What Form Rejection Means to Me

The following post is offered in celebration of The Rejectionist, whose blog has just turned one year old! Hooray to that! Let's hope I'm one of the five randomly selected winners of her anniversary uncontest! Because I really want a SPECIAL MIX CD of MOSTLY BON JOVI SONGS that she picked out just for lil' ol' loser me.

All of the form rejections I've received have come from my efforts to win literary contests and get published in literary magazines. I will admit right now, at the cost of my pride, that I have never managed to make this happen. But I firmly believe that failure is a staple of the writing life. I am doing what I'm supposed to be doing; and inuring myself to form rejection, in particular, is an essential skill for psychological wellbeing in the field. If rejection didn't happen frequently and to everyone, form letters would not be necessary; and the fact that I have a bunch of 'em means I'm writing, or, at least, trying. Trying and failing is better than not trying at all, so the old saw goes. And I'm getting really, really good at failing now, which means getting good at success can't be far behind, right? At least this way, I'll really be able to appreciate that when it happens.

To me, form rejection letters are artifacts of a brief and unsuccessful courtship, the kind that ends before it has a chance to begin, the kind that happens the most when you're young and working really hard to figure it all out. You're left with so little information at the end that it's sometimes difficult to tell what went wrong. You stand there, dejected, wondering what did it, exactly. "Why won't you love me?" you wonder. "Is it because I wear leggings as pants? Because you noticed my lisp? Because I kissed my dog on the nose?" and, of course, "Can you at least tell me so I don't do it again in front of someone else?"

The more you get rejected, the faster you learn that it's bad form to ask questions about it. This may be true generally, but it goes double when you're being fed a line. The underlying force behind the form letter is the fact that the sender simply does not have the kind of time necessary to respond to your desperate questioning. Under those circumstances, it is in fact counter to your best interests to go forth demanding that kind of individual attention. I'll 'fess: I responded to my first form rejections. It's instinctive; we're an inquisitive species, and when things go wrong, we like to know why, because we want to improve ourselves. I never got a response. In fact, when I think of the questions I had for the readers/editors/judges who rejected me, I cringe a little bit. Failure analysis is better carried off on one's own time—by reading the stories that won the contest, or taking a closer look at the stuff the magazine does select for publication. All the effort that goes into negotiating rejection should be yours, unless someone offers otherwise.

The other reason it's bad form to question failure is the that it's not always all about you. Sometimes "sorry we can't use this" means just that. Maybe there have been too many stories about dying grandfathers/talking cats/hoarders/time machines this time. Maybe your story just can't play well with everything else in the issue. Maybe there just isn't room for you. Occasionally, form rejection is the equivalent of "It's not you; it's me," and sometimes it's true. It is your duty as a writer to take it like a champ and move right along. That's life.

In the last couple of years, a handful of magazines have started accepting submissions online. Narrative and Glimmer Train, for example, have submission forms on their webpages. This streamlines the process for everybody. The very concept of the rejection letter is itself streamlined, trimming away the faint modicum of personality that good old-fashioned form rejection used to offer the well-versed. Let me explain: Once you've received a fair quantity of form rejections, you start to realize the individual personality of each; that is, you find yourself personalizing the impersonal. I have noticed, for example, the antiseptic, almost refreshing brevity of SmokeLong's letters, the distinctly biting quality of Iowa Review's, the high quality of Granta's paper. When you use online submission forms, the form-rejection experience is effectively transcended, distilled down to a single word.

So, rather than amuse myself by distinguishing differences in personality from letter to letter, I am now gathering a smart collection of euphemisms for "fail"—like "complete" and "pass"!

(Clicking on these images will make them more readable, and will also reveal where they came from.)

Stuff like that makes you positively romantic for a real form rejection, doesn't it? Well! I WILL NOT DISAPPOINT. There are plenty of literary magazines out there that welcome online submissions without compromising a writer's well-deserved sense of failure. Conducting such exchanges online, via email, may even introduce new and unprecedented variables for contemplating the personal nuances of one's rejection. As a case in point, I offer you, in all of my shamelessness, my new favorite rejection letter. I received it in January of this year, from The New York Tyrant, and it would not have delighted me nearly as much if email didn't always come with a timestamp.

Fifty-two minutes, my friends. You'll notice that I submitted at booty-call hour, and that it took Tyrant a snappy fifty-two minutes to confirm their inability to publish it and notify me of such. That's fast! That's the fastest turn-around dumpage I've had since middle school! (Was it my reindeer sweater? Or my nervous stuttering? What happened during that near-hour? IT WAS MY STUPID SWEATER, WASN'T IT?) It's okay. I don't take it personally anymore.

Spending this much time as a reject has been good for me. I've learned so much that I was able to craft, for the first time this year, my very own form rejection letter. I'm quite proud of my gentle hope-dashery, apart from the canned-response quality of the phrase "does not meet our needs." What can I say? These things have a language of their own. I'm fluent now.

Special thanks, once again, to Le R., who fills my life with awesome on a regular basis. Happy anniversary! Here's to many more!