Rejections and the Revision Decision

How many rejections do I let a story accumulate before I revise it? That’s a question I get asked a lot these days (maybe because I plaster my rejections all over the internet). It’s a good question, and my answer usually is something like, “Well, what kind of rejections are we talking about?”

It’s really the type of rejection that informs my decision to revise rather than the quantity of rejections. To show you what I’m talking about, let’s look at some of my recent rejections, and I’ll tell...