A Little More On the Business of Writing (with just a little touch of Franco rant)

I wanted to say a few more words about "New Yorker Rejects Itself."

Shortly after The Review Review's story on the New Yorker rejecting one of its own previously published stories, Slate published this rebuttal, in which David Haglund argues that big journals have no time to respond to plagiarism with anything more than a form rejection. Thus, he suggests the journals recognized the piece from the start. Unfortunately, he offers no evidence to support this assertion.

My own experience (one year of working as a graduate assistant at the Georgia Review) contradicts Haglund's argument. The editors were as time crunched as any, yet they treated plagiarism with the utmost seriousness. They would definitely have contacted the author of a plagiarized submission had they recognized it--and would have told that author never to darken their door again. And I'm not just guessing that this is the case. While working there, I found a story that had lifted a line from a story I knew. I brought it to the associate editor's attention and watched the result first hand. What's interesting is that the Haglund does not seem to have asked the editors at the New Yorker what policies they have and follow regarding plagiarism. He only speculates.
 
Though Haglund's defense is based on speculation, I do think the New Yorker's rejection of a New Yorker story is defensible on different, more modest grounds. Every journal has its own style and space limitations. Just because a piece suited the taste of one editor at one magazine, no law states it must naturally suit all other editors' tastes as well. One New Yorker slush reader may have loved the story in the past and passed it up the chain. Another didn't. Or they did but this time, the story was up against unusually stiff competition and didn't make the cut. That hurts, but I understand that those decisions are part of the business.

What's less defensible and also sadly true is this: literary fiction magazines must sell copies to stay in business. Why else would Esquire publish this bit of dross by James Franco? Or Ploughshares for that matter? Why else would Graywolf accept his collection? Franco may not be a talented writer, but his name will sell copies. I won't launch into my full Franco rant, but this is where I get conflicted because, generally, yes, I feel optimistic about the business. I feel that if we strive and try long enough, we can make it. I wasn't simply blowing smoke when I wrote last week's post. But Franco still stares me in the face, contradicting that faith.

Here's what I don't know: will Franco sell enough copies to allow Graywolf to take a chance on an unknown writer? Will his name work like a carbon offset? Will Graywolf purge itself of the pollution of his poetry by taking on more projects from the kind of writers it has long been respected for--namely, the little known literary talent? Did Esquire and Ploughshares bring other writers, more talented but less known, into public awareness because they were in the same issue as his piece?

And I'm asking sincerely, because I do want to stay optimistic. And also because it fits with my experience with editors so far--including the many who've rejected me--which is that they care passionately about words and art and have suffered many years of low paychecks and long days to give that art a forum. I know that optimism tends to be read as naivete or, worse, stupidity, but the questions we face as writers are too easily written off with cynicism. It's equally simple-minded to be passively jaded or actively angry because of one instance of rejection. There is no one kind of editor or journal or publisher--and thank God for that. Every day, people sit down to their work at small presses and magazines and attend to their business with the same passion with which I sit down to my own work.  
  
The truth is, I have no idea what goes on in the New Yorker's editorial office. I hope and suspect they still are driven by passion, but I don't know firsthand, and it's fruitless to speculate. And you know what? At the end of the day, fretting over what they do or don't publish only distracts me from my own part of the writing business, the humble business of sitting my bottom in a chair, placing my hands on the keyboard, and writing.

Why I Should Not Have a "Career" (and why I do)

I've seen a lot of gloom and doom lately about the state of the literary publications market. Last week, for example, The Review Review published a story aptly titled "New Yorker Rejects Itself" in which the author takes a lesser known New Yorker story, replaces the author's name with an invented one, and submits it for publication there and several other highly regarded journals. At each one, it is rejected.

My friend Jeff Newberry (author of Brackish) saw the article and said it reminded him of this piece from OneHundredRejections.com, in which a novelist resubmits his own best-selling novel (name & title changed) to his own publishing house's slush pile, only to have it rejected.

Both articles seemed to confirm what so many of us feel in our darkest hours. It was the old Catch-22. Namely, that the odds are impossibly stacked against us, that one can't get published without a name and one can't get a name without publishing.

In the face of such stories, it's easy to give up hope. As painful as writing is, why keep doing it if there's no chance it will reach an audience outside ourselves? Why did we sign on for this? Where is that bottle of Bourbon?

I've been there. Sometimes, I admit, I still feel that way. I talked to an author last summer whose first short story collection is garnering huge praise everywhere (major awards and prizes, full color spreads in popular magazines, etc, etc), who told me that she had never had her work in the slush pile. A few years ago, her MFA director had told a highly reputed literary magazine's editor-in-chief to look at her work, which he did. That editor published her story, and her career was off and running. Sometimes, editors asked her to send to them directly. Sometimes, friends put her work in their hands. Either way, her stories skipped the slush pile altogether.

The thing is, I know that kind of treatment doesn't happen unless you have incredible talent, and, knowing that, I wanted to be happy for her. This writer struck me as a thoroughly cool person. As fellow strivers, shouldn't we all be cheering each other on?

Instead, I felt the cold gut punch of jealousy. There was no one in my life who had that kind of clout, no one willing to stick his neck out that way for me. I was doomed.

I got over it. She is talented and amazing. I don't want to be a bitter, jealous person. I want to cheer her on sincerely because she, too, is a writer, and even if publication might have come a little easier in the end, the words never do. She got her reputation because she sat down to the keyboard like all the rest of us and wrestled phrases and images into the magical spell that is all good short fiction. She worked--and that's something none of us should take lightly.

What's more, I've come to see it as much role as a writer much differently. I'm not a person who's ever known people in high places. My role, instead, is to claw and scratch my way through the backdoor of the publication world. And I have. I've gotten pieces in journals I'm incredibly proud to be in (Ninth Letter, Quarterly West, Versal, etc)--places whose editors were willing to take a chance on a girl they'd never heard of just because they liked her words. My first novel is coming out from New Rivers Press in October--the same press that published Charles Baxter, one of my all time favorite writers--for the same reason. Somehow, over time, my work has begun to find an audience.

I'm going to be honest: back in those undergrad days, my writing did not stood out above that of my peers. I had no discernible talent. By the time I began my Master's degree, I recognized how poor my own writing was compared to my peers. I spent the next six years struggling to be better. Slowly, my work was starting to get acceptance letters.

What I have going for me isn't untrained ability, and it certainly isn't "connections." What I have is perseverance and a willingness to learn. What I have going for me is a world in which editors do care and do want to find new voices. What I have going for me is a writing community of people who support each other, even when things look bleak. And you know what? It's enough.

Coming to Terms with "Voice"

When I worked at The Georgia Review, I saw plenty of examples of failed voices. A story would start in heavily misspelled vernacular, heavy with the y'alls and yokelisms we might expect from a bad actor, and I'd find myself scanning ahead quickly to see if it ever redeemed itself. They almost never did. And because I associated "voice pieces" so heavily with bad writing, the concept of voice itself became suspect. I cringed when I heard people talk about a writer finding "his/her voice," as if it were lost change in the couch cushion that had to be dug out. I figured, a writer's voice was whatever was natural, and if I had to think about it too hard, then the piece was doomed to feeling hackneyed and artifical.

Lately, though, I've realized just how wrong that assumption is. I've been listening to the New Yorker Fiction podcasts (which are free through iTunes and are, for the most part, mind-blowingly good). A few weeks back, I was listening to Eudora Welty's "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" while scrubbing my toilet, and Joyce Carol Oates, who selected and read the story, talked with New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman afterward about the title and how crucial the voice was to the piece. The language seemed so natural. Welty said that she felt she knew this person because she had grown up with him. He was her neighbor, her uncle, her grocer, etc. He was a part of her community and thus a part of her--though, as the title suggests, a part that perhaps she didn't know was there and may not have wanted to acknowledge.

On Thursday, Joshua Ferris read George Saunders's "Adams" intimately into my ear while I ran around the track (again, thank you New Yorker Fiction podcast), and I felt the same impulse driving the story. The speaker's voice was crucial, as Ferris pointed out, to mediating the violence of the story, allowing it to flirt with the comedic while we are simultaneously horrified by the speaker's action. It's the same trick Burgess pulled off in A Clockwork Orange, a book I've always loved for its language, its voice.

It dawned on me just how many books I first loved for the voice of their speakers: Jane Eyre, Holden Caulfield, or more recently, Christopher John Francis Boone (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightime) and just about any character by John Green. Their voices made the speakers real to me. They drew me in.

A speaker is a book's emissary. We have to like them if we're going to root for them--especially if they're as despicable as Burgess's Alec or Nabokov's Humbert Humbert. I think a part of me always recognized that voice was a part of this liking, but I've arrived at the conclusion that it's more than that, that voice is nothing less than the embodiment of personality in language.

This is perhaps what is most terrifying about finding the voice for a novel. Let's face it: most of us worry about whether we're likable enough. Do we have the necessary charisma? Are we witty enough? Can we create a character who is?

I suspect that it's this fear (that no one will like me enough) that drives my avoidance of voice-driven fiction, but, in this season of resolutions, I vow to avoid it no longer. I still believe it's inaccurate to talk about a writer finding "his voice" because that implies there is a single voice to find. The voices a writer seeks are multiple: the voices of all of those characters, the embodiment of all those personalities. In Welty's example, the killer's voice is and is not her own. Her and her speaker's language are related but not identical. Welty allows what's familiar in their common language to draw her into a vernacular of racial hatred that was not her own, and the story is terrifyingly successful as a result.

Whether they come easily or not, the best voices draw us in not because of any politician's false charm but because they feel natural and authentic, because the writer erased the footprints that got him there.