Rejection Letters

This post was originally published July 20, 2023.

Writing is a vulnerable profession. Not just because you are externalizing some of your rawest feelings and thoughts through fiction or nonfiction, but because that externalization will be rejected more than it’s accepted.

I keep all my rejection letters in a folder in my email. I don’t look at them, and even for this blog post, I won’t bother to go back and count how many I have—in the same way people are told not to check their investments every day, it can quickly turn obsessively demoralizing—but I do know I have many years worth of them.

My short story “Lost Shoes” was one of the first pieces I ever received a rejection letter for. The first place I sent it to was a website that published several short pieces a day. After not hearing back from them within the suggested review period, I reached out and finally received an email back. It was my most detailed rejection letter. The person writing it likely thought they were offering a lot of helpful criticism, but criticism seems like a generous word. They pointed to the characters and premise and called it stupid and nonsensical. I was so shocked by the lack of decorum that I just started laughing.

I was upset by it, of course, especially when some of my peers and teachers had read the same story and enjoyed it. I continued to submit it to a handful of other places I thought it had a chance of getting accepted.

Rejected.

Rejected.

Thank you for your submission, but rejected.

A couple years later, I reworked it. I even added in one of the suggestions from the original rejection letter. When I first wrote the story, the main characters didn’t have names. They were simply, “the girl” and “the boy,” taking inspiration from Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.” Well, the original reviewer thought that was stupid, so I penned each of them names—Gracie and Mason. Do I think that made a difference in the story getting published? I mean… Honestly? Not really, but at least the story was a little less Hemingway and a little more my own.

Every time I sit down and work on a piece of writing, it becomes a little bit more my own. Each edit is a commitment to it. Every tweak, the taming of a stray hair before the taking of the picture. I spent years working on “Lost Shoes” with the photographer saying “not ready yet,” and me thinking “just one more hair.”

And sometimes, it is about the hair. I sincerely believe that my published version of Lost Shoes was a more developed and refined version of the one I first sent out for publication. But sometimes, it’s not. Sometimes it’s just about waiting until the sun crests the sky at just the right angle for the golden hour and its majestic light.

Now my short story lives on my shelf and the shelf of my alma mater’s library, it was sold for a good cause, and I made 8x more money than I would have if the man with the heavy criticism accepted it.

I’ve received many rejection letters recently, and though I never expect acceptances, I still wish for them. It’s impossible for the rejection to not hurt at least a little bit every time. Some people don’t understand why I keep the rejection letters, especially since the vast majority of them don’t even have anything to say about my submission. I don’t know why, really. Maybe there’s an underlying motivation to use them as a big “haha, I told you so and I’m actually an amazing writer you fools,” but probably not. But when I was feeling rough about getting three rejection letters in one week, my mom reminded me that those letters are proof that I’m trying, and that made me cry because the only thing that hurts more than a rejection letter is the idea that I would give up on trying to share my writing.