Alas, no more. I don't finish half the books I start nowadays, and a good many get hurled across the room after a couple of chapters. Part of this, I'm sure, stems from the self-confidence of middle age. The narrator of Toby Stein's All the Time There Is confides that she vowed on turning thirty-five never to finish a book merely because she had started it, and I submit that that's a good vow to make and a reasonable time in life to make it.
I think, though, that an increasing ability to discriminate between good and bad writing has had at least as much to do with my changed attitude toward what I read. The writing I do, day in and day out (whatever that means), has served to make me perhaps excessively aware of the technique of other writers. When I read the work of someone lacking in craft, I know it. This knowledge, this acute awareness, interferes with the voluntary suspension of disbelief upon which fiction depends for its effectiveness.
If my writer's ear tells me the dialogue I am reading is unnatural and clumsy, how am I to make myself believe in the existence of the characters who are speaking it? If my writer's perceptions force me to notice that I am reading lumpish prose, how can I lose myself in the story?
As a result, any number of bestsellers with considerable popular appeal leave me colder than an editor's smile. They may tell a good story, but if I can't get past the writing I can't enjoy that story.
I don't mean to imply that people who do enjoy such books are to be condemned for their enjoyment. More often than not, I envy them. They're having a good time, while I, a lifelong reader, am having an increasingly difficult time finding something to read.
There are compensations, however.
Because when I do find something good, I can enjoy it on several levels at once. On the most basic level, I can get caught up in the story as inextricably as the rankest soap-opera addict. I can laugh when it's funny and cry when it's sad. That, after all, is what fiction is for, and if anything, my professional involvement with the stuff has intensified my ability to respond to it?when it's good.
At the same time, I always have my writer's eye open when I read something well-written. However involved I may be in the fate of the characters, I allow myself to notice what the writer is doing. When something works, I try to figure out what makes it work so well. When one paragraph in an otherwise smooth novel seems a little rough, I take a moment to try to figure out what off-note soured the chord.
Sometimes, when I'm reading, I find myself doing a little mental rewriting. Does this one particular conversation go on too long? Suppose a couple of responses were eliminated?would that speed things up? Is this transition too abrupt? Or would things move more effectively if we had a fast cut here?
You might think that reading like this would be like sleeping with one eye open, that the writer's awareness would inhibit the reader's involvement. Curiously enough, it doesn't seem to work that way. I've seen musicians at concerts sitting in the audience and following the score as they listen to the music, and I've been given to understand that this can heighten their enjoyment of what they're hearing. In a similar fashion, my involvement in what I read can be intensified by my awareness of just what the writer is doing.
The flip side of the whole process is at least as important. One never stops learning the tricks of our particular trade, and I've found that my continuing education takes place in two classrooms, my office and my library. I learn by writing and I learn by reading. If the years I've spent writing have raised my consciousness as a reader, so do the books and stories I read continue to sharpen my skills as a writer.
The extent to which I've changed as a reader is never more apparent than when I reread something I haven't looked at in years. Sometimes this can be a very disappointing experience. There are writers I treasured in adolescence whose books I find quite impenetrable today, not because they've deteriorated but because I look on them with altogether different eyes now. I was less critical then, less capable of reading as a writer, and when I turn their pages now I want to weep for my own lost innocence.
These disappointments are more than made up for by the great delight of rediscovering an old favorite and finding I like it more than I ever did?because now I'm far better equipped to appreciate the author's excellences. It seems to me that every time I return to John O'Hara and Somerset Maugham I discover new evidence of their enormous craft. Years ago I read their novels and short stories for several reasons?for sheer story value, to make the acquaintance of their characters, and for what light their auctorial intelligence could shed upon such matters as Life and Truth and Beauty.
I still read them for these reasons, and get more out of them than I ever did. But at the same time I am more aware now of the manner in which they achieve particular effects. I observe, while caught up in the story of The Moon and Sixpence, say, how Maugham wields the perspective of his narrator like a conductor's baton. Reading Ten North Frederick for the fifth or sixth time, I am no less caught up in the inexorable decline of Joe Chapin for my noticing how O'Hara uses the viewpoints of various characters to reveal facets of his protagonist.
I've slowed down in my reading. I used to dash through books like a self-taught speedreader. Now I take more time, savoring what I read, chewing each mouthful thoroughly before swallowing. Writing has indeed made me a better reader, just as reading continues to make me a better writer.
How to read like a writer? I'm afraid I can't think of many specific tips toward that end. One thing I've observed is that I'm more critical and detached when I read a manuscript than when I read galleys, more so too with galleys than with a bound book. The closer I am to what came out of the writer's typewriter, the more conscious I am that I'm reading a person's work rather than something that came down from the mountaintop carved in stone tablets. By the same token, it's easier for me to get caught up in a bound book than a manuscript.
But that's by the way. I don't know that you have to make a particular effort to learn to read like a writer. If you keep writing?and keep reading?it just happens.
Enjoy it.
CHAPTER 9
Rolling With the Punches
A COUPLE of months ago a writing student of mine was discussing a story he'd written a year or two previously. It had come within a hair's breadth of being accepted by a prestigious literary quarterly. The author then submitted it to Harper's and got it back with a personal letter from Lewis Lapham.
Well? I said. Where'd you send it next?
I didn't.
Beg pardon?
I put it in a drawer, he said, shrugging. I figured it got rejected twice so there must be something wrong with it, so why should I waste my time sending it out again?
Extraordinary, don't you think? Any story that came that close to acceptance at these two markets is almost certainly publishable somewhere. But this particular story will almost certainly not be published?because the author isn't sufficiently determined to give it every possible chance of publication.
When novice writers ask my advice about getting published, one point I can't emphasize too strongly is the importance of being absolutely relentless about submissions. Once you've got a story to the point where you think it's worth submitting, you must submit it and submit it and submit it until someone somewhere breaks down and buys it. Before this happens, you will very likely accumulate rejection slips sufficient to insulate an attic. Your collection may not represent any near misses, may not include any personal notes from eminent editors. You may not even experience the wee thrill of seeing Sorry hand-scrawled across the bottom of a printed slip.
Tough. If you really want to be in this silly business, you cannot let this sort of thing bother you. You paste the rejection slip on the wall or toss it in the wastebasket. You take the story out of the envelope it came back in and tuck it into a fresh one. You consult your records, see where it's been, then flip through Writer's Market and pick out a place where it hasn't been. And then you put it in the mail, and you repeat this process ad infinitum until the damn thing sells.
&nb
sp; Over and over. Again and again. Relentlessly.
What do you suppose it means when your manuscript comes back to you like a well-hurled boomerang? It doesn't mean you're a brain-damaged churl who couldn't write your name in the dirt with a stick. It doesn't mean your story stinks on ice. It doesn't mean you should forget about writing and pay more attention to those ads promising high profits raising chinchillas in your bathtub.
All it means is that a particular editor didn't want to buy a particular story on a particular day.
Maybe he didn't even read it. Editors are as apt to be overworked as the rest of it, and sometimes the prospect of wading through slush is uninviting, and who's to say that no one ever had a bad day and just rejected everything unread? This doesn't happen often, but even an editor with the best will in the world can have a headache or a hangover and simply not like anything he reads under those conditions.
Suppose the editor does read your story, and reads it on a good day. He can still despise it?but that doesn't mean it's despicable. When all is said and done, editorial reactions to all material, and most especially to fiction, are ultimately subjective. The fact that one person dislikes something does not mean it is bad.
Furthermore, a rejection doesn't have to mean the editor dislikes the story. Maybe it simply means he doesn't like it enough to buy it. Maybe he's over-inventoried on fiction at the moment, and you'd have to knock him out of his chair in order to sell him, and he just doesn't like your story all that much. Maybe he just bought a story very much like yours. Maybe your story's about eggs and he got a bad one at breakfast. Maybe?
Well, you get the idea. Bad stories get rejected, but so do most good stories most of the time.
It's important to recognize?and then dismiss?the enormous odds we all face every time we put a story in the mail. I was talking recently to the editor of one of the little literary magazines. He buys three or four stories an issue and publishes four issues a year. So he's in the market for twelve or fifteen stories annually, and how many fiction submissions per year do you suppose he receives?
Four thousand.
The odds would seem overwhelming. On due reflection, the inference you might draw might be that anyone would have to have his head examined to buck those odds. On the other hand, twelve or fifteen people every year do get a story accepted by this publication, and those twelve or fifteen stories have one thing in common.
They all came out of the pile of four thousand.
The more you submit, the more you reduce the odds against eventual publication. But nobody ever sold a story by leaving it in a desk drawer.
Yes? Did you have a question out there?
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I agree with what you say, but when one of my stories keeps coming back I get discouraged. I figure they're right and I'm wrong. It's only natural, isn't it?
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Of course. Even a seasoned pro finds rejection disheartening, and for a beginner it's that much more of a blow. What you have to do is work on your attitudes so that rejection doesn't lead inevitably to dejection.
The best way I know to manage this is to make your resubmission policy as automatic as you possibly can. Establish a hard and fast rule to get a manuscript back in the mail within twenty-four hours of its receipt. Better yet, send it out immediately?make it the first order of business to get that script off your desk and back in the mail.
One reason not to keep it around is you might read it, and that's a bad idea. You've already read it enough. The addition of a rejection slip isn't going to heighten your enthusiasm. So don't read it. Don't even keep it around long enough to tempt yourself.
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Just submit the damn thing forever?
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Well, forever's a long time. You can work out your own system, but I'd recommend keeping it constantly at market for a minimum of a year. Then, if you want, read it. Maybe you'll see something you want to change. Maybe you'll decide you hate it altogether. After a year, you can give yourself permission to withdraw it from market?or you can confirm your original judgment and resubmit for another year.
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Isn't it a mistake to submit a story to an editor who's already rejected a different-story of mine?
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No, and why should it be? Remember, you weren't rejected. Your story was rejected. It's not the same thing.
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It costs a lot to keep a story in the mail. Don't you reach a point of diminishing returns?
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Admittedly, the whole process was less of a wrench when first-class mail cost four cents an ounce. Even so, the high cost of submission isn't all that high. If you ultimately sell the story, you'll come out ahead. If the story proves ultimately unsalable, you'll have spent a few dollars establishing its unsalability. Depending on your current status, you may regard the expense of stamps and envelopes as part of the cost of doing business, an aspect of one's apprenticeship, or the price of a relatively inexpensive hobby.
I don't believe it when someone tells me he stopped submitting a story because of the expense. I think he's simply rationalizing an unwillingness to face further rejection.
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You mentioned the long odds we all face. Isn't part of the problem the amount of amateurish tripe every editor has to wade through? It seems to me that people who submit inferior work make it harder for the rest of us. Why don't you say something to discourage them from wasting editors' time?
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I received a letter from a Florida writer who made essentially this point. What she failed to realize is that a writer's own perception of a story's salability is no index of anything.
Unquestionably, a great many would-be writers submit inferior work. But I don't think they do so knowing it to be inferior.
Nor is this glut of inferior work a problem for the rest of us. If my story doesn't sell, it's not the inferior stories that have kept it from selling. Quite the opposite. It's the stories that were better than mine that got in my way.
If I were going to be self-seeking, then, I'd try to discourage good writers from submitting their work for publication. Of course nothing I might say would be likely to influence their behavior?any more than it would influence those people sending in amateurish efforts.
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Back up a few steps. You dismissed the pain of rejection very blithely a few mintues ago. Believe me, it's real pain!
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No kidding. Do you think I enjoy it myself?
There are some things you can do, however, to minimize the pain. First of all, you can keep involved in the constant production of new work. By focusing your concentration upon the work itself and making the marketing process as mechanical as possible, you can shrug off rejection more easily.
This leads to the second method of reducing pain. Keep as many things in the mail as possible. That way when a story comes back it's not your entire output that's been rejected but only a very small fraction thereof. By the same token, you'll have so many swallows up in the air that one will be returning to Capistrano every day or so. Oddly, this makes things easier. When rejection becomes a routine fact of life, a virtual daily occurrence, you get used to it.
Ultimately, you may reach the point where you see rejection not as a negation of your worth as a writer, not even as condemnation of a particular story, but as what it is?an inescapable part of the process which ultimately results in acceptance. Don't be too upset, though, if it takes time before you acquire this philosophical detachment in full measure. Until then, just sum up the editor's ancestry and personal habits in a few terse sentences?and get your manuscript back in the mail.
CHAPTER 10
Bic, Scripto, Parker and Cross
SO YOU'RE a writer, they say, time and time again. That must be very interesting.
Must it? My work, such as it is, consists of sitting alone at a typewriter and tapping fitfully at its keys. It has occurred to me that the only distinction between what I do and what a stenographer does lies in my havi
ng to invent what I type.
If I say as much, it's generally assumed that I'm joshing, whereupon my questioner will very likely chuckle. Should another question seem called for, he'll ask where I get my ideas, or if I've had anything published.
Or he may ask what name I write under.
I've written under any number of things in my life. Low ceilings. Hanging plants. Threats of exposure. Duress. I have also written under a whole host of aliases at one time or another. In recent years, however, I have written solely under my own name, but if I say as much to my interlocutor I'm going to put him off-stride; he'll feel he's committed a faux pas, having assumed I use a pen name since he's so clearly unfamiliar with my own. And I'll only make things worse by obligingly trotting out some pen name I used in the past, for it surely will be equally unfamiliar to him.
Norman Mailer, I'll say. Or Erica Jong. Or both of them, if the mood strikes me. It may be my doing that any number of people are walking around today, secure in the knowledge that Norman Mailer is a pen name of Erica Jong's, and for all I know they may be right. Did you ever see those two at the same time?
But let's shift gears before all of this cuteness gets irretrievably out of control. Pen names, to judge from my mail, are a subject of at least passing concern to many of my readers. I had a letter just the other day from a woman intent upon keeping her true identity a secret not only from her readers but from her prospective publisher as well, and wanting to know how she could do all this without getting into a tangle with the tax authorities. I assume she has her reasons.
But just what are the reasons for writing under a name other than one's own? Surely the ego gratification of seeing one's name in print is a powerful motivator for most of us. Why should we pass up that satisfaction for the dubious pleasure of seeing our words attributed to Helena Troy or Justin Thyme or some other appropriately altered ego?
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