Surviving Rejection as Writer
Five things to remember when you get a rejection
Today, I received another rejection email.
I’m having trouble “placing” a story I wrote the summer of 2019. It’s a good story — I know it is — but it’s also very niche. Stylistically, it’s weird. It pays homage to a novel I’m obsessed with. Some might even liken it to fanfiction (it’s not, really). It won’t be everybody’s cup of tea, and I knew that when I first started sending it out to literary journals and magazines via Submittable.
That doesn’t make each rejection hurt any less.
This one story has gotten me fourteen rejections already. Fourteen.
But I keep sending it out to other places, checking my Submissions page for news every few weeks. Some places will hold onto your work for a year, only to send a curt “no thank you,” if they leave a note at all. Others will get back to you quickly, and some will even provide feedback or a reason why your work wasn’t a good fit for their publication.
Whether you’ve submitted work to a Medium publication, an academic journal, a magazine, a blog, or a book publisher, the results are the same: rejection stings.
