In praise of bland rejections

 I’ve been getting an lot of short story rejections lately,  That ‘s the downside of submitting stories in volume, you get volume rejections too.

Along with the bland rejections, the ‘not for us’s, I’m getting quite a few which actually comment on the story.  One of them even said they don’t make a habit of providing feedback on stories, but had made an exception in that case.

We’re always told that we should be pleased when we get personalised rejections, as it means that the reader has found something good in our story.  But I’m finding that it’s not as simple as that.

What do I do with a rejection which says the story has some cool ideas, but the start wasn’t what they wanted?  That kind of feedback is totally useless unless there’s some kind of detail about what changes the  editor would like to see.

Of course, editors don’t have time to provide that kind of detail, but their vague comments are, frankly, worse than no comments at al.

I’ve also had a comment from an editor who thought my story was too slow.  I’d rewritten that story just before that submission to tighten it up.  I totally disagree with that feedback, and don’t plan on making any changes to that story at present as a result of it.

I think we have to be careful about taking feedback from editors as gospel truth.  An editor who once told me my story was slow publishes lots of stories which, to my mind, are slow to the point of being tedious.  Slow is in the eye of the beholder.

Some of the editors I submit to are writers too, but even then it doesn’t guarantee that I’ll get useful feedback about a story.

The worst piece of feedback I’ve received recently was a rejection which referred to my character as a tax assessor. The story I submitted is about two diplomats.  That annoyed me enough that I tweeted about it, not naming the magazine, but wondering if they’d even bothered to read the story. The day after I got an apologetic email from the slush reader, sending the right feedback.  Which was - you guessed it - the story contained interesting ideas, but they weren’t going to buy it anyway.

These pieces of personalised feedback have really brought it home to me how much of a lottery submissions are.  And how often I don’t agree that the stories editors pick are good, or that the feedback I receive is valid,

I think I prefer to receive the kind of ‘not for us’ bland rejection.  That doesn’t make my Imposter Syndrome rise up in the same way as personalised comments.  I’ve recently rewritten every short story in my files.  I know the ones I’m sending out are good stories, so I’m just going to keep on sending them out.

One writer sold a story after 82 rejections, so it can be done.  And it looks like I’m headed the same way.