Office Hours

Rejected!

Hi all,

Am feeling good today because, last night, Paula and I went to the Hollywood Bowl and heard Gustavo Dudamel conducting Verdi’s Requiem. Just mind-blowingly beautiful and inspiring, in part because of the presence of a huge, appreciative, and riveted crowd.

Sometimes I can get a little down/pessimistic about the state of the arts in our culture but last night was a really lovely antidote to that. The quality of attention of the audience, the beautiful performances, the seriousness of the whole thing, and, especially, the intensity of the piece itself, and the fact that all of us were right there with it, its complexity notwithstanding, because it was about something in which all of us are invested: a fear of death and what comes after, and the hope that, whatever it is, it will have a quality of mercy and transcendence about it.

From the restaurant, before the concert.

I know many of you have been hard at work on the description exercises from Sunday, so I’ll give a brief answer to the important and heartfelt question below… (Also, my parents are in town. They just, at 86 years old each, came across the country in an RV - and so we’ve been busy, having a great time, and hence I’m getting a late start on this post. But here goes anyway…)

Q.

My question concerns the (seemingly) complicated intersection of creativity and marketability. Recently, I've been sending around a short story that I think, after much revision and struggling and crossing off and adding in, is one of the best things I've ever done. However, not only has it been rejected at every turn -- which I know is often par for the course -- but the few personalized rejections I've gotten have said that a 'comedy' story has little chance of placement in theirs or any publication, and that many of my references or touchpoints in the story will only appeal to baby boomers (e.g., Barbarella, the Red Hat Society, etc.). [I am a millennial]

This was news to me, George, on several levels:

—I do not think of what I wrote as a comedy story. Sure, it's sort of funny -- but whatever humor it has it just how it came out in the end, if that makes sense. I definitely was not trying to appeal to anyone's sense of humor as the primary tone of the thing (for what it's worth, I think it ended up being a story about frustration, about what it's like to be alive sometimes, about new beginnings and how they're not always what or where you'd expect)

—I was unaware that things that are funny, be it the overarching theme of a story or simply something that lends itself to the tale, are out of vogue these days in literary magazines. It certainly doesn't/didn't seem to hold you back!

—I am also torn on their suggestions at the piece not being timely enough. If a story has worked itself out as being about someone who's older, then it makes sense to my mind that they would have such touchpoints to their life, and that it would almost be cheap in a way to simply update it in an effort to get the thing actually read by people. 

What do you think, George? In your earlier days were you ever tempted to tamp down the unique voice or tone of a story to try and thread the needle for publication or recognition?

A.

My experience was, in truth, the exact opposite - I never could get any attention for my work until I started trying to be funny. I’m not against “threading the needle” to be more publishable, but, for me, that involved leaning into this thing that was natural for me in real life but that I’d been artificially keeping out of the work, i.e., a certain manic, exaggerated, funny quality.

Once I did this, I immediately started getting a good response. I honestly never got a rejection that cited the humor. Never once.

Here’s something I’ve observed (and I’d very much like to hear if the group’s experience confirms this): editors have a very hard job and the main part of it is to find a few things to love, that they can publish. It’s a lot of work to run a magazine or journal and, in the end, what the audience is paying for is the editor’s taste, expressed radically in the choices he or she has made, especially in terms of what stories are getting run.

So, it’s often seemed to me that the editor first reads the piece to see if that passionate reaction is there. (“Do I love this enough to really see it through and fight for it and tether my reputation and the reputation of the magazine to it?”)

If not…it’s a no. It has to be. This is a reaction that comes from the gut. Everything else depends on it. In a sense, that’s an editor’s superpower: knowing what they love when they see it.

Then….the rejection has to be written. (And if one gets a written rejection, that’s already an accomplishment.) Reasons for the rejection must be provided, but the real reason (“I didn’t love this enough”) begs a return question from the writer: “Well, why didn’t you?”)

And that’s a hard question to answer.

I’m also not sure that if the writer “addresses” those comments, the piece will necessarily be accepted. Sometimes, maybe. But it’s hard to articulate why something hasn’t moved you sufficiently to champion it. (It’s kind of like trying to explain, in 100 words or so, why you didn’t fall in love with someone you briefly dated.)

And editors have to write a lot of these letters. Even if the reason for rejection is heartfelt, and articulately stated by the editor, it’s not necessarily easy for a writer to translate that critique into a new (“better”) draft.

But it might be helpful to think, “Well, editors, too, can have trouble articulating what it is about, a piece that isn’t landing for them and, in trying to do so, they may actually get it wrong.” Not that their reaction is wrong (it’s their reaction, after all) but that the explanation of the rejection may or may not be precise, or accurate, or helpful.

I don’t read admissions manuscripts at Syracuse these days but when I did, it was exactly as described above. I was reading fairly quickly to accept or reject. I had three piles: Yes, No, Maybe. As the process went on, anything that wasn’t a Yes became a No. That is, once you had a pile of 40 “yes” choices for only 6 spots, you knew the bar that applicants had to clear.

This was always done by the gut. And, in that process, you don’t have to say why you’re rejecting someone. But I really came to feel for the applicants we were rejecting (of course) but also for editors who, out there in the real world, would have to explain why they had rejected someone. I could have tried, but the truth was somewhere beyond “not enough story” or “slow opening” or, as in the case here, allegedly, “too comedic.”

To really tell the truth of why I was rejecting someone (and to tell it in a way that might be useful to the writer), I would have had to read the story two or three times, mark it up, do multiple drafts of the letter - and even then, who knows?

So, what do we do with this sort of feedback? I’ll tell you what I do: I think, or try to think, anyway: “Something is lacking in my piece but it isn’t necessarily what the editor said it was.”

Then I wait and see what I think it is.

Often, there’ll be some submerged anxiety about the piece that, while I was finishing it, I’d brushed aside. (“I know the middle section doesn’t entirely hang together but….”)

Suddenly, I’m aware of, and admitting, that feeling. It’s like a shy forest creature has come out of the woods because I was being very still. (Or, in this case, because, the pain of rejection has made my mind very quiet and humble and receptive. And sad.)

A strangely large part of the writer’s job is to get better at listening to those quiet (but very real) voices inside us, that allow us to scrutinize our work at a more intense level - to really see it objectively and clearly.

I sometimes think of it this way: I’m the mayor of a city. I have a hundred advisors. Ninety-five of them are very loud and vocal and are always clustered around my desk, shouting.

The other five are quiet and a bit shy but very wise, with excellent taste.

Part of my job is to learn to seek those five advisors out - learn to find them in the noise and really listen to them.

A rejection will sometimes help me do this. (It’s almost as if, in light of the rejection, the ninety-five loud advisors are embarrassed and go quiet, and those five others step forward, saying, “Well, since that didn’t work, we might have something to add.”)

The process starts with the faith that, at some deep level, we do know something additional and hidden about our story, something that we might not yet have acted upon, that might (might) be part of the reason it’s not communicating with others in the way we’d hoped.