I haven't failed, I've just found 100 editors and agents who don't believe in me

When i got four rejections on the same day recently I had a massive downer.  It was time for some swift self-esteem boosting measures.

And then I remembered the famous Thomas Edison quote: "I have not failed.  I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." And it occurred to me that this was just as relevant to trying to get published, albeit in a slightly altered form.  What an inspiration that quote is!  And it gave me a clue to a new way of dealing with faceless rejections.

Because, of course, every rejection that comes in is a failure.  It's a failure to convince another person of the brilliance of our prose, or the brilliance of our ideas.  And it hurts.

But, having got picked off the unsolicited slushpile once, I know I'm not deluding myself that I can write.  That was a major publisher, and the submission was made without an agent.   A tiny, tiny, proportion of scripts get followed up from this source.  I had the whole manuscript read, and received some fabulous feedback on my world-creation and characters.  A serious publisher thought my writing was good.

Since then I've had lots of this type of infuriating feedback on my short stories.  You know the sort of thing, "I love this character, she's really spunky... But we're not going to publish your story anyway."

And that brings me back to Edison's quote.  The most important thing in engaging with the brutal edifice of publishing is to make sure we keep our self-esteem intact.  And Edison's quote gives me the lead to doing that.  I haven't failed, I've just found a hundred editors and agents who don't believe in my writing.

Some will, some won't.  Next!  Their lack of belief in me is their problem.  It isn't going to destroy my self-belief.  Because the publishing process is all about belief.  It's about finding people who believe in me and in the world-visions set out in my novels.  And when I get downhearted I remind myself that even people like NASA fail.  Twenty of their first 28 attempts to send a rocket into space failed.

But now we have the International Space Station, and NASA is planning to go to Mars.  So persistence pays off, and i intend to follow that lead.  And one day, I will find the agent and editor who do believe in me and my work.  Watch out then, for I'll take off like one of NASA's rockets.

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Committing to submitting

I've been keeping up my submission commitment this week, with five new submissions.  I'm not sure whether it's good to get rejections swiftly, or after a month's wait.  I've had some of both types this week.  At least the quick ones allow you to move on fast and get the story turned around and sent out again.  Those that take a month to return somehow seem like I've wasted time getting the answer.

It helps to keep an eye on social media when you're submitting stories.  Following publishers can alert you to their open reading periods, and I came across one of these this week.  Tor.com closed submissions some months ago, and have just re-opened.  But when I was following up their submission requirements for short stories I happened to notice they were open for submissions of novellas again.  For a whole month.  But I just happen to have a novella looking for a home, so I submitted that too.

I've been spending some time recently looking at the openings of stories that have been published.  Even for subscription magazines, you can usually read the first three or four paragraphs of published stories for free.  As these are the very paragraphs that persuade an editor whether or not to buy the story, that's handy research.  

I've also been trying to take a long, hard look at my stories to work out why they don't sell.  Ànd I've detected a tendency in me to start the story too slowly, or just a shade too early.  I'm still writing myself into the tale.  Once I've got to page two or three the story's rattling along, but it needs to do that on page one as well.  So the novella, and the stories that got submitted this week, got a page one re-write to eliminate the excess story establishment before they went off. 

I'm committed to submitting my work now, and to selling it.  So if I need to keep on changing my stories I'll do it.  But it's knowing what to change that matters too, and I sense I've reached a higher level of awareness on that in the last few weeks.  I'm learning to pull back far enough to look at my stories as a stranger, to develop the lack of investment in my work that allows me to see it as an outsider who knows nothing about me, or the story.  Time will tell if it pays off.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com