Rejections; Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Keep Writing

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a writer in possession of many stories is going to get rejected approximately 1000 times before anything they’ve worked on sees the public light of day.

I’ve been writing seriously for quite a long time now, and I’ve got the word-count to prove it – if you add up all the short stories and books and other random stuff I’ve done since I started writing every day then it cracks a million words pretty easily. It’s a lot. And though most of it desperately needs editing before I dare show it to anyone remotely professional, I think a lot of my stories are pretty good. And when I write something I think is good, I want to see if anyone else thinks so – so off it goes into the aether, there to be judged by the unknowable eldritch creatures that are editors.

And 99% of the time, or thereabouts, it gets rejected. And that is fine.

I’ve thrown a lot of short stories out at the world, and I’ve had a go with a couple of books too. I’ve submitted work to dozens of magazines and anthologies and competitions, and I do mean multiple dozens. It’s all been good writing, at least in my opinion and those of my poor proofreaders. But I get rejected. A lot. I’ve been published a few times, yes, but for every success I have so many failures. If you click that link and go to my short stories page, scroll to the bottom. All of those ‘Unpublished’ stories have been round the houses, been submitted to every magazine and anthology I could think of. They’ve all failed. They were (hopefully) decent writing, but they didn’t go anywhere.

I’ve failed more times than I can count. Literally. I can fit my short story successes on one hand, but my rejections barely fit on my collection of severed ones outnumber them completely.

[image error]This is a few years of submissions on Submittable alone – not including three or four times as many that have gone through Moksha or directly to magazines.

But I keep going. I keep writing new stories, and I keep submitting the old ones (probably for far longer than is strictly wise). Because if one story isn’t right for a publisher, maybe the next one will be – and the first one might be right for someone else.

I was lucky enough to have that proven recently, when a story I’d almost given up on unexpectedly found a home with a publisher I’d been rejected from half a dozen times already. It was a pleasant surprise, not just because it proved that what I thought was good writing actually might be, but also because it proved that perseverance works.

Don’t give up. Sometimes it takes time to find the right place for your work. If you stop trying, you’ll never know for sure.