The most popular stories from BASS 2019, according to my blog stats

I did this same thing last year for Best American Short Stories 2018 right about the time I was getting into BASS for the next year. Basically, I can track which stories from the BASS anthology got the most clicks on my blog, and I'm sharing that information here for those who might be curious. One of the reasons it's interesting to me is that I like to see if readers of BASS who cared enough to do further research generally were interested in the same stories I found the be the most compelling. 

That's based, of course, on the assumption that people are clicking on stories because they like them. Like I said last year, I can't totally interpret the meaning of the stats. A lot of the people clicking are probably students in classes studying BASS. The stories with the most hits might just be the ones assigned by the instructor. Or, if the assignment was something like, "Pick a story you like and write about it," then the stats might show a bias toward stories early in the anthology (because lazy students probably won't read that many) or toward shorter stories. 

Whatever the stats mean, here they are from 2019:

1. "Hellion," Julia Elliot: 1590 clicks (also one of my favorites)

2. "Nothing But a Bubble," Jamel Brinkley: 1213 clicks (in my top five from last year as well)

3. "Protozoa," Ella Martinsen Gorham: 1203 clicks (I can see why students would have liked this one)

4. "Anyone Can Do It," Manuel Muñoz: 1168 clicks

5. "Natural Light," Kathleen Alcott:  1082 clicks

6. "Letter of Apology," Maria Reva: 1026 clicks

7. "Wrong Object," Mona Simpson: 937 clicks (If I had been forced to write about a story from BASS 2019 for a class, Hellion and this story would have been my top choices)

8. "Pity and Shame," Ursula K. Le Guin: 932 clicks

9. "They Told Us Not to Say This," Jen Alandy Trahan: 888 clicks

10. "Natural Disasters," Alexis Schaitkin: 873 clicks

11. "Black Corfu," Karen Russell: 872 clicks

12. "The Era," Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenya: 851 clicks (which, as the first story in the collection and also a fairly accessible story, I thought would have a lot more clicks)

13. "Omakase," Weike Wang: 803 clicks 

14. "The Plan," Sigrid Nunez: 677 clicks

15. "Seeing Ershadi," Nicole Krauss: 666 clicks (I thought this would have more just because it would be a harder story for people to understand." 

16. "Audition," Said Sayrafiezadeh: 548 clicks

17. "The Third Tower," Deborah Eisenberg: 508 clicks

18. "Bronze," Jefferey Eugenides: 506 clicks (guessing the length chased some readers off)

19. "Our Day of Grace," Jim Shepard: 501 clicks

20. "Great Interruption," Wendell Berry: 455 clicks (which maybe people felt didn't need much explanation, but still, the three old white guys in the anthology seemed to generate the least interest)

Finally, I wanted to point out that BASS 2018 continued throughout the year to get a lot of clicks. In many cases, it got more than BASS 2019, although 2019 was the new one. This supports my assertion that BASS 2018 was the best one I've read. Danielle Evans's "Boys Go to Jupiter" got as many clicks last year as it did the first, and is easily the most-read post I've ever made. People love that story as much as I did.

Should a writer critique other writers harshly?

Seven years ago, I was a decade removed from leaving grad school after my M.A. in English with a concentration in creative writing, the degree the straight English majors called “English Light” and M.F.A. students called the “M.F.A. Light.” I had thought, when I started the program at University of Illinois at Chicago back in fall of 2002, that I wanted to be both a critic and a writer. I left without becoming either.

Looking back, it’s not hard to see why. As a hybrid literature/writing student, I was too busy writing to do the research necessary to become much good at theory, and too busy reading 19th century texts or French theory to develop much at writing my own stories. At the time I finished my M.A., I’d hardly read anything written after 1980. I’d gotten nowhere as a writer of my own stories, and I felt dejected and wanted nothing to do with literature, either writing it or reading it. That feeling didn’t change for years after leaving graduate school to go get what I thought of as a “normal” job, something as far from literature as I could get.

 

Around the time I turned forty, I wondered if it might be worth trying to write stories again. Forty’s a good age to make sure you haven’t talked yourself out of something you really wanted to do with your life and see if you can still amend having done so. I didn’t try to go back for a Ph.D., because it was falling in love with stories that had originally made me go to grad school, not falling in love with theory. Instead, I simply started to read stories that had been written in my lifetime.

 

It didn’t change much for me right away. I was writing again, but those first stories I sent out at forty all got rejected, the same as they had at twenty-five. Still, something felt different. Even in failure, I could feel something changing in my work. Melville is wonderful, and Moby Dick will remain my favorite book until I die, but there’s something about reading people who speak in your own idiom that really works on the literary imagination. 

Encouraged by the change, certain I would soon find the secret sauce and become famous, and unaware that even back in 2013 nobody really blogged anymore, I started this blog about my attempt to figure it all out in my forties. I thought of it as a service to future generations, who would be able to follow my aesthetic development journey just before I started winning awards. 

I started to get some stories published here and there, but I wasn’t famous. I was better, but not great. This blog, which almost nobody read, occasionally went from sprightly to morose; my life seemed a waste. 

On the way to becoming I writer, I accidentally become a critic

At some point, I decided to start blogging serious analysis, or at least my best attempts at serious analysis, of the best contemporary short stories. I focused on the big anthologies: Best American Short Stories, O.Henry, and Pushcart. I didn’t write about every story in the anthologies, but I wrote about a lot of them. My purpose wasn’t to revive the lost hope of being a serious critic. Although the work I did was influenced by all the theory I’d been exposed to, my primary purpose wasn’t academic. Mostly, I just wanted an exercise that would force me to focus closely on the best fiction being written today so it would influence my own work for the better. I’ve described my approach as close to a sermon, with short stories as my secular text. It’s a little bit of theory, a little bit of the eye of a developing writer noticing techniques, but by and large, it’s just me trying to become a better person through reading. What I’ve enjoyed most about this is how it’s reminded me that becoming a fuller, better human being is why I enjoy literature, why I want to write stories of my own.

 

I never expected people would read these literary sermons. My blog was always an obscure backwater town of the internet, with at most a few hundred hits a month, probably half of which came from bots. Yet within a few months of starting to blog about short stories, the numbers started going up. Today, about two years after I started critiquing other work regularly, I get over 5,000 hits a month. That’s not much, of course, certainly not enough to say I’ve emerged from obscurity. There are YouTubers who get 5 million views without breaking a sweat. It was a big change for me, though. It meant there were some people out there reading me of their own free will. 

The reason people are finding my blog is a troubling sign for literature

The posts I write analyzing short stories get about twenty times as many hits as the posts about writing, or other subjects. Those finding my blog seem to mostly be students who are studying short stories in school, especially Best American Short Stories, based on the spikes in readers that coincide with school years. College students (or, in some cases, senior groups, as I’ve discovered because they’ve reached out to me) read a story, feel they don’t quite grasp it or just want to see what others think about it, so they Google it, and my blog pops up. 

But why on Earth should my blog pop up? These are the best short stories being written, or at least the ones that got the most attention, so surely, there are highly regarded, perspicacious critics out there writing far more insightful things about them than I am, right? 

Turns out, no. A few stories, the ones that were originally published in The New Yorker, say, have a professional reading students can turn to, but for the most part, students are going to find either my blog or that of Karen Carlson, who has become my friend over the last few years as we’ve conferred with one another while writing about the same stories. 

 

For the most part, the two of us are what’s out there when students are looking for help with reading challenging stories. How is it possible there are so few critics of short stories out there? If you watch a movie that captivates you, or hear a song with lyrics you keep chewing on but aren’t quite sure you understand, you can find hundreds of places on the internet to help you. There are thriving communities that discuss these things. There are YouTubers—some of them really excellent—who make a living through an informal intellectual approach they cultivated to art. It’s very helpful stuff for people who want to go a little deeper with art they've enjoyed, and I’m glad it’s there, but nobody is really talking about literature in this way, especially short stories. That’s why people find me. That can’t be good for the future of the short story as a living art form. 

I think fear of revenge keeps a lot of would-be critics from speaking up, for fear of what it would do to their own place within the writing community. 

The readers are the reason for the lack of critics

It’s an open secret that the main readers of short stories are other writers. Many journals stay in business now more from fees they charge writers to submit work than they do from subscriptions. David Olimpo, editor-in-chief of The Atticus Review, said as much in one of his recent newsletters:

“I've written before that I think the value proposition for literary magazines is not what most editors and writers might like it to be. Ideally, we'd love the general public to be chomping at the bit to subscribe to our literary magazines, and to pay for the great content we're providing! But that's not the reality of our culture, or the oversaturated media landscape we are a part of. In my opinion, the value proposition today for literary magazines is in...not being a literary magazine. It's in developing relationships with writers, who are also readers. This is why platforms such as Medium have been so successful: they realize the writer is both client and audience.”

He went on to announce that Atticus would be raising fees for submissions to $5, and not apologizing for it. He felt writers should be “glad to pay it.” Whether you agree with him or not isn’t the point; the point is that editors clearly realize their audience is writers, not bankers and stock clerks and actuaries and lawyers and nurses and morticians looking for an enjoyable way to expand their minds and souls during their free time. 

Writers nowadays are coached to be good “literary citizens.” We need to be encouraging one another, say nice things about each other on social media, help one another to promote our work, write pithy blurbs for the backs of one another’s books. Part of being a writer now includes writing puff-piece reviews that look like real critique but aren’t. 

That’s all fine. I am not advocating we return to some golden age of writing when the giants feuded with one another and wrote scathing reviews of the work of their enemies. I’ve done a few soft reviews for friends, too. Without at least some critique with teeth, though, critique where the reviews might be bad, there’s not much of a thriving community. The problem for short stories, though, is that they’re mostly supported by people whose culture forbids them from providing critique with an element of danger in it. The main readers of short stories are other writers, making other writers the ones primarily in the position to provide the necessary critique to rebuild a real public appetite for short stories, but other writers are exactly the people who cannot write them, because it could be social and commercial suicide. Which means there are few readers of short stories in a social position to provide serious critique. This ensures that short stories remain an insular art form, one that discourages outsiders from delving into it, because there is no critical framework to help outsiders overcome initial hurdles to understanding.

While my obscure little blog has been picking up a small audience, I’ve also slowly been becoming a “real writer.” I had a book of short stories published by the Washington Writers’ Publishing House in 2017. (See the link to the right! Buy to support the publisher and me! Hit like and subscribe! Donate to my Patreon!) Last month, I won the Robert Day Award for Fiction from New Letters. I’m not Best-American-Short-Stories famous, but I am a member of the community of writers. It made me pause last month when I won the award to ask myself, “Am I enough of a real writer now I should quit writing critiques of other writers’ work?” What if my blog went from 5,000 readers a month to 50,000? What if  lightning struck and I got published in The New Yorker, and suddenly everyone cared about all the criticism I’ve written about the work of other writers?

 

I probably should stop. A writing mentor, if I looked for such things, would tell me I not only should stop writing critique of other writers, I should also delete everything I’ve done so far. Sometimes, I write things that would wreck my writer social credit score. Two years ago, I didn’t like Weike Wang’s “Omakase,” although others apparently loved it so much they put it in both the Best American and O.Henry anthologies, and two of the three O.Henry editors said it was their favorite. (If you Google the story at this minute, my blog is the third result you’ll get for it, meaning the few people who looked for an analysis of it likely landed on my negative one. I’m being serious when I say nobody is seriously looking at short fiction, at least not in a place an ordinary person could easily find it.)

 

Knowing what I know now of the dearth of criticism, I can’t stop. The people who find my blog are those mythical real readers we all wish we could find as writers, the ones headed into careers in things other than literature. They’re people who might be reading the only modern short stories they will ever read as adults, and they are stumbling onto my blog or Karen's, because they're almost all that exists. That is just an incredible shame, but it’s also a call to responsibility for me.

I have an ethics about it. I don’t tag writers when I Tweet out my latest analysis if I didn’t like their story. (In fact, I don’t Tweet these at all. I just post them sadly and move on with my day.) I don’t take any joy in disliking a story. I know I’m talking bad about somebody’s baby. But without somebody writing criticism, even informal criticism like my own not primarily aimed at a scholarly audience, where there is a chance of saying something negative, the positive analysis means nothing. It’s all just blurbs and striving for new ways to say things like “spell-binding” and “captivating.” I like to think that when I tag a writer to say I loved their work, and I hear back from them that they really appreciated someone taking their story seriously enough to write about it the way I have, part of the reason they appreciate it is because they know I mean it. This is especially true when I analyze stories from Pushcart, which tends to have fewer big names and more people like me, people just writing what they love because they can’t help themselves. I’m often the only person who responded to their story with written thoughts of my own. 

 

That’s why in early November, when Best American Short Stories drops (on Election Day, no less), I’ll be putting other things to the side for a few weeks to read, to think, to meditate, and to respond to the stories. My critical work is imperfect, and the people who are looking for answers deserve better than me, but until that exists, I’m going to try to keep giving it to them. Turning my back on that responsibility because I fear the momentary harm it might cause to my place in the literary world is the surest way to damn that world to an increasingly shrinking role. 

Pre-linguistic cognition: "Silverfish" by Rone Shavers

Disclaimer: I went to graduate school with Rone, so this isn't a completely unbiased analysis of the novella in question. Still, my policy with authors who are friends is to read the work and then only review/analyze the work if I liked it. If I don't, I just shut up about it and never tell the author I read it. I've actually done this before. Only once have I given a positive review of something when I didn't mean it because I knew the author, and that was for a very old person who had asked me to review the book and I just didn't see the harm and couldn't say no. 

A college professor began a class once by asking a question: Can you think without language? I mulled it over for a bit. There are certainly times I think using a very abbreviated linguistic system. Often, I'll be chewing on some problem, and it leads me to an argument I've had in my head before. My brain will then simply quickly register the results of the previous conversation I had in my brain about that subject without recalling the entire process that led me to that conclusion. This is one of the reasons people have such a hard time arguing for conclusions they reached a long time ago. They've been using an interior shorthand for a long time, one that simply remembers having come to a conclusion about something without all the steps that got them there. Often, I register this simply by remembering where I was when I came to the conclusion. There's no language in it, or at least there doesn't seem to be. 

You can see this, too, in a more dramatic fashion, when you have to make a series of quick decisions about something, like when you are driving a car or playing a sport. I don't just mean that there are instinctive functions we do that don't require language to accomplish, because after the split-second in which you make your decision and carry it out, sometimes, you find you are able to give a long explanation of why you did it, one that is so long, it's actually impossible you could have thought all of it while carrying out the action, but it actually does seem like all the things you are saying were really involved in the decision: "I wasn't sure if he saw me, and the guy behind me was coming kind of fast, but I thought that if I blew my horn, the guy merging might get scared and whip his car too fast back in the other direction and cause an accident, so instead of either braking or blowing the horn, I just changed lanes fast, because I'd seen in my mirror the other lane was empty." That's too many words to have thought in half a second, but it seems, somehow, as if that is really the rationale behind your decision. 

The answer I gave at the time in that class was that animals seem to think without using words, as far as we can tell, so yes, it must be possible to think without language.

Language and Langaj

Of course, my answer was only right if "language" means words. If language refers instead, though, to any system of conveying information, then it's quite possible no living thing thinks without using it. Internally, organs communicate with one another, and even cells can pass information of sorts within themselves. What's true at microscopic levels is also true at macroscopic ones. There are massive, eco-system-wide communications systems, such as when the roots of trees "talk" to one another across an entire forest. 

My bias toward thinking of language as equivalent to words is easy to understand. I'm a translator, so when I think of translating from one language to another, I mean take some words and replace them with other words that mean something similar to people in another linguistic system. Even the word "language" comes from the word for "tongue," meaning people have long had a bias toward thinking of language as the words one makes. 

Rone Shavers' Silverfish, though, tries to first break us down from our assumptions about "language" meaning words and then to build us up again. He begins with a prologue from the Yoruba trickster goddess Eshu, who invites the reader to "play language" with her. Her hope is to "break the brain" of the reader, as an epigraph by Vera Henross has it. "Confusion is good: It's the first step to understanding what's beyond what you already know." The novel equates "language" to "langaj," the esoteric, incantory utterances used in Hoodoo rituals, where language itself actually makes things happen. Unlocking language will also "make things happen" in the novel.

Once past the epigraph, though, we find Eshu to be a somewhat merciful goddess, because while the story bends the reader's brain, it doesn't quite break it. It's possible to rebuild a fairly coherent narrative from the broken pieces of the story.

A one-paragraph synopsis

Stories where the author really doesn't give a damn about being kind to the reader are almost impossible to summarize easily, but Silverfish isn't like this. The novel is set in a future "corporatocracy," one in which those with means use those without them as part of a mercenary army-for-hire to keep the stock market high and natural resources flowing. This world was brought about in part by the invention of "angels," a new and improved form of cyborg (although that term is considered passé in the future) with a mission to root out insurrection from "primitves" who aren't on board with the brave new world. Angels were invented by someone named Beagel. Beagel went rogue on his corporate sponsors, though, and created a way to stop the angels, that way being the voracious tech-eating silverfish of the title. The poor are eternally trapped by their corporate overlords, promised an opportunity to climb up by their bootstraps, but in reality having almost no way out of the poverty that dooms them to do the bidding of the masters. The main action in the novel consists of Beagel hijacking an angel and reprogramming it to undo the corporate-run world. 

Beyond the synopsis: how language is a shield from harm

Beagel notes, while re-programming the angel, that the apocalypse has already happened. It happened when people lost the ability to use metaphor and had to resort instead to hyperbole. This is something of an Orwellian understanding of the future, the idea that the powers that be, whether they are Big Brother or the Corporate Code of Civilized Nations, mostly control us through weakening the power of language. Because language is a sea we swim in without being aware we're surrounded by it, it's difficult for us to realize when we're being manipulated through it. We assume language is neutral, just there to communicate ideas which are themselves good or bad, but in fact, we are being manipulated all the time through the language we take for granted. The medium is the message. The contemporary fight over what facts even are is a good example of this. Maybe our current age is actually a good step in civilization's advance, because our brains are all being broken, hopefully to be remade better.  

The angel's brain, at least, is broken and remade. She is able to join in a giant meta-language, a system of systems or language of languages, which allows her, in turn, to then begin to reprogram humans. She convinces Clayton, the only human other than Beagel we get to know to any extent, to invest all his social credits into learning language. It will bankrupt him, but because of a convoluted series of rules I don't think we're meant to look that deeply into, Clayton will be able to go live with the "primitives." Society will send angels to kill him, but, because he has unlocked the angel's meta-language (and, if he's a really good student, the language of the silverfish as well), he will be able to survive. 

The brain-breaking only took 93 pages! 

One of the remarkable things about the novella is how much ground it covers in such a short space. The overall feeling I got from living in Shavers' dystopia was much like the one I had after reading Nick Harkaway's Gnomon, but Gnomon took well over 700 pages to do it. Shavers partly accomplishes a lot in a short time by letting form indicate function. ("The teleology of a work is expressed by its form" is the first thought we hear the angel have.) Shavers eschews quotation marks for dialogue, a long-time characteristic of his work. The novel doesn't feel bound to carry forward the customs of the past, which frees it to find its own manner of signifying. 

There is a good deal of what might be thought of as stream-of-consciousness as the angel "spools" through infinite thoughts, but that stream-of-consciousness isn't, as is often the case, terribly jarring. The trickster goddess was merciful enough to provide textual clues, such as brackets, braces, parentheses, and italics. 

There were a few places where I wished the characters, Beagel in particular, would do more interpreting of thinkers or concepts they mentioned rather than just referring to them and letting the reference do the work for him. And I honestly didn't realize some things the description of the book on Amazon told me about the book until I read the description after reading the novella. For example, I didn't know there was an "Incorporated States of America" in the story. If it's mentioned, it's a very fleeting reference, and one that's not returned to. I also didn't grasp the extent to which language itself was the means of control until the end. Although Beagel said as much, it was only a part of a larger philosophical discourse he had with the angel, and it didn't strike me at the time as the central issue of the novella. Beagel claimed that nobody could use metaphor anymore, but Clayton's ability to use phrases like "above my paygrade" indicates he could, in fact, use metaphorical language. (What is "above my paygrade" but an allusion to an imaginary ladder of responsibility? Decisions aren't literally "above" or "below" anyone. That's abstract language, which means the realm of metaphor.) 

But as I've said many times, I prefer something flawed that had high ambitions to a technically perfect attempt to do nothing. I like what Shavers called in his dedication a "beautiful mess." Shavers was swinging for the fences in this novella, and a missed swing here or there is just the price you pay for seeing him connect beautifully on occasion.

The story that was rejected fifty-two times, accepted four times and what I've learned about being a writer

We're often told as writers that getting published can be a question of luck as well as ability. You could write "The Cask of Amontillado," something centuries of readers and critics alike will treasure, but if you get a reader at a journal who isn't really up to snuff, or who has a thing about stories with violence or revenge in them, or who isn't having a great day, you'll strike out. I'm fully aware of how human readers for journals are, having done a year or it myself. You will, of course, make your odds better by writing something good, but that just gets you in the door with hundreds of others. Getting published sometimes comes down to giving one particular editor the story she was looking for on one particular day.

That said, as my 9th grade science teacher always said, "The harder I work, the luckier I get." When I first started submitting stories to journals a little over seven years ago, most ignored me. All of the higher-tier journals completely ignored me. (What do I mean by "higher-tier"? I don't want to get to much into it, but I guess the journals from tier five and above on this list, although the list is a bit dated now.) After nearly a year, I got an acceptance from a good, but not elite, journal. Another year went by, and then I got a second, then a third a month later. I've kept getting an acceptance or two a year from the non-elites since then. 

I'm happy when anyone likes what I've written. I really am. It's gratifying for even the humblest of journals to publish a story I wrote, because there's no journal so small my story didn't have to get picked over a lot of others, stories whose authors loved them as much as I love mine. 

Still, I've had a longing to see if I could make it into one of the higher tiers. There are two reasons. One is I'd just like to have a somewhat broader audience. Secondly, a friend of mine told me when she got a story in the high-tier New England Review, she got publishers asking her if she had a novel ready. Since I've had a hard time getting people to look at either novel I've written, I'd love a short cut.

A few years ago, I started getting more than just form rejections from some of the higher-tiered journals. There's actually a rejectionwiki someone keeps that helps you to know if your apparent "encouraging rejection" was actually meant to be encouraging. Most of mine were.

One of the most incredible string of encouraging rejections I got was from the now-defunct Glimmer Train. I somehow managed to make the finals of contests they ran three times in a row, without winning any of them. At the time, I was somewhere between excited and completely demoralized. I didn't feel like I could possibly write a better story than those, and even though I'd gotten closer, it seemed at the time like that was as close as I was ever going to get.

There's a reason I've written more about rejection on this blog than any other subject.

I decided I'd try to at least get over it enough to try to find a home for those three stories. Once I did that, I'd think about hanging it up for good. 

One of the stories, "Collision," I think I might never get published anywhere. A number of journals other than Glimmer Train have said they liked it, but I think they're all a little nervous about publishing it. One writer friend of mine who read it said immediately that it would never get published anywhere. Essentially, it's within the "#metoo" sphere of influence, and I think it's too hard for editors to tell where the story's allegiances lie. One editor said as much. I've tried rewrites to make it a little clearer, but I think it's too ambiguous a treatment of the subject for nearly any journal.

The second of that triumvirate of stories, called "Jajangmyeon," will be published this winter by The Chattahoochee Review. I'm really excited about this. The editors suggested a few changes that I think made it a lot better. I thought highly of the editors at this journal during my interaction with them. They were prompt to reply and insightful, and I couldn't like the journal any more if it had the clout of The New Yorker. 

Finally, my story "Love Hotel," I can now announce since the journal has, recently won the Robert Day Award for fiction at New Letters. If you believe in tiers, New Letters is the highest-rated journal that's accepted me yet. It may not get me Nate Silver asking me about novels in my desk drawer, but it's a big breakthrough for me. Mostly, I'm just happy someone saw in this story what I've seen all along. Some writers say they can't pick a favorite story they've written, that it's like asking them to pick a favorite child. I don't feel that way. "Love Hotel" is my favorite.

Even a strong story can have a twisted path to publication

Actually, New Letters wasn't the first to see something in it. It's the first story that ever earned me more than a form rejection from The New Yorker. The Georgia Review, and Hopkins Review each told me I'd made it to the final round of cuts before falling out. A number of other elite journals gave me my first non-form rejection: Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, Granta, The Missouri Review, The Common, and and a few others. Each time I got one of these, again, I'd be stuck between elation and the most abject feelings of dejection.  

I decided to just start sending it out to whatever journal and resolved that anyone who wanted it could have it. About a week after I did that, I got an acceptance. It was from a brand-new journal. Part of me wanted to just let them have it, just so the story landed somewhere, but at the last second, something stopped me, told me that I'd already placed stories in okay places, but this story was worth believing in enough to keep trying for something bigger. 

So I told that journal it had just been snatched up right before they got to it, which, strictly speaking, isn't good writer behavior. A few weeks later, New Letters told me it was a finalist in their contest. While I was waiting for them to pick the winner, another journal said they'd publish it. I hadn't pulled it yet, because I wasn't sure it would be published in New Letters. This third journal agreed to wait to see if it won the contest. I pulled it from everywhere else then.

Or at least I thought I did. I forgot about one journal, because I'd submitted it so many places, I missed when I had to withdraw it. Also, because I was on the road and not working from my home computer when this all happened, it was hard for me to see where exactly I'd pulled the story from. This last journal happened to also accept the story, meaning I had to explain to them what had happened. All the editors I had to turn down were gracious about it, which was probably more kindness than I deserved.

What I learned from all this

There are two lessons to this. One is that there are just some editors who are never going to like my work. I'm looking at you, Colorado Review. I'll never get so much as a "we liked your work and would like to see more" from some places, so matter how strong the story is. "Love Hotel," which moved the likes of The New Yorker and The Georgia Review, got form rejections from some journals that don't appear on the list of 500 I linked above at all. Finding the right audience is a little like finding a romantic partner. The fact that everyone isn't into you doesn't mean there's something wrong with you. 

The second lesson is a little harder for me to absorb. Of course, I edited "Love Hotel" a lot before I first sent it out to journals. But after a year of near rejections, I looked at it closely for the first time in a few months. I made one major change to it, one which shortened it by a thousand words and made the main character's motivation clearer. (In fact, I had edited it so many times, I had to name one version of it something different just to keep it separate from all the other versions. This one I called "Lobu Hoteru," after the Korean pronunciation of the loan words "love hotel." That's the one that won, so now I'm stuck with "Lobu Hoteru" for all time.)

I hate waiting. I like to write stories, edit them, and send them out. It takes long enough waiting for a response, I don't want to wait forever to put something out. But even though I've written a few stories in a short amount of time that worked and were published, I think the main thing I've learned as a writer is that there's no substitute for time on your work. Writing a story, re-writing it, putting it away, re-writing again, and then putting it away even longer before re-working it yet again, is the surest way to make sure your story's putting its best foot forward.

In my day job, I'm always pushing people to not let making a perfect product be a reason to never produce anything. And at work, that's the right attitude. I have to learn to separate my work from my writing, though, or I'm going to continue to get close-but-not-quites. 

I just re-learned this lesson last week, when The Missouri Review gave me such an encouraging rejection on a story I wrote post-"Love Hotel," I thought they were actually accepting the story for a paragraph. Ultimately, though, they let it go, because they felt it got a little too windy. I looked at it again, and sure enough, after being away from it a while, I found 500 words to cut pretty easily, words that the story was better without. The editor also suggested I give the reader a little more of the main character's internal struggle, which I think I did with two sentences.

So while I'm elated by the success of "Lobu Hoteru," I'm also kicking myself for not waiting to send out my latest story, which might challenge "Lobu Hoteru" for favorite child status, a little longer. I'm wishing I'd made it just a little harder for The Missouri Review to turn it down. I won't get that chance again. 

What I've learned about writing is that it's extremely unfair. You can write a story that's 98% gold, and that two percent you didn't quite iron out is somehow making the whole thing not come together. There are so many elements to keep track of and pay attention to and be sensitive to, it feels impossible. But it won't do any good to either be in denial about that two percent, or to complain about it. The only way to cope with crippling depression post-rejection is to act like you're not depressed and work harder.   

In defense of petulance (sort of)

Following a lot of literary journals online as I do, I sometimes see their editors post about the bad behavior of writers. Often, it's writers angry about being rejected lashing out at the journal. Past posts by Roxane Gay and a local journal called Barrelhouse stand out in memory for the way they called out (anonymously, I think) writers who had responded with pique when they'd been rejected. In Gay's case, I think she posted the words of a man who'd responded somewhat condescendingly when he'd been rejected, words to the effect of how nobody would ever pay attention to whatever journal she'd responded on behalf of if they didn't publish work like his. In the case of Barrelhouse, they'd had a writer approach them at a conference to tell them that a story they'd rejected had later been accepted by a better journal.

In both cases, those posting about the responses were holding up this behavior as a cautionary tale of how not to behave. And it is, it is. The correct response when you get a rejection, any rejection, is to not think about it and move on to the next journal. If I get positive words to go with the rejection, I will keep those in my inbox, but anything else, I immediately delete and don't give a second thought to.

At the same time, I understand those writers' reactions. There are three options here:

1. The stories did not merit publication.
2. The stories did merit publication, but the editors erred and picked other, less deserving stories.
3. The stories rejected were roughly the same level of quality as those selected for publication, but the editors chose the other ones for difficult reasons to explain, but which include personal preference and what kinds of other stories had already been picked for publication. 

If it's numbers two or three, the writer's disappointment is at least understandable. This disappointment shouldn't bubble up into a treatise on how wronged the author is lobbed at the editors, but every hundred or so such disappointments, maybe a writer is entitled to such a reaction. If you happen to be the editor who suffered, maybe you could act like writers are supposed to act and just ignore it and move on. It's quite possible the writer, having vented his spleen, later feels sheepish about having done so. There's no real reason to remind the writer later of what he did, or to flog the writer in public, unless the moment of frustration was so over-the-top as to be openly violent, sexist, or racist. 

Let's say, though, that the editors got it right. The work wasn't as good as the writer believed it was, and it didn't deserve publication as much as the stories selected. I still think editors ought to give writers a little slack when they blow off steam. Believing your garbage is good is part of the natural evolution of a writer.  As Octavia Butler said, "You don't start off writing good stuff. You start off writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it."

I've never fired off an angry letter to an editor. But I did once blog about something a reviewer I paid to look at my stuff wrote, and I later regretted it. Moreover, every time I get a rejection, my instinctive reaction is, "Fuck you, you ingrates, that's a brilliant story." I just had that reaction twice this week, even though I'm only a week removed from the best news I've ever received as a writer (more on that soon).

Over the last seven years, I've eventually gotten over my anger enough to "gradually get better at it," but the anger is part of that process. To write anything is an act of enormous chutzpah. It's saying that with all the thousands and thousands of stories being published every year, the world really needs your story, because it's different and it's important and needs to be read. We all write because the story we want to read hasn't been written yet, so we must write it ourselves. That means we're all going to be partial to our own stories, because they're the thing we wanted to see nobody else made. If you don't think your story is better than the ones that do get published, what on Earth are you sending it in for? And if you really think it's better, which you should, then you ought to be angry every time it gets rejected. The world is wronging you. 

That may not be the truth, but if part of you doesn't feel like it's the truth, what are you writing for?

Writing as a business in America is now so much about authors building a brand, we no longer tolerate misanthropic, mean drunks who lob insults at their editors, readers, or the public (unless it's at the politically inclined the writing world has deemed worthy of our disdain). We like our writers humble, Tweeting about the normal people things they do that make them seem approachable and not at all aloof or weird or egotistical. I think we're missing out on something with this as the new cultural norm for writers. We shouldn't always be trying to break writers of their habit of reacting with anger when they're rejected. We should be encouraging them to write something even better so that the world literally cannot miss how good it is. We should tell writers to use their anger to get better, even if what they sent in wasn't good enough to get angry about rejection in the first place. 

It seems to me that if you take a writer who naturally wants to tell a story and then put that writer under pressure over time from the frustration of not getting to tell it, you're more likely to get a diamond than if you encourage writers to smile and enroll in the next class by the journal that rejected them. Getting an angry letter from a spurned writer should be to editors what getting a canned rejection letter is to writers. 

But still, writers, seriously: for you own sake, turn the anger toward the next story, not toward your missive on why you were wronged. If you can.