No Never Forever Fever: Affairs with Rejection Slips

by Mandira Pattnaik

Randy Laybourne

For writing the opinion, “The editor’s desk is a cemetery of nascent broken hopes,” I may be taken to task, but I’m waiting, instead, for your love — “What a great line!” — though I doubt it’ll ever come, I get so few responses to my tweets. Waiting expectantly, and endlessly, I revert to my spouse, and that’s where I’m told: it’s subjective, it’s the freaking algorithm, and that I should rein-in my anxiety. Nonetheless, I see myself in a pond, and like countless others, I’m hollering, drowning, gasping for constant validation. In fact, the admittance by many that they’re addicted to tracking followers, statistics, and comments is reaching hilarious levels. Let me put it bluntly: At the editor’s table, 90–99 percent of submissions will be thwacked to death. There’s just one mind at work at a time, and even with multiple stages of review, the statistics won’t change because there’s only as much space in a publication. So, following each round, there’ll be hundreds of hurt souls looking for redemption. Even with simultaneous submissions, there’ll be pieces trashed, this time by the creators, because their creators are too peeved to look at it anew, or submit again. The immediate reaction is to vent the frustration on public platforms. I’ve done that too. Worse cases, like that of attacking the masthead, aren’t uncommon either.

So what precipitates this? The answer is: Common human psychology. We’ve been wired to feel part of a group, member of a social order in some capacity or the other, and any hint of exclusion is seen as a threat to our very existence. The joy of acceptance, or of sharing a latest publication with the reading community, is often dwarfed when measured against the pain of a decline. Numbers are heavily stacked in favor of writers not listed in a particular literary contest, or not accepted in a certain journal. Therefore, sometimes, it quickly snowballs and projects the hurt on a much larger canvas.

I identify with writers not having the urge to write at all because “Who reads?” A writer feeling rather demoralized after a bad day at work complained, “A tweet that just said, I went to the hairdresser’s, received 300 likes, and my 3,000-word essay went for 10 likes.” I wish I could laugh over it. With coffee in hand, wished we could talk to each other. Maybe, cribbed, and gossiped, and lent a shoulder. But writing is a lonely business. Next morning, I wake up to notifications of my submissions, pieces shown the door, junked, and must gather myself afresh to throw hats into the ring again!

In this context, volunteering to read at a magazine, and given the chance, at the editing desk, can work wonders. I’ll vouch to that: it rewards you with a whole new perspective, and the learning-on-the-job part of it cannot be over-emphasized.

There’s something very compelling about craft and creation — you do it in spite of yourselves. The sharing part of it, where today’s connected world offers multiple choices and instant critical feedback, is the infinitely more difficult part. Couple this with our acquired habits of approval-seeking since when we were kids, and that is reason why a rejection might degenerate into an ugly public meltdown. Thankfully, writers get used to it with time, and decline mails become hated roommates, not more nor less.

If hearing this helps, then Animal Farm was rejected by at least four publishers before making it into print in August 1945. And, Rudyard Kipling got this response, “…you just don’t know how to use the English language,” to a short story he pitched to a now-defunct newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner. Affairs with rejection slips continue to be pursued, however unhealthy, now-on-now-off partnerships. Turns out, how to handle rejection is, in itself, a time-tested acquired skill, even an art form.