Approaching Personal Feedback
As a writer with a lot of stories and poems, I do a lot of submitting my stories to markets. Of course, the flipside of that is that I receive a lot of rejections on my stories. Many markets take fewer than 1 percent of the stories submitted to them. This means that even if you send them a perfect story, they might still say no to it.
Some markets simply send back a rejection with no commentary. But when you get a personal rejection, where the editor or slush reader might tell you what problems they saw in your story (or what they liked about it, even if they didn’t accept it), there’s often a question about what, if anything, you should do with that information. I tweeted about this recently as part of the NSFWords Thursday evening Twitter chat, but I realized that the length of a tweet wasn’t nearly enough space to explore this topic, so now it’s turning into a blog post!
My initial statement was “When a pers. R explains what didn’t work for the reader, it’s good insight, but it doesn’t mean it’s something that needs fixing. Readers/editors don’t always understand the story. Sometimes it means your story needs more clarity, other times it’s a them thing.”
Breaking this down a little further, the first sentence is talking about the sort of personal rejection that has suggestions for what the story needs or doesn’t need. For example, a personal rejection could say “I found this side character unimportant to the story.” Some writers might see that comment and think “oh, I’ll remove that character.” But the important thing to remember is that one person found that character unimportant. Unless you fully agree with their assessment, I’d leave that character alone.
Why? Because the person who made the comment has already said “no” to the story. If they liked the story except for that element, they might instead have asked you to consider a rewrite that removes that character. But since they’ve said no already, there’s no strong reason to change the story to fit their idea of the story, unless you fully agree with their assessment. In other words, you may not necessarily make the revisions they’re suggesting if those changes don’t resonate with you.
Secondly, there’s a difference between something being unclear in your story vs. a reader not understanding something in your story. Sometimes they’re connected. But veteran writers have many stories about personal rejections that completely missed something they’d written into the story. In some cases, there are revisions needed to make something more clear, but in other cases, the information is clear as day and the reader just missed it entirely. Maybe they were reading a lot of stories quickly, maybe they were distracted by something else going on, or possibly even they stopped reading the story before something was explained.
So if there’s a case where a personal rejection mentions something that you think is crystal clear in your story, it can be worth it to take a step back and make sure that the thing is just as clear as you believe it to be. Maybe ask someone who hasn’t already read the story to look at it. But it’s also possible that the person reading the story initially didn’t read it in the way you wrote it. So it doesn’t always mean you need to revise that story.
The short version is: when you get a personal rejection, consider what the reader is saying. You don’t always have to act on their suggestions, but they may be worth at least considering closely to see if they are giving you advice to make your story better (period) or to make your story better for them (who has already said no). The first is worth doing, while the second often is not.
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