A.J. Flowers

I’m accustomed to getting rejections from literary magazines, because well, the acceptance rates to the ones I submit to are less than 1%. Let’s be realistic for a minute, rejection is the most likely outcome!

Rejections are a part of a writer’s life, and they, too, can have value. What I look forward to are personal rejections. They really give me insight into what I can do to stand out, improve, and meet my goals. C.C. Finlay is the editor from one of my favorite magazines, F&SF, and he has often given me personal feedback for my stories. According to Duotrope, my favorite story submission manager, Finlay rejects 99.3% of stories submitted, but has provided personal feedback 57% of the time.  I’m impressed by the speed with which he goes through submissions, with an average response time of two weeks, and he doesn’t seem to delegate his choices to readers. Just for reference, the typical magazine takes two months to respond. I don’t know how he does it, but it’s amazing to get feedback from someone so experienced.

Most personal feedback results that I receive from lit mags within the past year praise my prose, pacing, and sentence-level skills. These are learned writing skills that I’ve been honing for the past few years, so it’s nice to see validation that I’ve definitely made progress. But I’ve seen a trend in personal rejections. They praise my writing, but reject the submission because the story didn’t touch them or the ending wasn’t satisfying. I know that some feel the story is good too, but it still didn’t make the cut because they were looking for something specific or the vibe just didn’t match the theme of that month’s magazine.

Of course it’ll be difficult to overcome circumstantial rejection, but there’s a clear trend of something that is preventing pro-magazines from accepting my stories. They want a deeper “story,” something that really touches their readers and makes them think. It needs emotion, passion, and a plot that stitches together perfectly from beginning to end.

When it comes to short stories, I think my creativity is just fine, as is my character building, but it needs to be targeted and more focused. I tend to just sit down and write a story, which can make it meandering and overflowing with more “story” than there needs to be. I need to adjust my gears and try approaching this from a different angle. For the next few stories that I’ll write, I’ll try writing a mini-outline, or having an end already in mind and see how it goes. I’m hoping that approaching a story with a plan, I’ll finally tick all the boxes necessary to create an amazing story that’ll make the cut.