I've written roughly a zillion posts about how writing, especially the rejection side of it, causes me to feel like shit bordering on depression. This week, I began to consider the extent to which my eight months as a fiction reader take a toll on my psyche.
Years ago, when I was trying to get published in Agni, one of the top literary journals out there and for which I was clearly kidding myself, I must have subscribed to their newsletter. Maybe I thought this would somehow increase my chances of publication. Whatever the reason, I've ignored it every time it has come, but for some reason chose to read it this week.
In a meditation called "The Sluice," Agni Editor Sven Berkerts talks about how he is liberated each summer when Agni stops accepting submissions for three months. "Closing the sluice never fails to deliver a bit of a body-shock and then, almost right after, a growing sense of psychological well-being....This is...because for a fixed period of days I know I'll be free of the remorse of saying no to hard-working writers."
Berkerts remembers his own writing life, the bundling of papers and postage and envelopes and trundling it all to the post office to wait and wait and wait for what was often bad news. His life as editor is therefore "tinged with guilt," because he is the bearer of bad news to hundreds of writers a week.
He attempts to wrap up by trying to clarify what Agni is looking for from writers--not very successfully, I thought, although it's not really his fault. I've never seen any magazine adequately answer the "what we want" question. It's an impossible question. The best answers I've read are more what they don't want--we're tired of stories in bars, for example. We're against stories in which children are raped. We generally don't publish stories written in second person. That's at least a little bit of a help. But nobody can explain what they want. Berkerts' attempt, "writers thinking things through from the ground up, using language that is free of the innumerable standard conformities," is a description of what we all know we ought to be doing, but doesn't tell us anything about how to do it. It's saying "we want writing we think is good."
I can't blame him for trying to end on a positive note. I've noticed in just eight months that being an editor/reader is tough on me psychologically. I give a lot of no votes, even though I say yes a lot more than I should, statistically speaking. I feel terrible about not even reading to the end many stories that I can tell were written with great affection, but which I can tell just don't have the juice.
The morose feelings aren't just because I'm dumping on somebody's dreams, though. I now have an entirely different way of looking at my own submissions. I'm the one putting one more task onto some volunteer reader somewhere. I'm the one flicking one more little spark of troubled conscience their way.
More than that, I now have a very visceral feel for the sheer numbers involved. It's one thing to know that 200 people submit for every story a magazine will publish. It's another to count to 200 one-by-one, reading a story for each tick. It's the difference between knowing a marathon is 26.2 miles and running one.
At my day job, I work for an organization with tens of thousands of people. Every day is like a major sports event in terms of the number of people there and the logistics necessary to take care of them. I occasionally get the sickest feelings. I think about all the food, all the animals slaughtered, all the fertilizer dumped, to feed all of us. I think of all of us excreting in various ways, all of the sewage we create. I feel incredibly superfluous, like if I were gone, it would make no difference at all, except to decrease slightly the demand for sewers and fertilizer.
That's how being an editor makes me feel about writing. The supply of writers is enormous. Nobody needs me to write. Over the past year, I've become much more aware of both how much it sucks to say no all the time and how inevitable nos are. It makes the sting of a rejection actually worse, rather than better. It's a confirmation that I'm just another writer in the sluice.
I'm thinking of ending my volunteer stint as an editor at the end of the year. If I don't just end my writing career or my life first. Our summer break ended Tuesday. We got over 30 submissions the first day.
Jake, I'm your friend, marine to marine -- you understand. but this is all a giant admission that the fiction racket is mostly crap. for some jackass to say we want x, but not y, is so self-important and absurd. what did mencken do? he simply invited any and all to prove send him whatever to prove that that good writing was out there. mostly there was just crap. mostly there is just crap. but the idiots at that stupid journal you mention: seriously. i could be merely be the worst story-teller on earth, but i know something interesting when i hear it, and that guy you mention sounds a complete, sorry, compleat jackass. why do you care about the esthetics of tertiary nonentities who will absolutely not be known now and, more importantly, be nothing but footnotes, if they're lucky, in succeeding generations. the opinions of nobodies are nothing. do not let the taxidermists, who have no artistic sense, tell you what to do.
ReplyDeleteI was mostly just struck to see that other editors have the same feeling of guilt weighing them down after rejecting one story after another. I'm rejecting people who are in the same boat as me. I can't be too quick to reject tertiary nonentities; I might be one myself. The only way to find out if I'm a non-entity or a good writer worth reading is to keep submitting. But seeing behind the submissions process makes me just feel gobsmacked by how tough the odds are. Even if I do have something worth reading, the signal-to-noise ratio is so high, it might be very hard to be heard.
DeleteSo I've been worried about you since I read this post last week. I have a tendency to sprinkle half-humorous lines like "if I don't just end my writing career or my life first" which can vary from 1% to 99% humorous depending, with ambiguity as a defense against inquiry at the lower end of the scale. So do I say something, and if so, directly or indirectly? I don't know, I'm just gonna wing it.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I have a video to recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm-Jjvqu3U4&index=143&list=LL6FhsmDDdLpzM_VwJLM0exw
. It's short, about 3 or 4 min. I don't know if you're familiar with Vi Hart; chances are your kids are. She used to do math videos, worked at Khan Academy for a while, and now is off doing virtual reality research, she's probably the person I'd most like to be. So the video I'm thinking of isn't really pertinent to someone who wants to write fiction, but it's still worth keeping in mind that any audience, including publishers, have agendas that have nothing to do with finding the best work. But of course you knew that already. Still, I feel like I have to offer something, and that's the best I can do. Unless you haven't seen OKGO's This Too Shall Pass which is soooo much better than you'd think from the title.
If the editor gig is costing you more than it's nourishing you, maybe it's a good idea to back away.
I should probably quit making so many glib suicide jokes. I mean to be droll rather than dramatic. "Kill me" is still hyperbole for me. I don't know how Game of Thrones ends yet.
ReplyDeleteThat video states a position fairly well. It's a familiar position: "Speak thy latent conviction, and it shall be true in the universal sense," as Emerson put it. I get what she's saying, that you should make art for you, and the audience will come, and that if you try to make it for an audience, you'll fail. At the same time, I knew a lot of people in grad school writing bad stories, who insisted they would keep on writing their way and be true to themselves, and their audience never came. I was one of them.
I'd certainly prefer to have a small audience that gets me than a large one that sees me as something I'm not, but at some point, a developing artist who has no audience or next to no audience has to wonder if the message is just not good. Total lack of interest at some point suggests that maybe it's me, not them. So I can either change the message or keep having no audience.
This isn't an easy formula to arrive at. I agree with the video that an artist will create an audience by making a true message. At the same time, the audience gets a vote. Costanza was true to himself when he "went with jerk store," but the audience didn't laugh, which was the surest sign the joke wasn't funny.