KEEP FISHING

I shall remain hopefully optimistic with the submission process of a certain small literary journal that has rejected me thrice. What more can I do?—besides the obvious: Write better, keep submitting, and establish an ongoing writer/editor relationship.



I've been reading this specific journal faithfully, and know their submission format by heart. They assign your work to one of three teams of editors. Each team consists of two editors. If one of the assigned editors likes your piece, or if both editors say “maybe,” it advances to the other four editors for further consideration, or scrutiny, or whatever you want to call it. Either way, it usually spells “rejection.”

Here are some favorable comments I received regarding my last nonfiction piece:

Editor 5: No. The writing is good but the environment is alien enough to require more backstory than is given. Too many gaps in information, as it is presented.

Editor 6: No. Interesting subject matter but this lacked emotional sequel to me. I needed to see an arc in understanding from one of the characters; otherwise this is just the telling of an event without the punch a story gives. If it was wrong for the coworker to promise the inmate a tutoring gig, why was it ok for the narrator to do the same thing?

Although I do not agree with everything in their critique, I will say this: The entire submission process is subjective. Who knows, maybe they’re killing me with kindness, maybe they don’t like prison stories, maybe they’re hoping I’ll go away, maybe with my most recent submission, they’ll come right out and say, "You suck." All I can do is keep writing, keep submitting, and keep fishing.