Reversal

In one of his elegant-but-little-known song lyrics, "So Near and Yet So Far," Cole Porter not only objectifies Fate, he observes as it "steps in and mops up the floor with me." In the song, the singer's romantic ambitions are dealt a reversal; in real life, Fate does not necessarily tread on iambic feet and indeed may enter on roller skates. Reversal is a dramatic turn away from an anticipated shower of good fortune, of success in a venture, the acceptance of a story or book, an A-ticket to all the rides in the park.

Our nature as humans and of course yours as a member of the rejection letter congregation is to look with suspicion upon anything that appears to arrive with ease. Suspicion is wired in, at least to the point where we have a Plan B however vaguely formulated, where we believe the need to work up a sweat before achieving the desired results. In one of the apocryphal accounts of the Old Testament, David's Plan B was to run like hell if the rock he'd launched at Goliath missed its mark. We bestow our deepest regard and harbor our greatest hopes for results on those projects that vex us the most, seem most likely to slip from our grasp. A last-minute reversal that we engage and cope with seems almost a herald of impending success, even though we have scarcely caught our breath from the fright.

To some of us, reversal is an omen of lost power, the power being that sense of invincibility that in so many ways reverts us to our teen years when all was inevitable success, and reversal was like unto a misguided mosquito, strayed from its true course. As a species we are great symbol makers. You have come to believe, for example, that those remarkable drawings of animals on the walls of the caves in France represent boasts of animals safely hunted down into the evening meal and possibly even as expressions of meals yet to come. Thus a rejection slip becomes only a platform, a plateau scaling the heights of ambition. When you receive rejection letters, look how far you have climbed. That sort of thing.

Some in our midst see reversal as calamity; you have had your share of calamities to the point where you can no longer call to mind which among them was the most calamitous, preferring instead to think that the potential for future reversals is a sign you are still in the game. You suppose the game you are talking about in that sense is the game of life, but it could also be the game of writing, the game of editing, the game of teaching, and ah, the game of romance, except that some critic may impute your lack of serious intent in all these ventures to your consideration of them as games rather than endeavor.

Reversal is the force that knocks you on your ass with enough impact to cause you to marshal the intent to rise and go forth again--simple up endings do not count because those may only arrive as distractions. The measure of the reversal is in direct proportion to the effort necessary to recover from it.

Every story needs reversal. Every story needs that whoosh of impact that lays one or more characters low enough that the primal breath and intent is knocked from them for a time. The things you get up from, make sense of, translate into the poetry of newer energy and a sharper, clearer music are the things that make you who you are, that influence the vocabulary you chose from the available wonders of feeling and harmony about you. Grim determination is no small thing, not at all to be dismissed, but beware the you who gets of from the floor humming the music of the spheres, delighted with the sound of it while simultaneously wondering how it ever got in where you could hear it.

Itch

There are days when you don't get anything worth keeping.

Back in the old days, days of the typewriter, not getting anything worth keeping meant a waste basket filled with wadded-up yellow second sheets, your preferred means of start up until you'd become convinced you had in fact something going.

The wadded-up yellow sheets were in and about a waste basket of modest size and proportion, large enough to house the waste of a day or two, its original design long since covered over with a collage of rejection slips in varying sizes and colors, many from magazines even then no longer publishing. They peered forth from under a protective coating of clear varnish, a kind of irony in the sense of why would you want to preserve and protect rejection slips? It was neither originality nor irony you were after when you added to the design of that waste basket, rather it was a reminder of the world you had chosen, where, like random event, rejection slips often had no meaning other than an ad hoc no as opposed to any greater judgment.

The rejection slips you get today are more likely to be letters, much less impersonal in their no, more a reminder that you subscribe to Thomas Carlyle's concept of The Everlasting No, as in You shall not be daunted. These communications go into a folder which you trot out from time to time to show students what awaits and some of what it all means.

But this is not about rejection slips or that aspect of the life you have chosen; this is about nothing, which is to say it is about the days in which the sum total of your work amounts to nada, zip, zilch.

Nothing is the result of trying to produce. The efforts may be applied to a work in progress, a work in which you already have some sort of vision and investment of feelings and intent. You know the individuals and the circumstances in which they behave. It is not so much that you have no clue what comes next as it is that you have no feeling for the authenticity and veracity of the next word, the next movement. You are not there and as a consequence of that, you are trying too hard, perhaps even thinking, which at that stage of things is always a danger, a sort of Let's see what happens if I stick my finger in this electrical outlet. Sometimes coffee helps. Coffee at home vs coffee out. Now you have the glorious distraction of deciding where. The baristas and coffee at Peet's are incomparable and they do know your preferences often to the point where you are able to secure your coffee and retreat to your favorite corner table without having uttered a word. The coffee isn't as good at La Luna, but quite often the baristas radiate the effect of post-coital tristesse, making them interesting and your own frame of reference speculative, alert for signals and impressions from the outer world. The coffee at The Coffee Bean is servicable and the baristas there radiate the impression of wishing they were in the afterglow of post-coital behavior, which is a different vibe from La Luna. You have the option then of at least three places to go in your attempts to get something when there has so far been nothing. If none of these seem appropriate, you can always go to the Laguna Market, a splendid enclave appropriately on Laguna street in the part of downtown that is truly funky and is out of the self-conscious Funk Zone, down by Garden and Gutierrez, where fish markets, Red's, an eclectic gallery/wine bar/coffee shop and The Santa Barbara Winery Tasting Room compete with small, nondescript stores in which marginal persons attempt to sell marginal dreams. It is perhaps this last awareness that keeps you out of The Funk Zone unless The Burger Bus happens to be parked in the Red's parking lot; you are no stranger to marginality nor marginal dreams.

You spend such days resorting to highly idiosyncratic formulae; a person who did not know you might even think you superstitious. But you are not. You are merely on such days after a decent page. You will even settle for a decent sentence, one you can keep as a token of having got something for the day. It may even be a not-quite-keeper, a sentence that will send you reeling drunkenly off tomorrow when you approach the keyboard or the note pad.

Most days, you get something. On such days you are not a danger to yourself or anyone around you; you have managed to reach the seemingly unreachable spot on your back, where you are able, having got something, to scratch an intolerable itch into the post-scratch tristesse. The days when you get nothing, you are thus doomed to wandering about with an intolerable itch that is just beyond your reach.

Submissiveness

submission--an offering of a novel or short story for publication; a presentation of a manuscript to a literary agent or editor with hopes of impending publication; a practice engaged in by a writer in which work is offered to a publishing venue.

The moment comes when a writer knows a particular work is finished, that there is nothing more to be done to it without transforming it into something altogether different that what it is now, that readers will not be aware of any additional tweaking or changes. 

 If the work is a novel, the writer usually sends it to a literary agent because relatively few publishers will read book-length manuscripts unless they have been invited. If the work is a short story, the writer sends it to the editor of a magazine or journal, hopeful of it being accepted and scheduled for publication. Such is the nature of submission. Writers wishing to have their work published accept the process of submission as a way of life, just as the actor or actress accept the reality of audition, equally as the musician accepts the reality of audition.

True enough, some writers are invited to submit stories to journals and novels to publishers. These writers are generally veterans of previous publications, which came from previous submissions.

As a generality, writers whose work reflects a difference in theme and voice, while observing an awareness of what makes a story, will have a higher rate of acceptance than writers who strive to make their work less different, possibly even lapsing into derivative or imitative approaches.

Beginning writers see submission as some Sisyphean chore; published writers see submission as a way of writing life.

When Joseph Heller was told he'd have to change the title of his forthcoming novel, Catch-18, because it was on the same list as Leon Uris's Mila 18, Heller readily agreed to changing the title of his novel to Catch-22 because it had been submitted previously to twenty--one other publishers before being accepted.

Stand and Deliver

emotion--a feeling or combination of sensations which lead to a mood or an attitude; the result of events, stimuli, and interactions; possible results of memory, thought, or association which may be pleasing, distasteful, or ominous.

Emotions are triggered by experience, whether the result of direct action, contemplation, or analogy. These sensory and perhaps sensual results are among the principal goals to be achieved in story; a story that does not evoke emotion is placing itself in the metaphorical third balcony, some distance away from the performance.

The fact of a reader seeing or understanding the intended emotional content is not sufficient; the reader is entitled by having read the story to feel the resident emotional tones.


rejection--an arbitrary condition arising when a publisher declines an offered work; a situation wherein a writer loses enthusiasm for a project and either shelves or discards it; a work that has been denied entry for idiosyncratic, judgmental, or technical reasons. The experiential sense achieved by an author that certain publications, publishing individuals, and random other individuals are not moved by his work. An author, editor, or publisher in a state of denial.

It is the rare writer who has no experience with having a work refused, either in terms of representation by a literary agent or publication from an editorial representative of a publishing venture; rarer yet is the writer who has had no work returned with a memo of notes for revision. Rarest of all is the writer who has not of his or her own accord set a manuscript aside as being unworkable or uninteresting. All these are examples of rejection. Similarly, a note from a publisher's representative expressing great admiration for a work but nevertheless returning it because of its thematic resemblance to a recently published work is still rejection. A note from a publisher accompanying a rejected manuscript and as well inviting the writer to submit more work is--rejection.

An author, standing in a book store while watching a prospective reader pick up his or her book, thumb through several pages, then set the book back on the shelf, is witnessing rejection of yet another sort.

"There are fifteen types of rejection in connection with writing," Santa Barbara Writers' Conference Director, Barnaby Conrad said, addressing an auditorium filled with attendees. From the voluminous depths of his blazer pocket, he produced an index card from which he was about to read examples, but before he was able to begin, a voice from the rear boomed, "Sixteen."

Ever the polite one, Conrad smiled, nodded. "As I was saying, there are fifteen specific types of rejection." Squinting at the index card for a moment, he continued. "The first instance of rejection is when a writer submits a manuscript electronically or by postal mail and it is subsequently rejected."

Once again the voice from the rear of the auditorium blared forth. "Seventeen!"

Rejection is a living presence in every writer's calculus; even if the writer were to forswear submissions, it could be successfully argued that the writer was rejecting himself. Responses to rejection vary from anger to mild annoyance to conspiracy theory; all of these conditions may or may not be justified but they may all produce the side effect of listening to and agreeing with the Inner Critic, the symptoms of which prevent the writer from writing.

There probably are successful writers who believe their abilities have evolved enough; they accordingly do not worry about becoming better at their craft. The greater number of writers burn off considerable calories with concern about their developmental progress. This is as it should be.

Some letters or notes of rejection address flaws as seen by the rejector. Unless you, the writer, see some way to enhance the effectiveness of the work, or unless a particular editor offers publication of your work if a specific change is effected, a four-letter Latin word, common to publishing, obtains. Stet. Let it stand.

I'll Show You Mine if You Show Me Yours: Rejection Slips in the Free Market Economy

You began getting these as an undergraduate, when journalism and nonfiction seemed the proverbial piece of cake, and cake began to be boring. Facts had to be looked up and the people you interviewed often didn't say things that interested you.

You'd pretty well set your sights on fiction early on, and were impatient to crack some of the markets, which was about the time you ran into two widely diverse classmates, who set you off on what at times seemed a task fit for Sisyphus, an analogy you particularly like because of the essay about Sisyphus in which Camus among other things argued that Sisyphus was a happy man, a man who enjoyed his work.

Ed Hunter seemed able to crank out pulp adventure stories between classes, sometimes relying o his sales for such necessities as rent, food, and dates. After reading Ed's work on a regular basis, you began to consider the science fiction pulps as splendid targets. Those were good years for a number of magazines such as and Amazing, Galaxy, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Thrilling Wonder Stories, all of which you knew from the intimacy of being a subscriber. Ed was also that most romantic of all majors, theater arts.

On the staff of the literary magazine, Scop, you met and admired Lou Bartfield, a man who had returned to the university after a long stint in the army, during which tenure he had acquired a wife and a persistent admiration for Nelson Algren. You didn't realize it at the time, but Lou wanted to be as legendary as Algren. You were not sure exactly who you wanted to be as legendary as. Possibly Fitzgerald, but Twain played a part in there, too; you did, after all go to Virginia City and you did contribute to The Territorial-Enterprise.

Lou Bartfield wanted to make enough money to be able to afford to be legendary. The plan you both devised was to pick the highest paying pulp markets you could find, which happened to be the so-called confessions or true romances. Twice a week, you met, hashing out enough plots for the rest of the week. You took half the plots, write a draft; Lou took the other half, wrote a draft. The real fiction was that these stories were supposed to seem true, hence true confessions, hence no bylines to worry about. We wrote and submitted.

The first thing I did with my share of the rejection slips was to paper a waste paper basket. After a time, I had enough to do the shade of a desk lap, then I began the north wall of my bedroom. At about this time, Lou decided we were not getting rich enough to be legendary, and you got a letter from an editor that saved me a good deal of time. We'd picked the romances because they paid a nickel a word. That worked out to two hundred fifty dollars per story, split in half. Still not bad for a day's work.

The editor reminded you that she only bought about one in three or four stories from you, which averaged out to considerably less than five cents a word while most of her regulars placed most of their stories. You could go on being a regular if you wanted in effect to risk the low acceptance rate. She even told you why so many of your stories were returned. They were too funny. Romance readers don't think romance is funny.

Lou decided to stop, as he put it, screwing around with romance, which you thought was pretty funny at the time and still do. You can't screw around with romance. He tried to be serious for another six months then got a high-salaried job with an insurance company. The last time you saw him, he was wearing a suit. You got any more rejections slips before you began wearing suits, and there was the magical time when Clarence, the mailman, brought you a special delivery letter every day with a check for a short story, sometimes a western, sometimes science fiction, sometimes suspense or mystery. Thinking back on those times, you realize that most of those stories were funny in one way or another, and now, although there is some seriousness in your stories, you suppose the funny stuff is something you have learned to live with.

Interestingly enough, you began wearing suits when a part of your job was to reject the works of other writers, sending many of them form letters, which is certainly the equivalent of a rejection slip.

But that is a part of another story.