My job is great, but like any job there are some tasks that are dull and downright depressing. To wit, I've spent the past week or so archiving the manuscripts and related editorial material of a Canadian literary publication. I don't mind working through the files of an actual issue – and kudos to the production editors that box the stuff up since it always arrives in great and well-organized shape – but there's an unsavoury aspect to one part of the collection: the slush-pile of rejected manuscripts.
Firstly, let me give full props to any and all that volunteer for a literary publication, particularly the slush-pile readers. I can only imagine how mind-numbing the exercise must be, having to wade through the seemingly interminable pile of short stories, creative non-fiction and poetry. (It's hard enough sorting them all for the archives.) It's thankless, difficult work. I'm actually quite shocked at the sheer number of manuscripts the journal receives – or maybe not, since many people consider themselves "writers." Geez, even a hack like me has been known to refer to myself as a writer! Although now I consider myself a 'hobbyist' with respect to my writing (BTW, there was a great piece in the NYTimes last Sunday about authoring a book. You can read it here.) And while there are a number of talented writers sending their manuscripts, much of what the journal receives can be considered dross or turgid. (Better still, feel free to insert your our own adjective here: _______.)
Truthfully, when I first worked on this journal's archive a couple of years, I got a mild kick out of the rejections. Naturally, it was way too tempting to read bits and pieces from manuscripts that a reader declared was 'terrible' or 'dreadful.' More often than not, the reader's assessment was dead on.
I've since changed my tune, however, to the point where I wish the journal would shred the rejects rather than ship them here for posterity. It's not just the sheer overload of bad material that gets me down – for one, not all of it is dreadful (although some submissions really have me questioning the author's judgment in sending it out for review) – but it's the slush-pile readers comments and general attitude on the manuscripts that is also wearing on me.
The comments cover a wide range, from the simple, declarative 'no,' to something like this: 'These stories are Kafkaesque allegories (like The Hunger Artist) which should be great especially since ideas like free-market capitalism and spectacle are so ripe for allegory and ironic introspection. However in their brevity these stories fall flat.' Talk about a considered reading - although I have no idea what he means.
Some of the readers – one in particular, actually – can be particularly mean-spirited. A few examples that I've seen today:
'This could have been a great story but the author spoiled it with MFA wussiness.'
'No – hard to get past the first 3-4 pages for the error-ridden, rambling prose!'
'There are two stories here, neither of which are as profound as the author believes. NO'
'A few more writing classes would do him good.' (Incidentally, this is from the same person that complained about the MFA wussiness.)
'This is actually a biography – a boring, boring biography.'
'11465 words of awful.'
'A gossamer disaster.'
'Utter crap. Apparantely we’ve published her before, which does us no credit.'
'Well, at least it was short. NO.'
'I had high hopes for this going in, but it became flabby and unco-ordinated. It was a Britney Spears story.'
'So slight that you gotta squint to see something. NO.'
'She should have sent a different excerpt: an interesting one.'
'This reads like all the other stories scrawled by the untalented dregs of every community college writing class. Ultra-no.'
Not all of the comments are so nasty. In fact, some of the readers are sensitive and willing to give something a chance, even if an author's voice is not-yet well developed and the story/poetry needs some work. There are some readers that will almost never declare a firm "no" without at least a look-see from another reader. (It's been particularly difficult coming across negative comments of manuscripts from friends/acquaintances of mine.)
What I'm left thinking is how much of getting published is pure chance. Of course there needs to be some ability, but what happens when a reasonably good piece first lands in the hands of a nasty reader? Maybe s/he just isn't attuned to a particular story or style of writing. Or is having a particularly bad day?
I'm starting to think that if you don't have anything nice to say...
Listening to: the Metric’s Live it Out (pity I won’t get a chance to see them play tonight)
Reading: the Dec. 15 issue of the New Yorker; the Rough Guide to Washington, DC
Watching: Wong Kar Wai’s Fallen Angels, Wordplay (the doc about crosswords)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Having been both a slush reader and a slush submitter, I have to say my horror show is mean rejections. There is no excuse for that, no matter how busy, miserable and annoyed at the writer for sending inappropriate material. If you can't say something nice...absolutely right, WG, say nothing. There's always tomorrow.
But there is definitely room in my world for slush-readers who aren't aren't attuned to this or that style, and sadly, also room for people who normally have liked it but are having a busy, miserable, plagued by inappropriate submissions sort of day. As a writer, I feel a lot more human thinking that the person who wrote my rejection letter is human, too.
There's always tomorrow for the writer too--there's always somewhere else to send the manuscript where someone might really get it.
Best,
Rebecca
PS--I hope you like the book!
I like this by Randall Jarrell:
Someties it is hard to criticize, one wants only to chronicle. The good and mediocre books come in from week to week, and I put them aside and read them and think of what to say; but the "worthless" books come in day after day, like the cries and truck sounds from the street, and there is nothing that anyone could think of that is good enough for them. In the bad type of thin pamphlets, in hand-set lines on imported paper, people's hard lives and hopeless ambitions have expressed themselves more directly and heartbreakingly than they have ever expressed in any work of art: it is as if the writers had sent you their ripped-out arms and legs, with "This is a poem" scrawled on them in lipstick. After a while one is embarrassed not so much for them as for poetry, which is for these poor poets one more of the openings against which everyone in the end beats his brains out; and one finds it unbearable that poetry should be so hard to write - a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey in which there is for most of the players no tail, no donkey, not even a booby prize. If there were only some mechanism (like Seurat's proposed system of painting, or the projected Universal Algebra that Gödel believes Leibnitz to have perfected and mislaid) for reasonably and systematically converting into poetry what we see and feel and are! When one reads the verse of people who cannot write poems - people who sometimes have more intelligence, sensibility, and moral discrimination than most of the poets - it is hard not to regard the Muse as a sort of fairy godmother who says to the poet, after her colleagues have showered on him the most disconcerting and ambiguous gifts, "Well, never mind. You're still the only one that can write poetry."
It seems a detestable joke that the national poet of the Ukraine - kept a private in the army for ten years, and forbidden by the Czar to read, to draw, or ever to write a letter - should not have for his pain one decent poem. A poor Air Corpse sergeant spends two and a half years on Attu and Kiska, and at the end of the time his verse about the war is indistinguishable from Browder's brother's parrot's. How cruel that a cardinal - for one of these book is a cardinal's - should write verse worse than his youngest choir-boy's! But in this universe of bad poetry everyone is compelled by the decrees of an unarguable Necessity to murder his mother and marry his father, to turn somersaults widdershins around his own funeral, to do everything that his worst and most imaginative enemy could wish. It would be a hard heart and a dull head that could condemn, except with a sort of sacred awe, such poets for anything that they have done - or rather, for anything that has been done to them: for they have never made anything, they have suffered their poetry as helplessly as they have anything else; so that it is neither the imitation of life nor a slice of life but life itself - beyond good, beyond evil, and certainly beyond reviewing.
Post a Comment