Creative submissions and response times

Getting rejected is part of the game of writing, and any serious writer who wants to be published needs to get used to the idea.  Stephen King used to pin his rejection letters to his wall, as a perverse kind of motivation, or just to remind himself that he was in fact submitting and working hard. As artists with a personal investment in what we write, writers naturally take rejection hard, and it can be dispiriting and disheartening.

While it's risking exposing myself as a fraud -- someone who's not as successful a writer as I'd like to be -- I must admit that yesterday I received a particularly difficult rejection for a non-fiction piece from a magazine I admire and was hopeful about contributing to. Writing this essay proved emotionally draining, but I believed the end result was worth it. The editors unfortunately compounded this psychic pain by prolonging the rejection process, sending me a curtly worded slip after having the piece in their possession for six months.

Publication's important, but how long should we wait? 

Normally, when an editor takes such a long time to return something, the writer is apt to take that as a positive sign, a variation on "no news is good news." So a writer may get hopeful, which is not the editor's fault as such, and then must still process the rejection as a routine sort of thing that happens very often in the writing business.

I have edited a literary journal and understand that dealing with the volume of submissions, even for  relatively unknown journal, can be overwhelming. Yet it seems unconscionable that we have come to accept it as "routine" for an editor to take six months or longer to respond to a writer. And sometimes editors don't respond at all.

This isn't just about being rejected. It's about professionalism and the very real harm that comes from taking a piece off the market for six months, assuming the writer is being respectful enough not to send out simultaneous submissions, which annoy most editors. Unfortunately, because of the market dynamics, writers have no say in how the game is shaped or played. We are expected to conform to editors' demands (which vary widely), wait patiently for any kind of response, and be grateful and respectful when an editor declines.

All of this makes me personally reluctant to even submit material, although I have of course had work accepted in the past. The process is just emotionally tiring and frustratingly inefficient. But of course, I continue on, because I recognize the value of publication from an artistic standpoint (not from the standpoint, as many non-writers sometimes assume, of vanity).  Here's an earlier piece I wrote about the value of publication, and while I'm more jaded now, I suppose I stand by it.