I recently read an essay in Issue 3 of Kugelmass by Pank editor  (and excellent writer in her own right) Roxane Gay. The essay is called “The Art of the Rejection of Rejection,” and as the title suggests, it’s about Gay’s experiences as an editor receiving angry, bitter responses from writers whose work she rejects.

One of the most interesting responses she shares in the essay came from a fellow editor, with whom it was clear she had established some sort of working relationship prior to rejecting his work. More than anything, it seemed this fellow editor was upset about receiving a form rejection, but one comment he made in his lengthy missive was one I’ve heard many writers make about work that has been rejected, the gist of which is that many of his stories rejected by Pank have gone on to get accepted elsewhere.

If I were Gay, my reaction would be, “And your point is?” Clearly this editor—and many writers who have made similar complaints—believes that because a story is accepted somewhere, it must deserve to get accepted anywhere, and any journal that rejected it was wrong to do so. This argument is so illogical, it’s almost not even worth picking apart, but just for fun, let’s have a go at it anyway.

First of all, a confession: I’ve felt this way before, too. It never would have crossed my mind to email an editor who had rejected me to complain, but I do understand that initial in-your-face-sucka! feeling you get when something somebody said wasn’t good enough gets accepted. One of the first rejections I ever received came from a journal whose policy it was to give personal feedback on every submission. There’s a lot to be said for form rejections, let me tell you. This rejection essentially said the story was uninteresting, the character idiotic, and the writing weak and awkward. Ouch! When the same draft of the story got accepted elsewhere a few weeks later, I felt, I admit, kind of gloaty toward the journal whose editor had said such nasty things about it.

But I was wrong to feel that way, and here’s why: writing is subjective. Yes, some editors seem to forget that when they say things like, “Most of the work that gets submitted is terrible,” but on some level, I think most editors know that just because they don’t engage with something doesn’t mean it’s inherently bad. A rejection doesn’t mean the editor is rejecting you or your ability as a writer. It doesn’t even, really, mean they think what you submitted is bad. All it means is they, personally, don’t like this particular piece quite enough to make room for it in their particular journal.

Each journal usually has its own specific aesthetic, which is often difficult to pin down even after you’ve read multiple issues. Sometimes, as is the case with journals run by grad students, the aesthetic is constantly in flux because the masthead changes from year to year. Sometimes, though, you might think you have a pretty good idea of what this journal publishes, and you might think your story or essay or poem is a good fit, and you might be right—but you might be wrong, too. You can never really be sure if a specific editor is going to like a specific submission, and the fact that an editor from one journal says “no” and an editor from a different journal says “yes” doesn’t say anything about either editor’s ability to recognize a good thing when it’s in front of them. All it means is that the one editor engaged with that particular submission more than the other did.

Snarkily pointing out that a journal has rejected work that was accepted elsewhere—even when the “elsewhere” is, in your opinion, a “better” place to have been accepted—says more about you as the writer and your attitude, ego, and level of bitterness than it does about the journal. Every editor has a right to like or not like whatever he or she wants. You’d think, as an editor, the guy that wrote the letter to Gay would have understood that.

I’ve been working as an Associate Editor for Bound Off for a few months now, and I think it’s time to talk a little bit about what I think you can learn from working on a literary journal.

1.      Reading submissions gives you an idea of an editor’s perspective. I’m given ten submissions to read every two weeks. It’s not an overwhelming number by any means, and since we only publish flash fiction, I DO read every submission all the way through. I know, however, from previous experience working for journals that this isn’t always the case. Many editors and slush pile readers stop reading as soon as they feel they can justify saying no—why waste their time reading the entire thing when they already know they won’t accept it?

But even people like me who do read every story all the way through expect to be sucked in quickly. If your story gets off to a plodding start, or has lots of exposition right away, or is extremely confusing for the first few pages, you’ll be really lucky if an editor sticks with you to the payoff later in the story. And even if the editor does stick with you, that payoff will have to be damn good to justify an uninspired beginning.

2.      Reading failed submissions forces you to think about what makes writing good or bad. When I respond to submissions, I’m supposed to give a brief summary of the story and say a thing or two about what I liked or didn’t like about it. Then I give my yes or no (or sometimes maybe) vote.

Because I have to articulate why I’m saying yes or no, I have to really think about the strengths and weaknesses of each story. I can’t just say, “It wasn’t my kind of story.” Instead, I have to figure out what about this story makes it not good enough in my opinion. It goes the other way too. When I say yes to a story, I have to put into words why I think the story deserves a spot on the podcast, and it’s got to be more convincing than, “I just really liked it.”

3.      Reading submissions helps you put rejection into perspective. I can’t stand it when editors claim that most of the submissions they see are terrible. That’s BS! I’ve found that in any batch of ten submissions, two or three are “terrible,” although I would probably opt to describe them as amateurish instead. It doesn’t mean these writers will never amount to anything, but they’re not there yet. I don’t feel bad saying no to these stories because, aside from the fact that I want our journal to only have good stories so people will actually listen to it, these writers need to learn that their writing is not up to par yet. Rejection is probably the most painful for writers at that stage, who are submitting though they’re not ready to submit, but it’s also an important part of the process of becoming a good writer.

The other seven or eight stories in each batch—which, keep in mind, amounts to seventy to eighty percent of the submissions—could not, in my opinion, be reasonably  described as terrible. These are stories that are clearly NOT written by novices. They’re well written; they often have elegant prose and make good use of craft techniques. But that doesn’t mean they get accepted. We accept only a very low percentage of the stories that get submitted to us, which means we reject the majority of those pretty good stories.

I sometimes agonize over whether to say yes or no to a particular story. Some stories are so good in so many ways, but there will be just one thing bringing it down. It might be too much exposition, or maybe some element of the plot doesn’t feel original enough. Whatever it is, I have to find reasons to whittle that remaining seven or eight stories down to maybe one “yes” vote. From there, the stories will be read by other editors, who will add their own votes without knowing mine, just as I didn’t know what those who had read the stories before me thought.

Since I’ve been volunteering for Bound Off, it’s happened exactly three times that I read a story that I instantly and uncontrollably fell in love with. Two of those stories ended up getting accepted—and pretty quickly, too. To my knowledge, so far none of the other “yes” votes I’ve offered have ended in an acceptance.

So you see, everything has to come together just right for an actual acceptance to happen. Rejections, then, shouldn’t devastate anyone too much, but do bring your work back to the drawing board if you get a lot of form rejections for it. Many of the stories I’ve said “no” to might have earned a “yes” had they just been revised in XYZ way. A rejection doesn’t mean your story has no potential, but sometimes it does mean your story needs a little more work.

This week, Damien received several boxes at work, packed with the newest issue of New Ohio Review. It’s always exciting when the new issue arrives. He puts so much energy into designing and editing it that it almost feels unreal, I imagine, holding the final product in his hands. He brought a copy home and read aloud to me some of his favorite poems from the issue. I loved them, too, though it’s safe to say that as simply a reader, I don’t have quite the same experience reading the journal as he does, having been in on the issue from its inception, having watched it grow and become what it eventually became.

His enthusiasm, sharing the new issue with me, reminded me of why I decided to volunteer to work as an Associate Editor at Bound Off. Certainly, the amount of work I’ll put in at my position is nowhere near the amount Damien puts in at New Ohio Review (and a good thing, too, since he gets paid for his efforts, while mine is just a volunteer, few hours a week kind of job). Still, I look forward to having that satisfaction again, that feeling of accomplishment every time a new edition goes out (especially when a story I recommended we accept is part of that new edition).

I’m also looking forward to the ways slogging through a journal’s slush pile will improve my own writing. As writers, we sometimes forget that our work must first win over an editor before it can ever make it in front of a reader. Editors read slightly different from readers. While readers go into a piece expecting it to be good (because, after all, the bad stuff has been filtered out through the publication process), editors have no idea what they’re going to get every time they open a new submission—they may be about to read something brilliant, but it’s just as likely that they’re about to read something terrible. The most likely scenario, though, is that the story will be neither brilliant nor terrible, but will exist in that hazy world between. Those are the submissions it’s most difficult to decide on, but decide we must—and quickly! Quickly! We don’t have a lot of time to devote to each submission!

A reader goes in to a piece planning to like it, but an editor must reject 99% of everything he or she reads. This means an editor must read looking for reasons to say no, planning to say no. Knowing that 99 out of 100 submissions you receive will be rejected puts the odds in the “no” pile for every new submission you open. In a reader’s hands, then, each piece is innocent until proven guilty, but to an editor, the burden of proof (that the piece is worthwhile, that the piece deserves a spot on the page, or in Bound Off’s case, in the podcast) lies with the submission.

And it’s useful to remember this as a writer. It’s useful to remember it when you get rejected, because it takes the sting off a bit; it’s useful to remember it when you get accepted, because it hammers home how good you must be that your stuff is making it past the editorial hurdles; and it’s useful to remember it when you’re revising, because if you really want to make it into the hands of some readers, you do need to take the opinions of other smart, with-it, literary types into consideration. You do need other people’s feedback, and you need to seriously consider anything other people might say. The things your beta readers or workshop classmates are getting stuck on might be the same things that cause an editor to slide your submission into the “no” pile.

This doesn’t, of course, mean that every piece of feedback you ever receive should be taken or that you should change your work in a way that you, as the writer, don’t like. But. You should listen, and more than that, you should really seriously evaluate any feedback you receive if publication is one of your goals, and let’s be honest, for most of us, it is.

About a year ago, I made the incredibly difficult decision to stop messing around with the novel I wrote as my MFA thesis and move on, at last. This came after years of writing and rewriting and submitting what I eventually admitted was a doomed manuscript—and the admission hurt. A lot.

My process for submitting the book had gone like this: I started by querying agents. I sent the first query on August 27^th, 2009, almost three years ago. I was mired in an agent hunt for a little over a year and a half, and during that time I queried exactly 61 agents. I received five manuscript requests and a handful of encouraging personal responses from agents whose submission process allows for the unsolicited submission of a partial manuscript. Of course, I mostly received form rejections, and sometimes, no response at all, but the personal responses I received were encouraging. I was told by several agents that the writing was really good, and some even said the story was compelling—they just didn’t fall in love with it.

By the end of my agent hunt, I had rewritten the manuscript several more times and had moved on to Plan B: entering the manuscript into contests. Money being tight, I entered the manuscript into only four contests before chucking the plan. I didn’t receive so much as an honorable mention in any of those contests, and having recently been through the contest process with Peter Never Came (the first contest I entered Peter Never Came into I won a semi-finalist slot; the third contest I entered I won first prize), I was pretty quickly disheartened and decided not to waste my money.

I had just begun to move on to Plan C, adding my manuscript to the ever growing slush piles of small presses, when I gave up. When I finally decided to move the manuscript to the “Failed Attempts” folder on my computer, I had submitted to only a handful of small presses—just the “big” small presses, if that oxy-moron doesn’t make your head want to explode. You know the ones I mean: the small presses who can afford the giant, luxurious, multi-table booths at AWP each year.

That was well over a year ago. I still haven’t heard back from all of them, though I’m certainly not holding my breath. But here’s the thing, here’s why I’m dredging this up again: I finally did get a response from one of  them—one of the “big” small presses, one of the biggest, without naming names—and the rejection . . . was incredibly encouraging. They said what a difficult decision it had been and that I should know that they really enjoyed the manuscript. They rejected it, yes, but their rejection left me unsure if I’d been too hasty to abandon the novel I’d worked so hard on.

And here I am again. Wondering. I can’t decide what the better route is: submit the manuscript to “small” small presses or stay the course, figuring whether the novel is publishable or not is beside the point because I need to move on with my life. But you know, even last year when I gave up, I still couldn’t bring myself to move the novel to my “Failed Attempts” file. It’s remained this whole time, unopened, in my “Novels” file. Part of me thinks it’s a waste to have a book that I believe is publishable just sitting there, collecting virtual dust.  But I don’t know, maybe I should leave the file exactly where it is now, in a sort of limbo, not given up on, exactly, but no longer making the rounds, either.

I’ve had two mostly unrelated epiphanies about submissions recently that I want to share with you. These seem pretty obvious when I say them out loud (or type them out, anyway) but maybe you’re like me and need them to be fairly explicit before they can really take root.

Epiphany #1: If you know the editor(s) of a journal like your writing, you should submit to that journal. Duh!

Until a few months ago, I had never submitted to a journal in which I had previously been published. This refusal to try the same venue twice was based on my desire to have an ever larger number of journals in which my work has appeared. Doesn’t it look better for me, I wondered, to say I’ve been published in more journals rather than having multiple pieces appear in the same journals?

I think this attitude was a holdover from back when I had only published one or two stories. At the time, I wanted to be able to say, in the bio section of my cover letter, “My work has appeared in X, Y, and Z, among others.” It’s that “among others,” see, that was getting me into trouble. I’m still very much an early career writer, but I now have a fair amount of publication credits to my name. This aspiration to always be adding to the number of places my work has appeared no longer matters.

But even if it did, that old idea was pretty counterproductive. When a journal publishes something you’ve written, that’s a pretty good sign those editors like your style. Why, then, would you cross that journal off your list of places to submit? That’s like saying “Oh, I can’t submit there. The chances are too good I’ll get accepted.” Not the soundest of logic.

After years of holding myself to this foolish imperative, a few months ago I finally decided to submit to a journal, the Bound Off podcast, in which I had been previously published. I love this podcast and loved how they had handled the story of mine they had already published, so I decided to go for it, and you know what? The new story was accepted (it should come out sometime this fall).

Epiphany #2: If you don’t like a journal, the journal is probably not going to like you.

Has this ever happened to you: Johnny is looking for places to submit and reading through the sample material posted to a journal’s website. Ug, he thinks, this stuff is terrible! My story is way better than the stuff these guys are publishing. I’ll surely get in! And then he giddily prepares his submission to the journal, preemptively patting himself on the back for his next soon-to-be publication.

Can anybody tell us where Johnny went wrong?

If you don’t like the stuff a journal is putting out, your aesthetic and that particular journal’s aesthetic just don’t line up. Literature is subjective, and if the editor(s) of a journal choose to publish a bunch of stuff that you think is crap, they’re probably going to think what you’re doing is crap. And even if they don’t—would you really want to be published in that journal anyway?

Okay, so maybe the term “epiphany” is a bit strong, but these are genuinely things I only recently started to think about in a conscious way, and I’ve been changing the way I submit as a result. And I’ve already earned myself one publication because of the change.

It’s early summer, and the rejections have been pouring in over here at the Cowger house. On the one hand, receiving a fairly steady stream of rejections is a good thing—it means I’ve been submitting, for one thing, and extended periods of silence from editors always make me question myself as a writer. At least when I’m getting rejections, I feel like I’m part of the writing world. (Plus, each rejection earns me at least one point on the submission response tally pinned to the bulletin board in my bedroom. I’m getting very, very close to a hundred points, which will earn me a $25 Amazon gift card.)

Still, receiving nothing but rejections from editors is sort of a lousy feeling, and to make things worse, I’ve almost entirely been receiving form rejections. For a while there, I felt like I had reached a point where, even though I still got rejected way more than I got accepted, I received mostly personal rejections, and when the rejections were form, they were usually the higher tier form rejections (the ones that state they thought your piece was good and they want to read more from you).

Ever since I had to start over with a whole new set of stories (because all of my other stories had either been published in journals, published in my book, or both), I feel like I’ve taken a huge step back in terms of rejections. Only one of my stories—one!—has been published since my book came out. Okay, part of this is because for about a year there, I was barely submitting. But for the past few months I’ve been getting back to my regular submission habits, and now the form rejections are starting to pile up.

Of course, the first possible reason for this is that my new stories aren’t any good. This, naturally, is where my mind first takes me every time I open a new email and read the same old words: “Thank you for your submission. Unfortunately . . .” I wonder, have I lost it? Did I use up all my stories, and I just need to accept that I only really ever had  a little over a book’s worth of stories inside me? Or is it that the stories in my book—most of them, anyway—were workshopped in grad school. Do I NEED the feedback of a class-full of writers in order to revise my work to completion?

But then I remind myself of the few personal rejections I have received on these very same stories. I’m getting a flow of form rejections right now, but the slow and irregular drip of rejections that were coming in before this included a fair amount of personal rejections, so maybe it’s not time to throw in the towel just yet.

Damien suggested that I consider the time of year it is before I read too much in to these form rejections. Most journals close for submissions during the summer, and this usually means there are some straggler submissions that the editors really want to plow through and respond to in a timely fashion. It’s nice to start the new submission period with an empty submission file, I’m sure. So the sudden flood of form rejections might just mean they were quickly working through their backlog and saying no a bit more readily than usual. No personal response might mean they’re strapped for time, that they don’t want to waste what little time they do have writing individual notes about every story they thought was good but that didn’t make the final cut.

Looking at it this way makes me feel a lot better. It might not actually be what’s going on here. It might be that I’m getting form rejections because these stories suck. It might also be I’m getting them because these stories aren’t as polished as I thought. Maybe I’m getting them because I’m just sending to the wrong places, places for which these stories aren’t a good fit. It’s even possible I’m getting them because the editors just didn’t read my submissions very closely. There’s no way to know. That’s the (often frustrating) nature of form rejections: they tell you very little about your submission. But to look at it in a positive way, it does mean that these form rejections are not necessarily a sign that I’m a failure as a writer. I’m going to keep plowing ahead and keep submitting, and even more important, I’m going to keep working on some new stories that might help me garner some more personal rejections, or better yet, an acceptance.

It’s no big secret that the three years I spent in my MFA program were among the best of my life (or maybe I should change that to the last two, maybe two-and-a-half, years in the program, since, in fact, my first semester was pretty discouraging, so discouraging that I almost quit the program and gave up on writing altogether). While I was in my program, I grew immensely as a writer. I came to understand the role momentum plays in my output, and I became, for a while, a very disciplined writer, a writer who writes for a couple of hours almost every day, a writer who produces a lot of work.

From the time I began getting published—during my second year in the program—I’ve been scoring a minimum of two publications a year. Two a year isn’t great, but I’ve always felt good about the fact that, if nothing else, I’ve never dipped below that number. But this year, I fear, will be the year. We’re heading into May and I don’t have any impending acceptances. I’ve only just recently begun submitting again, after a several month long hiatus, and though I have four stories in circulation right now, it seems unlikely that two of them will get accepted soon enough to get published by the end of 2012.

The likelihood that I’ll probably break my streak this year isn’t really any big surprise. I spent the year after I found out my book was getting published leapfrogging from project to project, actually finishing very few complete drafts. Then, I had the baby—need I say more? I’ve only just in the past couple of months started tentatively writing in earnest again, and even so, I still feel like I haven’t found my groove yet. I definitely haven’t gotten my momentum back up, and I’m having trouble deciding which of the many half-finished stories, novels, and children’s books I have going to work on when I sit down to write.

I’ve entered into the awful cycle I was afraid I might enter into before I had the baby: I have very little time to write, and when I do write it all seems like crap to me. So then I feel down about myself as a writer, which in turn makes it difficult to write, which in turn makes me feel even more down about myself as a writer, and so on and so on. When you’re already feeling lousy about your abilities, every little failure makes you really questions yourself. Every rejection, every unwon contest, every job for which you don’t even land an interview—it all gets inflated and overshadows your successes. The negatives aren’t meaningless—I’m receiving sign after pretty clear sign that I still have a ways to go as a writer—but they’re not necessarily more meaningful than your successes—in other words, my failures prove that I’m not “there” yet, but gauging from my successes, I think I’m headed in the right direction.

So to pull myself out of this self-perpetuating cycle of self-loathing, I’m going to try to take some small steps to remind myself that I have control of my own life, and to remind myself, too, of the power of momentum:

1.      I’m going to start exercising again. I’m going to start small—just doing my arms every other day. I know that sounds inconsequential and irrelevant (to a blog about writing), but here’s the thing: exercise and writing are inextricably linked in my mind. My first winter in Fairbanks, Alaska, when I hit rock bottom and made up my mind to get on top of my life, I made two resolutions: to get in shape and to start writing more. By the next winter, I had lost close to thirty pounds and received my first couple of story acceptances. And—until very recently—I’ve kept both resolutions up pretty consistently. For me, now, exercise has become more than a means to stay in shape—it’s the way I keep my life balanced; it’s my way of reminding myself that my life is in my own hands.

I don’t need to lose weight. In fact, it would probably be dangerous for me to do so, since I’m breastfeeding. Though I had worried that having a baby might take a serious toll on my body, I came out of the experience with no stretch marks, and my body snapped back to its previous weight astonishingly fast (a result of A) not having over-gained while I was pregnant, and B) burning an extra thousand or so calories a day due to breastfeeding). I have no real problems with the way I look now, but if I ease myself back into an exercise schedule, I’ll feel better in other ways, ways that go much deeper and matter much more than my physical appearance.

2.      I’m going to try to focus on one project at a time for a little while. I have way too many half-written stories, too many begun but not completed book projects. It’s overwhelming. The hard part will be picking what to focus my attention on, but I think I’ll benefit from just working on one thing until it’s done for a bit. I crave that rewarding feeling you get when you finish something. I need it. And as much as I’m a believer in just working on what you want to work on and not forcing things, I really think, right now, I need to freakin’ finish something, for cripe's sake.

My hope is that if I can take these two, small steps, I’ll be able to slowly but surely pick up speed from there, and soon enough (well, it may take a few months, I’m sure) I’ll have my momentum back up.

So I got a rejection the other day that really bothered me. It burrowed its way deep inside my brain and hunkered down, having apparently made up its mind that this would be a lovely place to live. It wasn’t your typical sort of rejection. It didn’t come from a journal or an agent or a publisher. It didn’t offer any chance of personal feedback or the suggestion to try again. This was a rejection for a grant, an artist’s grant through the Ohio Arts Council.

When I applied for the grant, I knew it was a long shot. Only ten percent of the artists who apply, the application instructions said, receive funding. Still, I felt I had a decent enough shot that it was worth my time to put together the application materials. After all, the stories I included as my writing sample had all been published both in journals and in my award winning book, and two of them were nominated for Pushcarts.

The application process was complicated, the instructions poorly put together and lengthy. When it came time to mail the materials in, the grant instructions directed me to send the package to the wrong address, so, after my materials were returned to sender, I then had to hunt down the correct address, mail it priority, and hope I was actually finished this time.

Maybe it’s because it was such a time and energy consuming process applying for the damn thing that I started to feel an unwarranted sense of entitlement about this grant. I should definitely get this, I began to tell myself. Why wouldn’t I? I’m a good writer. I know people like these stories—there’s no gamble there. Only ten percent of the applications are approved, but just imagine how many of those come from amateurs who have deluded themselves into believing their not-ready-for-prime-time stuff is good. No way was I one of those amateurs. Nuh-uh. Not a chance.

Right.

I became so convinced I was going to get the grant, I started planning out how I would spend the $5,000—no joke! I was going to embark on a book tour across Ohio, and try my best to get my book in the hands of as many readers as possible. I could never afford to do something like that right now, but with that grant . . .

Of course, I didn’t get it. Incidentally, I knew I hadn’t gotten it before I got the email informing me of the fact. I knew because, in a series of events involving Facebook comments and the friend of a friend, I learned that the people who did get the grant had already been contacted. And I hadn’t heard anything yet.

So. When I received an email from the OAC, my heart only lurched a little bit. I opened it and scanned through, knowing already what I would find. The grant committee has met bla bla sorry to inform you bla bla bloo. They could have said, “Dear Amateur, quit wasting our time,” and the rejection wouldn’t have hit me any harder.

First, I was bummed.

Then, I was ashamed, very, very ashamed. For actually thinking I stood a chance.

Normally, rejections don’t really get to me, and even when they do, they don’t get to me as much as this one did. I had to talk it out with Damien—I don’t usually dwell on rejections, you see, so I don’t usually talk about them with Damien besides to say, “Guess who’s one point closer to Amazon bucks?”—because I knew if I said it out loud, it would seem ridiculous that I was so bothered. It did, and I felt better getting it out there, but I also realized that the reason this rejection hurt so much was because I had allowed myself to believe I was better than I actually am.

This is sort of the roller coaster of being a writer, at least this is how it’s always been for me. You have some smallish series of successes and begin to believe you must have arrived, or are at least well on your way. Then something happens—a rejection, a bad workshop, maybe even just the realization that the aforementioned successes don’t mean much in the grand scheme of things—and you’re knocked down a peg or two, maybe not all the way down to where you started, but certainly down to where you belong.

And the truth is, this is necessary. This is exactly as it should be. We need to be reminded that we’re not brilliant, that we do have to keep working very hard if we want those successes to keep coming. We need to be reminded that for every one person who likes what we’ve written, at least one (and probably many more) doesn’t. We need to remember these things lest we stagnate in our own hubris. Nothing is more damaging to a work of art, in my opinion, than the artist’s belief that he or she can do no wrong. If nothing else, our failures can motivate us to succeed next time, just like that old cliché: the only real failures are the people who give up.

A topic I’ve addressed before and no doubt will feel compelled to address again in the future is when to know whether a particular piece of creative writing is finished, polished, as good as it can be and ready to publish as it is, and when to accept, on the other side of the spectrum, that a piece is simply not ever going to be good enough, that it’s time to drag-and-drop it into the old “Failed Attempts” file.

Sometimes this question arises—like with my MFA thesis—because you’ve been sending and sending and sending something out and getting nowhere with it for so long that you have no choice but to ask yourself if it’s actually publishable. I got several agent nibbles on my novel, but no bites, and while most of the agents who actually requested to read some or all of the manuscript said it was well written, none of them believed that they would be able to sell it to a publisher. Fair enough. So I gave up.

But sometimes you find yourself asking this question because a particular piece keeps coming back with personal rejections. “This is very well written.” “We’d very much like to see more from you.” “You should know this came very close to getting accepted.” And yet it always gets rejected in the end. I have a story like that right now—the only story, in fact, that I’m currently submitting, which in and of itself is kind of depressing, don’t you think?

I guess it’s maybe because this is the only story I have in circulation, but I’ve been paying particular attention to this string of rejections. Why, I keep asking myself, does this story keep garnering these kind words from editors, even though it keeps getting rejected. I’ve come up with two likely possibilities.

The first is that maybe they think the writing is good, but not the story. This, I think, I would choose to take as encouragement. Then I would shelve the story and use the rejections as motivation to finish up some of the not-quite-ready stories I have in the works. (Motivation, by the way, I am in desperate need of, having taken such a long break from any serious attempts at writing and being, as a result, a bit rusty and hesitant.)

But the other possibility is that it’s a good story that just hasn’t found its home quite yet. This possibility is obviously preferable, but I don’t know if my considering it is wishful thinking. Am I wasting these editors’ (and my own) time by sending this story around? Am I futilely clinging to a bad story just because I’ve sort of lost my writing groove and this story is, at the moment, the only story I’ve got to send?

How to know, how to know.

Personal rejections are, of course, always a good thing, but sometimes they can be more confusing than form ones. I just don’t know when to take the fact that the story keeps getting rejected as a sign to pack it in. I’ll probably send this story out for at least one more round of submissions, but eventually, if it keeps getting rejected, I’ll need to accept that it just isn’t going to happen with this story. So I guess the real question is how many rejections should I rack up before that happens?

Last week I talked about the frustration of receiving mostly negative feedback as a writer. This week I thought I’d touch on how I manage to keep myself going in the face of all that rejection. Different writers deal with their steady stream of rejections in different ways. Some even save every rejection they ever receive; some even put them on display!

One of my instructors at UAF had a box containing not only rejections but acceptances and other writing related correspondence, like the letter he received from a literary agent who had read one of his stories in a journal and was interested in representing him, or the letter from an editor informing him he had been nominated for a Pushcart. He let us, one day after workshop, paw through it. This was an award winning writer, mind you, with two books published and a full-time, tenured position as an MFA instructor, and he had plenty of letters in that box that would seem in line with those facts . . . but he also had plenty of rejections.

The most striking thing about the collection was the fact that he hadn’t separated the negative from the positive, and seeing all the rejections mixed together with the positive feedback was a valuable reminder that it’s all just part of being a writer. Neither the rejections nor the acceptances were given extra weight in this box—it was just a memory box, mementos of his career as a writer.

I thought it was inspiring, but still, me personally? I don’t save rejections unless they are encouraging personal rejections. In fact, the first rejection I ever received bothered me so much I couldn’t stop obsessing about it even after I’d ripped it up and thrown it away. Just knowing that the pieces of it were still there in the garbage kept the wound open until the garbage bag was safely carted away to the dump.

Obviously, that was years ago, and I’ve received enough rejections since then to develop the writer’s version of a guitarist’s calloused fingers. I don’t take  rejections personally and I don’t dwell on them . . . but I don’t save them either. I log them then delete them and, unless they include some bit of useful feedback that I can use for revision, I try never to think about them ever again.

I do, however, save encouraging responses. Acceptances I print and put in a file. Encouraging personal rejections and other positive feedback (the couple of “fan” emails I’ve gotten, for example, from people who felt compelled to email me and tell me how much they liked a story they’d come across in a journal) I save in an email folder. I save this type of thing because just knowing that they’re there helps bring me up again when too many form rejections (or low book sales) has gotten me down. I wish I could say I didn’t need this sort of masturbatory ego massage, but the truth is, sometimes you just have to find any way you can to prove to yourself that it is worth the time and energy you put in, that you should keep writing, even if X editor or Y agent doesn’t seem to agree.

Recently, I closed down an old email address and had to forward any saved messages that I wanted to keep to my new email. The sheer number of saved emails in my encouraging responses folder gave me a much needed boost in self-esteem, and as I read through them again trying to decide whether I should really forward them all, I started to feel even better. This happened, by the way, at a time where I’ve been the most unsure of myself as a writer. The anti-climax of the book deal, the pregnancy, and now the new baby have left me really questioning my abilities as a writer. I’m so glad I saved all of those emails over the years, even if for just that one moment where I would stumble across them again and be reinvigorated.

For the record, I did decide to forward every single one. I may need them again one day. In fact, I know I will.

I don’t know about you, but the majority of the feedback I ever receive as a writer comes in the form of rejections or acceptances. This is unfortunate, since, let’s be honest, for every one acceptance a writer might receive, he or she probably received several rejections for the same piece. The result is that the vast majority of the feedback we ever get comes in the form of rejections.

Of course, all rejections are not created equal. A personal rejection, complete with a note explaining why the piece was rejected or complimenting you on some specific aspects of the story feels almost as uplifting and encouraging as an acceptance. But of course, a stiff and reserved form rejection—especially the sort that doesn’t even encourage you to submit again!—can feel like a fierce, deliberate kick in the shins.

They say that rejections and acceptances are not evenly weighted. “It only takes one acceptance,” well-meaning friends will tell you, shrugging at you and then promptly changing the subject. This is true. One acceptance means a hell of a lot more than twenty rejections combined. The acceptance means the piece is going to actually get out there. The acceptance means, also, that someone, somewhere thought the piece was good enough to share with a readership. A rejection might mean the piece isn’t any good; it might mean the piece has potential but isn’t ready; it might mean nothing, though, nothing at all. It might just mean the issue was full when your piece came in and so the editor read your submission just looking for any reason, any reason at all, to reject it.

Even so, it can be discouraging when the feedback you receive on your writing is mostly negative. This problem is compounded if you’re like me: having published my first book—and won a contest for it, no less—I’ve had to deal with the reality that a book publication doesn’t mean anybody will actually buy or read the book. You’d think having a book out there might help tilt the feedback scale to the positive side, but if anything, the silence feels ever louder now.

Since resuming sending out my work after getting my book published (I had to take a break because all of my stories that were ready were now taken), I’ve received mostly form rejections. Okay, I’ve gotten one acceptance and a handful of personal rejections, but most of my responses have been a formal one or two sentences: “Thanks for your submission. Unfortunately . . .” A friend of mine was wondering if maybe I’ve been aiming too high since getting the book published, that maybe the book gave me an extra dose of confidence that caused me to submit to higher ranked, harder to get into journals. In fact, the opposite is true. I’ve been concerned with building up more of an online presence and have been mostly submitting to tiny online journals. I suppose that fact makes the rejections smart even more: these journals don’t even get that many submissions, and they’re sending me form rejections. Ouch!

So yeah, I’ve been feeling a bit discouraged as a writer lately. It’s frustrating to fall back down to a point where I mostly receive form rejections. The feedback ratio problem is, I think, probably the hardest thing about being a writer. It’s hard to put so much time and effort into a story, only to receive a series of indifferent responses, and it’s hard to motivate yourself to keep going when the majority of the feedback you receive is negative. But I guess it’s important to remember that all writers must go through this, even the best writers, even your favorite writers of all time. And we should all remember, too, that getting over this hump, that sticking to it and keeping going in the face of constant rejection, is what sets the people who will end up being successful apart from the other, would-be but won’t-be, failed writers.