"Please Excuse the Impersonal Nature of the Reply": What Rejection Letters Really Say to Those Who Get Them

It is a truism that those pursuing a career as a writer, and submitting their work for publication, experience a great deal of rejection, overwhelmingly by way of form rejection slips. Those who acknowledge the fact commonly wear on their faces that "smelled a fart" expression that stupid people think conveys gravitas and say something like "Rejection? Yes, terrible that," as if the emotional wound of a "No" in reply to one piece of their work was all that they suffered.

Of course, that is not at all the case.

There is the fact that submitting that work was a time-consuming, sometimes costly, never pleasant process--and the time, effort, money that went into that submission was completely wasted.

There is the reminder, not least by way of that "impersonal" reply, that the other party has all of the power in the relationship, they have none, and the other party makes the fullest use of its advantage in controlling the terms of the exchange so completely--with that impersonal rejection letter that rendered no satisfaction whatsoever peremptorily cutting off the conversation. ("Don't call us. We won't call you.") Because they are of no account whatsoever in the eyes of those who sent that form letter, and it matters not in the slightest if they do not excuse the impersonal nature of the reply.

And there is, for those who have been at the activity of collecting such rejection letters for a while, the way that each and every one of those letters affirms them in the increasing suspicion that those rejection letters are all they will ever get--because, contrary to the Big Lie that keeps alive that vast industry living on the hopes of aspiring authors (the books and workshops and courses and the rest), publishing is not some big meritocracy, the slush pile is in fact exceedingly marginal within the publishing world's release schedules, and, as Jack London's Martin Eden began to wonder amid his own struggles, he was not dealing with human beings, just a machine that took in submissions and returned rejections the way a vending machine takes coins and gives out sticks of gum.

The wastage, the humiliating treatment to which they are subjected as inferiors, and the impression of fraud and futility--all that is also conveyed by the rejection letter, and it is all the more devastating when trying to get published was not some whim, but their sole hope of a life they would find worth living, as it was for Eden.

But of course, this is more than the sort of person whose idea of expressing gravitas is pulling a "smelled a fart" face can wrap their small mind around.