Rejection Letters: Critics versus Editors

Example of a good letter: I've never submitted to The Paris Review.

I recently updated my Fiction page and found this post from years earlier. I am reposting it, updated. It mostly refers to short story rejection letters...sent by mail!

I've received many rejection notices throughout the years. I'm going to list various types of rejection letters, favorites to least favorites:

The best, of course, is the personalized note--the handwritten scrawl across the bottom of the form letter or, if you're really lucky, a personal, typed letter. These personal notes fall into two categories: one, an explanation for why the story wasn't accepted; two, an apology for not accepting the story even though the editor really, really liked it. Of the two, the first, believe it or not, is best. As my brother Eugene says regarding the second, "My ego thanks you, but I'd rather be paid." Still, both are way up there. The first time I got a personalized note from an editor, I was as happy as if I'd received an acceptance. It was a fairly prestigious magazine (for me), and I floated around on Cloud 9 for days.

The second best, which I didn't used to like, is the form letter with boxes. The editor(s) check the boxes that apply: Not Enough Description; Lack of Dialog; Not For This Magazine. I've learned to appreciate feedback though I know it isn't always possible; besides, I always like to make sure the Totally Horrible Writing box isn't checked.

The next is the ordinary form letter. Eh. But in comparison to the next type of rejection letter, I don't mind it as much.

The personalized form letter: now, most form letters say something like, "We're sorry we can't use your story. Try us again. We apologize for this form letter," and that's fine, but I get a bit ruffled when the form letter says something like, "We read your story, Katherine, and although we enjoyed TITLE OF STORY, we won't be using it this time around." The first time I got one of these, I thought it was a personal note. Yes, okay, call me naive. After I received the third one, I realized that it was a form letter sent by a clever assistant. (Merge is an amazing feature.) These types of form letters really annoy me. I'd rather just have the editor say, "You're a cog in our machine" than pretend to know me, like salespeople who want to buddy up to me on the phone. Just tell me about your product. If you can't tell me about your product in ten seconds, if you're just going to ask me how I'm doing, forget it.

The final type of rejection letter is a personal critique rejection letter; this kind of personal note rejection letter is different from the type mentioned above. 

At this point, I have to digress and talk about literary criticism versus editing. Literary criticism is no-holds-barred "I personally don't like this" justification. Hey, critics can say whatever they want for whatever reason--in academe, they use a gloss of jargon and highmindedness to pretend that they are calling down the fires of heaven. In truth, literary critics are often entirely obsessed with what is "cool" and, yes, "cool" exists in the academic world. 

Editing is a different beast. One of the most important jobs of editing is figuring out what the author intends to do. That intent then becomes the standard by which the piece is judged. In other words, it is pointless (if interesting in a bizarre way) to criticize Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings for not involving aliens and spaceships or successfully describing submarine warfare or devolving into a pastiche of modern habits using contemporary settings.

Not only should editors look for the author's intent, they should also look at the author's work as a whole--so it is also pointless to criticize Tolstoy for killing off Anna Karenina (spoiler, I know, but really, you ought to know that) or Kafka for turning his protagonist into a cockroach rather than a bear.

In other words, editing should never be about what the editor thinks the story ought to be about (or what the editor wants to read). It should be about whether the author succeeded at what the author was attempting to do.

To return--the personal rejection letter that I don't care for is the personal rejection letter which isn't about my story as a whole and whether it succeeded or not or, even, where it was flawed; rather the personal rejection letter I dislike is the one which wants to take issue with me for employing a certain theme or for delivering a particular outcome or for using a particular set of tropes or for operating in a certain genre. 

If you don't like it, says I, don't buy it.

This isn't to say that I'm opposed to the magazine editor saying, "Well, really, you know, we prefer happy endings" or "Well, really, you know, we prefer sad endings where everyone dies and life is hopeless and there's angst dripping from the ceilings." That's fair. Magazines have certain audiences and certain self-perceptions. 

But there's a difference between saying, "We prefer angsty endings, and you don't have one" and saying, "You ought to change the pleasant hero into a Byronic sociopath. That will make the story so much better" or, in literary speech, "Such changes will explore the profound tremors within the human psyche that match the contemporary zeitgeist" (academic criticism isn't that hard--seriously). 

This final type of personal rejection letter inevitably involves blatantly condescending sentences. I have received brutal rejections of stories, but none of them are as bad as the condescending rejection letter which smugly informs me that I'm a good little writer in my way and here are some suggestions (which would completely alter the theme and plot and style of my piece) which will make the writing and me ever so much better. What the critic (not editor) really means is that if I could only turn my piece into something the critic approves of (rewrite my DNA), then I will be acceptable in the critic's eyes.

Over the years, I've come to the conclusion that most critics (and academics) simply don't read that much. They honestly seem to believe that only one "proper" genre exists in the universe. They are always issuing challenges to "break barriers" because they are, in truth, rather conventional. All the barriers have already been broken. Writing is about trying out a particular approach, not upsetting a tiny apple cart of what literature IS.

From a writing point of view, such critics completely miss my real failures as a writer--namely, slow beginnings (which these days, I tend to overcome by starting about a chapter in), struggles with description, and a tendency to assume my readers know my characters as well as I do. They instead mistake my plot choices as good or bad writing. A broad example are the critics who mistake the appearance of magic in a story as bad writing, simply because they don't care for all that fantasy genre stuff (these are the people who use "magical realism" rather than "fantasy" in their critiques when the author is someone they do approve of, i.e. someone "cool").

But then, I will say that I think good editors--who can put themselves in the writer's shoes and try to look at what the writer is attempting to do from the inside--are hard to find. It truly is a skill.