One of the nuggets of Ray Bradbury advice I was reminded of after his passing was the concept of aiming for 500 rejections as the litmus test of whether you should be a writer. I may be muddling this a little – my copy of “Zen in the Art of Writing” has long since vanished, so I’m relying on the comments of others and my own memories to recreate this sage advice.
Recently, a capstone has been loosened, at least temporarily. I’ve written 2 short stories in the last week, with the notes for a third sitting, waiting (the second story needs a full redraft before I can tackle the new one). Being reminded of the Bradbury advice is no accident – it was thinking back on his other advice that helped remind me of how to write short stories again.
So here I sit on a Saturday morning. 500 rejections seems like a good target to me, but there are a few ground rules I’m going to impose:
- They have to be meaningful rejections. Sending the right story to the right market, not a rejection because I sent a horror story to a cooking journal.
- I will be sending my stories to those markets listed as pro and semi-pro – no false positives here. Its not that I hold my work to such a high standard, but rather that in order for it to count as a sale, it should count as a professional sale.
- The goal is publication.
- This means writing a lot more, and it also means putting myself out there a lot more, but that’s kind of the idea. You can’t get 500 rejections for one story, and the law of statistics begin to melt in your favor the more you have floating out there. Write 500 short stories and something has to stick 😉
So, with all of that in mind, I present my first rejection in this new era, from Lightspeed magazine for the short story (horribly) entitled “Frog Prince.” 499 or so more rejections to go!
