Storytellersunplugged

By Janet Berliner

Once upon a time, when I was a lot younger, I came up with a term to describe how I feel about astrology. I am an astrological agnostic. It would seem more sane to say that I’m a non-believer, but the fact is that I’m too close to the classic description of a Libra to do that. My life is governed by the scales, by Justice and Balance. When those two states of being are out of sync in my life, I am unhappy. My writing is almost always about Justice and the days and nights of my life are about creating harmony out of absurdity.

Publishing is the greatest absurdity of all, and so I am a seeker of balance there, too. When I was seventeen, I wrote a children’s book and sent it from South Africa to a British publisher. It was rejected because I had illustrations. They were done by a friend who is today a well-known graphic artist. They rejected the manuscript because I wouldn’t let go of the drawings and they wanted to use a house artist. I didn’t send out the manuscript again and in the vagaries of my life, it was mislaid. If I ever find that book, I’ll send it out again with the same illustrations because the fact of my loyalty to the artist is what, for me, balances the rejection.

When I received my first rejection of a serious work, I was a wreck. One writer friend said, “You’ll get used to it.” Another said, “Think of it as their loss.” A third told me, “They’re rejecting the story, not you.” Yet another papers his bathroom with them.

The truth of it, for me, is that rejections still hurt. Less when I’m told why, but I have not become inured to them. In itself, that’s irrational after thirty years of fulltime writing, yet more famous writers than me, by far, have gone to battle about the subject.

Rumor has it that Nadine Gordimer, angered by the stupidity of editorial decision-making, wrote a book and sent it out to market under a pseudonym. It was resoundingly rejected until one astute editor said, “This sounds a lot like Nadine Gordimer. Maybe we should take a chance with it.” She knew full well that, had she sent it out under her own name, it would have been greeted with cries of “A brilliant work” and wanted to make a statement on behalf of the rest of us.

Stephen King recently wrote of a writer published in England and not in America that she was a fantastic scribe. He could not, he said, understand why her books had not been picked up in the USA. Predictably, a bidding war ensued for her current book and backlist.

Back in the ancient days when I was a stringer, I had a handshake contract for a series of essays. I wrote one about a spa in Miami and made an indelicate comment about looking at women over 250 lbs. being massaged. It was a good essay but, sigh, my editor–whom I had never seen–was one of those large ladies. Handshake be damned, I never wrote another word for that publication.

No matter what editors tell you they do and do not want, there is simply no way to outguess what the acquisition editor’s mindset will be at the moment in time your contribution is read. There are rules to be followed: Don’t send erotica to Scholastic; Read the magazine before you submit to it; Make certain your work follows standard formatting. Write as well as you can. Other than that, there’s no outguessing the world of publishing and, with rare exceptions–bless you, Koontz, King, et al–we will get rejections.

I remember the time I got two letters in the same mail about the same story. One rudely rejected the story; the second sent a check and a request for more.

Here’s a really bad one: When I was first agenting, I occasionally marketed a short story by one of my more literary clients. The one I remember most clearly–a beautiful piece–came back from a small literary magazine with the following scrawled note: “This is so bad I refuse to read it.”

Think about that.

I’m told the editor who wrote the note is now in acquisitions at one of the large publishers. I’m told he has lost his arrogance. But has he lost his stupidity?

My most recent asinine rejection was by a publisher who rejected a proposal because, “We don’t do anything that smells of chick lit.” The protagonist of the book in question is a retired tennis pro in her fifties. Chick lit? I don’t think so.

Then there’s, “We can’t do a novel that says anything bad about Nazis. We might offend our German readers.” True story! And the infamous, “Great writing. Loved the characters. Sadly it’s not right for our list. I’ll probably shoot myself when I see it’s a bestseller.” Not right for your list? I studied your list.

Or the one where the editor reads my direct quote from one of Hitler’s speeches and writes across it, “No one would say something like this.”

Really? How old are you?

What I tell my students about rejection is, don’t read between the lines and take note only if there’s a theme to the rejections.

So where’s the balance?

It lies in the letter from a Holocaust survivor who wrote to thank me for MADAGASCAR MANIFESTO and tell me I got it right and in the letters from some of our troops who wrote to tell me they wished they could have helped and thanked me for my books. It sits in the laps of the homeless who asked me for books and get boxes of them from me each year and it rests in the small hands of my grandson who asked for a children’s book and takes each installment to class for Show and Tell.

I’m too stubborn to listen to rejections. I’ll just keep doing what I do and trying to do it better each time.

There are twenty-eight books bearing my name in the Library of Congress. So, go ahead, New York. Reject me.