Rejections Category
Rejection, Acceptance, and Opportunity
Posted on October 8, 2015 1 Comment
Yesterday, I received a rejection for a creative nonfiction story that I crafted this summer. It was from a high profile and very competitive journal. But that’s okay. It’s okay because they received over 550 stories in response to their call, and I’m a writer, which means I immediately submitted that same story to four […]
Let’s talk about: Failure
Posted on January 30, 2015 Leave a Comment
“I’ve never failed at anything in my life,” he said, earnest and nervously giggling. “And now I can’t fail. I have a family and a mortgage.” “But what’s the worst thing that would happen? Do you really believe you couldn’t recover? What if you succeeded?” “I have no choice now.” I thought, how sad. To […]
The terrible, inevitable subjectivity of rejection
Posted on December 8, 2014 Leave a Comment
If you are a writer, you will be rejected. Not once. Not twice or thrice. Hundreds of times over decades of writing your guts on a page. And sometimes the reason you are rejected is entirely subjective – the editor, the editorial board, the publisher, the agent – just didn’t like what you wrote. It […]
Five journals said no. Now what?
Posted on September 26, 2014 Leave a Comment
Rejection is hard, especially after you worked on that piece for months and months. You spent all that time polishing and revising, seemingly to no avail. You dutifully submitted that piece to one journal at a time, waited for each to respond, received “thanks, but no thanks” emails, and repeated this process five (or more) […]
The Six-Minute Rejection
Posted on September 12, 2014 Leave a Comment
One of my all-time favorite rejection stories to tell isn’t mine. A friend of mine who is a well-published writer (in multiple genres), holder of a Ph.D. in Creative Writing, and professor, shared the most amazing rejection story on her blog a couple of years ago. I’m paraphrasing here, but basically, she sent a story […]
Demystifying “a good fit”
Posted on August 18, 2014 Leave a Comment
The phrase “a good fit” is often deployed in rejection letters and is rarely expanded upon, leaving the recipient wondering WHY the piece wasn’t a good fit for that publication at that moment in time. If you’re like me, you don’t care what the reason is, you just know that the editor wasn’t interested for […]
The positive rejection
Posted on August 4, 2014 5 Comments
“Thank you for sending us your brief essay ‘Handlining for students’. This one came very close, up to the final round of decision making, in fact, but we’ve decided to pass. I don’t know if that makes you feel good or if such ‘close but no cigar’ news is just hard to hear, but we […]
Amanda Morris, Ph.D. 