On rejections ...
Charlie Stross
Tor. Some of you may know her as a prolific blogger. Of particular
interest, is her current weblog entry -- and the discussion hanging off
it -- at http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004641.html -- on
the subject of authors and rejections.
Read it, and learn thereby, if you have trouble with rejection slips.
-- Charlie
Nicola Browne
news:c5e2f1-...@antipope.org
I enjoyed it and it will put me off careful rejectomancy
in the future ( Maybe)
Nicky
--
Posted via Mailgate.ORG Server - http://www.Mailgate.ORG
Dan Goodman
@antipope.org:
I have trouble with _one_ form rejection: the bottom-rung one from
Asimov's.
--
Dan Goodman
Journal http://dsgood.blogspot.com or
http://www.livejournal.com/users/dsgood/
Whatever you wish for me, may you have twice as much.
Charlie Stross
as <cha...@antipope.org> declared:
> Some of you may know Teresa Neilsen Hayden as one of the SF editors at
^^
> it -- at http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004641.html -- on
^^
Aaagh. Why do I *always* get her name wrong?
-- Charlie
AKNicolle
That was a good read. It sounds like some people need to stop whining and get
back to work! Time spent dwelling on rejections would be better spent either
sending the ms out again, fixing it, or getting arse into gear and writing
something new - or all of the above.
Cheers,
Andrew
http://www.journalscape.com/AndrewN
Mary Gentle
Stross) wrote:
You know, I find it difficult to think there's anybody out there who
_doesn't_ know the basics of this stuff, by now. I mean, it's easier to
find it now than it was pre-www, when I was starting to send stuff to
publishers. (Then there was just _Writers & Artists,_ which I have to
admit tells you all you need to know: here's how you format a manuscript,
here are the people who deal with XYZ, send an SAE.)
Then again, I'm familiar with that site for rejection letters and
comments. I think it does the people who post there a great disservice -
in that what they say hangs around and looks unprofessional for the next
<x> decades. But . . .
But, rejection is a painful part of the business, even though it _is_
business. Pain can be vented. Everybody's _entitled_ to their "this
editor is a purblind idiot, in the pay of the Rosicrucians, who wouldn't
recognise my genius if I bit his or her arse!" moment. Several moments,
even. I wouldn't recommend verging on the paranoid ("the editor must hate
me personally"/"there's a massive conspiracy against publishing novels on
subject <x>"/"publishing is part of the old boy network"[1]), but you're
entitled to those moments, too, in the seconds after the rejection letter
hits the mat.
I can see where Teresa NH would be unhappy at reading the responses, but .
. . I dunno, when I did the little editing I did, I was never under any
illusion about the fact that the writers whose stories I rejected would be
cursing my name. It doesn't matter how you slice it, or how you phrase
the rejection letter: _no_ is still _no._ Then writer sucks it up, and
sticks the manuscript in an envelope, and sends it on its merry way to the
next publisher. And the editor accepts that some people now hate them
without justification.
Putting it on a web site makes you look an idiot, because everybody's
tantrums look idiotic to others, no matter how emotionally justified they
are at the time. But it's not like 99% of writers of rejected manuscripts
aren't thinking much the same thing: "they rejected my book; the sons of
bitches, how dare they!" No matter if that's not a rational response.
I loved one of the appended comments to Teresa's piece:
"I'm heartened to see how many fuckwits are trying to publish novels,
which can only make the rest of us look brilliant by contrast."
Heh.
Actually, I'd rather the fuckwits got a going-over with the clue-bat,
because, who knows?, they might eventually produce something I'd enjoy as
a reader. But there is some truth in the theory that certain responses to
rejection are Darwinism in action . . .
I liked Teresa's point 13, too:
"It’s a good book, but the house isn’t going to get behind it, so if you
buy it, it’ll just get lost in the shuffle."
_That's_ the sort of industry thing that isn't obvious from the outside,
the way "editors send form rejections because they're short of time, not
because they hate you" probably is obvious. Many people have a grip on
the fact that being functionally illiterate, or producing something trite,
clichéd, and generally crap, will move your manuscript over to the 'reject
this' heap. It isn't always obvious that things which would happen in the
_process_ of publishing can affect an otherwise-good book.
Charlie, I'm not really sure your reasons for why rejection is painful are
quite on target for some people:
>It's an issue of self-identity. People who write think of themselves as
>being writers; thus, to have their writing rejected is to question an
>aspect of their identity.
I think it's simpler than that, for some. When you write something and
send it in, you _know_ it's good. Every writer knows that. You _know_ it
even when it's the biggest bit of drek on God's earth. If it gets
rejected, despite that gut knowledge, the writer _knows_ it's not fair.
People's feelings of injustice are powerful, and it's those feelings that
go looking for a hook to hang themselves on -- the editor's mean, the
publisher is politically biassed, etc and etc.
Then you can get the other painful part of rejection -- the realisation
that maybe this wasn't so good. In fact, maybe it wasn't so hot at all.
This, that, and the other thing are wrong with it, and . . . Well: and
time for a rewrite before you send it off to another publisher, if
professional publication is what you're after. But it's painful to see
you weren't as good as you thought you were.
Oh, and when you say:
>The whole issue of why so many people harbour romantic misconceptions
>about the literary lifestyle is one that needs to be examined if we're to
>understand why so many people respond badly to rejection letters. And
>here I think other writers are partially to blame, for in all too many
>fictions about writers we see them presented as free, and wealthy, and
>fulfilled ...
which fictions are you thinking about? I would have said there was far
more of the 'starving in a garret for my art' about, in terms of romantic
misconceptions.
Then again, _I_ think being a writer is romantic. :-) Or at least, the
best thing since sliced bread. I haven't ended up wealthy, but it beats
every other job I've done hollow, even if it does reduce me to ferocious
gibbering incoherency every so often . . .
Mary
[1] There's a little truth in that one, in the UK, though a lot less now
than there was; and it isn't anything to really worry about - it functions
about on the same level as going to a con and persuading an editor to let
you send him/her a manuscript.
Remus Shepherd
Saw it earlier -- good article.
She does overlook one thing about authors, though. Authors see rejection
slips from multiple editors, so their reactions are often based on how a
rejection is relative to others. When you get one rejection that says,
'Great story -- I'm sure someone will publish it but we can't right now',
three form letters, and one more that claims you're a chimpanzee with a thin
grasp of the english language, then it's hard not to lose respect for one
or more of the editors involved...if not the entire profession.
... ...
Remus Shepherd <re...@panix.com>
Dan Goodman
news:memo.2004020...@roxanne.morgan.ntlworld.com:
> You know, I find it difficult to think there's anybody out there who
> _doesn't_ know the basics of this stuff, by now. I mean, it's easier to
> find it now than it was pre-www, when I was starting to send stuff to
> publishers.
Consider how many people fall for the Nigerian Letter -- a scam which in
one form or another has been well-known for at least the last couple of
centuries.
Consider how many people are surprised to learn that stock markets can go
down as well as up.
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
> But, rejection is a painful part of the business, even though it _is_
> business. Pain can be vented. Everybody's _entitled_ to their "this
> editor is a purblind idiot, in the pay of the Rosicrucians, who wouldn't
> recognise my genius if I bit his or her arse!" moment. Several moments,
> even. I wouldn't recommend verging on the paranoid ("the editor must hate
> me personally"/"there's a massive conspiracy against publishing novels on
> subject <x>"/"publishing is part of the old boy network"[1]), but you're
> entitled to those moments, too, in the seconds after the rejection letter
> hits the mat.
The publisher I am doing internship for now generously accepts and reads
and responds to all manuscripts. They get screaming-insults phone calls
from rejected authors for their pains.
(Not me: I don't answer the phone).
--
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan - ada...@spamcop.net - this is a valid address
homepage: http://www.fantascienza.net/sfpeople/elethiomel
English blog: http://annafdd.blogspot.com/
LJ: http://www.livejournal.com/users/annafdd/
David Friedman
mary_...@cix.co.uk (Mary Gentle) wrote:
> I think it's simpler than that, for some. When you write something and
> send it in, you _know_ it's good. Every writer knows that. You _know_ it
> even when it's the biggest bit of drek on God's earth.
One element of this I have wondered about, mainly in the context of my
own response to my own work, is how much of it is simple bias and how
much of it is the fact that the author knows lots of things that he
hasn't given the reader enough information to know. If we think of "the
story" as the story in the author's head, it might really be a very good
story. The author's mistake is in not realizing that the words he wrote
don't succeed in reconstructing that story in the head of a reader--in
this case the editor.
And it might not even be that the information isn't there. I've not only
written my book, I've read it many times. So of course I know the
throwaway comment on page nine that makes it perfectly obvious to anyone
not an idiot what is really going on on page 197.
--
Remove NOSPAM to email
Also remove .invalid
www.daviddfriedman.com
Patricia C. Wrede
"Remus Shepherd" <re...@panix.com> wrote in message
news:bvma1q$p49$1...@reader2.panix.com...
> She does overlook one thing about authors, though. Authors see
rejection
> slips from multiple editors, so their reactions are often based on how a
> rejection is relative to others.
*Some* authors see multiple rejection slips. You'd be surprised at the
number who give up after one bounce, usually in either a major snit or a
major depression.
*Published* authors have seen multiple rejection slips, from multiple
publishers. Frequently, they've seen a whole heck of a lot more of them
than the unpublished folks. And it's a funny thing, but you know, you just
don't find published authors having those kinds of reactions to the kinds of
letters Theresa was quoting.
> When you get one rejection that says,
> 'Great story -- I'm sure someone will publish it but we can't right now',
> three form letters, and one more that claims you're a chimpanzee with a
thin
> grasp of the english language, then it's hard not to lose respect for one
> or more of the editors involved...if not the entire profession.
Only if you either know nothing whatever about books and readers (note that
I don't say "the publishing business"), or have not thought at all about
what you *do* know. I have never met a reader who had *not* run into that
exact diversity of opinion regarding some published novel: "This is a
fabulous book; I loved every minute of it! I wish there were a dozen
sequels just like it!" "What are you talking about? It sucked rocks. The
editor who bought it should have been fired." "I dunno. It was OK, I
guess, but I don't see what you other two are on about. It was good
airplane reading, that's about it." The idea that editors are going to
reflect a similar diversity does not seem to me to be all that much of a
stretch.
Your three categories -- great story, form letter, insulting rejection --
only have any general implication about editors if you assume that there is
some set of generally accepted objective criteria against which all stories
are judged, and that therefore one or more of the editors is not applying
those criteria appropriately or effectively. But there isn't any such
thing.
Patricia C. Wrede
Patricia C. Wrede
"David Friedman" <dd...@daviddfriedman.nospam.com> wrote in message
news:ddfr-E4B7C2.1...@sea-read.news.verio.net...
> hasn't given the reader enough information to know. If we think of "the
> story" as the story in the author's head, it might really be a very good
> story.
I don't quite see what that has to do with anything. I mean, whether the
story in the author's head is a good, great, or brilliant one has nothing to
do with what got onto the page. And even if the story on the page is, by
some mythical objective standard, a brilliant one, that doesn't guarantee
acceptance by the first editor who sees it, or even the tenth. Else there
wouldn't be all those stories about bestselling titles and future classics
getting rejected over and over.
It's not a matter of whose judgement is "right" -- whether the book is
"good" or not. The fact that a story has been rejected has *nothing* to do
with whether the writer, or even the story, is objectively "good" or not.
Because there *isn't* a generally accepted set of objective criteria that
you can use to judge "good" for even the smallest sub-market of fiction, let
alone all of it together. But that's how people often take rejection -- as
a judgment that the story "isn't good." And of course they resent it.
But when you get into the *business* of publication, it's, well, business.
Editors aren't paid to judge whether a book is good, bad, brilliant, or
mediocre; they're paid to decide whether *their publisher* can make money
selling it. "Good" is one factor in that equation, but it's far from the
only one and it's not an objective opinion anyway.
>The author's mistake is in not realizing that the words he wrote
> don't succeed in reconstructing that story in the head of a reader--in
> this case the editor.
I don't know that that's a mistake, particularly. I mean, the editor may
not be the kind of reader the book is intended for.
The real mistake I saw all those authors making is precisely the one Theresa
fingered: taking it personally. Not seeing publication (note: not
writing; *publication*) as a business, with the constraints of any normal
business -- some of which constraints may never be particularly obvious to
any given writer. One of which constraints is, always, that the particular,
individual, house/line/magazine editor has to "get it" at least enough to
realize that other people will buy this, even if it's not the sort of thing
the editor him/herself likes much.
Patricia C. Wrede
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
> The real mistake I saw all those authors making is precisely the one Theresa
> fingered: taking it personally. Not seeing publication (note: not
> writing; *publication*) as a business,
What I see from my perch in a mainstream publisher, and that is probably
obscured in SF, is that for a lot of writers what they write _is_
personal: they write autobiography. It's really unsettling to read an
author's cover letter and bio and then their work. You get the distinct
and unwelcome impression that you're rejecting _the person_ and their
life's story. Gives me the creeps, frankly.
Irina Rempt
(ada...@spamcop.net) wrote:
> What I see from my perch in a mainstream publisher, and that is
> probably obscured in SF, is that for a lot of writers what they write
> _is_ personal: they write autobiography. It's really unsettling to
> read an author's cover letter and bio and then their work. You get the
> distinct and unwelcome impression that you're rejecting _the person_
> and their life's story. Gives me the creeps, frankly.
I'm *so* glad I write fantasy. Though people think I write autobiography
*anyway*, and it's very hard to talk that out of their heads.
Irina
--
Vesta veran, terna puran, farenin. http://www.valdyas.org/irina/
Beghinnen can ick, volherden will' ick, volbringhen sal ick.
http://www.valdyas.org/foundobjects/index.cgi Latest: 02-Feb-2004
Nicola Browne
news:ddfr-E4B7C2.1...@sea-read.news.verio.net
>
> And it might not even be that the information isn't there. I've not only
> written my book, I've read it many times. So of course I know the
> throwaway comment on page nine that makes it perfectly obvious to anyone
> not an idiot what is really going on on page 197.
I think you're doing well if you can face reading it several times.
I have to make myslef read my stuff again for edit purposes and then
I never want to se it again - ever : )
David Friedman
"Patricia C. Wrede" <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
> "David Friedman" <dd...@daviddfriedman.nospam.com> wrote in message
> news:ddfr-E4B7C2.1...@sea-read.news.verio.net...
>
> > hasn't given the reader enough information to know. If we think of "the
> > story" as the story in the author's head, it might really be a very good
> > story.
>
> I don't quite see what that has to do with anything.
It has to do with why the author might react as, I gather, many authors
do, to a rejection. Which was the point I was commenting on. The author
knows the story in his head and isn't allowing for the fact that that
isn't the story that was rejected, because the editor could only judge
the story as it got to the editor.
> It's not a matter of whose judgement is "right" -- whether the book is
> "good" or not. The fact that a story has been rejected has *nothing* to do
> with whether the writer, or even the story, is objectively "good" or not.
"Nothing to do with?"
> Because there *isn't* a generally accepted set of objective criteria that
> you can use to judge "good" for even the smallest sub-market of fiction, let
> alone all of it together.
Do you try to make your stories good ones? Is revision in part an
attempt to make them better? If so, you believe there are criteria to
judge good, whether or not they are generally accepted and "objective,"
whatever the latter means.
So suppose we go by your criteria. Do you believe there is zero
correlation between whether a story is good and whether it is accepted?
If you think your second draft is much better than your first, do you
also think both drafts are equally likely to be accepted?
...
> But when you get into the *business* of publication, it's, well, business.
> Editors aren't paid to judge whether a book is good, bad, brilliant, or
> mediocre; they're paid to decide whether *their publisher* can make money
> selling it. "Good" is one factor in that equation, but it's far from the
> only one and it's not an objective opinion anyway.
Once you concede that it is one factor in that equation, your previous
statement that "The fact that a story has been rejected has *nothing* to
do with whether the writer, or even the story, is objectively "good" or
not" reduces to a quibble between "good" and "objectively good." Because
if it is one factor, than the fact that a story has been rejected does
have something to do with whether the story is good.
One more datum and I may have to conclude that there is a correlation
between writing good books and finding it difficult to think in
probabilistic terms. But as long as it isn't too high a correlation ... .
Nicola Browne
news:1739000.o...@calcifer.valdyas.org
>> > What I see from my perch in a mainstream publisher, and that is
> > probably obscured in SF, is that for a lot of writers what they write
> > _is_ personal: they write autobiography. It's really unsettling to
> > read an author's cover letter and bio and then their work. You get the
> > distinct and unwelcome impression that you're rejecting _the person_
> > and their life's story. Gives me the creeps, frankly.
>
> I'm *so* glad I write fantasy. Though people think I write autobiography
> *anyway*, and it's very hard to talk that out of their heads.
>
I don't think it matters what you write- people always think it's
about you - and of course at some level it always is. I find the idea
of people I know reading my stuff acutely discomforting because,
although
I've never been a cetic warrior who can turn herself into a man at will
and has magical powers, the whole business is just too revealing.
Dorothy J Heydt
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan <ada...@spamcop.net> wrote:
>Patricia C. Wrede <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>> The real mistake I saw all those authors making is precisely the one Theresa
>> fingered: taking it personally. Not seeing publication (note: not
>> writing; *publication*) as a business,
>
>What I see from my perch in a mainstream publisher, and that is probably
>obscured in SF, is that for a lot of writers what they write _is_
>personal: they write autobiography. It's really unsettling to read an
>author's cover letter and bio and then their work. You get the distinct
>and unwelcome impression that you're rejecting _the person_ and their
>life's story. Gives me the creeps, frankly.
That has always been very hard for me to understand. Unless
you're seriously famous for having done something else, why write
autobiography? Well, for therapy, yeah. But why write autobiography
and expect someone to publish it? And yet apparently it does get
published on occasion.
Many of you have probably read Anne Lamott's _Bird by Bird,_
which is her advice on writing, sort of, but huge chunks of it
are autobiography and she makes it plain that everything else she
writes is thinly-disguised, or not even thinly, autobiography.
She has managed to sell several of her books; though a large
chunk of the autobiography contained in _BbB_ is "how I starved
and suffered for six years while rewriting the latest chunk of my
autobiography forty-six times."
Why do people write autobiography expecting that someone will buy
it? Why do editors buy it, when they do? Why do those readers
who read it, read it?
Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djh...@kithrup.com
David Friedman
"Nicola Browne" <nicky.m...@btinternet.com> wrote:
> "David Friedman" <dd...@daviddfriedman.nospam.com> wrote in message
> news:ddfr-E4B7C2.1...@sea-read.news.verio.net
>
> >
> > And it might not even be that the information isn't there. I've not only
> > written my book, I've read it many times. So of course I know the
> > throwaway comment on page nine that makes it perfectly obvious to anyone
> > not an idiot what is really going on on page 197.
>
> I think you're doing well if you can face reading it several times.
> I have to make myslef read my stuff again for edit purposes and then
> I never want to se it again - ever : )
Interesting.
How about other people? I have reread my WIS multiple times, in part to
spot things I might want to change but also because I enjoy doing so.
From time to time I reread a chunk of one of my published (nonfiction)
books or articles, and enjoy it. One reason to write a book, after all,
is that you believe the world suffers from a shortage of that particular
sort of literature--which is to say that there is less of it out there
for you to read than you wish.
How many people out there are in Nicola's camp, how many in mine?
David Friedman
djh...@kithrup.com (Dorothy J Heydt) wrote:
> >What I see from my perch in a mainstream publisher, and that is probably
> >obscured in SF, is that for a lot of writers what they write _is_
> >personal: they write autobiography. It's really unsettling to read an
> >author's cover letter and bio and then their work. You get the distinct
> >and unwelcome impression that you're rejecting _the person_ and their
> >life's story. Gives me the creeps, frankly.
>
> That has always been very hard for me to understand. Unless
> you're seriously famous for having done something else, why write
> autobiography? Well, for therapy, yeah. But why write autobiography
> and expect someone to publish it? And yet apparently it does get
> published on occasion.
I'm not sure if it was what Anna meant, but I would have said that lots
of writing is about oneself without being autobiographical. My
protagonist's life is not at all like mine. But he is, in some ways, me
as I wish I were. And the conflict that the book grew out of, and that
now motivates the first half, was ultimately inspired by a real world
conflict I was part of, although it changed enormously from that over
the course of becoming part of a novel.
One's own life is, after all, the life one knows most about. So it is
natural for various elements of it to end up in your writing.
Shelly
I would guess it's a few things. Some people think they're more interesting
than other people think they are.
Some people take the advice to write what they know a bit too seriously, IMO.
Some people don't know what else to write about.
Some people use writing, even fiction as a form of journaling or they put too
much of themselves into a character, so it might not be strictly
autobiographical but close enough cuz they know themselves best and find that
easier to write.
I'm sure there are other reasons, too.
On the AOL writers boards, not a week goes by when someone doesn't pop into one
of the folders and announces they have a unique story to tell and ask either if
someone will write it for them or if someone can tell them how to get it
published. Usually, they're talking non-fiction, but the need to write about
their lives is the same and almost invariably, those lives seem to be about
surviving and recovering from horrible abuse. It gets rather sad, actually.
Shelly
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
> Why do people write autobiography expecting that someone will buy
> it?
From what I see, because they are terribly narcissistic and truly
believe their life of being of absorbing interest to the world at large.
Mostly it isn't but...
>Why do editors buy it, when they do?
Why do those readers
> who read it, read it?
...Because if they are good, they do actually manage to make their
life's story unforgettable, significant. I've just been reading one such
novel. Mostly it's the style for me, but that's saying all and nothing,
right?
(Actually, I'm reading Iain Banks' bloody whiskey shopping _lists_ and
they make for riveting read! That guy is actually gluing my eyes to the
page with a list of secondary Scottish roads and how he drives on them!
I wish I knew how he does it.)
Zeborah
> I think it's simpler than that, for some. When you write something and
> send it in, you _know_ it's good. Every writer knows that. You _know_ it
> even when it's the biggest bit of drek on God's earth.
No, I know that I love it, but I don't know that it's good. I _really_
don't know if it's good or not, and though I like to think it's better
than some of the drek out there, I know it's got some large unusual
aspects that could well be considered serious weaknesses.
And the WIP seems destined to replicate some of those things. I'm
hoping that it's just that I haven't had a whole lot of practice yet
with endings, and that I'll eventually get over it.
Zeborah
Remus Shepherd
> > She does overlook one thing about authors, though. Authors see
> rejection
> > slips from multiple editors, so their reactions are often based on how a
> > rejection is relative to others.
> *Some* authors see multiple rejection slips. You'd be surprised at the
> number who give up after one bounce, usually in either a major snit or a
> major depression.
> *Published* authors have seen multiple rejection slips, from multiple
> publishers. Frequently, they've seen a whole heck of a lot more of them
> than the unpublished folks. And it's a funny thing, but you know, you just
> don't find published authors having those kinds of reactions to the kinds of
> letters Theresa was quoting.
Yes, I posted the above to the blog and someone responded, likening
the variety of rejection slips to the variety of critiques you'd get from
a writing workshop. The best advice is to mentally average the responses.
But many people aren't that wise. :)
Dorothy J Heydt
David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.nospam.com> wrote:
>In article <HsHD...@kithrup.com>,
> djh...@kithrup.com (Dorothy J Heydt) wrote:
>
>> >What I see from my perch in a mainstream publisher, and that is probably
>> >obscured in SF, is that for a lot of writers what they write _is_
>> >personal: they write autobiography. It's really unsettling to read an
>> >author's cover letter and bio and then their work. You get the distinct
>> >and unwelcome impression that you're rejecting _the person_ and their
>> >life's story. Gives me the creeps, frankly.
>>
>> That has always been very hard for me to understand. Unless
>> you're seriously famous for having done something else, why write
>> autobiography? Well, for therapy, yeah. But why write autobiography
>> and expect someone to publish it? And yet apparently it does get
>> published on occasion.
>
>natural for various elements of it to end up in your writing.
I dunno about yours, David, but the more like my life the writing
is, the duller, more boring, more thoroughly plotless it will be.
(Hm, maybe that's the problem....)
Dorothy J Heydt
Shelly <shell...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>On the AOL writers boards, not a week goes by when someone doesn't pop into one
>of the folders and announces they have a unique story to tell and ask either if
>someone will write it for them or if someone can tell them how to get it
>published. Usually, they're talking non-fiction, but the need to write about
>their lives is the same and almost invariably, those lives seem to be about
>surviving and recovering from horrible abuse. It gets rather sad, actually.
Yes, well, that's why I said "therapy".
But expecting people to pay to read it?
Shelly
>Shelly <shell...@aol.com> wrote:
>>
>>On the AOL writers boards, not a week goes by when someone doesn't pop into
>one
>>of the folders and announces they have a unique story to tell and ask either
>if
>>someone will write it for them or if someone can tell them how to get it
>>published. Usually, they're talking non-fiction, but the need to write about
>>their lives is the same and almost invariably, those lives seem to be about
>>surviving and recovering from horrible abuse. It gets rather sad, actually.
>
>Yes, well, that's why I said "therapy".
>
>But expecting people to pay to read it?
Yeah. Many of them actually say they think their life story is inspirational,
will help others, etc. They feel the need to share. They also seem to think no
one else has published a book/story like theirs.
Shelly
S. Palmer
> Read it, and learn thereby, if you have trouble with rejection slips.
Hmmm. My only problem with rejection slips is having too many of 'em,
and not enough of the other kind. (Well, okay, *none* of the other
kind.) The way I've been thinking about it lately is it'll be neat to
have a really impressive collection of 'em (stacks and stacks) when I've
finally succeeded, as proof of the value of not giving up easily.
-Suzanne
Brenda W. Clough
I can't imagine not enjoying one's own work. I adore rewriting and
rereading. The difficulty usually is in putting the old work down and
starting a new work.
Brenda
--
---------
Brenda W. Clough
http://www.sff.net/people/Brenda/
Recent short fiction: PARADOX, Autumn 2003
http://home.nyc.rr.com/paradoxmag//index.html
Upcoming short fiction in FIRST HEROES (TOR, May '04)
http://members.aol.com/wenamun/firstheroes.html
Marilee J. Layman
People frequently say I should write about how I got sick and how
things have been since, and not only am I not particularly interested
in writing that, but I can't see how it would be interesting reading
to non-medical people.
--
Marilee J. Layman
Brian Pickrell
> > When you get one rejection that says,
> > 'Great story -- I'm sure someone will publish it but we can't right now',
> > three form letters, and one more that claims you're a chimpanzee with a
> thin
> > grasp of the english language, then it's hard not to lose respect for one
> > or more of the editors involved...if not the entire profession.
>
> Only if you either know nothing whatever about books and readers (note that
> I don't say "the publishing business"), or have not thought at all about
> what you *do* know. I have never met a reader who had *not* run into that
> exact diversity of opinion regarding some published novel
Well, yes, but I don't have much respect for most readers.
R. L.
<dd...@daviddfriedman.nospam.com> wrote:
>In article <88e26584f4eee768ac...@mygate.mailgate.org>,
> "Nicola Browne" <nicky.m...@btinternet.com> wrote:
/snip/
>> I think you're doing well if you can face reading it several times.
>> I have to make myslef read my stuff again for edit purposes and then
>> I never want to se it again - ever : )
>
>Interesting.
>
>How about other people? I have reread my WIS multiple times, in part to
>spot things I might want to change but also because I enjoy doing so.
It's kind of two different mind-sets. If I'm looking for things to
change, I try to resist getting carried away and starting to enjoy it,
ie seeing it in a non-critical light.
>From time to time I reread a chunk of one of my published (nonfiction)
>books or articles, and enjoy it. One reason to write a book, after all,
>is that you believe the world suffers from a shortage of that particular
>sort of literature--which is to say that there is less of it out there
>for you to read than you wish.
>
>How many people out there are in Nicola's camp, how many in mine?
Definitely yours!
I don't reread my own much, but when I do, I usually fall into a mode
that sees my original vision and is surprised by some wording and
details, and shamelessly enjoys both.
Wonder how that fits with having such a draconian Internal Editor that I
can hardly get anything written down in readable form the first time....
R.L.
--
RL at houseboatonthestyx
Patricia C. Wrede
"Anna Feruglio Dal Dan" <ada...@spamcop.net> wrote in message
news:1g8jzgs.1ul4j9d12d0n27N%ada...@spamcop.net...
> Patricia C. Wrede <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> > The real mistake I saw all those authors making is precisely the one
Theresa
> > fingered: taking it personally. Not seeing publication (note: not
> > writing; *publication*) as a business,
>
> What I see from my perch in a mainstream publisher, and that is probably
> obscured in SF, is that for a lot of writers what they write _is_
> personal: they write autobiography. It's really unsettling to read an
> author's cover letter and bio and then their work. You get the distinct
> and unwelcome impression that you're rejecting _the person_ and their
> life's story. Gives me the creeps, frankly.
Ah. Yes, you're right; I hadn't considered that aspect. Though it doesn't
really make any difference to the situation; it's still not about them or
the story. But the autobiographical nature of the stuff would tend to make
it *much* harder to view the whole publication thing as a business
transaction.
Mama always said it was a bad idea to get personal stuff mixed up with
business...as usual, she was right.
Patricia C. Wrede
Patricia C. Wrede
> In article <401ecfd1$0$41295$a186...@newsreader.visi.com>,
> "Patricia C. Wrede" <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> > "David Friedman" <dd...@daviddfriedman.nospam.com> wrote in message
> > news:ddfr-E4B7C2.1...@sea-read.news.verio.net...
> >
> > > hasn't given the reader enough information to know. If we think of
"the
> > > story" as the story in the author's head, it might really be a very
good
> > > story.
> >
> > I don't quite see what that has to do with anything.
>
> It has to do with why the author might react as, I gather, many authors
> do, to a rejection. Which was the point I was commenting on. The author
> knows the story in his head and isn't allowing for the fact that that
> isn't the story that was rejected, because the editor could only judge
> the story as it got to the editor.
But that was Mary's point: that the author *knows* it's good and therefore
can't accept the editor's rejection.
> > It's not a matter of whose judgement is "right" -- whether the book is
> > "good" or not. The fact that a story has been rejected has *nothing*
to do
> > with whether the writer, or even the story, is objectively "good" or
not.
>
> "Nothing to do with?"
Well, yes. There are vanishingly few published stories that have *never*
been rejected. If you assume that rejection is some sort of actual
indicator of whether a story is objectively "good" or not, then there are
vanishingly few published stories that meet that criteria, and a lot of the
ones that don't are classics, bestsellers, prize-winners, or have other
indications that they probably ought not to be considered bad stories, or
even mediocre ones. And some of the extremely few ones that got taken on
the first try have tanked despite heavy ad budgets, sunk without a trace, or
otherwise displayed indications that they perhaps ought not to be considered
"good." So collecting a rejection slip or thirty doesn't appear to me to
have anything whatever to do with the "goodness" of a particular story.
> > Because there *isn't* a generally accepted set of objective criteria
that
> > you can use to judge "good" for even the smallest sub-market of fiction,
let
> > alone all of it together.
>
> Do you try to make your stories good ones? Is revision in part an
> attempt to make them better? If so, you believe there are criteria to
> judge good, whether or not they are generally accepted and "objective,"
> whatever the latter means.
"Good" is subjective. I certainly try to make my stories the best I can
write...but I recognize that that is "the best *in my opinion*" and that
there are lots of people who won't agree with that opinion, no matter how
"perfect" my story ends up being by *my* standards. And some of the people
who disagree will be editors, which is how come I get rejection slips. And
the fact that those stories get rejection slips has no bearing on whether or
not they are "good" in my opinion, by my standards, or not. Or on whether
they eventually get published or not, which is not quite the same thing.
If one person is selling apples, and a customer wants to buy corn, the fact
that the customer passes up the apples says nothing whatever about whether
they were good apples or not. They weren't what the customer wanted, that's
all.
> So suppose we go by your criteria. Do you believe there is zero
> correlation between whether a story is good and whether it is accepted?
I think there is no correlation whatever between whether a story I consider
really, really good will or won't collect one or more rejection slips.
Eventual acceptance has nothing to do with whether or not a story has been
rejected multiple times. Even if a story is really good in my opinion, by
my criteria, it will almost certainly collect one, and probably more than
one, rejection slips. Consequently, I conclude that collecting a rejection
slip or six has nothing to do with my opinion of the worth of the story.
> If you think your second draft is much better than your first, do you
> also think both drafts are equally likely to be accepted?
They aren't equally likely to be accepted, because they aren't equally
likely to be submitted. But, should I submit them, I consider them equally
likely to collect rejection letters. I have every hope that the second
draft would *eventually* collect an acceptance, but I have no illusions
about it being more likely to sell on the first try. And you will recall
that I did say it was *rejection* letters that have nothing to do with the
goodness of a given story.
> > But when you get into the *business* of publication, it's, well,
business.
> > Editors aren't paid to judge whether a book is good, bad, brilliant, or
> > mediocre; they're paid to decide whether *their publisher* can make
money
> > selling it. "Good" is one factor in that equation, but it's far from
the
> > only one and it's not an objective opinion anyway.
>
> Once you concede that it is one factor in that equation, your previous
> statement that "The fact that a story has been rejected has *nothing* to
> do with whether the writer, or even the story, is objectively "good" or
> not" reduces to a quibble between "good" and "objectively good."
It's not a quibble; it was the primary point I was trying to make. The lack
of an objective standard of "good" and "bad" in fiction is really, really
important when you start talking about this.
>Because
> if it is one factor, than the fact that a story has been rejected does
> have something to do with whether the story is good.
It *may* have something to do with whether that particular editor *thinks*
the story is good -- assuming the editor didn't reject it for one of
umpty-jillion other reasons. But that's one editor's opinion, and in the
absence of an *objective* *measurable* standard -- or at the least, one that
everybody agrees on -- for "what is good fiction," opinion is all it is.
The next editor may well disagree, and buy the story. So *at most* all a
rejection letter can be is an indication that one particular editor thinks
the story is not good...and without an agreed-upon standard, there's no way
to tell whether or not he/she is right.
Patricia C. Wrede
R. L. Divergins
wrote:
/snip/
>Unless
>you're seriously famous for having done something else, why write
>autobiography? Well, for therapy, yeah. But why write autobiography
>and expect someone to publish it? And yet apparently it does get
>published on occasion.
Duh.....
That's like saying, why read any first-hand accounts of anything, why
not stick to strictly fiction.
I suppose most of the memoirs and autobiographical stuff that I've seen
were by famous people, otherwise the publisher wouldn't have gambled
money on them. But I wouldn't need the person to be famous, for me to
find the book worth reading.
Was Annie Dillard famous before she wrote PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK? Isak
Dinesin? I don't know or care. I know Gladys Taber wasn't, and she
didn't even tell adventures. I don't think Lewis was yet famous when he
wrote PILGRIM'S REGRESS.
I read real life accounts for the same reasons (excluding plot) that I
read fiction: setting, style, characters, interesting content. If I
can't have a sff setting or genre or really over the top plot, then I'd
just as soon have a memoir of real events, where the author has more
attention to spend on presentation.
I'm glad Collette and Twain and Kipling didn't have to be famous before
publishing memoirs, because some good stuff might have got lost.
Hm, I'm specially attracted by fiction that at least appears
autobiographical, such as DUSTY ANSWER and CANNERY ROW and DAVID
COPPERFIELD and WELL OF LONELINESS etc. It seems the best of both
worlds: fictional vividness and depth, emotional truth uncluttered by
fact. :-)
David Friedman
"Patricia C. Wrede" <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
> "David Friedman" <dd...@daviddfriedman.nospam.com> wrote in message
> news:ddfr-F81A96.1...@sea-read.news.verio.net...
> > In article <401ecfd1$0$41295$a186...@newsreader.visi.com>,
> > "Patricia C. Wrede" <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
> >
> > > "David Friedman" <dd...@daviddfriedman.nospam.com> wrote in message
> > > news:ddfr-E4B7C2.1...@sea-read.news.verio.net...
> > >
> > > > hasn't given the reader enough information to know. If we think of
> "the
> > > > story" as the story in the author's head, it might really be a very
> good
> > > > story.
> > >
> > > I don't quite see what that has to do with anything.
> >
> > It has to do with why the author might react as, I gather, many authors
> > do, to a rejection. Which was the point I was commenting on. The author
> > knows the story in his head and isn't allowing for the fact that that
> > isn't the story that was rejected, because the editor could only judge
> > the story as it got to the editor.
>
> But that was Mary's point: that the author *knows* it's good and therefore
> can't accept the editor's rejection.
And I was offering one explanation of how the author could "know" it was
good even though it wasn't--not because of a fault in the author's
judgement of "good" but because the author was thinking about the wrong
"it."
> > So suppose we go by your criteria. Do you believe there is zero
> > correlation between whether a story is good and whether it is accepted?
> I think there is no correlation whatever between whether a story I consider
> really, really good will or won't collect one or more rejection slips.
...
> > If you think your second draft is much better than your first, do you
> > also think both drafts are equally likely to be accepted?
>
> They aren't equally likely to be accepted, because they aren't equally
> likely to be submitted. But, should I submit them, I consider them equally
> likely to collect rejection letters. I have every hope that the second
> draft would *eventually* collect an acceptance, but I have no illusions
> about it being more likely to sell on the first try. And you will recall
> that I did say it was *rejection* letters that have nothing to do with the
> goodness of a given story.
It sounds as though you are dividing all stories into "zero rejection
letters" and "more than zero," and pointing out that there are very few
in the first category. I am looking at each rejection as a datum. Each
rejection is evidence against the story being good. A single rejection
is very little evidence. Twenty rejections and no acceptance provide
significantly more evidence.
> If one person is selling apples, and a customer wants to buy corn, the fact
> that the customer passes up the apples says nothing whatever about whether
> they were good apples or not. They weren't what the customer wanted, that's
> all.
But what if one customer wants to buy corn, a second wants to buy
oranges, and a third wants to buy apples--but only good apples. You pick
a customer at random, offer him your apples, and he doesn't buy. That is
evidence that your apples are not good apples. It isn't proof--the
probability that you were rejected for a reason unrelated to the quality
of your apples is 2/3--but it is evidence. And that seems to correspond
to your situation. The editor has some ability to judge whether the
story is a good story of the sort he is interested in--which is how you
can say that "'Good' is one factor in that equation."
David Friedman
R. L. Divergins <see...@nospam.comss> wrote:
> That's like saying, why read any first-hand accounts of anything, why
> not stick to strictly fiction.
>
> I suppose most of the memoirs and autobiographical stuff that I've seen
> were by famous people, otherwise the publisher wouldn't have gambled
> money on them. But I wouldn't need the person to be famous, for me to
> find the book worth reading.
I have a cousin, probably in his nineties by now. He was born in
Lebanon, came to this country as a teenager. He's written an
autobiography--not for publication, just for the interest of family
members. It isn't as well written as published works generally are, but
it is indeed quite interesting.
...
> I'm glad Collette and Twain and Kipling didn't have to be famous before
> publishing memoirs, because some good stuff might have got lost.
I don't know about the other two, but I'm pretty sure that Kipling was
famous long before he published _Something of Myself_, which is the only
"memoirs" I'm aware of.
R. L. Divergins
<dd...@daviddfriedman.nospam.com> wrote:
>In article <oc7u109pijokuvopa...@4ax.com>,
> R. L. Divergins <see...@nospam.comss> wrote:
/snip/
>> I'm glad Collette and Twain and Kipling didn't have to be famous before
>> publishing memoirs, because some good stuff might have got lost.
>
>I don't know about the other two, but I'm pretty sure that Kipling was
>famous long before he published _Something of Myself_, which is the only
>"memoirs" I'm aware of.
I was thinking of his India stories, early travel books -- short
personal real life accounts (tho the stories were stretched some, I
expect :-). Same for the others. Weren't the Claudette books set at C's
real school, tho she invented the spicy parts?
Brandon
"Patricia C. Wrede" wrote:
>
> The real mistake I saw all those authors making is precisely the one Theresa
> fingered: taking it personally. Not seeing publication (note: not
> writing; *publication*) as a business, with the constraints of any normal
> business -- some of which constraints may never be particularly obvious to
> any given writer. One of which constraints is, always, that the particular,
> individual, house/line/magazine editor has to "get it" at least enough to
> realize that other people will buy this, even if it's not the sort of thing
> the editor him/herself likes much.
I don't know whether realizing that publishing is a business
would make much difference. I've been sitting here thinking
about the jobs I've applied for (non-writing jobs, in my
professional field) and not gotten, and it hurt every single
time, on a personal level, despite the fact that I know that
the people doing the hiring are engaged in a business, and
can only afford to hire one of the many applicants.
On the whole, that web site with the public rantings makes
me a little queasy, though. When I didn't get the job I
applied for and really wanted, I took it home and cried on
my wife's shoulder. I didn't have a big screaming fit in
public, and I most certainly didn't call up the hiring
official and tell him he was a fuckwit for not selecting me.
After all, I might want to put in another application with
his organization someday.
--
Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable
from malice. -- seen on Usenet, 10/22/03 (with apologies to
Arthur C. Clarke)
Brandon
Remus Shepherd wrote:
>
> Yes, I posted the above to the blog and someone responded, likening
> the variety of rejection slips to the variety of critiques you'd get from
> a writing workshop. The best advice is to mentally average the responses.
> But many people aren't that wise. :)
I don't think averaging the responses is the best way to go
at all. That assumes that all responses have equal value,
and (especially in the workshop setting, but also, I
suspect, in the publishing business) that isn't true.
What's needed is the ability to figure out which responses
are on point, whether they are good or bad. By which I
mean, if I set out to write an Extruded Fantasy Product, and
I might get the following responses:
"I thought this was very gripping. The dialogue was top
notch, and I liked the characters. I thought the plot was a
little weak, though, and if you're interested I can offer
some suggestions in how it might be strengthened."
"That sucked."
"The book was well-written, but you need to add some
spaceships and ray guns."
Of those responses, only the first one is useful. (Granted,
these are extreme examples, in order to make a point.) It
actually seems to be trying to help me produce the story I
want to produce, and is offering ADVICE which I am free to
take or leave.
The second response carries no information at all; I gain
nothing by adding it into my hypothetical average.
The third response is completely off point -- I'm not trying
to write an Extruded Space Opera Product; I'm trying to
write an Extruded Fantasy Product. Again, there is no
benefit to including it in the "average".
I'm not sure how this carries over to the publishing field,
but I've been in a number of workshops, and in each instance
it didn't take me very long to figure out which members of
the group were really able to help me (perhaps different
people in different ways), which ones were really only
providing "white noise", and which ones were actually
inimical to my purpose (although not necessarily inimical to *me*).
Julian Flood
"Patricia C. Wrede" wrote
> Your three categories -- great story, form letter, insulting
rejection --
> only have any general implication about editors if you assume that there
is
> some set of generally accepted objective criteria against which all
stories
> are judged, and that therefore one or more of the editors is not applying
> those criteria appropriately or effectively. But there isn't any such
> thing.
'Nobody knows nothin'.'
JF
David Friedman
R. L. Divergins <see...@nospam.comss> wrote:
> On Tue, 03 Feb 2004 06:03:18 GMT, David Friedman
> <dd...@daviddfriedman.nospam.com> wrote:
>
> >In article <oc7u109pijokuvopa...@4ax.com>,
> > R. L. Divergins <see...@nospam.comss> wrote:
> /snip/
>
> >> I'm glad Collette and Twain and Kipling didn't have to be famous before
> >> publishing memoirs, because some good stuff might have got lost.
> >
> >I don't know about the other two, but I'm pretty sure that Kipling was
> >famous long before he published _Something of Myself_, which is the only
> >"memoirs" I'm aware of.
>
> I was thinking of his India stories, early travel books -- short
> personal real life accounts (tho the stories were stretched some, I
> expect :-). Same for the others. Weren't the Claudette books set at C's
> real school, tho she invented the spicy parts?
Kipling got famous very early. And his early India stories, which were
what made him famous, weren't memoirs, they were short stories.
David Goldfarb
Charlie Stross <cha...@antipope.org> wrote:
>Stoned koala bears drooled eucalyptus spittle in awe
>as <cha...@antipope.org> declared:
>
>> Some of you may know Teresa Neilsen Hayden as one of the SF editors at
> ^^
>> it -- at http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004641.html -- on
> ^^
>Aaagh. Why do I *always* get her name wrong?
Because you can't remember "i before e"?
The version I use is, "If it looks like Mr. Gaiman's name, it's the
wrong way round."
--
David Goldfarb <*>| "LUM-ber. *heh!* *heh!*"
gold...@ocf.berkeley.edu |
gold...@csua.berkeley.edu | -- Scott McCloud, "Some Words Albert Likes"
Brian Pickrell
> Some of you may know Teresa Neilsen Hayden as one of the SF editors at
> interest, is her current weblog entry -- and the discussion hanging off> the subject of authors and rejections.
>
> Read it, and learn thereby, if you have trouble with rejection slips.
>
>
>
Ironically, the site leaves me a bit pissed off over a process that
never worried me before, especially as it's entirely academic for me
until I finally
finish a story.
The whole concept of letting someone down easy hits me as
condescending. Of course it's personal. Why waste 10,000 words on a
Web page pretending it isn't?
Dear loser,
We don't want your story because it sucked. Our
opinion of you around here is that you're a person
who writes stories that suck. If you want
us to like you more, learn to write better.
p.s. Please don't get mad. We're not paid to care.
Wouldn't that be inspiring?
Kevin Karpenske
news:eed75299.04020...@posting.google.com:
> Dear loser,
>
> We don't want your story because it sucked. Our
> opinion of you around here is that you're a person
> who writes stories that suck. If you want
> us to like you more, learn to write better.
>
> p.s. Please don't get mad. We're not paid to care.
>
>
> Wouldn't that be inspiring?
I can already feel myself improving.
--
Kevin Karpenske, krk at firefox dot com
Nicola Browne
> One reason to write a book, after all,
> is that you believe the world suffers from a shortage of that particular
> sort of literature--which is to say that there is less of it out there
> for you to read than you wish.
While I write books I might want to read ( were I not the author,)
I don't think I'm motivated by the above. By the time a book
comes out - I have had more than enough of it.'Basilisk' was finished
(as far as I was concerned:))and submitted/accepted in the summer of
2002, I was negotiating the editing process on and off through 2003
and it finally comes out here next month and in the US in May. Its not
that I'm not pleased with it - I think I probably am, but I'm kind of
past any emotion except mild discomfort when I look at the text.
> How many people out there are in Nicola's camp, how many in mine?
I assumed everybody else felt the same way : )
Nicky
--
Posted via Mailgate.ORG Server - http://www.Mailgate.ORG
Nicola Browne
>> But what if one customer wants to buy corn, a second wants to buy
> oranges, and a third wants to buy apples--but only good apples. You pick
> a customer at random, offer him your apples, and he doesn't buy. That is
> evidence that your apples are not good apples. It isn't proof--the
> probability that you were rejected for a reason unrelated to the quality
> of your apples is 2/3--but it is evidence. And that seems to correspond
> to your situation. The editor has some ability to judge whether the
> story is a good story of the sort he is interested in--which is how you
> can say that "'Good' is one factor in that equation."
I presume we are talking about those submissions which are not
immediately
rejected on the grounds that the writer is illiterate, certifiable but
not in an interesting way, and/or has no grasp of plot,structure etc.
I think one can probably agree that works in the above category
are 'not good' and so there is some consensus on that basic kind of
'not good'.
Once out of that category I can see that there may be more debate and I
would probably class as potentially 'publishable' all those submissions
which are not 'not good'ie all those which exhibit the requisite minimum
characteristics for a novel/short story. At that level the published/
not published divide does not necessarily correlate with quality.
J. F. Cornwall
<dry_English_voice>Yes, we've noticed that...</dry_English_voice>
JFC
Mary Gentle
(Graydon) wrote:
> In <memo.2004020...@roxanne.morgan.ntlworld.com>,
> Mary Gentle <mary_...@cix.co.uk> onsendan:
> > I think it's simpler than that, for some. When you write something
> > and send it in, you _know_ it's good. Every writer knows that.
>
> I don't.
>
> I know I'm not troubled when I re-read it,
After some thought, I conclude that may be the Graydonese version of what
I meant. <g>
>and that the people who have
> read it for me have been ok with it, but 'good' is a statistical
> measure.
Statistical? Oooookay.
Mary
Mary Gentle
nicky.m...@btinternet.com (Nicola Browne) wrote:
> "Irina Rempt" <ir...@valdyas.org> wrote in message
> news:1739000.o...@calcifer.valdyas.org
>
> >> > What I see from my perch in a mainstream publisher, and that is
> > > probably obscured in SF, is that for a lot of writers what they
> > > write
> > > _is_ personal: they write autobiography. It's really unsettling to
> > > read an author's cover letter and bio and then their work. You get
> > > the
> > > distinct and unwelcome impression that you're rejecting _the person_
> > > and their life's story. Gives me the creeps, frankly.
> >
> > I'm *so* glad I write fantasy. Though people think I write
> > autobiography
> > *anyway*, and it's very hard to talk that out of their heads.
> >
> I don't think it matters what you write- people always think it's
> about you - and of course at some level it always is. I find the idea
> of people I know reading my stuff acutely discomforting because,
> although
> I've never been a cetic warrior who can turn herself into a man at will
> and has magical powers, the whole business is just too revealing.
I think the advantage is that it's _all_ about you - in the exact same way
that it's all _not_ about you.
If someone could disentangle the parts that are observation of the world,
the parts that are speculation and fantasising, the parts that are dug out
from inside yourself, and the parts that are influenced by other fictions
. . . _and_ the parts that are simultaneously all of those things, plus a
few more . . . they could probably get a PhD in psychology out of it.
I think it might accurately reveal what one's obsessions are, on the macro
level. In terms of people being rejected, that might be enough, though.
Mary
Mary Gentle
dd...@daviddfriedman.nospam.com (David Friedman) wrote:
[...]
> . I am looking at each rejection as a datum. Each
> rejection is evidence against the story being good. A single rejection
> is very little evidence. Twenty rejections and no acceptance provide
> significantly more evidence.
Nope. All it provides evidence of is that it didn't meet the requirements
of those particular editors at that particular time.
Patricia's said it to you at great length, so I don't really have much
hope of you getting it if I say it briefly, but let's try one more time.
Stories accepted first time around and stories accepted after rejection
letter no.20 are equally like to vanish into the Great Unknown, /and/
are equally likely to win awards and stay in print for decades.
I know you'd like there to be an objective standard of good, but there
really isn't one. Once you're past the mechanical aspects of writing --
can put full stops in the right place, can set dialogue out correctly on
the page, etc -- then in publishing terms it's all up for grabs.
Possibly it shouldn't be that way, but all the while the judgement of
narrative is subjective, that's the way it's going to be.
Mary
Pat Bowne
> David Friedman wrote:
>
> >In article <88e26584f4eee768ac...@mygate.mailgate.org>,
> > "Nicola Browne" <nicky.m...@btinternet.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> >> I think you're doing well if you can face reading it several times.
> >>
> >>I have to make myslef read my stuff again for edit purposes and then
> >>I never want to se it again - ever : )
> >>
> >>
> >
> >Interesting.
> >
> >How about other people? I have reread my WIS multiple times, in part to
> >spot things I might want to change but also because I enjoy doing so.
> >From time to time I reread a chunk of one of my published (nonfiction)
> >books or articles, and enjoy it. One reason to write a book, after all,
> >is that you believe the world suffers from a shortage of that particular
> >sort of literature--which is to say that there is less of it out there
> >for you to read than you wish.
> >
> >How many people out there are in Nicola's camp, how many in mine?
I'm in your camp.
Pat
Patricia C. Wrede
> In article <401f2c99$0$41287$a186...@newsreader.visi.com>,
> "Patricia C. Wrede" <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> > "David Friedman" <dd...@daviddfriedman.nospam.com> wrote in message
> > news:ddfr-F81A96.1...@sea-read.news.verio.net...
> > > It has to do with why the author might react as, I gather, many
authors
> > > do, to a rejection. Which was the point I was commenting on. The
author
> > > knows the story in his head and isn't allowing for the fact that that
> > > isn't the story that was rejected, because the editor could only judge
> > > the story as it got to the editor.
> >
> > But that was Mary's point: that the author *knows* it's good and
therefore
> > can't accept the editor's rejection.
>
> And I was offering one explanation of how the author could "know" it was
> good even though it wasn't--not because of a fault in the author's
> judgement of "good" but because the author was thinking about the wrong
> "it."
Ah -- sorry, I didn't realize that you were talking about the *why* of it.
> It sounds as though you are dividing all stories into "zero rejection
> letters" and "more than zero," and pointing out that there are very few
> in the first category. I am looking at each rejection as a datum. Each
> rejection is evidence against the story being good. A single rejection
> is very little evidence. Twenty rejections and no acceptance provide
> significantly more evidence.
And I am saying that, as evidence of quality, rejection letters are
worthless, whether you look at them one at a time or en masse. Because
editors don't agree about what "good" is, nor do writers, nor readers, nor
critics. Until you agree what "a good story" *means*, you can't say
anything about whether a particular set of data is or isn't evidence of it.
> > If one person is selling apples, and a customer wants to buy corn, the
fact
> > that the customer passes up the apples says nothing whatever about
whether
> > they were good apples or not. They weren't what the customer wanted,
that's
> > all.
>
> But what if one customer wants to buy corn, a second wants to buy
> oranges, and a third wants to buy apples--but only good apples. You pick
> a customer at random, offer him your apples, and he doesn't buy. That is
> evidence that your apples are not good apples.
It's only evidence of that if everybody agrees in advance just exactly what
"good apples" means. If your apple-buying customer defines "good apples" as
blue apples, and your orange-buying customer defines "good apples" as green
ones, and your corn-buying customer thinks the only good apple is a red one,
and the seller has perfectly fine yellow apples, then the fact that the
customer who wants "good apples" rejects those yellow apples because they
aren't "good" is meaningless in any absolute sense. Which is why I keep
harping on standards.
> It isn't proof--the
> probability that you were rejected for a reason unrelated to the quality
> of your apples is 2/3--but it is evidence.
It's evidence of *something*, but in the absence of an agreed-upon standard
of goodness, it can't be evidence of general quality. If your definition of
"good apples" is "sweet and yellow," and yours are, and the apple buyer says
"I want only good apples, which are blue, so I'm not buying these," all that
this is evidence of is that you and the apple buyer don't agree about the
definition of a good apple and that yours don't fit his definition. If your
apples are sweet and yellow ("good" by your definition) and you compile a
huge stack of rejections from known apple-buyers, you are amassing evidence
that few apple-buyers currently agree with your definition of "a good
apple," but until you come up with some way of determining whose definition
is closest to being right -- some *outside standard* of "good" -- you
haven't any evidence of the actual goodness or badness of the apple.
To drop the metaphor for a minute -- it is perfectly possible to define "a
good story" as "one that eventually gets published." You can do that, if
you want. In that case, your arguement about the significance of rejection
letters is perfectly correct...for that value of "a good story." The
problem -- and a large part of my point -- is that this is not a
universally-agreed-upon definition of "a good story;" it is, in fact, one
that a great many readers disagree with (based on the number of people who
say things like "How the heck did *this* crap get published?") And it is
manifestly not how *I* define "a good story."
Until you have a non-subjective, agreed-upon standard of "what is a good
story," you cannot say with any confidence that a mountain of rejection
letters is evidence of anything except the present unpublishability of the
story. If you consider "unpublishable=bad story" to be true (if that is
part of your definition of "a good story"), then evidence of
unpublishability is evidence of badness. If you consider
"unpublishable=good story" (as do some of the extreme "selling a story means
selling your SOUL!!!!!!!" folks who really believe in the Great Publishing
Conspiracy To Suppress Good Literature), then evidence of unpublishability
is evidence of goodness. Presently publishable/unpublishable is something
that can be objectively determined by trial and error (that's what the
submission process does, when carried through to the bitter end), but it
doesn't say anything useful about whether a story is "good" or not because
people don't agree on what "a good story" *is*.
>And that seems to correspond
> to your situation. The editor has some ability to judge whether the
> story is a good story of the sort he is interested in--which is how you
> can say that "'Good' is one factor in that equation."
I can say that "good is one factor in that equation" because every editor
makes decisions based in part on his/her individual definition of "good."
The apple-buyer who wants blue apples is using "good" (by his definition) as
the primary factor in making his decision. But it doesn't say anything
useful about the actual goodness or badness of the yellow apples, nor about
whether some other buyer would consider them good or not. You can say that
*that particular editor* or apple-buyer didn't think the story or the apples
were "good" by his definition, and therefore the goodness of the
story/apples was indeed a factor. But it's not one that generalizes,
because the definitions keep changing.
Patricia C. Wrede
Pat Bowne
> news:1g8jzgs.1ul4j9d12d0n27N%ada...@spamcop.net...
> > Patricia C. Wrede <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
> >
> > > The real mistake I saw all those authors making is precisely the one
> Theresa
> > > fingered: taking it personally. Not seeing publication (note: not
> > > writing; *publication*) as a business,
> >
> > What I see from my perch in a mainstream publisher, and that is probably
> > obscured in SF, is that for a lot of writers what they write _is_
> > personal: they write autobiography. It's really unsettling to read an
> > author's cover letter and bio and then their work. You get the distinct
> > and unwelcome impression that you're rejecting _the person_ and their
> > life's story. Gives me the creeps, frankly.
I've had people tell me straight out 'this character is based on me, I'm
trying to work out some issues in the novel.' Now, how is one to critique
that? Questions about why the character does things are bound to turn into
(perceived) criticisms of how the author is working out his/her issues, when
truthfully I don't know a thing about the author's personal life, or wish to
comment thereon.
grump.
Pat
Yoon Ha Lee
> In article <88e26584f4eee768ac...@mygate.mailgate.org>,
> "Nicola Browne" <nicky.m...@btinternet.com> wrote:
> > I think you're doing well if you can face reading it several times.
> > I have to make myslef read my stuff again for edit purposes and then
> > I never want to se it again - ever : )
>
> How about other people? I have reread my WIS multiple times, in part to
> spot things I might want to change but also because I enjoy doing so.
> From time to time I reread a chunk of one of my published (nonfiction)
> books or articles, and enjoy it. One reason to write a book, after all,
> is that you believe the world suffers from a shortage of that particular
> sort of literature--which is to say that there is less of it out there
> for you to read than you wish.
Depends. The published stuff, I'm actually depressed about, because
after a few years I see things Wrong with 'em, or that at the least I'd
do much better this time around. (Of course, I keep finding different
ways to screw up, but that's the learning process for you.)
I reread work in progress every so often, but usually a cool-off period
is indicated, and there are bits I think I handled well, and then there
are the bits that lead me to discard the entire plot, do psychic surgery
on the characters, and start over. I seem not to be able to do anything
in between total rewrite (to the point where the thing is often not
recognizable except for names and places and the occasional theme) and
line editing.
I think it's mostly that the longer it's been since I looked at a
particular work, finished or not, the worse it looks, because the
mistakes become obvious when they weren't when I was "too close" to the
thing. Maybe I'm talking orthogonally to what you're asking, though.
--
Yoon Ha Lee
http://pegasus.cityofveils.com
Pi = 3, for small values of pi and large values of 3.
Remus Shepherd
> Remus Shepherd wrote:
> > Yes, I posted the above to the blog and someone responded, likening
> > the variety of rejection slips to the variety of critiques you'd get from
> > a writing workshop. The best advice is to mentally average the responses.
> I don't think averaging the responses is the best way to go
> at all. That assumes that all responses have equal value,
> and (especially in the workshop setting, but also, I
> suspect, in the publishing business) that isn't true.
(...)
> I'm not sure how this carries over to the publishing field,
> but I've been in a number of workshops, and in each instance
> it didn't take me very long to figure out which members of
> the group were really able to help me (perhaps different
> people in different ways), which ones were really only
> providing "white noise", and which ones were actually
> inimical to my purpose (although not necessarily inimical to *me*).
What workshop do you participate in? My main workshop experience is
with Critters, and that is a pool of thousands of people. Often the
reviewers for your manuscript are never the same twice. I believe I
only got to know two people in my time on Critters.
In any event, when submitting for publication 90% of all responses are
form letters, and the rejections are spaced out over a period of months.
It's impossible to attribute personalities to them. Even the editors I've
spoken with at conventions have staff to read slush for them. Averaging
the responses is about the best one can do.
... ...
Remus Shepherd <re...@panix.com>
Patricia C. Wrede
"Mary Gentle" <mary_...@cix.co.uk> wrote in message
news:memo.2004020...@roxanne.morgan.ntlworld.com...
> In article <b172dd433f20a58e70...@mygate.mailgate.org>,
> nicky.m...@btinternet.com (Nicola Browne) wrote:
> > I don't think it matters what you write- people always think it's
> > about you - and of course at some level it always is. I find the idea
> > of people I know reading my stuff acutely discomforting because,
> > although
> > I've never been a cetic warrior who can turn herself into a man at will
> > and has magical powers, the whole business is just too revealing.
>
> I think the advantage is that it's _all_ about you - in the exact same way
> that it's all _not_ about you.
And the thing to remember is that the readers are going to be so busy with
the baggage that *they* bring to the story, that they're not even going to
notice any of the stuff that you think is really revealing.
>
> If someone could disentangle the parts that are observation of the world,
> the parts that are speculation and fantasising, the parts that are dug out
> from inside yourself, and the parts that are influenced by other fictions
> . . . _and_ the parts that are simultaneously all of those things, plus a
> few more . . . they could probably get a PhD in psychology out of it.
What fries me about the whole thing is the way people always seem to assume
that all the awful stuff *must* be autobiographical, but none of the good
stuff can possibly be anything but wishful thinking. (Well, except where
there's a disconnect between the reader's definition of "awful stuff" and
the writer's...like the angry church lady who asked the Romance writer just
*how* a supposedly-respectable single women could *possibly* have come up
with all those hot sex scenes, to which the reply was, in fact, "Wishful
thinking, madam.") As if all writers must have horrible childhoods and
abusive relationships and problems with addictive substances, all together
or sequentially or in rotation, but nothinig good is ever allowed to happen
to them because that's what it takes to Have A Muse.
Bah, humbug.
Patricia C. Wrede
Patricia C. Wrede
"Pat Bowne" <pbo...@execpc.com> wrote in message
news:101vdfk...@corp.supernews.com...
I don't think I'm in either one.
I don't have any trouble re-reading a work-in-progress in order to revise
it, or even just in order to remind myself what I said back in Chapter 2.
By the time it's finished and turned in, though, I'm really tired of looking
at it. The copy-edit and the galleys are boring, and by the time it's
published, I have no urge to reread it ever again. If something comes up
and I *have* to reread it -- for continuity purposes while writing a sequel,
for instance -- it's usually been long enough that I don't mind looking at
it again, and sometimes I even giggle at my own jokes. But I wouldn't ever
pick up one of my own books to relax with. They're wrung out, so far as I'm
concerned -- I'm finished with them. That was the whole point of writing
'em in the first place.
Patricia C. Wrede
Remus Shepherd
Patricia C. Wrede <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
> To drop the metaphor for a minute -- it is perfectly possible to define "a
> good story" as "one that eventually gets published." You can do that, if
> you want. In that case, your arguement about the significance of rejection
> letters is perfectly correct...for that value of "a good story." The
> problem -- and a large part of my point -- is that this is not a
> universally-agreed-upon definition of "a good story;" it is, in fact, one
> that a great many readers disagree with (based on the number of people who
> say things like "How the heck did *this* crap get published?") And it is
> manifestly not how *I* define "a good story."
> Until you have a non-subjective, agreed-upon standard of "what is a good
> story," you cannot say with any confidence that a mountain of rejection
> letters is evidence of anything except the present unpublishability of the
> story.
I agree with you to a point, Patricia. However, there are some objective
standards. Let's look at some of the things that go into a manuscript (not
a story, but a story submission):
Formatting
Grammar
Plot, Characterization, and all that storytelling stuff.
There are no objective standards for 'plot and stuff' (although I feel
there should be in the case of continuity...but that's just me). But for
both formatting and grammar, there are objective and clearly-defined rules.
If you can't get the formatting and grammar right, then the story is
unpublishable. If they are kind, editors will point out these fixable
problems when they send out the rejections. Some do, some don't. If they
did, the authors would be able to stop worrying about at least that part of
the process of writing and submitting. And every story would then be
*potentially* publishable.
Charlton Wilbur
AFDD> ...Because if they are good, they do actually manage to make
AFDD> their life's story unforgettable, significant. I've just
AFDD> been reading one such novel. Mostly it's the style for me,
AFDD> but that's saying all and nothing, right?
One of the people on a mailing list I subscribe to was a military
translator in Vietnam during the conflict. Periodically he will write
an autobiographical essay of a couple thousand words, a very personal
account of something that happened while he was in Vietnam, or a tale
about growing up in rural west Texas. I'm not sure what makes them so
good; perhaps because they're personal without being narcissistic, and
they're vivid and detailed. The fact that they're largely
autobiographical seems to be irrelevant to their quality.
Charlton
--
cwilbur at chromatico dot net
cwilbur at mac dot com
Charlton Wilbur
G> There are clearly defined rules, but none are objective.
G> (Evidence the mania for not ending English sentences with
G> prepositions or splitting infinitives, because English should
G> be like Latin.)
And even should we decide that there can be objectively correct
grammar, there are works of fiction that are clearly incorrect
(_Feersum Enjinn_, "Flowers for Algernon," "Born of Man and Woman")
but which are considered by many to be good stories nontheless.
Remus Shepherd
> Remus Shepherd <re...@panix.com> onsendan:
> > There are no objective standards for 'plot and stuff' (although I feel
> > there should be in the case of continuity...but that's just me). But
> > for both formatting and grammar, there are objective and
> > clearly-defined rules.
> No, there are not.
> There are clearly defined rules, but none are objective. (Evidence the
> mania for not ending English sentences with prepositions or splitting
> infinitives, because English should be like Latin.)
Cannot I, written no regard tense; punctuation; sentencestructure, and
away get wit'it.
Maybe you can mangle grammar in character dialog (Yoda), but put an
entire story together that way and the manuscript will be be windmill-slammed
into the garbage heap.
> Or, above, note that I've taken out your paragraph indents, because this
> is an electronic medium that defaults to fixed-width characters and the
> presumption of delineating paragraphs by blank lines.
> Was it objectively correct the way you had it, or the way I've put it?
Markets have objective formatting rules. They vary from place to place,
but they are definite and publically available. Publishers tell you what
format they want manuscripts in when you ask them for submission guidelines.
If you break these formatting rules then your story's dead before it's read.
Obviously you can do anything you want for your own personal writings.
But there are concrete, objective rules when submitting for publication.
Nicola Browne
> > Maybe you can mangle grammar in character dialog (Yoda), but put an
> entire story together that way and the manuscript will be be windmill-slammed
> into the garbage heap.
>
As that is exactly what I'm doing at the moment in my current WIP - I'll
let you know if you're right.
> > Markets have objective formatting rules. They vary from place to place,
> but they are definite and publically available. Publishers tell you what
> format they want manuscripts in when you ask them for submission guidelines.
> If you break these formatting rules then your story's dead before it's read.
This is obviously an issue with short stories and US submissions
but isn't a big deal over here in the UK for novels. If there are any
guidelines I've never seen them.
> Obviously you can do anything you want for your own personal writings.
> But there are concrete, objective rules when submitting for publication.
>
I think this is, at best, only sort of true.
David Friedman
"Patricia C. Wrede" <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
> > But what if one customer wants to buy corn, a second wants to buy
> > oranges, and a third wants to buy apples--but only good apples. You pick
> > a customer at random, offer him your apples, and he doesn't buy. That is
> > evidence that your apples are not good apples.
>
> It's only evidence of that if everybody agrees in advance just exactly what
> "good apples" means. If your apple-buying customer defines "good apples" as
> blue apples, and your orange-buying customer defines "good apples" as green
> ones, and your corn-buying customer thinks the only good apple is a red one,
> and the seller has perfectly fine yellow apples, then the fact that the
> customer who wants "good apples" rejects those yellow apples because they
> aren't "good" is meaningless in any absolute sense. Which is why I keep
> harping on standards.
What bothers me about this is that I think you are making an all or none
judgement. We can't get general agreement on objective standards, so
there is no information at all in the editor's decision. But if there is
no information at all in the editor's decision, why have the editor make
it--and what sense does it make to say, as you did, that how good the
story is is one element in the decision?
Going back to my example, we don't need everybody agreeing. In my
example, a third of the customers agreed that a "good apple" was an
orange, a third that it was corn. All we need is some agreement--in my
example, that "good apple" was meaningful for the customers who want
apples.
> > It isn't proof--the
> > probability that you were rejected for a reason unrelated to the quality
> > of your apples is 2/3--but it is evidence.
>
> It's evidence of *something*, but in the absence of an agreed-upon standard
> of goodness, it can't be evidence of general quality. If your definition of
> "good apples" is "sweet and yellow," and yours are, and the apple buyer says
> "I want only good apples, which are blue, so I'm not buying these," all that
> this is evidence of is that you and the apple buyer don't agree about the
> definition of a good apple and that yours don't fit his definition. If your
> apples are sweet and yellow ("good" by your definition) and you compile a
> huge stack of rejections from known apple-buyers, you are amassing evidence
> that few apple-buyers currently agree with your definition of "a good
> apple," but until you come up with some way of determining whose definition
> is closest to being right -- some *outside standard* of "good" -- you
> haven't any evidence of the actual goodness or badness of the apple.
And again, it seems to me that you are jumping from "weak evidence" to
"no evidence." If there is no content at all to the statement "an apple
is good," it's hard to see why anyone would use the word. Similarly for
stories.
But in fact there is some content. Practically everyone agrees that an
apple that is seriously unripe or rotten is bad. There is some agreement
on standards less obvious than that. So when your apple is rejected,
that's some evidence that it is "bad" by standards that are widely
accepted--but not overwhelming evidence, certainly not proof, because it
might have been rejected because its not the kind of "good apple" that
customer wants.
> To drop the metaphor for a minute -- it is perfectly possible to define "a
> good story" as "one that eventually gets published." You can do that, if
> you want. In that case, your arguement about the significance of rejection
> letters is perfectly correct...for that value of "a good story." The
> problem -- and a large part of my point -- is that this is not a
> universally-agreed-upon definition of "a good story;" it is, in fact, one
> that a great many readers disagree with (based on the number of people who
> say things like "How the heck did *this* crap get published?") And it is
> manifestly not how *I* define "a good story."
How about the weaker statement "there is some correlation between
whether a story is good and whether it will eventually get published."
Add to that "there is some correlation between whether a story is good
and whether a random reader thinks it is good."
It isn't as if we only think, or act, or evaluate in terms of things for
which there are absolute, universally agreed upon, cast in bronze
criteria. Most of what we do involves categories where our judgements
are a mix of objective, subjective and random error. What bothers me is
that you seem to be jumping from the observation that there is a lot of
disagreement to the conclusion that individual judgements are completely
random--which I doubt you believe. Once you agree they aren't completely
random, and do to some degree correlate, then each rejection is indeed
information about the quality of the story, in a sense that isn't simply
defined as "will it get accepted."
...
> I can say that "good is one factor in that equation" because every editor
> makes decisions based in part on his/her individual definition of "good."
> The apple-buyer who wants blue apples is using "good" (by his definition) as
> the primary factor in making his decision. But it doesn't say anything
> useful about the actual goodness or badness of the yellow apples, nor about
> whether some other buyer would consider them good or not.
I'm stopping it there, because I want to see if, going from apples to
stories, you actually believe that.
We do the following experiment. We take a thousand story manuscripts and
submit them to several different editors, chosen at random.
Is your claim that there will be zero correlation between their
decisions--that the stories that editor A accepts are, on average,
exactly as likely to be rejected by editor B as the ones that editor A
rejects?
If that isn't your claim, then "doesn't say anything useful" is false.
David Friedman
Graydon <o...@uniserve.com> wrote:
> In <memo.2004020...@roxanne.morgan.ntlworld.com>,
> Mary Gentle <mary_...@cix.co.uk> onsendan:
> > In article <slrnc1tdm...@grithr.uniserve.com>, o...@uniserve.com
> > (Graydon) wrote:
> >
> >> In <memo.2004020...@roxanne.morgan.ntlworld.com>,
> >> Mary Gentle <mary_...@cix.co.uk> onsendan:
> >> > I think it's simpler than that, for some. When you write something
> >> > and send it in, you _know_ it's good. Every writer knows that.
> >>
> >> I don't.
> >>
> >> I know I'm not troubled when I re-read it,
> >
> > After some thought, I conclude that may be the Graydonese version of what
> > I meant. <g>
>
> Ok. :)
>
> I don't call "doesn't make me flinch" _good_, they're manifestly not
> the same thing.
>
> >>and that the people who have read it for me have been ok with it, but
> >>'good' is a statistical measure.
> >
> > Statistical? Oooookay.
>
> Lots of people like it over a long period of time.
I find this way of putting it unsatisfactory.
The fact that lots of people like something over a long period of time
itself requires explanation, at least if we observe that people's liking
isn't purely random--and we do observe that. The obvious explanation is
that the work itself has some characteristic that results in lots of
people liking it over a long period of time.
We could, after all, say that all we know about cyanide is that lots of
people who eat it die--a statistical measure. But it surely makes more
sense to take that as a datum, and then try to figure out why. And even
if we haven't yet figured out why, because we don't at that point know
enough biochemistry or whatever, it still makes no sense to treat "lots
of people who eat it die" as if it were the characteristic, rather than
evidence of some deeper characteristic we don't yet understand.
I should add that I'm not committed to identifying "good" with
"characteristic that causes people to like something over a long period
of time," although I do think it is one such characteristic.
David Friedman
"Nicola Browne" <nicky.m...@btinternet.com> wrote:
Does not necessarily correlate or does not correlate perfectly or nearly
perfectly? In part, I'm puzzled by the "necessarily." If it sometimes
correlates and sometimes doesn't correlate, then on average it
correlates.
Mary Gentle
ada...@spamcop.net (Anna Feruglio Dal Dan) wrote:
> Mary Gentle <mary_...@cix.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > But, rejection is a painful part of the business, even though it _is_
> > business. Pain can be vented. Everybody's _entitled_ to their "this
> > editor is a purblind idiot, in the pay of the Rosicrucians, who
> > wouldn't
> > recognise my genius if I bit his or her arse!" moment. Several
> > moments,
> > even. I wouldn't recommend verging on the paranoid ("the editor must
> > hate
> > me personally"/"there's a massive conspiracy against publishing
> > novels on
> > subject <x>"/"publishing is part of the old boy network"[1]), but
> > you're
> > entitled to those moments, too, in the seconds after the rejection
> > letter
> > hits the mat.
>
> The publisher I am doing internship for now generously accepts and reads
> and responds to all manuscripts. They get screaming-insults phone calls
> from rejected authors for their pains.
>
> (Not me: I don't answer the phone).
I don't blame you. :)
Rarely, but occasionally, a UK publisher will pass a reader report
direct to the author - usually one that wasn't written for the author to
see, and is one of your "this man is a waste of oxygen!"-style crits. It
can be a very interesting experience. It wouldn't surprise me if it gave
rise to a few screaming phone calls, either . . .
Having said that, even editorially-filtered rejections are often received
badly. An editor friend of mine says they no longer write encouraging
letters to the almost-made-its, because of the people who write back in
much the same tone as the rejection-letter web site, berating them.
I can understand _desiring_ to crucify the editor with rusty nails and a
staple-gun. Perfectly normal reaction. It's phoning the editor up to
express that desire that I don't get. Bizarre people . . .
Mary
Mary Gentle
(Graydon) wrote:
> In <memo.2004020...@roxanne.morgan.ntlworld.com>,
> Mary Gentle <mary_...@cix.co.uk> onsendan:
> > In article <slrnc1tdm...@grithr.uniserve.com>, o...@uniserve.com
> > (Graydon) wrote:
> >
> >> In <memo.2004020...@roxanne.morgan.ntlworld.com>,
> >> Mary Gentle <mary_...@cix.co.uk> onsendan:
> >> > I think it's simpler than that, for some. When you write something
> >> > and send it in, you _know_ it's good. Every writer knows that.
> >>
> >> I don't.
> >>
> >> I know I'm not troubled when I re-read it,
> >
> > After some thought, I conclude that may be the Graydonese version of
> > what I meant. <g>
>
> Ok. :)
>
> I don't call "doesn't make me flinch" _good_, they're manifestly not
> the same thing.
It may be a roughly equivalent feeling to what some people feel, I was
thinking, when they express it as "that's good".
> >>and that the people who have read it for me have been ok with it, but
> >>'good' is a statistical measure.
> >
> > Statistical? Oooookay.
>
> Lots of people like it over a long period of time.
I see what you mean. I think I disagree, but I understand why you could
look at it that way.
Some of the books I consider good have been liked by a small number of
people over a long time. (I don't think the converse works: 'hugely
popular for a short time' seems to equal 'bubble has burst'.) And some
have been liked by hardly anybody, but I still think they're good.
Then again, there are things that many people have liked for a very long
time that I think are not just crap, but proof positive that this isn't my
planet . . .
And there are books I consider are good that I don't actually like.
Maybe I'm just a lot more confused than you are. <g>
Mary
Mary Gentle
Bowne) wrote:
Under those circumstances, I would have thought you could just say 'keep
working, they're not worked out yet'.
It's easier than trying to explain both the gaps and the connections
between personal experience and fiction. Because if they're saying that
in the first place, they probably don't think about it in that way.
There's a lot of autobiographical fiction I do like, but it's like
anything else: it has to be done well. Just having a rivetting life won't
do it, for all the reasons that "but this really happened" isn't an excuse
for it not working as fiction.
Mary
Dorothy J Heydt
Graydon <o...@uniserve.com> wrote:
>In <bvoqa3$m65$1...@reader2.panix.com>,
> Remus Shepherd <re...@panix.com> onsendan:
>> Maybe you can mangle grammar in character dialog (Yoda), but put an
>> entire story together that way and the manuscript will be be
>> windmill-slammed into the garbage heap.
>
>myriad of popular short stories...
_Riddley Walker,_ _Moonwise,_ both written (in whole or in part)
in a very different dialect of English written phonetically. You
just about have to understand how a system of sound-changes works
to read 'em. Yet they're worth it.
Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djh...@kithrup.com
Remus Shepherd
> > entire story together that way and the manuscript will be be
> > windmill-slammed into the garbage heap.
> :Feersum Enjinn:, :Huckleberry Finn:, Damon Runyon's use of tense in a
> myriad of popular short stories...
Both Feersum Enjinn (the bad parts, which are only about 1/3rd of the
book) and Huckleberry Finn were written in first-person. The grammar
problems were character dialog problems. A good author might get away
with that.
I might also note that Twain wrote over a hundred years ago, and Runyon
over 60. The rules were considerably different then -- grammar itself was
somewhat different then -- and the publishing industry was considerably
less ossified than it is now.
Find me a published third-person story written since 1970 with horrible
grammar, and I'll concede the point. I get the feeling all you people are
more well-read and more experienced with the publishing biz than I am; I'm
willing to be proven wrong on this.
> > Markets have objective formatting rules. They vary from place to
> > place, but they are definite and publically available. Publishers
> > tell you what format they want manuscripts in when you ask them for
> > submission guidelines. If you break these formatting rules then your
> > story's dead before it's read.
> You're going from 'grammar' to 'formatting'. This is not so much moving
> the goal posts as changing the game.
I was talking about both. I refuted you on the first above; I was
then facing you on the second. :)
> Editors want something that's easy to read and which doesn't make their
> life more difficult. They're not going to take a ruler to the margins
> (23 mm! AVAUNT!) or care which fixed pitch font (or necessarily that it
> *is* a fixed pitch font) or insist that you do or don't break pages when
> you start chapters.
> Yes, it's a good idea to look up the house submission guidelines on the
> web and conform to them before you submit, but it's not -- for fiction
> -- going to be rigid. ('forced to learn LaTeX by _The Physical Review_'
> is a different situation.)
Every publisher whose submissions guidelines I have read includes
something to the effect of, 'If you do not follow these guidelines your
manuscript will not be considered'. Are you saying they're only kidding?
Nicola Browne
>> > Once out of that category I can see that there may be more debate and I
> > would probably class as potentially 'publishable' all those submissions
> > which are not 'not good'ie all those which exhibit the requisite minimum
> > characteristics for a novel/short story. At that level the published/
> > not published divide does not necessarily correlate with quality.
>
> Does not necessarily correlate or does not correlate perfectly or nearly
> perfectly? In part, I'm puzzled by the "necessarily." If it sometimes
> correlates and sometimes doesn't correlate, then on average it
> correlates.
What I meant was does not always correlate with my judgement of
quality : ) I'm in agreement with those he seem to be saying that
while there maybe concensus of opinion on the quality of some few
books there really are't a set of boxes to tick to define a good book.
Even where there is some agreement on what qualities need to be
present in a good book ( which there isn't) there is rarely agreement
as to which book has which and to what degree.
There may be broad agreement among publishers concerning what is
currently marketable (which is why one occasionally gets bidding wars
for certain texts) but that is no where near so common as your
argument might suggest and marketable may not in any case be
equivalent to 'good'.
In common with most people here, I have had the same book
decried for being deficient in the same area for which it has
been praised for excelling - what the hell have averages to do with
that?
Brian M. Scott
<dd...@daviddfriedman.nospam.com> wrote in
<news:ddfr-B52217.1...@sea-read.news.verio.net>
in rec.arts.sf.composition:
> In article <401fb676$0$41286$a186...@newsreader.visi.com>,
> "Patricia C. Wrede" <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
[...]
>> To drop the metaphor for a minute -- it is perfectly
>> possible to define "a good story" as "one that
>> eventually gets published." You can do that, if you
>> want. In that case, your arguement about the
>> significance of rejection letters is perfectly
>> correct...for that value of "a good story." The problem
>> -- and a large part of my point -- is that this is not a
>> universally-agreed-upon definition of "a good story;" it
>> is, in fact, one that a great many readers disagree with
>> (based on the number of people who say things like "How
>> the heck did *this* crap get published?") And it is
>> manifestly not how *I* define "a good story."
> How about the weaker statement "there is some correlation
> between whether a story is good and whether it will
> eventually get published." Add to that "there is some
> correlation between whether a story is good and whether
> a random reader thinks it is good."
These are meaningless or circular in the absence of a
generally accepted standard of goodness, or else they are
statements whose meanings depend on who is making them.
[...]
>> I can say that "good is one factor in that equation"
>> because every editor makes decisions based in part on
>> his/her individual definition of "good." The apple-buyer
>> who wants blue apples is using "good" (by his
>> definition) as the primary factor in making his
>> decision. But it doesn't say anything useful about the
>> actual goodness or badness of the yellow apples, nor
>> about whether some other buyer would consider them good
>> or not.
> I'm stopping it there, because I want to see if, going
> from apples to stories, you actually believe that.
> We do the following experiment. We take a thousand story
> manuscripts and submit them to several different
> editors, chosen at random.
> Is your claim that there will be zero correlation between
> their decisions--that the stories that editor A accepts
> are, on average, exactly as likely to be rejected by
> editor B as the ones that editor A rejects?
> If that isn't your claim, then "doesn't say anything
> useful" is false.
That is not true, unless you believe that positive
information content is useful no matter how small it is; I
have a somewhat stricter notion of usefulness.
Brian
Tim S
> In article <ddfr-36BE30.2...@sea-read.news.verio.net>,
> dd...@daviddfriedman.nospam.com (David Friedman) wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>> . I am looking at each rejection as a datum. Each
>> rejection is evidence against the story being good. A single rejection
>> is very little evidence. Twenty rejections and no acceptance provide
>> significantly more evidence.
>
> Nope. All it provides evidence of is that it didn't meet the requirements
> of those particular editors at that particular time.
>
> Patricia's said it to you at great length, so I don't really have much
> hope of you getting it if I say it briefly, but let's try one more time.
> Stories accepted first time around and stories accepted after rejection
> letter no.20 are equally like to vanish into the Great Unknown, /and/
> are equally likely to win awards and stay in print for decades.
>
> I know you'd like there to be an objective standard of good, but there
> really isn't one. Once you're past the mechanical aspects of writing --
> can put full stops in the right place, can set dialogue out correctly on
> the page, etc -- then in publishing terms it's all up for grabs.
But if you believe that, why on earth do you bother fixing up your own
stuff, or learning new things, or coming here and trying to help people do
things which have no effect whatever on whether anybody likes or sees their
work -- in fact, is just as likely to make it less publishable as to make it
more publishable? Why not just string together the first bunch of random
words that comes into your head, send it out, and get on with the next bunch
of random words? It would be a lot quicker, a lot less effort, and would
bring in at least as much money per book, and garner just as many readers
and give them on average just as much pleasure.
Tim
Thomas Lindgren
David Friedman <dd...@daviddfriedman.nospam.com> writes:
> But in fact there is some content. Practically everyone agrees that an
> apple that is seriously unripe or rotten is bad. There is some agreement
> on standards less obvious than that. So when your apple is rejected,
> that's some evidence that it is "bad" by standards that are widely
> accepted--but not overwhelming evidence, certainly not proof, because it
> might have been rejected because its not the kind of "good apple" that
> customer wants.
An observation:
As I recall, Nielsen Hayden's little essay delimited reasons for
rejection into (more or less) (1) unpublishable due to elementary
errors, and (2) unsuitable for the publisher in question. And to me it
appeared that mss in category (1) were *unlikely* to be worth
publishing/reading, esp. after somebody has looked it over just to see
if it's a mould breaker. (We all know authors love nothing better than
to defeat rules of thumb.) That seemed a good enough definition of
"bad".
Category (1) rejections often appeared not to make the reason for
rejection so explicit; perhaps this is to spare the poor author. I
think returning a checked-boxes form and/or a red line of doom would
be useful feedback to some, at least. Me, for instance.
Best,
Thomas
--
Thomas Lindgren
"It's becoming popular? It must be in decline." -- Isaiah Berlin
Brian M. Scott
<T...@timsilverman.demon.co.uk> wrote in
<news:BC45B4A3.4316%T...@timsilverman.demon.co.uk> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
> on 3/2/04 2:00 pm, Mary Gentle at mary_...@cix.co.uk wrote:
[...]
>> I know you'd like there to be an objective standard of good, but there
>> really isn't one. Once you're past the mechanical aspects of writing --
>> can put full stops in the right place, can set dialogue out correctly on
>> the page, etc -- then in publishing terms it's all up for grabs.
> But if you believe that, why on earth do you bother fixing up your own
> stuff, or learning new things, or coming here and trying to help people do
> things which have no effect whatever on whether anybody likes or sees their
> work -- in fact, is just as likely to make it less publishable as to make it
> more publishable?
I don't know what Mary will say, but to me the answer to the
first two questions seems utterly obvious: I have standards
of my own to meet, and I like learning new things.
[...]
Brian
Lori Selke
Graydon <o...@uniserve.com> wrote:
>In <bvoeqn$i9o$1...@reader2.panix.com>,
> Remus Shepherd <re...@panix.com> onsendan:
>> There are no objective standards for 'plot and stuff' (although I feel
>> there should be in the case of continuity...but that's just me). But
>> for both formatting and grammar, there are objective and
>> clearly-defined rules.
>
>No, there are not.
>
>There are clearly defined rules, but none are objective.
What he said in spades. Take a copy-editing course if you don't believe it.
Lori
--
se...@io.com, se...@mindspring.com, http://www.io.com/~selk
"I'm going to remind you of this conversation when we're exiled to Cuba."
-- Boondocks
Patricia C. Wrede
> I agree with you to a point, Patricia. However, there are some
objective
> standards. Let's look at some of the things that go into a manuscript
(not
> a story, but a story submission):
>
> Formatting
> Grammar
> Plot, Characterization, and all that storytelling stuff.
>
> There are no objective standards for 'plot and stuff' (although I feel
> there should be in the case of continuity...but that's just me). But for
> both formatting and grammar, there are objective and clearly-defined
rules.
So much is true.
> If you can't get the formatting and grammar right, then the story is
> unpublishable.
This is not necessarily true, as evidenced by books such as "A Clockwork
Orange," "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress," "Riddley Walker," and "Feersum
Injin(??)" to name a few of the better-known ones in the SF/F field alone.
Furthermore, by my standards a) unpublishable does not equal either Bad or
Not Good, and b) "poorly spelled and ungrammatical" also does not
necessarily equate to "not good." Else it would be possible to take an
award-winning story and make it a "bad story" simply by giving it to an
amateur typist to recopy and never running the spelling checker.
Admittedly, among stories in the slush pile, the odds of finding something
publishable with poor spelling, punctuation, and grammar are astronomical,
and most editors don't even bother checking. But that's a process developed
to save valuable editorial time by playing the odds, not an absolute
statement of necessary quality.
>If they are kind, editors will point out these fixable
> problems when they send out the rejections. Some do, some don't. If they
> did, the authors would be able to stop worrying about at least that part
of
> the process of writing and submitting.
I think you're trying to talk about something different from what I'm trying
to discuss. But my opinion on *that* side is that yes, it would be nice if
all editors did that; but it would also be nice if random people let you cut
into the banking line when you're in a hurry, or if strangers gave you $20
bills on the street every day for no particular reason. Editors don't *owe*
writers comments, even really basic comments such as "You need to improve
your spelling and grammar before this story can be taken seriously." And
when, as happens, editors who have made such comments get screaming phone
calls, letters, or e-mails to the effect that "U R a idiot the grammer and
speling is UR job to fix do ur job you sob," it does not encourage them to
send out even such apparently obvious and objective comments as that. And I
for one don't blame them one tiny bit.
>And every story would then be *potentially* publishable.
??? Sorry, no. A correctly spelled and punctuated story can still be
quite, quite unpublishable. Or did I misunderstand what you were trying to
say here?
Patricia C. Wrede
Patricia C. Wrede
> Maybe you can mangle grammar in character dialog (Yoda), but put an
> entire story together that way and the manuscript will be be
windmill-slammed
> into the garbage heap.
By some editors. Not by others. It's not a guaranteed generalization.
> Obviously you can do anything you want for your own personal writings.
> But there are concrete, objective rules when submitting for publication.
And *for the writing* -- that is, excluding the standard manuscript format
guidelines -- just what are these concrete, objective rules? Because I
surely can't think of even one.
Patricia C. Wrede
Patricia C. Wrede
"David Friedman" <dd...@daviddfriedman.nospam.com> wrote in message
news:ddfr-B52217.1...@sea-read.news.verio.net...
> In article <401fb676$0$41286$a186...@newsreader.visi.com>,
> "Patricia C. Wrede" <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> > > But what if one customer wants to buy corn, a second wants to buy
> > > oranges, and a third wants to buy apples--but only good apples. You
pick
> > > a customer at random, offer him your apples, and he doesn't buy. That
is
> > > evidence that your apples are not good apples.
> >
> > It's only evidence of that if everybody agrees in advance just exactly
what
> > "good apples" means. If your apple-buying customer defines "good
apples" as
> > blue apples, and your orange-buying customer defines "good apples" as
green
> > ones, and your corn-buying customer thinks the only good apple is a red
one,
> > and the seller has perfectly fine yellow apples, then the fact that the
> > customer who wants "good apples" rejects those yellow apples because
they
> > aren't "good" is meaningless in any absolute sense. Which is why I keep
> > harping on standards.
>
> What bothers me about this is that I think you are making an all or none
> judgement. We can't get general agreement on objective standards, so
> there is no information at all in the editor's decision.
No, I said there is no information *about the quality of the story* in the
editor's decision. There's plenty of *information*; even a form letter
provides you with the information that that particular magazine/house/line
doesn't want the story. Some of the rejection letters Theresa quoted
provided the information that the editor thought the story was publishable;
others provided information about why that editor chose not to buy the
story. You even get, very occasionally, a letter that tells you that this
particular editor does not consider the story to be "good." But that says
nothing at all about whether or not the next editor may consider the story
"good," because the editors aren't working with the same standard, and it
can't say anything about whether the rejecting editor is right or not
because there's no way of determining whether his standard of "good" is
right, much less whether he's applied it correctly in this instance. So
"This editor thinks this story is bad" is useless as far as indicating
whether or not the story *is* bad, or even for predicting whether or not the
story will eventually sell or not.
> Going back to my example, we don't need everybody agreeing. In my
> example, a third of the customers agreed that a "good apple" was an
> orange, a third that it was corn. All we need is some agreement--in my
> example, that "good apple" was meaningful for the customers who want
> apples.
But you don't have the agreement. You have a whole lot of editors, each of
whom thinks he/she knows what "a good story" is, and each of whom has a
different, subjective definition, which frequently changes with alterations
in the working environment. Heck, out at the extreme edges, you get
disagreement over what a *story* is, and what SF/F is, much less what a
*good* one-of-those is.
People do things all the time that don't make sense, on *my* planet. And
there's not *no* content; "This apple is good" tells you that *I think* it's
a good apple, and that *I* probably wouldn't turn down another one just like
it.
> But in fact there is some content. Practically everyone agrees that an
> apple that is seriously unripe or rotten is bad.
Unless they're looking for rotten apples to use for fertilizer.
>There is some agreement
> on standards less obvious than that. So when your apple is rejected,
> that's some evidence that it is "bad" by standards that are widely
> accepted--but not overwhelming evidence, certainly not proof, because it
> might have been rejected because its not the kind of "good apple" that
> customer wants.
So? "Widely accepted standards" are not necessarily accurate ones; they're
simply one sort of standard. In publishing, you have people who consider
high sales figures to be prima facie evidence that a book is *not* "good" --
in order to sell to that many people, the theory goes, it must be playing to
the lowest common denominator. And some of the people who believe this
theory are editors.
If you want to define "a good story" as "a publishable story," you can. If
you want to define it as "a story that sells lots of copies," you can. But
what you are doing is defining "good" according to *objective criteria* that
can only be determined after the fact (you don't know whether a story is
publishable until it's run the entire gamut and either been published or
not; you don't know the book's sales figures until it's been on the market
for a while). And *even among people who buy and read* a lot of popular
bestselling books you will find a lot of folks who don't agree that either
of those things is a sufficient, or even necessary, attribute of "a good
story."
And neither "publishable story" nor "sells lots of copies" correlate well
with whether a story gets one or more rejection letters, so *even if* you
define "good story" as publishable or selling a lot, your rejection letters
still don't tell you whether your story is good or not.
> > To drop the metaphor for a minute -- it is perfectly possible to define
"a
> > good story" as "one that eventually gets published." You can do that,
if
> > you want. In that case, your arguement about the significance of
rejection
> > letters is perfectly correct...for that value of "a good story." The
> > problem -- and a large part of my point -- is that this is not a
> > universally-agreed-upon definition of "a good story;" it is, in fact,
one
> > that a great many readers disagree with (based on the number of people
who
> > say things like "How the heck did *this* crap get published?") And it
is
> > manifestly not how *I* define "a good story."
>
> How about the weaker statement "there is some correlation between
> whether a story is good and whether it will eventually get published."
GOOD BY WHOSE STANDARDS? If you don't know what "a good story" is, how can
you determine whether there's a correlation between goodness and *anything*
else?
> Add to that "there is some correlation between whether a story is good
> and whether a random reader thinks it is good."
Repeat as above. First, you have to define clearly what a good story *is*.
You can't determine correlations until you have something to correlate.
Saying "There is a correlation between whether an apple is blrofminst and
whether or not it sells" is meaningless until you define what "blrofminst"
is. If you can't get people to agree about what blrofminst means, you can't
decide whether or how much of a correlation there actually is, because
everybody will be talking about something different.
> It isn't as if we only think, or act, or evaluate in terms of things for
> which there are absolute, universally agreed upon, cast in bronze
> criteria. Most of what we do involves categories where our judgements
> are a mix of objective, subjective and random error. What bothers me is
> that you seem to be jumping from the observation that there is a lot of
> disagreement to the conclusion that individual judgements are completely
> random--which I doubt you believe.
Not random. Subjective.
>Once you agree they aren't completely
> random, and do to some degree correlate, then each rejection is indeed
> information about the quality of the story, in a sense that isn't simply
> defined as "will it get accepted."
They aren't random; they're subjective. And they don't correlate.
> > I can say that "good is one factor in that equation" because every
editor
> > makes decisions based in part on his/her individual definition of
"good."
> > The apple-buyer who wants blue apples is using "good" (by his
definition) as
> > the primary factor in making his decision. But it doesn't say anything
> > useful about the actual goodness or badness of the yellow apples, nor
about
> > whether some other buyer would consider them good or not.
>
> I'm stopping it there, because I want to see if, going from apples to
> stories, you actually believe that.
>
> We do the following experiment. We take a thousand story manuscripts and
> submit them to several different editors, chosen at random.
>
> Is your claim that there will be zero correlation between their
> decisions--that the stories that editor A accepts are, on average,
> exactly as likely to be rejected by editor B as the ones that editor A
> rejects?
>
> If that isn't your claim, then "doesn't say anything useful" is false.
You're switching ground again. I didn't say rejections contained *no*
useful information; they contain useful information about the magazine, and
about the possible publishability of the story. I said rejections contain
no useful information about *the goodness or badness of the story*, nor
about what standards some other editor will use to judge the goodness or
badness of the story.
In your example, a rejection letter from Editor A does not tell the author
anything whatever about Editor B. Editor B may have standards that overlap
to a high degree with Editor A's, in which case the story rejected by A has
a high probability of being rejected by Editor B. Editor B may have
standards that are the exact opposite of Editor A's, in which case the story
rejected by A has a high probability of being accepted by Editor B. And
Editor B may have standards that have some overlap with A's, in which case
the story rejected by A has a probability of acceptance/rejection depending
on the degree of overlap between the editorial standards. That's assuming,
for purposes of argument, that all other things are equal between the
editors (such as amount of current inventory, budget for acquiring new
stories, editorial policies handed down from on high, etc.)
When your thousand manuscripts get 950 rejections from Editor A, those
rejection slips do not tell you whether Editor B's standards have a high,
low, or middling degree of overlap with Editor A's. Consequently, you
cannot tell from Editor A's rejections whether those 950 rejections have a
high, low, or middling probability of being rejected by Editor B. And
rejections from both Editors A *and* B will not tell you anything about
Editor C's standards and *their* degree of overlap with A's and B's.
Your 950 rejections from two different editors may, assuming all else is
equal (which it never is in publishing) give you some idea of how much
Editor A's and Editor B's standards for buying stories overlap this week.
But it still doesn't tell you whether your story is good or bad by anyone
else's standards, and it still doesn't tell you whether Editors A and B will
continue to have that much overlap in their buying criteria next month or
next year.
Patricia C. Wrede
Julian Flood
"David Friedman" wrote
> Going back to my example, we don't need everybody agreeing. In my
> example, a third of the customers agreed that a "good apple" was an
> orange, a third that it was corn. All we need is some agreement--in my
> example, that "good apple" was meaningful for the customers who want
> apples.
What conclusion would you draw if you found that the grocer was, week by
week, losing customers?
JF
Alma Hromic Deckert
<pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>"David Friedman" <dd...@daviddfriedman.nospam.com> wrote in message
>news:ddfr-B52217.1...@sea-read.news.verio.net...
>> In article <401fb676$0$41286$a186...@newsreader.visi.com>,
>> "Patricia C. Wrede" <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>>
>> What bothers me about this is that I think you are making an all or none
>> judgement. We can't get general agreement on objective standards, so
>> there is no information at all in the editor's decision.
>> Going back to my example, we don't need everybody agreeing. In my
>> example, a third of the customers agreed that a "good apple" was an
>> orange, a third that it was corn. All we need is some agreement--in my
>> example, that "good apple" was meaningful for the customers who want
>> apples.
>
>But you don't have the agreement. You have a whole lot of editors, each of
>whom thinks he/she knows what "a good story" is, and each of whom has a
>different, subjective definition, which frequently changes with alterations
>in the working environment. Heck, out at the extreme edges, you get
>disagreement over what a *story* is, and what SF/F is, much less what a
>*good* one-of-those is.
i think we are seeing a little bit of David's earlier posts coming
through here. we're all talking about fiction, which is utterly
dependent on the eye of the beholder - not even that, perhaps even
dependent on the mood presently twinkling in the eye of the beholder.
David is talking about the Gold Standard. works for non-fiction, works
just fine - the criterion there is whether something is correct or
not. there ain't no such thing as "correct" in fiction.
>>There is some agreement
>> on standards less obvious than that. So when your apple is rejected,
>> that's some evidence that it is "bad" by standards that are widely
>> accepted--but not overwhelming evidence, certainly not proof, because it
>> might have been rejected because its not the kind of "good apple" that
>> customer wants.
>
>So? "Widely accepted standards" are not necessarily accurate ones; they're
>simply one sort of standard. In publishing, you have people who consider
>high sales figures to be prima facie evidence that a book is *not* "good" --
>in order to sell to that many people, the theory goes, it must be playing to
>the lowest common denominator. And some of the people who believe this
>theory are editors.
<....>
>GOOD BY WHOSE STANDARDS? If you don't know what "a good story" is, how can
>you determine whether there's a correlation between goodness and *anything*
>else?
exactly what i was saying above.
fiction is so, so, so subjective. there are published books i cannot
read that someone obviously thought "good" enough to publish. there
are unpublished manuscripts i have seen that i consider brilliant, but
which remain, well, unpublished.
once again - it's someone else's good apple. that's fiction.
>>Once you agree that [editorial judgments] aren't completely
>> random, and do to some degree correlate, then each rejection is indeed
>> information about the quality of the story, in a sense that isn't simply
>> defined as "will it get accepted."
>They aren't random; they're subjective. And they don't correlate.
somebody. else's. apples.
no stringent rules.
fiction is LIKED or NOT LIKED. it doesn't have to prove anything to
anybody in an empirical sense.
>> We do the following experiment. We take a thousand story manuscripts and
>> submit them to several different editors, chosen at random.
>> Is your claim that there will be zero correlation between their
>> decisions--that the stories that editor A accepts are, on average,
>> exactly as likely to be rejected by editor B as the ones that editor A
>> rejects?
>> If that isn't your claim, then "doesn't say anything useful" is false.
>You're switching ground again. I didn't say rejections contained *no*
>useful information; they contain useful information about the magazine, and
>about the possible publishability of the story. I said rejections contain
>no useful information about *the goodness or badness of the story*, nor
>about what standards some other editor will use to judge the goodness or
>badness of the story.
what she said.
A.
Remus Shepherd
> > horrible grammar, and I'll concede the point. I get the feeling all
> > you people are more well-read and more experienced with the publishing
> > biz than I am; I'm willing to be proven wrong on this.
> Dorothy provided :Ridley Walker: and :Moonwise:. There have certainly
> been others, though I haven't had any come to mind just now. :Flowers
> for Algernon:, several chunks of early Cherryh, even larger chunks of
> early Zelazny that strings together evocative sentence fragments; it's
> really a truly a question of 'does it work?', not 'will the wise clerks
> of Oxenforde see fit to bless it?'
(...)
> > Every publisher whose submissions guidelines I have read includes
> > something to the effect of, 'If you do not follow these guidelines
> > your manuscript will not be considered'. Are you saying they're only
> > kidding?
> They're not kidding, but they're reserving the right, not asserting that
> they're going to go after your manuscript with micrometers.
> It isn't in their interest to make that effort. What they're saying is
> that if you present them with an awkward manuscript, they'll bin it
> without remorse, *not* that they're going to enforce strict numerical
> conformance to the standard.
Okay.
So tell me what Ms. Hayden meant when she wrote this, in the article that
spawned this discussion:
***
Manuscripts are unwieldy, but the real reason for that time ratio is that
most of them are a fast reject. Herewith, the rough breakdown of
manuscript characteristics, from most to least obvious rejections:
1. Author is functionally illiterate.
2. Author has submitted some variety of literature we don't publish:
poetry, religious revelation, political rant, illustrated fanfic, etc.
3. Author has a serious neurochemical disorder, puts all important words
into capital letters, and would type out to the margins if MSWord would
let him.
4. Author is on bad terms with the Muse of Language. Parts of speech are
not what they should be. Confusion-of-motion problems inadvertently
generate hideous images. Words are supplanted by their similar-sounding
cousins: towed the line, deep-seeded, incentiary, reeking havoc,
nearly penultimate, dire straights, viscous/vicious.
5. Author can write basic sentences, but not string them together in any
way that adds up to paragraphs.
6. Author has a moderate neurochemical disorder and can't tell when
he or she has changed the subject. This greatly facilitates composition,
but is hard on comprehension.
7. Author can write passable paragraphs, and has a sufficiently functional
plot that readers would notice if you shuffled the chapters into a
different order. However, the story and the manner of its telling are
alike hackneyed, dull, and pointless.
(At this point, you have eliminated 60-75% of your submissions. Almost
all the reading-and-thinking time will be spent on the remaining fraction.)
***
Points 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6 are about the author's use of grammar and
formatting. If a manuscript doesn't pass these tests, it's on an express
trip to the wastebin. This is not because Ms. Hayden is malicious, simply
because she's rushed for time and so she has to apply some basic criteria.
Every editor does. Formatting and grammar are the first criteria they apply.
Probably because they *can* be objectively appraised.
Now, I think you're going to tell me that there are avant garde markets
that allow strange deviations from english grammar and formatting. I'm going
to have to concede the point to you, because no doubt someone somewhere has
accepted a manuscript written in babyspeak on yellow lined paper. :)
But in my limited experience, every market has overworked editors that
insist on hard guidelines, and every editor's guidelines are similar.
The examples you cite seem to me to be rare, nepotistic, and/or archaic
exceptions in an otherwise industry-wide set of rules.
Remus Shepherd
> Furthermore, by my standards a) unpublishable does not equal either Bad or
> Not Good, and b) "poorly spelled and ungrammatical" also does not
> necessarily equate to "not good."
Agreed -- I'm not saying that a story is unpublishable because it's
bad. I'm arguing that there are considerations that will make a story
unpublishable simply because editors won't look twice at it. I am making
no judgements about quality, only probability of success.
> >If they are kind, editors will point out these fixable
> > problems when they send out the rejections. Some do, some don't. If they
> > did, the authors would be able to stop worrying about at least that part
> > of the process of writing and submitting.
> I think you're trying to talk about something different from what I'm trying
> to discuss. But my opinion on *that* side is that yes, it would be nice if
> all editors did that; but it would also be nice if random people let you cut
> into the banking line when you're in a hurry, or if strangers gave you $20
> bills on the street every day for no particular reason. Editors don't *owe*
> writers comments, even really basic comments such as "You need to improve
> your spelling and grammar before this story can be taken seriously."
I just threw that comment in as a 'wouldn't be nice' daydream. :)
Certainly the editors don't owe any comments to anyone.
> >And every story would then be *potentially* publishable.
> ??? Sorry, no. A correctly spelled and punctuated story can still be
> quite, quite unpublishable. Or did I misunderstand what you were trying to
> say here?
I was speaking to the chance that a story will get past the first round
of editorial review. If it's formatted wrong an editor is not going to look
at it, regardless of its quality. If the formatting is okay and the story
is intelligible, then it has at least a chance. It's at that point that
the story's quality becomes important.
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
> I was speaking to the chance that a story will get past the first round
> of editorial review. If it's formatted wrong an editor is not going to look
> at it, regardless of its quality. If the formatting is okay and the story
> is intelligible, then it has at least a chance. It's at that point that
> the story's quality becomes important.
I don't know how American editors do it, but I've always read badly
formatted and ungramatical manuscripts. Granted, they lost points at
every mispelled words but usually the reasons to reject them were
others. (I have just read, though, a very good manuscript which
contained its fair share of grammar mistakes - but it didn't come
through the slush, anyway).
This said, where I work we get about 1,000 manuscripts a year now.
That's not much. We can afford the luxury. Also, we never got the
manuscript written in lavender on toilet paper. The other slush
experience I had was very concentrated but quite low on absolute numbers
(about 50 manuscripts to go through in two months).
--
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan - ada...@spamcop.net - this is a valid address
homepage: http://www.fantascienza.net/sfpeople/elethiomel
English blog: http://annafdd.blogspot.com/
LJ: http://www.livejournal.com/users/annafdd/
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
> Maybe you can mangle grammar in character dialog (Yoda), but put an
> entire story together that way and the manuscript will be be windmill-slammed
> into the garbage heap.
Well, no, really: that is the classic "Is this genius or madness?"
moment. It's usually madness, and therefore binned, but at my publisher
it does get read as far as it takes, which usually means three-five
pages, to establish where on the threshold between madness and genius it
falls.
Cally Soukup
> In article <sui2f1-...@antipope.org>,
> Charlie Stross <cha...@antipope.org> wrote:
>>Stoned koala bears drooled eucalyptus spittle in awe
>>as <cha...@antipope.org> declared:
>>
>>> Some of you may know Teresa Neilsen Hayden as one of the SF editors at
>> ^^
>>> it -- at http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004641.html -- on
>> ^^
>>Aaagh. Why do I *always* get her name wrong?
> Because you can't remember "i before e"?
Because you're saying "aaagh" instead of "ieee!". That's how I
remember.
--
"I may disagree with what you have to say, but I will defend
to the death your right to say it." -- Beatrice Hall
Cally Soukup sou...@pobox.com
Patricia C. Wrede
> Patricia C. Wrede <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
> > Furthermore, by my standards a) unpublishable does not equal either Bad
or
> > Not Good, and b) "poorly spelled and ungrammatical" also does not
> > necessarily equate to "not good."
>
> Agreed -- I'm not saying that a story is unpublishable because it's
> bad. I'm arguing that there are considerations that will make a story
> unpublishable simply because editors won't look twice at it. I am making
> no judgements about quality, only probability of success.
I draw a distinction, and rather a sharp one, between "This story, as it is
currently presented, will not get looked at seriously" and "This story, even
if perfectly presented, will never be published." The former has
presentation, and possibly format problems, which are easily correctable
(and which can easily be discovered by spending ten minutes in the library
or on the Internet, these days). The latter is unpublishable. The former
may actually be a publishable story, and may in fact get published if and
when the author corrects the formatting problems. The latter won't get
published, by definition.
And the presentation-and-format problems have to be pretty extreme, on the
order of crayons and brown paper bags, or green ink on lavender paper, to
get bounced every time, from every house, without a single editor ever even
taking a glance at the opening...and a glance at the opening is as much as
85% or so of *any* slushpile stories get. At least two editors I know of
make a point of giving a hard look to the stuff that's improperly
formatted -- it drops to the bottom of their slush piles, because it's a
pain an a nuisance, but it doesn't get bounced unread. And no, I'm not
going to tell you who they are. I *like* those people, and I think they're
making heroic and unappreciated efforts, and I don't intend to make their
lives any harder for them than they already are.
> > >And every story would then be *potentially* publishable.
>
> > ??? Sorry, no. A correctly spelled and punctuated story can still be
> > quite, quite unpublishable. Or did I misunderstand what you were trying
to
> > say here?
>
> I was speaking to the chance that a story will get past the first round
> of editorial review.
That's not any more "potentially publishable" than it was before, so far as
I can see.
> If it's formatted wrong an editor is not going to look
> at it, regardless of its quality.
As a sweeping generalization, this just is not true. See above. The more
outre the formatting, the *less likely* most editors are going to be to look
at it, and the more times the intern is going to think twice before sending
it on to an editor to look at, and the more interesting to those folks the
story is going to have to be to overcome the handicap. And if the
editor/intern is in a hurry and has gotten 800 manuscripts behind in their
slush reading, then yes, it will probably get bounced unread if it does
major breakage of any of the standard formatting rules -- if it's single
spaced, on both sides of the paper, with quarter-inch margins, and so on.
But editors don't have time to measure to see if you got *exactly* one inch
margins all around, or if you fudged by an eighth of an inch.
>If the formatting is okay and the story
> is intelligible, then it has at least a chance. It's at that point that
> the story's quality becomes important.
<*sigh*> Look, I'm not going over this again. Go reread all my posts to
David, OK? "Quality of the story" just isn't determinable, not the way
you're using the word.
Patricia C. Wrede
Mary Gentle
T...@timsilverman.demon.co.uk (Tim S) wrote:
It's not the believing it, it's seeing it happen for <cough> years as a
published writer that's convinced me. Certainly I didn't believe it when
I started off...
>why on earth do you bother fixing up your own
> stuff, or learning new things, or coming here and trying to help people
> do
> things which have no effect whatever on whether anybody likes or sees
> their
> work -- in fact, is just as likely to make it less publishable as to
> make it
> more publishable? Why not just string together the first bunch of random
> words that comes into your head, send it out, and get on with the next
> bunch
> of random words? It would be a lot quicker, a lot less effort, and would
> bring in at least as much money per book, and garner just as many
> readers
> and give them on average just as much pleasure.
There's no objective standard. There are hundreds of subjective ones.
Like I said in a different post -- I'll write what seems to me to be the
best story that the story can be, and then I'll go looking for an editor
who shares my opinions.
The fact that a different version of the story might sell doesn't matter
to me: _I_ wouldn't like that version. Likewise, if one editor wants to
publish it, I don't care if I can point to 47 other editors who think it's
cat-poo . . . (Which wouldn't be impossible for anybody, if you picked the
right editors in the right genres - or perhaps that should be 'wrong'
rather than 'right'. :)
I know there's no objective standard of good, but I'm quite happy to back
my subjective one -- it just means I don't get bent out of shape if a
story doesn't get accepted.[1] Publication relies on finding editors and
readers who have a subjective standard of good in common with mine, and
writing stories that'll convince them the standard has been achieved . . .
If I wanted to get rich quick, I wouldn't be a writer; if I just wanted to
please a large number of people, I'd be a hooker. :)
Mary
[1] Excluding the initial stages of receiving a rejection, during which
I'm bent into all sorts of non-Euclidean Lovecraftian shapes . . .
sharkey
>
> Once out of that category I can see that there may be more
> all those submissions which are not 'not good'
Except that even 'not good' works are 'publishable' if the
'author' happens to be a 'football hero' or win 'pop idol'.
-----'sharks'
S. Palmer
> I mean, it's easier to
> find it now than it was pre-www, when I was starting to send stuff to
> publishers.
ACK! I misread this first pass through as saying you've been sending
stuff out since *pre-wwII*.
-Suzanne
Charlie Stross
>> Read it, and learn thereby, if you have trouble with rejection slips.
>
> You know, I find it difficult to think there's anybody out there who
> _doesn't_ know the basics of this stuff, by now.
Teresa's starting point was a website for people who evidently don't.
I have trouble believing it too, but ...
> But, rejection is a painful part of the business, even though it _is_
> business.
Hold onto that thought ...
> Actually, I'd rather the fuckwits got a going-over with the clue-bat,
> because, who knows?, they might eventually produce something I'd enjoy as
> a reader. But there is some truth in the theory that certain responses to
> rejection are Darwinism in action . . .
Yes.
More to the point, lots of people seem to confuse writing-as-self-expression
with writing-as-a-business. Which gives rise to ...
> Charlie, I'm not really sure your reasons for why rejection is painful are
> quite on target for some people:
>
>>It's an issue of self-identity. People who write think of themselves as
>>being writers; thus, to have their writing rejected is to question an
>>aspect of their identity.
>
> I think it's simpler than that, for some.
Well yeah, for some. In fact, for many. But you must have run across
people who write as a form of self-expression, without any idea of
writing because they want to communicate with someone else ...? And
people who do this, and then try to sell the results ...? And who don't
quite understand why nobody wants to buy their brilliant and incisive
insights into the human (well, *their* human) condition ...?
> Oh, and when you say:
>
>>The whole issue of why so many people harbour romantic misconceptions
>>about the literary lifestyle is one that needs to be examined if we're to
>>understand why so many people respond badly to rejection letters. And
>>here I think other writers are partially to blame, for in all too many
>>fictions about writers we see them presented as free, and wealthy, and
>>fulfilled ...
>
> which fictions are you thinking about? I would have said there was far
> more of the 'starving in a garret for my art' about, in terms of romantic
> misconceptions.
I'm sure I'll grab a couple off the shelf whenever I can get off my arse
and go looking for them. Memories of TV drama productions spring to mind
... naah, I'm feeling lazy tonight. Seriously, though, I think it's tied
in with the writing for self-expression cult. Writing is all too often
sold to people as a form of catharsis with a semi-detatched lifestyle
thrown in as a bonus extra. The starving-in-a-garret misconception tends
to stick tighter to poets and painters.
> Then again, _I_ think being a writer is romantic. :-) Or at least, the
> best thing since sliced bread. I haven't ended up wealthy, but it beats
> every other job I've done hollow, even if it does reduce me to ferocious
> gibbering incoherency every so often . . .
Well yeah, I agree on all of that ... but when people ask me what I do
and I tell them "I'm a writer" I usually end up having to spend about
half an hour squishing their romantic misconceptions before we can have
a halfway-sane conversation that isn't overlaid with their assumptions
(like, f'r'ex, being a novelist means you automatically sell millions of
books and get to drive a Porsche -- and that's just for starters). It's
kind of annoying, after a bit. It's almost gotten to the point when, if
a stranger asks me what I do, I mumble something about freelance office
work and leave it at that..
-- Charlie
Dorothy J Heydt
Maybe it's time to reference MZB's essay "Why Did My Story Get
Rejected?" which you can find at
http://mzbworks.home.att.net/why.htm
J.Pascal
(...)
>
> I've had people tell me straight out 'this character is based on me, I'm
> trying to work out some issues in the novel.' Now, how is one to critique
> that? Questions about why the character does things are bound to turn into
> (perceived) criticisms of how the author is working out his/her issues, when
> truthfully I don't know a thing about the author's personal life, or wish to
> comment thereon.
>
> grump.
The one time I brought something autobiographical to my writing
group I got some good responses on it. I hadn't told anyone that this
was an event from real life. I *still* think that it had a sort of
vitality that is missing from what I usually write. The best suggestion
was to change the title to "The Truth About Cows." Every other
suggestion, no matter how good, on how to turn this *event* into a
*story* was meaningless noise. I *couldn't* change the story to make it
better because it just *was*. I fully intended to try to "work" the
story around to improve it. I wasn't even emotionally attached to
some particular outcome or subtext. But the story refused to move
across the line from autobiography to fiction. I couldn't budge it
with a crowbar.
The one time I tried critters I sent a crit for a story that was
really *very* good in a lot of ways. The one thing that I had
a problem with in the characterization was something that signaled
to *me* that the minister was a hypocrite, except that clearly this
was not the author's intention. The response was a very nice, "Thanks
for the good things you said, I understand about the Playboy's in the
drawer, but grandpa *did* keep them there."
Dan Goodman
news:slrnc20bi0....@anchovy.zoic.org:
In the US, it's rare for books under such bylines to be written by the
celebrity. Someone else writes the book -- and that person is generally
someone with a track record.
--
Dan Goodman
Journal http://dsgood.blogspot.com or
http://www.livejournal.com/users/dsgood/
Whatever you wish for me, may you have twice as much.
Dan Goodman
@antipope.org:
> But you must have run across
> people who write as a form of self-expression, without any idea of
> writing because they want to communicate with someone else ...? And
> people who do this, and then try to sell the results ...? And who don't
> quite understand why nobody wants to buy their brilliant and incisive
> insights into the human (well, *their* human) condition ...?
>
There are also people who conduct their love lives this way, and find it
difficult to understand how other people could manage not to be hooked by
the perfect pick-up line or the perfect ear-nibbling technique.
J.Pascal
>
> What bothers me about this is that I think you are making an all or none
> judgement. We can't get general agreement on objective standards, so
> no information at all in the editor's decision, why have the editor make
> it--and what sense does it make to say, as you did, that how good the
> story is is one element in the decision?
As far as I can tell, it seems that it's not that there is no
information (or a trivially small amount of information) in the
editor's judgement, but that there is only trivial (or no)
information in the editor's *rejection*.
If the editor decides to buy it, then that is something else.
(...)
> And again, it seems to me that you are jumping from "weak evidence" to
> "no evidence." If there is no content at all to the statement "an apple
> is good," it's hard to see why anyone would use the word. Similarly for
> stories.
>
> But in fact there is some content. (...)
Perhaps. But it isn't useful. Concluding that maybe your story isn't
garbage because an editor buys it, taking that affirmation, is entirely
reasonable. But from what people who have lots of experience... that
is, they have far more than a single data point of rejection to work
with... say that the *rejection* is not meaningful.
Arguing the semantics of the meaning of *some* and *none* and how
close can we approach zero without going over, isn't useful.
The most encouraging thing I've heard about rejections and slush,
BTW, was from the editor of Strange Horizons. It was several
years ago now, when they were newer, but he said that he *knew*
that no one was sending their short stories to him first and that
they had all been rejected before, perhaps several times. He said
that he often knew just which anthology he was taking a second pass
through the slush pile for. And now he had proof that having an
excellent story didn't mean it would be bought because he saw the
rejects from *all* the major short SF markets and he knew what
they *all* had passed over.
The shorts that I've sent to Analog or Azimov's might have been
poor and unsalable, but the rejection slips I got back from them
did not contain any useful data at all. Perhaps if all rejections
from every author everywhere were compiled and sifted and examined
there might be useful information to be found. But for *my*
purposes the data available from the fact of a rejection notice
in my mailbox approaches zero.
Still feels like a punch in the gut... I don't have enough of them
for it not to. As long as I haven't heard back from the magazine
yet I can live on hope. It's not that I take it personally, it's
just that my hopes for that sale die. So it goes out again and I
hope again, and imagine, and think what it would be like if it's
*not* a "no" this time, and sit down to write with that little
tickle of excitement prodding me forward.
Remus Shepherd
> > markets that allow strange deviations from english grammar and
> > formatting. I'm going to have to concede the point to you, because no
> > doubt someone somewhere has accepted a manuscript written in babyspeak
> > on yellow lined paper. :)
> You know, putting a smiley after a rude statement doesn't make it less
> rude.
I don't mean to be rude. The convention on Usenet is to use smileys
after ridiculous statements to remind people that you're joking. I was
trying to lighten the mood -- forgive me if I failed.
> Last time I submitted a manuscript, it was in Luxi Mono, not Courier.
> The guidelines say 'Courier'.
(...)
> I didn't use the standard running footer for a manuscript submission, I
> used a footer that had all my contact info in it in teeny type.
(...)
> I wound up using 23mm side margins, instead of 25mm, because LateX and
> dvips and the postscript emulator in my printer appear to have Issues
> about consistent definitions of point size somewhere.
(...)
> I didn't provide a summary or outline of the novel, because, well, I was
> hoping to avoid the necessity to produce that, and I asked ahead of
> time if I could leave it out.
Okay, I retract my statements. You and others have broken the guidelines
in the past, or have seen them broken. Although guidelines are consistent
throughout the industry, they are not unbreachable rules. I was wrong.
Of course, as a neophyte to professional publishing, I am now wondering
why the guidelines exist at all.
J.Pascal
(...)
> Ironically, the site leaves me a bit pissed off over a process that
> never worried me before, especially as it's entirely academic for me
> until I finally
> finish a story.
>
> The whole concept of letting someone down easy hits me as
> condescending. Of course it's personal. Why waste 10,000 words on a
> Web page pretending it isn't?
>
> Dear loser,
>
> We don't want your story because it sucked. Our
> opinion of you around here is that you're a person
> who writes stories that suck. If you want
> us to like you more, learn to write better.
>
> p.s. Please don't get mad. We're not paid to care.
>
>
> Wouldn't that be inspiring?
No.
I agree that too much "trying to be nice" makes a person (me)
wonder what the other person is tiptoeing around and between.
But that isn't the same thing as being polite or making some
minimal effort. I sometimes think that the "helpful advice"
would be better done without... the "you may have been
rejected for one of these things" lists... but I suspect that
they are mostly there to take up space as a one line, "Thank
you for allowing us to consider your submission but we have
decided not to buy it," is just sooooo too short and lonely
looking even on a half-sheet of paper.
But dang anyway... if I'm expected to be professional then
I expect the other guy to be professional too. Of the rejection
notices on the Blog the poetry one being a poem was kind of
cute but that's about the limit that I'd care for cuteness,
and I'm not sending in poetry. If I can't send unicorn
stationary with purple ink then by *golly* the publisher
had better have boring correspondance as well.
And while the gray tone person flipping off the author in
the background of a rejection notice may effectively limit
submissions to suicidal goth teenagers... it's *not*
professional. But then, success in business would kind of
make it difficult to act all artsy and misunderstood, so
I suppose it serves its purpose.
-Julie
Patricia C. Wrede
"J.Pascal" <ju...@pascal.org> wrote in message
news:b00d4ca5.04020...@posting.google.com...
<snip a lot of stuff I agree with about rejection letters>
> Still feels like a punch in the gut... I don't have enough of them
> for it not to.
You *never* get enough of them for it not to feel like a punch in the gut.
You just get a little better at rolling with the punch. Sometimes.
Oh, and is something wonky with David's server, or is it with mine? I saw a
couple of quoted bits of messages from him go by that I haven't seen the
original messages of, and it's very frustrating...
Patricia C. Wrede