Neil Gaiman, as is his wont, shares some useful advice:
I remember once being taken to task by Rachel Pollack for something in a short story I’d written. “But that’s the only bit in the story that’s true!” I told her. “It doesn’t matter if it’s true,” she said. “What matters is if, in the context of the story, it’s believable.” And I knew that she was right.
I was recently taken to task myself — actually, I believe the word used was “asshole” — by a writer submitting a story to Kaleidotrope, who felt that I’d somehow insulted him by not falling instantly in love with it. Obviously I was rejecting the story only because I couldn’t handle its deep and affecting truth. It wasn’t, as I thought I had politely alluded to in my rejection letter, that I felt the story was over-written, sloppy, and difficult to get into — or even that it simply wasn’t the type of story I was looking to publish in the pages of Kaleidtrope. No, when I rejected it, I was obviously rejecting and insulting its truth — and, by extension, rejecting and insulting its author, to whom, presumably, that truth had happened.
You really can’t argue with someone like that. Beyond the unprofessionalism of calling an editor who rejects your story an asshole because of that — even if you are convinced that he is an asshole, never, ever do this — there’s a real misconception about what makes a story work going on there. A story can be full of fact and still not be any good. A rejection of the story isn’t a rejection of the author, or of the truth. It’s just a rejection of weak writing.