I got a rejection from The Georgia Review the other day. I did what exactly what all the rejection experts tell you do: I sent my story off to the next place on my wish list. And then I did what a lot of you probably find hard to do: I shrugged off the no and forgot about it. After a certain amount of rejections you develop a thick skin. And after a certain amount of acceptances, you develop confidence in your work. If you’ve had acceptances from the very start, you probably still wear a thin layer of prickly skin. When those rejections finally start rolling in, you’ll start feeling more like a beginning writer than a mid-list author.
I’m a big fan of The Georgia Review and the great stories they publish. When I first started sending out stories, I was living in Massachusetts. Whenever I visited one of the local bookstores (R.I.P, Independents), I checked out The Georgia Review, imagining one of my pieces in there. It has yet to happen, but now with the small but not negligible clout I wield as a lit mag editor, the burden is directly on me. First, I need to write the stories; second, the stories need to be good; and third, I need to select the one that is right for The Georgia Review. In the meantime, I get to enjoy Georgia Review stories by Erin McGraw and Lee K. Abbott and Sheri Joseph and some of the other writers I admire and like.
Do I take advantage of being the fiction editor of The Kenyon Review when I send out stories? Absolutely. I write a cover letter on KR masthead stationery. Does it make a difference? Obviously, judging by my stories appearing in The Georgia Review and The New Yorker. But seriously, of course it makes a difference. I escape the slush pile, and most likely I get a quicker response. If there’s a misplaced modifier in my first paragraph, I get the benefit of the doubt.
Your main goal always is to get out of that slush pile so that editors read your story in relaxed isolation rather than with a tidal wave of fifty other stories looming over them. When there’s a crowded queue of other narratives pressing forward, a misplaced modifier is just the excuse an editor is looking for.
I’m careful about sending stories one after another to the same place. The last time I sent a story to The Georgia Review was a few years ago. I’ve been working on novels mostly, and whenever I did complete a story, it seemed I’d always meet an editor at AWP or somewhere who’d invite me to submit. So I’d do that instead.
Way back when The Georgia Review was one of the early places I submitted to, and even then they sent me a nice note. Not too long after, when I felt I had another good story, I sent it to them. This one came very close and I got a longer letter. It came so close that it hurt. If I’d known that I’d have to wait another three years to get my first story published anywhere, it would have hurt a lot more. I remember saying to my husband, I can’t write a better story. This is the best I can do.
And it was true. In a way. Whenever you send out a story, it should be the best you can possibly do. You should feel that you couldn’t possibly write a better story, that you’ve lived up to all your talent potential. If someone then comes along and tells you, this isn’t quite good enough, it’s devastating because it seems like they’re talking about your talent level rather than your execution.
But it’s strange thing: the more you write, the more your talent base expands. Pretty soon you stop writing sentences like She got up from the bed and walked over to the window where he was. Maybe you fiddle around and rewrite it: She got up from the bed and walked over to where he stood by the window.
And you keep doing stuff like that and then one day without even thinking you write She joined him at the window. You realize all that other stage direction stuff is implied. The reader is filling it in for you. Little by little your writing gets smoother and that allows you to “write” where it really counts, where the story really matters.
Speaking of no transition, I’m always amazed by the 100-meter dash. It seems to me to be a race of pure speed and raw talent. Yet when you hear the runners interviewed afterward, they talk about the technical fine-turning they need to make, on their starts, their striding, their training. They speak of mechanics rather than talent. We’re talking about something that takes fewer than 10 seconds and these guys are looking at plenty of room for improvement. It makes improving a story look easy after that.
The story that almost made it to The Georgia Review years ago never did make it into print. I sent it out to a couple more places and then decided it wasn’t good enough.