We like it but ...

'We like your story but ...'
The 'but' is actually the good bit. If the editor goes on to say, 'we're not sure about ... could you edit ... if you make these changes ...' you've got a potential sale on your hands. More than that, you have the chance to prove you're a professional, writing for a market you understand, and not just a wild creative soul locked in a garret of idealism somewhere. As womag writers, you write to a brief and although you play with those boundaries, you have to recognise them. There is no shame in writing by rules as long as you empathise with them and allow your story to live and breathe within them.
So editing a story is a terrific opportunity and one of the magazines I work for is very good at nurturing its authors with such suggestions and I have always responded successfully. Last time, however, I had a problem.
The story contained an element of divorce - near-divorce. For some magazines, that's still an issue and has to be handled very carefully. Off-stage, past tense, no-blame divorce can be managed, but reconciliation is always a better option. My couple were on course for that reconciliation but the editor wasn't certain that their readers would like the course I had taken and suggested some adaptations.
I went back to my computer. I worked on it, I adapted it, I juggled it. It didn't work. To make the changes necessary the central premise and the implicit humour of the story had to change too much. It would become a different story. I knew as I tried that the story and I were fighting each other; and the story had to win.
I emailed back to the editor, explaining my clear sensation that the story wasn't convincing me and wouldn't convince their readers either. I apologised if I had wasted her time in the discussion we had had about the changes. I hit 'send' and was certain I would never work for them again! How would a fiction editor like an author rejecting their suggestions and telling them, in effect, that they knew better? Would this suggest I couldn't write well enough?
But five days later I had a reply - the editor thanked me, understood my reasoning entirely and suggested that I should try the story elsewhere because she still felt it was a good one, even though not right for them as it stood.
And that's why I work for this particular magazine!