Quoth Don: How often do you approach the box where you keep your past works (I can hear the creaking of the chest as you open it) and revisit writing that was rejected to improve your writing now?
Good question, Don!
My general feeling with rejected stories is that once they’re gone, they’re gone.
By the time I’ve written something, sent it into the world, and received rejections for it, the emotional connection I had to it in the first place has long faded. Sometimes elements of that work sneak their way subconsciously into other stories, but I seldom reach into the trunk and try to resurrect them entirely.
As any good crime scene investigator will tell you, once there’s maggots, you ain’t bringing that one back.

I have only a few basic reactions to a story rejection:
- Relief, because I’ve since realized that the story (at least that draft) deserved to be rejected and the editor saved me some embarrassment.
- Chagrin, because I’d submitted it in the vague hope that I was wrong about how mediocre it was but the editor caught me.
- Disappointment, because that story actually felt right and obviously didn’t connect with that particular editor or venue at this particular time.
Technically, you can choose to fix a story in any of those three scenarios but first, you need to ask yourself:
- Do I want to? Is there something about this story that I still feel compelled to express? Does it still spark something in me? Do I still believe in it?
- Is it worth fixing? By “worth,” I mean whether you think that you have the skill to fix it and a good place to sell it after you do.
- Do I know how to fix it? Sometimes, you know exactly what’s wrong. Other times, you have no idea. Sometimes, a fix means changing a few words or a scene. Other times, it means starting a whole new document and salvaging the twenty good words from the last one.
For me personally, it’s fairly rare that a story meets all three of those criteria. A notable exception is the novella I just finished that started as a short story, became a novel draft, became an MFA thesis, became another novel draft, and finally became a novella after I started over from scratch.
In that case, I felt the idea was special to me and my experiences, and it seemed a waste to let it go for someone else to write.
(I have a suspicion that stories float around and find people to write them. If you let one pass by, it goes to someone else. I swear to God I was writing a short story about FBI agents investigating strange phenomena the year before The X-Files came out.)
The risk of picking over your rejected stories is that you’ll never stop. There’s a certain fantasy in refining a work over and over again that you can finally get it “right.” This fantasy is even stronger if a rejecting editor or workshop group gave you some vague and well-meaning advice on how to fix it. You can chase that around and around forever.
You make up for feeling bad about losing a single story by writing a lot more to take its place. Your chance to get it right comes with whatever’s next, not what came before.
Unless, of course, there’s that nagging idea that won’t let you go…