You're No Good

"Thank you for your submission. It has been read but unfortunately it isn't what we are looking for at this time."

Early this week I received five letters. They were all very similar to the above and all from the same magazine, a well known publication that I've been trying to get my work into for over a year. I was naturally disappointed but I knew that I had more stories still out for consideration by this particular market. They might have rejected five but they had kept the other two. Maybe that meant that they intended to publish those.

Wrong. The missing pair of manuscripts arrived back on my door mat the next day complete with their own copies of the same thanks-but-no-thanks letter. Again, that was very disappointing. Very. But what am I to conclude from this wholesale  discarding of my writing? Am I doing a bad job of it? Am I simply a poor writer? Or had the editor recently published several other pieces in the same vein as those I'd sent in? Maybe they'd had a glut of stories and had been swamped by the sheer numbers? Or perhaps one or more of my stories was pretty close to what they wanted to print and with just a few minor tweaks would have been perfect.

That's the problem with such a generic response. "It isn't what we are looking for at this time." There's nothing that I can take from that apart from abject disappointment. It's not exactly constructive criticism but then again why should I expect an editor to provide a more detailed critique? Their job is to pick the best submissions that they think will please their readership, not to help me improve my writing skills. My job is to anticipate their requirements and follow the magazine's guidelines to the letter. Sometimes it might feel like I need ESP abilities to produce the work that they require but it has to be possible. Some people are able to do it - they get their writing published issue after issue.

So it's time for me to recommit to this work and produce the stories that they actually want to print, which is not necessarily the same as a story that I think is really good. I have to start with an original beginning though. Let's see…

'It was a dark and stormy night.'

© Shaun Finnie 2014