"It F***s With Your Compasses"

An uncensored tale of rejection.

An old professor of mine, Steven E. Jones, had a phrase. When new information completely disorients you and your sense of reality, he said: “It fucks with your compasses.”

I’ve hung onto that phrase because I think it describes something I feel a lot, and it’s a feeling I hate perhaps more than anything: the inability to trust myself and my own judgment. This kind of trust in myself is already fragile and hard-won, so losing it feels devastating, absurd, a kind of existential cruelty that’s almost like being strung along in a romance.

I suppose this is why I take feedback so hard and so personally, because my sense of self-direction is always at stake. So when I got what may have been my first round of really bad feedback earlier this week, it… Well, you know.

A little background: I’d just gotten a really encouraging rejection from a rather big-deal fiction venue. The general editor wrote a personal email informing me that “fewer than 5% of stories” make it to the final editing round, where mine was finally knocked out of the running. They assured me—and I don’t doubt it—that this was an exceptional accomplishment and that I should feel very proud. They offered personalized feedback on my story (something that pro journals rarely do), reiterated their confidence that my piece would find a good home, and expressed hope that I would submit again in the future.

Well, I was feeling very proud of myself, especially since I’d already felt that story was quite good and so had my beta-readers. Not being one to turn down a rare offer of feedback, I followed up with the editor to thank them for their encouragement and to get their feedback on my story.

The return email opened, “Thank you for the lovely response.  We do our best!” An excellent chord. Then, further down:

Our comments are often raw and unfiltered and can sometimes be difficult for an author to read.  Keep in mind that the harshest comments most often come from the deepest disappointment that a story with such potential doesn't meet our expectations as much as we would like. 

Well shit, I thought, maybe this isn’t the right email to read right before I go to bed. (Or while watching the presidential debate, for that matter.)

Turns out there probably wasn’t any good time to read some of those notes. It seemed half the editors (I don’t actually know how many there were) liked my story well enough, but, fairly, felt it was more a scene than a story. The others though… Well, let’s leave aside that my premise was taken more seriously than I’d intended, likely affecting how the piece was read. Let’s jump right into how one reader was very, very offended by something in my story, totally blindsiding me over something I (and my other readers) thought was totally innocuous. Let’s jump right to their evisceration of my style and dialogue, which other readers have praised as some of my greatest strengths.

Or how about how the word “idiotic” cropped up two or three times in their comments?

So I’m venting. And I can, damnit, I want to, even though this is ultimately a post about learning and growing, not about complaining or—you know, 8 Steps for More Visceral Bouts of Rumination. Still, I’ll ask a burning question to get it out of he way: were they in the wrong here?

Maybe, in some ways. I’m a little surprised they didn’t offer their warning that their feedback can “sometimes be difficult for an author to read” more up-front, before actually sending it along. At this high a level, even a lowly author is entitled to expect a certain tone when hearing about what does and doesn’t work. Then again, maybe their policy is that any author who makes it into the winnowing round can handle the blunt instrument and the rawness of first, hyper-critical reactions—and they’re perfectly within their rights to that. I do know, however, that if I’d written some of those comments and learned later that the author saw them, I would be embarrassed. This is going to affect how I comment as an editor from now on, no matter how private my notes.

But I can’t finally change any of this; I can’t go back and unread what I read, can’t say “Thanks but no thanks” to that offer of feedback (and I still believe I’d have been pretty silly to turn it down). So, what am I going to take away from this? What am I going to learn?

This experience definitely demystified the “top bracket” for me. I think I’ve always had these illusions that making it to the final review round means everyone up there is just heartbroken when you’re edged out. The fact is that, though fewer than 5% of submissions (out of thousands) make it to the winnowing round, only about one of five of those will go on to see publication—and to make those decisions, people put on blinders. They pummel stories that may have delighted them as a casual reader. At this level, editors are looking for any reason to reject your story, making room for ones that approach that given day’s definition of “perfection.” And that day, my story fell way short.

I would’ve liked to believe I put up more of a fight, that the process was more of a struggle. I think I expected it would be, that high up the ladder. Turns out that, sometimes, it’s not. Just because you’re up at the top of the heap doesn’t mean everyone is fighting to let your story in. It doesn’t mean that rejecting you is a “hard decision” for everyone involved, and it doesn’t mean that the whole table believed yours was one of the “excellent stories” that had to be turned away because of space.

And yet, I’m still left with reassurance, with the sort of big and smiling sign-off that every author craves:

Your story reached the winnowing round for a reason. Fewer than 5% of stories reach the winnowing round.  The fact that your story was among them is an accomplishment you should be proud of. Thanks again for submitting with us, and we hope to see your name in our slush pile again soon!

I don’t doubt that any of this is true. I don’t doubt that I had some kind of positive impact over there, or that this story will find a home somewhere else—maybe even complete with the same jokes that pissed a couple people off. But it’s hard to find a home when your compasses are fucked. That’s the most important thing I can do right now: recalibrate my compasses. I need to remember the praise I’ve already received from people who have read far more of my work, and seen my consistent strengths and weaknesses. I need to remember the small but game-changing successes I’ve managed so far. I need to choose who I’m going to believe, when my compasses start spinning again…

I’ll start by believing the friend who said, “Whoever criticised this is a moron. It's fantastic.”

Even so, here are three things I’ll still do differently based on this feedback:

• I’ll admit that I’m not, like, really good at flash fiction. At least, it’s not my instinct. I world-build a lot, writing interesting scenes and characters that make the reader want more… But then that “wanting more” works against me at the 1000 word limit. If I’m going to do more flash, I need to study the form more closely—or just put on my big-boy pants and submit some longer, riskier stuff.

• I’ll work at setting my tone. When writing this piece, I think I “discovered” somewhere in the first third that it would be pretty tongue-in-cheek. Several readers at this journal did not pick up on that, and I need to own it. I’ve been advised that, if I should change anything about this story, it should be a clearer sense of tone in the first half-page. I’ll make such tone-checking a habit from now on.

• I’m going to cap the time I spend revising this piece. My instinct is to over revise—like, by a lot. I’d never let anything go, if you gave me infinite time. There is a good chance that, if I let it, this kind of feedback will send me into a tailspin of self-doubt over whether or not I really have the instincts or the talent to recognize and rectify my own shortcomings. But what I’m dealing with here is a market fit problem, not a Lyle is a bad writer problem. The time and the tools should be proportionate to the reality. I’ll give 2 more hours of editing to these 5 pages of text. Then, I have to try again.

And if all else fails, I guess there’s always the option of killing an editor with a flugelhorn—which is, apparently, a stroke of genius.