We’ve all heard it, especially lately. “If you aren’t making any sales, then write a better story.” Allow me to confuse you for a moment; They’re totally right, and they’re also completely wrong.

The goal should always be to write better. To grow and experiment and play with language genre and form. You should always try to live new lives, have new experiences, through your fiction, or reveal something new about yourself. (Like how much you freakin’ rock!)

But it’s not always a matter of writing better, sometimes it all comes down to stupid, uncontrollable luck.

You will NEVER go wrong by improving your grammar, spelling, punctuation and language use. You will NEVER go wrong reading as widely as you can, and especially reading the genre you write in to see what is currently being published.

But chances are very high you’ll work and grown–and reach a point where you’re regularly getting personal, kind rejections and requests for more, invites to submit and sometimes even a lot of interest from editors…who still ultimately pass.

Writing better isn’t the end all of advice for breaking through this stage. Persistence is.

Because only part of being successful in publishing is writing well. The rest is all timing. It’s being ready when opportunities arise. It’s networking and being tuned in to calls for submissions. It’s having the pitch when the editor asks “what are you working on right now” and having the pages when the agent says “That sounds interesting, do you have pages I can read?”

Rejections don’t always mean “Your writing isn’t good enough”. It also means “We wanted classic giant bugs, not new interpretations of bug” or “We want post apocalyptic zombies, not magical zombies”. Or “This issue is shaping up to be about mental illness and we need something that matches that” or “We have too much fantasy, do you have a SF story?” or “We already have a time traveling lesbian in space story”.

I don’t know that there is “writing better” in these cases, unless it comes down to a “We have three zombie cow stories and only need one, which one is the best?” situation. Sometimes it’s just a matter of timing, or else big name authors wouldn’t still get rejections (and they do. They also sometimes deserve to get rejects.)

So if you feel you can’t get an better, you can’t put anything else into your fiction (you’re wrong, but it might take some time for you to find that next step, so you’re allowed to feel this way) without slicing a vein and just offering that up–then just hold on to persistence. Because timing does count and that editor interest means something. It means you’re on your way. The rest of the world might just need to catch up to you.

And take heart, because very few stories expire once written, so even if it takes years to sell, or seems to go through everywhere and only get nos, that doesn’t make it complete trash.