The past is not such a foreign country

Lynne Patrick

I was looking for something in one of the many archive boxes in my workspace the other day (I can’t help it, I’m a squirrel by nature; I can’t bear to throw things out) and I happened upon a file of old rejection letters. They dated back to a time before e-mail, before computers even, when we still had a postal service that delivered real mail rather than advertising junk and overdue bills.

You can guess what happened next. I started reading those old letters, and got so engrossed that within minutes I couldn’t remember why I’d hauled the archive box out in the first place.

They were interesting. Back in those good old days, editors actually wrote letters.

They told you why they were turning your work down. They let you down gently.

I once saw editors described as natural writers who don’t have anything much to write about. These days that pretty much describes me. There was a time when story ideas flowed out of my brain like the Colorado in full flood, as it was when I saw it a month or so ago, but of late it’s more like the trickle in the bottom of Bryce Canyon. Probably something to do with the advancing years.

So maybe it’s just as well I enjoy editing. The buzz I get from taking a manuscript that very, very nearly works and polishing off those little rough edges and untangling those occasional muddled sentences isn’t quite up there with the acceptance letter for the short story that turned out better than I hoped. But it’s close.

I enjoy being involved at an earlier stage too: looking over an early draft or even an outline, and homing in on potential problems.

All that is real editing. It carries with it the satisfaction of knowing you’ve helped, in a small way, to make a good thing better.

(And it’s an even more enjoyable escape at a time when a crowd of 70,000 is roaring at twenty-two men kicking a ball around at least three times a day. Yes, folks, the World Cup has come to a TV screen near me, and though husband is less addicted than some, there’s still a disproportionate amount of football – soccer if you prefer – disturbing the edges of my life at the moment.)

But (forget the football; we’re back on the editing now) sometimes, just sometimes, I start to wish I’d never set up the pesky editorial consultancy service all those years ago.

Which brings me back to those long-ago letters.

Because the part I really don’t like is explaining to would-be bestselling authors that their manuscript is unlikely to get past first base with one of the new generation of editors: the ones with shiny Oxbridge or Ivy League degrees and a firm eye on the next million-selling trend in publishing, who don’t even have time for a two-line e-mail in response to the hundreds of non-starter submissions their in-boxes generate.

There always comes a point, in any relationship between freelance editor and writer who has had the good sense to realize s/he needs one, when the Big Questions are on the table. Now I’ve paid you all this money and you’ve knocked it into shape, who do I send it to? Can you recommend someone? And most loaded of all, Can I mention your name? And that’s when it gets tricky. Because when you consider the frighteningly small proportion of first-timers get published by the conventional route, it becomes a sad but self-evident fact that the number of manuscripts with real potential which any freelance editor is going to encounter is going to be... smaller.

It would be easy to take a ‘it’s not you, it’s them’ approach every time, and claim the subject matter simply isn’t popular at the moment. (Come to think of it, that’s what some of those letters said; strange that others said something completely different, about the same piece of work.) Aspiring writers can live with the suggestion that the market isn’t right at the moment, because that means it’s not their fault, it’s just that other people have bad taste. And sometimes that really is the reason, so that’s what I say.

The problem is the others. The ones that will never make the grade, but find being told that hard to handle. If people really did shoot the messenger, I’d be in trouble. Along with every editor I’ve ever encountered.

So I was glad I unearthed that file of letters the other day, for two reasons. One, it reminded me how much rejection, however kind, hurt. And two, they provided an object lesson in how to let people down gently.

Comments

[Mysterious Bibliophile]

The right kind of rejection letter can be a positive, encouraging experience.

[Lynne Patrick]

It certainly can. But the converse is also true, and those are the difficult ones: treading the precipitous path between raising unrealistic expectations and trampling on people's dreams.