Post a rejection letter Friday

Shaun C. Green writes:

Apropos of the ridiculous focus on whether or not posting rejection letters is common practice/professional/legal/cuddly/appropriate/blue rather than on the exposure of crude and offensive racist language, I’m officially declaring it Post A Rejection Letter Friday

People who’ve jumped in:

Naamen Tilahun

Willow Fagan

Luke Jackson

Moondancer Drake

Justine Larbalestier

Ursula K. LeGuin (well, not for this event, but it’s an easy link LOL)

Samuel Tinianow

Shaun Duke

Shweta Narayan

My favorite rejection letter, and the one that is most blunt, was from a magazine called Altair, and it was thus:

“Dear Mr. Buckell:

Have you ever heard of the phrase ‘everything and the kitchen sink?’ In this short 3,500 story you have cyberpunks, arcologies, alien conspiracies, a love affair, the down spiral of a drug abuser, and the headspace of assassins.

Consider that your story may benefit from focusing on one, or possible two, of these things in that same space.”

It had a great affect on my realizing I needed to narrow down in order to pull off short stories. Until then I’d been a novelist trying to cram all my cool ideas into one go. This rejection made me sit back and think about the concept of eliminating all but the essential.

I talk about the rejection at conventions and workshops when people ask about the struggle in difference between a novel and story.

Post a link the comments to yours if you post it, and I’ll link it via this post.

Filed under the topic Journal on July 11th 2008 at 11:32 am. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.