Re: how to get published - fact
Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Thu, 30 Sep 1999 12:30:46 -0400
At 2:04 AM -0400 on 9/25/1999, Hotbuns200 wrote:
> Robert Pirsig was turned down 121 times before Zen And The Art Of
>Motorcycle
> Maintenance was reluctantly picked up by a small editor.
Yes, and John Kennedy Toole KILLED HIMSELF because of the depression he
suffered after A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES was rejected by nearly everyone.
The only reason it saw the light of day is that his mother went to the
office of Walker (Percy?), the editor-in-chief of a university press, and
demanded that he read the MS. He groaned at the prospect, but he read it,
published it, and had a best-seller on his hands (a rarity for a university
press), and the book won the Pulitzer prize that year. Massive numbers of
rejections are not unusual; they're a double-edge sword. It can be that
the reader is an idiot who would not recognize a good story if it hit
him/her with a mallet. Or it could be as Scottie has said, that it needs
more work. Only you, and one or two objective readers, can say upon which
side of the sword the manuscript falls.
One story I enjoy is that a number of years ago, a screenwriter retyped the
screenplay of "Casablanca" and submitted it, under a different title, to a
number of places, where it was uniformly rejected as unshootable, trite,
and so on. Perhaps with our knowledge of filmography today, the movie
might seem trite, considering the influence "Casablanca" has had on U.S.
movie-making; however, it is unthinkable that no reader RECOGNIZED the
script.
Even Melville was convinced, as he walked to his job at the lowest tip of
Manhattan, that he was a failure as a writer, because nobody would buy his
work. The tale comes up over and over; the exceptions are writers like
Hemingway (urged upon Max Perkins by Scott Fitzgerald), though he, too, had
his work returned, before publication of his first collection of stories by
one publisher and his subsequent contract with Scribner's, which accepted
THE SUN ALSO RISES.
I guess my point is that the number of rejections is often an indication of
the quality of the work, but not always an accurate barometer, and you
don't know whose eyes and brain are reviewing the submission.
--tim