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?