Twelve submissions. Eleven rejections, each with its own specific flavor of polite discouragement. Then, finally, a yes that made the whole spreadsheet worth it.
A humor piece I wrote close to two years ago finally got accepted for publication this week, on its twelfth submission attempt, after eleven previous rejections from eleven different outlets, each one logged carefully in a spreadsheet I have been maintaining this entire time with a level of obsessive detail I am not entirely proud of but that I now, with the acceptance finally in hand, feel genuinely vindicated in having kept up so faithfully across two full years of rejection.
The spreadsheet itself has become something of a private joke among the handful of writer friends I have shown it to, a running document tracking not just which outlets rejected the piece and when, but the specific flavor and tone of each individual rejection, ranging from the genuinely encouraging “not quite right for us but please send more” form letters, to the considerably more deflating pure form rejections with no personal note attached whatsoever, to one memorably brutal, if genuinely useful, personalized rejection from an editor who took the time to explain in real detail exactly why the piece’s central premise, in her professional view, simply did not sustain itself past the first third.
That specific brutal rejection, roughly submission attempt number seven if my spreadsheet’s dates are accurate, which I trust them to be given how obsessively I have maintained this document, actually turned out to be the single most useful piece of feedback across the entire two-year process, prompting a genuinely significant structural rewrite that I think meaningfully improved the piece, even though it took another five submission attempts after that specific rewrite before anyone actually said yes to the considerably stronger revised version.
I think there is something genuinely important about this specific two-year saga that goes beyond simply the eventual, satisfying acceptance, a reminder of how much genuine persistence this particular kind of freelance humor writing actually demands, considerably more than most people outside this specific corner of the writing world probably appreciate. A single published piece, once it finally appears in print or online, arrives looking entirely finished and entirely inevitable to the reader encountering it for the first time, with absolutely no visible trace of the two years and eleven rejections that preceded its actual acceptance.
I want to be honest that there were several points across these two years where I genuinely considered simply abandoning the piece entirely, filing it away with the handful of other pieces in my own drawer that never found a home despite considerable effort, and I think what actually kept me submitting it, attempt after attempt, was a specific, stubborn confidence in the underlying premise that I could not fully shake even during the more discouraging stretches of rejection, a confidence that this week’s acceptance has, at minimum, retroactively validated, whatever that validation is actually worth against two years of accumulated rejection first.
I sent the spreadsheet itself to the accepting editor once the piece was officially confirmed, half as a joke and half as a genuine offering of the piece’s actual journey, and she responded with genuine delight, asking if she could actually publish the spreadsheet alongside the piece itself as a kind of behind-the-scenes companion, an idea I am seriously considering despite the mild embarrassment of having my own obsessive rejection-tracking habits made quite this publicly visible.
Twelve submissions, two years, one genuinely unhinged spreadsheet, and finally, this week, a yes. I am allowing myself to properly enjoy this one before I inevitably start the exact same process again with whatever half-finished piece is currently sitting, similarly unloved, in my own drawer waiting for its own turn at this same long, uncertain road.
I think what I actually want to hold onto from this whole two-year saga, more than the specific satisfaction of the eventual acceptance itself, is the evidence it has given me that my own judgment about which pieces are actually worth persisting with is, at least occasionally, more reliable than eleven consecutive rejections might otherwise have led me to believe. That is a genuinely useful thing to know about myself, going forward, the next time some other piece sits in my drawer collecting its own growing stack of polite, discouraging rejections.
I have already pulled up the spreadsheet again tonight, adding a new tab for whatever comes next, because I suspect, whatever this particular success teaches me, the actual practice of this job remains exactly what it has always been, a long, uncertain, mostly rejection-filled process that occasionally, unpredictably, produces a genuine yes worth all the accumulated noes that came before it.
A friend outside this industry, hearing the whole two-year saga over dinner tonight, asked genuinely, kindly, why I had not simply given up on the piece considerably earlier, given how discouraging eleven consecutive rejections would presumably feel to most reasonable people. I did not have a fully satisfying answer for her in the moment, beyond simply that the piece kept feeling worth one more attempt every single time, a stubbornness I am not sure I can fully explain rationally but that I am, tonight, deeply grateful I apparently possess in whatever quantity this particular two-year saga required of me.
More from this author at Violet Woolf, prat.uk.