Try, Try Again: Rejection and Persistence

Beyond the Margins.>

Two months before I moved to New Mexico to study fiction writing with four writers I deeply admired, I submitted a short story to magazines for the first time. Knowing a response would take a while, I listed my future address on the SASE. I had only written one story good enough to send out. A shocking coincidence: It was the only story I had ever seriously revised.

To kickstart the writing career I desperately wanted, I dutifully prepared five copies of the manuscript, personalized the cover letters, evenly sealed the manila envelopes, and worried that my stamp selection — Daffy Duck angrily eyeing the mailbox — might suggest that I wasn't serious enough to be considered.

I sent the story to the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Story, Zoetrope: All-Story, and DoubleTake. I knew enough to have read each of these publications a few times. They were available at the recently opened Barnes and Noble in my hometown. I followed the submission guidelines closely. At the end of the summer, on the day my girlfriend and I arrived at our new apartment in Las Cruces, four rejection letters waited for me in the mailbox. The fifth arrived a few weeks later.

 

I expected rejection. Here's what I didn't expect: Only two were form rejections.

A year before, I had attended a week-long writing workshop in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where I befriended Colum McCann, whose third book had just been published. A couple of his stories had appeared in Story, my favorite magazine, so in my letter I said that Colum had told me to submit. Which wasn't exactly true. He had encouraged me to start sending out my work, though, and clearly he considered Story to be a good magazine. A little white lie wouldn't hurt.

An editor at Story had written — by hand — a personal response: I like your story, but we're going out of business.

The Atlantic sent a personalized letter, too, something I now know was a common reply to many writers enrolled in M.F.A. programs. While the letter was brief, it was signed by legendary editor C. Michael Curtis, who had helped better some of my favorite stories.

But the one that really surprised me was the note at the end of theNew Yorker's letter. I had been told to not even expect a reply, as the slush piles towered in their offices. The form cited the story's "evident merit," which was helpful, as its merit wasn't evident to me, while the handwritten note praised the story's honesty and humor, as well as its ending.

Rejection has never felt so good.

I would love to say that one of these five publications later snatched up a different story of mine, or that the story then called "Goose Lake" eventually found its way into a respectable literary journal. But that never happened.

Not that I didn't try. In that first semester of grad school, Antonya Nelson showed us her record-keeping system, which featured index cards for each magazine or journal, and an index card for each submission. Do I have to say that I promptly ran out and bought some index cards, along with a little box to organize them?

Given that I would submit 416 times to various print and online journals before my first book was published, I soon switched to Excel within a year or two — so cold and corporate, yet so sortable and searchable. The simple act of record-keeping let me track my repeated failure across the years, which led to the most important lesson I learned about the business of writing: Your work will usually be rejected, and it will be hard to "break in," and it may never get any easier. But if you don't believe in yourself, no one else will. And if you don't keep writing while facing down rejection, you'll never get past it.

After six years and 252 submissions, one of my stories was accepted for publication, but not in a literary journal. I began corresponding with an independent publisher from whom I'd purchased a chapbook written by a friend. I asked him how he found his authors. He explained, then asked if I had something I wanted to submit. I sent him three stories, and he chose to publish one of them, "Modern Love," as a stand-alone chapbook. My best friend did six pieces of artwork for the chapbook, including the cover. It's truly beautiful for reasons that have little to do with me.

I gave the chapbook to several writers I admired, thank-you gifts for their good prose. One of them, Tom Chiarella, who writes forEsquire and served then as its fiction editor, liked what I sent him, so he mailed a cocktail napkin and asked me to write a story on it, which was later published as part of a series on the magazine's website. In the weirdest way I can imagine, my fiction found a home at Esquire.

Since 2008, I've published seven short stories, all but one of them online. While my fiction has never appeared in a print journal with a wide circulation, one publication has often led to another. One editor read, but didn't buy, my chapbook at Powell's in Portland, Oregon, then invited me to submit a story to Superstition Review, a journal in Arizona. One of the readers at Booth read my story published by Hobart, then asked me to submit. My acceptance rate has skyrocketed, partly because these stories are better now after dozens of revisions. But it's also like dating: You might never be more attractive than when you're in another's arms. One acceptance will often lead to more.

My book of stories, Naked Summer, was published in June. The first story I ever sent to magazines, now called "Lost Lake," was submitted 81 times between July 1999 and December 2010, when Press 53 offered to publish my collection. Though "Lost Lake" was never accepted by a journal, I couldn't — wouldn't — give up on the story.

Its new home begins on page 53. I hope that New Yorker editor still likes the ending.