November 30th, 2010 / 5:36 pm
Behind the Scenes
Blake Butler
Behind the Scenes
Most editors really want your shit to be as awesome as you think it is
Ever go back and look at the things you wrote and submitted years ago and thought were great then and felt miffed or mad when they were rejected, and then realize with that time passed between, Hey, holy shit, this sucked, thank god nobody published this, I can’t believe I didn’t realize… ? So, maybe it’s not always the case, and maybe some editors’ tastes are too safe, or behind the curve, but maybe more often you could think of a rejection as a second chance, and say thanks for the protection.
me too. getting shitty work accepted can scare u into not submitting for like, years. whenever i’m feeling particularly self-destructive, i just google that bad shit.
Yes
That’s one form of rejection but it comes in wagons. I think we’ve all orbited stuff out when we the work was not pie. Mostly writers do this early in their publishing moons I feel.
Sometimes a piece I seriously have worked on and believed in gets rejected. That makes me blar, but good blar–I work it more and re-send. I believe in the piece more, a stubborn belief, but I think that’s a glow thing. Piece gets picked up somewhere else, usually.
I will say editors should get their glow pretty much always. An established editor is doing you a favor by rejecting your work.
And of course some great stories just don’t ‘fit’ (Tao Lin quotes) the magazine. An editor has a vision for their venue. A Midwestern Toyota doesn’t fit in a honeycomb. Mint gravel doesn’t fit in a talk show.
Etc
I also think if you don’t read everything you wrote five years ago and think it sort of sucks then you’re not progressing. And I mean every five years of your life, look back and blar it. Then glow.
editors are awesome and lovely, but i don’t really want them or need them to protect me. seems like in writing you ought to make bucketfulls of wrong choices.
I stumbled on some of mine this morning on my hard drive at work. I felt like some of it was not “bad” so much as it showed a lack of discernment and judgment. I think these are the muscles we develop.
To dissent: are writers generally or often or even more than occasionally fair, effective self-critics? You might be being too generous to that olden editor and too hard on that self you were ‘this morning’, Blake.
It’s common to cringe inwardly – maybe kneesward – at one’s immaturities, but give those youthful infelicities more than your own lifetime. One doesn’t know how stupid one is, but nor does one know how clever one is.
I don’t really have emotions about rejection. I assume editors are right to reject me for their purposes and if enough of them do it I say “cool, I will stop submitting that,” at least usually. Sometimes I’m stubborn. As deadgod says I can’t judge my own work at all. Sometimes I hate it all, sometimes I think I am hot shit.
Actually the main reason I won’t submit to a venue is if I don’t trust the editor to not take it if it isn’t good. By that same reasoning I intentionally submit things that are not obviously “good fits” because then if they take it anyway I will know I am maybe doing something right. I have had one or two sinking feelings after acceptances because suddenly I realized I didn’t believe the editor would necessarily have told me if I sucked.
Publication doesn’t really prove anything either, but I let myself enjoy it. I have enjoyed it more as it’s happened more, which has been for me like the successful repetition of an experiment. First time didn’t mean much. Fifth time began to feel real.
I think you can become a better self critic with work. It probably takes a shit-load of reading good work. I mean hard word. You read enough and I can’t imagine someone would think they know anything.
That’s the key approach: Many, many, many writers are doing better work.
Then you can evaluate your own work.
I have some work I submitted many years back that got accepted and wish had been rejected!
I side-step the problem by declining to submit in the first place.
me too. getting shitty work accepted can scare u into not submitting for like, years. whenever i’m feeling particularly self-destructive, i just google that bad shit.
Maybe it’s cynicism on my part, but I often feel that having a piece accepted has more to do with luck, or the editor’s whim, than the actual quality of the piece. Several times I’ve sent out a group of poems, and had the poem I thought strongest declined, while other poems in the group made it through. And more than once I’ve received my contributor’s copy, flipped through it, and said to myself “If the editors liked these other pieces, how could they like mine?”
Sometimes it feels like the submission process is more of an endurance game than a form of honing. In a recent issue of Poets and Writers, Benjamin Percy wrote about having a piece rejected 36 times, and when the piece found a home it went on to win space in Best American Short Stories, or something like that. I also remember Blake mentioning, on his blog long ago, a submission process for the stories in Scorch Atlas that consisted of sending a story to ten places, and then when a rejection came back, sending it out somewhere else, so that the story was constantly being considered in ten places at once.
I don’t know Sean, about the re-working it thing. Sometimes after a rejection, you look at a work like, man what’s wrong with you, like how my mom looked at me when she bailed me out of jail that one time. But then again, you know, I have sent out poems that have been rejected like crazy and then get accepted somewhere pretty effin cool, and some places that even pay. Then I began to realize that one rejection was, probably, equal to only like 3 opinions (sometimes, only one if the first reader that it was hella wack). I sometimes wonder when the work is really done and it just isn’t finding a home and when it needs to be operated on. I guess it is our job as writers to know that shit, right?
I just want to live in a world where nobody is rejected because everybody is so awesome.
When do you think you’ll actually reach a day when you won’t like your newest work? Won’t you always look back on what you wrote and be like, “Man, I can’t believe I wrote that,” or worse, “I can’t believe I sent that out for publication and it got accepted”? Kind of seems like you’ll always regret writing something and/or publishing something. Show me one writer who has a flawless record doing either.
For sure.
But I’ve also had other interesting situations.
I’ve sent off stories that I thought were good, but wasn’t totally in love with at the time, for whatever reason, and they got snatched up, and I went “Hmmmmmmm. Okay.” And then I go to bat for a story that I absolutely love, only to see it get rejected 6, 12, 25 times. Sometimes it’s trying to place at a rag that is probably not the best fit. Sometimes it’s just the odds: if you submit to 25 places and all are 1% acceptance or LESS, that doesn’t mean the story sucks. I’ve retired a few stories for sure, felt that there wasn’t anything I could do to save them, and some of those got rejected a lot, so that’s a good thing. And then, I’ve also had stories get rejected a ton, finally getting placed someplace really nice.
I’d like to think we all evolve, so that of our work, looking back years later, there will be stories that we think of as okay or maybe even weak, but there will still be gems that give us a bit of a flutter, and that’s pretty cool.
If you don’t think everything that you have ever written is less than what it could’ve been then you will never become as good as you think you are.
Some of you are very impressed with yourselves. You shouldn’t be.
Def. agree with you on this, Blake. Fail better, people.
Def. agree with you on this, Blake. Fail better, people.
Def. agree with you on this, Blake. Fail better, people.
Considering the fact that at most national print journals, readers spend no more than 5 minutes on the stories they reject, and that many of them are 19 year old kids, I don’t think they deserve that much credit.
I find it odd that we use the word “editor” so often in discussions like this when most rejections are issued by readers. Readers might be part of the editorial team, but when you say, “editor,” you imply the genre editors or even the top dog. While these folks read slush too, most of the rejections are still issued by slush readers.
Considering the fact that at most national print journals, readers spend no more than 5 minutes on the stories they reject, and that many of them are 19 year old kids, I don’t think they deserve that much credit.
I find it odd that we use the word “editor” so often in discussions like this when most rejections are issued by readers. Readers might be part of the editorial team, but when you say, “editor,” you imply the genre editors or even the top dog. While these folks read slush too, most of the rejections are still issued by slush readers.
Considering the fact that at most national print journals, readers spend no more than 5 minutes on the stories they reject, and that many of them are 19 year old kids, I don’t think they deserve that much credit.
I find it odd that we use the word “editor” so often in discussions like this when most rejections are issued by readers. Readers might be part of the editorial team, but when you say, “editor,” you imply the genre editors or even the top dog. While these folks read slush too, most of the rejections are still issued by slush readers.