The Wit’s Guide to Rejection

Or, a lifeless kick to the guts

The Rejected Poet, William Powell Frith, 1852

What misunderstood genius — and at last count, 3,460 of them read this newsletter! — doesn’t love to read stories of great writers being rejected? Publishers told Proust his work was “full of duchesses, not at all our style.” They told Flaubert that Madame Bovary was a novel buried under “a heap of details which are well done but utterly superfluous.” They suggested that Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita should “be buried under a stone for a thousand years.” And for the love of Ahab, those artless ingrates told Herman Melville to ditch the white whale: “For instance could not the Captain be struggling with a depravity towards young, perhaps voluptuous, maidens?”

“I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.”
— Sylvia Plath

Of course there is survivorship bias at play here; uncollected are all the rejections of the vast majority of things that deserved rejection. No editor will be celebrated for calling trash trash. Can you blame the bleary-eyed editor who accepts one in 100 pieces if they accept 1 in 101?

“Don’t make the mistake of enclosing a self-addressed stamped envelope big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation for the editor.”
— Ring Lardner

Shaun Usher of Letters of Note has seen many rejection letters in his research and sums up the genre as “a lifeless kick to the guts aimed en masse at a pool of unsuitables who are, it would seem, undeserving of a personal shove.” But among the form letters he found a gem from Brian Doyle who proves that “it’s not you, it’s me” does actually work if you’re sufficiently specific.

“Thank you for your lovely and thoughtful submission to the magazine, which we are afraid we are going to have to decline, for all sorts of reasons,” Doyle writes. “The weather is dreary, our backs hurt, we have seen too many cats today and as you know cats are why God invented handguns, there is a sweet incoherence and self-absorption in your piece that we find alluring but we have published far too many of same in recent years mostly authored by the undersigned….”

He lists more problems, among them a parakeet with a goiter, and ends with grace: “Please feel free to send us anything you think would fit these pages, and thank you for considering our magazine for your work. It’s an honor.” The acknowledgement of our shared suffering and the ability to joke about it is all you can ask of any human at any time, really.

“After being turned down by a number of publishers, he decided to write for posterity.”
― George Ade

Before he founded Buzzfeed and before she played Gina on Brooklyn 99, Jonah and Chelsea Peretti founded The World’s First Rejection Line, a phone number you could use to “streamline your personal, business, and familial relationships” and “give to creditors, telemarketers, and religious zealots.” When you called, a recorded voice explained that “Unfortunately, the person who gave you this number does not want to talk to you again,” and then offers the option of talking to a comfort specialist, listening to a sad poem, or “clinging to the unrealistic hope that a relationship is still possible.” Though the 2001 website remains, the number is sadly no longer in service.

“Rejection means ‘to throw back.’ You throw yourself at her, and she throws you back.”
― Tony Tulathimutte

The solution to rejection is found in nature, where there are K-selected species and R-selected species. The Ks, like kangaroos, have very few offspring and lavish them with care; if one is lost, it’s soul-crushing. And there’s nothing sadder than a kangaroo with a crushed soul. The Rs, like rats (this is actually the mnemonic I used to remember the concept in first-year biology, and clearly it worked!) crank out their little ratlings and let them fend for themselves. Many don’t make it but enough do to keep exterminators around the world in business.

“Please curb your doggerel.”
― R.K. Munkittrick

So think of your efforts as rats and the editors as exterminators; eventually, you’ll overwhelm them. And you’ll end up like the smugly satisfied Muriel Spark: “Thinking back, it is surprising how many — almost all, in fact — of my once-rejected pieces were subsequently published, as I began to make my name,” she recalls in her essay The Writing Life. “Among the rejects, of course, I found some which, on reflection, I was not quite happy with. Those I put aside. But the majority of those one-time rejects have become a part of my oeuvre, studied in universities.” 💅

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It’s March, the calendar alleges, and so I have a new Riposte Card to offer up for my paying subscribers! It’s a good one — elegantly mordant when viewed from afar and mordantly elegant when examined up close. It’s by Natàlia Pàmies Lluís, a Barcelona/Toronto illustrator who draws herself like this:

And the quotation she’s chosen to illuminate is this gem:

“One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.”
— Jane Austen

I’ll reveal it in this space next week, and mail it out shortly after! Subscribe today!

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“Actors search for rejection. If they don’t get it, they reject themselves.”
―Charlie Chaplin

“We have read your manuscript with boundless delight,” says an apocryphal rejection letter from a scientific journal circulated on the early internet, when the relatively rapid transmission of unattributed jokes was the biggest problem we faced. “If we were to publish your paper, it would be impossible for us to publish any work of lower standard. And as it is unthinkable that in the next thousand years we shall see its equal, we are, to our regret, compelled to return your divine composition, and to beg you a thousand times to overlook our short sight and timidity.” I agree! And for next week?

It’s not you, it’s Issue No. 296 of Get Wit Quick. I accept all readers. The newsletter’s mascot is a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. My book, perhaps voluptuous, was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting which was rejected before it was accepted. Tapping the ❤️ below is acceptance.