More on the Slush Pile

I want to talk about something that’s kind of a sensitive subject, a subject I’ve been avoiding talking about for some time because, while I think it’s extremely illuminating when it comes to the inner workings of literary journals, it may make a particular literary journal that I used to read for look bad.

So I’m going to start by pointing out that I don’t think that this practice is uncommon at all, particularly not amongst the journals that are run by MFA programs, which many literary journals are. And I would also add that even those literary journals that don’t technically do these sort of slush pile parties are still probably making decisions based on the same kinds of variables and gut reactions (that’s right, I said “gut” and not “visceral.” You know why? Because I’m not a pretentious a-hole). And finally, I would remind you that though this certainly doesn’t seem an effective way to wade through the slush pile, I don’t know that there is an effective way. The slush pile is massive and is ever growing; the people who have to read submissions simply do not have the time to give every single submission a fair chance. It’s a sad truth about the publication world.

The way the slush pile party works is this: all the editors and readers for a journal get together and the stacks and stacks of unread submissions are placed in front of them on a table. They have got to get that slush pile knocked out because more submissions are arriving every day and the older submissions simply have to be decided on before the pile gets any larger. So they dive in. They work through submission after submission as quickly as possible, trying to move on to the next and the next in the hopes of finishing and being able to leave at some reasonable hour. Which means, as you can imagine, not actually reading most of the submissions all the way through (not the prose ones, at least). It means reading every submission looking for a reason, any reason at all, to stop reading and reject. And many submissions, believe me, don’t get more than their first page read. Many submissions don’t get read beyond their first few sentences.

But this is a social event as well as a job. That’s why they call it a “party.” Sure, the term is sarcastic, but even as it is it’s also kind of serious. This is a chance for a bunch of friends to get together and share with each other what is normally very solitary work. There is a loud din of chatter going on during the entire event, and it’s very difficult to actually focus on reading through all that noise.

But what really depressed me the first time I went to one of these events wasn’t just the fact that submissions were not getting read carefully, that there was so much noise it would have been difficult to read something all the way through even if you had the time to. What made me almost want to give up was the fact that one of the major ways that the readers socialized with each other was by making fun of the submissions. (Again, I remind you: this, I am absolutely certain, is common practice. I can’t even count the times I’ve read about an editor who claims that almost everything in the slush pile is terrible. This is a sort of making fun, as is that fabled “wall of shame” we’ve all heard about, where editors will pin up on the wall, as a joke, some really terrible submission or cover letter.)

Now sometimes there really are truly terrible submissions. Some submissions are just asking to be made fun of. But some of them aren’t. Most of them aren’t. Most of them are well written, interesting stories or poems that are getting made fun of because the reader isn’t reading carefully. The other people in the room laugh along with the initial reader, who perhaps stops to read a sentence aloud, and they’re laughing not because it’s a terrible sentence but because the sentence is being offered to them as a joke. Because they understand that they’re supposed to think it’s terrible, and so they do.

I don’t know that there’s any absolutely foolproof way to guarantee that your work makes it through the slush pile alive. I suggested last week that one trick is to make sure you’re doing something new, but even then I think whether your submission gets read fairly probably has more to do with luck than anything else. But here’s the bright side: when you do get rejected, you shouldn’t take it personally. I know I’ve said it before and I’ll probably say it again but seriously, rejections don’t mean much in the big picture. Acceptances are all that really matter, and maybe rejections that actually give you personal feedback or encouragement. Form rejections, though? Just brush them off. Throw them out or file them away or nail them to your wall or burn them in a primal ritual, whatever your method is, but whatever you do, don’t let them get you down.

That Great Big Pile of Slush

This past week I volunteered with a group of my colleagues at Zane State College to judge a fifth grade essay contest put on by the Foundation for Appalachian Ohio. It was an interesting and fun experience and it reminded me a lot of the slushpile parties that Permafrost, UAF’s graduate student run literary journal, used to have. If you had walked in on us judging the essay contest, you would have found a group of exhausted looking English faculty sitting around a table with stacks and stacks of contest entrants in the center, and at our feet you would have seen stacks of essays that had already been judged. As the day wore on we got more and more draggled looking, I’m sure, and by the end of the day we were admittedly somewhat rushing through the essays, trying to just finish up already so we could get out of there. It was fun . . . but it was an all day thing and by the end of “all day” pretty much any activity begins to wear on you.

Even though we spent the first hour or so of the day norming our standards, we disagreed on a lot of things. While any essay that scored under a certain point got tossed to the side immediately, many of the essays had to be read by at least two readers. If the disagreement by those two readers was large enough, the essay would go to a third reader. It was fascinating to see how all these English instructors that all teach at the same institution could have such different reactions to the very same essays. Ultimately the winners were essays that we were able to come to some sort of a consensus on, though often the winner in one category would be the one that three or four people thought was the best, and the rest of the people just sort of agreed to accept the decision since the one that they would have chosen wasn’t going to get a majority vote.

This experience very much mirrored reading for a literary journal. You start with stacks of submissions and the feeling that you’re in over your head. Some of the submissions are going to be at a low enough level – however you even gauge that! – that you don’t have to spend much time with them. Others will have different readers in total disagreement. One reader might think it’s good but it should be rejected for X reason. Another might argue that X reason is nowhere near important enough to reject such a good piece. Yet another might think the whole thing is crap and it should be rejected now before anybody wastes any more time arguing about it.

Some editors and agents say that there are good submissions and there are bad submissions. The good ones will get published and the bad ones won’t. Period. This is absurd! It completely ignores how subjective literature is, for one thing, and it also relies on the fallacy that there are no other variables going into the reading process. If I grab a submission off the slushpile after I’ve been at it for four hours, I might, through no fault of my own, be less inclined to give it a fair read as I would have been if I had grabbed it at the beginning of my reading session. If the particular submission in question happens to be 25 pages long – forget about it! I don’t want to read another 25 pages right now. I’m probably going to be looking for any excuse I can find to stop reading and reject it. This is all completely subconscious. You don’t pick up a submission and consciously think, “I don’t think I’m going to give this a fair chance.” But the variables, the variables!

With the essay contest, what it really came down to, I feel, is that the essays that were saying something different from the other essays were the ones that rose to the top. Most of the essays were extremely similar. This did not make them inherently bad. It did, however, make them boring, at least after you had already read several others about the exact same topic. The same is true with submissions. You might get a really well crafted story that just happens to remind you of any number of other stories you’ve read or that have been submitted to your journal, and you’re going to reject it because even though it’s good, it bores you. I’ve received rejections like this, rejections telling me that the writing is excellent but the topic is nothing new. I’ve written rejections like this, too.

The fact is it’s the ones that are doing something we’ve never seen before that seem to be the ones we all agree that we like.

Get Some Rest!

The MFA/MFYou newsletter is going to take a week off . . . because I am extremely sick. I'll be back next week, I promise, all rested up and ready to write your ears off.

Sacrifices

As the first full week of my new part time retail position draws to a close and the two stacks of papers that I have to grade for my classes remind me that they won’t grade themselves, I’m beginning to rethink my old idea that there is no such thing as no time to write. I haven’t been able to find a single second to write in the past week until right now, and even now I’m sort of choosing not to do what I should be doing so that I can spend a few minutes writing this. I’m already so drastically behind in my writing goal for the month that I don’t believe it’s possible to catch up, even if I quit the retail job right now . . . but I’ll come back to that later.

There’s this image that we have of the starving writer. The person so dedicated to writing that he or she behaves totally irresponsibly in all other aspects of life. Makes no real effort to hold down a job. Ignores family and friends in favor of writing. Ignores his or her own physical health, even, and hygiene, all in the name of art. We’ve all heard the stories. People who went on to great success and who will tell you that part of the reason they made it is because they made the conscious decision that writing was more important than, say, earning a steady income.

I always used to think that sort of behavior was utterly unacceptable. Artist or not, there are certain things we all have to do to survive. I thought that these success stories stand out only because these people got lucky. That for every one such success story there were probably hundreds of stories with similar beginnings but that ended with the person starving to death on the streets or at least eventually giving up the dream.

Well I’ve been realizing lately that what those stories are really about, I think, is sacrifice. That sometimes we have to make sacrifices so that we have time to write. It could be sleeping for an hour less, or not going out drinking with your friends on Saturday nights, or not watching TV, or, in my case, not working that extra job to bring in extra money.

This past week and a half, since I started the new job, I haven’t felt like a writer at all. I haven’t really been a writer, to tell you the truth. A writer is a person who writes, and I haven’t been meeting that one simple requirement. And the thing is there’s nothing that I could really sacrifice besides the job. I don’t watch TV. I haven’t been playing video games. I haven’t even been reading. I’ve been working the two jobs, and that’s it. I even had to schedule time to go on a date with my husband, Damien, the other day (and I fell behind on my grading as a result).

I see two possible choices that I can make here. I can choose to be a writer and quit this retail job so that I can have time to write, or I can choose not to be and keep the job so that we’ll have a more comfortable amount of money coming in. Between my meager income as a teacher and Damien’s as a TA, we make enough to scrape by. It’s a tight scrape and it will involve a lot of other sorts of sacrifices, but we’d have enough for all the basic stuff you have to pay for to get by.

And I’d rather be a poor writer than a financially comfortable nothing.

Being and Writingness

I heard somewhere recently that when we visualize ourselves reaching whatever ultimate goal we have – whatever sort of success we are looking for in life – we are setting ourselves up for failure. This, of course, is an overstatement, and it’s also not really that innovative of an idea, either. But we do hear motivational speakers and self help books rely on this somewhat wrongheaded approach: if you keep your mind in this fantasy world of where you want to go, it will motivate you to take the proper steps to get there.

What I heard recently is that, in fact, we should be visualizing ourselves taking the small steps that will lead the way to whatever that larger goal is. That we shouldn’t distract ourselves from the practical, concrete things we need to do by fantasizing about ourselves in some dream version of the future, which may or may not come to pass. This, of course, is just another self help nugget – and self help nuggets, as a rule, are not very helpful – but I think there is more truth to this idea than this visualizing yourself having reached the ultimate goal hooey.

This idea is essentially the same method as making small, attainable goals that will lead you in the direction of where you want to go – and feeling good about yourself when you reach each of those small goals. The big problem with the other method is that you can reach small goal after small goal and actually be doing quite well, but still be years away from reaching that ultimate goal that you’ve been dreaming about. The result is that you might feel discouraged, might feel like these small steps aren’t getting you anywhere, might just give up altogether.

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I had these elaborate fantasies of myself becoming rich and famous off of my writing. I would think about how great life would be one day, when I wouldn’t have to have another job outside of writing (and filmmaking, which was my other big dream at the time), and when I would have regular meetings with an agent and with editors. When I would have plenty of money to live comfortably and live well and, more importantly, make my living off of an activity that I enjoyed doing, anyway.

Here’s how it would go: I would sit down to write, be at it for maybe half an hour, give or take, and then I would start thinking about how good I believed this thing that I was writing was. How this was definitely going to get accepted somewhere. How this was going to set me on that path I had been desperately trying to find the entrance to: that fabled path to success. And then I would start thinking about what would happen next, and what would happen after that, and where it would all lead – that final image of myself as a successful professional writer.

I was one of the biggest writing clichés: the person who wants to have written rather than to write. I wanted to skip all those steps inbetween and just get to the point where I would wake up in the morning with nothing that I had to do but write. But of course, I had time to write; I was wasting it fantasizing about success. Those steps that I wanted to skip? Those were the steps where you actually, you know, write things.

I have this theory that most of us – maybe all of us – enter into that stage somewhere early on in our development as writers. We begin writing, of course, because we enjoy it, but once we start to realize that we’re kind of good at it, and that there are people out there who make a living off of being good at it, well that’s when the trouble begins. The important thing is that we move past that stage.

I’ve reached a point now where I pretty much just assume that I won’t ever get a book published by a major publisher, that I won’t ever make enough money to live off of writing. And the surprising thing is that this is actually a very freeing realization, because now my focus is on meeting these small goals I set for myself. Writing for X amount of time every day. Submitting to X number of journals each month. Getting the kinks worked out of Y story and better developing Z character. Now I actually feel like I’m sort of living the life I want to . . . right now. I don’t have to fantasize about a future that will probably never happen because the point is that I want to write, and as long as I squeeze time out of my days to do this, I would say I’m living the dream. I am a writer.

The Real World and Other Nightmares

Perhaps it’s because I had a nightmare last night about work – one of those dreams where everything goes wrong and you lack the wisdom to deal with it the way you would in real life – but I’m feeling sort of cynical about life in the real world today.

This past week has been sort of a downer for me as a writer. I’ve had a phenomenally busy week – planning lessons, grading papers, getting things squared away with a new part time retail job I’ve taken to supplement my teaching income, and as always: errands, errands, errands. I haven’t written much this week, and what frustrates me is that it’s not because I’ve been sitting around watching TV or playing DS (my video game drug of choice). I haven’t written much this week because every second that I’m awake I have something else, something more pressing that I have to do.

I’ve talked before about how saying you don’t have time to write is something of a cop out. I do think this is true – after all, you could sleep for an hour less each night and spend that hour writing, if nothing else – but I also think there is something to be said for the lifestyle of a graduate creative writing student.

When I first started grad school I felt that my life suddenly revolved around teaching – and I wasn’t even sure at the time whether I wanted to be a teacher. I hated my new life, and I spent a lot of time ranting about how I had had a lot more time to write when I was working in an office than I did now that I was a creative writing MFA student. (This time I spent ranting, of course, could have been more wisely spent writing.)

After I got used to it, though, and especially after I got the hang of teaching, I found that I had waaaaaaaaay more time to write than I ever did out in the work world. When you work eight hours a day, yes, it’s possible to come home and write for an hour or two, but don’t forget you also have to make dinner, spend time with your spouse, run errands, and sleep. If you get home from work at five, and you should really try to be in bed by, say, ten so you can get a good eight hours before having to get up at six and get ready for work, you really don’t have a lot of time in which to carve an hour or two to write. And you can absolutely forget about the possibility of writing for three hours a day – which is always my ultimate goal.

As a graduate creative writing student your schedule is much more open. It’s stress, more than any real barriers, that keep you from writing. You teach one class (in most cases) and take two or three. Most of your homework is enjoyable – it is, after all, your field of interest – and even after doing all your homework and all the stuff you have to do to teach, after running all your errands and doing everything else you have to do to survive, you still have plenty of time leftover to write and write and write and write.

Not so, I’m learning, as a part time adjunct instructor and a part time retail sales girl. I haven’t even gotten into the thick of the retail job and I already can tell that finding an hour or two to write everyday is going to be a constant battle. Every single day I will have to search for time, figure out how I’ll do it this time, figure out what I need to sacrifice to squeeze it in.

But I know even as I write this that I will work it out. I’ll find some routine that works and I’ll get my writing time in. Maybe not as much as I would like – that three hour a day goal feels more unattainable than ever right now – but I’ll find some time. I’ll find enough to keep myself sane. And in the meantime, I’m thinking again about PhD programs. I’m scheming how I can get myself back into that cushy life where even though you don’t make a living off of writing, it’s just assumed that writing is important and that you simply must have time to do it. That writing is as essential as breathing, that it’s one of those basic functions that keeps us going, keeps us alive.

Editorial Feedback

So one of the non-MFA writers that MFA/MFYou has published mentioned that he doesn’t feel he’s missed out on anything by not getting a formal creative writing education – he gets essentially the same (or one could argue more valuable) feedback that you get in workshop from editors when he submits his work. This is very true. Although not all editors give feedback on rejected submissions, it’s not uncommon for editors to give personal feedback on the submissions that came really close to getting accepted or even that they liked enough to bother spending the extra few minutes writing a real rejection and not just sending out the form response.

This past week I got a rejection that caused me to go back and revise a story – and the story, I feel, has greatly improved as a result. What happened was that the editor gave me a reason for the rejection that happened to be the exact same reason that another editor had given me a few months ago. The problem that these editors pointed to had to do with the amount of exposition that fell at the beginning of the story. The first time an editor told me this, I recognized that this was true of the story but I felt that it was alright – that it was still well written and engaging and I shouldn’t feel the need to change it just because the current standard is that we don’t like it when stories have a lot of exposition.

But when the second editor cited the exposition as the reason for rejection, I decided I would be wise to go back and revisit the story with that concern in mind. I opened up a new document and wrote a new beginning, working to address the problem these editors had with the story, but I kept the thought in the back of my mind that if I didn’t like the end result, I would chuck the revision and keep the story as it was. But I did like the end result and I think that the story is immensely stronger now.

This is similar to the experience MFAers sometimes have in workshop. You might cringe at some of the workshop feedback, but when several people agree that something is a problem you’ve got to be kind of arrogant to not seriously consider their concerns. The difference here is that I think in some ways the feedback you receive from editors should carry more weight. If more than one editor – having no knowledge of what other editors have said – agree that something isn’t working in your piece, you’d be wise to really think hard about whether they might be right.

I had another editorial feedback episode yesterday, this time for a story that has been accepted for publication (from a market that is both paying and international – woo-hoo!). The editor sent me some feedback and would like me to revise the story and get it back to her in a week. Much of her feedback was similar to the margin notes you receive in workshop. Not the major stuff that gets discussed out loud in class – no, if there had been major problems I doubt that the story would have been accepted at all. This is the sentence level stuff that gets marked on the individual copies of a piece: this sentence is a bit awkward, this bit of dialogue seems out of character, this is perhaps a bit of a cliché. That sort of thing. And it’s all (with the exception of one sentence that I plan to talk to the editor about – see if I can convince her why this is okay) stuff that I agree wholeheartedly about.

I feel like my workshop experiences were at least partially preparing me for the feedback I would later receive from editors, but I also think that you could skip the workshop environment altogether and, as long as you’re a mature enough writer (and human being) to be able to listen open-mindedly to criticism, you’ll be able to improve using the editorial feedback that will inevitably come your way. You may not always like it, and you certainly won’t always agree with it, but you should be happy to get it whenever you can. None of us can do this entirely on our own.