If at First You Don’t Sell a Story, Wait a Couple Years

When it comes to freelance writing, rejections are the currency of experience. As the late Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch would’ve said, editor rejections are brick walls to keep less persistent people out of the writing business. The trick is to climb the wall before it grows tall enough to block out your self-esteem.

Successful writers get rejected, but after they recover from the indignity, they tinker and polish, tweak and tighten, and quickly query again. If the idea is strong, eventually you can find the right home for it.

But here’s a secret: Sometimes, the right home is the first place you pitched, even if some short-sighted editor rejected you. The shelf life of editors, after all, is not significantly different from, say, that carton of milk going green in the back of your fridge. Wait a while, and you may find that the person who rejected you has been replaced by someone who feels differently.

Or maybe it’s not the editor. Maybe the timing just wasn’t right for the topic. Or, equally plausible but harder to swallow: Maybe the piece isn’t good enough yet.

In all these cases, your work has two faithful allies. Their names are “Improve” and “Wait.” I’m proof. I’ve sold two essays to publications that previously rejected them.

The first was a first-person essay I titled “The Silent Crisis of a First-Time Caller.” In it, I recounted the miserable occasion when I called the Rush Limbaugh Show, not expecting to get through, but did, and found myself on national radio five minutes later with children shrieking in the background and, as it turned out, nothing of importance to say.

Hillary Clinton had been in the news (I know, when is she not?), this time talking about the “silent crisis” of child care—how working women were desperate to find competent caregivers who could take care of their kids during the day. Limbaugh claimed the issue was nonsense, and I—desperate to find a competent caregiver so I could work—was outraged.

I was also too busy caring for my shrieking children to think through my argument before I picked up the phone. Nationwide humiliation ensued. A week later, I wrote the essay, primarily to make money, but also to lick my post-traumatic-radio wounds.

To sell this essay, I needed an audience of conservatives intimate with talk radio, Dittoheads sympathetic to my plight. This severely limited the range of potential publications, so I headed straight to the top and submitted it to National Review. The editor was kind and swift in dismissing my essay as “not quite right” for their needs at the time.

After grumbling for a few days, I pitched my essay again to other magazines. More rejections came in. After a while, my enthusiasm waned, and I began to think that maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t meant to publish this piece any more than I was meant to be on the Rush Limbaugh Show. To the back of the bin it went.

Every now and then, I would come across that essay, tinker a little, and think about how it wasn’t half-bad. Then, I’d forget it again.

Four years later, I submitted another essay to National Review Online, where it was enthusiastically accepted. This was a humor piece called “The Ann Coulter/Strom Thurmond Diet Plan” and the editorial momentum from its warm reception gave me an idea. I pulled out the Limbaugh essay, polished it, and sent it in.

Coincidentally, the Rush Limbaugh Show was celebrating its 15^th anniversary the same week I resubmitted. Bingo.

NRO bought the piece, and Limbaugh read it, linked to it on his website, and sent me a personal note. And I happily wrote for NRO for several years after that, duly cognizant of the lesson.

The lesson came in handy, because, sure enough, it happened again with another publication.

Two years after my national-radio debut, I ran a half-marathon in South Carolina, and penned an essay about the experience, calling it “Confessions of a Fat Runner.” I wrote with a specific venue in mind: the “My Turn” column in Newsweek. I submitted the article, confident it was a good piece and perfect for the column’s broad readership. The editor, alas, did not share my view.

Again, I revised the essay and sent it elsewhere, but polite editors always returned it to me, saying it wasn’t quite right for them. Of course it wasn’t—I’d written it withNewsweek in mind.

So I set it aside for a while, and “a while” turned into five years. Eventually, I came across it one day while cleaning out my digital files, and sent it to Newsweek again.

Three weeks later, an editor called to say she loved the piece. She sent a photographer to take a thousand or so pictures of me, and a month later, it ran.

After publication, I got a pile of email from readers, including some who complained that I wasn’t really fat in the picture. Well, who’s to say what’s fat? But I confessed to some that I had lost 20 pounds since I initially wrote the essay, which eventually became a book.

In both cases, I never told the accepting editors about the rejecting editors. Really, who needed to know?

In truth, the delayed publication may not have been so much about fate as simple rewriting and revision. In both cases, the pieces were significantly better when I resubmitted them. I cut “Caller” significantly and completely rewrote the lede to “Fat Runner.” I tweaked and polished every time I opened the files over the years. Both essays benefited from their involuntarily hibernation, as well as my increasing maturity as a self-editor. Maybe the essays just weren’t good enough the first time I submitted them but were ready the second time around.

Then again, maybe it was fate, the invisible hand of a meddling universe intent on having its say.

Regardless, I was happy to have the bylines. And the checks. And I learned something in my 40s that all 4-year-olds intuitively know: Just because someone says “no” the first time doesn’t mean you won’t get what you want. So when, in the course of your freelance career, you hit one of those brick walls Randy Pausch talked about, pay attention. Maybe it doesn’t mean to stop, or even to keep going. Maybe it’s just telling you to wait.