The Fine Line Between Acceptance and Rejection

Years ago, I  read the view of an editor from a major journal who estimated that the vast majority of submissions are terrible. My experience leads me to a different conclusion.

Most journals are inundated with submissions and can only publish a fraction of what they receive, maybe 1/100. Many journals publish primarily work by established writers solicited by the editors, so the fraction of work coming in via the slush pile is even smaller, maybe 1/500. So does that mean the other 499 are terrible? Or even bad? Many of those are probably pretty good, but the editors did not rank them to be the best out of the stack of 500 they were considering.

When I began submitting, all my work earned form rejections. Then, as my writing got better, I slowly started getting some acceptances. Now I'm at a point where I still get more rejections than acceptances, but about as often as not I get personal rejections that say things like "this made our short list" or "our editors spent significant time discussing this essay, but . . ." or there's the old classic: "please consider us in the future." I take those personalized rejections as a very good sign that I'm on the right track with my writing. It means what I'm doing is good, very good even, but just not the 1/100 or 1/500 they want to publish in the next issue.

I recently served as a guest editor for Driftwood Press, a journal in its second year. They published a story of mine earlier this year and asked me to help with editorial duties this summer, going through the slush pile and picking a few submissions for consideration.

I was assigned fifty short stories, which broke down roughly like this:
1 was great. I voted yes, it should be highly considered for publication.
5 - 10 were in the maybe pile, good but not quite right for the journal's aesthetics or maybe matching another editor's tastes more than mine, so definitely worth having someone else offer a second opinion.
1 or 2 stories were withdrawn by their authors.
2 or 3 didn't meet submission guidelines.
20 - 30 featured some good writing but had some problem or other: they needed additional editing or relied on clichéd plot turns that experienced writers recognize and beginning writers don't. Basically, these stories were promising and with more work and experience, these writers will produce very good material, but these stories just aren't there yet.
Only 5 - 10 were bad, like full-of-typos-bad.

So here's my takeaway from this experience on the other side of the slush pile: there is a lot of good work out there. Being the one standout in the pile is hard. It means being absolutely polished with more interesting characters and plot elements and more resonant metaphors and sophisticated language use than all the surrounding pieces. You  have to hit every note just right to be that one standout.

And even then, you never know. It could be the one story I selected will wind up rejected by the next editor who reads it. This journal gets hundreds of submissions but only publishes four to eight stories per issue (and again, some journals have worse odds than that). So it could happen that the next issue is published, and none of the fifty stories assigned to me are included. If that's the case, I hope the many good writers I read understand the rejection doesn't mean their stories were bad. A lot of them were good, but the odds are long. To them, I say, keep submitting. Keep writing. And please consider us again in the future!