Recently I wrote an essay about my writing. In it, in short, I said I used to submit a lot of short stories for publication, but then I got discouraged when they were almost all rejected, and ultimately stopped sending stories out completely. However, once I started sending stories out again, I started to sell stories again – so there was no use in getting discouraged.
That’s a nice little story, but even as I wrote it, I knew that story might be wrong – my data was clustered by stories in the order they were written, not by date of sales, so by necessity it caps my submission rate at the rate at which I wrote stories. I suspected that real chronological data might be even more spiky, with several stories being written and sent out in one year. As it turns out, I keep great records – all my rejection slips, spreadsheets of date sent, meticulous notes on submissions and magazine closures – and when I dug further into the data, I found that my story was wrong in ways that I didn’t expect.
First, I never stopped sending stories that I’d written. With rare exceptions of stories I couldn’t take from first draft to salable product, every single story I wrote, I sent out. No, even that’s not quite right. One story I didn’t send out at all after a particularly nasty review from a friend to whom I never send stories anymore. Other people loved the story and were “haunted” by it and said I should send it out. But the point being, most of the stories I thought I had never sent out actually got sent to many places.
Second, my story sending was even spikier than I thought – 1990 to 1998, with a spike in 2001 to 2002, not resuming until 2011; you can see this in the chart above. Now, there are lulls in there where stories didn’t get sent … but since I have records of sending out almost every story that I wrote, this sounds like I stopped writing stories, not stopped sending them. And that actually is true: when I joined a dot.com startup, I was largely too busy to write short stories, and I quit for a while again after my father and grandmother died … shifting gears instead to novels, of which the first one that I finished became my first novel published.
Third, and worst of all … I thought I wasn’t getting sales of my early stories because editors thought those stories sucked, but actually, editors seemed to love them. Excluding a Lovecraft pastiche, even the very first story that I widely circulated, “Common Ground,” got some very positive feedback. And I don’t mean just encouraging rejections – I mean people who wrote “Great story! Unfortunately, our magazine is shutting down and we’ll have to return it.” In fact, several magazines responded with “we’re out of business” letters – and most of the magazines I sent those early stories to have since shut down. So maybe I had the kiss of death, but I sure seemed to be doing something that attracted people’s personal attention.
So I was right to say that there was no point in being discouraged – but my picture of events was even worse than I thought. I have more thoughts about constructing and deconstructing your own personal myths … but for now, let me just say: check your assumptions. For those of us who are hard on ourselves, it’s all too easy to take a little rejection and turn it into giant discouragement. The reality is, even if things look bad, you might find a glimmer of hope … even in a rejection pile.
-the Centaur
