Hello there rejection, it wasn’t nice to have you hanging around me the last few weeks but there you are, reminding me that I am way off the mark in my writing and have a long journey still to get to where I want to be.
Talk about eating my humble pie, and it doesn’t taste very nice.
My last few articles have been rejected from publications on Medium lately and although this was not new to me, it was new that the rejections came from different publications and occurred around the same time. Even after making revisions to the piece, it was still rejected or currently still pending a second review.
So, were they right to reject my writing?
The short answer is, yes.
I was impatient to get more writing out in a slow month for me and I wrote a few stories out without further editing and made mistakes in both the writing and my publication submission strategy.
What mistakes?
1. Submitting Stories That Are Not A Match For The Publication
Yes, an amateur mistake, and it was made known to me clearly by the editors for those publications, that my stories were not a fit for their publication’s theme. Hence I was rejected for my third story submission to them. Maybe the fourth attempt will be it, right? Here’s to hoping.
2. Lengthy And Wordy Stories
Some of my rejected stories were due to my writing being too unnecessarily lengthy and long-winded. I knew this weakness in my writing from my earlier days where I would go on and on without a full stop and included nonrelevant information into the said story, which could have been omitted altogether. What a bore to read.
3. Lack Of Review And Editing
Another amateur writing mistake. I had a read through my rejected pieces and took note of what the editors feedback in their notes to me. It had grammatical errors and the mistake of being overly long-winded as mentioned in point number 2 above. If I had taken the time to re-read and edit through my article, and used my free Grammarly app I would have had a much higher chance of getting my stories accepted into their publications.
Apart from that, let’s not forget that it hurts a little bit to get these rejections in a row, but I can fully understand where the editors were coming from, and they were not being mean but purely objective in only accepting what they wanted, and only stories that make the cut for their publications.
At least I learned my lesson, and here’s to better writing in the future.
With the ending of this article, I am now just about finished healing from my writing bruises and will soon proceed to take the band-aid off.