Here's another angle on the whole thing: there have been one or two threads on rec.arts.sf.fandom which have covered in passing the weird tricks teachers can play on children.

I wouldn't be surprised if there is something on the reactions that can be traced back to what a teacher might have done.

(And, yes, I've had a few rejection letters. You're right about the emotional involvement of the author.)

The valley plums are sweeter
But the mountain plums are colder;
We therefore thought it meeter
To plant them in our poulder.
The catalogs of gardners
Wherein the plums are listed,
Said in zones three through seven
At night plums should be misted.

What you've posted here could be considered "Case Studies in How to Be an Oversensitive Git". I've known for a long time that us writers get attatched to our work and any rejection can sting badly, but really. After reading this I will definitely ensure that once I'm submitting manuscripts and collecting rejection slips, I will take a few deep breaths and a day away from thinking about the rejection letters I get before I make any sort of public reaction.

But then, I'm looking forward to collecting those letters [almost] as much as I'm dreading them - I'd like to think that the only sorts of letters that could really damage my ego would be a slip of paper with only the word "No." :)

'Twas Friday, and the slush heap grows;
It rocks and teeters in my glare.
All hopeful, as the sheer height shows
Are the writers out there.

Beware the editor, my son!
With pens of red and eyes of pearl!
Beware the mail room glitch, and shun
The non-SASE-ed transom hurl!

I take the first sent screed in hand:
Long time the gibberish I scan--
I've never seen prose this damn bland;
Must answer; must make plan...

But as in weary thought I stood,
The bean counter, black tie on blouse,
Threw red spreadsheets, dodge though I could,
And cried for more cash cows!

I quit. I quit. My heart won't sing
I'm here to read, not to crush dreams.
I'm a lit geek, not marketing;
This underside's all seams.

But I have bills, and New York's cold;
Send no-thanks note, and move along.
At least he tried, his heart is bold;
Sign name to standard song.

'Twas Friday, and the slush heap grows;
It rocks and teeters in my glare.
All hopeful, as the sheer height shows
Are the writers out there.

I'm currently applying for teaching posts in creative writing, and if I ever get one I'm going to make it mandatory for my students to visit a Real Publisher, the smaller the better. There's a huge difference between knowing intellectually that the editors don't hate you, and seeing for yourself that the center of the main floor is awash in 900 poetry manuscripts submitted for a single competition, and having to delay manuscript returns for an extra six months because you're cleaning up after the office gets flooded, and reading cover letter after cover letter that screams PLEASE DON'T HURT MY FEELINGS in the nicest possible way.

Being an intern allows me to play God (we get to reject manuscripts ourselves, it's that small an operation), but it keeps me humble. Best of all possible worlds!

I don't just mean the rejection itself, which they're bound to take personally, being writers and all.

If I took rejection personally, I'd never submit anything at all, least of all to people I actually know socially.

Since I substitute a conviction that I'm incapable of writing anything of commercial utility, I think I'm still up to my quota for character quirks.

On a tangential note, may I suggest that sometime you post a picture of the slushpile? I've always wondered what it actually looks like -- the great mound of manila envelopes, shot through with whatever neon-colored ones their authors think will "draw notice".

I laughed, I cried, I damn near peed my pants. That, my dear friend, is a classic and must be put into a
chapbook and handed out like bon-bons at writer's conferences and sf cons.

Signed,

ex reader of slush piles

Jane

I once, briefly, helped out with some slushpile reading
for a publisher of erotic fiction, and you're right: you know
you're going to reject a good 80% or more of manuscripts within
the first two or three pages. It was depressing to discover
just how few would-be authors can string prose together
well enough to hold your attention for even that length. The
additional wrinkle with erotic fiction is that it has to be
arousing, of course, which much of the stuff submitted just
wasn't. Also, those who attempt to write it should have at least
a passing familiarity with basic human anatomy. I still remember
my surprise on encountering the line: "then he parted the twin
nodes of her clitoris". That one made me wince, and I'm not
even female. As a way of signalling the protagonist is having
sex with either an alien or a mutant, the line has possibilities,
but this was meant to be a physically normal human woman, alas.

I'm firmly of the opinion that every would-be author would
benefit from spending some time slushpile reading. It's both
a sobering and a humbling experience. It gave me an appreciation
of what models of restraint most letters of rejection are.

Oh, and if I ever submit a manuscript to anyone myself, I'm
doing so under a pseudonym.

Ah, Bartleby, Ah, humanity!

Graydon, you're right. If you don't want to be rejected, don't submit.

And Rob, I think it would be humbling to read the slushpile. And instructional. But I just about fell out of my chair at the porno 'detail.' Yikes. Maybe if you write porn, you should get laid first? At least pick up an anatomy book or something? Yikes.

I had a journalism education and an editing professor who looked like I imagine Jehovah might, very tall, curly white hair and beard, ruddy complexion..... and he yelled at us if we screwed up.

The only time I've ever gotten upset (I read it and started crying, it also upset Jim because he doesn't like seeing me cry) at a rejection notice was a nastygram I got from MZB, but I'd also had a really rotton time at work that day.. The story she slagged ended up at Eldritch Tales after being rejected by all the magazines that might have published horror or fantasy -- I got lots of letters saying, 'it's a really nice story but we only publish fantasy, not horror: or the inverse. I kept thinking "if it's a really nice story, why don't you just publish it?"

I love reading this sort of thing. It's helpful and encouraging in the oddest of ways. (BTW, I read slush for a very short period of time because I knew some people on the staff of the Leading Edge at WhyBeYou, AKA BYU, and they were kind enough to let me help them weed out said slush pile. Well, kind in the sense that they knew they were slaking my curiosity about the whole publishing process. I'm not sure if letting me read some of the manuscripts I read was precisely kind, but it was informative.)

Rob: Twin nodes??? I'd wince too....

I must read this more when I'm not at work.

Entitlement is bizarre.

All the same, rejection is a slap in the face.

Submitting a manuscript is like a combination of applying for a lifechanging job and going down on one knee to propose marriage; when it's rejected after a looooooooooooooooooong wait, I think it's a natural human impulse to want to lash out at the person rejecting, because otherwise they're all alone with the fact that they're not good enough.

Even that nice rejection that hopes to see the book in print elsewhere is saying the book isn't good enough. And that woman is going to have to wait while it sits in the slush for another year elsewhere. It doesn't start higher because it's been almost accepted. So near, and yet... back to the bottom of the slide again, still inadequate.

It's rejection. Your work is being rejected for not being good enough. This does objectively suck and people can't be expected to enjoy it.

They're not hurting the editor by bitching about it online, surely -- if they sent the cat-shit, yes, then! Bitching isn't productive in the way working to make their writing better would be, but I expect it gives them a support structure and helps them feel less suicidal.

Useful advice for people who have trouble submitting anything because rejection feels like someone stamped on your head -- don't submit something until you have the next thing after finished. That way when it's rejected, you can think, well, maybe that one sucked, but I have got better already since then. And if you get rejection 12 above, you can email right back and say "Ah, OK, well, how about this one". With a novel it suffices to write a new one while the old one is waiting in the slush, if the old one is any good at all, you'll certainly have time.

This kind of behavior is caused by 'entitlement gnomes,' little fae creatures that whisper in writer's ears at night and tell us that we deserve to be published.

Which always makes me want to quote Bill Munny from Unforgiven: "Deserve's got nothing to do with it, Kid."

I wonder what they'd make of this one:

"We have read your manuscript with boundless delight. If we were to publish your paper, it would be impossible for us to publish any work of lower standard. And as it is unthinkable that in the next thousand years we shall see its equal, we are, to our regret, compelled to return your divine composition, and to beg you a thousand times to overlook our short sight and timidity." (a rejection from a Chinese economic journal)

Jane, if I've made you laugh that hard, my week is made. Feel free to use the piece ad libitum wherever it seems good.

Paula, the normal first reaction to reading slush is to get slushdrunk -- giddy, unbalanced, amazed in its full original sense. I know I've told this story here before, but the time I left Cory Doctorow, Jim Macdonald, Debra Doyle, and Lawrence Watt-Evans sedately reading manuscripts (they were in the office the afternoon of the annual SFWA Authors' and Editors' Party, a.k.a. the Mill and Swill), and came back later to find them sprawled, helplessly giggling, upon and amidst what had previously been tidy if superannuated heaps of unread slush, was a wonderful moment. I wish I'd gotten pictures.

The second reaction to reading slush is to realize that you're a much, much better writer than you'd previously appreciated.

What these guys have failed to understand about rejection is that it isn't personal. If you're a writer, you're more or less constitutionally incapable of understanding that last sentence ... Obviously, you've never met a writer in your entire life. You should have stopped that sentence right there.

Actually, I can tell you the best way to have writers understand the editorial process of rejection (not to mention the editorial process of editing): Have them become editors themselves. I was the editor of a humor site on AOL serveral years ago, at which I ended up rejecting 98%+ of the material sent to me, and a fair number of hours massaging the less than 2% of material I accepted. After I was done with that gig, I pretty much went back to every editor I had worked with up to that time and apologized for being a jerk (they were usually tolerantly amused). It's also saved me a great deal of internal angst regarding rejection, since, having rejected thousands myself, I no longer worked under the illusion that the rejection was personalized venom.

It's not practical, of course, to have every writer become a submissions editor, but perhaps what need to be done is to create a site that has 20 examples of writing, most bad, but some really good. Have writers go there and say to them "You're the editor. You can choose only one to accept. You have to reject everyone else. Choose, and then write the rejection letters as well." And then tell them for that the full editor experience, they'd have to do this every day with a new batch of submissions -- except that they would be able accept only two pieces in a full week.

You might get *some* writers who would be willing to write 138 personalized rejection notes, but I think most of them would finally get the idea of what rejection means from the editorial side. It's not personal because among other things, really, who has the time?

"Yes" to everything Jo said, which leads me to ask why does rejection hurt people? I suspect a big chunk of the reason is to do with the way people think of writing as an expression of identity. If you write and sell books, you are not someone who writes and sells books for your day job, you are a writer. It's an issue of self-identity. People who write think of themselves as being writers; thus, to have their writing rejected is to question an aspect of their identity.

In these cases, it's an aspect of their identity that needs to be questioned. "Being a writer" is about receiving rejection letters, shrugging, filing them, and going on. "Being a writer" is about walking a tightrope strung between the twin pillars of what-the-readers-want and what-I-want-to-say, above the abyss of obscurity. "Being a writer" is frequently a tedious, exhausting, isolating, financially insecure existence. Franz Kafka was no less a writer for never seeing a rejection letter for a novel (almost all of his works being published posthumously): why, then, the need so many people exhibit for their status of "being a writer" to be publicly acknowledged?

The whole issue of why so many people harbour romantic misconceptions about the literary lifestyle is one that needs to be examined if we're to understand why so many people respond badly to rejection letters. And here I think other writers are partially to blame, for in all too many fictions about writers we see them presented as free, and wealthy, and fulfilled ...

Wish-fulfillment, anyone?

I collected about fifteen agent-and-editor rejections on my first novel. Two of the agents hadn't bothered with a rejection form, but had just scribbled "no thanks" across the bottom of my own query letter and sent it back. This threw me into an absolute snit at the time - although, reading them over a year later, I can't quite see why.

Rejections suck. Form rejections really suck, because they suggest that you didn't even make it to #11 on Teresa's list. A certain amount of directionless anger is to be expected. Turning it into directed anger is, however, not a good idea... especially on the all-searchable, all-remembering Internet. I try to remind myself that, if I ever do become published and famous, every stupid rant I've ever posted on a listserve, messageboard, blog, or, well, comments thread, will be fair game to everyone, including my biographers.

I collected about fifteen agent-and-editor rejections on my first novel. Two of the agents hadn't bothered with a rejection form, but had just scribbled "no thanks" across the bottom of my own query letter and sent it back. This threw me into an absolute snit at the time - although, reading them over a year later, I can't quite see why.

Rejections suck. Form rejections really suck, because they suggest that you didn't even make it to #11 on Teresa's list. A certain amount of directionless anger is to be expected. Turning it into directed anger is, however, not a good idea... especially on the all-searchable, all-remembering Internet. I try to remind myself that, if I ever do become published and famous, every stupid rant I've ever posted on a listserve, messageboard, blog, or, well, comments thread, will be fair game to everyone, including my biographers.

And no matter how hurt, frustrated, angry, and rejected I feel - a year later I probably won't be able to remember why.

Wow. AOL turns down submissions. To look at "hot or not" you could never tell.

I'm a violent (yes) proponent of the amateurization of communication and entertainment, especially on the web, but I must admit that it hasn't helped editors when every schmuck thinks he deserves "The Atlantic Monthly."

Humor is the worst. I'm about to kick off an independent college zine, and I want to hire a stranger to tell kids, "You are not funny. If you were just a bad writer, I'd be comfortable telling you, but this is personal. When you suck at jokes, you suck at life."

Then again, as an editor who uses "suck" in business communication, I shouldn't set my standard too high.

Nick Douglas writes:

"Wow. AOL turns down submissions. To look at 'hot or not' you could never tell."

I'll thank you not to mock AOL too mercilessly, as even now they pay me to blog, so I like them. But suffice to say that this particular area was run like a small magazine, while most of AOL is designed to elicit member participation, and the two, while individually worthwhile in their own ways, do not have the same selection process involved.

K. Feete: Don't read too much (heh) into form rejections. I used them often, even with material I liked but couldn't use, most of the time because I had several other things I needed to be doing.

Having been author, agent, editor, and head of a company that owns a magazine, I can see the slush pile matter from four sides.

All the horrors are as Teresa says.

Setting aside the normal protocol of rejection slips, which are intended to be self-explanatory, strange things happen.

However, the crushing effect of even an enlightened and talented author comes from the total contradictions in rejection letters letters for the SAME specific manuscript.

I have had the same short story described as "too long", "too short", "too downbeat", "too techno-optimist", "too boxy" [whatever that means], "too many metaphors and similes", "great use of language", "too much sex", "too much science"... and so forth.

At a high point, I had over 300 mss in circulation at once (including many poems), and kept track by the computer system at Boeing (this was 1979-1980) which one of what characteristics had gone where, when, to which editor, of a market with what self-description, with a described response time of what, and should therefore be re-queried when. I also had my own evaluation of my perceived quality of each manuscript.

The results of statistical analysis of roughly 1,000 submissions include:

* There is no correlation whatsoever between how good I think a manuscript is and how many submissions it takes to sell

* There is an optimal number of poems to send in a single envelope. More than that peak increases the chance of rjection without comment. Less makes suboptimal use of the postage, overhead, and delay.

* As Heinlein preached, once you have written it, finished it (correct format and spelling), and submitted it, the optimal thing to do is resubmit again and again until sold. Do NOT waste time on unsolicited rewrite. Do NOT delay starting to write the next, independent, manuscript.

What I learned on interpretation:

Don't EVER take a rejection letter (let alone slip) personally. Tell yourself: "the editor had a bad day, unrelated to my manuscript; great, now I can submit to an even better market" -- and resubmit within 24 hours.

Somewhere (very incompatible software over25 years) I have many pages of the data, especially the utterly absurd key words and key phrases on the mutually and internally inconsistent rejections.

Yes, 90% of PUBLISHED science fiction is crap.

Yes, 90% of everything is crap.

BUT: 99%+ of science fiction slush is crap.

AND: 90% of science fiction rejections are crap.

This does not automatically mean: 90% of science fiction editors are crap.

Wow. That was entertaining and educational.

I think Charlie is onto something here, though. There's a definite image associated with "being a writer", and "being a writer" often has very little to do with the actual act of writing. It mostly seems to involve angst and sitting around in public attempting to look creative. I'm not sure what it accomplishes for the people who do it, but hey, whatever gets you through the night.

I think the problem is that the public does not perceive writing to be a business or occupation: they perceive it as an art form. And artists are apparently allowed to be moody, sulky, tempramental, nasty, unprofessional, childish brats in our society. So those who are busy "being a writer" will emulate this behaviour, in order to appear more writerly and thus impress those around them with how artsy they are.

Writers, on the other hand, tend more towards polite and professional, because writers understand how much work goes into this gig. And maybe that's the way it should be left. After all, we need some way to seperate the men from the boys... ;)

I think Charlie is right on the money about the romantic-identity thing. I've never read slush, but I've evaluated resumes and job applications in quantity...it's the job applicant's livelihood at stake, and yet they don't as a rule get nearly so worked up about rejection. (And, incidentally, it's pretty easy to weed the vast majority of resumes, too, for many of the same reasons one rejects manuscripts.)

In American culture, a lot of weight is ascribed to what one does as a living, so a job might be called an identity. But work is then about who one is, whereas the "being a writer" notion is about who one wishes to be.

And deny people their fantasies, and oh my will they get touchy.

An editor who’s had an extraordinary run of submission luck one year might look differently at a rewritten book that came back to her in a sparser year.

But are there really sparse years? I realize only a small proportion of stuff that goes into the hopper makes it past all those hurdles you cite, but with SO much stuff coming in, is it really possible to go a year and not get, what was the number for this small house, seven manuscripts that you want to publish? Wow. I can't decide if I find that encouraging or discouraging.

Heh, sorry John, that was knee-jerk of me. Thanks for telling me about the user-participation vs. magazine-style divide; should've seen that.

Is there a chance I can copy this and use it as my rejection form letter? I'm talking under 100 submissions a year, so this page has seen more eyeballs this morning than it will for my 3-year (assuming I do graduate from college) editing career.

And the third bird for the stone: Any of these writers could splurge for a "Writer's Market" copy and save themselves all this pain and suffering. In fact, most publishers could merely send the Library of Congress info for "Writer's Market," followed by the words "Buy this," as their rejection slip.

I've logged a grand two rejections in my two-month-old endeavor to get my book represented. The only reason the second one bothered me was because Satan had spent a decent amount of time constructing my day before I checked the mail. He must've been sitting back with a cold beer, waiting for my expression upon finding that letter at the end of that day. Hats off, Herr Teufel, that day was a grand piece of work.

I haven't had to read through fiction slush, but I have had to read through science slush. I've graded eighty "essays" on geologic eras by high school freshmen, and I've graded thirty "reports" on various scientific investigations by college freshmen. I'll never forget one pre-med student, upon receiving his C paper, working his mouth in shock and finally getting out, "But, but, but I've been published!" Because this punk had been irking me for the entire semester, my Polite Check failed me and I returned, "That paper wouldn't have gotten published." The other grad student TAs and I came up with a drinking game for grading these papers: for every time you have to scribble in red "figure legends go beneath the figure, table titles go above the table", take a shot; for every time you have to write "referenced figures not included with paper", finish the bottle; etc.

No matter what you do in life, "Read the instructions and follow them" should be a mantra when you are submitting anything to another person. Right along with "If at first you don't succeed" and "It's up to me".

The other thing that I think applies here is this. If you're an editor, chances are you are a reader (and probably writer) who LOVES the stuff you're editing. And after a while, the piles and piles of unedited, terrible, identical to the last one you rejected junk (because SO MUCH of it is junk) are really, really disheartening, and depressing. I just can't stand to look at poetry sometimes because I have to read the stuff people send my website, which is straight out of the teen angst "oh why does the world not recognize my genius" department. But if I am too gentle in my rejection letter, sometimes the same author sends me MORE stuff, and it's JUST AS BAD. So the rejection letter has to be polite enough for them to not write back and tell me what a raging bitch I am, yet firm enough to let them know I really don't want any more of whatever it was they sent.

The standard "doesn't meet the editorial needs of the magazine" is a bit formulaic, but it really catches so much. Why doesn't it meet the needs? It sucks? It's about killing women violently yet pretending to be by a woman? It's porn you want to try to sneak past me on my nonporn site? Or maybe it's some other subject matter we don't publish.

And I guess one thing about this is that it isn't actually personal, in a way. I don't have anything against those people who tried and sent me something and just don't realize it's not so good. But in another way, it's personal in that I have a limited amount of time in my life to read and I wish all of them WERE geniuses-- it's personal to me, and I just don't have to time to figure out the perfect way to not hurt your feelings. ESPECIALLY when I read these rejection letters that were really nice, and they read "being a total bitch" into them. I just can't win, so why NOT use the standard form rejection? When you take the time to write a nice note, it just gives people all the more to obsess over.

Actually, under the circumstances described--a submission via a friend in common--I thought this rejection letter was a tad too harsh.

It's these lines that got to me:

> I absolutely believe that your children love it, but there is a real difference between a told story and a written one. And I am afraid that PRINCE JASON AND THE MAGIC STAR is just too slight and too sentimental to make a successful book.

For some reason, only part of this posted the first time . . . trying again.

Actually, under the circumstances described--a submission via a friend in common--I thought this rejection letter was a tad too harsh.

It's these lines that got to me:

> I absolutely believe that your children love it, but there is a real difference between a told story and a written one.

This is true, but I can smell a faint whiff of condescension here on the part of the editor. I think it's in the phrase "your children."

> And I am afraid that PRINCE JASON AND THE MAGIC STAR is just too slight and too sentimental to make a successful book.

I'd keep the "slight" but lose the "sentimental." Actually, I would try to find another way to say all of this . . . .

"I think storytelling is a wonderful skill, as much about the performance as it is about the story itself. Perhaps because of the performance aspect, it's always seemed to me to be very difficult to turn a told story into a written one. I think you've made a noble effort with JASON, but I don't think it quite works on paper.

If I'm rejecting something that came to me through a friend, I want to do my best to ensure that the friend isn't going to get slammed by the submitting author. I also want to make sure that my friend doesn't wind up angry at me.

Posted by Melissa Singer at February 2, 2004 11:26 AM

There's the chiastic rejection from Samuel Johnson: "Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good."

He is also said to have rejected a manuscript with "I am in the smallest room of my house, and your manuscript is before me. Soon it shall be behind me."

Now that's harsh.

Hi, someone linked me to this. I also read and reject (and very occasionally accept) manuscripts.

You're right on the money about reasons for rejection, especially #1 and #2. It's amazing how much pain and heartbreak (and wasted paper) could be avoided if writers simply did their frickin' homework or used a spellchecker.

Anyway, thanks.

I needed to see this today. It was exactly the sort of bitch-slap I needed to get me back behind my writing desk and actually submitting things again rather than whining about how I'll never be a real writer because I can't take rejection.

Even though I actually work with editors and should in fact know better, it was so important for me to be reminded that I'm not personally being rejected, my work is (and if it's at all good, it won't be rejected forever). I think I'm going to go write "they don't hate you, they're just doing their jobs" in Sharpie on my monitor so I never forget again.

So thanks for that.

For a fairly good picture of the hell that is slush, SFRevu has a series of shots of the Tor offices from 2002 here.

My favorites are the latest in slush furniture and the slush of Isengard.

Oh man. Thanks for writing this. I find myself having a variety of responses to it:

1) I'm horrified that people say those things about editors in public, pointing out to all and sundry that, at the very least, their reading comprehension skills are so very weak;

2) I'm terrified that I will respond this way when I finally get around to submitting my dearest darling manuscript, the one I've been editing for the last year and a half;

3) I'm pleased that I have not yet submitted my manuscript before it is the very best story it can be; and

4) I'm heartened to see how many fuckwits are trying to publish novels, which can only make the rest of us look brilliant by contrast.

"All the same, rejection is a slap in the face."

No, it isn't.

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Gt grp.

Brava, Teresa. I laughed, I cried, I drank a cup of plum tea. I think I recognize a couple of those.

Melissa, have I mentioned lately that I love you?

The more I look at the grumbles of "a poetry parodist from Texas", the more suspicious I get. The complaint about produce looks just a little bit over the top. And that "whatever" part:

And that "whatever" part. How specific. How to the point. I think I'm going to go torture myself now.

feels, in this more cynical light, kind of self-congratulatory. "Hey, what if I wanted to parody a poetry editor rejecting someone? Wouldn't adding 'whatever' at the end of a riff on William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Koch be just perfect? How specific! How to the point! Score!"

Then again, human cluelessness is a powerful force in the world. But I am still suspicious.

C. -- no relation to WCW.

PS The link highlighted by "completely missing the point" has two conjoined URLs.

A couple more Tor slush pile pictures from September 2003, immediately after Patrick's Noble Assistant had Slaughtered The Slush Pile, are here and here. (Also note our gracious hostess' (is that the appropriate apostrification?) right hand in the second picture.) :)

I have a file folder in my, er, file cabinet (clever, wot?) entitled 'Rejection letters -- the fools, the fools!' I usually keep rejection letters on my desk for about two days, which is enough time to get over the breath-taking OW of it all, and then putting the letter in my FOOLS! folder makes everything much better. :)

I can't imagine going online and ranting endlessly about the vicious heartless nasty bad awful publishers who rejected me. The publishing industry's an *awfully* small pond to be pissing in. Besides, it's much more fun to go around the house yelling, "the fools! the fools!" Well, for me it is, anyway. Possibly I'm a little odd. :) (But full of smiley faces this morning, apparently.)

-Catie

Lisa: "I am in the smallest room in my house." etc. is actually from the German composer Max Reger, in response to a negative newspaper review of his music.

Somebody signing themselves only "John" quotes Jo Walton's observation that "All the same, rejection is a slap in the face," and responds:

No, it isn't.

Jeez, you would think that anyone who submits something to a company that charges money for their publications would automatically know that publishing is a BUSINESS.

This means the ONLY reason they would even consider publishing your work is because they think it can be sold for a profit. Therefore, even the thought that they are someohow judging the author is just hubris on the part of the writer since the author is nothing more than the "generator" of the product being offered for sale.

Imagine that you are a jeweler picking diamonds. You aren't making a value judgement by choosing some over others, you are simply attempting to find stones that will SELL to your customers at a price you can profit from. The fact that some diamonds get used to make cutting tools and others go on the rings of rich eye-candy is a business decision, not a "slap in the face" of the people who mined the gems, or the people who cut them, or the people who sold them to wholesalers. It's just BUSINESS people.

Get a grip.

Teresa was writing as a human being who works inside the publishing industry, and reflecting on the various different ways people in different roles see themselves in relation to the literary submissions process. Jo was adding her own note of personal perception--pointing out that although, as Teresa pointed out, editors don't mean a rejection personally, nonetheless for the writer it's probably going to feel that way.

"John" isn't adding anything to this except a bullyragging insistence that the values of business--excuse me, "BUSINESS"--must be paid tribute to at every stage of the conversation. For Jo to reflect on how the transaction feels to her as a human participant is impermissable--she must be shouted down. "It's just BUSINESS people. Get a grip."

This is the kind of culture we're turning into: a culture run by people like "John."

Very entertaining and educational post, Teresa!

I let fear of rejection stop me from submitting for many years. But then at Necon a few years back (this would have been right before VP) I realized that the only thing holding me back from being a published writer was my own fear. So ta-da, off to the post office I went, and though it took a little time to toughen up, I can honestly say that most of the time I now shrug rejections off as just part of doing business. It helps, perhaps, that I don't read the rejections too closely before I toss them into a shoebox under my desk. People who obsess over every little word and phrase, who think or write vile thoughts about editors, who nurture every real or perceived slight--these people, I think, need to get some perspective. Basketball players don't worry about the baskets they *don't* make, unless it's to use that knowledge to help improve their game--and rejections come in so many shapes and colors, and for so many reasons, that I think they're useless as far as telling you how to improve a story, if that's in fact what the story needs.

If a rejection does hit close to the heart, which some invariably do, oh well. It's why they invented Ben & Jerry's Cookie Dough Ice Cream. You get over it or you don't, you stop writing or you don't. Simple.

As an interested third-party with experience of neither editing nor authorship, I wonder if the disconnect might be more related to different codes of language. The Editor is writing in the code of her profession, into which the Author has yet to be initiated. The words simply don't mean the same things to the different readers.

For example, when an editor calls a submission 'sentimental', that's professionally a note on a specific dynamic in the writing that needs changing, in effect saying "ease up on the mush, and it might be a better work. Rewrite it." The hapless author, however, understands it to mean "Your writing is mawkish, and nauseatingly saccharine. Give up writing, now, and never ever consider yourself an author again. Try Hollywood."

It's not just the differing context of writing and reading the rejection, but the very words themselves that provoke such bile. What fun.

Jo: Bitching isn't productive in the way working to make their writing better would be, but I expect it gives them a support structure and helps them feel less suicidal.

Makes sense. OTOH, it also reinforces misconceptions about the publishing industry and gives people the opportunity to publicly display their lack of reading comprehension, in a forum that might well be read by the people they are slagging, or acquaintances thereof, whichever (see the teen writer).

Your advice is much more helpful than mine, which is: don't do the bitching in public.

(Wading into fanfic archives, btw, has to be much like reading slush. Except on screen.)

I normally get into a panic state just thinking about the moment when I have to send the baby out the door into the cold cruel world, but this was actually rather encouraging, if only because I'm sure I can get at least to step #8 and quite possibly as far as #11, and I'm very good at things like SASEs. And I may stand rejection, as long as there's clearly a human being on the other end. (Some day, we will all be rejected by computers. Will we feel better or worse?)

Oy.

I understand why people would not like to receive rejection letters (after all, what's to like?), it's just the... disconnection with reality that gets me.

It occurs to me that the experience may be somewhat different for writers who have actually published something, or for writers who hang out in places like this, than it is for the people posting on RejectionLetters. If you have some inkling of what actually goes on at publishers - and anyone who reads this blog should - you have context, so your anger at a rejection isn't likely to go off in silly directions.

And if you've been published, you are less likely to be wildly overestimating your abilities (the Particles link from a few weeks ago about people not knowing their weaknesses is desperately relevant here).

I myself have spent very little time reading slush. I was on the non-fiction editorial review board for my college's literary magazine, but we didn't get anything entertainingly bad that I can recall - nothing below an 8 on the list (of course Sarah Lawrence has a strong emphasis on writing).

What this really made me think of was resumes, from back when we had open job postings and I'd also troll Monster with keyword searches. Resumes obtained through these processes can be quite slushy. I recall one which included a lengthy section about how the job hunter was planning to run for the United States Senate (complete with platform), one handwritten on yellow lined paper which at some point started discussing the job seeker's desire to be dominated by women (actually my wife found this one), and the one which I treasure for the classic simplicity of the Monster title - "SENIOR QAULITY ENGINEER."

This is why so many companies use recruiting firms. They're agents.

Fascinating, Teresa. And if you think it's bad in fiction (most of my work and experience on the other side of the manuscript is with serious nonfiction publishers)...

Scrivener's Error: Marvin the Misunderstood Manuscript

What a great post. I think there's just something about rejection relating to story that sparks extreme reactions. I don't think it's just writers, maybe it's rejection itself. I don't know.

I've never read slush, but I did work as a used book buyer for a time. Otherwise normal customers used to behave in the oddest ways when selling their books.

I still remember one woman, who brought in a box of books that reeked of cat urine; it was sticky and dusty and scary. I asked her, politely, to take her books out of the box and place them on the counter (we always asked everyone to do this, as boxes hide many nasty things.)

The woman refused, saying the books had cat pee on them, and she didn't want to touch them. I explained that it was our policy not to remove books from boxes and that if she didn't want to touch them, I certainly wasn't going to.

I asked her, nicely, if *she* would buy books with urine on them, and she said, "No!" She still had a hard time linking that reaction to her books.

Our head book buyer had a variety of rejection softening techniques. The one I remember the best was the way he'd start his rejection with the word "yes". "Yes, thanks, we don't need any of these."

Reading the editorial letters, it sure looks like the editors are trying to soften the blow. Not sure it will ever succeed, really. Maybe that's just the nature of the game?

A friend of mine, probably in a moment somewhere between the blue form of death from ROF and the didn't grab,hold, work from JJA, has commented that if she ever became a slush editor, she'd buy twelve packs of colored paper, shuffle them, and use them to print rejections, thus forever bewildering the writers, who'd spend countless hours trying to compare and figure out what each color stood for.

The only cure from rejection is the realization that one's identity is separate from one's product. Unfortunately, easier said than done.

Reading these makes me feel downright well-adjusted. I barely even glance at rejections anymore; update the records, file, and move on. Occasionally I post a positive one on the desk for a while: a little egoboo.

The coldest rejection I ever got was from a rather important, well-known, SF-oriented agency. They sent back my original letter with "NOT FOR US" rubber-stamped on it. Gotta give 'em points for brevity.

Beth wrote: >Melissa, have I mentioned lately that I love you?

um, well, gosh, she said, blushing.

Always nice to hear.

I learned at least some of that sort of thing from you, you know . . . .

My first ever rejection letter was... interesting. I had sent some poems in for a competition, and received a pleasant, polite letter informing me that, however good my poems were, they weren't quite good enough. What got me was that the letter was addressed to "Mr Farmar". I realised that I'd signed the cover letter "KR Farmar", and one of the poems was a love poem addressed to a woman. Naturally, the editor assumed I was a man...

I kept that rejection letter pinned up on my bedroom wall for years afterwards, as an encouragement to doing better in future.

Since then I haven't sent out much, but my rejection letters have been getting steadily less discouraging, from the agent who said my novel was "very odd... we don't think it's a strong enough story" (it wasn't) to the magazine who said "the story ends too abruptly" (it did) to another magazine who didn't say very much at all (but having reread the story and taken a look at the calibre of writing they normally publish, I'm more relieved than surprised -- it would have been an embarrassment if it had been published; as it is it can moulder in a drawer until I'm dead and my executors publish it as "juvenilia"), to an almost-an-acceptance-but-not-quite from Marvel Comics. (And I know for a fact that Marvel were undergoing internal problems at the time, which lessens the sting of their refusal to publish my script as it stood. Plus, the editor said I was talented. Just thinking about that gives me a warm glow.)

Of course, I've worked for my parents' publishing company off and on since I was 14, so my attitude is somewhat different from the norm...

This is very off-topic. But:

"On the other hand, if all you want are affirmations, go to an AA meeting."

Have you ever been to an AA meeting? I'm just curious. I've never gone to an AA meeting wanting only affirmations, and I've never experienced one as being only affirmations, either.

I'm doing slushkilling right this moment - well, I mean, doing business hours - as an intern in a small small publisher. Today I got a manuscript I was really, really sorry for - I mean, my heart really bled for the poor kid. She didn't have clue one about writing. And it meant so obviously f***ing much to her.

While I was crooning my sorrow for her, quoting choice passages from her manuscript, I became aware of the other interns looking at me - those who agonize for one whole day over one manuscript, read all of it through, take notes, and write long rejection comments on the manuscripts received log.

One of them was looking at me with something between admiration and terror and told me: "If I ever write something, I never, never want to be read by you."

Well, somebody has to play the villain, I guess. It does get the slushpile down in a hurry.

It's true though: slushreading makes you realize you're a far better writer than about 95% of them. It made me want to get back to writing for a while, even from the deepest depths of depression. Didn't last past office hours, but it's a start.

Mostly, when I read slush, besides feeling sorry I feel a sense of admiration for the poor bastards. They may not have a clue or a good command of the language but by God they did sit down and hack out the thing letter by letter. That's a hard thing to do. It's this admiration that made me finally sit down and finish my first novel. I wish there was a way to convey that admiration through a "Thank you, but no" letter, but the sorry fact is, sometimes you really don't want to encourage them.

What those people at the site don't realize is that sometimes the polite form rejection is a lot nicer than what goes through your head reading the stuff. There's the ones you feel sorry for but there's also the ones you'd like to smack.

Then again, I can't throw stones. I got really mad at my first rejection.

Thank you for that entry. I see myself stalling around #8 or #9. My insurance doesn't cover psychotherapy, so I guess I'll have to keep writing until my prose and psyche improve.

Rejection letters are like war medals. I have half a dozen or so at this point and in some ways would feel a little betrayed if I didn't amass at leats a dozen. From the tone, I get the feeling Most Agents and Editors find my MS to be a catagory 13, which is heartening as it means I simply haven't found the right publisher yet.

I get miffed for all of about thirty three seconds and then realize that it isn't personal. These people don't know me. I'm a stranger asking an impertinant question of a busy profeshoinal. I'm lucky they don't send howlers.

Elizabeth -

I think it depends a lot on the nature of the blow.

I'm completely unpublished; I expect that I'm going to stay that way. The point of trying to get published, sending things I've written off to publishers, is to give myself an opportunity to be wrong about that. (Since I'd rather live in the universe where someone is willing to bet money that something I've written is widely entertaining than not.)

I find that having manuscripts rejected still sucks rocks, in a 'yup, I'm cursed' sort of way.

If the manuscript had gone out in a positive hope, instead of a negative one -- wanting to be right about being a good writer, instead of wanting to be wrong about being an inherently noncommercial one -- it would, I think, hurt rather more.

I don't think it matters that the decision by the editors at the publisher is fundamentally commercial; while that's true, there isn't any change in the personal consequences.

Which is where I think the impulse to soften the blow comes in; one doesn't want it to be a blow, and has no idea how hard it will fall (since that depends so much on the author's state of being), and one has to do it anyway. The preference for doing it as delicately as possible under the circumstances makes a lot of sense.

Interesting. In high school, before I came to the realization that I just wasn't good at thinking up new and interesting plots, I wrote and submitted a few science fiction short stories. (And, I blush to admit, rhyming poems, not good ones, including one in re: Challenger that began "you toil aloft on triple tounges of flame....") The rejection slips I got back neither suprised nor dismayed me. In fact, I rather treasured the one that appeared to be signed by Stanley Schmidt his own self.

But then, I'm not a writer.

I laughed so hard, my husband asked me what was so funny and spent the next twenty minutes listening to me read your comments! I'll echo Holly's comment that I feel totally sane and well-adjusted after reading this - that doesn't happen very often. I'm going to have to bookmark this for the time that I actually write something that I'm happy enough to start my own rejection letter collection with.

I believe that Hustler used to send out squares of toilet paper that said "This ain't the kind of shit we're looking for."

The best rejection letter I ever received was from Sub Pop Records, and began "Dear Loser." It was a form letter, so I didn't take it personally.

What does seem unfair to authors, though, is the (unwritten?) rule that they submit manuscripts to publishers in series rather than in parallel. What's the justification for this practice? The music business seems to manage without it.

Great article. There is something you may be overlooking, however. Authors get several rejection slips for every work they send out, so they make a relative opinion about rejections in comparison to other rejections they've received.

When a single story nets you one rejection that reads, 'Great story -- I'm sure someone will publish it, but we can't right now', then three form letters, and then one that claims you're a chimpanzee with no grasp of the english language....well, then it's difficult not to lose respect for one or more of the editors involved. Is the 'nice' editor an idiot, or is the 'mean' editor an asshole? Or is the entire profession just messed up? These are the things that go through authors' heads when editors violently disagree.

On the very first submission of my first novel I chose one of Canada's top publishing houses. I eventually received a glowing rejection letter from the Senior Children's Editor. Contrary to the cry-babies I've just read about, I used her recommendations and ended up self-publishing my novel.

I've now self-published three novels in the Autumn Jade Mystery Series and sold more books than the majority of first-time authors who sign on with a name publisher. The editor has since left that publishing house, but I managed to find her and sent an appropriate thank-you letter. It was her kindess and extra effort (in what must be a truly overwhelming job) that encouraged me to keep with it.

If you really believe in your writing, self-publish it! Check out http://www.autumnjade.com to see how it's done.

Fun and interesting post and discussion.

I've found that a rejection is a rejection, and
the person up-thread who just got a "no" written
on the cover letter actually got just as useful
a rejection as the person who gets more
information. A rejection is only a no.

As an example:
I've received a lot of rejections saying the
story and the writing were terrific, but just
missed the cut off, or that the editor didn't
feel it quite met the feel of the magazine or
imprint and that this editor was sure it would
be accepted elsewhere. This is a way to make
the writer feel better (and maybe the editor
too), but it ultimately fails when the writer
realizes that, well, actually the story is not
publishable and they're really wasting the
paper and postage

Personally, I recognize that my writing is not
yet publishable, but I would never get any feel
for that from the content of my rejections, (it's
not part of the editor's job description) nor
from anyone else who may read or critique a
story.

You can only figure out how publishable your
story is from the volume of rejections, not from
their content or tone. I guess this fits with
Heinlein's edict. Many a new writer has spent
too many hours trying to understand rejections
and what might be written between the lines.

What the begining writer is trying to determine
from the rejection is where in the list of 14
possibilities the story fell, but even if the
list were included in the rejection with the
number circled, it would only tell you what
that editor thought.

(OK, if one of the first few were circled, you
could learn something and maybe stop submitting
until you get some more basics, but how many
people who had one of the first few circled
would believe it anyway?)

Cliff

I suppose I was once a slush reader, although I didn't realize it at the time. My then-SO published a small-press literary magazine (fairly well regarded) and I helped him weed his incoming submissions once he got to the "tottering towers" level of behindness. I have never doubted that I could write after that; at least I would never consider letting anyone else see anything I had written that was as bad as 90+% of what we got.

But there are those moments. I got promoted to "fiction editor" for the last issue before he decided to fold it and I got to choose the stories for that issue. There were two that were so perfect and evocative that I still remember them all these years later. One of those authors had moved with no forwarding address and the other had died. They never knew they had been accepted.

MAO

I first started submitting short-story manuscripts when I was 16. At 16, I knew just enough about the industry to (a) always include a SASE; (b) type and double-space my manuscripts; and (c) not take rejections as an editor's judgement of my personal worth as a human being. Of course I was still disappointed by the form rejection slips I got, but I wasn't crushed to a sobbing pulp, and I was elated by my personal rejection from an editor who asked to see more of my work (though thoroughly disappointed when the magazine disappeared a couple years later). I'm amazed that there are adults out there that lack the sort of extremely basic understanding of the industry that I had as a high school kid. Especially since I was certainly more than willing to wallow in all sorts of other varieties of angst at that age...

If these people ever get published, how on earth are they going to react to bad reviews? Now those are painful.

I wrote a short humor piece about rejection letters a couple of years ago -- it was my first published work ever (appearing in the now sadly defunct Scavenger's Newsletter). It's online on my website now if anyone wants to go read it: http://www.tcinternet.net/users/kritzerburke/naomi/devilsmailbox.htm Gordon Van Gelder liked it enough that he sent me a postcard saying so. I, um, framed the postcard and hung it on the wall of my study. (There are stories about writers wallpapering their studies with their rejection letters. A more depressing exercise, I can't imagine. Wallpapering with ordinary wallpaper is bad enough.)

1) I am deeply, deeply pained that Jo Walton has four novels published. See, I only own three of them. Time to hit the bookstores...

2) My summer-long stint of interning at Tor was one of the smartest things I ever did in terms of understanding the process and sympathizing with/understanding editors. I agree with whoever said up-thread that more (or was it all?) authors should try it.

3) If I sent out manuscripts to make the rounds, I'd have to keep the rejection letters. They'd serve as a very deep and personal reminder of where I'd already sent a given manuscript, because I am certainly not capable of remembering these things on my own.

Remus said:

Authors get several rejection slips for every work they send out, so they make a relative opinion about rejections in comparison to other rejections they've received.

This is a good point. Writers' groups suffer from this same disparity of perspective. One member of your group thinks your characters are wonderful, well-drawn, sympathetic and engaging; another claims that character X is a racist cliche' while character Y is a blatant Mary Sue; and the rest of the group is making perfunctory proofreading marks while impatiently waiting to hear nice things about their stories.

After a while you learn to take a sort of mental and emotional average of everybody's comments, and throw out anything that's too extreme.

I had a moment there when I was shocked at your estimates of how many truly terrible manuscripts must be rejected daily, and I was on the verge of thinking "surely there aren't that many people who really submit their dreck in the belief that it has a fair shot at being published."

And then I remembered that we are, after all, on planet Earth, and that such a thing was imminently possible.

Also, I recalled just how many books actually are published which according to your categories should not be (*cough*RobertJordan*coughcough*category #10*cough*). In light of such, it is easy to believe that publishers really DO get plenty of submissions that contain entire sentences in all caps, etc.

>What does seem unfair to authors, though, is the
>(unwritten?) rule that they submit manuscripts
>to publishers in series rather than in parallel.
>What's the justification for this practice?

Editor A really, really does not want to deal with a letter coming back the other way saying "Thanks for buying this, but I already sold it to Editor B."

Any writer who hates rejection just needs to spend a year writing ad copy. I've never had a rejection from an editor that was nearly as harsh and painful as client feedback. Marketing flunkies who destroy your ideas over speakerphone while they dawdle over their tri-colored pasta are the cruelist people in cubicleland.

At least editors don't expect your work to do something that stories can't do. Unlike marketeers, who want your short ad to compel billions of folks to buy some crap that they don't want or need. Editors just want to publish something that they think people will buy. If we disagree on that, I do feel disappointment, but I don't feel personal rejection. They didn't like my story, for whatever reason. Generally, if I send something out, it's because I think it succeeds at what I was trying to accomplish. By the time I'm getting the rejections, I'm on to the next story anyway.

Maybe the anger comes from the relationship of the client and the worker. The worker must resent the client, it's the way. You want fries with that?

Sometimes even very *cough* successful writers submit manuscripts with entire sentences in CAPS. Sometimes it even works...but maybe there is some long-term indicator there, after all...

"IT IS NOT HERE."

"Well, if you're referring to plot advancement, then, yeah, I'd have to agree."

"I WILL TAKE NO PART."

"...of what? You'll take no part of Elayne's bath out of the manuscript?"

Yet more links for y'all:

Myrtle the Manuscript

Confessions of a Slush Pile Reader

Sean writes:

"Any writer who hates rejection just needs to spend a year writing ad copy. I've never had a rejection from an editor that was nearly as harsh and painful as client feedback."

Huh. Strangely enough, I never have any problem with criticism of my business writing. My feeling about it is that I'm there to deliver what *they* want, not what I think they should want (or I think they should have). I pretty much entirely subsume any ego when I do corporate writing, which I guess is an interesting writing exercise in itself. But it means that if a client has a virulent reaction, I don't take it personally -- I just try to get it closer to what they want.

I am of course awed by some of the miscomprehensions quoted by Teresa, particularly the writer who took "While your story has some really strong writing, it doesn't fit our needs" as meaning "Our needs preclude really strong writing."

Still, even as someone who's never submitted fiction to a professional market, I find myself sympathizing with some of the hurt feelings here, even as we're being asked to sympathized with the editors who have to make the rejections.

Some of the writers seem especially hurt by the particularly gentle, sympathetic, "it's a good story but ..." letters. What these remind me of is romantic brushoffs of the "Why can't we just be friends?" or "You're a really sweet guy but ..." type. Or, I suppose, the typically male equivalents, "I'm not ready to settle down" or "I need my space."

Thanks for a great post and a great conversation. I'll be telling all my friends about this one.

The worst rejection I've received in the last year was from a Major Literary Magazine, who crammed my MS into the one-stamp SASE (along with a form rejection letter) and sent it to me with 92 cents postage due. What part of "disposable manuscript" didn't they understand?

A friend of mine, probably in a moment somewhere between the blue form of death from ROF and the didn't grab,hold, work from JJA, has commented that if she ever became a slush editor, she'd buy twelve packs of colored paper, shuffle them, and use them to print rejections, thus forever bewildering the writers, who'd spend countless hours trying to compare and figure out what each color stood for.

I believe Argosy is now doing exactly that.

I've just been thinking about the similarities between programming and writing in this context. Writers have editors, and gather rejection slips; programmers have testers, and gather bug reports. Neither should be taken personally, because they're not intended as such. In fact, there's a technical term for coders who take bug reports as personal affronts: project managers. (Miaow.)

The 13 reasons for rejection also map roughly to the reasons a tester might have for not accepting a piece of software:

• 1-7: code doesn't compile
• 8-10: code doesn't conform to requirements
• 11-13: code doesn't run fast enough

The software teams that finish their projects and actually ship product are the ones that buckle down and keep working until they get to 14: acceptance. Same with writers.

The way to stop rejection slips hurting is to gather more. Eventually you just feel numb. I've had 28 in the last 12 months and have now attained the happy state of shrug and resubmit.

Shouting 'Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! at the envelope helps.

Slush readers, however, should all be issued with a small monk to stand close by as they plod through the piles. His job is to ignite threads soaked in naphtha while whispering 'Remember John Grisham'*.

JF
*Or 'Watership Down.' Or...

Editor A really, really does not want to deal with a letter coming back the other way saying "Thanks for buying this, but I already sold it to Editor B."

That doesn't sound like much of an imposition compared to spending months or years finding out if a story or book is publishable, when you could do it in six weeks.

But maybe it's just the difference between publishing and music. A musician makes a greater financial outlay in a demo than a writer does in a manuscript, with less hope of success. The shelf life of a demo is also shorter.

And of course an editor buys more manuscripts in a given time period than a record company signs artists, so the process needs to be more streamlined. Still, if I were a writer, it would bug me.

I've just been thinking about the similarities between programming and writing in this context.

The levels of rejection don't also map like that - code that merely doesn't compile is at level, well, the levels don't map well at all, but if I were doing 14 levels of code evaluation it'd be around level 7 or so. There are all sorts of nasty things lurking in levels 1-6.

After reading this, I can name a lot of reasons why your stories are rejected--the SSAE just one of them, attitude another. I don't know one SERIOUS writer who would ever send a submission without an SSAE. It's a lack of respect to omit it, not to mention being a clear indicator of where you are professionally. But hey, if it's working for you...

He is also said to have rejected a manuscript with "I am in the smallest room of my house, and your manuscript is before me. Soon it shall be behind me."

"I am in the smallest room in my house." etc. is actually from the German composer Max Reger, in response to a negative newspaper review of his music.

I was told that was Voltaire.

6. Author has a moderate neurochemical disorder and can’t tell when he or she has changed the subject. This greatly facilitates composition, but is hard on comprehension.

Gosh, I guess I won't submit my stream-of-consciousness novel from the point of view of a guy with severe ADHD (I was going to call him Marcus Sam). And I was making such progress...I'd almost gotten started.

Seriously, the only time I ever actually submitted something it was to Asimov's, and it got a form letter (I thought a very nice one), saying "Your story was seen by an editor, but either..." [list several of the low-number reasons in Teresa's post] "...or simply did not rise high enough above the level of the other ____ stories we received that month." And "217" was handwritten in.

I, of course, assumed it was that last. But I never submitted it anywhere else, and by then I was bored with the story and didn't rewrite it.

This morning's edition of Making Light, reminds me of the relentlessly incisive and entertaining introspection, say, of "Law Day." I hope we can look forward to reading this again, along with other selected entries, in _Making Book 2_. In the meantime, I'll keep the permalink for our old lodge brothers -- for the next time the meme-wheel comes around to: "blogs: all politics and ephemeral chit-chat; fanzines: literate introspection."

Melissa wrote: "It's these lines that got to me:

> I absolutely believe that your children love it, but there is a real difference between a told story and a written one.

This is true, but I can smell a faint whiff of condescension here on the part of the editor. I think it's in the phrase "your children."

> And I am afraid that PRINCE JASON AND THE MAGIC STAR is just too slight and too sentimental to make a successful book.

I'd keep the "slight" but lose the "sentimental." Actually, I would try to find another way to say all of this . . . ."

Melissa, as a one time editor of children's books, I cannot tell how many letters with mss. begin "My children all love this story. . ." or how many relate that it was a told story they insisted get put down on paper. (Almost always badly.)

And probably slight and sentimental are the two bugaboos of children's picture books.

I think the editor did that author a big favor. Not that the author probably saw it that way. But if I had taken time to write to the author, I would probably have said the same thing.

YMMV, obviously.

And I love you, too.

Jane

re Holly M.'s comment, I think part of the problem is that (unless one is part of the Literary Scene, and thus probably published already) the editors are unknowns. In a writer's group, you KNOW that Person A has real issues with strong female characters and Person B gets bored if there isn't an action sequence every ten pages, so you mentally adjust for their criticism.

As a writer, you have no way to know what an editor's preferences and issues are. There's no way to know that the editor who rejected your manuscript is just plain sick of mission-to-Mars stories, no matter how good yours was, or that the name of the main character is the same as his nutbar ex's.

That said, I don't take rejection letters personally unless they ARE personal, e.g. "Your writing sucks, don't quit your day job." After all, if it were personal, I never would have been rejected, being the fabulous and irresistible person I am. ;)

Peter Watts and I just received a short story rejection from an obviously overloaded and therefore delayed market. The dim background picture on the page is of a girl giving the reader the finger. Supposed to show they have "edge," I guess, but I have to say that and the time they took won't entice either of us to bother with them again.

But that's the end of my bitching, since I've seen a tiny fraction of the crap that Teresa gets to see.

D

It's odd...I have a friend who actually passes by conditions 1-8 at least, and sometimes 1-10...but who seldom finishes work and submits it for publication. After a recent round of correspondence with her, I found myself reflecting on the why of this. I decided that the unfortunate truth is that many would-be writers are treating submission as part of (sometimes most of) an educational system, and expecting some level of attention from the system.

My favorite rejection slip was a form with about 20 reasons to be checked off as needed. I got "It was too long" but not "It was very bad" or "It was AWFUL". I suppose knowing I wasn't at the worst end of the spectrum was comforting to my teenaged ego.

I still wonder how bad I'd have to be to get "Your enemies, who are constantly plotting against you, have paid us a large sum of money to reject anything you submit."

Great post! Thanks for it.

Quoth Remus:

Is the 'nice' editor an idiot, or is the 'mean' editor an asshole? Or is the entire profession just messed up?

Or none of the above. Editors are just people with fancy titles, after all, and different people are bound to have different opinions on stories. That doesn't have to mean anyone's wrong or nasty or overly charitable. Could be that all this scenario means is that you misread one of your markets. It happens...no big deal.

(Could mean other things, too, of course.)

The following three points are, I think, inarguable (tho correct me if I'm wrong):

Reading slush largely sucks, and editors are perfectly justified in rejecting the majority of the submissions they receive.

Writing and submitting means you will inevitably receive rejection letters.

Rejection letters aren't fun, even at their best. Some people can shrug them off; others are driven to quitting writing, or even life, altogether. Common advice seems to be that writers need to "toughen up" to learn to live with rejection.

My question (stupid, probably, but I'm used to it): Is a "tougher" writer a better writer?

The way to get around having your manuscript sit on Publisher A's bookshelf for a year before it gets rejected, thereby freeing it to sit on Publisher B's bookshelf for another year, etc, until by the time it's finally accepted you are too old to tour is by getting an agent.

Agents can submit manuscripts and proposals simultaneously as long as they inform editors that they're doing so.

It's probably at least as hard to get a good agent as it is to get your book accepted by a publisher. But there are many more agents to submit to and their turnaround time is far faster.

The lesson I take from all this is that we should turn slush around faster than we do. The wait makes everything too agonizing, and the responses too important.

Fran, there are tough cookies who are awful writers, and others who are excellent. One of the most respected writers in the field is as touchy as a bear with a toothache. Fortunately, said writer isn't often in danger of rejection.

We recognize two very rough categories. One are the writers who wouldn't take a hint if it weighed six hundred pounds and were dropped on their collective foot. They're immune to discouragement, along with most other forms of social influence. The other sort will take any hint that could possibly be construed as a comment upon their work, and clutch it to their bosom. The Spartan boy with the fox has nothing on them.

It is impossible to say anything about commercial writing that will get through to the first sort without unjustly frightening and depressing the second sort.

What bothered you the most about this letter?

The second sentence, because it inferred that an offer was available

If this is an example of the usage in the manuscript, I can see why it might be rejected.

I'm not any kind of writer, but this whole post makes me feel like finishing up a story or two and sending them out. Heck, I compulsively proofread everything down to cereal boxes. I can write a paragraph that's all about the same thing. Even if my plotting were terrible, I'd at least make it to number 7.

Ah, the "should" factor! But, O Wise and Lovely Hostess....

A: how many mss do you receive in a week? (My guess: 35)

B: how long does it take to log a ms in your records, open it up, read (some of) it, make a decision, find the appropriate rejection (or acceptance) letter, scribble in an encouraging note if appropriate, stick it in the SASE, make a note in the log boook, and put the package back into the mail to return it to the author? (My guess: 20 minutes)

Multiply A x B. (My guesses => 12 hours)

Can you afford to take this many working hours out of your week, every single week?

Hey, how 'bout doing one of those contests of the the "guess how many M&M's are in this glass jar" type? You could do "how many mss are in this slushpile?" with a photo of your office. All entries must be accompanied by a box of chocolates or a ball of yarn. Winner gets a free line-edit of their first chapter. :-D

All the letters cited in Teresa's original post strike me as perfectly professional and acceptable. The writers taking offense at them seem, to me, to range from overly sensitive to downright loony.

In particular, this item: "The manuscript you gave (a mutual friend) arrived today. I read it at once and am really sorry to have to tell you that I am afraid it is not something we can add to our list. I absolutely believe that your children love it, but there is a real difference between a told story and a written one. And I am afraid that PRINCE JASON AND THE MAGIC STAR is just too slight and too sentimental to make a successful book. This is, of course, just one opinion, and I wish you every success with the project."

strikes me as being written by an editor genuinely going out of his way to be a little bit more helpful than professonally required, because the submission came from a friend of a friend.

The statement "I absolutely believe your children love it" seems to me to be a simple statement of fact, not at all condescending - we love the art created by the people we love far more than we would if they were created by strangers. Children love the stories their parents tell them, parents hang their children's crude pictures on the refrigerator door. For further discussion of this phenomenon, see here.

I've always somewhat disliked Harry Chapin and thinking about that song again makes me think about why. In my version of that story, Mr. Tanner rents out the concert hall, everybody in town comes and gives him a standing ovation. The critic writes the withering review - and he's right, too; Mr. Tanner's voice really isn't very good by professional standards - but nobody really cares. Mr. Tanner goes back to singing opera in his dry-cleaning store; the customers love to hear him sing, although to tell the truth his employees sometimes get a little tired of it. Sometimes he tells his nieces and nephews about the time he sang in a concert hall; they're kind of tired of hearing the story but they love seeing how happy Mr. Tanner is when he remembers the experience.

Indeed, one of the things I love about fandom is that it's one of the few places I'm aware of in America where amateur artmaking is still celebrated. Fans understand that it's often not as important how good the art is - the important thing is that the art brings us together. Shary McCrumb doesn't seem to understand this at all.

I highly recommend the book "Kitchen Confidential," by Paul Bourdain, a professional memoir by a chef. One of the chapters contains advice about food presentation, for people who want to know how they can get the food they cook at home to look like food served in restaurants. Bourdain explains how, but that's not the advice he gives. The advice he gives is: forget it. A home-cooked meal should look and taste like a home-cooked meal, not like restaurant food. He described how his mother-in-law apologizes when she cooks a meal for him and he tries to get her to stop because he loves her cooking, in part because of who it is who's doing the cooking.

This post started out being about one thing but now it seems to be about something else. More on another rock.

Hey, is anyone monitoring RejectionCollection for a response?

thanks, Teresa. I guess what I was wondering was whether or not one would (hypothetically, of course) be doing more harm than good by handling the submission/rejection stuff for an author who took form rejections to mean "you loser, you cannot write your way out of a paper bag and should never be allowed near a keyboard again" -- i.e., would the cost of "preventing the toughening-up" outweigh the benefits of "protecting from the ouch"?

Kellie:

I haven't read any fiction slush either, but I think you're onto something with the analogy to grading. As a TA, on any homework I see so many permutations of the same error that, until recently, I was often driven to sarcasm.

Last semester, after grading an Intro to Flight homework in which a student told me that the airplane was flying at -10000 ft above sea level, I wrote a response ("Was it flying in a mine shaft?") that hurt the student. I was trying to be funny and remind him to use common sense when solving engineering problems, but it didn't come off that way. The whole class had been getting the problem wrong, and I was frustrated with them, which made me overreact.

I can easily see how a slush reader could fall into the same trap and write something with a hard edge to it, or how a writer could take an innocent remark (which mine was not) and read something ugly.

"[W]e should turn slush around faster than we do. The wait makes everything too agonizing, and the responses too important."

That would really be nice, if it were possible without spending lots of money on people to do the slush reading. It's true that if I have to wait over a year to hear back, I'm fantasizing that somebody's actually taken that manuscript home, read it, carried it to his or her supervisor or maybe even the committee, and is debating as to whether it might make the list. It's a real comedown when the little SASE arrives to set me straight.

"I always try to remember to turn page 27 upside-down again, and put the hair back in at the end of chapter two, before returning the manuscript. Scraps used to turn page 27 right-side-up, but turned two other random pages upside-down."

See, I would appreciate that bit, because it would [theoretically] tell me that he/she had read about that far. What I usually wish I knew is at what exact point the reader abandoned my novel, because then I could surmise that it wasn't very gripping or that the tension dropped off *or* that I hadn't fulfilled some of the expectations that I'd set up earlier. If two people stop reading around page fifty, telling me, "I just got bored," that's a sign that something needs to be done around page forty-five or so . . . either I didn't go in the direction I'd led the reader to believe I was heading, or I went off on some kind of tangent and didn't notice. It's nice to hear where I went wrong. If he or she read the first five chapters and *then* decided it wasn't going anyplace, I feel more encouraged than if the reader bonked it against the mail slot after three pages of "this crap."

It's tough to tell what's wrong from this end of the pipeline. My rejections are usually of the form "Wonderful book with engaging characters, but not for us," or "Talented, but you wrote the wrong book again, or [silence] because I never hear anything back at all and am afraid to write asking about it (since that's usually treated as a request to send the brick back by return mail, or at least that's the way it has worked so far.) No, actually, I *do* know what's wrong. My Muse[s] send me small, personal stories that just don't have lots of commercial potential, and I'm not doing them in a "literary" fashion ("three friends meet again after twenty years and try to sort out their lives" bit, chick flick style) and therefore can't send them to people who like slower, smaller personal stories. At least that's my current theory.

(By the way, someone pasted a link to this entry into a msg on the "Chick Lit" discussion group list, so if you get lots of responses from new people, that could be the reason.)

This was illuminating/scary/depressing. Also bloody hilarious.

I started submitting incredibly bad sf/f crap in 7th grade. Or was it 6th grade? By the time I hit 12th grade I'd collected a few rejection slips, most of them from South Korea. (You'd think that the extra 14-20 days turnaround wouldn't make a difference, but it did, psychologically. Also, I was an absolute tyrant about acquiring U.S. postage, because I couldn't get my mom to understand what on earth an IRC was, let alone where in Seoul to acquire some.)

I think maybe that when you start that young and naive, you have to develop a thick skin or you'd do the sensible thing and stop.

And to all the editors: I want to say that I have never felt insulted by a rejection, even a form rejection; I keep and treasure the ones in which the editor(s) took the time to write me a comment, and tried to learn from them. Anything above a form rejection is an encouraging sign, in my world. And although I don't think any of those editors are represented here, I want to say thank you; and I'm ashamed I never sent thank-you cards to those editors, except they sounded awfully busy and I was afraid of offending them with one more irrelevant thing to read. (That's the other thing you get from growing up in Korea, is a mortal fear of offending people.) Is it all right to send thank-you cards for personalized rejection slips? Maybe once a year? Or does one just keep submitting stuff that one tries to make ever-better?

I peer-tutored writing as an undergrad and lordy, we dreaded HCEC/med-school app season, because there were so many of those things (I remember only one person who had written a draft more than a month before deadline--maybe two, but I doubt it) and we were only open for 2 hours, or 3, and after you've read a few hundred of them, they fall into depressingly few categories, all of which, of course, the admissions people have seen a thousandfold more. In thinking about that experience--and it wasn't all bad, mind you; I had the pleasure of reading some really wonderful essays--and trying to extrapolate it to the scale of what editors must get in their slush piles...my gawd.

Yes, rejection letters hurt like the dickens. But when I get one, I put it away and don't look at it for a week and come back to it and then try to figure out what I did wrong so the next story I send in is an improvement.

That's the theory, anyway. It seems to be working so far, more or less.

Rejection slips are why God created bourbon.

Sure, they sting. But the payoff, baby, the payoff.

The lesson I take from all this is that we should turn slush around faster than we do. The wait makes everything too agonizing, and the responses too important.

It sure seems that way, but...

I'll bet $5 that if you do start turning slush around significantly faster, you'll see one of your rejection letters up on that site with the complaint that you clearly didn't take enough time to consider the merits of the manuscript, because the rejection came so quickly.

Still, it might help some people channel their anger or disappointment into more useful activities (such as more and better writing) than slagging off editors. Probably not any of the people whose comments you quoted in the post, but maybe some other people.

Wow. I'm really stunned at the reactions to some of these rejection letters; especially the writer who was told her book was wonderful, but came at a bad time. I'd kill for a rejection like that!

I got a great rejection letter the other day- completely handwritten, an underline beneath the "so" in "so sorry." It totally made my day (not as much as an acceptance would have, but for a rejection it was wonderful!)

I suppose I have an advantage that I've been writing (and getting rejected) for almost fifteen years. Tenacity has proved that eventually, something good will sell. Rejections aren't personal, and if you get something more than a pre-printed card, that's cause for celebration. It is in my house, at least. :)

Good heavens. Even in my bad old fanfic writing days in the 1980s, I think I would have made a 7 without too much trouble. Some of the stuff I wrote could probably make at least 8 or 9, and maybe 10 on a good day.

I salute you, slushpile readers.

On the programming tangent, I recently had an interesting experience with rejection. For more than a year now, we've had an annoying bug in our service-management code that no one has been able to isolate and fix. Progress toward a solution has been extremely slow, due in large part to the fact that the problem only occurs on machines that have about 50,000 active users, and then only after the code has been running for at least 48 hours.

In our latest meeting, the programmer dedicated to solving the problem for me had A New Idea. "Why don't we just replace this program with DJB's open-source tool?" My response was to throw up my hands in a warding-off-evil gesture and shout "no, no, anything but that!"

From my point of view, it was a joke, playing off a number of previous suggestions to use one of DJB's tools in our service, all of which had been shot down for good reasons.

From his point of view, it was a deliberate insult to him, rejecting his input as worthless.

It took us five minutes to calm him down enough for the meeting to continue, and I felt it was worth the effort to spend two hours writing up a detailed explanation of why I didn't like this idea in particular, why I didn't like DJB's tools in general, and why my response had nothing to do with the person who suggested it. I'd have done that to anyone. :-)

-j

Since the question was sort of implied, here's a story about nonfiction slush. It's not for bedtime reading, though, unless you like a combination of boredom and sheer terror. Scrivener's Error, 09 Dec 03

I used to have an old "Shoe" cartoon that mentioned an unseen, malign character who signed herself "Joyce Barnmouth, Rejectionist." I think many writers (me included, some days) believe in Joyce.

Teresa, that post brought back breath-taking memories of my brief career as a first reader. I really, really, =really= wanted to have a stamp made up, quoting Dorothy Parker, which said "Tonstant Weader Fwowed Up." This was not meant as a slap at the author--frequently I wanted desperately to like a book because the author so clearly beleved that he/she had done something special. And frequently, the sincerity of that belief was inversely proportional to the quality of the manuscript. And if you have worked your way through an entire 700 page bad manuscript you might be pardoned for responding rather snarkily. Fortunately, as a first reader I could snark all I wanted, knowing that my report would be filed, and the author would get a proper, business-like "does not fit the needs of the house" letter.

What was much harder was when I read a manuscript that was =just-not-quite= up to standard. Or something that was wonderful, but not right for the house. Or (maybe the hardest yet) something that made me a little queasy, that I was morally certain would sell like hotcakes used to in the pre-Atkins days. Because I really, really wanted to find something lovely. Or even something solidly good. No one would ever know that I Discovered somebody or other, but I would, and that would have been deeply satisfactory.

I suppose it would make no difference to the people who take their rejections personally to know the degree of joy and celebration that comes with one good manuscript....

From someone's tagline years back I picked up a quote supposedly by Isaac Asimov: "From my close observation of writers...they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review."

I think I've got the answer to the "why do they take it so personally?" bafflement, though, or at least one good answer... I imagine that everyone reads over their story and thinks, "I think this is great! People like me are going to just eat this up!" Then the rejection comes back: "There are no people like you. We're all over here, and you're all by yourself over there, where the wolves will be certain to pick you off first." It's a survival thing, hardwired into our species, and some people are just lucky enough to be able to override it better.

A lot of the thrust of this thread seems to me to be "I'm fine with this! What's the matter with *them*?" Which isn't really fair, or helpful. People feel things with different intensities, and you can't say "You shouldn't feel this way."

Which is why I look askance at the Plums rejection letter. I think a good rejection letter would try to put some boundaries on the forseen range of responses to it--try to be as clear as possible, and not cruel if the object is to be gentle. Isn't poetry, though, prized for having multiple meanings? And something as ambiguous as the plum rejection poem, headed into an environment where it is highly unlikely to be received joyfully, can't possibly be expected to result in a non-cruel outcome, right?

And as I read the plum rejection, it seems to me it's meant to be humorous... Which is terrible, in my opinion, as "humorous" in today's society is generally equated with "trivial". I would read that rejection as "We think you shouldn't sweat this rejection. It's no big deal." Which is, again, telling another person what they should be feeling... Without even having the decency of offering any evidence that that particular rejection is not worth sweating, a la "there were 217 competing bits of writing this month" or "I wish I could have published this."

Humor, as mentioned higher in the thread, is incredibly tricky; and in a "editor rejecting a manuscript" situation, it would take an incredible caliber of humor to be "laughing with you" instead of "laughing at you." (Though, somehow, "your enemies paid us to reject all of your stuff" is crazy enough that I'd love to get it.) So all-in-all, I think the plum rejection is a neat thing to consider, but in very poor taste to enact.

"We're not laughing AT you; we're laughing NEAR you."

I can forgive slush-pile readers for snarkiness, but again, there's a difference between snarking at the pizza party with your colleagues, and passing on that snarky to the writer. Even if their stuff is tripe, it's just unprofessional.

Dang it, Teresa, I should know better than to think it's possible to "just take a quick look at Making Light before bedtime." Hmpf. Attractive nuisance. Makes me want to ply you with yarn and citrus fruit. The reason I wrote, though, was to thank you for mentioning Kenneth Koch. I liked that rejection note a great deal too. Sending someone off to read Koch is probably doing them a favor, if they really mean to write poetry.

My favorite bit out of any Koch poem is from "Fresh Air" and it's the bit about the roses. I understand the urge to protect the roses.

Well, cheerio and good night and all that. And thanks. Oh, and is there really going to be a Making Book II? If so, wantwantwant!

Madeline:
A lot of the thrust of this thread seems to me to be "I'm fine with this! What's the matter with *them*?" Which isn't really fair, or helpful. People feel things with different intensities, and you can't say "You shouldn't feel this way."

Hmm. Good point. I think I should clarify that my objection isn't to whatever reaction you have in private; if people were doing this rejection-letter, ah, deconstruction on some private writers' list where we wouldn't be hearing about it, no objections to that. It does seem less than courteous to have a whole publicly accessible website devoted to this.

Of course, I suppose no one is holding one down at gunpoint and forcing one to read the entries, either, but...

"The lesson I take from all this is that we should turn slush around faster than we do. The wait makes everything too agonizing, and the responses too important."

I'm so glad you wrote that. I think there's even more to the turnaround time problem than you've yet written. The scary question that a beginning novelist might reasonably ask (but, I gather, so far hasn't) is, "How many years of unsolicited submissions does it typically take to make the first sale of a novel, going only by unsolicited submssion?" I suspect it's a median of three to five. Mind you, that doesn't count work the that doesn't meet the author's standards and never submits. Another problem of slow turnaround: with the no-multiple submission rule and very few agents willing to take on an unpublished novelist, it could easily take years to get even a decent first novel published.

This all sounds perfectly awful. Do I have it right?

After reading all this, I'm more convinced than ever I want to be an editor (or even slushpile sorter!) than a writer. I wonder how one goes about becoming an editor... (I am actually serious)

Silly me, I've always assumed that there was a perfectly valid reason for rejecting my work.

Yeah, sometimes it can peeve me when I get a rejection that seems out of left field. I'm not an annoying git about it, though.

Like being an actor or a salesman, rejection is a part of the business.

>What does seem unfair to authors, though, is the
>(unwritten?) rule that they submit manuscripts
>to publishers in series rather than in parallel.
>What's the justification for this practice?

Editor A really, really does not want to deal with a letter coming back the other way saying "Thanks for buying this, but I already sold it to Editor B."

So what? Potential Employer A really doesn't want to hear from a job candidate "Thanks for the job offer but I'm going to work for your competitor Employer B instead" either, but if I'm looking for a new job I'm going to apply to at least three or four jobs at the same time, maybe more.

I'm not going to be submitting anything for publication, so my opinion is just so much waste of bandwidth really, but the pre-published author and editor relationship has a serious power imbalance that I find a bit off-putting.

Theresa,

As a novelist who lurks and browses your column regularly, can I just say thanks for it? This post is just wonderful. In fact, I'm wondering if you would mind me using an excerpt of it in a university class I teach?

Thanks!

Blimey, I never get mad at rejections. Slightly downhearted, yes, but I'm grateful that they took the trouble to read it (if they did, some letters make it clear they didn't, and that's okay too, I shoulda done my research better) and if they offer constructive criticism, I want to buy them a drink and if they say something nice I want to invite them home for dinner. And submitting stuff is a real chore. I have a job a wife and a child. My printer's dodgy, funds for postage aren't always easy to come by. Working out who to post what to is a slog and the process of filling and addressing and posting the envelopes can be daunting. But this is what I do, with the help and support of my lovely wife. I, we, choose to do it. Nobody owes me a single goddamn solitary thing, except maybe common courtesy, and the bare minimum for that is the form letter, and that's fine. I'll keep doing it till I get accepted or drop dead and in the meantime I'll try and get on with the next book because it's better than the last.

Taking it personally is going to leave you sad and wounded and bitter and that's got to take the fun out of life.

I've had rejections a-plenty, and I've never been that upset about them. It's disappointing, but editors aren't trying to make me cry.

Next time I submit something, I'm tempted to include a separate note encouraging them not to feel bad if they reject me. And a chocolate frog.

I get such lovely rejections that I put them at front and center on my home page. My favorite one remains:

"I was very impressed with "Amazed," which I found to be well written and with great characters. I was especially impressed with the premise, which is highly original. However, it's not right for (Professional Print Publication)."

Sure, we have all gotten scissored-out eight-to-the-page twelve-times-photocopied abrupt ones, but thinking of the "reader-view" of the process does rather put things into perspective.

Thanks for an enlightening article and the enlightening replies.

Figuring a few small comments from the person who physically processes the general Tor slush might be in order...

Tony Zbaraschuk wrote: "Editor A really, really does not want to deal with a letter coming back the other way saying 'Thanks for buying this, but I already sold it to Editor B.'"
Tim Walters wrote: "That doesn't sound like much of an imposition compared to spending months or years finding out if a story or book is publishable, when you could do it in six weeks."
fionna wrote: "So what? Potential Employer A really doesn't want to hear from a job candidate "Thanks for the job offer but I'm going to work for your competitor Employer B instead' either, but if I'm looking for a new job I'm going to apply to at least three or four jobs at the same time, maybe more."
     For the most part, I'm vastly sympathetic to the dismay of those authors who want to know *now* that the first four publishers on their submission list will end up rejecting their work and the fifth will fall head-over-heels for it. However, I feel compelled to point out that the presumed reasoning behind this taboo is well-intentioned: it's not there to protect the publisher from being denied the opportunity to publish something they've unearthed, but to require the author to put some stock into their submission choices. Most authors would be pretty dismayed if their second-choice publisher ended up contacting them weeks after they've signed a contract with their fifth choice.
     Of course, it's been a scant few weeks since my first experience falling in love with a book, only to find that the author had already sold it to a much smaller press she was largely dissatisfied with--so I may be a little bit biased. :) In any event, as others have mentioned, if one feels that one's work is good enough that he or she shouldn't have to be subject to the multiple submission exclusion, then he is perfectly entitled to try finding an agent that can get him around it entirely.

mythago wrote:
"re Holly M.'s comment, I think part of the problem is that (unless one is part of the Literary Scene, and thus probably published already) the editors are unknowns. In a writer's group, you KNOW that Person A has real issues with strong female characters and Person B gets bored if there isn't an action sequence every ten pages, so you mentally adjust for their criticism.
"As a writer, you have no way to know what an editor's preferences and issues are. There's no way to know that the editor who rejected your manuscript is just plain sick of mission-to-Mars stories, no matter how good yours was, or that the name of the main character is the same as his nutbar ex's."
     Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic about this, but I hope that most professional editors can recognize a good book regardless of whether they object to a few superficial details or it's a subgenre they're not interested in. At Tor, we try to keep the needs of the entire house in mind and think things like, "There's no place for a mission-to-Mars book on *my* list, but this mission-to-Mars book is good enough that I'm going to pass it along to Editor X," or, at the very least, send back a rejection that says, "It's not what we need right now, but please send us your next book."

Teresa wrote: "The lesson I take from all this is that we should turn slush around faster than we do. The wait makes everything too agonizing, and the responses too important."
     For the record, aside from a few things on the "Second Look" pile and those that went directly to my or Patrick's or Teresa's piles, we're about 2/3 of the way through the slush from September '03. That means we're working a little bit above the recommended "query after four months" time, but safely below the desired upper limit of six months. This information is provided not to detract from the slush pile's legendary enormity, but to let all of you out there know that we're trying our best. :)

FranW wrote: "Hey, how 'bout doing one of those contests of the the 'guess how many M&M's are in this glass jar' type? You could do 'how many mss are in this slushpile?' with a photo of your office. All entries must be accompanied by a box of chocolates or a ball of yarn. Winner gets a free line-edit of their first chapter. :-D"
     We *could* do that... but do you really want any of us taking time out of our slush-reading to figure out how many submissions we've got in there? :)

Regarding rejecting the manuscript, not the person, I've read that sometimes editors can actually reject a person -- if they feel that the writer won't be easy to work with (for example from the impression they got from the cover letter), they're more likely to reject a borderline story than ask for revisions. Is this true?

BTW, I remembered an encouraging rejection I got a long time ago from Amazing. It was one of my first stories, and it was badly written, and got "stereotypical characters, setting, and/or situation" ticked on the rejection form (possibly the best rejection form I've seen). I expressed concern in the cover letter than my English wasn't good enough because it wasn't my native language, and the editorial assistant (Lisa Neuberger) added in handwriting "PS -- your grasp of English is excellent!"

This really encouraged me to continue writing in English. I just wanted to say that while rejections are just rejections, it does matter to the writer what and how they say it. The Amazing tick list rejection was very helpful to me as a beginning writer, since it not only told me what was wrong with my story, but also highlighted other problems I might check my manuscripts for (which was very useful in the pre-internet-tip-page days), and that personal comment was encouraging.

(BTW, since most people sign their real names here, my name is Eyal Teler, but I sign "ET" on most forums. No lack of respect meant. I hope that one day people who see ET will think of me immediately. :)

“I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast. Forgive me, they were delicious; so sweet and so cold.”

Two sentences that could have come from some generic romance novel or a post-it note on the refrigerator. And yet when a famous author/poet fragments them, seemingly at random, they become arguably the most famous modern short poem.

This Is Just to Say
by William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

You can get different meanings out, ones that you believe are important or insightful, because there were none put in. There are no guidelines, no clues, no vision, no limitations.

You can see where this originated. He ate the damn plums and felt guilty about it and wrote an apology. It is our expectations that there is more to this, some deeper truth, that make it meaningful, not the author’s content.

He was greedy, guilty, and then contrite.

My own opinion, in absolute seriousness, is that this Ogden Nash ditty is in fact the most important short poem.

“Candy is dandy
but liquor is quicker.”

Think about that for a few moments. In just seven words, two rhymes, he exposes and examines one of the most important human conditions – the relationship of men and women.

“Candy is dandy”. Yes it is. A thoughtful gift, obtained with effort and offered with affection, a token of feelings, and the result is hoped to be intimacy.

“But liquor is quicker”. Why bother? Get the bitch drunk and have your way. And then you’re outta there. William Carlos could learn from this.

So I offer this:

On the Craft of Poetry and the Art of Publishing
With Credits to Ogden Nash
and Apologies to William Carlos Williams
By John Darrin

Insight
Is all right

But fame
is the game

I have offered
the words
that were in
my mind

that I wrote
and was
saving
for you.

Forgive me
I cannot resist
the draw of fame
and fortune.

BTW, looking back at the Amazing rejection, I laughed at:

"[] Outre is not the same as obscene; wish fulfillment is not storytelling. Please choose a market with a more lax attitude toward the possibility of offending its readers, and/or consider seeking the counsel of a trained professional."

I wonder what prompted putting that in the form rejection -- especially the last part.

Just to clarify -- it's one of the things that can be ticked. I didn't have that ticked. :)

Liz -- presumably the reject-immediately slush that doesn't go into anyone's pile is part of the 95% of slush that falls below Teresa's "10". I'd respectfully suggest that if it would be possible to speed up the time on the 5% that might possibly make it, that might make an even bigger difference.

Watership Down famously got 30 rejections. It would have come about the "10" mark, so if that had happened now, with each publisher taking a year or more to consider the almost-there and the not-for-us, it would have come out not in 1973 but last year.

(Yes, I'm procrastinating on my galleys, but they're nearly done, really!)

I don't envy editors.

As an unpublished writer I'm just amazed by the reactions of some of the people on that site. I've developed something of a rejection collection, and they have all been disappointing, but I can't recall ever being angry about any of them. I suppose it has something to do with expectations - in my case it's been hammered into my head that the odds are against you being published unless your manuscript is very good. The rejections that specifically point out the weaknesses of the story are the ones that I value the most because they help me improve and learn to recognize those points in the future.

I do think Charlie Stross has a point to. There is this romantic image of the writer that I myself have fallen victim to, despite my attempts to banish that image from my mind. It's rather seductive, but not very realistic.

I haven't read any fiction slush either, but I think you're onto something with the analogy to grading. As a TA, on any homework I see so many permutations of the same error that, until recently, I was often driven to sarcasm.

Last semester, after grading an Intro to Flight homework in which a student told me that the airplane was flying at -10000 ft above sea level, I wrote a response ("Was it flying in a mine shaft?") that hurt the student. I was trying to be funny and remind him to use common sense when solving engineering problems, but it didn't come off that way. The whole class had been getting the problem wrong, and I was frustrated with them, which made me overreact.

One of the best moves I've made as a faculty member was to switch to electronic submission of lab reports last year. I had the students email their reports in, marked them up with the "Track Changes" feature of Word, and then sent them back by email.

This was a huge improvement, because after reading the tenth lab report in which the verb tense switches abruptly from past to future to present in the space of one "paragraph," I find myself writing "Mother of God, pick a tense and STICK WITH IT!!!" in the margins. And it's really hard to find a way to turn that into constructive criticism.

Doing them electronically, I can type in whatever snarky thing I want, feel happy for a moment, then delete it and type in something constructive.

Andy and Chad -

I handled the high school freshmen with kid gloves - a task made monumentally easy by the fact that my last day of teaching them was a week ahead of me during the grading. I no longer had to worry about teaching them English in addition to the math I had already discovered they lacked and the science I was contracted to teach. Although I still think back on those essays and fight back tears at the state of public education in America.

The college freshmen received a little mercy as it was likely that they had never written a scientific report before. However, I did not take kindly to the students who tried to pull a fast one on me and thought I wouldn't notice when they cleverly reworded their lab partner's report or just submitted the exact same report. By the time I got to the college juniors and seniors, I showed absolutely no mercy - especially because they were given an opportunity to have me read their drafts and suggest revisions. I do like the electronic submission idea, but I'd need to get in the hang of typing my comments. I'm stuck on reading paper versions when it comes to grading/revising/etc.

Thinking back, I'd gladly deal with any kind of college grading over high school grading. The latter can be so heart-wrenching when you realize the magnitude of Things Unlearned. I wonder if there's a similar comparison in slush reading? Perhaps the submissions in the action genre are notoriously bad compared to science fiction or something? As in, "Make way! He reads wannabe Clancy slush! He gets first dibs on the buffet!"

Fionna asks:

"So what? Potential Employer A really doesn't want to hear from a job candidate 'Thanks for the job offer but I'm going to work for your competitor Employer B instead' either, but if I'm looking for a new job I'm going to apply to at least three or four jobs at the same time, maybe more."

The so what is that if you piss off an editor by not following guidelines, maybe the next manuscript you send him or her gets stuffed into a round file.

Jane wrote: Melissa, as a one time editor of children's books, I cannot tell how many letters with mss. begin "My children all love this story. . ."

Actually, we see the adult variant of this all the time on slush submissions (i.e., my wife/husband/mother/best friend/SO loves this book). It's one of the most commonly used phrases in cover letters.

Here's the thing, which I'm sure Jane knows but I'm mentioning here for the benefit of others: Whether the identified adoring reader is adult or child, this sentence, appearing anywhere in a cover letter, is the mark of an amateur.

> And probably slight and sentimental are the two bugaboos of children's picture books.

As a reader of many children's books, due to the child in my life, I completely and totally agree that sentimentality and slightness are chronic problems, even in published works.

I think that my issue is less with the actual letter, which may, as you say, have done the writer a favor, than with the idea that the submission was received through a friend and was rejected more bluntly than such a submission method called for. As an over-the-transom rejection, it was fine, but given the (possibly slight, but we don't know) personal connection, I would have expected--and I personally would have written--a softer rejection.

And you know I've loved you for years . . . so much so that I have never given you any of the stories I've written for my kid (who was busting my chops just yesterday because she feels, quite rightly, that I owe her a story. I give her one for Hanukah every year but I discovered partway in on the 2003 story that I had begun at the wrong point in the plot, and so I've had to start it all over again . . . . Seven-year-olds don't like to wait . . . .)

Thank you! I've gotten my share of rejections in the past and the only one that bothered me was the one in which the editor scolded me because she thought the content was Not Very Nice. (It was actually fairly tame, but oh well, right?)

I've had some terse form letters, and some lovely personal ones. I take the former for what they're worth and the latter I cherish because it meant someone felt that I was good enough to encourage.

I hope writers take your comments to heart. Thanks again for taking the time.

I've received a few rejections (from agents and publishers) and actually enjoyed receiving every one. Not once did I feel slighted or maligned, not once did I take it personal.

Rejections are all part of the process, afterall, and we're trying to sell a product. It's a business.

I guess some people forget that and get lost in the illusion.

Since the question was sort of implied, here's a story about nonfiction slush. It's not for bedtime reading, though, unless you like a combination of boredom and sheer terror. Scrivener's Error, 09 Dec 03

Ah, slush-killing at a law review! Been there, done that, and have the T-shirt, though it wasn't a primary part of my job. Yeah, that sounds about right.

(The wackiness of having student-edited law reviews is another topic.)

Chad wrote, about marking in Word, using Track Changes, Doing them electronically, I can type in whatever snarky thing I want, feel happy for a moment, then delete it and type in something constructive.

That's really, really dangerous, but I imagine you're on top of it. We had an editor who used to do that very thing with authors' mss. She was fired after she sent the snarky copy back to the author.

Mind you, one of the nice things is that after the third time you type the same comment, you can simply copy'n'paste it, or record a macro that will insert "tense confusion---remember that you can write in the past tense or the present tense, but not both" with a keystroke. I'm rather fond of that feature for marking.

The comparison of editing, and, in particular slush reading with marking is not especially useful. In fact, I think it's where a lot of novice authors get stung. When I mark student papers, it's my job to provide useful criticism. When I edit, it's my job to jolly well make it correct---I don't write "wrong word" in the margins, I simply change the word, if the correct word is obvious (the au. has written "All the children accept Billy had cheese sandwiches for for lunch; Billy had mortadella." and of course meant accept.) If the fix isn't as obvious, I may query it, and I always suggest a fix. But, that's copy editing, after someone's bought the ms. If I'm reading a pile of stuff to figure out whether it's worth passing along, I'm not concentrating on what it will take to make the ms better. I'm not there to educate the author. I'm simply there to assess the ms using the House's criteria, my own editorial judgement, and the time available to me. So, while it would be nice to have the time to write a nice, personal, constructive cover letter to every author, outlining the shortcomings in their writing and explaining how their work didn't meet my needs, that's not my job, and if I'm to read the other hundred-and-eleven mss in anything like a timely manner, I simply can't take that time.

Oh, and another thing:
Several people have addressed Remus's ... it's difficult not to lose respect for one or more of the editors involved. Is the 'nice' editor an idiot, or is the 'mean' editor an asshole? Or is the entire profession just messed up? These are the things that go through authors' heads when editors violently disagree.

Here's my take on it:

Find five editors who both like and can eat pizza. Put them in a room. Ask them what kind of pizza they want. You'll probably get five different answers. Ask those same editors how they take their coffee. You'll get five different answers. Ask them what books they like to read. You'll probably get five different answers, though there may be some overlap. Ask them what they look for in a MS, and initially, they'll all say something like "strong writing, strong plot, interesting premise, good characterisation, something I can take to the publishing and editorial boards and get them behind..." then get them discussing what that means....and you'll be there for the next good while (which is what you needed all that pizza for).

Editors are people who exercise their own taste and judgement in acquiring and midwifing books. They have training and experience in this. Taste, however, is individual and impossible to determine. So, five different editors may say five different things about your ms. On two different days the same editor may say two different things about your ms. This is a hazard of working in a creative industry staffed by people. This assessment doesn't even take into account the stated mandate of the house, imprint, or list---what may be a really good bit of hard sf will be completely unpublishable for an imprint that specializes in fantasy. We try really hard to be objective and equitable, and to give every ms a fair reading---that's why publishers have selection criteria. But we're human beings and all different, and we have different taste and likes and dislikes.

That's the difficulty and the glory inherent in working in a creative field governed by human beings and the fancies of the marketplace.

Here is a PartiallyClips that is apposite.

"[] Outre is not the same as obscene; wish fulfillment is not storytelling. Please choose a market with a more lax attitude toward the possibility of offending its readers, and/or consider seeking the counsel of a trained professional."
I wonder what prompted putting that in the form rejection -- especially the last part.

As someone who's been reading short-fiction slush on and off for six or seven years, I have no trouble imagining what prompted them to put that in the form rejection. It's even more striking when you get a lot of stories from the same author who appears to be working out the same Big Issues. This isn't always a bad thing--there's at least one author I can think of whose work I love but who clearly is using writing as a way of taking a particular set of inner demons out for a walk--but more often than not, I don't know. More often than not you end up reading through the story thinking, great, Author X is still upset that no one sat with him at the lunchtable in eighth grade.

Thanks, Teresa, for a wonderful post. I always appreciate these insightful glimpses into the editorial mind.

I've just recently begun to have some success selling my work, and one of the things I learned away on the way was this: writers should focus on what they can control. And the corollary to this is that a writer should focust *most* on what they can control *best.* For me, this came down to how much I produce, how much I learn, and how much I mail. Most everything else resides outside my sphere of influence. It's amazing how much of a difference this simple philosophy made.

By the way, reading your site falls under "how much I learn." :)

I am so posting this to the writer's forum I manage...it reminded me, thankfully, of the other point of view. I used to be an editor. We recieved things from all over the world, and some of it was wonderous, some of it cool but unusuable, some drech. Of course, that's just opinion, but that's all you have, well that and the guidelines, to help you decide. As a book reviewer, I've tried to, as I did before, combine opinion with an honest critique of whether the book works or not...because opinion is so dang subjective, really, in the end, it doesn't matter whether you really liked it or not, but whether the book/manuscript is actually good or not.

But I'm also a writer. So I understand that rejections hurt...I groused slightly on my own blog about some rejections I recieved, (and have since felt a little guilty about) but always tried to be careful to say that I apprieciated the work the editor went to. I may not agree with what they say, or, ick, I might and may decide to go back and fix it in the ms, but still, they read it, they didn't like it, and they tried to be nice about it. Well, mostly.

Some of the rejection letters Teresa used as examples would have put me in the mood to celebrate. And, participating in a site like that sounds a bit like career suicide, doesn't it?

So any way, thank you for this post. Very, very cool...it reminded me of something I shouldn't have forgotten, and will help me deal more gracefully with future rejections. :-)

Teresa, your post was illuminating, filled with psychological insight and empathy, and entertaining as all hell, yet I kept coming back to the desire to dash off a story with a title like "Doc Fanthorpe and the Reeking Havoc."

As for Ogden Nash vs. Walter Carlos Williams, we've seen who got the postage stamp.

Wow. I'm a writer, and those rejection letter responses just boggle my mind. I'm a member of Evolution, an online writing group, and most of us would be dancing in joy to receive some of those rejection letters. Certainly not wailing and gnashing our teeth.

But maybe it's just me. When I get a rejection that's personalized, I'm damned excited. When I get a form rejection, I usually think, "Your loss. Next!" I have faith in my work. I have faith that it's just a matter of time until I find a publisher who gets as excited about my work as I do.

Someone needs to give these writers a clue.

Thanks for the entry. I'm now thoroughly amused. :)

Jennie, I meant the comparison in the sense of groups of folks handing their work over to you for evaluation - in whatever form. It's one way to help those of us not in a position to read slush to understand at least in part what it must be like to read slush. Anyone who's ever had to grade a stack of writing assignments should be able to translate enough of the experience to help them prepare their manuscript so as to be higher up in Teresa's categories. But, as Teresa has demonstrated in numerous posts, writers tend to forget quite a bit of their experiences when The Novel is involved, so I suppose the comparison really wasn't useful. :)

It's taken me a few days to realize how incredibly useful this post is going to be to me. If I ever do write a novel, I'll use this as a checklist before submitting it -- with translations, of course. For example, #11 becomes "Is this the right place to submit this?"

There are some that aren't amenable to this process. For example, I can't see what I could do about #13, and I just don't even understand #12. What is "writing the wrong book"? Is that where e.g. the selected protagonist is a less interesting character than the sidekick, and the same tale would be better told with a focus on the sidekick? If so, what other ways are there to write the wrong book? If not, what does it mean to "write the wrong book"?

Anybody who can answer that would be helping me greatly. I really need this checklist, and #12 is really scaring me.

Teresa, I think the phenomena of guys who aren't satisfied with anything short of putting out and of authors not satisfied with anything short of acceptance are related by more than general feel; I would conjecture that both come from a sense of entitlement. Being in lust and wanting your book published are both uncomfortable sensations, and some people believe that their discomfort obligates others to relieve it. Not so, of course, but they sure do get pissed off. Someone needs to hit them with a clue bat.

Having said that, I hope I remember it when I start getting rejections (as I inevitably will).

The "submissions from friends" thing brings to mind a dilemma of mine (strictly a thought-experiment, since I've yet to write anything submittable to any market where my friends are editors).

Teresa: suppose I wrote a novel. I wouldn't submit it anywhere unless I thought it was at least decent. Suppose I've gone through the list and it passes on all counts (by my admittedly-possibly-delusional judgement). If it's a plum, I'd like to give Tor first crack at it; if it's a barely-saleable dog, I don't want to burden you with it OR put you in the situation of having to tell me "Christopher, you know I love you, right? But..."

The trouble is, a dog looks a lot like a plum to its daddy.

Of course, if it's really terrible the slush readers will spray it with deodorizer and send it back, and you'll never even know I did it. I'm assuming it gets past that point. And I suppose you could recuse yourself to avoid the whole issue. But if I wrote a novel, would you want me to submit it to Tor at all? Or would that be a social transgression on its very face?

A few things:

Teresa: Yes, on the time thing. F&SF's rejections tend to be to the point, without much in the way of feedback. Other markets have given me really nice rejection letters, filled with compliments and advice. F&SF is always the first market that I send appropriate stories to, as their turn-around is something like two weeks.

As far as to why publishers can get away with frowning on sim-subs, while simultaniously submitting resumes is standard practice, it's worth considering how little of a standard publishing house's list comes off of the slushpile. It's something on the order of a title every couple of years, or less. This means that there's a real power imbalance -- publishing houses will not be upset if their rules mean fewer people send manuscripts in.

Thank you for an entertaining and enlightening view of the reader's side of the desk! I find myself *wanting* to be a slushpile reader -- and I've done enough editing that I ought to know better. I should probably seek medical help.

(I haven't yet read the 144 comments on this post -- I'm a little behind -- so this comment is to the main post anyhow.)

I have to say -- as a writer, I emphasize -- that I just do not get the attitude shown in the quotes. Yes, sure, obviously if I send something out and it's rejected, I'm going to disagree with the editor, or I wouldn'ta sent it out in the first place. But for Christ's sake! (Or anyone else's!) I danced with glee when I got a personalized rejection from F&SF. (This is not exaggeration. I did a little jig on my way back from the mailbox.) I have a printout of my latest rejection from ChiZine that I'm planning on hanging up by my desk, if I ever remember to buy bluetac. (It was a pretty darn encouraging rejection.) Am I just really weird as writers go, or are these people just especially vitriolic and bitter?

I'll have to peruse the site at some point. After I'm done reading the 145 comments on this thread...

Hey, can I bore everyone with a Cool Editor story?

Back in my teenage writing days, I wrote up an article for Dragon magazine. In retrospect it was probably quite lame (though I was capable of spelling, grammar, and similar basics). Roger Moore, the then-editor, not only took the trouble to write a polite rejection letter, but actually photocopied the editorial comments between himself and another editor and sent them to me, by way of specific criticism.

He did this, as I recall, through THREE iterations of my revising the article and sending it back in.

I never did sell them the article, but after that act of kindness, I will happily suck up all the checkbox form letter rejection slips in the world. Because editors AREN'T sadistic monsters; they're people who love writing, but they are also people who need sleep and rest breaks and time to water the plants occasionally. If they don't send me a long apologia for not buying my stuff, that's perfectly understandable.

Some more thoughts

Jo Walton wrote:
It's rejection. Your work is being rejected for not being good enough. This does objectively suck and people can't be expected to enjoy it

I don't expect to enjoy it (actually, obviously I've had exceptions, but I'm sure some of that is still being unpublished as far as fiction goes), but... I don't really see it as being told my writing isn't "good enough". I see it as being told my writing doesn't appeal to that editor on that day for that story. Sometimes, I even end up understanding why. (I just had a short story of mine brutalized critiqued by some folks on my writing site and in retrospect I can see why it got rejected.)

I may also just be unusually thick-skinned. I don't like getting rejections; I'd love to get something published. But it doesn't really weigh on me, either. (It certainly doesn't inspire the kind of vitriol quoted, but, well, give me time....)

Anyhow. I do get what you're saying, I guess I just look at it differently, so far.

Keith wrote:
I get miffed for all of about thirty three seconds and then realize that it isn't personal. These people don't know me. I'm a stranger asking an impertinant question of a busy profeshoinal. I'm lucky they don't send howlers.

Yes. That! What Keith said!

Confidential to Steve Whan: Boy, are you in the wrong place!

Julian Flood wrote:
Shouting 'Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! at the envelope helps.

I giggled helplessly at this. Luckily, I sit in a corner at work...

And, as several people have pointed out: an editor deciding whether or not to reject your story is a person expressing an opinion. One person. One opinion. You could write an amazing story that your critique group loved and your friends think should be engraved in stone, and you could still get a rejection because the editor doesn't think it fits their theme or just doesn't happen to like stories about the topic or type of character you include.

That's why I value the rejections with comments so much, of course. Where it seems to be a matter of taste, I still learn what that editor seems to like, and where they point out flaws, I at least have something to think about in terms of my writing.

Now if I could just get over the waiting...

Randolph asked: The scary question that a beginning novelist might reasonably ask (but, I gather, so far hasn't) is, "How many years of unsolicited submissions does it typically take to make the first sale of a novel, going only by unsolicited submssion?" I suspect it's a median of three to five. Mind you, that doesn't count work the that doesn't meet the author's standards and never submits. Another problem of slow turnaround: with the no-multiple submission rule and very few agents willing to take on an unpublished novelist, it could easily take years to get even a decent first novel published.

This all sounds perfectly awful. Do I have it right?

It's much worse than your summary suggests.

In my case, I began writing when I was 12. I began submitting short stories when I was 17. I sold my first short story (to Interzone) when I was 21. But I didn't get my first actual contract for a novel (as opposed to a short story collection or a non-fiction book) until I was 36. Even though I first tried writing one when I was 15, and tried submitting them from age 18 onwards.

With the cool collected benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I started submitting novels way too early. I should have stuck to short stories 'til my mid-twenties. But hey, we all make mistakes, right? I just hope I didn't waste too much editorial time in those early years.

Rejection is strange, to say the least. The last time I sent out some short works to a magazine, it was only a few weeks later that I started second guessing and went to reread and edit them for resubmission. By the time the letter got back to me, the crushing sense of rejection was eclipsed by a relieved "Oh, thanks be, they're sane after all."

I've edited essays from grade school age relatives and university friends, and my parent's masters theses. When done face-to-face, it becomes like a tutoring session. This is wrong, this is why it's wrong, these are your options to fix it. This is unclear, what are you trying to say? Okay, write that down. This quote weakens your argument. And so forth. The results are usually good, but it can take a very long time. The idea of trying to do something similar with each book-length fiction manuscript, by letter, stretches possibility. There's no way that editors have that much time - they have to spend that time on the pieces they actually intend to accept. Slush readers have my admiration just for not being jaded enough to set my stuff on fire after reading drivel for days. I am reasonably happy with my small but growing collection of rejections. I learned a little from most of them. And I haven't stopped writing yet.

Thank you for all that you have written. I wrote a rather long diatribe in response, but I decided . . .you guys have enough to read, I better not distract you.

But it is very nice to know that threads like these, both educational and amusing, exist.

"Rejection isn't personal": One of those truths that we accept intellectually, but have a hard time taking to heart.

For me, as with others in this thread, it did take becoming an editor: more specifically, the managing editor of a small-press "mainstream literary" magazine. We never had more than three-hundred subscribers and only paid in copy, but on average we still received at least one-hundred subs each month. I can't imagine the slush pile a major outfit may have at any given time, and any comments I receive above and beyond "Sorry, we can't use it" are like manna to me.

Liz Gorindky wrote: For the most part, I'm vastly sympathetic to the dismay of those authors who want to know *now* that the first four publishers on their submission list will end up rejecting their work and the fifth will fall head-over-heels for it. However, I feel compelled to point out that the presumed reasoning behind this taboo is well-intentioned: it's not there to protect the publisher from being denied the opportunity to publish something they've unearthed, but to require the author to put some stock into their submission choices. Most authors would be pretty dismayed if their second-choice publisher ended up contacting them weeks after they've signed a contract with their fifth choice.

Very good point, I guess I hadn't thought of that. I guess the real difference between the job market analogy I made and the publishing industry slush-pile is that the potential employee is probably applying to a vacancy that is advertised and can be guaranteed to be processed in a timely manner, whilst the slush-pile supplier is applying on spec - *and*, once a book is sold, it can't be resold, unlike the employee's time - he or she can always change jobs in the future.

Apologies if these points have already been made. It's late at night here, I only just got home, and it's time to retire, so no time to catch up on the comments I missed.

Very amusing and long post, Teresa (I love your long posts!), but really, it seems to boil down to: many of us writers are too damn self-centered and sensitive and have a false sense of entitlement. :) (Our obsession with me-me-me could explain why we sometimes don't get refs like the riff on that Williams poem, which I'd not previously encountered.)

It's rejection. Your work is being rejected for not being good enough. This does objectively suck and people can't be expected to enjoy it.

Jo, I think Teresa's examples made quite clear that a number of these rejections had nothing to do with "not good enough." As I think the assumption you make here is from the POV of the rejectee, I'm afraid I don't find it terribly objective.

Honestly, if people can't handle rejections with any sort of objectivity or common sense, they should do what I do - self-publish (blogs, apazines, etc.) and/or write on an amateur or for-charity basis. It's easy enough to be published if you do stuff for charity - I've completed exactly four short comic book stories, and all four have been published in charity books.

Ilona: The only cure from rejection is the realization that one's identity is separate from one's product. Unfortunately, easier said than done.

Especially when people keep getting told to write what they know.

154 comments, too many to read without glazing over, but I've gone paralytic with anxiety about being rejected. Which may be why I haven't submitted anything anywhere (or, er, written enough to choose from to submit...). Like a cross between rejection fear and the impostor syndrome.

I see a lot of rejections though, at work (a science journal; I'm the editorial assistant), and the author's responses if they appeal it are remarkably well-mannered and rational. There's only been a very few instances of frothing rage and the decision. But probably this area of publishing is different, being somewhat specialized (Jonathan v. P. might know, from what I remember of his CV).

At the same time, this post has made something go click. If something I start writing today ends up published, I'll have Teresa (and the commenters) to thank, I think.

May have been said already up there (it's pages and pages, I haven't read it all), but if nothing else a rejection letter is proof that you've tried. ('course, now I have to try.)

I think one thing we need to remember is that this is a buyer's market. Comparing the simultaneous submission rule to simultaneous job interviews would make sense if only one out of every several thousand (million?) people would ever get a job in their life, any job at all. Sure, we'd be disappointed if we accepted our fifth choice publisher a week before we got an acceptance from our second choice; sure, the utility of this rule goes both ways. But I think the scarcity of "slots" in a publisher's schedule helps us to accept this rule as reasonable.

The rejection that upset me the most was when an editor (not a Tor editor) who had asked for revisions on my first novel then turned around and sent me a form reject on the revised version. I felt I had bent over backwards to accommodate what this person had asked of me regarding the book, and had expressed eagerness to discuss any further changes, but...nothing. Not, "I think you misunderstood every single one of my revision suggestions," nor yet, "You did it all exactly right, but I got several more fabulous books than yours last week; sorry." Form rejects are not painful. Form rejects after edits are confusing at the very least.

Hi, Teresa. Here's a voice from Tor slush-pile readers past. I will refrain from commenting on my own experiences with Bad Novels, or even with Bad Novels by Published Authors, and instead direct my comments thusly: 1) You have, as always, produced a witty, germane and well-balanced explanation of the mysteries of the book trade and I have greatly enjoyed reading it. Thank you. 2) I have submitted very few pieces of my writing, and gotten only one rejection letter, which I found so amusing that I still remember almost all of it. It read: "We apologize for taking so long to send your poem back. It has been the subject of much debate in the office. In the end, we found the combination of sex and violence, without humor, ultimately too disturbing." So if I'd written one with sex and violence but *made it funny* that would have been better?

I always hear the advice, "Get an agent first, so you don't end up in the slushpile." My problem with agent-getting is that I've never even made it to the slushpile stage. Of the nine agents I queried, eight of them weren't interested in seeing any of the manuscript, and the one who did returned a rejection of the "this really isn't the sort of thing we represent" kind. (I hadn't considered the fact that my book does look like it's going to be a YA novel in the first ten pages; perhaps that doesn't type the whole book accurately and perhaps it does; at any rate this agent didn't want to see the rest of it.)

I'm left with an unpleasant choice: I may be able to simultaneously query agents, which cuts down on the waiting time, but agents don't actually have to look at my book, whereas the slushpile editors eventually do. I'm going to start submitting to slushpiles-- which, if it follows my agent experience, means that after I wait anxiously for a whole year, someone is going to look at my work, decide it's not the genre I thought it was, and toss it anyway.

That being so, I'm in favor of shorter turnaround time if possible. Loudly, screamingly, standing-in-the-bleachers-waving-a-pennant in favor of it. The biggest service you can actually do for writers, I think, is to let them know as fast as possible how they stand-- even if it means a "no" stamp instead of a letter that people are going to take badly anyway. Apparently, rejection hurts no matter how nicely it's done, but those who can get back up and brush themselves off and try again would like the freedom to do so as soon as they can.

When a single story nets you one rejection that reads, 'Great story -- I'm sure someone will publish it, but we can't right now', then three form letters, and then one that claims you're a chimpanzee with no grasp of the english language....well, then it's difficult not to lose respect for one or more of the editors involved.

Much more amusing is when you get the same story bounced with "Strikingly original idea but you didn't do enough with it" and "Good writing but the idea is too cliched." Or when an editor complains about inconsistencies and points out that on page X the characters are wearing hats and on page Y they are bareheaded, and I go "ARRGGHH! In the first draft, they were taking off their hats on page X. What did I do when revising?" and rush to page X to find the characters were -- taking off their hats.

I still submit stuff to these markets.

It helps to consider how many stories the editor has likely bounced that day and so how much time the comments took.

Personal comments are nice. One should certainly look at the story again in their light, and see if they have a point. OTOH, concluding the editor's comments were not helpful is a perfectly valid result. So is concluding that while there is a problem there, the editor misdiagnosed it.

If two or three editors agree, they are almost certainly right about there being a problem and mostly likely right about what it is.

From Frequently Asked Questions Answered for Beginning Writers on the SFWA site.

Q: Why did they publish other people's bad fiction and not mine?

A:The following are Damon Knight's rules:

"The other story is the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle, of a certain size, a certain subject, a certain....

"In buying a bad story by a good, or established, author, the editor hopes the author will later send better.

"Your story is rejected because it's similar to another bad story previously published.

"The author of the published bad story is sleeping with the editor or is the son in-law of the publisher.

"The editor is a nitwit--or has blanked out.

"The merits of your work are not established up front when the editor is scanning.

"Your bad story is worse than you think."

This kind of thing is why I stopped moderating a newsgroup. Essentially all we had to screen for were categories 2 and 3 on your list. But some days it seemed that everyone whose post was rejected thought that the moderator could be convinced to reconsider, and had a long and detailed argument ready. A few people never learned otherwise even after literally thousands of rejections of essentially the same material. Most were offended to some degree.

Actually, there are cases of SF being rejected as too bold. Joe Haldeman's classic 'The Forever War' was originally rejected by John Campbell because Campbell couldn't imagine American women serving in combat. Of course, another publisher took it very quickly, but it does happen.

I was shocked at some of those responses to rejection letters. I'm a writer myself and wouldn't dare to react that way. In fact, not only do I think rejection is a right of passage for most writers, I don't think I'd be stretching the truth if I said my first rejection, at thirteen, was the best thing that ever happened to me. Admittedly, I was lucky enough to have the editor respond with specfic comments on my manuscript, showing me where I was doing well and the areas in which I needed to improve. It wasn't until a couple of years and many rejections later that I realized quite how lucky I was. Too many people look at rejection in a bad light. It's not always bad. Sometime's it's extremely helpful.

Devin - If I recall correctly, John Campbell rejected the first part of "The Forever War," a novelette or novella called "Hero." Campbell passed away relatively soon afterwards, and Ben Bova decided to publish "Hero."

So it was a case of the SAME publisher, different editors.

If my memory is correct.

I have a copy of that issue of "Analog" somewhere in the house, unless I gave it away. When I was 12 years old or so, my cousin, then in his late 20s and married, loaned me several years of Analogs from the late 60s right up until the first few issues of Bova's editorship; he never wanted them back, and I've been hanging onto them for 30 years since. One day I may sell 'em on eBay and split the proceedings with my cuz - although after 30 years of storing them for him, I'd be within my rights to keep all the money for myself as storage fees.

My cousin gave me all his cast-off sf books, the ones he didn't want. He wonders now why our tastes in sf and fantasy are 180 degrees different from each other; hell, it's because I formed my reading tastes on the stuff he didn't want to read.

If, as implied above, typical slush fiction is that which makes the reader fall about laughing at its sheer badness within the first two pages ...

Then I have a fantasy novel to recommend to anybody who'd like to know what slush fiction is like without having to go to a publisher's office to look at manuscripts:

Eragon by Christopher Paolini, the 15-year-old from Montana.

It's that bad, it really is.

Why I hate simultaneous subs? Because Tom's assistant hands off this manuscript that we've gotten from an agent who wants to make a deal on it fast, and so I drop everything and read it promptly, taking notes all the way through, and it's really good, in fact a hot property. Wow. Maybe we should see about acquiring it.

So I talk to Patrick, explain the book to him, and we run a P&L on it, and we maybe call in a few favors to get info on the writer and his or her previous books; and if the info's forthcoming we use it to re-tinker the P&L. This is looking interesting. We do some talking to people in Marketing, see what they think about it. We further refine our P&L. Oh, and at the point that Patrick agrees that it's worth looking into, we make an additional copy of the manuscript and pass it on to a good reader, who may be either freelance or junior staff. This is all being done fast.

Then we pitch the book to Tom. He wants to know more about it. We supply what information we can. He hums over it, knits his brows, knits some more, throws in some cabling stitches, scribbles some calculations on a corner of the cover letter, puts his glasses on and takes them off again, hums some more, comes up with a good number for the advance, and gives us permission to make an offer on the book.

We call the agent. Well, gosh, says the agent, [other house] bought it at the end of last week.

Say what? we say, Say what? From the sound of it, that date was prior to our receipt of the manuscript.

They jumped at it, the agent says complacently; they really liked it.

We don't believe the agent. While [other house] isn't exactly hidebound, neither is it the kind of place that decides to buy a manuscript within a day or two of receiving it -- not unless it's an established author they already knew they wanted, or the book has some obvious virtue, like it contains The Secret Of The Universe or something. We figure the agent meant all along to sell the book to [other house], and sent it to them before she sent it to us. We were her backup plan.

Which may be ducky for her, but it's cost me several days' work, and one or two days of Patrick's time, and we've had to call in favors, and bug the people in Marketing, and Tom won't be happy. But there's nothing to be done about it. So I tear up all the notes and P&L printouts and other data, throw it away, and get back to my work that was interrupted when this manuscript came in.

That's one scenario. However, there's this other scenario where the unpublished author is sending forth his or manuscript to make its fortune in the wilds of the slush pile. It could take four months. Once it took 72 hours: a fluke. It could take a year and a half. I know someone whose manuscript languished in another house's slushpile far, far longer than that. In fact, for all I know the thing is still there.

Personally, I can't think it would be all that awful if we let the slushpuppies submit to several houses at once, especially if they let us know how many and to whom. If we started working up a serious interest in a book, we could let the author know. If the author got an initial offer from another house, he or she could let us know. You're not likely to see two houses going into full-scale acquisition mode over the same book within the same four-day period. It'll doubtless happen once in a while, but it's not likely.

Mind, I'm not suggesting that anyone should do that. It's contrary to policy, at Tor and everywhere else. I'm just saying that I personally don't see that it would be all that bad an idea.

*gawp*
My oh my.

I'm a new reader of your blog, and this is one of the first posts I have read. Frankly, I am astonished at how many people think ordinary rejection letters are such an affront!

I suppose I've been lucky; I've sent very few manuscripts out in my life because of a previous lack of faith in myself and my talent. However, 95% of those manuscripts were returned to me with glowing rejection letters which included plenty of encouraging comments and constructive criticism. I have never had occasion to be particularly upset about a rejection letter, but even if I did have occasion I firmly believe a writer has to approach their writing career like they do love. You keep trying with new people, or you work hard to improve yourself and try with the old people.

Thank you for posting this! I feel much better about my renewed commitment to my stories.

I'd just like to observe, in reference to the poetic rejection note, this one thing: Who says you have to have read the works of another poet to be a poet yourself?

I'm a sometime poet myself (though I haven't written in some years). I've had a few pieces published in small poetry journals, and though I hate to blow my own trumpet, I tend to be well reviewed. I've never heard of William Carlos Williams. Does that diminish my writing? Will my writing magically be better now that I've heard of him?

Muses don't obey laws. They don't necessarily take writing courses. And they don't necessarily whisper in the ears of people who've heard of another specific poet, or even know anything at all in an academic sense about the body of extant poetry. And sometimes, their writing is the better for it, because it is fresh and original, not derivative.

None of this, of course, should be taken as disputing that the writer in question completely missed the point of the effort that went into that rejection slip.

Can sweet summer plums
Not be offered in respect?
This editor tried.

I'd just like to observe, in reference to the poetic rejection note, this one thing: Who says you have to have read the works of another poet to be a poet yourself?

You don't. But if you get a poem as a rejection, and it seems to refer to something you don't understand, you should be able to either a) shrug it off as editorial weirdness, or b) look up the references. After all, we know the author in question had access to the internet.

My slushpile joyride: I read unsolicited manuscripts for a small literary magazine for more than eight years. This was an unpaid position: more an act of love than a good professional move. In my experience, 99% or more of the poetry submitted to small literary magazines is just the pages of the author's diary, typed up with funny line breaks. It made me stop writing poetry, it was so bad.

On another web site where I hang out, someone (I believe a writer/ editor combo iof some kind) once stated what she felt her favourite short-and-to-the-point rejection would be:

A single red line on the manuscript, marking where the editor stopped reading and reached for the return envelope. (Of course, I suppose that in tiself would require a form letter to explain the meaning, but you could send back *just that page* and the form...)

I can't help think that's a bit too terse (it's all very well if it's on page 5 of a short story, or chapter 4 of a novel, but I can imagine getting back a novel with the line in the first paragraph.) but there are times I think it must be tempting to resort to something that straightforward.

I'm another one who's been trained to survive rejections with a blink and move on. Alas, procrastination strikes then, and the novel length stuff but rarely gets out the door, and the short stories at too slow a rate.

'Scuse me while I go print out some manuscripts.

Mythago suggested:

re Holly M.'s comment, I think part of the problem is that (unless one is part of the Literary Scene, and thus probably published already) the editors are unknowns. In a writer's group, you KNOW that Person A has real issues with strong female characters and Person B gets bored if there isn't an action sequence every ten pages, so you mentally adjust for their criticism.

As a writer, you have no way to know what an editor's preferences and issues are. There's no way to know that the editor who rejected your manuscript is just plain sick of mission-to-Mars stories, no matter how good yours was, or that the name of the main character is the same as his nutbar ex's.

I find don't quite agree with this, for two reasons:

(1) A fair number of editors maintain blogs or participate in online forums these days; others often take the trouble to specify authors they enjoy reading, either in their guidelines or in the various market guides or in interviews. I'm of the opinion that it's currently easier than it ever has been to make educated guesses about a particular editor's taste.

(2) Analyzing the magazines/books they've already published is also a way to assess what they tend to accept (or not).

(It's not a surefire way to gauge what they're _going_ to be buying, of course, but then again, the editor doesn't have a surefire way to determine what Random Person Browsing in a Bookstore is going to purchase 12-24 months from now - especially considering that Random Person may simply opt for Tolkien or Heinlein or the latest movie tie-in. And, ultimately, it's not like Random Person will be any less quirky or baggage-laden than fellow writers and editors. . .)

In any case, even with (1) and (2), I'll readily concede that there's still plenty of room for mysteries and intangibles and unfortunate coincidences like the examples Mythago provides, but I figure that's also the same exhilaration-friendly space that causes a reader to remain unmoved by Poems A, B, C but lock onto Poem Z, even though all four poems might be equal in style and substance. The submissions game is still ultimately an intricate form of roulette, BUT there's a distinct difference between the person poking random quarters into the slots and the player who tracks the fall of the cards and understands how the odds work. Sure, the slots pay off once in a while, but. . .

Which is also my response to Alaric's rhetoric about WCW. Sure, stunning work sometimes appears out of nowhere, but so does an awful lot of cliched, boring drivel (some of it even in print. *grin*). Reading widely helps trains the eye, ear and mind to clue into cliches and understand how and where It's Been Done Before. While it's not guaranteed to make one a better writer, I frankly believe it improves the odds.

(And by "widely" I mean both classics and schlock. I'm trying to remember who said that one of the lessons he learned from Thornton Wilder was to sit through an entire season of bad plays and pick them apart, the better to understand what makes a good play good. . . ).

On the whole multiple submission thing...

My very first (non-fiction) book was an idea I had, which Kim Newman and I did a 3 chapters and an outline submission on, to three publishers. One said no, fast, feeling it was too like another book they'd recently published. One said yes, fast. And the other sent us a letter shortly after the book was published by the second publisher to let us know they'd received our submission and were thinking about it failry seriously, and we'd be hearing from them sooner or later, although we never did.

Although I don't remember any "no multiple submission" rules back then. And neither Kim nor I had an agent (I was 22, and he was very much more elderly, at 23) and no-one had told me that publishers wouldn't look at things unless you had an agent. I don't think, looking back at it, that anyone had told the publishers either.

(The book in question got my favourite ever rejection letter from Beth Meachum, when we sent it to her at Tor. She said that she'd giggled madly all the way through, that everyone in the office had wanted to read it, that they were quoting bits of it to each other, that she couldn't return the copy I'd sent her because someone in the office had taken it home with them and not brought it back, and that she couldn't publish it because it was too English and people probably just wouldn't get it in America. It put a huge smile on my face, and she was probably right at that.)

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Stll shddrng.

shll prms mslf t nvr g nwhr nr pblshr vr gn, fr fr f brshng shldrs wth sch ngr mngmnt clss rjcts.

LTTL MSS SNR MKS N SS F HRSLF
--r--
TH RL-WRLD CNSQNCS F GVNG D
STDNTS B'S, SPCLL WHN THY GRW P T BCM DTRS

s xprnc prvs s cnclsvl, mst s-clld "dtrs" nwds cldn't slp sbjct nd vrb nd n bjct tgthr t sv thr msrbl lvs.

Tr str:

n rrgnt ncmptnt gnrms nc rjctd n f m mss wth th nttn SP (`wrng spllng') n th wrd "rcc" nd th nttn PL (`shld s plrl frm') n th sntnc "hs grfft wr btfl."

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Wnt th snglr frm?

Grfft. Frm th tln.

Rmmbr ll ths hdlns tht shrkd "Jhnn Cn't Rd" bck n th 1970s nd 1980s? Wll, Jhnn (r Jn, n ths cs) nw wrks s n dtr fr Tr Bks nc. nd th hrsh rlt rmns tht ths wrthlss jrkffs wh msnm thmslvs "dtrs" xhbt lss fclt wth th nglsh lngg thn Wnstn Chrchll's prrt.

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s fr s tht ss f n dtrx s cncrnd, vr clm sh mks cntrdcts vr thr clm sh mks -- fct whch sh sms t drnk r t hgh n ck t rlz.

Lt's rn thrgh th whl trd ltn f hr flls nd npttds:

n th n hnd, sh vhmntl ssrts "Wht ths gs hv fld t ndrstnd bt rjctn s tht t sn’t prsnl".... bt n th thr hnd sh thrws hstrnc tntrm t wrtrs wh gt bggd b rjctn bcs "th rmnd m f th bs dtd n cllg wh nl wntd t gt ld."

h? Rll?

nd *nw* wh's gttng "prsnl," Lttl Mss Snr?

Th crp thg msnmd s "dtr" cntrdcts hrslf t vr trn:

n th n hnd sh vrs tht n f th bsc rsns fr rjctng mss bls dwn t " sw tht mv/TV shw lst nght"... Yt n th thr hnd sh sms blthl nwr tht f ths stndrd wr ppld crss th brd, *L*L grt fctn n th nglsh lngg wld gt thrwn smmrl t f th slshpl.

"thll? Jst nthr rvng plt. Bn thr, dn tht, b-rng. Th Jpns crtn Cwb Bbp hd th sm plt lst nght. Frgt ths Shkspr crp, sw th sm plt n TV lst nght."

Ys, nd flt mgnn cms frm str, jst lk McDnld's sldgbrgr -- vr stp t thnk tht th mnngfl dffrnc mght rs frm TH WY T'S DN, y mbclc bmb? ccrdng t tht dtc "lgc," lmp f cl cn sb fr dmnd nggmnt rng snc, ftr ll, th bth cnsst f crbn tms.

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"Hcklbrr Fnn? Frgt t, jst nthr kd-rns-w-frm hm bk. Lm. Tss t. sw xctl th sm plt n TV mv lst wk."

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Whr dd ths hlfwt dtrx gt hr lbtm, MNGLSM R S?

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f chrnt d vr ntrd th vcnt hd f ths rfg frm th thggsh frng f dtng, t wld d f lnlnss.

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n th n hnd, Lttl Mss Snr ssrts (sns prf) tht pwrds f 75% f n- slctd mnscrpts cm frm ppl wh thr lck th blt t wrt chrnt sntnc, r sffr frm "nrchmcl prblms"...Yt n th thr hnd, sh fls t rcgnz tht (f tr) ths ssrtn shld ppl t dtrs wth vn mr frc.

Wht, pr tll, xmpts dtrs frm tht nfntl blst f hbrstc bmbst?

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f s, thn wht mks _hr_ s lmght qlfd t rjct mnscrpt?

Spkng f qlfctns -- n xctl whch dctnr cn w fnd ths mmrtl trms "rl trl"?

rrgnt ncmptnt gnrm lk Lttl Mss Snr hv lws plgd s, lk bd wthr, r cckrchs. Bt tht dsn't mn w hv t lk t, r st stll fr t.

Having just read Diogenes post. Teresa, I have to ask the obvious question. Coke and booze? When I visited Tor it seemed a remarkably sober-sided operation, with people all diligently beavering away in their tiny offices. So did you just hide away all the alcohol and drugs when I came? Enquiring minds want to know.

Diogenes wrote: (...lots of stuff)

Imagine for a moment that you are an editor, and you've just read the item you've posted above. Would you feel that the writer of that post was someone you would wish a professional association with?

I dunno, Rob: I was really impressed by the "Paul Kopal" piece. A clear Four on the scale, with reading comprehension problems to boot. (I liked the implicit sex change, though.) Whoever did it really got the message -- I just wish the self-parody was more evident!

Thank you for a brilliant exposition of the process of reading the slush pile. I once added a note at the bottom of a form rejection letter suggesting that the writer might type any future submissions as her handwriting was extremely difficult to read. The letter was returned with diogenes-level vituperation scrawled across it.

My guess is that "Diogenes" is one of the guys Teresa dated in college.

Diogenes writes: "and the notation PL (`should use plural form') on the sentence 'his graffiti were beautiful.' "

"His graffiti was beautiful," sounds better. Chill out, dude.

Scott Sheaffer

Diogenes scores a solid 8.

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T m ths s ll rthr rmnscnt f th ld jk bt hlpng t r ndrstffd plc frc b btng yrslf p. Hw hv w gttn nt th sttn whr w r nt nl xpctd t mk n rctn t sptfl sslt bt t b msd b t? r ds sh ssm hr ntr dnc rsds nsd th hllwd hlls f spnsrd nd pprvd crtvt? t ws rthr lk rdng ths strs f rstrnt wrkrs spttng n cstmrs sp xcpt nw w r ncrgd t xpctrt n r wn bllbss t sv thm tm! stll fnd t hrd t blv tht thr r tw clsss f wrtrs, th crsp prfssnl gnrtrs f wrds t rdr nd nthr slthfl nd mnk brwd ndrclss f crn srs wth scpthc tndncs. glrfctn f frm vr cntnt tht bggrs blf.

Th pblshrs cnfsn btwn ffc sklls nd crtvt cntns nbtd s! cn't s hw th blt t tp trnslts nt rtstc blt. Sm wrtrs m wll d wht ws dscrbd bt hr vsn f dpt. bsgd xclsvl b tlntlss crtns sms t m ncrdbl nt t s nsltng.

Anyone else notice that the folks who fail so spectacularly at insecurity management around questions of publication seem to correlate well with the people who want there to be absolute rules and no human judgement -- other than theirs, perhaps -- involved in the process?

Among social primates, that's a passing harsh judgement of themselves to hold up, as with banners and trumpets.

I'm getting a sense that there's at least one billy-goat out there being sorely deprived of terrorizing today.

Whoa. If that's an 8, then I will forever be lighting candles in church for slushpile readers.

The line of red on Paul Kopal:

>I only noticed this was written by a woman so masculine was sense of rage and barely repressed bile.

'Diogenes' got the red line on his title. Good way to win friends and influence people, dude. (And really... this much rage over two tiny editorial mistakes, one of which is actually quite arguable? Issues much?)

Actually, it's writers like that that make me sure I will eventually be published, so they do serve a purpose...

Paul, I have a serious question. Have you read through the comments? No? You might want to do so. Notice the number of writers who agree those reactions to rejections are over the top. Then consider again if this is a case of "us vs them".

But you're right. If you can't handle the idea that not everyone likes your writing, you probably shouldn't be trying to do it for a living.

No one says you can't disagree with an editor. But on the flipside, no one says an editor can't disagree with you. A rejection letter is just an example of the latter. You think your work is publishable. They don't, at least not by them.

The thing that irks me the most about that site are the people who are sure it's some great conspiracy. The ones who get back some really complimentary rejections and whine, "But if it's so good, why didn't you buy it?" Hey, guess what. It's really, honestly true that editors can't buy everything they like. Or that they can like something about your work and still not think it's for them. Saying, "Obviously, they must be lying about liking it, they're just trying to soften the blow" is some sort of bizarre application of the sour grapes mindset. Why the hell would they take the time to write to you beyond a form letter if they didn't really believe what they said? They could just as easily have sent a letter that says "Thank you for your submission. Unfortunately we do not feel it meets our needs." and signed it. Anything more than that suggests you at least made them think about it, however briefly. That's a good sign, even if the end result is an unsold piece. But people persist in taking it as some sort of heinous, deadly insult.

I expect any day now to hear of someone taking a trip to an editor's office after receiving a rejection letter, getting admitted into the presence of said editor, and slapping them across the face with a glove, saying, "I demand satisfaction!" That seems to be the level of mortal insult these writers are taking....

Possibly, however, I've been too immersed in the 7th Sea RPG lately.

Anna writes,

"What those people at the site don't realize is that sometimes the polite form rejection is a lot nicer than what goes through your head reading the stuff. There's the ones you feel sorry for but there's also the ones you'd like to smack."

LOL Amen that. I've been senior mystery editor for FUTURES Mysterious Anthology Magazine for about four months. I used to be kind, generous, gentle, even-tempered, warm, considerate - all the things my mother always told me I ought to be. I can still be all those things, but it takes more effort now. I've had stories submitted to me that were nothing more than several hundred cliches strung together; stories so filled with elipses and dashes they looked more like Morse code than English; stories with more exclamation points than a mid-sixties issue of Spider-Man; stories that were scene for scene retellings of thirty year old television scripts; stories that read like they'd been written in Urdu, then translated into Swahili and French before making it to English; stories in every genre but the one I publish or double the word count listed in the submission guidelines.

I've developed that thousand yard stare that all editors get when the mind is benumbed by the sheer weight of the submissions, when all you want to do is get these things off of your desk or hard drive. That's when the rejection letters go out, as rapidly as possible, as simply as possible.

It's not always that you dislike the story; it's not even that you don't love the story. Sometimes it's that you just bought a story with the same theme and basic plotline. Sometimes it's that the author, let's call him Efrem Clayton (not a real name; this is a character in my as-yet unpublished novel DEAD WOMEN IN LOVE), is sending dozens of submissions at a whack, so that even if you love each and every one, you have no intention of renaming your magazine the Efrem Clayton Mystery Magazine. One story per author per issue, that's my policy, and once I get someone's work included in a solid decade's worth of issues, it's time to start suggesting they might be ready for other markets.

Okay, so, I put some serious thought and effort into that particular rejection, but that pretty much uses up whatever creativity would have been available for the other six or seven thousand stories that still need to be turned down. That's when the form letter comes out. It's not personal. It's shell-shock, it's combat fatigue, it's post grammatic stress disorder.

BTW, yes, we editors often do know one another. We do swap horror stories. We are capable of being vindictive, despite our genteel upbringings. Responding to a request to reformat your story so that half the punctuation doesn't resemble comic strip cussing with snide comments about the editor's ancestry and education will result in your name being added to a circulating list of our least favorite people.

One of my favorite things on the Internet is when a certain class of person takes it on themselves to flame Teresa. These people generally come across as young men, and I imagine that they do indeed stir up a great deal of trouble in the online forums they are used to inhabiting, even driving some of the members to tears.

I always imaging myself setting up the lawn chairs and pouring ice-cold glasses of lemonade as I wait for Teresa to return and see the posts. "Honey, come here," I say to my wife. "You're going to want to see this."

It's a funny thing. People who can't do advanced math, or play classical piano concertos, or pitch a no-hitter in the major leagues, generally know they can't do it. People who don't have an intimate relationship with language are far less aware of their condition, and for them the written world can be a very frustrating place. Near as we can make out, they literally can't tell that their rejected writing isn't like the writing that does get published.

Those of you who've hung out in Usenet newsgroups for any length of time will have seen the phenomenon of a tone-deaf poster exploding in fury and frustration because all he can tell is that he's somehow being left out of some part of the conversation, and that for no reason that he can see, his posts don't get the same reactions that other people's do.

Sympathy and irritation. Trouble is, if you try to explain to them that language doesn't work the same way for everyone, they won't believe you. They just get angrier.

At least these people got rejection letters! Somebody let them know that he took the time to read their submission and gave them a reason for not publishing it. They ought to be thankful. My college's literary magazine didn't even give us that courtesy. The only way I knew that they didn't like my doggerel was by picking up the latest issue and noting the absence of my submissions.

I suppose it sounds like I'm still bitter. Perhaps I am. But I prefer to think that my stories and poems were either too controversial or too silly for the lit mag, and since nobody ever let me know why they were rejected, I can continue to live in this fantasy world.

Thanks, Mitch. You're no slouch yourself. But I can't light into Kopal and Diogenes; they're unarmed and fighting blind. I'd have disemvowelled them by now if the rest of you weren't commenting on them as the pertinent illustrations they are. I may disemvowel them yet. At minimum I'm going to correct their bad formatting, so we don't have to deal with elongated or picket-fenced versions of their screeds.

I have nothing to do with writing manuscripts for publication or reviewing them and I still found this inside account so interesting. The "coaching" is so wise and helpful that it could easily be applied to a much wider range of human endeavors and I'm going to make it part of the reading for the graduate program of which I am a director -- a program in a college unrelated to lit, English or communications.

Thanks for taking the time to organize and express your thoughts in such a clear and helpful way. I very much enjoyed and profited from reading the whole thing -- I came to sample and stayed for the evening.

Dear Kopal and Diogenes,

We're sorry, but your recent submissions, which produced considerable discussion in our virtual office, do not precisely meet our needs. However, we earnestly suggest that you two form a partnership, and coauthor a novel of passion and fulmination. Dennis Miller's Rant Press is a plausible market, but leave that to your joint agent. For that, we suggest Max Bialystock.

*holds breath while reading the posts of Diogenes and PK*

*exhales slowly*

Wow. "...barely repressed bile." Project much?

Kinda curious as to how you extracted "Do not write anything whatsoever" from Teresa's post. I personally found it very useful and I have received a handful of rejections in my relatively short time as a submitting writer. (T actually was once very helpful in deciphering some of the editor-speak behind one of those notes.) I have a better idea of where to clean up my manuscripts, and how to make the best presentation I can.

I know this is cliche but some people see obstacles where some people see challenges.

I, for one, have read enough of Diogenes and Kopal to be satisfied, henceforth, with their consonants alone.

My $/50.

Maybe henceforth? The first two or three posts provide context for late-comers. I agree that reformatting would be a boon. It's hard to read those short lines on such a long post. My scrolling hand is tired.

Much to my everlasting shame, I would not have picked up on the William Carlos Williams riff in the poetic rejection letter; on the other hand, what a wonderful rejection letter! I hate to say it, but there's every chance that a letter like that would have me smiling all day. Who could possibly object to the form of that rejection?

PiscusFiche, while I see your point, do we really want to keep talking about them? There was quite an interesting discussion going on here prior to their arrival, IIRC. And I personally redlined them pretty early, though I don't tend to read things in order top-to-bottom.

"Try to imagine this piece rewritten using the name of an ethnic group
instead of 'writer' throughout, the result is not pretty."

Ah, the old rhetorical ploy of equating discernment with racism; as if being stubbornly resistant to critique of your own prose was an accident of birth, or as if banning smoking in a restaurant was practicing discrimination against a few rather than discouraging behavior in all.

I am reminded of nothing so much as an anonymous letter a friend received accusing them of aggressive and insensitive behavior, penned by someone so obviously lacking in self-awareness that they were totally blind to the self-inflated arrogance and lack of regard for others that positively dripped from their own pages.

Oh, and about the teenage author:

1) Why did she put her age in her cover letter anyway? Did she think they'd publish something by a teenager that they wouldn't publish if it were written by an adult? What's the source of that delusion?

2) She used "it's" when she meant "its."*

3) She wrote 'dribble' when she meant 'drivel'.

4) The fact that she thinks she's "qualified" to write a novel about a teenager because she is one makes me suspect that her name might be Mary Sue.

*Yes, those should be single quotes. Doubled because of the apostrophe in the first one.

This was very interesting to read, both as a struggling writer and an editor with in-house aspirations. Thank you for posting it.

I don't know...the formatting is really yet another of the posts' delightfully illustrative properties. Clearly, these two are incapable of taking the time to correct something so monumentally trivial as the line breaks in a multi-paragraph post. This on a site that requires one to preview each post for problems before one's missive gets tossed into the fray.

If they cannot show evidence of so slight an effort towards readability when it is so nearly impossible not to do so...what must their extended works be like?

I pray I never know.

Xopher: Talk, no, not really. Read, possibly yes. (I often find that reading the disembvowelled posts is much harder when one has limited free time on the computer, but my curiosity impels me. Like Mitch, I find it fascinating.)

But your point is also a good one. So....as you were. :)

I would also like to note for the record that I am currently valiantly sitting on the urge to edit Paul's posts and return them to him with revisions.

It is taking a serious will of effort to not even so much as point out one phrase that got my inner red pencil twitching.

I will concede this is principally because I've been having a really bad 2004 so far, and I'm looking for some aggression-release. I'm not sure what it says about me that editing someone else's post for clarity counts as aggression-release...

(Some writers have an Inner Editor that keeps them from writing by making them wonder if everything they've written is crap. I have one who looks forward to improving the first draft. If one can take certain people's attitudes as Truth, it's like I'm some weird human-alien hybrid from X-Files....)

Teresa, I think you are exactly right that there are people who are entirely tone-deaf as far as writing goes. 'Style-blind' might be an appropriate term here. (Or, for the PC, 'differently expressive'.)

Ray R, I didn't pick up on the William Carlos Williams either, and I actually like WCW, so I'm not sure what my excuse is. So don't feel too bad, you're in tolerably good company. :)

I have reflected upon the matter, and Diogenes snuffs it. On re-reading him (reformatting helped), I realized I couldn't tell whether he'd actually been through the submission and rejection process. Whether he had or not, he was clearly just enjoying an opportunity to be nasty, and you know my take on that: If he's just getting off on abusing someone, let him go to a professional and pay their usual hourly rates. Besides, he was implicitly insulting my high school English teachers, and one of them posts here.

Mr. Kopal will probably go soon. As Christopher points out, having these guys in the conversation shifts it from a discussion of submissions and rejections to a discussion of them.

Elizabeth, good ear. They're both mad about that.

It's a valuable lesson on both sides, I think. A professional writer should see his writing like any good salesman sees his product -- something to believe in, something to view with pride, but ultimately something that must be sold. The buyer never HAS to buy your product, and believing that the buyer DOES is a great way to rub people the wrong way. On the other hand, the editors would do well to remember the kind of people they're dealing with -- folks who are going to overanalyze every word of the letter in question. :)

I try not to take rejection letters personally. I would, however, note that, when I last submitted to Tor, I received no response to:

- My initial three-chapters-and-synopsis, which included an SASE
- My query letter with SASE, sent after one year
- My query e-mail, sent after another six months
- My second query e-mail, sent after another three weeks
- My third query e-mail and subsquent withdrawl

A simple form rejection letter would have been preferable.

-Patrick

This is such an excellent read! It reminds me of an article I was assigned to read in an acting audition-prep course; the article had been xeroxed half a million times already, it had been that important for it to be disseminated among emotionally fragile drama students! It listed the top ten common flaws in a (professional) audition, and why rejection often has little to do with the actual performance. You can give a flawless performance, but if your resume contact info is wrong and they can't get ahold of you, you're rejected---skill can sometimes have nothing to do with it, or simple details can reveal a lurking glacier of personal flaws that the auditioner/reviewer doesn't want to get involved with. What you've written should be given as preemptive required reading to all unsolicited-submission writers; the incredibly simple technical mistakes (no SASEs, etc) that writers make can be corrected so easily, and knowing this kind of inside information on the whole slush pile procedure will prevent a lot of heartache.

I stumbled across this illuminating post and its multitudes of replies last night via a writing group friend's recommendation, and can't tear myself away lol. What a wonderful description, Teresa! Thank you so much for sharing your slush experience.

I was thinking about the discussion this morning, and the slush pile in general reminds me very much of when I was in my early teens and interested in acting. I went to a "cattle call" audition, and I remember being stood in a line with several girls who looked somewhat like me in age, etc., and having the casting director come and look closely at all of us. The reason I was not chosen to go further? I have brown eyes, and they were casting a daughter to two blue-eyed parents. Point being, I didn't even get a chance to be judged on whether or not I could act, because I didn't fit the market need. Sort of like if someone had submitted a hard sci-fi novel to Harlequin. The author could be the next Asimov, but s/he's not going to get published at that house!

Someone mentioned also (I think it was Teresa) that writers can be utterly tone-deaf as to whether or not their own work is any good. That made me think of the pop culture phenomenon of the American Idol franchise. What do they show in the early days of the competition if not their aural slush pile? And how many of the would-be writers who become so vitriolic over a polite rejection letter are laughing at the people auditioning for A.I. who really, truly believe they have talent but are showing the world that they cannot sing? Can they even recognise themselves in that situation?

As for myself, I'm not published, nor do I have my manuscript ready for submission yet. But when I do, I firmly believe that if I'm not ready to hear a 'No,' then I have no business sending it anywhere. If you submit an unsolicited ms to a publishing house, truthfully they are doing you a favour to even look at it. They don't have to; as was pointed out somewhere above, most pub.s derive only a tiny portion of their material from the infamous slush pile. The only reason you should be sending anyone anything is because YOU feel it's worth publishing; because YOU believe in it. It takes time to find someone else who feels the same way. :)
hugs, Tas

Changing posts to consonants only is pure evil! For thread readers, that is. The awful thing is that having read the responses, I'm tempted to try to decipher what these guys said, which is possible even without vowels but is a lot of work. Replacing the text with "something not worth saying had been written here" in red, or whatnot, would be much more conductive to my mental health.

Aaaaaargh, Patrick Weekes. Aaaaaaargh. Give me the title and approximate genre again. For maximum embarrassment, it'll probably turn up in my "Hey, this one's good" stack.

There are so many interesting things to respond to here, and I don't have time for more than a fraction of them. Among other things, I'm dealing with submissions. (You think I'm immune to guilt? Hah. Think again.) Both the articles Jim Macdonald linked to are excellent. Neil speaks only the truth about Tor's reaction to his first submission. Alaric, while in theory you don't have to be familiar with the existing body of English-language literature in order to write good poetry, if your hypothetical poet had written good poetry, he or she wouldn't be getting the rejection letter.

A number of comments have fretted over the whole "neurochemical disorder" thing. Don't worry. We can tell a severe headcase from a relatively normal author who's using all-caps for emphasis, and we can usually distinguish intentional stream-of-consciousness from the unintentional variety. If there's anything slush teaches you to do, it's to recognize those disorders. It was even easier before everyone got computers, when we could spot them by their formatting.

It's been years since I participated in Usenet, but many items in the Nielsen-Haydens' blogs bring back the pleasures of a spirited newsgroup thread. And I think that such threads can benefit from dissenters, even from ranting dissenters. If you're going to expunge their contributions, I'm at least glad to have had the opportunity to read them before you did so.

On the other hand, I can see the logic in steering this thread back to the quite fruitful topic at hand. One impression that I get from seeing these rejectees' complaints is that they don't seem to have learned much about how the publishing business works. How many of us who aspired to published authorship read everything they could about the business, talked to real live editors and authors, and knew all about slushpiles and agents and form rejections and SASE's long before we ever submitted anything? These are the people who can say, "Yeah, those kooks are taking it way too personally."

On another issue, that of multiple submissions: I understand that it takes a lot of work to set the machinery in motion to accept a manuscript, and that the people in the publishing house don't want to be inconvenienced by it. But the process is quite similar to what happens when a company wants to hire a full-time worker: you have to do interviews, reference checks, authorize salary and benefits expenses, do tax paperwork, and much more. And businesses deal all the time with potential employees who get a job offer and then at the last minute say, "Sorry, I got another offer somewhere else." They accept this as part of the cost of doing business, and they're not likely to take petty revenge by automatically circular-filing that same person's resume if they apply for another position later. So, I know the publishing industry has what it considers good reasons for its policies and they aren't likely to change based on a few contrary opinions, but I still consider it unreasonable.

Finally, I'd like to reiterate a legitimate question that I don't think I've seen answered yet: just what does it mean to say that "The author wrote the wrong book"?

ET, I rarely delete when I can disemvowel instead. It means you can still puzzle out what it said if you're interested, but you don't automatically read it as you go past, which spares the other readers a dose of unpleasantness.

ET, "disemvowelment" is the local penalty for being rude and offensive. It's preferred to just removing or replacing the offending post in part because we still get to see at what length the person was being rude and offensive, and because those of us who really want to know can puzzle it out.

Trust me that Diogenes was not worth reading. It was just a lot of nasty sht directed at our beloved Teresa, as far as I read, which wasn't far.

Okay, okay. I admit it. I'm only commenting at this particular moment because it makes it easier for me to determine where I left off.

I am utterly fascinated and educated and amused. Except for the disemvowellment duo, whom I have sacrificed to the gods of blogs. May your souls find peace, as your words crumble to pieces.

Oops. Sorry. Cross-post. Yeah, I know it was 16 minutes...I had the window open for a while there.

Jimcat: your employment analogy is well taken. However I don't think it's accurate to say that the process is quite similar to what happens when a company wants to hire a full-time worker: you have to do interviews, reference checks, authorize salary and benefits expenses, do tax paperwork, and much more. And businesses deal all the time with potential employees who get a job offer and then at the last minute say, "Sorry, I got another offer somewhere else."

Putting the boot on the other foot, when you as an author approach a publisher, you aren't simply trying to get taken on as staff. You're not even trying to get them to give you $X in cold hard cash for your manuscript. You're actually proposing that they bet a chunk of their turnover (typically on the order of 10 x $X, if the royalty rate is, say, 10%) on their ability to sell your manuscript to the reading public.

The amount the publisher has at stake is soberingly more than the amount of money the author gets to see. See that $10,000 advance? That means the publisher probably needs to sell $90,000 of product just to break even. Nor do they have a perfect target lock on the market: there's no accounting for taste, and the readers might stay away in droves and thundering herds. In which case the publisher is out of pocket to the tune of $BIGNUM. And there's worse: because publishers invest in authors' careers (often issuing multibook contracts because they intend to promote that author, in the hope of increasing sales of future books), the amount at stake is even larger than that.

This is not the same as the company hiring a labourer for $10,000 to do some work for them. A better analogy is that you are asking an editor to gamble their career on your manuscript.

Way, way upthread, Rob Hansen said:

I still remember my surprise on encountering the line: "then he parted the twin nodes of her clitoris". That one made me wince, and I'm not even female. As a way of signalling the protagonist is having sex with either an alien or a mutant, the line has possibilities, but this was meant to be a physically normal human woman, alas.

Actually, the writer might know too much about female anatomy, rather than too little. The clitoris does have two "legs" going down from the base, on either side of the vaginal opening, and stimulation of these nodes can be most... stimulating. But most people -- even most women -- don't know this, and to use this fact in erotica smacks of too much book-learnin'.

I'm irrationally pleased to read your post, Charlie, 'cause I'd figured numbers something very much like that as to what a publisher had to sell in order to break even. Gosh, don't I feel smug! :)

On multiple submissions--the thing that frustrates me, from a writer's standpoint, is that multiple submissions are frowned upon, but it takes *so* *long* to hear back from most publishers. I've gained an appreciation for the idea that publisher time is not like writer time, but as an individual writer who's trying to build a career as an author, the prospect of waiting five months or a year to be rejected (or even accepted) by one house, and then if it's a rejection, going through it again at another house--is just wildly impractical. Sort of like building a house with the hopes of moving in to it in five years, but you're only laying two bricks a year.

I know the proper way to deal with this is to get an agent, but agents are just as hard to come by as editors. Catch-22: if you don't have a book sale, you can't get an agent; if you don't have an agent, you won't get a book sale. It's not a perfect catch, because people can and do get agents without sales, and sales without agents (which is what I did, and then I went and got an agent immediately), but if what you're doing is waiting and hoping to hear back good news, it generally seems as good a use of your time (maybe better) to be querying editors as agents.

I've seen the Tor slushpile, albeit at its low-tide level, and I doubt other houses have any less impressive slushpiles to go through. I don't know how a house would burn through its slush (or even its solicited manuscripts) faster without accruing significantly more cost, but if there was a way, we'd all love you forever.

Not that we don't anyway. :)

Catie hath scrivened,

"I don't know how a house would burn through its slush (or even its solicited manuscripts) faster without accruing significantly more cost, but if there was a way, we'd all love you forever."

Hmmmm, there's an idea, burning....

Alas, as Futures takes only electronic submissions, that wouldn't work. Not that I'd ever seriously consider convening a convenient conflagration. ;{)

I'd like to add, lest the above and my previous post lead folks to believe I am terminally curmugeonly, that generally speaking the submissions I receive are in serious violation of Sturgeon's Law, falling well short of the requisite 90% crapola level. This is of course my own biased opinion; others are welcome to disagree. I've gotten some gems over the electronic transom, more than I expected when I took on the job in September. It hurts to have to let a good one go by, for whatever reason, but it does happen.

Peg, you're quite right that one can get a sense of what an editor prefers--and in the case of a smaller market, such as a magazine, it's essential to know that Magazine A's editor really hates romance stories and Magazine B's editor really likes action sequences.

But at a book-publishing house that's trickier, and it's still not the same as having a personal acquaintance. Unless you are indeed the editor's sister's shoeshine-boy's best friend, you're unlikely to know them as well as you know that irritating old biddy in your writing group who loudly insists that it's OK to end sentences with prepositions.

And of course, sometimes it is you and not them--but there's no sure way to know.

I must admit I'm reading this thread (with great interest) from the safe standpoint of a non-writer; I'd *like* to write, but I'm pretty sure I don't actually have any talent for it. :)

One thing has been going through my head while reading, though - the people Teresa quoted from the site. Would they actually be any happier if they understood the rejections weren't personal, or would they just get upset over that instead? My money's on the latter.

but I'm pretty sure I don't actually have any talent for it. :)

That never stopped [insert hack bestselling author's name here]. :)

I browsed the rejection site once, but found that all comments fell into two categories:

1) You just sent me a simple form note saying "no thanks;" why didn't you have the courtesy to explain in detail?

2) You explained in detail; I would have preferred a simple form note saying "no thanks."

You're right: There is only one answer that will not elicit irrational whining: "Thanks, check enclosed!"

PS: A lot of people got a good leg up by being forced to handle slush piles. In Hollywood, many a successful screenwriter spent horrible months doing first reads on the slush pile, and learned the most invaluable lesson of all: What not to do, and every possible way not to do it.

And yes, of course you can tell in the first few pages. Dear Writer: If you can't grab 'em in the first few chapters, then you lack narrative ability. Duh.

...that irritating old biddy in your writing group who loudly insists that it's OK to end sentences with prepositions.

Um. It is, actually. Can you see where I'm coming from? See, that's what I'm talking about. What is the world coming to?

What isn't OK is writing something awkward and ugly. That includes some sentences that end in prepositions, but it also includes "Can you see from where I'm coming?" and "See, that's about what I'm talking" and "To what is the world coming?"

Thanks, Xopher. I, for one, would be extremely happy if the whole preposition hobgoblin would just go away. It's an annoying misperception to have one's readers and reviewers labour under.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden writes:

>Those of you who've hung out in Usenet newsgroups for any length of time will have seen the phenomenon of a tone-deaf poster exploding in fury and frustration because all he can tell is that he's somehow being left out of some part of the conversation, and that for no reason that he can see, his posts don't get the same reactions that other people's do.

*COUGH* At**ck *f t*e Rock**ds *COUGH*

On the WCW poem: Garrison Keillor did a Guy Noir skit with many variations on the theme, including this:

This is just to say
that I have written
the poems
that you found in
your mailbox

and which
you were probably
hoping
would have stopped by now.

Forgive me.
They are irresistible
so short
and so irritating.

As one of those SOB's, I must confess we sometimes DO mess with writer's heads...

At the WFC in Washington DC, Argosy Senior Editor Lou Anders and I were having breakfast with a prominent British author whom Lou wanted to impress. Lou wanted this guy to send us stories. I wanted to make Lou happy. So, in the course of editor/author/publisher friendly banter, the topic of rejections comes up, and I look at author and say, eyes glinting, "Well, we would NEVER reject a story of yours."

If that had been it, well enough; however, I went into hyperbole overdrive and spent a full minute along those lines, explaining how this guy was the ONE AUTHOR we would NEVER send a rejection letter.

Author blinks. Lou blinks. I grin, feeling I've reached a plateau of suckingupedness to authors Whose Stories We Will Buy.

Author says, "I sent you a story. You sent it back."

Lou confirms this. My subsequent statuelike state and Lou's assertion (and author's confirmation) that Lou said that PARTICULAR story wasn't right AT THAT TIME, and we would like to see OTHER stories in the FUTURE do nothing to assuage the underlying reality that I Was Messing With His Head.

Bwah hah hah.

(Okay, okay - so it WASN'T planned. Terribly embarassing. Going to be buying the story. Moral: should stay in my Publisher/Designer/Editoral Director cubbyhole and let Lou do what I hired him to do to begin with. Also, should keep mouth full during breakfast meetings.)

For those asking about novel submission times: I did a fair bit of looking at the "rules" before taking the big step of getting my novel(s) turned down by everyone in sight (This is less true of short stories, but I started subbing those at 16, and started with MZB, which meant I got over the shock of how vicious a rejection can be, and learned how little to heed said viciousness, very early).

In looking at the rules, this is what I was told, and how I understand the process works. Usually, with Agents (if not with publishers), it IS considered ok to simultaneously submit a query letter. In most (Not all) cases, this is true even of a letter with sample chapters and synopsis.

Where the break comes is at the level of full manuscript. I'd NEVER simsub one of those. (Not that I've had the opportunity. I've been shot down a fair bit, though.)

Parenthetical asides aside, this means that the initial queries can actually go by pretty quickly, and while it has happened, it's rare for two agents to request the full manuscript at the same time. And even then, courteously asking them to limit their "exclusive look" time to 8 weeks (which is sometimes even done at at their behest, not yours), and sending a polite reminder at th 8 week mark, and being scrupulously honest to everyone about the MS's whereabouts, can cause you to get two clear responses on your final MS within 4 months. And could I have made that sentence more convoluted?

Short version: Unless you're assuming that everyone is going to ask for a full manuscript, you're generally not looking at 5 years for 5 rejections, or any such horrific number.

Teresa or others in the know can correct me if all my theoretical knowledge is incorrect, but this system tends to work in everyone's favour. Fewer pages for the author to print and mail, saving on cost, faster times for the author, and the agent is still not likely to get stuck hearing, "But I got on board with {competitor X} while you were working day and night to get my story on board."

Lenora, I think you're right in terms of agent turnaround times, but I think when it comes to submitting directly to publishers, it'll vary quite a bit -- and not often in favour of the author.

My indirect experience (via close friends who've subbed novels; me, I've never even written one):

Entire novel sent as slush to Publisher A: form rejection after 13 months.

Entire novel sent as slush to Publisher A: after ~16 months, ms reported as lost and author asked to re-sub.

Synopsis and 3 chapters sent as slush to Publisher B: form rejection after 3 months.

Syopsis and 3 chapters sent as slush to Publisher C: form rejection after 11 months.

Entire ms sent solicited to Publisher C: after 19 months, ms reported as lost and author asked to re-sub.

YMMV.

I'm not entirely sure what my point was here; maybe that the whole rejection letter thing is quite different for novelists vs. short story writers. The latter are likely to get a lot more of 'em over a given period of time, and the rejections are a lot more likely to contain editorial feedback, through checklists or personal notes. Thus, the short story writers have received, at least intermittently, some information as to =why= their work was rejected.

I've been reading, and thinking...always a dangerous combination...and I've come to the conclusion that thee's nothing you really can do about slush piles. Except to trudge through them, and hope that all the envlopes stay where they're suppossed to be and that when the editor gets to it she or he happens to really be in the mood for what you've written.

Forgive me for saying so, but this is why I actually prefer places that ask you to query first. Alright, maybe you don't have a chance to dazzle them with your fiction writing skills, but if you have a strong idea, then they'll go for it. Maybe actually *look* forward to reading the ms/partial, etc.

Anyway, my point...yes, it's there, coming over the horizon...is that I actually like slush piles. Slush piles are a chance. Most publishing houses of any size won't even *look* at you if you don't have an agent. (Another reason why Tor rules!) So, a place that has a slush pile is a place that gives new writers a bit of hope. The wait's painful, but then you should be writing something else, not betting all your dreams on one book, anyway.

And to the young lady who never recieved a rejection letter...I've lived in college magazine offices, and sometimes things get lost. Even *good* things get lost. Never be afraid, after a decent amount of time (or the time listed in the GL's) to ask.

A tentative suggestion: maybe the first page of a submission could be sent as email. This would allow quick first filtering (no futzing with envelopes). If the submission makes it past the first cut, you can ask for a paper manuscript.

Wow, slushspam.

No, that didn't come out right. Though I suspect first-page-by-e-mail (or, inevitably, fax) would lead to massively multiple submissions.

And I'm not sure it would make much difference. It would only select against books so bad that they can be rejected from the first page -- admittedly, this is a nontrivial percentage, but those books are -already- being rejected from the first page. Yes, it would save having to stuff the partial back into the envelope (or the carton, or the box filled with foam popcorn and the foil-wrapped . . . uh, never mind), and it would clear the office space currently needed to park the things, but -only- for the One Page Wonders. Everything else would have to be followed up by a partial. A certain percentage would be followed by a partial (or more) anyway, the author protesplaining that the book doesn't really get good until Page 85, or the end of Book Two, or in the part he hasn't got on paper yet. (Yes, I have opened these letters. I have opened letters from short-fiction writers who explain that they -know- the story isn't any good until the last page, that was the point.)

Understand, I wish as much as everybody else who's ever read slush that there was a solution, even an incremental one, to its thousand natural electroconvulsions. But, as with an awful lot of subsystems in Our Beloved Industry, this one did not emerge, mature and fully armored, from some bit of Harold Ross's anatomy; it evolved (probably by punctuated equilibrium rather than pure gradualism, but my prejudices are showing).

It's hard (I'm not suggesting that it's impossible) to come up with a qualifying exam for stories. The core system now -- look at the material until it stands up on whatever it is using for legs and yells something in a heavy accent about being untimely ripp'd, at which point it goes home -- cannot be streamlined much below chapters-and-outline, not and have much chance of finding good novice work (which, characteristically, -doesn't- get good until at least a few pages in). And, as noted, it's the layer of fond on the bottom that wants us to see it in its multivolume entirety. Plus the maps and glossary. And the military TO&Es. And the character stats for d20. And the letter that's supposed to be forwarded to Peter Jackson, so he can buy raw stock.

I started a two-act play about this, once, to be called, with no particular apologies, S*A*S*E. Realized early on that nobody would believe the true stories, and, much in the fashion of NOISES OFF, there was no ending so much as a spiraling toward chaos.

Okay, I knew the job was dangerous. Not -that- dangerous, but, well.

Slashing the Slush

by A Lady

Once upon a time an overworked and underappreciated editor decided that she'd wasted entirely too many precious hours slogging through slush.

"If only the no-talents would wake up and smell the putrid stink of their sorry manuscripts, I might actually get around to signing on brilliant new talent in less time than it takes the Earth to complete a revolution around the sun!" she said, waving her arms toward heaven in exasperated supplication.

As so often happens in this type of scenario, sudden insight gripped her. Or struck like a lightening bolt. Or smacked into her like an intoxicated three-hundred-pound redneck at a monster truck rally. "I know! I've got it! I'm a freaking genius, I am!"

Five months later:

"All right now, prospective writers, gather round, gather round. No pushing!" Overworked and underappreciated editor's eyes gleamed with barely suppressed, and quite possibly maniacal, enthusiasm. "Now, I want you all to know that our publishing house appreciates your solicitations; we really and truly do. It's just that lately we've had more hopeful piles of sh** cluttering our offices than we can reasonably manage. And it hurts, it really does, to reach the enlightened conclusion that America's pool of writing talent resembles--yes I think it would be fair to say it resembles--a great big gloopy primordial swamp, out of which crawl a few rare gems of slimy evolutionary survival."
"And I see by the radiant knowing looks on your faces that each of you imagines him or herself to be one of these rare gems. I thought so, yes. That is why I have gathered you here today. You see, I would like for each of you to indulge that vision for moment and then--oh, please don't hurry on my account--I want you to reread your manuscripts with ruthless self-honesty, stripping your ugly naked selves bare of all delusion. And *then*, and only then, would I like for you to consider whether or not that piece of crap you hold is dazzling enough to prevent--THIS!"

With a dramatic flourish, overworked and underappreciated editor indicates a somewhat lumpy and puzzling, human-sized and mysteriously horrific, shape hidden beneath a large black swath of fabric. The radiant eyes of a thousand would-be gems of evolutionary survival turn their attention to the black-swathed curiosity. Two thousand feet carry their nervous charges closer to a dais in the center of the hall, where the editor, reaching purposefully for the black cloth, is now visibly twitching with excitement. She grasps the end of the cloth and pauses for effect--her expression that of a Kindergarten teacher readying gullible young charges for a most wonderous surprise. One thousand prospective authors hold their breath (twenty-six grasp an arm, shoulder, or closest appendage, of their neighbor's).

SWISH! The cloth races to the floor, pools of black fabric forming on the dais as one thousand prospective authors subsequently scream, faint, tear at their hair, flail their fists at the air, or all of the above. Overworked and underappreciated editor screams with laughter, pointing with psychopathic glee at the suddenly berserked prospective authors.

"Yes! Don't let THIS happen to YOU!!!" she shrieks. "The next wannabe author that dares--DARES!--to pass off a royal stinker as potentially publishable material will meet the SAME FATE!!! Mwahahahahahahahaha!!!"

Prospective authors dash wildly for the exits, trampling their unconscious counterparts underfoot, tears of rage and bewilderment spilling to the ground--not unlike the entrails of the unfortunate example lashed to an overworked and underappreciated editor's chair, in the center of a dais, in a hall, from which one thousand prospective authors fled.

Yes, it has to be said: and the next year a grand total of ten manuscripts were received by the publishing company.

And each was an exquisite gem.

***

Catie Murphy wrote:
"I've seen the Tor slushpile, albeit at its low-tide level, and I doubt other houses have any less impressive slushpiles to go through. I don't know how a house would burn through its slush (or even its solicited manuscripts) faster without accruing significantly more cost, but if there was a way, we'd all love you forever"

This may be an entirely implausible suggestion, but I've always believed "unpaid intern" to be a magical phrase. I'm a young kid just trying to get started in this world, and work experience or a good letter of rec from a respected professional is worth more than its weight in gold. Judging from some posts in this thread there seem to be people who would be willing to read slush for fun and enlightenment, especially if it could be done in one's free time, at home.

Maybe the screening process would be more trouble than it's worth, or you would burn out a few boundlessly energetic optimists, or they just wouldn't be competent enough. I don't think that there would be a problem finding volunteers, at least until the horror of the reality started becoming all too clear.

Maybe most college grads my age don't have the kind of free time I do. Then again, a friend of a friend is moving to California for an unpaid internship with Tokyopop, so it it's possible I'm not whistling in the dark here after all.

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> Um. It is, actually. Can you see where I'm coming from?

Er, that part was meant to be a little joke about how authors can differ vituperatively over eensy meensy little details.

Though MOST of the time, it is better not to finish a sentence a preposition with. ;)

Have you ever noticed how *real* crackpots - regardless of their political, religious, or aesthetic focus - are almost always incredibly verbose? It seems to point to some common underlying dysfunction.

(ok - not *always* verbose - the business card I found in my mailbox from the self proclaimed 'Nazi hunter', offering his services to all and sundry was quite short and to the point).

Sorry, but I can't resist injecting a little irony, here.

I'm a published fiction writer, knows lots of other pubbed and unpubbed writers. And I've noticed an undeniable pattern among the unpublished writers' responses to rejection.

The ones who don't take their potential readers' emotional reaction to a story (or the presentation of it) into account while they're writing, are the SAME ones who obsess endlessly over what an editor has--or hasn't--written in a rejection.

Call me snarky, but I often catch myself hoping they'll get a form letter so they'd know how I felt--or didn't feel, as the case may be--while reading their submissions.

Some get it, some don't. Nothing you or I can do about it until they do.

In the meantime, thank you for saving what precious little reading time I have from accidentally being filled with such things :-)

Oh, look! It's Johnny Wizard!

Can anyone guess the two words I've been trying to avoid throughout the original posting and all the subsequent comments? They've already been used by someone else here:

------- -------------

Slush Sucks?

You Suck?

Writers Suck?

Screw This?

Screw Them?

F'ing Wannabes?

F'ing No-talents?

F' You?

F' Them?

Eat This?

Blow Yourself?

Get Lost?

Go Away?

Dial 911?

I've Dialed?

Police Coming?

Run Now?

Look, Straightjacket?

Give Up?

Help Me?

Mmm, Valium?

Ginentonic, Better?

Shoot Me?

Eek, Arrrrrgh?

Green, stamps?

But seriously folks.

What I find rather saddening about the obsession with editorial rejection is that the people doing the obsessing are missing the important part of writing.

There are three things you can find satisfying about writing: writing, having written, and having other people look at you and say you're a writer. The luckiest few love to write, many writers love having written. I fear that people who are plunged into despair over rejection letters are people who are hung up on having other people tell them the are writers - and therefore important people - rather than the writing itself.

If you just want to be a writer, to assume the role and put on the costume, you look to editors for validation. But if you want to be a writer for real, you write, and nobody can take that away from you.

I don't want to turn this into a Harlan Ellison-esque sermon about how writing is a "holy chore," "it's not what I do it's who I am." Because that's dead wrong; writing is NOT my identity, writing is just something I do - and that's the beauty of it. It's part of my life, like watching TV and taking out the trash on Tuesday nights and feeding the cats on odd-numbered days. Writing is a compulsion, an itch, I can no more NOT write than I can stop rubbing my feet on the floor when I'm sitting down and barefoot.

By my back-of-the-envelope calculation, I've written one million words of paid prose; the only thing I've ever done to earn a living, since college, has been as a journalist. I've done probably ANOTHER million on Internet discussion forums like this one and my blog and, before that, GEnie and CompuServe. And I've written and finished four or five complete works of fiction, ranging in length from short stories to novellas, none of which have been published. As a matter of fact, my attempts at fiction have been pretty bad. But so what? I got a kick out of finishing them up. I've written four or five complete works of fiction, the number of people who can say they've accomplished that is a vanishingly small percentage of the billions populating the Earth.

If you're a professional writer, then satisfying editors is EXTREMELY important, because you may not be able to make your mortgage payment if your editor is unhappy. But if you're NOT a professional, then it's really not important at all whether an editor buys your work or not. Sure, the money for a novel is significant, even for a first novel, even in these declined times - but, financially speaking, writing a novel is a lousy investment, considering the amount of time that goes into it; you're better off financially spending the time taking accounting classes.

One of the things that creeps me out about instruction for beginning writers - and I see some of that in this discussion - is the focus on PROFESSIONALISM, at a time when new writers should just be spending time fooling around and writing.

P.S. Last time I did that back-of-the-envelope calculation was a few years ago and I came up with TWO million words of paid prose. I must be getting slower.

P.P.S. Patrick rejected two of my stories - he rejected one of them TWICE.

Writing is a compulsion, an itch, I can no more NOT write than I can stop rubbing my feet on the floor when I'm sitting down and barefoot.

I think this, and your later comment about professionalism, is one of the more insightful things I've read here (not that there haven't been a lot of really interesting and insightful posts, of course). If you really want to be a writer, you only have to write, and viola! -- you're the butt of a lot of orchestra geek jokes. (Sorry. That's one of the perils of a word prankster marrying a musician.) At any rate, there's no third party involved. If you want to be a writer, you write.

If you want to make money as a writer, you have to study your market, learn to deal professionally with editors, and take every step you can to make your writing more marketable. Everybody who is successful in the arts is successful not because of raw talent, but because they spent the time to market themselves relentlessly, or they spend the money to hire somebody who will do it for them. This makes people unhappy, because it's unfair, just as it's unfair that bullies in fact have very high self-esteem, and apparently tend to come out healthier and wealthier than the people they bullied. But it's one of those truisms that you're better served to accept and learn to live with than to fight against.

If marketing yourself is painful, or even if it hurts your feelings to get rejection slips, well, don't submit your work anywhere. Being a published author doesn't make you any more or less a writer. Writers are people who don't have to be paid to write; they have to write, and they'd like to not have to do any other kind of work, so they generally would like to be paid to write. But there are other options. You don't have to make money as a writer to be a wrier. You can have a day job that pays the bills and write during the time in the evening when most people watch TV. Or you could marry somebody who will support you while you write. Or work as seasonal labour and use the off-season to write.

It's not impossible to arrange your life around writing without making a living doing it; it's just something most people who mostly want to be rich and famous published authors can't conceive of, because they don't feel the urge to write quite as strongly as some of us feel it. Or maybe they can't conceive of it because nobody they ever met ever did anything but what most other people did. But if you love something with a passion, it should come first in your life, money be damned.

I made my living as a writer for many years. It was much less emotionally fulfilling to write for other people than it is now, writing for myself. I don't care much about being published any more; I don't need to support myself on my writing, and I don't know if I'll ever submit anything to a commercial publisher again. I wish I could bottle this feeling of contentment I have with not knowing whether my writing would make the bestseller list; I think it would be a real balm to some people who just want to write, and are urged by their friends and family to "do something about it," as if the writing itself was not doing something. Certainly, the size of the slushpiles at small literary magazines would drop considerably.

> There is only one answer that will not elicit irrational whining: "Thanks, check enclosed!"

Mac, you're grossly underestimating writers. We can be irrational and whine even about acceptance. When I opened the letter from F&SF and saw the cheque and contract inside, my first thought was "what, no letter telling me how Gordon loved the story and it's the greatest thing ever? I'm so disappointed!" :)

Well, okay, I was jumping and dancing and making strange happy noises and calling all my friends (and trying not to make strange noises while talking to them so they wouldn't think I'm crazier than normal), but still. You know, I think I'll start a site for authors to post their complaints about acceptances. :)

Teresa -

"reading comprehension"

(search with regexps is a lovely thing.)

I agree with Mitch. Yay, Mitch.

I'm gonna keep writing regardless of whether (or when) I get published. Getting published is an entirely separate endeavor for me from writing. The stories are there. They will come out. Whether anyone but my friends and writing group see them has nothing to do with that part.

I would like to see them in print. I would love to get paid for it. I'd love most having enough income from writing that it was my main -- or better yet, sole -- means of support. But that's not why I write.

Being serious about writing -- finding the time to write, to try to write the stories in my head the best way I can -- is a cherished hobby.

Submitting the writing and hoping to sell it is a career plan.

They are not the same thing.

Teresa: Burma shave?

Ayse: It is possible to be a published writer without marketing yourself or writing things other than what you want to write. It's possible even if rejection makes you hide in a hole and stupid reviews make you bite the bedcovers. It is possible to win awards without campaigning. Self-promotion or hiring someone to promote you is not essential.

Yes, you can write for yourself. But you can write for yourself and also be published without needing to worry about that stuff overmuch.

The trouble is that the world isn't black and white and neither are the issues. You do have to be aware of where other people are standing. Marketing and integrity are not in fact virtue and vice holding flaming swords in endless opposition. Nobody is going to publish something people can't read. But if you write something pretty weird that people can read, they just market it as "You have never read a novel like this before", and you know, that's supposed to be a good thing.

Writing is in the province of Apollo, god of creativity, and publishing is in the province of Hermes, god of markets, and bearing this in mind is certainly useful. But Apollo and Hermes are brothers, not enemies.

;-)
I'm always somewhat surprised when other scribes seem to get SO upset over a rejection letter.
Weren't they aware that rejection slips are just a part of ANY writer's life?
Rejection slips are a right of passage, nothing to sweat. They're the 2nd step in ANY writer's career (the first being actually FINISHING a story and getting someone to look at it).
Personally, I was actually PROUD of my first rejection, and I'm not kidding, I've still got it. It's in a nice frame right there over my desk, and it's a BEAUTY. It's on Paramount letter head, with a nifty Star Trek logo across the top, and it was hand signed by Lolita Fatjo, the pre-production coordinator of the franchise from years ago.
I wasn't bitter when I got it, I was psyched! I'd taken my first step as a writer, taken my second, and was ready for my third step, (trying again, with a better story, that brought everything to bare I learned from my first attempt), and you know what's right underneath that first rejection up there in it's sleek frame?
A framed copy of A CHECK baby, also from Paramount.

I have not finished reading all the comments above which puts me at the bottom of the slush pile to which I'm adding, but wanted to thank you for this great piece.

At Harvard University Press the nicest rejection we gave, other than a lengthy, personalized letter outlining ways the book might be improved and a suggestion to send it to Routledge or Duke, where it might find a more appropriate home, was "not right for us." It seemed less formally generic than "does not meet our publishing needs at this time. It's hard to soften, though, as many people above have said.

Charlie, hiring an employee isn't just a matter of paying their salary any more than getting a manuscript is just a matter of paying the advance.

I don't know what the ratio of investment to salary usually is--it probably varies from much less than the 9/1 you suggest for books to much more.

I also don't know quite how the levels of trust compare--a bad enough employee can wreck a business, but that's very unusual. Do editors really bet their careers on single manuscripts?

My impression is that editors change their jobs moderately often, and I don't know how likely that is because of bad editing decisions and how much is publishers changing their minds about what they want to do, cutting jobs, or going broke. I also note that, at most, editors are betting their jobs, not their careers.

Writing is in the province of Apollo, god of creativity, and publishing is in the province of Hermes, god of markets, and bearing this in mind is certainly useful. But Apollo and Hermes are brothers, not enemies.

I know in my mind those technically are their domains, but my instinctive reaction is it's all wrong (except for their being brothers). In my heart, Apollo stands for Official Art and institutions of sanctioned creativity, while a trickster and thief and barginer is axiomatically creative in interesting ways. Maybe this is merely yet another sign of my overAudenification.

One day, I really need to write 'Br'er Mercury and the Tarbaby' — "Please, Br'er Hercules, please don't throw me down to Hades!"

---L.

Somerset Maugham, rather than just say (as on a rejection slip) "the author is not clear," marvelously explains (as in a rejection letter):

"The author wraps his meaning in mystery so that the vulgar shall not participate in it. His soul is a secret garden into which the elect may penetrate only after overcoming a number of perilous obstacles."

Leah Miller wrote: Judging from some posts in this thread there seem to be people who would be willing to read slush for fun and enlightenment, especially if it could be done in one's free time, at home.

I would, which I think makes me weird, but the thing is, I don't think it would be that much help. It's the last few bits on the list that take up all the time, after all, and all I could do faced with something that had passed a first-page test is tell TNH whether I liked it and what I thought of it--which would have some little value, because goodness knows I buy enough Tor books, but I wouldn't dare think myself qualified to say whether something ought to be published. Someone else would still have to read it to make that decision.

Yeah. I'm weird. I'd like to read slush.

Well, one of these days when I win the lottery I'll come down for slush parties at the Flatiron. Or something.

Jo Walton wrote: But if you write something pretty weird that people can read, they just market it as "You have never read a novel like this before", and you know, that's supposed to be a good thing.

I feel this is where I should jump in with a testimonial, but, umm, _Tooth and Claw_ is still on the inpile. It's probably #1 on the pile, but.

Yeah, it's been busy.

Maybe if Chad is still reading this monster of a thread?

Writing is in the province of Apollo, god of creativity, and publishing is in the province of Hermes, god of markets, and bearing this in mind is certainly useful. But Apollo and Hermes are brothers, not enemies.

I thought Hermes was the god of thieves. I guess it amounts to the same thing in the long run.

Pica wrote, "At Harvard University Press the nicest rejection we gave, other than a lengthy, personalized letter outlining ways the book might be improved and a suggestion to send it to Routledge or Duke, where it might find a more appropriate home, was 'not right for us.'"

A nice thought, but if in fact the author had already submitted to and been rejected by Routledge and Duke, then annoyance at your kindly-meant suggestion would be justified, especially if they'd said "Try Harvard."

Have you ever phoned one customer service number to be told that your question wasn't their department, you should try another number; and then the people at the second number tell you the same thing and refer you to the first number? It's a little like that.

Several people have mentioned the difficulty of getting an agent.

Would I be correct in saying that if one has written and sold short stories, that such a track record increases the odds of a good agent being willing to look at your first novel?

When I managed to make it to the Santa Fe Nebs a few years ago, one of the agents there, when he heard I'd sold a few handfuls of stories and edited a couple of anthologies, asked if I had a novel he might take a look at. (Not at that time, though I've been working on an outline and hope to have an actual manuscript done sometime next year.) This wasn't one of the top-level agents who represent people like Silverberg, but a reputable mid-level agent with a pretty good list of clients.

Back up on the topic of the site originally being discussed, I wrote up some of my take on this in one of my 'blogs this morning and said something there I'd been saying here, only backwards, and it made more sense this way 'round, so I thought I'd share:

Some of the problem is the perception that some people have that editors all judge (all aspects of any submission) by One True Objective Standard.

Obviously, this just isn't so.

[Well. I say "obviously", but apparently it's not obvious to everyone.]

Therefore, disagreements are proof of The Great Editorial Conspiracy To Keep [Insert Author Name] From Being Published.

Granted I'm a freak, but the acceptance is actually better than the publication, at least at my penny-ante level of writing. Knowing that a professional editor-type person liked my work enough to say "Yes, we will put our name behind your writing, and our money, and we will tell other people to read your stuff"--that's fantastic. By the time it gets published, I'm just seeing the stuff in a different font.

It is possible to be a published writer without marketing yourself

Leaving aside posthumous publication, or one's spouse sending off the submissions without one's knowledge, I don't see how that can happen. Well, except the way that I do it, which is to print everything I want to print on my own press and bind it myself into limited edition book-art books. But nobody's buying the books I'm making (because I'm not selling them; I'm hoarding them in my studio to take out late at night and paw over while cackling quietly so as not to wake the Spouse).

or writing things other than what you want to write.

Well, not for me, not any more. But I know that for many MANY authors, what they want to write happily coincides with what editors want to buy. Like Stephen King, who seems to be described as a hack by a lot of literary people, but who also genuinely seems to write the very best book he can every time. Same deal for a lot of genre fiction writers, I think; they get branded as hacks or sellouts, when they are writing something that is what they love to write, writing it well, and it happens to sell well.

I could always smell insincerity as an editor, and I imagine that that ability only gets stronger with experience.

It's possible even if rejection makes you hide in a hole and stupid reviews make you bite the bedcovers.

Anything is possible. I was offering a view into a world where publication itself is not the end-all be-all of writerdom. For those people who simply cannot get beyond the level of criteria 1-4, for example, but who want to write. Or for people who have the technical skills down, but who want to do something weirder or (more likely) more banal than what would sell to a publisher easily. Or for agoraphobics like myself, who have days when answering the phone seems like too much human contact.

I think that as a culture, we're a bit too insistent that what somebody does to make money defines who or what they are.

Yes, you can write for yourself. But you can write for yourself and also be published without needing to worry about that stuff overmuch.

I think you've confused something about what I wrote, perhaps because I was being unclear: Hugely famous, rich authors/artists are very good at self-promotion (or hire somebody to do it). If that's what you want, that's what you need to do.

Also, (almost) nobody ever gets published without even a small amount of self-marketing (submitting their stuff to a publisher). These are two different scenarios. If all you want is to make a meager living on your writing (or even just see your name in print occasionally), and that's fine, then all you need to do is get the technical bits down, then submit until you get accepted. If you want to be Stephen King, a lot more work is going to be required from somebody. I understand Mr. King has a publicist and an agent to do a lot of that for him, because he doesn't care for it.

(I'm not obsessed with Stephen King, by the way; I just happened to see a Biography episode on him a couple weeks ago and it's fresh in my mind.)

Marketing and integrity are not in fact virtue and vice holding flaming swords in endless opposition.

I don't think that they are, and I didn't intend to imply that they were. My comments were intended to give people who want to write but have a hard time dealing with the marketing part of it a view into another option. That of being a writer, and choosing not to submit your work anywhere. Maybe it's my secret hope that some of those poets whose terrible, unthinkable poetry I had to read for more than eight years will read this and think, "Wow, I love writing this poetry; it really helps me get my feelings out. But nobody ever seems to accept it, so maybe I'll just write it in my diary and leave it be." But if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

I'm very realistic, now, about what I write versus what will sell to a publisher. For years there was a happy convergence of the two, but now I do things that are more, um, unsellable (namely, hand-crafted book art). And I found that the thing I hated about making my living from writing was the marketing part -- writing cover letters, having to worry about whether I'd be able to get enough assignments in a given month to cover the rent, having to manage and follow up on a list of fees due to me so that I would be paid soon enough to pay the rent, calling around to my regulars to see who needed something to fill a gap near deadline. All that was very stressful for me. For some people, the payoff of writing for a living would be great enough that that would be worth it, and talking to people is not quite so difficult. For me, the real joy came from the writing itself, not the paycheck or the sight of my nom de plume in print. When I started making my living doing other things, my writing moved off in a direction which continues to be personally satisfying to me and yet happens to be less commerically viable.

I'd meant to address the "wrong book" comments. To me that suggests "person is a natural short story writer trying to write a novel", or maybe a nicer version of #8 and #10, or just "this story doesn't fire up the imagination, though it's executed well."

It's not a phrase that I would naturally use to describe a book, but maybe I've just never seen it in action.

I'd really, really like to know what it means to write the wrong book. Kate, I think they're talking about things besides the ones you cite.

Here's a question for editors who have to read a lot of submitted stuff: what do you need to do to clear your palate, as it were, between readings?

If I were an editor and the thing I looked at a moment ago was not so great, this could lead to a preconception that the next thing I look at won't be so great either, or a general fed-up-with-it feeling, and this could prevent me from seeing the next thing I read in the best light.

Regexps is a wonderful thing.

Hypo, if you really think that, I can refer you to publishers who'll fulfill your every expectation.

Getting an agent. Here we open an institutional-size can of worms.

A bad agent is worse than no agent at all. A really bad agent is worse than not being a writer. Getting past the "no unagented submissions" barrier is not sufficient justification for hooking up with a bad agent.

The easiest time to get an agent is when you've just gotten an offer on a book. The editor phones you and says "I want to buy your book."

"Wow! Gosh! Gee Whiz!" you say coherently. Then you thank the editor, make sure you have their correct phone number, and tell them you'll get right back to them. Call the agent who's your first choice. Politely explain that you've just gotten an offer, and would they be interested in having you as a client? If they say they're not interested, call your second choice. It's hard to imagine you having to call a third choice. You're offering them a commission on a book you sold.

It's harder if you haven't sold a book. Selling short stories helps. Having a really good novel in hand also helps.

(If you've never sold anything, and one of the top agents in the genre not only takes you on as a client, but gives you his Saturday-night dinner timeslot at the next Worldcon, please believe that he's taking your prospects very seriously indeed. You know who you are.)

Least appreciated fact about agents: There are very few real ones. Of the gormless, the not very helpful, and the confirmed scammers, there are a great many.

Real agents learn how to be agents by working for other real agents. It's like a medieval apprenticeship, except the authorities don't bring back the ones that run away. After a while the young assistant becomes a sort of junior agent (I'm a little vague on this part) and starts taking on authors. Eventually they decide to set up on their own, taking some fraction of their former employer's client list with them. This is not always accomplished without friction, but as far as we can tell, that's part of the natural life cycle of the agent.

Gormless agents aren't consciously dishonest, but they don't know how agenting and publishing work. They trade ignorance with others of their kind. Many of them have gotten their ideas about how the industry work by reading websites maintained by scammers. They may have the best intentions in the world, but they can't figure out a standard contract, much less negotiate an advantageous one, and they don't know who's who and who's doing what.

Not very helpful agents have some knowledge of and connection with the industry, but what they know isn't current, and the people who were their best connections at various houses no longer hold those positions. They tend to have one or two notable clients plus a bunch of small fry and marginal types. These guys have two virtues: they won't deliberately cheat you, and they can get you past the "agented mss. only" barriers. It's still a bit like marrying someone you don't care for because at least that way you'll get laid: the imagined benefits will rapidly pall, while the underlying problems will only become more irritating.

Scam agents are legion. The wiliest ones are constantly refining their approach, and the merely sneaky ones steal riffs from them, so I won't try to describe their current cabana acts. For that, see Preditors & Editors and the Writer Beware site. Meanwhile, observe the following rules:

1. Never pay them. The real ones make their money by collecting a percentage of what the publisher pays you, and they collect it after the publisher pays it out.

2. Ask to see their client list. If for any reason they refuse to show it to you, run away. If you don't recognize their authors, be suspicious. If their authors turn out to be published by vanity or subsidy outfits, run away even faster.

3. If they try to refer you to a book doctor or freelance editor, start edging away. If they tell you that "No publisher will look at your book unless it's been professionally edited," see earlier remarks regarding fast getaways.

4. If they try to place your book via a deal that has you paying anything (that includes PublishAmerica's deal), vide supra.

5. The internet may have given scam agents a vast new playground for their operations, but Google is on your side, not theirs. Use it.

6. In a pinch, Victoria Strauss and Yog Sysop (a.k.a. Jim Macdonald) will always give you the straight dope.

Teresa, I wish you'd written that post (or some version thereof that I'd seen, cuz I suspect this isn't the first time) back when I was trying to figure out how to pick agents to query. :)

(Seriously, not that anyone needs Teresa's Knowledge to be affirmed, but she just summed up everything I learned in a year+ of going through tons of sites and books on how to find a good agent.)

Actually, I'm still dithering about the whole querying-an-agent vs submitting-to-slush thing, despite earlier proclamations to the contrary, precisely because of a point in that post: If I submit unagented and get an offer, I stand a much better chance of landing my first choice agent, who is my first choice by a wide margin. On the other hand, querying first and getting turned down probably doesn't rule out trying again later.

Dither dither.

(I do want an agent. I'm working on book #4. I think that's sufficient novel projects to make it helpful. But only book #1 is anything like submission-ready, so I'm not in a hurry, really.)

I'd add one side-note to Teresa's exegesis on agents: I sold short stories. I wrote a novel. I got an offer from a (small, went defunct before publication) British publisher. I then approached an agent. In my case, I picked an agent with no prior experience -- I was their first new author acquisition, as far as I can tell. The reason I approached her? She was just starting out as an agent -- after having been an editor at a genre publisher for some years. In other words, she didn't have a list of prestigious authors to put ahead of me, but she was well-enough connected to do the job (and had a clear idea of what the job entailed). It was a bit of a gamble, but it paid off handsomely for me.

Anyway, my point is that agents (the reputable kind) have a relationship with editors that's a bit like the one between journalists and PR/marketing lobbyists. And a big warning sign should be an agent who doesn't actually know any of the editors in your field.

I've never heard it was improper to submit material to agents and publishers at the same time.

Kate, Christopher: Melissa Singer says what makes a book the wrong book, and how can you tell that the author's written one, are really good questions, but that she's busy this afternoon. We'll have to return to that one, unless Beth has time to start in on it now.

The discussion of multiple submissions, yes or no, continues here. There turn out to be complex and cogent arguments on both sides.

But right now I have other things I have to do. I just had a discussion with one of our upper-level production people, and learned new intricacies of trim sizes and paper stock allocations I'd never known before.

TNH and all the other nice editors reading this thread: go! make books! If nothing else, this'll be good conversation fodder at Boskone.

Charlie Stross: Anyway, my point is that agents (the reputable kind) have a relationship with editors that's a bit like the one between journalists and PR/marketing lobbyists.

Editors run screaming when they see an agent coming?

As a moderator on a large fandom's Fan fiction site I see an awful lot of crap, as well as an awful lot of people who I wish would turn aside their fanfiction and write something to make themselves some money.

However, my rejection experiance has come from an internet archive. They usually send a form rejection letter (it's actually what most people complain about - they want specific help not "your pacing is bad" for a two hundread page story). My first rejection leter for a particular piece came back with a note from the editor saying I should change a couple of specific things, wait a week and then resubmit because it would get in. I changed the points and then resubmitted. I recieved another rejection for completely different points the second time. I refused to change it and waited a week to resubmit and had it rejected again for entirely different reasons then why it had been rejected on point one and two. The final time I submitted it was accepted.

The experiance taught me that I do not react well to rejection when I cannot see the point of it. It also taught me that I can use it for my own advantage (as the piece is published on the net, I used the fact it had been rejected so many times as a promo and gained myself readers).

Kithera

Mitch: on this side of the Atlantic (hint: not yours) many journalists become PR/marketing agents, and occasionally vice versa. Plus, PR/marketing people give journalists little presents from time to time, in between the parcels of raw sewage. It makes for a more ambiguous relationship ...

I note with interest that this is probably the 274th posting on this thread. Much kudos and my thanks to Teresa, who has successfully prevented me from starting to read the new Christopher Brookmyre novel -- my designated airline reading -- before I fly out to Boston next Monday.

> who has successfully prevented me from starting to read the new Christopher Brookmyre novel

New Brookmyre? Good stuff - I've been holding my breath.

I was a little disappointed with _The Sacred Art of Stealing_, but not so disappointed that I'm not incredibly keen to see what he does next.

Charlie Stross wrote: "...PR/marketing people give journalists little presents from time to time..."

Gee, that sounds so...political. I must be the last person on earth to harbor disdain for this sort of thing.

A question to all the talented authors and future authors here: If you've received a rejection notice(s), are you still (sincerely) glad you submitted your work; or would you, knowing better now, rather have kept your MS a secret from the publishing world, therefore keeping that little flickering flame of What If alive?

I'm still glad I submitted. Even the story that in retrospect probably wasn't ready for it yet.

Reed -

One rejection doesn't kill any general hope; it kills the specific hope of having that manuscript accepted by that publisher at this time, but there are still many publishers.

And, you know, "esteemed prose" and "sensible to publish" are not the same thing. It's quite possible to get ego-boo with a rejection.

After twenty years of making recordings, today I got my first ever acceptance based on an unsolicited demo.

Thank you all for making this wonderful coincidence possible!

Charlie - PR people aren't analogous to agents in this discussion - they're analogous to the people sending in mss to be read on the slush pile. I'll occasionally get a good story out of a PR tip, but first I have to clear through an enormous volume of pitches that are completely inappropriate.

Mitch: on this side of the Atlantic (hint: not yours) many journalists become PR/marketing agents, and occasionally vice versa.

By "this side of the Atlantic," I presume you mean you're making the distinction "UK" vs. "America," and not the distinction "above" vs. "fishes."

And, yes, many journalists do become PR/marketing agents here in America, too. Not so much vice-versa, although a PR guy I know did quit his job recently and tell me he's looking to land a job in the journalism biz.

This is a subject I can get pretty wound up about, so I apologize in advance if I get long-winded and boring.

I work in the computer trade press. I'm involved in editing three webzines, InternetWeek, Security Pipeline and Linux Pipeline. Every business day, I get an average of 65 inquiries from PR people looking to get me to write something about their client. Most of the inquiries come in e-mail, some are made by phone. That's 65 inquiries a day, day in, day out, 325 a week, 50 weeks a year (it slows down to about 10 a day in the two-week Christmas/New Year's period).

Simply saying "no" to PR people is a significant part of my workload.

I blog this subject occasionally when I get fed up and need to vent:

- Loren Pomerantz writes: This one is about why journalists think most PR people are idiots - it's because most of them are.

- Dear PR person: Why I didn't use your pitch

Charlie Stross: "Plus, PR/marketing people give journalists little presents from time to time"

Reed: "Gee, that sounds so...political. I must be the last person on earth to harbor disdain for this sort of thing."

Far from the last, Reed; journalists have disdain for this sort of thing too. This is not because we are more honest than you think we are, but rather because the gifts are crap. The PR people send coffee mugs and T-shirts, mainly. What's worse is when one of them decides to get creative and "re-enforce the brand."

I received an e-mail a few months ago from a PR person offering to send some burgers made of Idaho beef. The gimmick: he represented an anti-spam company - get it: spam, bad meat, good meat? I told him we don't eat much red meat, and when we do we never cook it ourselves.

At least he asked first - I work from a home office and I frequently let my mail pile up for weeks without opening it. I was just imagining Julie and me wandering around the house, three weeks after the burgers arrived, wondering, "What's that smell? Did something go into the crawlspace and DIE?"

Several years ago, a PR person did NOT ask - he sent an American editor a package of fresh lobsters, not realizing that the editor was in Europe for a few months, launching the European edition of the magazine. The editor's mail was being dumped in his office pending the editor's return. The lobsters met a tragic end. The editor sent the PR guy the fumigation bill.

And then there was the PR guy about 20 years ago who sent each of the editors of InfoWorld magazine a single bullet, accompanied only by a postcard saying, "Something Is Killing Your Readers." The PR guy INTENDED to follow up with a package explaining who his client was and what was (metaphorically) killing the readers (a productivity problem which the PR guy's client's product was designed to solve). The PR campaign was interrupted, however, by a visit from the FBI.

I've blogged this subject too:

- Adventures in Public Relations Or: Don't send me your gifts, I don't want them. I know you think I'm being coy, but, really, I don't want them.

Graydon wrote: 'One rejection doesn't kill any general hope; it kills the specific hope of having that manuscript accepted by that publisher at this time, but there are still many publishers.

And, you know, "esteemed prose" and "sensible to publish" are not the same thing.'

I so agree with you on that (esteemed prose vs. sensible material). I have read some seriously lacking--in style, substance, etc.--stories that have essentially left me shaking my head in bemusement. Which is why I would make a terrible editor/slush reader: I'm a fickle reader. I would've passed on half the authors that line the Borders New Fiction shelves. And I have rather eclectic tastes in fiction, so...

I think most big name authors are familiar with the rejection note tradition in publishing. Right, it would be insane to expect instant validation of your work. Maybe I should have phrased that to say "Are you sorry you've submitted your work, and can't turn back the clock to those happy days of carefree innocence, now that your study is wallpapered with rejection notices". Not that that would speak poorly of an author's work/talent, of course. No examples are coming to mind currently, but I'm sure authors have achieved fame and glory posthumously; and there are probably a fair number of bestselling authors that were spat on and could've papered entire houses in their rejection notes pre-break out success.

I think Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was rejected five times, or something like that, before a pub house decided to take a gamble on it.

Heck, if you want to get published posthaste all you need is a pulse, access to pen and paper, a bottomless capacity for inventing neurotic female characters, ten days, and a willingness to have your slapdash pseudosoapy bestseller labeled a "Chicklet" (see Dirty Girls Social Club). But I have the feeling most of the Aspirings here have a greater sense of dignity than that.

Mitch Wagner wrote: "Far from the last, Reed; journalists have disdain for this sort of thing too. This is not because we are more honest than you think we are, but rather because the gifts are crap."

True story: I read up to the period in that first sentence and got up to make a cup of tea, thinking "Gosh, the world is really a better place than I'd previously thought", came back and read the rest of the paragraph and felt my little Faith In Humanity balloon deflate quite expeditiously.

May all your future bribes not suck.

The bullet story was too good: forget fiction, reality is far more amusing. Far more.

Kit' wrote: However, my rejection experiance has come from an internet archive. They usually send a form rejection letter (it's actually what most people complain about - they want specific help not "your pacing is bad" for a two hundread page story).

---

As a reviewer for said Internet archive, I can say that there's been a lot of argument among the reviewers and editors over our rejection system. The different options the editors have make the rejections more specific than "story does not meet the needs of the Archive". On the other hand, we reviewers have to give feedback to the editors on why we reject or accept every story, not just the ones that were borderline. Which means reading allll the way through a whole lot of slush. Believe me, we'd love to have an option like #1 on Teresa's list to check after reading the first page of some submissions.

In addition, as you've noted, many authors who have a piece rejected from the archive don't find the checklist rejection helpful enough. Hopefully-encouraging notes are added to the form letter for stories that are almost there, but the idea of providing detailed feedback for every story we reject gives the reviewers headaches. As one put it, "We're reviewers, not beta readers. We accept or reject. Period." (Which inevitably brings the discussion around to whether or not the archive should just do as the pros do and accept or reject, period.)

It doesn't help that there are four editors and something like twenty reviewers volunteering their time for an archive that gets maybe a couple of hundred submissions a year. Getting everybody to compromise on anything is a gargantuan task.

/rant

[My gawrsh this discussion has gotten long!]

"People who can't do advanced math, or play classical piano concertos, or pitch a no-hitter in the major leagues, generally know they can't do it. People who don't have an intimate relationship with language are far less aware of their condition, and for them the written world can be a very frustrating place. Near as we can make out, they literally can't tell that their rejected writing isn't like the writing that does get published."

In folk dance, we call them "permanent beginners." It's a common problem in all the arts I know well. Sometimes they surprise by finally "getting it." It seems to me that preparing a manuscript for submission is part of the learning process for writers; would the pros here agree?

I suspect part of the problem with the slushpile system is that, for some submitters, it's the only professional criticism they're getting at all--and they don't even know the criticism is valuable. Turning it faster would be a help, especially since it would also get submitters more quickly to the point where they could make intelligent career decisions. It seems to me that one could easily spend 10 years trying to learn be a writer and not make it, learning no marketable skills on the way--no wonder many pros say that if you can do anything else, do so. That said, speeding it up would seem to require a windfall to pay slushpile readers or maybe a slush readers volunteer co-op, neither of which seem likely things.

I don't know what the ratio of investment to salary usually is--it probably varies from much less than the 9/1 you suggest for books to much more.

The numbers I've seen in the past indicated that on a continuing basis, typical employees "cost" their employers roughly double their salary (unless they're being wildly over- or underpaid, of course). That also probably doesn't hold for employees who do a lot of company travel, or who receive a large amount of special training on company time; but a regular denizen of a cubicle farm who makes $50,000 a year, say, probably costs his company $100,000 a year.

Randolph - I'm no professional, but I would say that the entire writing process is a learning process. Even language use - though we should already be on good terms with the Muse of Langauge. It's interesting to be happily writing along and then suddenly realize that you've used the word "just" in every other sentence. (I've fixed that problem; now I'm on to using "of course" in every other sentence.) Or that your past experiences with a foreign language are creeping into your use of English. (I'm so confused after studying German for twelve years that I can't remember if it's English or German to describe something in the order of time, manner, place.)

But that's just the problem with folks in categories 1-7 (and maybe even 8-10): writing is not a learning process to them. It's something that they believe has come so naturally to them that they can't possibly need to do anything other than run spell-checker on their manuscript. Or perhaps change the formatting so it looks pretty. But a deeper self-analysis seems to have flown the coop, thus negating any potential for learning in the writing process.

Kellie - German goes Te Ca Mo Lo: Temporal Causal Modal Local.

I can't believe I remember that from High School German back in 1975 or so.

It's something that they believe has come so naturally to them that they can't possibly need to do anything other than run spell-checker on their manuscript.

I dated someone -- briefly -- who held this view and took it one better: he said he would never let an editor change anything he wrote.

No. Really. His natural talent couldn't be sullied by the hands of an editor.

Even then, I knew this was pretty much going to be the kiss of death for his ever getting published. Looking at it now, a dozen years later, I see him as prime candidacy for vanity publishing, unless he got over it.

As Cyrano said "I might! If my blood didn't curdle at the thought of anyone's changing a single comma!"

Tina said: I dated someone -- briefly -- who held this view and took it one better: he said he would never let an editor change anything he wrote.

Ditto, babe. My grandfather said the same thing, couple years ago, after my mom and I went over his MS with red pens. He also said, "Editors are supposed to ENCOURAGE writers, not tell them what they did wrong."

Ahem.

Re: writing the wrong book, I can take a stab at that one.

Example one:
Say you really like reading SF and horror. But your college prof instills in you a deep shame of your interest in spec fic and convinces you that the only noble goal is literary fiction (whatever the hell that is).

So you write a perfectly competent contemporary novel, full of fleshed-out characters, subtle imagery, and nonlinear plotting, all carefully crafted in the image of Faulkner. Your prof loves it. Your classmates praise it. You send it off to one publisher after another and they all send it back with, "Great writing, but it just doesn't work somehow." (In cases where there is an overwhelming editorial consensus, you should take it seriously.)

It doesn't work because your heart's not in it. Trust me. I know this. You need to drop the literary pretentions, which aren't really yours anyway, and get on with writing the stuff that inspires you.

Example two:
Your first novel will not retire quietly. Maybe you wrote it in college. Or high school. Or junior high. Maybe you've rewritten it every year for the last ten. You know it was bad back then, but it's so much better now.

The truth is, it's not. It's like pie crust that's been worked too long. It's tough. No layers. No nice lumpy bumps to make it interesting. Your first manuscript is like your first child: it's going to be screwed up, no matter how hard you try--probably because you're trying too hard, and it will fight your attempts to straighten it out.

Now, I'm not saying never to revise, but I have seen stories that were just plain worked to death. Stories have to be fairly fresh and new to be engaging. You have to be excited about it, or we won't be.

Furthermore, while a writer's skills usually improve with time, often the concept of a first novel is simply too weak to build a story upon, and no amount of embellishing will completely disguise the fact.

It's the wrong novel. Love it for what it is, but leave it in the back of the drawer and write something new, with a better foundation. Something you're passionate about.

Something in my desk drawer is whimpering.

Mitch, you rule!

I was the on-the-ground, writer/media tracker/general dogsbody at a PR arm of an advertising agency. We had important clients, they regularly got stories based on our press releases. Then we had other clients who were trying to sell the 12th of the same product on the market and got royally pissed that they weren't getting media coverage. And paying good dough for our services (or reneging on their bills after approving services). Then my boss would rag on me about making - yes MAKING the media cover that client. How the hell do I do that?

On the other hand, that particular boss, a bit before he laid my position off (he was elminating anyone who had been hired by the first director of PR at the agency), got totally pissed off at me because I couldn't find a service that would let him do some sort of video taped publicity stunt that involved parachuting out of an airplane by himself. "XXX, they all require lessons to parachute by yourself." "You'd better fucking out someone who will!" (XXX said, standing over me and yelling,,,) I purely wish I had, it would have done the agency a service -- he got fired outright for stealing things like a video camera... laptop, etc.

Until I worked for the last guy I kind of enjoyed PR, my clients were good clients (we were business to business), I had real fun with an employee newsletter for a bank until federal amalgamated bancshares pushed a pseudopod in to the MO/KS/OK area and swamped them.

I'm so glad I don't work there anymore. I had three months off with pay, etc. in the middle of what had been the most miserable winter we'd had until now, I have a happy job.... and they let me work at home! (with salary and benefits,....)

No matter how many things I write, or what I write: prose, poetry, copywriting, et al; if it is not edited, refined, refurbished at least once; I know I have not done my best.

It is hard enough to strive to capture content, context, clarity, and character. But to achieve perfection, unsulliable artfulness in one fell swoop? I can't even begin to be that assertive and self-assured.

(even now I cringe to post this and desperately reviewing commas, semi-colons, et cetera, knowing some editor is cringing at my grammatical incorrectness. )

Just as there are well-known SF novels I haven't read, it seems entirely plausible that a poet might not have read that William Carlos Williams poem, well-known though it is.

What seems a bit weird is that a poet, submitting to a poetry magazine, would consider it unreasonable that the magazine couched its rejections in poetic form.

regarding slush:

Excellent essay and comments. Goes a ways to describing the complexity of the creative process: Eric Clapton once said: "I'm an egomaniac with an inferiority complex". Seth said: "As an artist I have to be both arrogant and humble at the same time: arrogant enough to put in the effort to push my vision on an uncaring world, but humble enough to want to be aware of my weaknesses and constantly strive to improve my work". Your slush essay touches on this human contradiction.

I would very highly recommend a recent satirical novel about the publishing industry: "HappinessTM" (also released under the title "Generica") by Will Ferguson. It describes the futile efforts of a cynical slush reader to prevent what he believes is most pathetic unsolicited manuscript ever submitted from taking over the planet. Hilarious stuff.

Trivia question: which modern classic matches this submission query: "My son wrote this novel and nobody liked it and he killed himself, will you please read it?"

A downunder perspective on a fascinating topic, and many thanks to Teresa for broaching it. I've just done a 2 book deal with Harper Collins Australia -- my first. After submitting the story as a standalone I eventually received a fabulous rejection letter, saying basically you write well but this story has some problems. Why not consider x, y, z, and feel free to resubmit? I did, after turning the standalone into a duology, and made the sale. All in all, this took over a year. In the meantime I submitted a completely different book. I rewrote it 3 times on editorial advice, all with no commitment, and in the end it was turned down, but passed along to the YA division. They turned it down too, but with a highly complimentary rejection letter. That story goes back in the drawer for a rewrite at a later date. Those who rejected it were absolutely right to do so. I have more work to do there but at the time was far too inside the project to see it.

My point is this: from my reasonably limited experience, editors really really want to find a publishable manuscript. It's what keeps them in business. No sane editor rejects a story out of spite or because they get their jollies torpedoing some poor sap's dreams. And anybody who thinks so needs to have a little lie down till the delusion passes.

What we as writers must grasp is that sometimes we're not as good as we think we are. And if we can find somebody who truly does want to read good writing, and who will honestly tell us when we're on the money and when we're just on the nose, then we should kiss their metaphorical feet. We might not want to hear the story sucks just now, but the fact is that it might, and we owe it to ourselves to listen to that advice and then get back to work.

My only exposure to a slushpile was when I was involved in judging a ms competition, three years running. And much of the entered work was dire, so it didn't make the short list. And that's the way it is. And if we don't want to be abandoned to the 'dire' pile, we have to be as impersonal, meticulous and critical about our own work as we are in a bookshop asking ourselves why we should pay $20 for that paperback. (Which is, alas, what we're paying for mass market paperbacks in Australia).

And that's my 0.2c worth!

[...] a slush readers volunteer co-op, neither of which seem likely things.

Well, http://www.pgdp.net/ is a proofreading volunteer co-op. Perhaps the idea isn't as impossible as all that.

Ambar

It isn't only editors who have to reject these people. As an artist, I was contacted a couple of years ago by a writer looking for someone to illustrate her book.
She assured me that her book was 'going to be published', and asked for a standard large color piece for the cover and one full-page black and white illustration for each chapter.
I was excited, I'd never done any book illustrations before. I met with her and we discussed my working for a small commission and a portion of the royalties..I left with a copy of her prologue and first chapter.
Then I read it.
Her grammar was poor, her prose was weak and disjointed, her premise was cliched.
I couldn't imagine picking it up as a reader, let alone an editor. I met with her again, and asked about her editor. She became vague and evasive. She couldn't give me an editor's name or a specific publisher, and it turned out that the sample she gave me was all she'd written thus far.

I felt like I'd been scammed.

I suppose she thought the illustrations would have made her manuscript really stand out. 8/

When we talked, she told me the first artist she'd worked with abandoned her for no good reason at all...I wonder what she's saying about me right now? It was hard to tell her no...but I couldn't afford to work for cobwebs and hope.

I really feel for those of you who are editors, it can't be easy.

re. agents - it's one of those chicken-and-egg situations for young authors - can't get a book accepted without an agent, can't get an agent without a book offer, what now?...

charlie stross got lucky in one way, i got lucky in another - i connected with a really well known British agent some ten years ago or so through sheer chutzpah on my part, then life happened and i went my own way, and when i was working on the megabook coming out this spring i took another dose of chutzpah and emailed that agent and asked if she would be willing to take me on. as it happened, circumstances weren't right there - but she DID steer me to someone who might be interested, who WAS interested, and who has since worked miracles for me. without my agent - we've been in partnership for over a year, now - i couldn't have got very far - she opened doors that would have not only been inacessible to me without her, i would not have even known that they were there.

having a good agent really is worth its weight in comissions.

having said that, teresa has it in a nutshell - a bad agent is far worse than no agent at all. homework is tough but it's worth doing in this instance.

I can imagine the problem by thinking of the slush pile as a real life version on www.fanfiction.net A fair number of stories can be rejected on the basis of the summary alone; a large number more by the end of the first page. Some will look interesting at first glance, but upon further reading that first impression will have been proved remarkably mistaken.

I've never gotten any really nasty rejection letters; then again, I've only just started submitting things, so perhaps I just need to be patient?

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Contemptibly bad insecurity management, too.

... Did he get translated into leet instead of fully disemvoweled?

Anyway, great article.

Von Bark asks:

"Trivia question: which modern classic matches this submission query: 'My son wrote this novel and nobody liked it and he killed himself, will you please read it?'"

I believe it's "A Confederacy of Dunces." Tellingly (whether of the book or of me, I can't be sure), I've had a very hard time slogging through it.

Re: Agents -- ironically I had a harder time getting an agent after I had sold my books than before. I got my non-fiction agent when he approached me about doing a book (normally a warning sign, incidentally, but he was just starting out and was very clear he wouldn't be asking me for money up front). But the first fiction agency I approached passed on representing me -- even though at that point I had already sold two fiction books to a very reputable house. Apparently they thought that they'd have a difficult time representing the work, even though it had been sold. (I got another agent instead, clearly.)

Showing that getting an agent, like everything else about getting published, can be a random and inexplicable process.

Hrm. He alternates between spelling Teresa's first name with and without an H. How's that for consistency? (A minor nitpick, I will concede, but spelling editors' names correctly is one of the first unwritten rules of submitting, right?)

Thanks, Graydon. I also got e-mail from Jim Macdonald, subject header FCKNG DGNS. "Pre-disemvowelled" is what it is; presently, was. Heigh-ho, off I go ...

... can't get a book accepted without an agent, can't get an agent without a book offer, what now?...

Neither is strictly true. While having an agent will make it easier to get a book offer, it isn't required. While having a book offer will make it easier to get an agent, it isn't required.

What is required is workmanlike-or-better prose and a compelling story compellingly told.

Teresa --

Alas that I lack Mr. MacDonald's gift for the pithy phrase!

I shall just have to chortle quietly to myself in appreciation, and be content therewith.

If I were going to attack me, grammar is not the subject I would choose, nor would Making Light be my first choice of venues.

If I knew Dgns were familiar with Sandman, I'd refer him to a panel which explains this very concept.

Whoops -- sorry, Del, didn't mean to ignore you. The answer is: No. The one-for-one substitution of bits of punctuation for his vowels was something he did to himself. He missed one, which makes me think he went through and made all those changes by hand. Automated search-and-replace wouldn't let one "u" stand while transforming all the others.

TNH: "Near as we can make out, they literally can't tell that their rejected writing isn't like the writing that does get published."

Strikes a chord. See this Journal of Personality and Social Psychology paper - "Unskilled and Unaware of It" (www.apa.org/journals/psp/psp7761121.html) which talks about incompetence, including in writing. Incompetence, it argues, carries a dual burden: not merely the incompetence itself, but the associated cognitive inability to recognise competence elsewhere. I came to the conclusion recently that writers' groups are a waste of time for this very reason. You can critique until you're blue in the face, but many, if not most, amateur writers will never, ever, grasp what their problem is.

Ray Girvan: The paper you link to explains a LOT!

The mutant (not in a good way) fans who cost me $2,200,000+ in lost wages at Rockwell, and who helped ruin the Space Shuttle, were convinced that they were greatly skilled in Engineering and in Science Fiction. Neither knew Calculus (essential for Engineering, right?) and the one who plagiarized me on "The Integrated Space Plan" had no clue that Robert Heinlein had invented the Future History chart.

One had two published interviews in a 1970s semiprozine, and cultivated the attention of genuine SF authors through asskissing and parties. Even fooled the former attorney for SFWA, who said nice things about the defendant online.

They were blithely convinced that they were super-competent, and that self-confidence helped to convince others. Proof to the contrary was ignored.

I saw this when I was an actor. I learned quickly that I was a bad actor, because my paraphrases caused others to miss the cues they awaited. But there was no shortage of actors worse than I who expected to be superstars any day now.

I saw this in politics where, as I say, I was elected twice to local councilman offices. The very worst councilmen (and -women) were conviced of their competence, although everything whatsoever which they did resulted in being overturned by higher authorities, or resulted in lawsuits, or were flat-out unconstitutional.

And George W. Bush honestly believes that he was a good soldier (as Reagan also believed) and a great President.

Hmmmm...

Scalzi, if you're slogging through "Confederacy," I think you accidentally picked up "Harry Potter" with the wrong binding. Perhaps your bookstore has been overtaken by Italo Calvino, because "Confederacy" is gold.

If I'd first read the wonderful novel
"Confederacy of Dunces", then I might not have gone to the Worldcon in New Orleans.

The Con was the worst-run I have ever seen. I was in the Green Room, along with Big Name authors such as Terry Pratchett, as schedules were changed RIGHT THERE, and panels begun, without said big name authors being notified by staffers 6 feet away.

But who cares? It was in the French Quarter, and those who gave up on the Con and roamed the restaurants, bars, concerts, and environs had a wonderful time.

So where were the real dunces? On the streets of N'Orleans, on the Con staff, or in the editorial offices where "Confederacy" was again and again summarily rejected?

And, Nick, my wife, son, and I (all professional authors) adore the Harry Potter books. To each his/her own.

Anybody interested in rejection letters should look for a copy of The Eureka Years: Boucher and McComas's Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction 1949-1954, which prints a selection of rejections sent out by that pair (among the most literate and gracious editors ever to grace an sf magazine). A couple of samples:

17 November 1949

Dear Mr. Lowert:

First a word of warning: 95% of all editors in the business would simply have returned your MS unread, because it was in handwriting. Or rather they wouldn't even have returned it, since no postage was enclosed, but just dumped it in the wastebasket.

If you can't afford to buy a typewriter, then beg, borrow or steal one. Or pay to have your story typed by a professional. Submitting handwritten MSS is a pure waste of time. And ALWAYS enclose return postage, and put your name and address on the story as well as on the cover letter.

AL'S REVENGE certainly isn't publishable (how many first stories are?): but it's a little hard to say whether it shows promise. The idea of a corpse returning after the cement treatment is good and I think new; but the writing, I'm sure you won't be surprised to learn, is very amateurish. The structure's awkward, your characters are just names without personalities, the prose has no individuality.

The hacks that you speak of so scornfully (and incidentally, they do not make "comfortable livings") may have little real talent, but they do have experience and technique. The only way to get those qualities is by reading a great deal in the fields that interest you, reading critically and trying to observe just how things are put together, how effects are attained; and by writing a great deal, to the point where you begin to see what's wrong with your earlier stuff and how to improve it.

As I say, it's hard to tell from this very fumbling first effort whether you should continue. But if you do decide to, we'd be very happy to see how you're coming along -- say about 20 stories from now.

        Sincerely yours,
        The Editors

And here's one to an agent:

16 March 1950

Sorry but... after reading this, A.B. coined the proverb: one man's turd is another man's turquoise. This disgusting little piece of scatology is definitely not our turquoise. McC

(The latter submission was clearly ahead of its time; it would be snapped up for Hollywood today.)

Nick:

Nope, nary a mention of Hogwarts in my copy.

I'm willing to entertain the idea that the problem lies with me and not the book. Which is why I put it aside rather than throwing it out and will attempt it again in a year or two. Perhaps by then it will have grown on me, or me into it.

Actually, Dgns didn't just miss one: a quick scan reveals 3 a's, 2 i's and an e. (I didn't notice the u that Teresa mentions, however.)

For what it's worth, I got an excellent agent without having sold my book first. I wrote him a query letter, he wrote back and asked to see the manuscript, and ta-da! It's now being submitted to places which do not accept unagented submissions.

Persistence was the key here. And, as Teresa mentions, it's important to only query agents who you would actually want to have represent you. My first agent (for TV, not books) was indeed worse than useless. This time around I was not willing to settle for someone whose only qualification was that he had one working client and wasn't a scam artist.

Actually, I've seen automated programs miss replacing characters on many occasions. One of the ways that happens is when a character is entered while some unprintable keystroke is pressed, other than the shift key. What this does is create a new combination that doesn't quite match what the replacement program is expecting to find, but that still appears correct visually. This does not happen in all programs, but I have seen this happen in several brands of word processors in particular.

Teresa: Which issue of Sandman?

(And if we're referring to why refering to a seemingly singular "professional" in the first clause and ending with the plural "their rates"--is it because "a professional" could refer to any in a large group?)

RE: Nolacon

Yes, it was an excreably run convention. Not that I noticed. We were miseraby poor at the time, but somehow we managed to gather up the plane fares and a bit of dough to eat with. Some dear friends understood our plight and let us stay in their hotel room for free.... something we'll always love them for. Jim was the Hugo Ago-go (he had a position with the Hugo committee, which even now I cannot divulge.... )

1) I had my first totally cognitive disassociation event -- I was going up an elevator in the Sheraton and coming on the down elevator was (in order of viewing) - a) a pair of nice high heels, b) a shapely pair of clean-shaven legs, c) a miniskirt and a belt with an amplifier, d) a tank top with chest hair spilling out as well as arm hair and a guitar, and e) a bearded man-head..... I was totally astonished. I was accustomed to transvestism and even transgenderism (one of Jim's best friends from High School made the change from male to female and is a MUCH happier person). But this was just astonishing....

2) The French Quarter. There should never be a Worldcon in a city where the stuff that the city provides is so much more interesting than a worldcon can provide that the worldcon becomes the second-rate item..... I think. I'm not certain. But I spent most of my days (after finding that I was NEVER, EVER going to find the programming items I wanted to attend) exploring the French Quarter.

Paula - I'm not much of a con-goer myself, but I know a couple of fans who plan their vacations around cons - a few days at the con, and a few days before or after to see the city the con is in.

We're thinking about doing the same thing this year: a couple of weeks touring the Northeast, finishing up with Labor Day weekend and Worldcon.

On our first weekend living in San Francisco, we stopped at a little health-food grocery store, where I saw a person wearing a sundress shopping in the produce section. The person was a man. I don't know if he was a transvestite or just a man taking advantage of the relaxed mores to enjoy wearing a sundress in hot weather - a sundress is, after all, much more practical in hot weather than anything a man might wear. Extra credit question: what's the difference? how would you tell?

PiscusFiche: I'll take a guess at the Sandman issue. Episode 6 of "The Season of Mists", when Morpheus confines the demon Azazel.

"This is my home, Azazel, my place of power. This is the Heart of the Dreaming. Reality here conforms to my wishes. It is what I wish it to be -- no more, no less."

I actually picked up a copy of Confederacy of Dunces while in New Orleans, in May of last year, after seeing a program on local cable interviewing the guy's mother. Somehow, I had managed to complete miss its existence until then, although since then I seem to have come across a rather wide assortment of references to it.

I highly recommend people who have trouble with it stylistically give it a second chance. There was a point at which that was true for me, but once I kept going I was sucked in but good.

I do suspect that visiting New Orleans first, then reading it, makes it more interesting, though.

As far as holding Worldcon in New Orleans goes: I don't see where it's much different than holding it in any large-ish city, where there are also a ton of things to do. I mean, don't get me wrong, I loved it there, but the French Quarter (or anywhere else) doesn't auto-trump Worldcon. Taking an extra couple days (or more, if you can) to see the city would be nice, but that'd be true in other places, too. If the Worldcon was poorly run, naturally the city looks more attractive than it, but again, that could be said of other places.

Of course, I've only gone to one Worldcon, and honestly, I'm not sure I'm going to go to another. There's a point at which I simply overload on too-much-to-see, too-many-people-to-meet. I skipped the one in San Jose, and that was a bus ride away for me (maybe two busses). So I may be approaching this with a different mindset to begin with. But if I were going to go, I am sure I could fit in a bit of sight-seeing around the the Must Do things at the con, or extend my stay if the host city was that interesting.

I'll take a guess at the Sandman issue. Episode 6 of "The Season of Mists", when Morpheus confines the demon Azazel.

To be absurdly completist about it, this scene and quote also appear in Jill Thompson's Death: At Death's Door (a manga-styled retelling of Season of Mists from Death's POV).

John M. Ford wrote: Wow, slushspam.

Sirs:

Enclosed please find the manuscript of You Can Have a Larger Penis. It details a simple method whereby, using natural herbal supplements, any man can increase his penis size up to 150 percent in as little as thirty days. Perhaps it's a little long, but I think you'll agree that this could be a big seller...

*****

Sorority Orgy

Chapter 1: The Webcam

As Amanda ran perkily up the steps of the Tri-Delt house, the wind occasionally lifted the pleats of her plaid cheerleader skirt to reveal a soft curve at the top of her thighs.

"Hey, Amanda," her sorority sister Diane said mischievously as blond, busty Amanda walked in the door, "look what we got!" She pulled a small electronic device out of a cardboard carton. "It's a webcam! Imagine what we can do when we hook this up to our own website!"

Soon the girls had the camera all hooked up and ready to braodcast anything it saw to the world. "Hey," said Amanda, "let's give them a look at my panties!

"Woops, I forgot! I'm not wearing any!"...

*****

DEAR SIR OR MADAM:

I HAVE ENCLOSED AN OUTLINE AND THE FIRST THREE CHAPTERS OF MY NOVEL THE AFRICAN PRISONER. IT'S THE THRILLING, FAST-PACED STORY OF AN ORDINARY BANK CLERK IN LAGOS, NIGERIA, WHO ONE DAY FINDS HIMSELF IN POSSESSION OF SEVENTEEN MILLION DOLLARS ($17 MILLION) IN FUNDS LEFT BEHIND BY A CORRUPT BUREAUCRAT WHO DIES IN A PLANE CRASH. IN A DESPERATE ATTEMPT TO RECLAIM PART OF THE MONEY, HE MANAGES TO MAKE CONTACT WITH A KINDLY AMERICAN WIDOW WHO LENDS HIM THE USE OF HER BANK ACCOUNT. WHAT FOLLOWS IS AN EXCITING, DEADLY CAT-AND-MOUSE GAME WITH NIGERIAN CON MEN, PRIVATE DETECTIVES, AND THE FBI BUNCO/FRAUD DIVISION....

Ray Girvan: I came to the conclusion recently that writers' groups are a waste of time for this very reason. You can critique until you're blue in the face, but many, if not most, amateur writers will never, ever, grasp what their problem is.

That's ... excessive. I expect there are some writers' groups containing only incompetents; you can probably find circle jerks in any hobby or profession. But this thread was kicked off when T found a collection of (apparently irretrievable) rectocranial inverts; that doesn't make it a fair sample of the universe of would-be writers. A counter-example: IIRC the Liavek books were born in a group of would-be writers. You can argue that as an unfair comparison, as one or more members had already been published -- but I doubt they would have stayed around if the rest of the group had been interested in ego-stroking and self-pity rather than learning.

On another subthread, I'll cop to being one of those people who never saw the point of Confederacy of Dunces; I do wonder whether it would have gotten such a critical reception if some editor had taken it on \before/ the author killed himself, but I know tastes differ.

Re: The Sandman Issue - I hadn't considered it quite in that light, although of course, it's still applicable. I guess I was thinking that Teresa was explaining some obscure grammar rule through an example in Sandman. (After all, Sandman is where I first learned about sestinas.)

While I appreciate the effort here to inform us sensitive writers on how to take rejection, spare me the perspective gained from your lofty, tiring position. You sound like the pretty girl that complains about the irritating number of dates proposed to her. Aren't the rejections by editors enough without going to rejections.com and further rejecting writer's feelings towards not being published? Most writers can't be creative full time, with a head for business and posess a salesman's silver tongue too. I don't see any reason to poke fun at them for it. Granted, many writers refuse to admit their own flaws, but sometimes that ignorance is a necessary armor to get to the next day, and maybe in that next day they'll realize their short comings without the help of sarcasm from you.

Dear Slushpile author,
Your piece was sarcastic, derivitive of others work and calloused where it should have been sensitive. I'm afraid we cannot at this time accept your advice as little was given.

Thank you very much.

I just have a moment here; I'll be back later today.

One thing I've kept forgetting to say, in re Ray Girvan's astute suggestion, is that my instantaneous reaction to "Unskilled and Unaware of It" was that it explained slush as nothing else ever had.

Just wanted to say that that was a great essay, and I'm on the side of the editors. I've been rejected so many times I practically have tire treads on my back, and every time it was a very good thing. If some of that stuff had seen print, my career would be over. Plus by rejecting me, those editors kept me from contracting with somebody who didn't love my stuff. That's really crucial, I think, having an editor who thinks you're brilliant and treats you that way. There are much worse things than being unpublished. (Got an editor from hell thread?)
Also, I have never been able to get through A Confederacy of Dunces, so put me on the slow track, too.
Really a great essay. Thanks.

Okay, just a couple more.

David Goldfarb, the "u" isn't there because I noticed it. The rest of the vowels I didn't. I find I feel no guilt over not paying more attention to Dgns, though I salute you for spotting the missed vowels.

Elizabeth, I'm on record as favoring "their" as a neuter pronoun -- a usage that has a long history in English. Dgns, for all his braggadocio about grammar, has apparently reached an advanced age without noticing that that's one of the language's legitimate variations.

David again: That's the panel, though I was thinking of the art rather than the text. I'd have re-ballooned it as "Hello, have you thought about where you are?" There's no place in the universe that entirely conforms to my wishes, nor would it be proper for there to be one. Another aspect to disemvowelling rather than deleting posts is that it acknowledges that those people and their viewpoints exist, which helps keep me honest.

Robert, if I were handing out virtual prizes, you'd get one.

Ray, Chip, the usefulness of writers' groups varies with the group. The Scribblies were undeniably successful.

Finally, Joshua Rizer, let me say, in a purely democratic and street-level spirit, that if you had a better ear for what's going on here, you probably wouldn't get rejected as often as you do.

I'm *working* on becoming a pro writer [in between, of course, raising a small child and trying to keep a house in order] but so far all I'm known for is my fanfic. [shamelessplug]Check out my site for my literary ramblings[/shamelessplug].

Anyway, sometimes I find a fellow writer who IMHO needs a few helpful tips. The potential for greatness is there, they just need a mentor. The people I pick on have one of three reactions:

1) They vanish, never to be seen again.
2) We become fast friends and I gain someone to confab with over my multitude of ideas.
3) I get a rain of abuse [the rarest so far].

The one abuser I encountered sounds *so* much like the people mentioned abusing the poor editors in this article that I feel very empathic towards anyone receiving a future work of mine.

Never going to complain. Never *ever* going to complain. I hereby vow to take any lumps I'm due with the quiet knowledge that I've made one person's day that much easier.

If "Jenny Crusie" is the one who wrote FAKING IT, thank you for making me laugh aloud and repeatedly and for changing my mind about the entire romance genre. I went out the other day and bought three more of your books.

If not, never mind.

I never said that I was rejected, but perhaps you remember rejecting me in the past, although that seems unlikely. I apologize sincerely for the venom earlier. I am not a regular here, and did not take any time whatsoever to understand the forum before responding.
I only read familiar advice that outlines a simple equation for authors which is essentially that: if you write quality work and present it in a concise, polite manner, you will be published. This is never guaranteed in so many words, but it is implied through negative relief when so many pieces of advice suggest that an author's failure is because of their technique, their presentation, their grammar, when many entry level people ARE hitting all of these points and still haven't found their way in. True, most pieces are probably rejected with good reason, but in the spirit of helping people, should we poke fun at those who maybe aren't good enough for print? Should we poke fun at those that ARE good enough for print but haven't gotten their break?
The link I followed into this discussion suggested a helping hand, and maybe that gave me preconceptions. I don't seek applause or cheerleading, really I don't. But when I came to the portion regarding the 14 reasons for rejection, it read to me more like a David Letterman top ten. A neurochemical disorder is sarcastic, and