Rejection and the Silver Lining

I'm currently working as an administrative and editorial assistant at a liberal arts college. Like many who work in a secretarial capacity at small private institutions, a variety of tasks fall under the aegis of "my job." My favorite of these responsibilities involves an artist-in-residence program that, for the purposes of the privacy of all concerned, I shall dub "the Bananafana Fiction Prize." It goes like this: Authors (typically between the ages of twenty-five and forty) submit a CV, a brief description of the WIP they're planning on working on during their time at the college, and a few copies of their published novel. Every autumn, the Bananafana Fiction Prize Committee agrees upon the best novel and most suitable candidate, and the winning author receives some money and an appointment as writer-in-residence for the spring semester. He or she gives one public reading upon arrival (and is feted afterward by the extended literary academic community at a spectacular dinner I've been honored to attend a couple of times), and the rest of their time here is spent being an informal mentor to the students and pursuing creative goals with the support and encouragement of everyone here. It's a sweet deal. And it's a great experience for me, too! Every year, I'm exposed to new authors whose work I might not otherwise have read. (And I confess I draw a certain amount of self-importance from the collection of great writers in my professional address book, even if the full extent of our correspondence is mostly me acknowledging the receipt of their materials and thanking them for their submission.)

So, t'is the season, and the 2011 Bananafana Fiction Prize applications have been rolling in. A few weeks ago, I came into the office to discover a trio of skinny 10x12 envelopes addressed to the Fiction Prize Committee, sitting on my desk awaiting attention. These envelopes each turned out to contain a brief cover letter, a short-story (manuscript), and a self-addressed stamped envelope. The letters all expressed appreciation for my consideration of the enclosed 2,000-some word story for this year's prize, included a sentence-long description of the story, and closed with a signature in the awkwardly idiosyncratic cursive common to young people. Perhaps it was the care with which the papers had been assembled, or the increasingly unusual, almost quaint sight of the SASE (complete with Forever Stamp), or the fact that this had never happened to me before, but I was completely charmed.

I took the manuscripts home and read them. I wrestled with myself over whether I'd mark the copy. I worried that drawing attention only to the errors would cause the students to see failure instead of potential. On the other hand, circling the occasional solecism might encourage the kids to revise their stories and (per the advice I was already drafting in my head) consider submitting their work somewhere more appropriate. I resolved to find at least one valuable thing to say about each story. It occurred to me that my responses to these applications might constitute the first rejection letters these writers would ever receive. And the first time should be special, shouldn't it? I would be gentle. Patient. Kind. Genuine. I admit I fancied myself a bit of a Francis P. Church, holding the illusions and imaginations of so many young people in my hot, ink-stained little hands.

The following afternoon, the mail guy delivered six more applications identical to the first few, each with cover letter, SASE, and story. I thought, "Hm! Now I have kind of a lot of these," but I was nonetheless still smitten. I took the second set home, too, and read them all. Like the stories I'd received the day before, these were also fictional biographies and fictive recastings of historical events. I decided not to mark the papers, in part because deviations in the quality of the manuscripts were beginning to make themselves apparent, enough to make me question the depth of my investment in a project I'd decided to take on outside of work. Copyediting some 25,000 words and crafting personalized responses to each story presented a time commitment that could put a considerable dent in my weekend "me" time.

Maybe you can see where this is going.

On Monday, I arrived at my desk to find a three-inch-tall stack of 10x12 envelopes. I tore into them to verify that they were what I figured and feared they might be. They were. The honeymoon period was over.

Here's an illustrated summary of our time together:

MS Paint artwork inspired by [read: directly ripped off from] the wry, witty, and wise Allie Brosh of Hyperbole and a Half, who knows that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery on the internet.

When my boss suggested that maybe someone ought to change the website (which, incidentally, features not only a full description of the prize but pictures of past winners and blurbs about the novels they wrote), I banged my fists on the table, raged against people who don't follow directions, and defended the website as though I had given birth to it myself.

Now, here's the thing. I subscribe to the blogs of a number of literary magazines, authors, agents, editorial assistants, and self-described rejectors and rejectionists. I followed the #queryfail debacle on Twitter. I read SlushPile Hell every day. I know exactly how common it is for people to ignore submission guidelines and send their work to agents and contest judges who will not read it, and I am well familiar with the deluge of snark and scorn that these writers bring down upon themselves in this fashion. But what became inarguably apparent to me as I tore through the final stack of envelopes was the following awful truth: Someone told them to do this. Some adult to whom the educations of young people are entrusted gave their entire class instructions to do something that arouses nothing but rage and loathing in the editorial community. This person provided envelopes, stamps, and the college's address, so that a room full of writers could waste everyone's time. It is infuriating.

It's tragic, too, because there's a bunch of kids in Texas who won't be getting a real rejection letter from me, but rather what might more properly be called a "letter of disqualification." I made it myself. It looks like this:

Dear [Name],

I am writing to you on behalf of the Bananafana Fiction Prize Committee to thank you for your application. We appreciate your interest in the prize, and I enjoyed reading your short story, "[title]." Unfortunately, your submission does not meet our needs. The Bananafana Fiction Prize does not accept unpublished manuscripts for consideration, and high school students are not eligible to apply.

Because you and your classmates have the distinction of being the youngest applicants in the history of the Bananafana Fiction Prize, I hope you'll permit me, as a longtime aspiring writer myself, to offer you some advice.

Rejection is a staple of the writing life. Failure presents a valuable learning experience, and it’s important to cultivate the ability to do it as well as possible. For starters, dismiss any negativity you might be feeling and welcome the circumstances. The more you fail, the more opportunities you give yourself to succeed.

Secondly, be aware of precisely what it is you’ve failed to achieve. One way to make the most of potential failures is to make sure in advance that what you're applying for is something you really want. Effort should always be conscious. Your greatest successes and your worst failures all have one thing in common: their significance to you. To determine whether an award, publication, or other opportunity is right for you, take time to learn about the people who have already achieved the goals you’ve set for yourself. For example, the current Bananafana Fiction Prize writer-in-residence is [name redacted]. Her novel [title redacted] is a work of historical fiction based on the life of [here's a hint: mad scientist with a penchant for pigeons]. Reading her novel would be especially useful to writers interested in transforming biographical material into fiction, in the same way that you did in the short story you submitted. But reading her novel (or those of past winners of the Bananafana Fiction Prize) would also provide you with a solid idea of the kind and quality of writing that the committee hopes to see among the submissions every year. If you know what you want, be sure to do your research and follow directions—you don’t want to fail for the wrong reasons; and if you do fail, it should be for reasons that are constructive and useful.

Lastly, think about what, if anything, the experience has cost you and how you can benefit from it. (This may also prevent you from making the same mistakes in the future.) Put your analysis of what went wrong to use as soon as you can. Make revisions to your work if you need to, and then submit it to a short-story contest or literary magazine, and then another, and then another--rinse, repeat. Don’t give up. Failing well just might be what really trying is all about; and once you master failure, you’ll be that much readier to succeed. Good luck.


Sincerely,

[my real name goes here]
Administrative Assistant to the Bananafana Fiction Prize

Perhaps what upsets me the most about the ordeal is that it really didn't have to be this way. Instead of being told to put together these packets and send them somewhere they don't know or care about, somebody could have learned something. What happened here is the poor execution of an otherwise laudable idea. Personally, I feel like I waited too long to start collecting rejection letters--because I valued what I considered an "unblemished" submission history, and also because, quite frankly, I was suffering from the well-trod delusion that I would be knocking them out of the park from day one. Since then, I've certainly thought that if I were to teach a creative writing class at the high school level, I would have my students research potential venues for the publication of their work (by, for example, perusing literary magazines or reading contest-winning material), so that they're actually invested in the endeavor when they invariably get rejected. Hell, I'd buy a class subscription to The Paris Review, and then we could all send our short stories and get our rejection letters and put marshmallows in our hot cocoa and commiserate together! It would be grand. It's a good idea to introduce young writers to contest rejection early on, to normalize it quickly. But it should at least be an honest-to-goodness rejection, not a you-didn't-read-the-rules-and-never-stood-a-chance rejection. The lesson is important.