Living the Fictional Dream

If you send your stories out into the world, you’ve gotten rejected. It’s just par for the course. Getting published is a mixture of hard work and luck (getting your story to the right editor at the right time).

I think one of the hardest things about writing fiction with the hope of publication is the frequent rejection. These stories are our babies. We work on them, endlessly tweaking one word here and one paragraph there. We cut for flow and add for understanding. We craft characters out of thin air and breathe life into them with quotation marks and semicolons.

But, rejection isn’t all bad. If you can take rejections with a grain of salt and see them as something professional, not something personal (I know that’s hard… what is writing if not personal?), it’s easier not to lose heart. I know… I lost heart when I was in high school and again in college. But when I started submitting short stories in 2007, I promised myself that this time I wouldn’t give up. And I didn’t! And now I actually have a publication list, which thrills me to no end.

Rejection notes still have a sting to them, but it’s so much less now than it used to be. So, if you’re a new writer out there who has yet to garner that ellusive first acceptance letter, I would encourage you to keep trying. Craft the best stories you can, and eventually someone will want to publish it. It might take a while to find that first right fit, but it’s out there.

Also, try to learn something from your rejection notes. Sometimes rejection letters include comments from the editors. That is especially nice – you’re not left wondering why they didn’t choose your piece. (Every Day Fiction is one market that takes the time to do this. Haurah: Breath of Heaven and flashquake do, also.) However, you have to be able to take the criticism. If you fire off an angry response (or even a pleasant, but argumentative one), not only are the editors not going to change their minds, but they’ll probably be glad they didn’t accept your story.

Even if you recieve a form rejection, sans comments, you can still learn something, even if it’s just something about what kind of stories that market likes/dislikes. The more rejections you get for a story, the more it might be that there is a flawed element in the story that needs work before sending it back out there.

So, for all you new writers out there, I say brave the rejections and start submitting. The worst anyone can say is no!