I’ve had my share of rejections lately, but I’ve been submitting my stuff long enough now that I’m unfazed by it. It’s mildly disappointing, sure, and even annoying, but not discouraging. It doesn’t make me question my ability or ambition to write. (Writing’s a compulsion anyway, so I couldn’t stop if I wanted to.)

 

A rejection can happen for a lot of reasons. It may be pure subjectivity (the piece just didn’t resonate with the editors). It may not fit with a publication’s vibe. The writing may be weak.

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Take “Zephyr.” My guess is that the early submissions were rejected for a combination of things:

 

• The manic interiority may have been off-putting to some publications. There’s not much I can do about that. It’s what the story needed, and it’s just the way I write. I wouldn’t (and probably couldn’t) adjust my style to cater to some arbitrary mainstream trend. If the story’s odd, so be it.

 

• I may have submitted it to publications that weren’t a good fit (just as the rejection boilerplate said). More recently, I’ve been better about doing what the submission guidelines always say to do: I read back issues of a publication and, if it’s not a good fit, keep looking. It’s better to take a little extra time at the beginning than it is to wait for months to find out it’s just not their thing.

 

• The story was flabbier than I realized at first, and the narrator’s main concern (his grief over his daughter) was hard to make out. So, on that last round of revisions (before it was accepted at BULL), I added a few details to make it clear what the narrator was going through. I also ruthlessly condensed it—cutting, consolidating, toning things down that were trying too hard.

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The original first paragraph shows the flabbiness:​

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Over the phone, I tell the customer service rep my pizza’s disappeared, but more alarmingly, the delivery driver, Zephyr, has likewise vanished. I watched it happen. I watched the map, that is, as the little car icon barreled apocalyptically up Route 4, idled urgently at Gardner and Main, Pac-Manned through town, and then finally turned onto my road, Esker Road, a narrow, serpentine path wending for miles through the woods and flanked by precipitous gullies. And just after 1:09 a.m., the car—along with Zephyr and, presumably, my medium Carnivore’s Delite—evaporated. And at that time of night, along that treacherous stretch, something marginally catastrophic may have happened to Zephyr, and I don’t want to get into a whole big thing here, but this should be, ideally, concerning.

 

The thinned-out version I submitted to was just as jittery but less burdensome:

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​Over the phone, I tell the customer service rep my pizza has disappeared, and more to the point, my delivery driver, Zephyr, has likewise vanished. I watched it happen, I say. I watched the map on my phone as the car icon barreled apocalyptically up Route 4, Pac-Manned its way through town, and turned onto my road, Esker Road, a serpentine path winding for miles through the woods. Around 1:26 a.m., the car—along with Zephyr and, presumably, my medium Carnivore’s Delite—evaporated. Along that stretch, at this time of night, something marginally catastrophic may have happened, and I don’t want to get into a whole big thing here, but this should, ideally, be concerning.

 

So you can control for the quality of the writing, and you can be strategic about where you submit. But a lot of other things (many beyond your control) have to fall into place for a piece to get accepted. So if something’s declined, keep going. Do whatever’s necessary to make it work. Sometimes that means failing several times, reworking it, submitting it elsewhere, reworking it, and so on. But don’t give up. If your story needs to be told, you’ll find a way to tell it.