Chapter 74: Avoiding Rejection: A Guide

Writerland is a newsletter from The Delacorte Review whose mission is to help writers tell the stories they need to tell.

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Stories come to us all the time and much as we’d like to say yes, we love it and want to publish it, we cannot. This is not for a lack of effort by writers who have taken the great risk of putting their ideas into a story and sending it along in the hope that an editor will like it.

It brings us no joy to say no – we have all been, and continue being that writer, and so understand that having your work rejected hurts.

The task of screening submissions belongs to our senior editor, Cissi Falligant, and before you think, oh so that’s the person I will always hate for turning down my submission, be advised that Cissi is not only one of the wisest and most thoughtful editors I have ever worked with, but one of the two or three nicest people I know. Maybe even number one.

Cissi periodically sends us all notes on submissions; she reads them carefully and with an eye toward seeing if there is a way to make a flawed piece succeed. But often they just will not work ; the flaws are too fundamental and too pervasive.

Much as rejection stings, I feel it is helpful to know what keeps stories we see from finding their way onto our pages. When I put the question to Cissi, she replied with a headline that is just so her: Why stories fail and the stories that make us sad.

And with that she began to explain:

At the Delacorte Review we receive hundreds of stories each year.  Only a few make it to publication.  Many are rejected for simple reasons.  But the stories that haunt us, the ones that make us sad, are the stories that could be great but are unpublishable. 

Narrative nonfiction is difficult to write.  It requires the storytelling skills of a fiction writer combined with the dogged reporting skills of a journalist.  Even when a writer recognizes a good story idea, few can execute it.  

First we reject the “Easy No’s” – the pieces that won’t work at all.

We publish narrative nonfiction.  Yet people submit essays, articles, term papers (some still with footnotes), and other forms that show a clear misunderstanding of our publication.

 If you are a professor or grad student with an excellent dissertation, please do not send it to us.  As wonderful as your scholarship may be, and even in the unlikely event that it involves original reporting, the academic style is the antithesis of great storytelling. 

Memoirs are among the most gripping category we publish, but only if they involve a riveting story, well reported and well told.   If you have a personal reflection on a bad breakup, a sudden depression, mean parents, chronic illness or any of life’s other vicissitudes, we are sorry for you, but most submissions in this category are just whining written down. It takes a fine and wise writer to turn a life event into a compelling story. 

Another category we don’t publish is travelogues.  We are glad that you had a nice trip to Patagonia or Nepal or Samoa but unless something happened that changed your life or someone else’s, your 20,000- word piece on what a cool trip you had is not enough.

Divulging confidences is another red flag for us.  If you participate in a 12-step group, keep it up but please don’t reveal to us the other member’s secrets.  They are not yours to tell.  Similarly, if your child, best friend, parent, or brother, has a great yarn, please be careful that you are not violating their privacy.  Do not risk your family relationships or friendships because you are a chatter box.  When this person confided in you, they were not expecting you to broadcast their story internationally.

Similarly, if you are providing a service to famous people, do not assume that they want your take on their lives spread publicly.  If you came to know them as a lawyer, architect, nanny, or neighbor, they may have let their guard down and not treated you with the circumspection they would a member of the press.  We have real questions about your reflections on the six visits you spent with the famous person and what his or her life really means.

Congratulations if you have strong opinions about something. Turn it into an Op-Ed piece for someone else. Please do not send us pages of argument between you and your friend over a political or philosophical issue. 

And for those with multi-generational family sagas, only a master can organize that much material and sustain the tension. 

But the real problem for us, the stories that make us sad, are the stories where writers have a terrific idea and grasp the meaning of what they are trying to tell but the stories don’t work and it is always for one of two reasons: flawed reporting or poor storytelling.  

Flawed reporting is a problem for fiction writers, even those who teach in MFA programs, along with retired professors in other disciplines and new writers. We also receive many under-reported pieces which are essentially the seed of a great story but the writer hasn’t put the work in to develop it.  The only solution, is for the writer to do old-fashioned, serious reporting. And this presents a great challenge to the inexperienced who have never gone out into the world curious, following the facts to the story they uncover, not the story they set out to tell. 

Reporters, on the other hand, send us pieces filled with facts but lacking story dynamics. How sad to read a piece that includes all the elements of a great, dramatic tale but the author doesn’t know how to write it.

Some reporters do a fine job of interviewing all the people important to their topic, researching the policies and context of the problem, and describing the setting and events.  But reading their work is like reading raw notes – there is no narrative at all.  They send us the interviews and facts without ever writing the story. 

Another mistake good reporters make sometimes is focusing on What rather than Who.  We understand that a reporter can fall in love with all the facts he or she worked so hard to discover. But sending us 24 pages of beautifully reported information about an issue without ever focusing on one person is sending us data without a tale. 

And that brings us to the art of storytelling.  Everyone is busy and all of us are overwhelmed with reading material.  How difficult it is to keep a reader’s attention all the way through a long piece!  The writer has to make us care about at least one person who then becomes the vehicle for telling the story.  The art is interweaving that individual’s experience with all the data and context without ever losing the story’s momentum for momentum is key.  How do you make that reader want to stick with you graph after graph, page after page?  Only by making them care so much about your main figure that they can’t wait to find out what happens next.  What made the main character the way they are? What motivates them? What are the stakes? Every well-told story in any category includes suspense – no exceptions. 

Over the years, there have been stories we fought for.  The editors at the Delacorte Review are generous and patient and have put many hours into working with writers to elevate their stories, editing and teaching that goes on for months and sometimes years.  But we can’t do it for everyone.    

So it is with great sadness that we say no to some of these stories, pieces that could be great, written by sincere hard-working writers who got halfway there and don’t know how to do the rest.  We know how to help them, but we also know how much work it will be and frankly, we often don’t have the time. 

As many as we have rescued, there are many more we couldn’t save. And those are the ones that haunt us, that stay in our memories because they were so strong, that remind us of what they could have been if only we had the time to work with the writer to fix them.  

So we open our submissions with great hope, hope for splendid stories, and hope for all the struggling writers who are learning the lessons of reporting and the art of storytelling.  We are cheering you on. 

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We’ll be off until Labor Day. Back on September 9th.

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Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture. Writerland, The Delacorte Review Newsletter comes out every other week. Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website. Never miss an update.