On literary rejection
What it's like being left on the shelf
It’s well-established that literary life involves a lot of rejection. They should perhaps be clear about just how much. I myself receive two or three rejections on creative work a week; I tend to read them quickly, often just before going out or performing another task, so as not to dwell on them unduly. In the early days, rejections would cut me deeply. When I was at university, exactly 20 years ago now, I had a number of stories and poems shortlisted for a student anthology of new writing. The judge, the poet Andrew Motion, rejected them – all of them. I was at that time performing a role as a nightclub owner in a production of Barry Manilow’s ‘Copacabana’, and I remember feeling utterly distraught on the way to the theatre. But the show did indeed go on, and I was described by a reviewer on the first night as a ‘singing and dancing Henry Kissinger’, which remains the best review I’ve had.
These days the rejections are invariably less personal. Indeed, it’s already a superior class of rejection that supplies a name at all; nothing speaks to my work having been carefully considered like a rejection email that starts ‘Dear Writer’. There are phrases I’ve learnt to recognize over time, and these indeed seem to come in and out of fashion. At the moment the done phrase seems to be rejecting things as not ‘quite right’ for someone. This implies a state of ‘rightness’ over there, just out of reach, that a writer can never quite attain. Or I can’t. I feel jealous of those writers getting their work published in such places; it must be splendid to be so completely and exactly ‘right’.
Sometimes they publish books of the scathing rejection letters famous writers once received as unknowns. Nowadays even scathing feedback would be a luxury. I worked on a novel for five years of the last decade, honing and considering every sentence. From approximately 70 send outs, I received just two pieces of personalized feedback; one person who said that though there was ‘much to be admired here’, they didn’t feel passionate enough about it, and another person who said that, though ‘you have some interesting ideas’, ‘one reader’s giggle is another person’s groan.’ (My book deals with the lives of comedians). I replied to this analysis of the nature of comedy that in my experience there were things that all audiences found funny, such as farting, to which the affable agent replied, ‘Agreed on the farting!’
That is, you have to admit, a fairly modest return on several thousand hours of unpaid work. The overall feeling you’re left with is that the seriousness with which you’re taking the work is not being matched by the people who are receiving it. This is surely unfair; they’re just utterly overwhelmed with submissions. They need quick, easy wins which stand a decent chance of making them money. Still, these people never thought about the messages they sent me after sending them, whereas I think about them every week. Nowadays I submit my work without the slightest expectation of any positive outcome from the process; it’s more like taking a tablet for a chronic condition, or carrying out a grim, necessary domestic chore.
And life grinds on, and you’re 40. I should concede at this point that I’ve not been entirely without acceptances; I’ve placed an article here and there, and until I returned to the UK in 2013, I was publishing fiction quite regularly. But the vast effort I’ve required to even secure these successes seems almost comic in its disproportion to the rewards. With the same effort I’ve made to publish twenty-odd pieces of writing, I’ve developed parallel careers as an interpreter, translator, teacher and editor, all of which have proved more financially lucrative than writing. And as I get older the idea of being asked to labour for so long for no money seems more and more absurd. The biggest skill I have should surely command the biggest fee! The standard answer as to why I should keep trying comes from some elevated, almost mystical idea of ‘the work’ – but I didn’t create ‘the work’ for it to languish on my hard drive, and the idea of paying to stage or publish my own work seems the final insult. This frustration has been particularly detrimental the trilogy of satirical plays I have written over the last five years, none of which I have been able to stage, and all of which are now gradually waning in topicality.
The problem is, and of course this might be self-shielding delusion, that I can’t shake the feeling that all this would have been easier if I were a worse writer. Certainly in terms of getting things out there – I write for stage, page and perform stand-up, a combination pretty much designed to give the market a migraine. It would have been a much easier tactic to embrace a small modest niche and prosecute it for years, as I did in my one period of real success, doing stand-up in Germany. But perhaps there’s something deeper going on too. All the way back to that early Andrew Motion decision, I’ve suspected that there’s an odd tall poppy syndrome at work in British culture’s decision making, this idea that ‘the really talented person, the gifted one – that’s the one person we can’t reward or encourage.’ In Germany, show up with a precocious talent and they’ll give you professorships and grants and enormous cultural profiles in weekend magazines. Whereas the British attitude to talent is more like a football referee trying to even up the decisions between teams in a game, starting from the logic ‘Well, this person is really talented, they’ll find their way anyway, so reject them’ – with the result that talented people somehow always end up being passed on, and share their fate with those who never had talent at all. I used to joke that there were two stages for British writers, promising and dead.
I wonder if those who reject my writing saying they ‘understand the time and effort you put into my work’ genuinely understand the time and effort I put into my work. That they understand the significance their decisions have. It is no exaggeration to say that the hundreds of rejections my creative work has received has stopped me having the life that I wanted to. All I wanted from an early age was to be a writer; I have not been allowed to do this. Certainly not having the career I was capable of having. And of all the bad feelings the rejections have left me the thought of having been unable to fulfil my creativity in my peak years, when I had energy and intellectual power, hurts me most. Instead my whole life has been held up by this minor administrative technicality. Sometimes I feel like a civil servant in some strange magic realist novel, trapped in an obscure province, who has done everything asked of them to leave but receives the same ‘Computer says no’ response whatever they try. No wonder I’m a Kafka fan.
It’s just such all so barren. So repetitive. So painfully, wearingly predictable. I have a hundred ideas for great stories; I can write one; I can send it out; three to six months later, a pro-forma rejection will land in my inbox. I won’t stop submitting – I’ll be gone soon, so why not? - but every other part of my life gives more back to me than this process. Sometimes I do draft responses to the rejections in my head; it’s not the done thing to send them, of course, though once a year or so I do. I was told by an editor that my story would not be considered as it was 500 words over the limit, to which I replied that I would tell off my naughty story. Occasionally I tell people I won’t be submitting again. Usually I maintain a deep, cynical silence. What can I possibly say? Well, if I could say anything to you, all of you, I would say that I am angry that you have wasted my time. Because I have never had less, nor will I ever have so much again, of that.
Yep. Empathise there, and I have only just started compared to you!