It is so hard not to participate in rejectomancy.
The editor of a magazine that has a story of mine just followed me on Twitter. That’s got to be a good sign, right?
But here’s the thing: I don’t list my twitter on my cover letter. I do list my website which in turn lists my twitter, which would seem to indicate that said editor has been to my website, no?
Perhaps I’m reading too much into this…
[Edit: I wasn’t.]
I mentioned recently a story that received an honorable mention from Writers of the Future. The next venue that I sent it to rejected it, but they had nice things to say about it. One of the best rejections I’ve ever gotten. To those of us who practice rejectomancy, that counts as sort of a half-win.
“This story is sort of generating a lot of attention,” says I, “maybe this is the one!”
However, in searching for my next venue, I noticed something funny.
Usually, Writers of the Future is the first place every new story goes. So I assumed that I had sent this story out twice, with decent results. However, when I looked it up, I discovered that I had actually received 5 (form) rejections on that story before sending it to Writers of the Future. So it just so happens that I had 2 interesting rejections in a row, but the majority of the rejections were typical form rejections.
Some pro markets passed on it without a second glance. Others were very nearly interested. It just goes to show you, it’s all about catching the right editor on the right day.
Either way, if I’m even getting in the ballpark, I’d say that’s a sign of improvement!
I just wanted to follow up and clarify a little bit why an Honorable Mention would be seen as encouraging. After all, above Honorable Mention is Semi-finalist, Finalist, and Winner (not to mention Mega-Winner, the grand-prize winner chosen from the 4 quarter winners). So Honorable Mention is pretty far from winning, right?
Well, I could go into the statistics and number of entrants, etc. but that is not what makes me feel good. What makes me feel good is a sense of progress.
Normally, you can’t really see any progress being made. For one any particular story, you never know who’s going to like it and who’s not. So you send it out all over the place, but a rejection doesn’t necessarily mean it is bad story. For example, a story of mine that didn’t get anything in Writers of the Future made it all the way to the editor at one of the big 3 magazines. So it’s pretty much hit and miss, or luck*. And, since the story isn’t changing as you send it out to each different place (at least mine aren’t), then getting an acceptance on the story doesn’t prove anything other than you hit the right editor on the right day, since that particular story isn’t improving every time you send it out.
So for the most part, you are either accepted or rejected, yes or no, and no real way to tell how close you were to a yes. And even if you get a yes, that in-and-of-itself doesn’t really tell you much.
Well, that’s not exactly true. With a little rejectomancy, you can get a little sense of progress here and there if you submit consistently to the same market. Maybe your stories start out as form rejections by the slush readers. Then you start to get some personalized notes scribbled on there. Maybe you get a higher-form rejection, where your story was passed on by the slush readers. Maybe you start to get personal rejections from editors. Finally you make a sale. Of course, you don’t have to progress through these steps to make a sale, and not all markets do it the same, but if you do find yourself going through them, you do get some kind of feedback that your writing is improving. (I suppose you could also look at acceptances over time, but that implies you actually get acceptances.)
However, with Writers of the Future, there is no doubt. It’s not just a yes or a no. There are levels. You can actually, quantitatively see how close you were to a yes. And now I am one step closer than I have ever been. I might have a long ways to go up the ladder, but today I have proof that I am at least on the first rung.
*Don’t get me wrong, you make your own luck by putting yourself into a position to get lucky…if you have 10 quality stories out there, chances are you’re going to get lucky more often than if you have 1 bad story.
Getting rejections is a normal part of sending out your writing (or at least it is a normal part of sending out MY writing). As such, it really doesn’t bother me. I think this is because before I even wrote my first word, I spent months researching online anything I could find about writing short fiction professionally. One thing that came up time and time again was that you can’t take them personally, everybody gets them by the truckload, even established pros. They really mean nothing. (Don’t believe me? Go read this story about someone who accidentally sold a story to an editor who had already rejected it.) I don’t know if it was because of this foreknowledge or just some aspect of my personality, but it just doesn’t bother me.
Anyway, there was only one thing that bothered me about the rejections: the lack of feedback.
I’m a firm believer in sending your stories to the highest paying markets and then working your way down. You never know who is going to buy your story. If you start anywhere but the top and then you sell that story, you’ll never know if you could have done better. The worst case is that you get a rejection. Well, see the above paragraph to know how much that bothers me.
The downside of this strategy is that the largest markets receive the most submissions. So not only are your chances smaller, but they also don’t provide you any feedback with your rejection. Usually, they just send you a form letter.
This was sort of frustrating due to the fact that I know my stories aren’t the best…but I want to improve them. If there’s something wrong, I want to know about it, so I get better with the next story. So I spent many an hour complaining about the lack of feedback.
That was before I became an acolyte of the arcane art of rejectomancy. See, it turns out that editors frequently send encoded messages in their rejection letters that give you clues about the reasons you were rejected. Once you have several rejections from the same editor, you can compare them and find subtle differences in the wording. Correlate that with hundreds of others online and you start to discover that some editors actually have different form letters that mean different things.
For example, one might say, “I’m afraid it didn’t catch my interest” which means your opening might be too slow. Another might say, “I’m afraid it didn’t hold my interest” which means the reader got a little farther into the story, but it bogged down in the middle. There are magazines that send color coded slips which indicate how far your story made it (i.e. blue means it was rejected at the first reading, yellow means it made it to the second reading, etc.) And all of this is on top of other indicators, such as a rejection addressed to you personally or a rejection signed by the editor. Basically, any minor variation on that particular editor’s standard could be (and probably is) good news.
Now, of course you can get bogged down in rejectomancy, reading too much into little things. But I discovered something amazing: as I went back through all of my old rejections, it turns out that there was a wealth of knowledge to be found! And further more, my rejections tended to be the “good” rejections, or the ones that people generally agree mean that your story made it pretty far into the process. The “your story didn’t work for me” kind, that tend to indicate the story itself is okay, but just wasn’t what the editor was looking for on that particular day.
Furthermore, as I went back through all of them, I found out that editors had often included a sentence or two that was very specific to my story, which I had glossed over the first time. Basically, I saw rejection and that’s all. But on second reading, there were actually specific comments: “good characterization” or “focused too much on the premise” or “liked the core idea, but it went on a little too long”. Things that usually confirmed what I already thought about the story anyway.
So it turns out, the information was there all along, right under my nose! All the information I could ever care to know, if I just investigated a little bit.
This does beg the question however: why the obliqueness? Why don’t the editors just say what they mean, instead of having an elaborate code? I think there are a couple of (justified) reasons for this. First off, sometimes they did say, very directly, and I just ignored it. Second off, they might do it simply to amuse themselves. This doesn’t bother me; rejecting story after story has to be boring. It’s almost like an inside joke.
Finally though, I think what it mostly comes down to is the fact that editors are people too. They don’t want to tell people bad news, especially since they don’t know how any particular person will take it. So write a more-or-less neutral rejection letter so nobody gets too upset. Then, the people who are really into it, the ones that will take the time to dig deeper (the rejectomancers, if you will), will discover the secret code and get the feedback they are desperately looking for.
It’s almost like a test to see how much you care. If you don’t care, then rejection is rejection and that’s that. But if you do care, then you can gain some useful information.
What you do with that information is, of course, up to you.
My story came back today. I’m sure the rejection was a form letter, but it contained the words “The writing is well done” so that was sort of exciting. They can’t say that if it’s not true, can they? 🙂
So it’s off to a new market, and hopefully my other will be in the mail tomorrow.
Shane Halbach 