Translating Editor Rejections

Common rejection terms, what they actually mean, & what to do about them

“Oh my god, wow, I absolutely loved this novel. So captivatingly original and yet sweepingly universal. But as much as I admired literally everything else about this novel, I didn’t quite connect with the _______.”

If this sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’ve been on the receiving end of rejection letters from editors. I’ve mentioned before that these can be hard to parse. The standard format is a compliment sandwich:

1. Love-bomb the manuscript to the moon and back

2. Admit some tiny, vague reservation

3. Reject the manuscript, apparently on that basis

4. End with assurances that some other editor will very likely snap it up

Naturally, whenever you receive one of these rejections, you’ll fixate on whatever reservation was named in Step 2. They loved everything but the _____. What exactly is wrong with the _____, and how can you fix it??

While it’s true that you shouldn’t read too much into these rejection letters… you’re going to do it anyway, because it’s all you have to go on, and surely the editor wasn’t just picking reservations out of a hat. They must have meant to communicate something in their rejection letter.

So for everyone who has received or will receive such rejection letters (in other words, everyone who submits a manuscript to editors), here is my attempt at a translation dictionary of these common “reservations,” with explanations of what they actually mean and how to revise accordingly.

Quick caveat before we begin: obviously, every editor’s response to your work is subjective. You can’t please everyone. But if you notice that a preponderance of editors are citing the same reservation, this post may come in handy.

Say it with me: “I absolutely adored this novel from end to end, but…”

I didn’t quite connect with the characters.

What this means:

The editor didn’t care what happened to the people in your book.

But why not?

There are many possible reasons for an editor not to care about your characters. Your characters may be unlikable, or boring, or flat, or stereotypical, or passive, or inconsistent, or tiresome, or unrealistic, or insubstantial, or, or, or…

More likely, your characters are fine in conception—but the editor isn’t yet invested in whether they live, die, make it to Disneyland, or get the girl. There isn’t enough on the page to make those struggles feel relevant to the editor.

Whatever your characters are struggling with, the reader needs to understand 1) why it’s so important to the characters, and 2) what it says about the world we live in.

Otherwise, the reader will watch a carefully plotted sequence of things happen to your characters, and will think: So what?

How do I fix it?

You’ll need to gather some trusted readers and ask some tough questions. What were the moments they felt most invested in [Character]’s fate? Were there any moments when they threw up their hands in indifference or annoyance? Did they have strong feelings mid-read on what should happen to [Character]? If [Character] had been unexpectedly run over by a bus right before the climax of the book, would it have been a great loss?

It’s possible that your readers will say: “I don’t know what those editors were on about! I loved your characters!”

But even if you’ll never know why a particular editor felt indifferent to the fate of your characters, there are plenty of ways you can make your characters easier to care about.

First: recognize your own bias. Maybe these characters matter to you because you went through something similar to what they’re going through. Maybe they’re based on real people that you care about. Maybe you’ve spent so much time thinking about them that they feel real to you.

None of this is true for the reader. So you’ll need to make these characters objectively worth caring about.

Here are some tried-and-true methods:

• give the character something they really really want & will do anything to get

• give the character an unfairly huge problem that they have to deal with

• make the character unusually competent at something that everyone around them is worse at (but give them interesting flaws to compensate)

• have the character do something noble and good that is also totally thankless and maybe even gets them in trouble

• give the character a flaw that the reader probably also has, but taken to extremes

• give the character some intriguing contradictions, memorable quirks, and appealing speech patterns that help them stand out from everyone else

• make the character’s flaws and virtues come from the same place: whatever’s sabotaging them is also the source of their greatness

• set up the character’s struggle so that their victory or defeat sends an existential message (life is fair / life isn’t fair)

I just wanted a slightly stronger sense of momentum.

What this means:

The editor felt bored reading your story.

But why?

Momentum is the feeling that something exciting lies ahead. So a story that lacks momentum fails to build to something exciting.

It could be that the exciting thing is there, at the end of your book—big gunfight at the aquarium!—but that the reader doesn’t feel it coming. Or it could be that nothing exciting happens in your book at all. Or it could be that exciting things happen in your book, but they’re unevenly distributed and they don’t seem to chain together very well.

A problem with momentum is a problem with the domino sequence of your story. How does each domino (action, conversation, decision) knock down the next (reaction, consequence, revelation)? You can have lots of “exciting” plot events, but if the cause-and-effect sequence feels arbitrary, contrived, or unclear, the reader won’t get a sense of building momentum.

Most likely, this editor felt bored reading your story because there were some dominoes in your plot sequence that didn’t knock into anything at all, and some dominoes that fell down randomly of their own accord. “Momentum” comes from looking at one domino (i.e., reading one scene) and thinking: holy shit, oh my god, but if this is happening now then what happens next is going to be even more interesting!

How do I fix it?

First, you need to know where you intend the momentum of your book to come from. What’s pulling your reader from chapter to chapter? The reader should be asking some question that they keep turning pages to answer.

The first question on this list is the most common, but that doesn’t mean it’s your only option:

• What’s going to happen to these characters?

• What is wrong with this narrator?

• Why do I feel uneasy about this place?

• What could explain the unusual sequencing of this narration?

• What ties these seemingly unrelated events together?

• How did the events at the start of this book come to pass?

So before you attempt to juice your book with more momentum, you need to figure out 1) where you want that momentum to come from, and 2) where it’s actually coming from (if anywhere). Maybe you think readers are compelled from chapter to chapter by the unique narrative voice, but actually they care about whether the dog will survive. Maybe you think they care about the dog, but really they’re intrigued by the bizarre omissions in the narrator’s reminiscences about his past.

If #1 and #2 are at odds, go with #2. If readers care more about the narrator’s bizarre omissions than the dog, don’t waste time trying to get them to care about the dog—lean into the bizarre omissions. Work with the momentum you’ve already (unwittingly) created.

The list of momentum-generating questions above is not exhaustive. But there’s one question that I deliberately left off the list:

• Will the next sentence be as beautiful as the last?

That’s because “beauty” and “lyricism” never generate momentum. They might coexist with other sources of momentum—“I want to see what this intriguing narrator will say next”—but mere beauty is not enough to keep a reader flipping pages.

Do not trust to the beauty of your language to keep readers interested. If you are a wordsmith on par with Shakespeare, please consider the amount of plot and intrigue and suspense in Shakespeare’s plays. Unless you are a better writer than Shakespeare, you will need some source of momentum in your work besides “beauty.”

I found myself wishing for slightly faster pacing.

What this means:

The editor felt bored reading your story.

But why?

Any time pacing comes up, we’re talking about boredom. In fact, I think pacing is a bit of a nonsense word we toss around so that we don’t have to call parts of a story “boring.”

Advice on pacing will often focus on whether the scenes of your story are the right length; whether they’re varied enough; whether the intensity levels of these scenes form a sine wave rather than a flat line; whether action, dialogue, summary, backstory, flashback, and description are well balanced and staggered…

This can all be helpful, but for the purposes of this post, we’re going to keep it simple. If editors are telling you that your story is slow-paced, they’re saying that your story includes some or all of the following:

• extraneous scenes

• scenes that go on too long

• scenes that tread water, when the next step of the plot is already obvious

• scenes that tell us things we already know

• scenes that tell us things we weren’t curious about and didn’t need to know

• scenes that contain lots of good moments but that play out too slowly (too much padding)

(I’m using “scenes” as a loose term here to include action, dialogue, summary, backstory, etc.)

How do I fix it?

Ask a trusted reader to list the scenes in your book where they felt the most excitement and investment, and the scenes where they felt bored. (If your reader is skittish about the word bored, you can say “scenes that felt slow-paced” or “scenes where you felt your attention wandering.”)

Now study those scenes closely. What were you doing in the scenes that generated excitement and investment? What missteps can you see in the boring scenes, now that they’ve been identified as such? Is it possible that some of these scenes can be skipped entirely? Is it possible that your plot plays out too slowly?

Here’s some general pacing advice:

• if the reader can accurately guess how a scene will play out, you don’t have to show it

• if multiple scenes in your story give the reader the same information, choose just one

• if your plot requires you to artificially delay some revelation (“He can’t find out about that till Chapter 12!”), let the character have that revelation now, immediately—it’ll force you to cover more ground and come up with more interesting conflicts

• if a scene that is boring also delivers crucial information, think of a more interesting way to deliver that information

• if your scenes are all necessary on a plot level but proceed too slowly, condense each scene to just the essentials

The plot didn’t quite come together for me.

What this means:

The editor didn’t think your characters’ decisions made much sense.

But why not?

Probably because you were focusing too much on plot.

We talk about “plot” as though the writer gets to mandate it from on high, but really plot is the sequence of decisions that characters make throughout a story. And when a writer gets too fixated on their vision of The Plot (“This novel has to end with a gunfight at the aquarium!”), they end up warping the characters’ decisions to fit (“That means Sally can’t tell Jeff that she’s carrying his baby!”). And then the reader loses interest in the story, because these characters aren’t acting in a way that makes any sense (Why wouldn’t Sally have told Jeff about the baby?).

Plot does not dictate character decisions. Character decisions dictate plot.

So if editors are telling you that something about your plot isn’t working, it’s probably because your preconceived vision of the story is overriding the reasonable wants and needs of your characters. This results in a plot that, indeed, “doesn’t quite come together”—a lot of things happen, but it’s hard to tell why those things happen, besides that the writer thought they would look cool on the page.

How do I fix it?

Anyone who’s written a novel knows that as characters start to come to life in a draft, they also start resisting the tug of capital-P Plot. They want to spill the beans too soon; they want to confront each other instead of stewing in miscommunication; they want to get out of the dodgy situation instead of walking straight into it.

Here’s the trick: instead of stuffing your characters back down into the containers of Plot that you’d prepared for them, let them do their thing. If your characters are determined to make reasonable decisions, you’ll just have to create bigger obstacles for them, or more complicated decisions. That will make your book better.

Many times I have written a scene feeling that I was walking a tightrope. “Okay, so he would reasonably say X in this situation, but I can’t let him say X, so I’m going to have him say Y. But then she would probably bring up X of her own accord, so maybe I’ll have them be interrupted… by a phone call about Z!”

This is dumb. The best plots come from battling honorably with your characters, not from manipulating them into making illogical decisions. (“I really want to solve this mystery… better drink myself into a stupor so I can’t eavesdrop properly on the conversation happening nearby!”) Let your characters act logically, create greater obstacles for them in response, let them respond logically to those obstacles, create even greater obstacles… and you will end up with a much stronger story, and, incidentally, “plot.”

The premise felt a touch familiar.

What this means:

The editor has seen stories like yours before, and yours didn’t meaningfully stand out.

But why not?

This is a tough piece of feedback to get, because unlike the others on this list, it kind of invalidates the whole thing you were trying to do. You thought up this whole deliciously complicated love triangle where a young ingenue gets involved with the perfect-on-the-surface marriage of a successful older couple, and the editor said: “Well… I’ve seen that before.”

And yet dozens of such novels get published every year. So clearly a familiar premise does work, or can work, or used to work. Why those novels and not yours?

Because yours wasn’t you enough. It read like a book that someone else could have written. It was mild and flavorless. It didn’t have enough of the intriguing, hard-to-place spice of Your Entire Personality.

How do I fix it?

Get weirder. Be honest. You know that abyss that you carefully skirted around in your last draft, making sure that things never got too transparent or off-putting or vulnerable? Hop down into it.

There aren’t enough original premises in the world for us all to come up with our own. Some of us don’t even pretend to. (Retellings!) But that’s okay, because the thing that is original about your book doesn’t have to be the premise. It can be you: your weird outlook on the world, your weird voice, your weird assumptions and proclivities and priorities.

The more that the you of it all comes through, the less likely that anyone’s going to notice that your book has a “familiar” premise. Because, really, who cares about the premise? “A family struggles with some stuff” sums up a lot of great books. Open the valve and let more of yourself through. You are much likelier to startle and intrigue with the truth than with some kind of posture.

I wanted a greater sense of stakes.

What this means:

The editor didn’t care about the things your characters cared about.

But why not?

Let’s get one misconception about stakes out of the way. We like to talk about stakes as though they’re the measurement of how much the character stands to lose. Raise the stakes—give ’em more to lose!

But this is obviously not true. For proof, imagine a short story about a soldier at war. What does he stand to lose? His life! Stakes can’t get higher than life-or-death! And yet, you read this short story and you feel bored, indifferent, distracted. The character cares a lot about whether he lives or dies, but you don’t care.

That is what the babble about stakes really points to: the gap between how much the character cares and how much you care. I have been supremely invested in whether a character earns $2.00 or $2.50 that day at the grocery store counter. I have been supremely uninterested in whether a character lives or dies. The difference is not “how much the character has to lose” but whether or not I give a fuck.

If you’re getting feedback that your story is low-stakes, you don’t need to add a life-threatening illness or a gunfight at the aquarium or a sick dog. Your characters already care about the minutiae of their lives. Don’t change those minutiae—just get the reader to care about them too.

How do I fix it?

You know how, if you receive the wrong email at the wrong time on the wrong day, it feels like your whole life is crashing around you? An email that, on any other day, might have elicited just a small shrug of annoyance.

Imagine that all the events of our lives have a long tail. That tail swings way out into the future, mapping the course of our lives. One tiny shift here in the present day controls the huge swing of the tail, so that receiving a terse email can swing your whole future from “Basically Happy Life” to “Cast Out, Ruined, and Despised.” You’re not having a meltdown over the email—you’re having a meltdown over the email’s symbolic ramifications for your entire future.

This sucks in real life, but it’s great for fiction. Think of books about small children. Whether or not they get bullied at the playground that day matters, because to them, it seems to lock in some vast and permanent future. And as readers, we care—because we remember what it feels like to gauge the whole swing of our lives by what happens on the playground that day.

This is what you have to do for your characters. They experience the events of their lives as the great symbolic swing of that tail—but your readers can’t see it. Help the reader understand what the small setbacks and small victories mean to your characters in terms of that tail swing—“I will always push through adversity” / “I will always be alone”—and your book will feel high-stakes, even if your character is just counting dimes at a grocery store counter.

The tone didn’t quite land for me.

What this means:

The editor didn’t feel that the story and the narrative attitude towards it matched up.

But why not?

Maybe you wrote a really dark story with some horrible atrocities plotted in there, but you maintained a glib and callous tone throughout. Maybe you created some wonderfully earnest, likable characters, but then the narration was biting and sarcastic towards them, seemingly without provocation. Maybe you framed the events of the novel in a black-and-white morality that didn’t do justice to the more complicated, shades-of-gray characters you depicted.

A tone mismatch is a sign that you’re mistaking what’s most interesting or appealing about your story. There’s something rigid about your approach to the book: you’re maintaining a certain writing style, even if it no longer fits the story you’ve actually created. You want your story to be something it’s not—and the irony is, the thing you’ve created is probably better than the thing you want it to be.

How do I fix it?

You need readers for this one—lots of them. “Tone” is slippery, subjective, and often misused. Stay away from the term entirely and ask your readers:

• What kind of story did it seem like I wanted to tell?

• Did you notice anything that seemed to contradict the story that I was telling?

• What was your favorite part of the book? In that part of the book, did it seem like the contradictions you just mentioned were better resolved or aligned?

• If you were writing this book, how would you have treated [event] or [character]?

• Is there anything unpleasant or off-putting about the narration?

• If I just neutrally summarized the events of the story for you, how would they make you feel?

• How did reading the book make you feel?

This should give you a sense of the parts of this story that are wrestling with each other. Luckily, there’s an easy winner: you have to trust your readers and give priority to the parts of the story that they liked. (Note that readers is plural. Don’t trust one reader—but do trust the consensus.)

If your readers don’t like your snarky sarcastic narrative voice, but they do like the characters you’ve created, lose the voice and keep the characters. You’ve created something good—keep it, grow it, trust it.

The novel that comes out will not be the one you intended, but that’s okay. Writers are often poor judges of their own creations. As you sit there on your eight hundredth stop of your worldwide book tour, surrounded by adoring readers, you’ll be saying, “My first draft of this novel had this snarky narrator that actually I really liked, and thought was good, but my agent and editor made me cut it out for some reason…” And your readers will raise their eyebrows, thinking: “Thank god for that agent and editor.”

I didn’t fall head-over-heels in love with the voice.

What this means:

The editor didn’t like your writing.

But why not?

Okay, I can hear editors screaming at me, saying: “Sometimes I just genuinely didn’t fall head-over-heels in love with the voice! That has nothing to do with whether I liked the writing!”

But come on, people. When we talk about “voice,” we’re really talking about the writing. If an editor doesn’t “fall in love” or “connect” with the “voice,” it means they didn’t like the writing enough to take the book on.

(Nota bene: I do think some editors use “voice” as a catchall term when they’re too lazy to articulate to themselves why they didn’t like the book. But I still think there’s a kernel of truth in that choice: the book was fine, but the “voice” didn’t get them excited. That means the writing.)

Editors will contort themselves wonderfully to avoid saying that they didn’t like your writing. “As much as I loved the characters, the setting, the themes, there was just something about the voice that didn’t fully click for me—but this is so subjective, and of course the author is such a talented writer, and I’m in awe of their mastery of language, and I can’t wait to see where this lands!”

The editor didn’t like your writing enough. That’s okay. Your writing is something you can work on!

Why didn’t the editor like your writing? Well, maybe it’s convoluted and try-hard literary. Maybe it’s flat and full of clichés. Maybe it’s not as funny as you think it is. Maybe it’s circuitous and vague. Maybe it’s unpleasantly self-conscious. Maybe it’s clever without being true. Maybe it’s fun at first but quickly grows tiring. Maybe you’ve created a wacky, voice-y first-person narrator that no one wants to spend time on the page with.

Or maybe your writing is pretty good, but not good enough to tip the balance.

How do I fix it?

Here’s my guess. There are some things you do in your writing that are really cool and unusual and appealing—and accidental. You’re not aware of them. They come out when you’re focused on other things.

There are other things you do in your writing that are tiring for the reader and detrimental to the story—and you do them intentionally, because you think they are cool and unusual and appealing.

We all have a distinctive patter to our writing—certain tics, habits, recurring sentence structures. And when people compliment our writing “voice” or “style,” they rarely specify which parts of this patter they like, and which parts of this patter they tolerate. So most of us are walking around with totally wrong conceptions about the writing “voice” we pride ourselves on.

I have a friend who changed their laugh. Do you know anyone who’s done this? They had a perfectly lovely laugh, and then at some point they must have decided to train themselves out of it. Now they laugh with a deliberate head-thrown-back ha-ha-ha that I find kind of off-putting. I wish I could tell them that I liked the old laugh better.

There are two points I want to make with this. One: we are very bad at judging which aspects of our voice people generally like, and which they don’t. Two: it is often the things we try to import into our voice—the things we have to force—that don’t work.

If you keep getting the message that something about your “voice” isn’t working for readers, it’s not a referendum on your entire personality. Your writing voice is a mixture of things you do consciously and things you do unconsciously. My bet, though of course I can’t guarantee it, is that the things you do unconsciously are better than whatever you’ve overlaid on top of them.

Find a really good, trusted, smart, affectionate reader who likes your writing voice. And then go through your story with them and have them point out the moments in the writing they liked best, and the moments they simply tolerated. Are there any patterns to those moments that aren’t working? Are you indulging any tics that it’s time to let go of? When your writing is at its most effortful, is it also at its best?

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I’ll repeat my caveat from above: editor feedback only matters in consensus. Most of these editors glanced at your novel, knew it wasn’t for them, and cast around for a gentle reason they could cite in the rejection. These rejection letters are useful only if a plurality of editors are citing the same issue, however delicately they allude to it.

But I wanted to write this post because I find all this “gentle” language sort of infuriatingly unhelpful. “I absolutely loved it, I just didn’t love love it.” These almost-but-not-quite rejections can drive a person crazy, especially if no concrete reason for the rejection is given.

I think the best way to show respect for a writer’s work and time is to speak to them directly, as though they are a reasoning adult. “I felt bored reading this story” stings a lot worse than “I wasn’t quite sold on the pacing”—but it’s also clear. It’s a problem you can solve, rather than getting tangled up in the question of slow pacing vs. fast pacing vs. what pacing even is.

I don’t expect editors to start giving honest feedback in their rejection letters. But I think the most empowering thing a writer can do is confront the problems of their work honestly, in clear and simple terms.

Hopefully this post helps you do that. If not, please feel free to tell me in the comments that you didn’t quite connect with the voice, tone, message, and content of this article.

Thanks for reading!