-prestige journals, the editors are so overworked, they really can miss good stuff. I did.

The other story that made Glimmer Train's top 25 has also had a couple of other "we almost published this" notes, but plenty of total ignores as well. So there's being good, and there's luck. Luck submitting a story at the right time relative to the other stories a journal gets, and luck just finding an editor who gets you.

Some people get lucky early in their careers, and some never get lucky. I'm feeling right now like I'm nearer to latter end of the spectrum.

When failing better isn't good enough anymore

If you've ever tried to beat a video game, unless you're a really good player, you'll likely hit a number of cruxes. These are moments where you have a really hard time beating the level you're on, and at some point, you have to decide if it's worth the time you'll have to put into it to get past the part you're stuck on. Sure, if you keep at it forever, you're bound to beat it sometime, but do you really want to invest that much time in a video game? Don't you have other things you could be doing? Didn't the game stop being fun a while ago?

As you try and try to beat the game, you'll likely have a moment where you almost get it. Either you change your approach, or you get a little better at what you were trying, and you very nearly beat the level. Close, but not quite, and that's usually when you throw the controller down and spend some time asking yourself how much you really want to beat this game.

You've gotten closer than you ever got, but to get even better, you're going to need to change somehow. You're going to need a genuine gaming catharsis. You might also need just a little bit of luck, as some levels of the game require you to get the right random combination of things at the same time as you are playing at your best.

I've had a lot of those kinds of moments lately with writing. No writer goes right from zero to success right away. It's a tough road for everyone, and even the extremely talented have to do some heavy lifting to get where they want to be. Earlier in my life, I decided writing seemed too hard for me, and I abandoned it for a decade or so. When I decided to really try it again five years ago, a big part of that decision was me agreeing with myself to keep pushing through a lot of failure. I didn't always keep that promise. I threw the controller down many times, but I always kept picking it back up after a break.

A really good rage quit is almost as satisfying as actually succeeding 

That led to "failing better," to paraphrase Samuel Beckett, and even to what you might call beating a few levels--publications in some smaller journals, the book, etc. For the last two years, I've been trying for a much harder level--cracking into one of the top 50 literary journals. At first, I didn't get very far, just form rejections. Last fall, I took a whole new approach to writing and cranked out five new stories. The results have been coming in for the last few months. In that time, I've gotten rejections but with encouraging notes from five of those journals: Glimmer Train (who put me on their honorable mention in a contest), Iowa Review ("we gave serious consideration to your submission and found it very promising"), The Common ("we were impressed by your writing and would like to see more work in the future"), Shenandoah ("we found much to admire in this story"), and One Story.

This is "failing better." Any writer will tell you a rejection with a note is far, far better than a form rejection. You got noticed off the slush pile, out of hundreds of manuscripts. You were probably in the last round of selections, you just didn't quite make it. I ought to be encouraged, but I'm kind of at a point where failing better isn't cutting it anymore.

This is where, to keep the video game analogy, I might just need a little luck to go with doing it better. An editor somewhere who has a personal connection to my subject matter, maybe, or just having someone read it on the right day to be in the mood for what I'm laying down.

I just don't know if I can stick with it that long. I'm not saying I quit, and I'm not saying I'm going to keep going. I'm saying I threw my controller down with one of those encouraging-but-not-quite messages, and I haven't gotten to where I can pick it back up yet. I might wake up one day and feel like I've got a way to get past the next boss, and I might decide I ought to do other things with my time.

One thing that's very different about writing from trying to beat a video game: the lag time between trying something and finding out if it works can take between a month and a year, and you don't always know what it was that killed you.

I'm sharing this in case other writers ever feel the same. I mistrust advice that tells you to keep going and believe in your dreams no matter what. I also mistrust advice that tells you the opposite. What I trust is when someone tries to tell me the truth, so that's what I'm trying to share with you. There will be moments as a writer when you don't know if you really ought or want to keep going. The only way to know if you should is to put down the controller for a bit and see how drawn you feel to pick it back up.

Props to the Adirondack Review: The "encouraging rejection" is one of the best services a literary journal can provide

I've probably written about rejection more than any other subject on this writing blog. That's because it's the single most ubiquitous fact of writing life. That doesn't change after a few publications or a few dozen or a few hundred. Nearly every writer faces rejection, even the stars. True, if you're Cormac McCarthy, your form of rejection might be that you didn't win a Pulitzer this year, instead of that your story didn't get published by the Zimber Creek Review, but either way, you're going to face disappointment.

I've received a few rejections just this week, but one of them stood out. The Adirondack Review added a little note to the automatic notification. They wrote this: We really enjoyed your work, and it was a strong contender for publication in The Adirondack Review. However, we regret to write that it was not selected. We encourage you to submit again.

Literary journals, most of which make no money (in fact, they often have to exist off the largesse of a patron who endows the magazine), are providing a valuable service to American literature. They provide a training ground for the next important writers to emerge. Without small journals, there wouldn't be as much good work coming to the big journals, and there wouldn't be as many writers perfecting how they write enough to produce important novels. 

Choosing stories for publication is always subjective, by definition. A story later regarded nearly universally as great may spend years getting rejected before is gets published. Jacob Guajardo's "What Got Into Us," one of the choices for this year's Best American Short Stories collection, spent two years getting rejected before it finally found a home, which led to it eventually being picked for BASS.  

What that means is that there is nothing "right" about any choices a journal makes. A "good" story is more likely to get published than a "bad" one most of the time, but there are all kinds of reasons why a good story might be hard to recognize at first. It's also very hard for a panel of editors to pick the "best" of what they got. One editor might like it, another might hate it, and a third might be on the fence.

What I'm getting at is that even though small journals do a great literary service by giving developing writers a place to go to test how they are doing at developing as artists, the feedback writers get isn't always going to give the right messages. This is especially true if you are only getting a "yes" or "no" every time. I can tell you, as a former literary journal editor myself, that there are a hundred different kinds of "no," from "almost made it and probably should have made it, in retrospect," to "I quit reading after one sentence."

So when journals go the extra mile to let you know that you made it past the slush pile and got real consideration, that's incredibly useful feedback. It says you're on the right track, and there is probably something to the story you've got. It might need a tweak, or it might just need to be submitted more. But either way, it hit a nerve somewhere, which increases the likelihood it'll do the same somewhere else. It takes a minute to craft that extra language in the email, and I understand that every journal everywhere is overworked, but just writing a few of those kinds of rejection with every edition you put out makes a journal's impact to the writing community much stronger.

It was especially useful to hear this response on the story in question, which is really an oddball. I wasn't sure that editors would even be open to the premise at all. This is now the second rejection-with-feedback I've had on the story, though, so I guess I'll keep pushing forward with it. I'd never know, though, if it weren't for editors who care.

What is this strange feeling? Is this the humility people have always talked about?

One of the recurring themes I've tried to capture in this blog over the years is the internal struggle between believing in yourself as a writer enough to stay the course and being wise enough to realize when you need to change. It's the most difficult part of developing. Without heeding advice and changing here and there, you'll never improve. But without believing in your vision as you see it to such an extent you're willing to ignore all the advice, you're unlikely to write anything worth reading.

Be it bad advice or just too much good advice, sometimes, listening too much to various flavors of focus groups just produces crap. 

I've bounced around between the two poles, trying to find the right mix that works for me. I tend not to find a settled place in between, but more to swing back and forth between the two. One day I'm an island, the other I'm desperate for someone, anyone to tell me what I'm doing wrong.

The other day, though, I experienced something that wasn't quite either. I got a notice that someone was publishing a story I'd submitted. That now makes eight total acceptances (including the book) against maybe 250 rejections. Until now, when I've managed to snag an acceptance, I feel about two seconds of gratitude to the universe for allowing me some small measure of success, followed by the inevitable greed: it's great that I got it accepted, but maybe I should have held out for a bigger name journal? Last week, however, I didn't feel that at all. I didn't feel justified or relief or any of the expected feelings. I felt unworthy. Not fake unworthy, like in an Oscars acceptance speech, but really unworthy.

I think it has something to do with how I view artists as secular prophets. It's an extension of my former evangelicalism, which even though I now completely reject, continues to pervade my view of the world. If artists are prophets, then they should be wiser and holier than I am.

If that's not true, though--if prophet-artists are just screwed up, utterly lost people like me, then that invokes another old ideas from my Bible-toting days: grace and election. Artists aren't artists because they are better people than others. It seems like they should be, since part of art is to show us a better way to live, hopefully. But that's not how it works. Stories go where they choose to go. It's easy for anyone who's ever written to understand where the idea of muses came from. You work and work and work at a story, and the story eludes you, until one day you wake up and something totally different from what you were working on just shows up in your brain and you write it in three days and it's just right and it's exhilarating but also utterly humbling.

So I guess that's what I felt last week: another holdover from my days at Faith Bible Church, humility. I don't know what that means for how I write. Maybe it means I should try to exert less control over my stories, because they aren't really "my" stories. But I usually hate that kind of talk. It sounds like a writer being pretentious and trying to sound like an author. I think for me, it serves more to contextualize the failure I have such a hard time with. If I am "chosen" to write stories (by whom I do not know--I'm still as agnostic as ever), then I am also chosen to go through the failure.

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:

The benefits of occasionally rage-quitting writing

By all accounts, when you get a personalized rejection letter from an editor, it's supposed to be encouraging. They don't send those to everyone. They don't have the time to tell you they liked it if they didn't. They publish a few stories and send out a few more notes to those who almost made it. If you got a personal note, you were in the top one to three percent. So you should feel good about it.

Video games and me

I tend to get pissed off kind of easily while playing video games. I was like that playing tennis as a kid, too. I broke a fair number of rackets. Nowadays, if I keep playing a tough level in a video game over and over and can't beat it, I have a tendency to chuck the controller on the ground, swear a lot, and quit playing. The kids call this "rage quitting." They generally mock rage quitters, especially in a multi-player game where you leave your teammates down a player, but I can't even pretend that's not me.*

The benefits of the rage quit

As disconcerting as it might be to watch a grown man have a fit over playing a stupid game, there are some benefits to the player. It's sort of a giant reset button. You get away from the problem for a while, maybe go take care of the things you ought to have been doing for the last four hours while you failed at your game. You know, because you're a grown man and all. You remember there are other things in your life besides the game. You could live quite happily without ever beating the game. You don't need to beat that level. And suddenly, you've got it. You realize the way to beat the stupid thing. Sometimes, the best you'll ever play is immediately after coming back from a rage quit.

The getting published part of writing is a lot like a boss level of a video game to me

I usually like writing stories. I usually like editing them. But getting them published is a pain. I have little control over it. Luck is involved. I think I've written the story I always wanted to read, but editors have their own ideas of what they've felt was missing in their lives. You can keep putting a story up over and over again, only to have it fail repeatedly to get past the final level.

This would be an interesting form rejection letter for an editor to use

This is especially frustrating if it's a story you're personally invested in. Last year, I started puttering around with a story and I realized while writing it that I was writing about my adopted daughter and how she'd changed my life. It's been a bit of an obsession to me to get this story published. I feel like I owe it to her. 

I recently got my third encouraging rejection letter, a.k.a. the "almost" letter, on this story. I ought to be encouraged, but really, I feel more like I've now gotten to within seconds of beating the final boss only to have it all fall apart. It's more than just disappointing; it's infuriating. 

So I'm rage quitting for a bit. I don't believe in waking up each day and answering to some higher calling to be a writer. If it's not making me happy, I don't want to do it. But the very act of acknowledging that I can live without it is often just the thing to get me past the hurdle. Either I'll think of some way to change the story that will put it over the top or I'll come up with something new. But I'd never have gotten either without first clearing my head through a little purifying rage. 

*I don't really play video games that much. I haven't for most of my life. But for a while, I was playing a lot when my son's interest in the games exceeded his manual dexterity, and he kept asking me to get him past the hard parts. That phase is long gone, now. But there were definitely some times when I was trying to beat levels for him that I threw controllers across the room. 

What to make of all these encouraging rejections

I got another one of those emails today. Dear Jake, although we're not going to publish you, we liked your writing enough that we were able to distinguish it somewhat from the mountain of rubbish in the slush pile. If you sent something to us again, we might be interested in reading it.

Every writer who isn't George Saunders knows the struggle of submitting short stories to literary magazines. There's rejection--the majority of what you face--and there's an occasional acceptance to keep you going. But then there are also those in-betweeners, the "encouraging rejections."

I've gone back and forth on how "encouraging" an encouraging rejection is. On the one hand, of course it's nice to know someone noticed it. And it does mean something. With ratios ranging from 50 stories to one you can accept to thousands to one, every editor has to let go of stories she likes. So it's nice to hear that even if you weren't the one in a hundred, you were still in a select group. It's some validation.

On the other hand, it can be a little maddening to know you were close but not quite there.

These conflicting feelings get stronger when the journal giving you the nice no is one of the big ones. In the last four months, I've had four of these from four different journals that are generally considered "top 50." I know that these aren't just form letters, because I've sent stories to them before and not gotten this secondary type of rejection. Earlier, all I got was "it's not for us."

I guess I could take it as a sign that I'm growing as a writer, and if I keep at it, I might get a big breakthrough sooner or later.

On the other hand, I'm so exhausted from the effort I've made up to now, and feeling so much like I ought to quit writing and do more responsible things with my life, that it feels like this was the final close-but-no-cigar. Right now, my son is upstairs not doing his homework, because I'm downstairs  writing and not making him do it. I should do something more adult with my time, shouldn't I?

I imagine reactions to rejections are sort of Rorschach tests for writers. True believers will not be deterred by any amount of rejection, even if the local high school turns you down for a journal that all citizens are invited to with the note "Please never write again." Pessimists will always see a down side. Even if the New Yorker picks their piece, you can then whine that it didn't go as viral as "Cat Story" or didn't get picked for Best American Short Stories. Me, I'm an agnostic, and that means I see mixed results in everything.

One way or another, I feel like 2018 is a year where something is going to happen. It might be the year I make some key breakthrough, or it might be the year I hang it up. These last four years of making an honest effort to write successfully have so far felt like I've come to an inconclusive draw. I can't help but interpret these notes as a sign that I'm either boutta knock this writing thing out or get knocked out. 

Can you actually desensitize yourself to rejection?

Following my latest trend of reading whatever the algorithm gods have suggested I read, I recently perused a parenting advice article on getting your kids to become "rejection proof." It had to do with getting your kids inured to hearing no, so they aren't afraid of asking for what they want. The premise was that the more you ask for something, the more you get used to being told no, so the more courageous you become.

I wondered, "Does this work for wrirting?" Am I becoming more desensitized to rejection, and therefore more able to work through it?

I don't think so. The last few months, I've been almost completely unable to write fiction. I stopped in the middle of a rough draft of a story in October. Prior to that, I'd been on a roll. Feeling pretty good about myself, I submitted all of my recent work since the book, six stories in all, to many of the top 50 literary journals in September. In October, the rejections started coming in, and they haven't let up. One day, my creative mind just stopped firing, tired of producing work that is just going to sit on my hard drive.

You'd think I'd be used to it by now. I've had over 130 rejections to only six yesses as a writer, one of those yesses being the book. But apparently, I'm not used to it. Neither has my work for a literary journal, where I see how long the odds are and how haphazard the process of selection sometimes is, helped me to be philosophical about rejection. It feels personal every time. 

I think there are a few reasons rejection in writing is a more difficult thing to get used to than the kinds of rejection this article on raising kids was talking about.

1) Although "never settle for a no" is a rule in sales, if a customer doesn't want to buy your widget, that's not a slam on you as a person. But rejection of your writing is in a class with being turned down for a date or a job. It feels like someone is saying no not just to your work, but to you.

2) No matter how many times I get rejected, I can't keep myself from getting excited every time I see a notice come in. Every no, two seconds before opening it, has the potential to be the definitive yes that could make getting your work out there easier from now on. It could be the yes that means you're taken seriously. I cannot make myself stop doing this. So every rejection hurts a little bit, because it represents a little flicker of hope snuffed out as soon as it starts to burn.

3) Rejections have a strange way of coming in at a bad time, like right after you get the bill that says that your insurance isn't paying for that trip to the emergency room, or right after you find out you didn't get a promotion at work. They are often a fuck-you cherry on top of an already shitty day.

4) Would you want to date someone who machine-gunned through dating rejections until he got a yes? Probably not. Neither, I think, would you want to read the work of someone who didn't put enough thought into his work and who he was sending it to that every no stung at least a little.

5) Courage isn't an obstacle, like it is in sales. I don't talk to the people who read the story and reject it. It's a very impersonal interaction. It feels like nothing. It's not like asking a girl to the dance. It's like applying for a loan. 


Overall, I'm probably a little able to withstand rejection than I was five years ago, but I'm more like rejection-resistant than rejection proof. I can withstand a little splash of rejection, but don't drop me in a pool of it, or I won't keep functioning. I'm pretty sure I'll get through this current patch and get back to writing stories before too long. I'm drying out, so to speak. But I don't think rejection in writing is something you can harden yourself to the way a salesperson can learn to ignore it. That's like saying the best way to protect yourself against getting hit in the ribs with a baseball bat is to do it repeatedly until it doesn't hurt anymore. 

What it means when your story is in Submittable a long time

This is a subject that a lot of blogs on writing have covered. Does it mean anything if your story is in Submittable for a long time before it gets rejected? Specifically, does that mean that the editors thought it over a long time before sending the rejection? If you're waiting on a notice and it's been in there a while, do you have a better chance of acceptance, because the editors are spending time mulling it over?

Generally, I'm going to agree with the community consensus on this and say that you shouldn't make too much out of the length of time something is in the system before you get a notice. But I will differ and suggest that it might tell you something, but only in specific circumstances.

The basics

Submittable is the system by which about 85% or so of literary journals accept submissions. (That's a totally subjective figure based on my own experience. Many of the very high-end journals, however, use their own systems rather than Submittable.) I assume you know this, or you wouldn't be reading my blog, but you never know. Maybe you just like to check in from time to time to see if I've posted any new photos of myself that show the progress of my baldness.

When you submit a story, Submittable gives you a status of "received." Some time later--could be five minutes, could be a year--you'll see the status change from "received" to "in progress." "In progress" means that somebody has done something administrative with your story. Clifford Garstang's excellent blog tells us that merely opening a story does not change its status. Kelly Davio, however, guest blogging for Submittable, so I take it as authoritative, tells us that the only time a story can be opened without it changing status is if the reader closes the browser without first voting, assigning, or going back to the main screen. I've tested this by submitting to a journal where I myself am an editor and messing around with my submission in various ways. I'm actually going to lean with Clifford on this. I think you have to actually make an administrative action to a story. Which means you can't really tell from the disposition status whether anyone has looked at it or not. It all depends on the magazine's own preferred process for going through submissions.


Types of literary journal staff structures

Structure One: Well heeled journal with lots of intern slaves. This type of magazine probably assigns your story very early on, because they have a specific person to assign it to. How long it takes for someone to read it and vote on it from there is anyone's guess, and you won't know when it happens. So unfortunately, with the heavy hitters, you won't have any idea based on time what's going on. Most likely, it'll be a while. The good news is that a lot of the stronger journals will give you an "encouraging rejection" if they liked what you wrote and just didn't have room for it.

Structure Two: Ordered, but small. This is a magazine where everyone knows the drill and the machine is well oiled, but there aren't a ton of student interns to command. Often, there is one editor for fiction, one for poetry, one for non-fiction, and that editor does everything in that genre. Here it's a total crap shoot. It's up to how that editor likes to do things. She might open it up, read a page, then put it aside if it looks like it's something she'll need to give time to later. I do this sometimes as an editor. Some nights, I am just going through the slush looking for bad stories I can get rid of easily. If I find something decent, I leave it for later. Or the editor might never touch the story until she's ready to read it for real. In this case, you're likely to go from "received," straight past "in progress" and on to accepted/rejected in a very short amount of time. There's no committee to talk to. It's just one person, and she reads and makes a decision. In other words, there's not much you can tell from this.

Here's the exception, and the one time when being in the system a while might mean your odds are improving: Let's say it sits there for a while in "received," and then one day it goes to "in progress," but then it waits again for a while. To me, that might mean the editor finally got the story and then had to think about it. So if you submit to a magazine like this, and you're in "received mode" for a long time and THEN you go to "in progress" and sit for a long time, it MIGHT mean something.

Structure Three: Controlled anarchy. There are several editors for each genre, and nobody is really telling anyone what to do. All the editors are free to go in and read what they can, when they can. This is the model on the journal I work with, and I suspect it might be common for journals where the inbox is too big for one person but the staff is still all volunteer.

This is the structure where I think your story sitting in "in progress" mode for a long time is most likely to mean something. This is especially true if it took a long time to go from "received" to "in progress."

We like to have two editors vote no before we reject a story. This isn't always possible, but it's how we like to operate. Very often, once a story gets one vote, someone else jumps on it so we can close the loop. If we don't like the story, it often will go from "in progress" to rejection in days.

So if your story waits a while to get opened, then gets opened, then sits around a long time (say a month), I'd say that with this type of journal, there's maybe a 60-70% chance that it means people were divided on the story. There are other things that might be going on--sometimes, anarchy means that people just aren't paying attention, and a story that needs to be finished up just gets ignored. But I think the odds are that if your story didn't get assigned soon after coming in, and when it finally does get opened it sits for a while, it probably means something. But only for structure three. It could mean that for structure two, also, but it's harder to tell. With just one person, they could have any kind of system.

How do you know what type of magazine you've submitted to? Well, you don't, unless you know someone who works there. But you might be able to form guesses if you submit to the same place several times and start to notice trends.

I really think all journals ought to do a good job of differentiating between rejections. If a story made an editor or editors think before tossing it, they ought to send a different kind of rejection. It ought to be clear that the "encouraging" rejection actually means "we read your story and liked it more than we like most stories we get." That's the easiest way to tell what a journal thought. Well, that, and actually getting accepted.

In any event, for you, the beleaguered author trying to get some acceptances and make sense of it all, I think it's best to heed the majority advice: a rejection doesn't mean a whole lot, and it's best not to try reading tea leaves. Enough journals will actually tell you if you merited a closer look that you should pay a lot more attention to those than you do to time spent in limbo.

Heretic recommends: Tahoma Review's "fiction with feedback"

I spent $7 a few weeks ago to submit a story to the Tahoma Review. Normally, it doesn't cost that, but for the $7, they promise to give you some feedback. I got my feedback this week, and it was well worth the money. It wasn't exhaustive, but I wouldn't expect it for that price. Rather, they gave a two paragraph response as to why they didn't accept it.

Sure, I've been pretty negative on getting feedback, but I found this useful enough for what it was. Turns out, the reason they rejected it had a lot to do with the same flaw I saw in the story. It was a flaw I'd tried to iron out in later versions, but they didn't feel I'd quite attended to the issues. That doesn't mean, of course, that they're right. But right and wrong isn't really what you're after with something like this. You want to know the impressions someone had. It's like when I do a "Would I Have Published This Story" bit. I'm not saying I'm right or wrong, I'm saying this is how I think I'd have voted on a story and why. It's not criticism, it's just pulling back the curtain on what the gut reaction of a reader was.

I'd say that $7 was pretty good money, then. I've gotten less for a lot more money other places. The takeaway for me was that I might not have a story there right now. I'll probably pull that one and let it sit. Sometimes, at a later date, I get an idea for how to rework something, and then the original story becomes something new and better. I'm hoping that happens here.

Why I care if people read what I write

I posted last week about how to deal with it emotionally when a writer seems to get more than they deserve. Frequent commenter Badibanga--who is a friend of mine in real life--asked why I care. His comment:

...why do you want to fit in so badly? Great fiction is a coterie of usual suspects who will be unknown and unremembered 30, 20 years from now. That is the rational gamble here. The "great" writers often were not appreciated by contemporaries. So do you want to be of the moment? If so, then behave accordingly. Do you want to do what suits you, then do that, accept the consequences, and do not whine about it. Rare, rare is the person who is appreciated both by contemporaries and subsequent generations. I guarantee, however, that many of the truly great did not give a shit about fitting in or being some sort of also ran to a bunch of celebrated hacks.

We discussed this in person last week, after the ablutions demanded by sacred tradition were first performed, but because I thought it was an interesting conversation, I'll share my view here.

Badibanga has a point. And lately I've been thinking a lot about that Borges story...the one I referred to in that post, where a man writes his masterpiece entirely in his head a split-second before he is gunned down by a firing squad. I think anyone who's going to write seriously will have to internalize that story at some point, because the odds are long for nearly every writer that anyone will ever seriously give a shit what you write. So yes, on some level, you have to write to please yourself.

That being said, what primarily motivates me to write is a sense that some disconcerting truth about existence has lodged itself in my brain, and nobody that I know of has ever mentioned it before. Am I wrong about it, or is this really a truth nobody has ever mentioned? I pick at it and pull at this notion and keep trying to give words to the thought it until I'm done. But the only way to know at that point if I've really arrived at some hitherto unspoken truth is for others to read on it and comment. So I need readers.

As much as folks romanticize the writer who was only discovered after death, that's actually not all that common an occurrence. And I have to believe it will become even rarer as time goes by, and the world is ever more and more caught up in the moment, caught up in today, and forgetting whatever happened five minutes ago.

As Badibanga says, it's likely that even if I became a well known writer today, I'd be forgotten soon after. It's far, far more likely, though, that if I am unknown when I die, I'll remain that way. It's very hard for me to imagine a future where a child or a widow goes through my thumb drives after I'm gone and manages to find a publisher--if such a thing even still exists--who will take them on.

Even many of the authors cited as examples of people who were discovered after death had at least some recognition in life. Phillip K. Dick was a well known Sci-Fi writer, he just hadn't crossed over into mainstream appeal until some of his books became movies. Edgar Allen Poe achieved mild success in life, albeit not the financial kind. Long before critics hated Moby Dick, they liked Melville's Omoo and Typee. Even Emily Dickinson had a few poems published before she died. In order for future generations to find gold floating in the detritus of the past, you have to at least get your work into that detritus. And the more of it you get there, the more likely it is to be found.

So yes, I do want to be read, which means I crave publications and awards and notoriety. That leaves me with a tough choice ahead of me. The more seriously I pursue writing, the more it becomes clear that what I want will probably elude me. The latest round of stories I have sent out were the best shots I had. I put everything into them, and they're coming back rejected. So I either have to keep plugging away with a growing sense of hopelessness or give up.

Gradually, I am arriving at a position that is something of a paradox. If I write only to be published, then I won't write anything worth writing. But having written that true verse in the darkness, I have to then become another person who cares very much about getting them published. I have to not care what people think when I write, and then care very much what people think when I'm done writing.

I used to not understand why writers so frequently suffered from a variety of psychological maladies, but the longer I'm at playing out this paradox, the more sense it makes to me.