#writer rejected

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Sunday: Writer Rejected

At what point in your writing process are you able to view your work with a more objective eye? 

Sending work out did change my work, though. When I knew that the poems were going to be read by a stranger, I cleaned them up. And when I got them back rejected, I could see them with a really cold eye. ―Kay Ryan in an interview with the Paris Review

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Sunday: Writer Rejected

Where do old drafts of your writing live? And how do you keep track of submissions? 

More than one writer friend of Unmanned keeps a folder on their hard drive where old drafts of writing go—never be looked at again. Folders with names like: 'Terrible,' 'Another Bad Story,' and 'DO NOT OPEN.'

One friend keeps track of submissions in his head and has little to no problem keeping them straight. Another friend uses an Excel spreadsheet for tracking submissions, and has for many years, long before the days of electronic submissions. Personally, I hope that when I die my computer will burn along with me. 

William Stafford, who died in 1993, used a paper filing system, and for poems that never found publication, had folders called: 'Once Possibilities No More,' and 'Abandoned Poems.'

Friends of William Strafford, a nonprofit organization, reports:   

When he sent a poem to a journal, he wrote that journal’s name, and sometimes the date, on the documentary copy, thus ensuring that the poem could not be sent twice to the same journal. If the poem was rejected, he sent it out again, crossing out the last destination on the documentary copy, and writing in the next. Unpublished poems were sent out repeatedly. “Traveling through the Dark” was accepted at the fourteenth attempt. Poems that failed to find a publisher were eventually banished into folders with names like “Once Possibilities No More” and “Abandoned Poems.”

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Sunday: Writer Rejected

I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, ‘To hell with you.' —Saul Bellow (New York Times, 1985-07-21)

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Sunday: Writer Rejected

Sometimes after a rejection, you may submit that piece elsewhere, waiting for it to find a home that you know it deserves.

Other times, you might think, “Do I need to rewrite this?”

Look over old drafts. If you're anything like us, you may not be surprised to find that your drafts are more embarrassing than any awkward family photograph. But also think about how far you’ve come. Writing takes practice and practice takes persistence. As Hemingway said:

“It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.” (With Hemingway, Arnold Samuelson) 

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Sunday: Writer Rejected

The Bell Jar, a young adult novel by Sylvia Plath was published in 1963 by UK publisher Heinemann, under the pen name Victoria Lucas. 

Prior to publication by Heinemann, The Bell Jar was rejected by several publishing houses, but thanks to archives, we can read what one editor at  Knopf wrote in his recommendation—or rather rewrote in his recommendation more thoroughly after discovering "Victoria Lucas" was Sylvia Plath: 

I have now re-read—or rather read more thoroughly—“The Bell Jar” with the knowledge that it is by Sylvia Plath which has added considerably to its interest for it is obviously flagrantly autobiographical. But it still is not much of a novel. The trouble is that she has not succeeded in using her material in a novelistic way; there is no viewpoint, no sifting out o the experiences of being a Mademoiselle contest winner with the month in New York, the subsequent mental breakdown and suicide attempts, the brash loss of virginity at the end. One feels simply that Miss Plat is writing of them because [these] things did happen to her and the incidents are in themselves good for a story, but throw them together and they don’t necessarily add up to a novel. One never feels, for instance, the deep-rooted anguish that would drive this girl to suicide. It is too bad because Miss Play has a way with words and a sharp eye or unusual and vivid detail. But maybe now that this book is out of her system she will use her talent more effectively next time. I doubt if anyone over here will pick this novel up, so we might well have a second chance.

After Plath's death, The Bell Jar was published by Harper & Row in 1971 and went on to sell millions of copies. In 2011, The Poetry Foundation published an essay by Emily Gould on the American publication of The Bell Jar, which you can read here. 

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Sunday: Writer Rejected

In the face of rejection, sometimes you have to revisit writing and continue to work on it. Other times, you have to continue to believe in it, in spite of no. How do you know if it's any good? Well, here is an excerpt from a lovely poem, Berryman, by W.S. Merwin. John Berryman is of course a well known poet and he was also one of Merwin's teachers: 

I had hardly begun to read I asked how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all and he said you can't you can't you can never be sure you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write

- Berryman by W.S. Merwin. 

Merwin's parents were uneducated, but Merwin is a translator of Neruda, "El Cid," "The Chanson de Roland"; he reads and quotes often from Dante and the Welsh sagas. He was a scholarship student at Princeton in the 40's -- a waiter in one of the university's elite eating clubs. "He was a kind of prodigy," recalls Galway Kinnell, a Princeton classmate, "writing poetry that was so incredibly resonant." Even then, Merwin attracted the attention of eminent older figures. He studied writing with the critic R. P. Blackmur, and showed his poems to Blackmur's teaching assistant, John Berryman. Berryman, literally trembling with passion, would say, "You should get down on your knees to the Muse." Sometimes Berryman told Merwin his poems were terrible, but he was encouraging too, in a "guarded" way. One day, Merwin asked how he could be sure his poetry was any good. Berryman's response was memorable, and later, Merwin wrote a poem about it: "You can't you can never be sure/you die without knowing. -  NY Times

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Sunday: Writer Rejected

We regret to inform you that no writing is undeniable. And if you want to get down with Aesop, the moral is and always will be: don't let others suck your joy out. Keep on keepin' on. And listen, if it helps, even Mark Twain had trouble spelling. It's like, he's human, you know?

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DEAR HOWELLS,—I have to write a line, lazy as I am, to say how your Poe article delighted me; and to say that I am in agreement with substantially all you say about his literature. To me his prose is unreadable—like Jane Austin's. No, there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.

Another thing: you grant that God and circumstances sinned against Poe, but you also grant that he sinned against himself—a thing which he couldn't do and didn't do.

It is lively up here now. I wish you could come.

                                   Yrs ever,

                                             MARK

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Sunday Writer Rejected

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller was published in 1961 by Simon & Schuster. While some books don't garner any reviews, Catch-22 didn't have that problem. The New York Times and The New Yorker were among the publications that gave it an unfavorable review, but isn't any publicity good publicity? Despite negative reviews like the one below, Catch-22 went on to be reprinted by more than seven publishers, including Knopf and their imprint, Vintage Books. It was adapted into a film and sold only 30,000 copies in its first year of publication in the United States. Welcome to the big leagues. 

OCTOBER 22, 1961

"Catch-22" has much passion, comic and fervent, but it gasps for want of craft and sensibility. A portrait gallery, a collection of anecdotes, some of them wonderful, a parade of scenes, some of them finely assembled, a series of descriptions, yes, but the book is no novel. One can say that it is much too long because its material--the cavortings and miseries of an American bomber squadron stationed in late World War II Italy--is repetitive and monotonous. Or one can say that it is too short because none of its many interesting characters and actions is given enough play to become a controlling interest Its author, Joseph Heller, is like a brilliant painter who decides to throw all the ideas in his sketchbooks onto one canvas, relying on their charm and shock to compensate for the lack of design.

If "Catch-22" were intended as a commentary novel, such sideswiping of character and action might be taken care of by thematic control. It fails here because half its incidents are farcical and fantastic. The book is an emotional hodgepodge; no mood is sustained long enough to register for more than a chapter... 

-  RICHARD G. STERN  as published in The New York Times