"Science" by Alan Good
This is the introduction to Dear Writer, an anthology of frequently rejected fiction published by us, Malarkey Books
I’m probably exaggerating when I say my first rejection nearly killed me, but goddamn. It sure felt like it. At least Twitter didn’t exist yet.
Part of the problem was I had too high an opinion of myself; I thought I was going to sail straight to the top. It’s true, yeah, I was a big idiot. I’d been in two creative writing classes and enjoyed them, did well. People liked my stories. They responded to them in ways they didn’t to other people’s stories. One guy even refused to give back his copy of a story I wrote called “The Exception.” It was an homage to Kafka, probably pretty funny, probably pretty derivative, but I don’t remember because I don’t have a copy and it seems I deleted it from my hard drive during one of the bouts of depression that ate up my twenties. This guy, I can’t remember his name, he typed up his notes and he asked me to sign my story and he kept it. So if you’re out there, and you’ve still got that story—well, it’s still not worth anything, just burn it. But scan it first and send it to me. In general, though, while it’s okay to be enthusiastic about a young writer, I think maybe asking for their autograph in a writing workshop is a really dangerous idea.
I don’t have records from my early days of submitting, don’t know if I could stand to look through them if I did; the point is I racked up more rejections and they all hurt, but each one hurt a little less. I eventually got lucky and picked up a couple acceptances, which sustained me through the dry spells. At this point I’ve endured many hundreds of rejections, nearly ninety just for my first novel. I’m at a point in my career (if you can call it that) as a writer where rejection doesn’t hurt anymore, even though it still does.
We called this anthology Dear Writer because that’s something litmag editors actually say in their rejection emails:
Dear Writer,
Thank you for gracing us with the pleasure of reading your genuinely magnificent story. Reading it truly was a sublime, transformative experience. Sad to say but, unfortunately, it is not the right fit for us at this time.
Best,
The Editors
Nothing irritates me more than the Dear Writer email; of course now, having served as an editor, I understand the utility. Dear Writer may be impersonal, but it’s more efficient, and it spares the editor from having to spell people’s names right. If you’re using Submittable you can get that done for you, but Submittable costs money. We used regular old-fashioned email. Between this book and another anthology we published, I had to send more than a hundred very unpleasant rejection emails, and I addressed each one personally, which meant I did spell one person’s name wrong. It was mortifying and required an apologetic follow-up email. But a generic greeting would be more mortifying.
Writers like to complain about their rejections, and I think it’s a good practice. There’s no need to call out individual editors or publications over a rejection, unless someone has done something highly unethical or cruel, but it’s good for the editors on Twitter (okay, most of them are writers, too) to be reminded that there’s a genuine, feeling, vulnerable person on the other end of every rejection email. Anyway most of the rejections I’ve received have been pretty bland, but the most pretentious one I remember went something like “Sad to say, but we cannot accept this.” That was one rejection where I felt like I missed a bullet.
Off-topic but I’m just gonna throw this out there: editors, don’t call your rejections “declines.” They’re fucking rejections. Don’t try to spin it.
Some writers and editors are full of advice about getting published, this is the best way to write a cover letter, this is what you shouldn’t do, this is what you have to do, and honestly who gives a fuck? I don’t mean to disparage them, but one thing I learned, I think after my two-hundred-ninety-sixth rejection, is that the way to get published is to just keep going. Keep writing. Keep sending your work out. If it’s good, at some point someone will notice it. That’s the key. There’s just so much good writing, so much bad as well, and it’s hard for anyone to notice it, including the editors who are looking for it. Forgive me for quoting my own tweet, but I posted the following from the @MalarkeyBooks account because editing this book showed me it was true: “Hello if 50 editors reject your story that doesn’t mean it sucks or that you suck or even that all of those editors suck. The 51st editor might love your shit. Maybe the 87th, I don’t know. This isn’t an inspirational tweet by the way, it’s just science.” The criteria to be considered for this anthology was that your story had to have been rejected at least ten times, but few of the stories that made it in were actually rejected ten times. Most were rejected far more frequently than that. And one of them, I’m not making this up, was rejected two hundred times, if you include non-responses as rejections, which you should do. The thing about that story is it’s good. It’s kind of weird, kind of funny, kind of sad. But it’s good. All the stories in this collection are good. I’ve read them all four or five times now and I still like them and I’m grateful the ten writers whose work we were able to include in this book didn’t give up after a few rejections.
Look, bad stories are going to get rejected, but a rejection doesn’t tell you anything about the quality of your story because good stories get rejected all the time. Could be it was too long or not long enough or had too many swears or too many adverbs or too many typos or in some ineffable way it just didn’t conform to the sensibilities of a certain publication at that time or the editor or intern, depending on where you’re querying, didn’t even finish reading it.
I lied, okay, none of this is science. Certain stories might never get published. We had to reject a whole bunch of stories in the process of making this book. Some of the stories we didn’t like, or they just didn’t connect with us. But we also had to reject several stories we did like simply because we didn’t have enough money to pay to include them. This is slippery stuff. Your story might get rejected because the journal ran a story on a similar subject in a recent issue, or it might get rejected because it genuinely sucks but the editor doesn’t have the heart to say it. The thing to remember is you can’t control how an editor’s going to react to your story, but, and I’m really annoyed at myself for even saying it like this, you can control how you react to rejections. You know, don’t write back and tell the editors they’re pieces of shit and don’t go on Twitter and say Blah Blah Blah Literary Journal is a bunch of fucking tasteless phonies. But also don’t quit writing because some editors reject your work. Just keep writing. Just keep querying. Your belief in your work might be delusional, and it might be justified, and the only way to find out, if it’s possible to find out, is to just keep going.
Always available on Bookshop, Indiebound, and Amazon.
Dear Writer: Stories That Just Weren’t a Good Fit at the Time collects ten stories that were each rejected at least ten times. Several were rejected many more than ten times, but they’re all very good stories. Edited by Alan Good and Jason Gong, Dear Writer features work from Sarah Evans, Yousef Allouzi, Karen Thrower, Jennifer Porter, Anna O’Brien, Sarah Yasin, Emad El-Din Aysha, Lituo Huang, Rosaleen Bertolino, and Ellen Ricks.