Rejection Woes

By: Meradeth Houston on 8:33 AM

I generally keep my rejections to myself, for obvious reasons, but I've been thinking about this one all day and I figured I'd do a locked post on it, just to share the glorious randomness. This is what I received in my in-box this morning:

Dear Ms. Snow,

 

Thanks for the look. I think your plot sounds interesting—I’m a sucker for a time-travel story—but I found I didn’t connect with your writing. As an example (I hope this is helpful rather than annoying): 

“I fought to remember why—the memories were sticky and unwilling to reveal their secrets.”

“Fought” feels a little precious to me—fighting should have a more specific foe, it seems to me—and for the “memories” to be “unwilling” is to attribute will to them, consciousness, which doesn’t make sense to me at all.

I wish you very good luck!

 

Sincerely,

As I should be, I am extremely grateful for the personal rejection. I mean, that's great, and I'm super happy about it. But, at the same time, it totally made me scratch my head. I've gotten quite a few comments about the above line, and all of them were positive. I actually kind of love it--it shows how she's struggling to remember something that's just buried under the surface. That kind of memory like what I dreamt about just before waking. Apparently, though, that's not what's coming across. Or, my metaphor is just being trashed in translation.

So, the question is, kill my darling line here, and hunt for others like it, or just take it as a matter of taste? I'm really not sure.