A Rejection Letter That Made Me Take My Writing By Surprise

It’s time for another Insecure Writers Support Group (IWSG) post!  IWSG is a monthly blog hop that occurs every first Wednesday of the month where we writers talk about the challenges in writing and how to resolve them.


For today's post, I'm going to answer IWSG's question for the month which is: Has your writing ever taken you by surprise? For example, a positive and belated response to a submission you'd forgotten about or an ending you never saw coming? Well, I'm sure there have been several times that my writing has done this to me such as when I’ve received positive responses from critique groups or have come up with a scene in a story that helped further develop the plot. However, having a bad memory, I can't recall a specific moment when any of these have happened. Because of that, I'll talk about my most recent experience with this sort of thing which occurred with a rejection letter that I received about a month ago.

Rejection letters always sound like a bad thing to a lot of us writers. However, they can contain very valuable and even encouraging feedback. That was the case with this rejection letter to a story that I had been working on for several months in revisions. Before I submitted the story to the publication, I had put it through my writers' critique group who gave me both positive and negative (though useful) feedback. They said that much of the story needed to be rewritten for grammar, structure and clarity. So I worked on these problems and eventually submitted it to a science fiction/fantasy magazine.

Within the past year, most of my rejection letters contained very little to no feedback. However, this most recent one provided a whole paragraph of it! What, I guess you could say, caught me by surprise was the editor's complement that said the story was, overall, written well. I have not gotten that positive of feedback on my fiction writing until then as far as rejection letters go. The most positive feedback I had gotten before was that the story had a good or creative concept, which was also an indication of improvement on my writing compared to rejection letters from even further back in my writing career. But what is a great concept when it is not communicated well or not made convincing in the events of the story? So this recent rejection letter was an indication that I'm conveying the concept more clearly and comprehensively.

However, the more constructive feedback, what many of us would call "negative" feedback, in the letter indicated that the story’s events needed to be made more convincing. This feedback that showed how the story could improve was well-detailed and so pointed out specific scenes such as a character’s  reaction to a situation. This is the most detailed response I've received from an editor and so I take it as a sign that my fiction writing is improving.

So, it seems, the key to getting better, more useful and specific feedback from editors is to keep writing and submitting stories and to seriously consider advice from fellow writers and critique groups and, definitely, from editors. The more you do these things, the more likely an editor will eventually see the potential in your work and give you feedback that goes beyond just "the story is not right for our publication" or something as vague such as "the story didn't convince us."


What's the best, most useful or encouraging feedback on your writing you’ve received? For example, feedback from a critique group, a fellow writer, beta readers or an editor?

Today’s IWSG is brought to you by these super co-hosts:  Renee Scattergood, Sadira Stone, Jacqui Murray, Tamara Narayan, and LG Keltner! IWSG was founded by awesome author Alex Cavanaugh, writer of the Cassa Series of novels!

Until next time . . .