Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014
More rejection
Publishing your work
Getting published
The final sentence in the last section sounds easier to do than it really is. Rejection is never easy, especially when it comes from someone you respect and hoped to work with.
As a creative writer and teacher of creative writing, I always want to comfort a discouraged student with a line like, “I view rejections as evidence of growth.” But to the novice, such advice might sound like, “Eat your spinach; it’s good for you.” Well, spinach is good for you, but if you really hate the taste of it, you’re not going to eat it. Similarly, getting rejections might be good for you, but only if they don’t cause you to give up submitting material to editors. As noted in Chapter 23, I dutifully eat my spinach—that is, I still get rejected.
It’s a healthy fact worth keeping in mind: all successful authors get rejections. When I learned that an award-winning writer I respect named George Garrett had seen all of his 40+ books rejected at least once, I couldn’t believe it. Yet successful writers grow as a result of rejection; they learn from the experience. Some aggressive novices even ask editors for advice. They query editors of referred journals for copies of the reviewers’ evaluations of their manuscript. With this kind of feedback in hand, rejections can become painful blessings.
Perhaps the best advice for dealing with rejections is to study the rejections immediately, make the necessary improvements, and promptly send the manuscript to another publisher. If you received no feedback, either ask for it or quickly examine your returned manuscript for editorial marks. Then make the needed corrections, put the manuscript and a self-addressed, stamped envelope within another envelope, and send it to another publisher. Remember, often as not, the reasons behind rejections are unrelated to the quality of the manuscript. Rather, it’s the subjective tastes of the editor running the show.
I believe there are two reasons for handling rejections hastily. If you leave the rejection on your desk, you’ll dwell on them—even if only in your subconscious—and the slight will begin to loom and grow. Second, by promptly sending out the manuscript again, you decrease the time between acceptances, and this increases your number of publications. If your manuscript has any value at all, there’s likely to be some correlation between your number of acceptances and the time your manuscript spends on an editor’s—any editor’s—desk.
Having been rejected many times, I can tell you—at least in my experience—there’s no apparent reason or pattern to what gets turned down. I’ve had some of my best work turned down by good magazines and then had those same magazines accept material I deemed—and still deem—vastly inferior in quality. I’ve even had an editor of a magazine who was just starting ask me for material and then reject it when I turned in my piece. Subsequently, it ended up in a better venue, and I attributed the novice editor’s action to his lack of experience in publishing. However, I should warn you: both editors and writers can hold grudges for years over such scenarios. Obviously, you have to deal with rejection in the way that works best for you, but I hope you at least keep the focus on the work.
Editor and writers come and go, rise and fall, flourish and die; but the things you publish will reside in various libraries far into the future—when most all our names are forgotten and the paper the work is printed on finally is thrown out and/or crumbles to pieces.
IDEAS AND INSPIRATION
I’ve heard many successful writers remark, “If you haven’t been rejected lately, it might mean you simply aren’t trying hard enough.”
Rejection shouldn’t be the most difficult part of writing, but it is. I suspect potential authors don’t write for publication because they don’t want to deal with rejection. I learned early in my writing career that I would need to develop my own mechanism for addressing it. After a few rejections, I sat down and developed a process:
1. I always attempt to develop quality manuscripts. Usually, when I have a manuscript rejected, it’s not because it’s poorly written or poorly put together. Nor is it because my idea wasn’t well thought out.
2. I target the manuscript for at least two specific journals. If one rejects it, I send it to the other.
3. When I receive a rejection, I read the cover letter and file the manuscript for a week.
4. I return to the manuscript and read the cover letter and the constructive criticism provided on a rating sheet or on the manuscript. (If no constructive comments are provided, I send the manuscript to the second journal).
5. When constructive criticism is provided, I weigh the comments and make those changes I feel are warranted. (Sometimes I don’t make any changes.) I then send the manuscript to the second journal.
I don’t suggest you copy my approach but rather develop a mechanism that’s reflective of your own personality and psychological coping mechanisms.
Now, as a way of preparing you for what you might see in a rejection letter, I’ve gathered some particularly harsh and/or funny lines from rejection letters. I hope they demonstrate that in addition to being very intelligent and discerning in their tastes, editors can also be flawed and flat-out mean. No doubt you’ll recognize the names of some of these rejected writers:
· On Jack Kerouac: “His frenetic and scrambled prose perfectly express the feverish travels of the Beat Generation. But is that enough? I don’t think so.”
· To D. H. Lawrence on Lady Chatterley’s Lover: “for your own sake do not publish this book.”
· On Lord of the Flies by William Golding: “an absurd and uninteresting fantasy which was rubbish and dull.”
· On Sylvia Plath: “There certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice.”
· On Crash by J. G. Ballard: “The author of this book is beyond psychiatric help.”
· On The Deer Park by Norman Mailer: “This will set publishing back 25 years.”
· On Catch-22 by Joseph Heller: “I haven’t really the foggiest idea about what the man is trying to say … Apparently the author intends it to be funny—possibly even satire—but it is really not funny on any intellectual level … From your long publishing experience you will know that it is less disastrous to turn down a work of genius than to turn down talented mediocrities.”
· On Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov: “… overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian … the whole thing is an unsure cross between hideous reality and improbable fantasy. It often becomes a wild neurotic daydream … I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.”