To all the pitches rejected before,
There were the pitches that could have been more original. The pitches that could have had a stronger angle. The pitches that someone else was apparently writing about, yet never seemed to pop up in the paper.
At this point, I’ve had — what I hope is — my fair share of rejected pitches.
It always goes like this. You rack your brain to turn what started as just a passing thought into a paragraph, somehow explaining how your article will come together without having written it yet.
And then it comes. The “sorry, this didn’t get upvoted,” or the “we had too many pitches this week,” and you are back to the start. Sometimes, you won’t hear back, and your pitch just disappears into the void. I guess that was a rejection…
You start to see a pattern. If you know how to write the piece, it won’t be accepted. If you don’t know how to write the piece, it has the best chance of being accepted. And then, you’ve got the week to figure out how to write it.
But then, there are the pitches that you don’t hear back on, assuming they were rejected, and yet you see an eerily similar prompt on the art callout. You sit back, confused, until an editor realises they have forgotten to tell you that it was accepted. This has happened to me twice, which though not a lot, is still weird.
Somehow, even with all of the rejections I have faced, there has been an editor who has promised to keep workshopping my ideas with me, or reminded me that we could pitch something else next week. There has always been next week. If I was persistent enough, soon it became, “Your article has been accepted!”, and on to writing I went.
To all the pitches that were rejected before, it was you.
It wasn’t me.
