Journal Entry

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.

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6 Responses so far

  1. 1. Matt Smit

    You know, if I had actually received rejection more letters for my few submissions (rather than having them go unanswered), or saved the few that I got, I would definitely be taking part.

  2. 2. Samuel Tinianow

    Matt, good for you for not enshrining your rejections. It took me a couple years before I realized that putting them up on my walls was desperately counterproductive and replaced them with some nice family portraits.

    I’ve contributed my own entry. I’m told that if you click on my name it will take you to my blog where you can read it.

  3. 3. Moondancer Drake

    No better regection then one you can learn from. :)

  4. 4. Carole McDonnell

    Saw this post today (on Saturday) but decided to post (back-post) my latest rejection on my site anyway. A good rejection can heal the soul…especially if another place rejected it with extreme anger and superiority. -C

  5. 5. Veronica

    If only I could learn something from my rejections. Getting the standard ones doesn’t help a bit. :-) I’m also taking the advice to not hang on to them anymore – onward and upward.

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