Three case studies on pieces of mine that were rejected often prior to publication as well as a list of typical reasons for rejection, intended as a metaphor for life. They answer to “Why they rejected you” is simpler than it seems:

I find it a shock at this stage in life that I have something of substance to say that might encourage you in the midst of rejection. Yet, upon reflection and after a bit of math, I truly do. Though I could talk of how I was rejected when asking permission to marry my bride, rejected from multiple choice internships, jobs, proposals, friend groups, etc. that won’t be my focus today. Today I’m going to use rejection slips from my writing career to reveal a broader point about rejection generally. I’ve received thousands of rejections.

There’s another impetus to this: a couple of years prior to the pandemic at a wedding of a mutual friend, two long term friends were single for very different reasons. Single after thirty as young, successful, handsome, and highly educated men — one had a specialized master’s, one a PhD, both highly sought in their respective fields. They were creative, they were problem solvers, they were pillars in their respective communities.

And they were still single.

Their solution was to start a capital Y capital R “Year of Rejection.” They would continually — in-person — put themselves out there to be rejected by asking out eligible women they met in any of their circles until they found their soulmates. By sheer quantity of rejections, they would find the women for them.

It took years, but spoiler: they both did. One right before the pandemic, one right afterwards.

This parallels my experience with writing and many other arenas of life, so I wanted to talk today about a few different rejections that eventually ended up as acceptance letters within the writing world. I’m doing this not to talk about writing, but to talk about rejection in general.

As a mental image, know that I was a part of one of the last generations of writers who still mailed in 100% of his rejections back in 2008 through 2011. The email, forms, and submission systems really didn’t open up until starting in 2012 and later. Even the examples from the spreadsheet screenshot below, the majority of those in 2013 were paper submissions. Because of that, I took a note out of Stephen King’s writing book and literally nailed a massive nail into my wall and hung my rejections, cruciform, to our upstairs writing and making studio at the old house on Emperor Lane. I do miss those gables.

If you forget anything else, though, close your eyes to see those motley papers, some of them silk with high quality ink, some of them Xeroxed into indiscernible oblivion, some of them stamped, some handwritten on the query or the first page of the manuscript. All of them in their diversity telling me, “No.”

Nailed to the wall and many overturned with later acceptances of the rejected piece or later acceptances by the rejecting outlet. Feel the various papers hanging there from that rusty iron thing.

So assume, though this piece may also help writers and creatives, that I’m using rejection slips in my writing career as a general metaphor for rejection of all kinds. It’s your job, discerning reader, to create your own meditation or mental poem — how do rejection slips for my writing career apply to your own experience of rejection in the domain you feel most discouraged within?

**Why Did They Reject You?**

First, I must confess: the title of this piece speaks to the truth of your emotion, but not the truth of the situation. In that way, it’s meant to draw you into the piece, but plays into your own self-deception. They didn’t reject you. That’s your toxic shame talking. Perhaps, even, they’re the kind of critical person who wants to export their own toxic shame onto you — there’s a trick to this, see: the moment you complain, explain, or defend yourself, this mentally deranged person will believe that you deserve to be shamed or exiled and will never stop to think it’s their own shame they’re trying to export. Again, that’s only the case with hyper critical people and not the case for all rejection.

Either way, whether it’s someone with toxic shame trying to export it onto you or someone who is healthy and detached from the logic of the rejection, they didn’t reject you.

They rejected either your work or your idea.

And this is the biggest thing to learn for most people: you are not your ideas.

I see this problem all the time with creatives, artists, makers, and muse-oriented folk. Artist gets an idea. Artist smeagols idea. Artist hoards idea and pampers idea until idea multiplies like black mold. Artist scares off — or kills off — anyone who comes anywhere near idea. Artist finally releases idea. Idea flops because it’s covered in mold.

Here’s another scenario:

Artist gets hired onto a team. Or artist gets a salary as a permanent part of a team. Consultant / coach / collaborator is hired by team as an expert in a specific arena or discipline.

Artist pitches idea.

Consultant / coach / collaborator drastically improves idea.

Artist whines because his idea changed.

Look.

You’re not your ideas.

You might think you are.

You think you need to smeagol them away like little ferret hoarders, like little radioactive squirrel pirates who need to protect their dragon gold.

But you’re not.

See because the power of the artist is to bring abstract concepts into a concrete reality. Poetry makes ideas concrete. Paint makes ideas concrete. Story makes ideas concrete. Come to New York and you can spend entire weeks watching photographers take pictures of concrete.

You get a “what if…”

And then you make that “what if” into a “here’s what happened.”

When you don’t, you shrivel.

That means:

You are not your idea.
Your idea is not your only idea.
Your idea is not your best idea.
Your idea is not necessarily better than someone else’s idea.
Your idea is not perfect.
Therefore you and others can improve upon your idea…
…As it’s coming out…
…Or in sequels…
…And in later versions and renditions…
…Or in the ashes and scraps of a junked idea that you can frankenstein into something new.

I had a project a few years back for which I was hired as a story coach. Worked with a few screenwriters. One of them pitched an idea that was predominately voiceover. The story premise was solid, but voiceover’s a lousy way to tell a story. Rather than celebrate the core story, the artist disowned his very good idea once the voiceover was scrapped.

Now I didn’t make the ultimate decision. I simply gave advice and argumentation for why that was the case.

But this guy I respect disowned his own idea.

The project ended up being a really solid piece.

But “my precious” mindset took over because idea and identity were inseparable. For this same project, I pitched somewhere between ten and twenty ideas, gave synopses and some treatments for several of those. All of them were rejected.

Was I hurt?

No.

Because I’m a masochist?

No.

Because the end story was better than anything I pitched.

I’ve said this hundreds of times:

Collaboration is how artists delegate. Therefore your idea is not your identity. It’s just an idea. It’s not capital “T” truth. At best, it’s an idea we all share because it’s a truth connected to capital “T” truth. Therefore the idea of intellectual property is absurd except as a defense for those who would use other people for financial gain.

**Why Did they Reject Your Work?**

When I ran both the Showbear Family Circus and Of Gods and Globes (not to mention several other creative publications and productions that required me to accept fewer people than had submitted) I, Merrill Lee, Kendall, and the team had to reject for many, many reasons.

The Canadian magazine of the fantastic On Spec has a really solid list that summarizes all of the non-story problems that caused us to reject a piece:

We aren’t the right market.
We JUST bought two pieces with a nearly identical premise or setting or main character. This one is always hard for people to believe, but you’re not as original as you think you are — reading the classics and especially the classics in your genre will help you see this.
Not our thing. I recall one magazine right now that VISCERALLY hates selkies. Which autocorrect changed to “selfies,” and I suppose there are editors who hate those as well (I am one).
Wrong length.
We liked parts, but the end didn’t work. Or the beginning dragged. Or the two pieces didn’t connect.
We don’t like you. This one is kind of funny, so I’ll quote it directly, “You called us names in your blog or at a convention, maligned our characters, and generally went out of your way to get in our way. Or, you insulted our close friends and colleagues at a sister magazine and they mentioned your name in the bar the other night as someone we might want to stay away from because you were a jerk to them. Or we tried to work with you in the past, but you were intractable and difficult (in this case resubmit something else and we can try again but don’t be a pain twice. We’re supposed to be a team).” Frankly, this one terrifies me professionally: I’m really kind in person, but I fear coming off as a jerk in text because of terseness. I’ve never really mastered the skill of textual coddling of egos.

E.S. Foster includes:

It was more of a “rough draft”
It contains little mistakes
Elements of the story didn’t make sense
The journal has no room
The journal has no more money for this issue
The story is bogged down with exposition
It got lost, the journal faced difficulties, closed, someone got sick.

That last one cannot be overstated. I’ve had at least five “never responded” for the following reasons: mother died, massive eye injury, recurrence of cancer, wife’s surgery, flooded basement. Here’s the thing: there are human beings on the other end of that submission. Please remember that: we’re all pushing a big rock up a hill and watching it roll back down again.

On Spec has a further list of story reasons they reject. As does David Farland.

There could be any number of reasons it didn’t fit. At this stage in the game, removed from toxic shame, we could say your work was rejected due to the natural limits and boundaries set upon finite time, money, space, season, parallelism, contrast, antinomy, synonymity, stage of the work’s development, etc.

Case studies on long-term rejections that turned into acceptances:

From my own career, I wanted to show three pieces that started out as rejections and then grew into acceptances. All three in this instance are fiction pieces, but together they show the iterative persistence that must mark your career and life.

The point isn’t that there’s a bad idea. All ideas are bad ideas until time, space, and careful cultivation allow it to bear fruit. This is, in fact, the privation theory of evil: evil is merely a proximate good. So too with creativity. For your bad idea to become a good idea, it must find itself properly ordered in the great universe of ideas and given space and time and nourishment to grow into the precise manifestation that it and it alone can become in the great world.

Each of these bad ideas became better through their unique processes of rejection and revision:

The Right Pitch

Read full story

I seldom write flash fiction, partly because my ideas are seldom so distilled and partly due to practice, but this piece came out in a 600-word fury, a single image of Vonnegut-level surrealist satire on the suburban experience I noted in dozens of homes.

Originally I sent this flash surrealist humor to Riddlebird and they wrote back with incredibly kind notes. But they didn’t have space for it. It was too short for what they needed so they asked for another piece. I sent them a piece that has received many, many personal notes, but has yet to find a market: The Acupuncturist of the Occident. It may, like several pieces, end up on the site + newsletter as some pieces do when I get bored of sending them out and decide I need something creative to share. Or it may find a market before my boredom threshold rises.

In any case, Riddlebird wrote back initially and said:

“Thank you for your (oh so relatable!!!) amusing short story. At this time your piece does not fit our upcoming issue. However, it was a finalist. If you find a “home” for it, please send us publication information and we will share it on social media and riddlebird.com. We enjoyed reading it, and please consider sending us work in the future.”

I thanked them. Then I sent another piece that’s been rejected often, but mainly because it’s so… odd. Here’s what they said:

“I can’t lie, I’ve kept your piece in our “perhaps” folder because I am drawn to it, yet–”

They mentioned a quirk about the story that made it less understandable—

“—Feel free to submit other pieces at any time – would you like me to mark it rejected? Or can I hang on to it?”

I had them hang onto it. They asked me to submit more and gave me a chance to both resubmit the frequently rejected one as well as a second. I did that, they changed back their settings. I should note: this sort of thing happens very seldom, so they seemed willing to work with me, but we had to find the right fit.

“They are both there. I also keep thinking of your story where the father keeps chucking things in the loft (I apologize for forgetting the name). It still makes me laugh when I think of it, couldn’t possibly have my own closet of horror.”

The Right Pitch. The original rejected story. I told them it had yet to be accepted.

“If you are willing to share it, I would like to publish “The Right Pitch” with this issue. I’m looking for a bit of levity and theme people connect with, and your piece has both. It is the type that readers tend to compliment in email… Would you be willing (happy???) to do that?”

So to track the whole journey with this piece: here’s a piece that was rejected by some magazines and then Riddlebird. After Riddlebird rejected it, I submitted another oft-rejected piece that they hung onto because they liked, though they had no idea where it fit within their current holding. After that, I submitted a third piece along with that one they held onto (though I submitted it elsewhere as if it was rejected, since they gave permission), and then in the midst of those considerations, The Right Pitch, which had already been rejected 12 times, was accepted and purchased.

The Chronic Resurrections of Jack Clinker.

I don’t want to jinx this one, but I also don’t believe in jinxes (the universe doesn’t run on karma, it’s a bit more complicated), so even if it ends up rejected, I think its publication story is interesting enough that I should share it here.

Originally, if I have my timeline right, I wrote a draft of this story either on the night shift at the hospital St. John’s in Joplin, Missouri (which became Mercy regional hospital after the EF5 tornado) or on break when I was selling diamonds or on my hanging desk when I started my writing business the first year of our marriage. I don’t quite remember the timeline of everything. If it was at the hospital, that job — in a similar way to Brandon Sanderson’s hotel night shift — provided the perfect opportunity for writing on the clock. The head nurse didn’t care if I used the nurses’s break room computer as long as I emailed the document to myself at the end of shift and deleted it off the system computers AND all my floor work and prep was done. So it didn’t always happen, but I tried to do it on my lunch break whenever possible at very least. On super slow nights with only a couple of patients on the floor, I would burn through vitals, catheter care, baths, whatever was on the list, chat up the other nurses, especially Chris and Rob, Chris they called “the angel of death.” I’ll tell that story sometime.

Then I’d log in and draft. Email whatever I wrote to myself in a brand new document. Delete it. Do it all over again the next night while all of my friends and family slept.

This story was born in that kind of freedom and it’s a weird story with a Kafka / Chesterton / Marquez / Borges vibe. It’s had so many versions and revisions, they’re really not worth recounting, but somewhere in the file I have a spreadsheet with an adorable typo:

why they rejected you rejections in life and rejection letters — illustrated by a screenshot of a spreadsheet

This was long before my life got infinitely easier with The Grinder, Query Tracker, and Duotrope. It’s also, you’ll note, back when Orson Scott Card had yet to fall from grace and the public eye and was still publishing his Intergalactic Medicine Show. It was before Allegory went to a donation model and was struggling. Cesanne’s Carrot has closed. Ideomancer has closed. Externalist has closed.

Getting the picture?

Since that year, the story has easily been submitted twenty times to applicable markets. Had I been more on top of things in the first few years in New York City and not drowning, it may have had more.

Podcastle existed, but was hard for me to find. The Dark would start later that year when I was in the thick of fundraising, so I missed its launch and wouldn’t submit to it until many years later. New Myths existed, but I didn’t know about it.

Right now, it’s on hold at a magazine like one of these. So in the case of this story, multiple magazines literally had to die and others had to be born over the course of a decade and a half for it to find an editor that said, “Yes, we’d like to hold onto this one and maybe publish it in next year’s slate.”

It may not find publication, but it’s the first hold it received.

This — right here — is why keeping a story in the mail is important. Sometimes the magazine that will purchase your story hasn’t been born yet. Not to put too fine a point on it — and there’s other issues involved like the half plus seven rule — but in a very real sense, when Harlan Ellison was publishing his first two collections, his soul mate Susan Toth hadn’t been born yet. He was 21. They got married late in life. Harlan’s a troublesome figure for many, many reasons (including the four divorces prior to Susan) and there are all sorts of complexities and failings at play there worth volumes of books, but suffice to say, it is still true that the woman to whom he remained faithfully married and who adored him his whole life after marriage wasn’t born when he was that young as a writer.

Between that and my story, I think the “keep them in the mail” part of resilience in the face of rejection is important.

Cittandino in Villa.

This one is short, but it’s a specific story I wrote for 1632 & Beyond, which is a shared universe started by Eric Flint. This story is about a plant thief and he’s a character I would love to write more about in other stories.

The 1632 submission process has a high barrier of entry. I had to buy a story directly from the Baen bookstore. That associated my email with a purchase. Then I created an account wherein I could log in to the Baen’s Bar forum, which has been running unbeknownst to me for a very long time as internet years go.

From there, I did the research on the world bible and the rules of the various characters and tried to write within the alternative history of the world. I posted that to their slush thread and posted another to their slush thread comments to receive commentary.

That generated a ton of feedback about which characters could be used, which couldn’t, where kudzu had shown up before in the universe, what conflicted with the existing history of the existing 1632 series, etc. etc. etc.

I took all of that, revised. Submitted a second version.

Again the comments came back.

In this way, their forum rejects often but in the mode of a writing workshop. They want stories in this world, so if you’re passionate about learning and growing more than you are passionate about your specific draft, you can likely revise any story towards publication as long as remain iterative, joyful, and teachable.

We’re getting pretty close on Cittandino, I think, because we’ve now moved off of the forum to talk to the editors.

What is the conclusion of all of this?

At least four major habits improved my acceptance rate for these fiction pieces: time at task, quantity of pieces, quality of revisions, and quantity of submissions-per-piece. It’s not that your work and ideas won’t get rejected. The odds for any given endeavor, like any given poker hand, remain constant. The human element — the pot odds — however shift from moment to moment. Both people and the world they inhabit are fickle and volatile and what had no market yesterday will find itself the center of attention tomorrow. Your goal is not to follow a fad, but to be yourself and iterate your selfhood. To ignore the toxic shame critics (both inner and outer) who want to trick you into defending yourself, to ignore the crowd (which is fickle and will fund you one day and desert you another), and to follow the muse into making what you feel called to make and becoming the person you alone can become:

Time at task. All endeavors into becoming one’s self and in making what one feels called to make work much like language. Yes, you can learn noun and adjective cases, yes you can learn verb charts, the very objects and subjects, the very action and passions of your craft and calling. But at the end of the day, there is no shortcut around rote memorization of the working vocabulary and reading the language over and over. Translated into other crafts and modes of rejection: there’s nothing that will replace the try-fail cycle. Make, fail, make, fail, make, fail, make. Or as a long lost friend once said, “Play. Write. Record. Repeat.” Start with childlike play, write it down into a formal structure, record it for posterity, repeat. If that’s dating, then enter into the playful headspace, attempt to date someone, keep a record of the experience good or bad, then start again until you find someone you can be playful with forever. Similar with other forms of rejection: time at task has no substitute.
Quantity of pieces. That playful iteration becomes artistic practice, becomes the habit of being the kind of person who makes and learns a thing, the “beginner’s mind” of Go, the “I do not lose, I either win or learn” of chess, the riffing on ballet dancers of Degas: painting the ballerina was not the point; becoming the kind of person who would get caught dead painting ballerinas was the point. And so the ghosts of ballerina after ballerina filled his frames until he created the masterwork bronze sculpture of one lone ballerina. The sheer quantity of pieces marks your practice. It wasn’t until I had 35 completed short stories out on submission before I started seeing my acceptance rate go through the roof. That quantity allowed me to get into a rhythm of saying, “Well you didn’t like that one, what about this one?” with almost every market that my work could reasonably apply towards. It keeps my name in their roster, it keeps my work on their radar, and the editors actually start to pull for me, cheering me on as someone they want to succeed, particularly if I remain kind, civil, professional, and prompt. In a similar way with dating, if you’re kind, even the potential mates you didn’t work out with will pull for you. I know men who ended up with their soulmate literally on the referral of another girl with whom things did not work out. Is not The Taming of the Shrew written on precisely this phenomenon? Dean Wesley Smith has a great piece on how the quantity of stories you write makes it entirely possible to make a living after five years writing only short fiction. He wrote this in 2018 and it’s still relevant.
Quality of revisions. After three or five rejections — and, for some pieces, after every single one — I open the document to double check to make sure my fly isn’t down, to make sure I didn’t say something offensive, etc. I once caught a manuscript that had a thinly veiled insult aimed at wealthy literary types in the first two pages, the pages currently on submission to literary agents. Fly was down. I deleted it and wouldn’t have noticed it had I not opened the document after the rejection. Whoops. As rejections come in, it seasons the piece more and more. Through the rejection process, the piece actually becomes better: this is one of the things many failed self-publishers neglect. Your piece still needs the reformation of rejection. That might come through reviews, through ARCs, through beta readers, through hired editors — whatever the case, you’ll still need to find a way to reform the work regularly. This can happen after the “final” product releases as well. Sure, people denigrate George Lucas for his endless revision process, but didn’t Stephen King release an expanded version of The Stand? In fact, that version included Trash Can Man, a character without whom the plot — at least to me — seems to collapse. I have no idea how the original held together, for that isn’t the one I read. In any case, as the revisions grow, so grows the piece. Didn’t Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass grow and change with every revision? Semper reformata: always be changing your mind and heart into a better person. So too with your calling, your creative work.
Quantity of submissions per piece. As Robert Silverberg said in Science Fiction 101: keep it in the mail. That’s the best that you can do. A piece that was rejected will be accepted by someone eventually because, and here’s the truth, you don’t just write for yourself. You don’t date yourself. You don’t design a cathedral for yourself. You have an audience in mind, someone for whom your telepathic message is intended. Given time and space, you will find those people. Bach’s music was wrapping paper on _____ before they discovered its beauty. Brother Lawrence’s manuscripts were rescued from the trash can by his abbot and have now been printed more than any guide on prayer and meditation in the world other than the Lord’s Prayer. That statement feels like exaggeration to me, but I think they’re true. It’s certainly true that they’ve ended up in more personal and public libraries than any other manuscript rescued from the trash. Except for maybe Stephen King’s Carrie. And the audience for that one was his wife who knew a thing or two more than Stephen about the experience of puberty as a girl in high school. Keep it in the mail. Whether the editor has a change of heart (as was the case with Riddlebird for The Right Pitch) or whether you find an audience that didn’t exist prior to its original draft (as is the case right now for The Chronic Resurrections of Jack Clinker), the work if put forth vulnerably into the world will find itself vulnerare: suffering outside the city gates for all the world to see.