Stay the Course vs Cut and Run

This is really an addendum to Reason #8: What's your Exit Strategy?. I'm posting it in the dying hours before the title becomes last year's top catchphrase.

Hopefully you've spent some time with your family this week, if they haven't already left you. Maybe you've had a chance to consider your writing goals, and how they impact your need for simple human intimacy.

Every writer gets rejections, and every writer can tell you an anecdote or two about the rejection that was totally bogus and personal, the one that turned up a year later, the one that really nailed the problem with the story, and the one that nearly drove them insane. (You might have to buy them a drink per anecdote, which is overpriced in my book.)

Most biographies of successful authors make note of how many rejections they received before their big break. A handful of unpublished novels, dozens, even hundreds of rejections are not uncommon. The common implication to these tales, however, is not "It took me that long to get a handle on this writing game," or even "Gee, my early stuff really sucked."

It's "My, those dolts in the publishing industry wouldn't know a good writer if they bashed them over the head with a Royal No. 10 typewriter."

And it's exactly this attitude that keeps the truly talentless from ever taking stock of the reams of first drafts spilling over their "writing nook" floor, the hard drive full of "fragments", the pile of dog-eared, hand-annotated writing books, the notebooks scrawled with cuneiform-like characters once thought to be poetry, the used envelope with the next submission for Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine already stuffed and taped in, postmark steamed off and ready for resending, or the grimy mirror covered with yellowed rejection slips for "inspiration", some older than their marriage.

At no point do they think, "I have wasted my adulthood. I am beyond help. The guys who beat me up in high school all drive BMWs now and have sex with their secretary. I spent next month's rent on story arc software. When the divorce papers were served, I revised and added six pages of backstory. I don't know what day it is and I think the dog died in here, somewhere."

They Stay the Course. They keep going until the cataracts form and they start typing on their televisions, and they start arguments with the postmaster about how he lacks the insight to fully appreciate how to mail his story. They don't stop until Old Man Death says "Just finish the sentence you're on."

You're probably not at this stage (yet). Your friends still call to let you know when they're getting married or moving away. You haven't wondered if you can save on toilet paper by wiping your ass on the rejection slips, then rinsing them off. You haven't tried to reassemble back into the shape of the original tree. When you get a rejection, there's still a small part of you who knows it's because the story was crap.

Now is the time to set a timetable for withdrawal.

I'm not saying you have to Cut and Run, just think about when to slow down. When to permanently retire those execrable early novels you still send out every three years or so because you think the agents will have changed jobs by now. When to just burn the story rather than reworking it (again).

Then, think about when you will stop writing. Set some specific conditions, and a date.

Then tell someone.

Guest Post: The Aspie Dilemma, by Paul Riddell

Paul Riddell sent long another contribution to the Stop Writing debate (see his first, Slushpile Freakonomics, if you missed it), while completely undercutting his argument by continuing to write. Just imagine that guy at the end of the bar, throwing back shot after shot while opining to no-one in particular, "I'll tell you another reason you should stop drinking," and claiming that "Next one's the last, I swear."

---

For a group that prides itself on self-diagnosed Asperger's Syndrome, wannabe writers sure have a problem with spotting patterns. Your work lunchtime conversations consist of nothing other than bitching about how everybody else is slacking off and you're the only one dragging the company out of its inevitable slide to bankruptcy, and you wonder why you aren't invited out to the bar after work. Your diet consists of nothing but McDonald's Happy Meals and Doritos served in a 55-gallon drum, and you can't figure out why your ever-expanding ass is generating its own event horizon. You can't understand why that hot little number in Accounting won't respond to your repeated requests for a date when you send them on official Star Wars valentines. Five jobs in two years, and every last one ended with you receiving a card signed by your co-workers reading "Don’t let the gates of Hell smack you on the butt on your way in." The temps you're overseeing quit within days of meeting you, and the few that remain talk about getting together to play a little game of "Let's frag the lieutenant". Your parents preface Christmas calls with "Let us know if you're going to be in town, because we won't be here then." Your last three ex-boyfriends and your ex-husband promptly married someone else within six months of leaving you, and your ex-husband came very close at one point to leaving you for another man. Oh, and your short stories keep getting rejected by every venue that receives them, many times without the envelope being opened. Naw, it can't have anything to do with you, can it?

Kids, it’s time to not only to use Occam's Razor as a diagnostic tool, but to wave it over our heads, howling "Blood and souls for my lord Arioch!" at the tops of our lungs. The reason why you've been unable to exchange your dead-end job for the luxury of writing short stories and poetry on a full-time basis isn't because of some horrible conspiracy intended to keep you down. Riddell’s Law doesn't apply here, either: yes, a lot of editors demonstrate the Peter Principle every time they trip on the carpet pattern every day on their way into their offices, but those are only the ones who have their jobs because nobody else wants it. Yes, you'll see writers who might be getting contracts due to a particular ability to schmooze editors or raw sex appeal, but they're usually flavors-of-the-week that'll be back to working at Starbucks before you can say "Kristine Kathryn Rusch" when their books bomb.

The reason why your stories, articles, poems, and novels aren't selling is because you aren't offering anything that anyone is willing to exchange money to acquire, and the odds are pretty good that you will continue down that sad path for the rest of your writing career. All six months of it.

That's not to say that there aren't any editors or publishers who have it out for you, especially if you respond to every rejection with a 3000-word tirade written with green crayon on toilet paper and signed with a dead gopher. (When Harlan Ellison sent a dead gopher Fourth Class Mail to a publisher who was screwing him over, it was a foul but thoroughly understandable response to a situation that could have been resolved peaceably and equitably. When you do it because you read about his doing it, it just means that you get more familiarity with the words "restraining order", "harassment suit" and "biorecovery fees".) Ranting to editors about rejections is like arguing with your local Officer Barbrady when you get caught speeding in a school zone. The only thing you've achieved is to move yourself from the slush pile to the "Pull Out and Burn" file.

Now, I could give a lot of positive suggestions instead of continuing to belabor the point: I'm just as guilty of ignoring patterns as you. If you wanted to improve your and everyone else's odds of getting published, you could decide to subscribe to the publications whose slushpile you defile: if ten percent of the people who flood a magazine with unsolicited submissions actually bothered to subscribe, the magazine industry wouldn't be in such a mess, and you'd actually see what sort of stories the editor is accepting. (This implies that you'd actually read something in the publication other than the Submission Guidelines, but I'm building dream castles and measuring for drapes.) You could do more to get people to put down the TV remote and PlayStation and read. Volunteering at your local public library is a start, as is organizing reading programs at your local bookstores, but the best thing you can do is dispel some of the stereotypes of people who read for pleasure. (As it is, the worst sort of science fiction fans have so badly poisoned the well that getting caught by the boss with a complete collection of Anal Rampage or Chicks With Dicks is less of a career-killer than being caught with the latest Orson Scott Card or Gregory Benford.)

Or…you could break the pattern and stop writing. Right now. Or do you like getting the same response to the same action and getting upset because you’re expecting a different outcome?

Axiom #2: Riddell's Law

Riddell's Law:

Any sufficiently developed incompetence is indistinguishable from conspiracy.

Writers find interesting ways to deal with the continuous stream of rejection slips that arrive on their doorstep, in envelopes they bought and stamped themselves. Some make little origami boats and hold races with their imaginary friends. Others build bonfires and dance naked around them, trying to make it rain in New York. Still others take the old adage too literally and actually try to wallpaper their spare room. And that's where their relatives find them, sometimes years later.

But the worst, most dangerous ones collect rejections in precisely organised folders, after the slips are analysed for fingerprints, hidden ciphers and tracking dots. They maintain files on each editor and agent, complete with address details, long-distance snapshots and the GPS coordinates of their office and mother's house.

They are the conspiracy theorists.

They don't read submission guidelines, but boy, can they read things into "not right for us".

They believe that agents and editors have the time and inclination to develop shared blacklists of authors who are "too radical" for the publishing world. They write impassioned scrawls on the back of the rejection slips about why the rejecter is wrong, on every count, and are obviously incapable of understanding the "laytent genies of theyre storie".

They cite poorly researched, inflammatory "stings" like the London Times conducted earlier this year, and Time Magazine 27 years ago, as evidence of the publishing industry's endemic incompetence (Of course they've never read Miss Snark's rebuttal).

Yeah, agents and editors have it in for new writers, and spend their days gleefully composing viciously subtle and obtuse rejection letters intended to eviscerate the ego with the razor of faint praise.

Of course, Microsoft, the Post Office, the cable guy and you and I are all part of the conspiracy. They blame anyone and anything for their failure, except their own craptacularity.

There are exactly three reasons why your submission was rejected:

1. They have all the submissions/clients they can read/publish/represent right now.
2. You sent it to the New Yorker when the obvious market is Penthouse Forum.
3. It's shit.

If you have ever interpreted another reason from a rejection, you're a conspiracy theorist. Stop writing.

Some agents and editors do maintain their own, personal "auto-reject" lists of suspected conspiracy theorists. If you've ever replied to a rejection with anything other than "Thanks for your time," you're on the list.