MYSTERYLITERATUREE-C
At 05:52 PM 5/20/2003 -0400, Gar wrote:
 >Once upon a time, if a host of agents and publishers kept kicking your 
manuscript
 >back to your mailbox, it was probably due in no small part to some lack 
of literary
 >merit.  So you had good reason to connect those rejections to flaws in your
 >manuscript, and rewrote accordingly.

Those were the good old days, I agree.  But nowadays, you don't get any 
indication of what's wrong.  They'll simply say, "Not right for us at this 
time."  I've even had writers bring in their own cover letters or first 
pages that have been scribbled on with "Sorry--not for us" or
"NO!!" (in 
one case), without even the bare courtesy of one of those quarter-page 
photocopied rejection slips.  It's pretty brutal out there now.

(I know writers have said this forever.  But even the pro markets are 
saying it now.)

Agreed, the writers in question were not ready for prime time, and they 
were in the groups I led in order to improve.  Still, they weren't getting 
any direction from rejections.
What they did get some direction from was the critique group(s) they were 
in and the groups such as I led (directed writing exercises, discussion, 
then critique of one or more chapters from a participant's manuscript we'd 
taken home to mark up.)  I was there partly to keep them from misleading 
the writer (by claiming that semicolons no longer exist--I've actually 
battled that one more than once--or by claiming that one must NEVER use any 
form of BE, because it was ALWAYS an indicator of the forbidden passive 
voice.  Of course, they're wrong, or else "the tire was flat" would be in 
passive voice, when it's in active voice, and also there's a time for 
passive voice, such as when the actor is unknown or unimportant and the 
emphasis should be on the action.)  It's a "common wisdom" now that you 
must go through crit partners/groups and outside feedback or editing in 
order to get direction.  And even then, your work may be deemed not right 
for a particular line.

If you get a lot of rejections, it could be your work isn't targeted to 
some particular line.

Every publishing house is now out for best-sellers.  They don't want to 
serve the midlist.  Even though you make the same money when you do eight 
books that earn, say, 250K, as when you do one that earns two million--and 
it's far tougher to find the $2mil one and make the public gobble it 
up--they want to save themselves the extra work and just do the 
biggies.  This is a disservice to the reading public, because one size 
doesn't fit all, but they're in the business to make money, not to serve 
art or humanity, after all.  Maxwell Perkins is dead, and so is his legacy, 
it appears.

Literary agents don't want to even talk to you if your "blurb"
doesn't make 
them think the book will go to auction.  They have treated me rather 
shabbily, which is, I think, unbusinesslike (sure, when I work at day jobs, 
I get harried, but I don't take it out on poor little hopefuls.)  Exactly 
ONE agent has told me what she really finds lacking in the manuscripts she 
hasn't taken on.  I'm not even a client of hers.  She must just be a Good 
Person.  But what *she* said has actually been helpful.  It isn't at all 
typical.  (She told me that cozies had to be 80K words or fewer, and thus 
that my two cozies wouldn't fit the market; she read my fantasy and said it 
was too young adult for the SF markets, and she doesn't handle YA or 
children's books; she saw my other mystery and said she'd like to see me 
explain why Ariadne doesn't suspect that Eddie is up to something and just 
ask him about it--which was a quite useful observation, because it made me 
realize that the reader doesn't "get" their relationship and how she's 
always been very hands-off with him, and I need to insert something subtle 
a couple of places earlier to let the reader catch on that she handles him 
with kid gloves for fear of his walking out.)

Someone else chimed in:
 >I couldn't agree more with Gar and Gene.  To put it simply: rejection 
improves a
 >manuscript.

Which is a generalization.  What you really mean, I suppose, is that *if* 
the rejection is actually based in reality rather than just market 
considerations only--and I'll get more into that in a moment--and *if* 
there is a well-articulated reason given in the rejection, then perhaps the 
writer can recognize what's really wrong and can figure out how to fix it 
without breaking something else.  (Sometimes three people will tell you 
something's wrong, and they'll all tell you different things that are 
wrong, and it won't be any of those things but actually a fourth problem 
that you need to correct.  Such as, you haven't set up something properly, 
and so they're expecting something else.  They demand description of some 
place when they should just "default to" a normal drugstore, for 
example.  It means you have led them to believe it'll be different, and 
your emphasis is messed up.  And so forth.)

But what repeated, anonymous rejection generally does to those with an 
artistic temperament is . . . it throws them into a depression and makes 
them think their work is worthless, and sometimes that they're 
worthless.  It doesn't "improve the work."  The only thing that improves 
the work is constructive feedback the likes of which editors don't have 
TIME any more to articulate, let alone type out and send to you.  Also, 
*you* have to just *know* the craft.  You'll type a million wasted words 
while you're learning, just the way that potters throw a bunch of worthless 
pots and carpenters build some iffy structures while they're apprentices 
and journeymen.  Once you have done this for a while, you'll be able to 
improve your own work by just letting the draft rest for a month or two, 
then coming back to it.  Also, a trusted reader or crit partner can be 
invaluable, as long as they're not dimbulbs and they don't take you down 
the primrose path to ruin.

On the other hand, there are too many writers already.  So the industry 
prolly figures that anything they can do to discourage some of them is 
good.  Thus, abrupt and non-informative rejection.

*Now.*  That said, I suspect this thread was actually a veiled attempt to 
ask whether the people who do POD books and self-publish are aware that 
their books aren't good enough for prime time.  The answer is that usually, 
they DO know this, but they want them in print anyway.  After all, ugly 
women get married and have careers, too!!  Not everyone can be the shining 
example of perfection, 110 lbs and blue eyes, etc.  And not everyone has 
the same standard of beauty as promulgated on MTV.  Readers aren't, in 
general, as discriminating as critics and writers and editors, and they'll 
devour just about any book and deem many of them good enough, even if there 
are flaws.  (Witness the popular books that should have been rejected, but 
were published by large houses.)

I'm tarring every POD writer (including myself) with the same brush when I 
say this, but it's true--most of what's out there as e-books or POD or 
whatever is self-indulgent or flawed or not well written or, um, trash that 
needs a couple more passes through the typer (as Heinlein would say); 
however, this doesn't mean that EVERYTHING that's out there as POD is in 
that condition.  Some books just don't fit any pigeonholes, are perfectly 
fine books as they stand, and thus won't be picked up by New York unless 
you self-pub, go out and promote, and then get noticed and picked up after 
you've taken the risk and proven them popular.

Sure, we could spend our entire lives revising and polishing the SAME book 
forever, but is that really useful?  We want to go on and write another 
book that will be better and different, but maybe this book is not without 
value, even though New York doesn't feel it can make money off of the 
book.  There's a point at which you have to say, "This is the book I had in 
mind, or as close as I can get it, and it represents the artistic intent 
and the story I wanted to tell.  Any further changes--such as wholesale 
deletion of chapters and subplots or what-have-you--would make it not my 
story, and thus aren't proper to do."  You have to be able to say,
"I wrote 
something that is unlike what sells well today, and I still believe it's 
worth reading, though it has a readership smaller than the pop 
best-sellers."  (There are fads, you know; now you aren't allowed to use 
adverbs as dialogue tags and you're supposed to SHOW what is meant, but in 
the past, those adverbs were shorthand used by everyone from Louisa May 
Alcott on down, and there was less ambiguity.  If I show that someone 
scratches his head and twitches his eyebrows, does that mean he's nervous, 
or that a fly is dive-bombing him, or that he's lying?  It's less clear 
when you have to show and not tell.  But that's the way it is NOW, and 
that's how we have to write.  It has not always been so.  The pendulum 
could swing back, or it could, as I suspect, change even further so that 
everything's a transcript of a movie with no internal monologue in novels 
at all.  But I digress.  If you haven't noticed already.)  There are 
several examples of good books--even Pulitzer Prize-winning novels--that 
were published posthumously, after the writer killed himself or herself 
because he couldn't write something that could get 
published.  (_Confederacy of Dunces_ is the famous example.  I believe 
there are others.)  So just because you're rejected doesn't mean you're 
BAAAAAD.

So, yes, okay, we KNOW that we could delete the first three chapters, make 
a car chase action scene at the climax, take out all the internal 
monologue, throw in a gory serial killer and his internal thoughts, add 
some explicit sex, and so forth, and "be more like the best-sellers," but 
maybe we don't want to.  Maybe we feel that artistic integrity, being true 
to the initial vision of the story we wanted to tell, is more 
important.  Maybe the tale of the Civil War kid who left home at fifteen to 
fight but then decides it's morally wrong is worth reading.  Maybe the tale 
of the man patterned after your grandfather who arrives in America with 
only the clothes on his back and three hungry children is worthy of our 
attention.  And that's perhaps the reason that POD and e-book authors are 
out here doing it "wrong."

(Sorry if this sounds like an emotional diatribe.  It's actually a string 
of logical arguments.  If you are a "thinker" instead of an
"emoter," this 
will come across differently.  I assure you, though, that it's not intended 
as an attack on Gar and the others who question whether POD authors realize 
they might improve their work.  It's just an explanation (in the best way I 
know how to make it) as to why someone might KNOW the work could be changed 
to be more marketable, but that there's such a thing as taking the heart 
and original intent out of the story, and some authors won't want to do 
that.  The real "culprit" here is the market, I suppose, or maybe the bean 
counters who bought up all the publishing houses and then realized they 
didn't make much money in the old days--and wanted them to be cash 
cows.  The market really had little choice in the matter--and perhaps the 
market is interested in reading some of our POD books, after all, because 
they are not getting them from the large houses.)

Of course, I'm still out here beating my head against the wall, and proving 
they're both equally hard.  I'm working on a chick lit novel, a shorter 
mystery, and a fantasy/romance, all targeted at specific lines.  I'm trying 
to rein in the word count.  I'm trying to keep suspense up, and so 
forth.  I'm going to try to sell all of them to New York houses.  But I 
won't be able to "write one like Stephen King/Diane Mott Davidson/Joan 
Hess," simply because I'm not one of those writers.  Their books are 
wonderful and appeal to millions, but they're tours inside those writers' 
minds.  What you get with me is, of course, a tour inside mine.  And that's 
going to have to be good enough, because that's all I can offer on this 
side of the Great Veil.

Who knows what my destiny actually is? I can only hope it's going to work 
out the way it's supposed to.

Big best-seller or no.

- - -
The only thing that flies faster than an F-16 is your guardian angel
- - - -
Nine out of ten doctors recommend reading my books.  The tenth is a quack.
Shalanna Collins   http://home.attbi.com/~shalanna/>
_Dulcinea: or Wizardry A-Flute_  (e-mail me 4 excerpt)  ISBN 0-7388-5388-7
New!  I'm trying out a blog/jrnl http://www.livejournal.com/users/shalanna/>

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