Rejections, Beyond the Call of Duty

What a difference a word makes. A few words, even more so.

For some reason—perhaps my writing has begun to warrant it, or perhaps I'm just getting lucky—I have received several personally worded and encouraging rejection slips in the last week. It's not so much the encouraging part that's important here (although that is always treasured), it's the personal nature that has surprised me.

Let's face it, everyone knows editors (including those of us at Perigee) are overwhelmed with submissions. They're easy enough to go through given time, time, and more time, but when it comes to responding to submissions—particularly rejecting work—who has time to comment on the specifics of the writing? (This question ignores those submissions which are, unfortunately, so broken that no polite advice suffices.)

As a writer who receives at least one submission response a week, and more often two or three, I don't begrudge editors this fact of life.

Which makes it all the more pleasing when I receive first rate, thoughtful, and personally oriented rejections. Rejections, no less!

Just today I received a rejection from Barrelhouse regarding a piece of short fiction, which included: "This, of course, is easy enough to fix, but I think it points to a larger issue in the piece, which is that I never got much sense of the characters. He was, essentially, the Guy In Mourning, and she was, essentially, The One Who Died. I think for the story to be successful, the reader needs a stronger and more particularized sense of who these people are."

How's that for feedback? And the editor is exactly right (a fact for which I thanked him).

Or take this note from Fringe Magazine: "We liked the detail of this piece—the hunt for the cricket was fascinating to read. However, we thought the work lacked a sense of the narrator's emotional landscape—it was clear that he was obsessive, but not why he was. To put it another way, the question of the story was 'What is happening in the character's life to make him behave this way?'"

Both comments speak to the same weakness. How much more likely is it that the writer (yours truly) will be able to address this weakness, improve his writing, and return with work more effective and more publishable? The answer, of course, is "far more likely."

I think it is about time that as writers and editors we remember that we are part of a process—that, ultimately, we exist in a partnership, and that one cannot function at his best without the counterpart functioning at her best. We, here at Perigee, will do our best to remind ourselves of this—both as editors and writers.

In the meantime, this writer will continue to cherish editors who take the time to nudge him in the right direction.

(R Woerheide, With Thanks to Fringe Magazine and Barrelhouse)