Hooray! A rejection!
OK, so that might not be realistic. Every now and then I used to get rejections that had the inevitable initial sting, but after that I would get past my despair and actually read the rejection and it would say something like:
After careful consideration I decided that while your concept is fresh and interesting, I just wasn't as pulled into those first few critical pages as I would've liked to be. Understand that this is a subjective business, and another agent may feel differently.
Ouch - my first few pages aren't that great. Hooray - I've got a fresh and interesting concept! That's a seriously big hurdle cleared! So I get my e-self over to QueryTracker to record my latest failure and see that another user has posted their rejection in full and it reads:
After careful consideration I decided that while your concept is fresh and interesting, I just wasn't as pulled into those first few critical pages as I would've liked to be. Understand that this is a subjective business, and another agent may feel differently.
Oh... so my concept isn't fresh and interesting. And maybe this means my first few pages aren't that bad... So what do I do?
If you're me (and I know you're not, but let's play) you obsess about it for a bit. So, somebody that sent a query about a girl torn between her love for a vampire and her buddy a werewolf would've had the same "fresh concept" form rejection I did. It also means that someone who sent a badly written query for a 500 page biography of a field mouse named TukkaBobba did too.
What do I deduce from this? The very real possibility that I suck, and no one has bothered to tell me yet.
I'm not saying that agents need to tell every single author exactly why they are rejecting them - that's an impossibility. But I do wish agents used a "You really need to do more work on your sentence structure and grammar use before considering being a writer," and a, "Hey nice try, keep working at it - you might have something here," form rejection.
Do you obsess over every word in the query, like I do? Or do you just notch the bedpost and keep going?