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| mollyfletcher |
Each year I vow to tidy up all the paper surrounding me. Each time, I make some progress then stop because tomorrow remains the superior day to sort paperwork. Anyway, I found a bag filled with story rejections from 1985 to 1988. Those years encompass my undergraduate days and shortly thereafter. Incredible. A pecking order of refusal existed back then.
1. Form rejection.
2. Form rejection signed by the editor.
3. Form rejection signed by the editor with a personal note.
Titles included Grue Magazine, The Horror show, and FACET, A Creative Writing Magazine. My submission sampler displayed progress from 1 rejections to 3, but never a sale. The amount of paperwork involved was daunting with multiple envelopes and postcards. (I should do a video on all that.) One time, a single rejection lead to two. Today, sites such as Duotrope list publishers, markets, and all manner of writerly statistics. Below are my short story submissions from 2009 to 2016. So many markets have gone the way of Grue Magazine, but more open all the time. A few keystrokes launches a tale, instead of envelopes within envelopes. But stories shall be told, and writers write, and editors reject—and sometimes accept. So it goes.
Should you cringe at rejection's bitter sting, speaker and author Molly Fletcher notes the upside.
1 comment:
On youtube, sometimes there are author clips from Master Class. James Patterson pointed out that his first short story was rejected by thirty-something publishers.
Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables series was rejected by a dozen or so publishers before a desperate Lucy tried one more time and got success.
Considering that books like "Fifty Shades of Grey" (your parody was better than the original novel!) and the Twilight series was published, it is quite literally God's knowledge as to what is or isn't acceptable.
I've listened or TRIED to listen to the first Twilight novel on audio book. Thank God I don't drive. I would have fallen asleep at the wheel and ended up killing someone. It was BORING! And yet, it has or had a major fan base.
At the end of the day, all you can do is try. And having a publisher who is willing to give CONSTRUCTIVE criticism helps. Then again, even that's a crap shoot because one publisher's garbage scraps might be another publisher's steak dinner. Tell yourself a story YOU would like to read and hopefully others will want to read, too.
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