Known Unknowns #6: Try Us Again!

Something different this week. (And these Known Unknowns will be weekly. A different kind of post will appear each Friday.) This post, I want to talk about the crazy process still undertaken by the people out there writing short stories, poems, and essays. You, who may know only of novels and memoirs, may not be aware of the Fight Club-like world of literary magazines, which still comprise the primary venue for short-form literature. For years, when I was a publicist, people in my life had no idea what that meant or how it worked. It is the same with being a writer of short stories.

How it works is this: You write a story, you work it over like a prison stoolie — maybe for weeks, likely months, possibly more — and then you send it out to literary magazines. You wait — maybe for weeks, likely months, possibly more — and then you hear back one way or the other: We loved your submission and are publishing it; or This piece wasn’t a good fit with the needs of our publication at this time, please try us again.

Now: These are the two extremes of acceptance/rejection. Acceptance comes either via email or phone call. Rejection comes either via email or regular mail. But, as any story-submitter knows, there are further degrees of rejection:

• The lowest degree is the form letter, which is never really a form letter anymore. It’s either an email or a pre-printed card or slip of paper with a generic rejection message. Here’s a nicer one in my pile: We appreciate that you think enough of [publication] to want your work to appear in it. However, upon reading your submission, we have decided not to accept it for publication. We wish you luck in placing it elsewhere. You can usually tell by the size and edges of these that they were printed out 4 or 6 to a sheet and cut out by interns to dispatch hopefuls with maximum efficiency. (Don’t begrudge them this; there’s a lot to read through at even the smallest literary magazine.)
• Then there’s the next step up, which is the form-message above, but with a generic, encouraging, handwritten note, like: Try us again! – TM. They maybe do mean you should try them again, but likely not.
• Then there’s the combo form-message and personalized comment. e.g., This was a good read but the protagonist seems to age and I feel you insist too much on his ignorance (“manicure,” etc.). Try us again! This is the note that will leave you overjoyed, and everyone else in your life puzzled. The story-submitter knows that this kind of note means your work has been read all the way through (a rarity), and that someone has taken the time to give you some editorial perspective. This is when they really mean Try us again!
• And there’s the full-on personalized letter with editorial suggestions, the final degree of rejection before acceptance. This kind of rejection, I find, while technically more encouraging than the last kind, is somewhat demoralizing. Dear Matt, the letter might say. Really enjoyed reading Version. The present-flashback framing device works, and you have the kids’ voices down cold. Unfortunately, we’re going to pass on this one. While we all agreed it’s a solid story, a few of us felt the narrator was still a bit of a cipher by the end. However, again — a strong effort, and we’d love to see some more of your work. Try us again! Why this hypothetical letter bugs me — and I’ve stitched it together from two different actual rejections I’ve received — is because it seems to suggest the story would’ve been publishable in their magazine if not for a fairly fixable thing. The main character remains a cipher? Why not ask me for a rewrite? Isn’t that something an editor can do? Why not say, “Do another pass on this story, and we’ll reevaluate then”?

At any rate, that’s what you do. You take your story and you send it to a literary magazine in hopes of getting it published. Actually, you send it to several, usually, because they can take an average of three months to get back to you (I once heard from Zoetrope: All Story only after a year) and if you sent to one, waited three months, then sent to another, it’d take you a very long time to get published, assuming anyone wanted to publish you at all.

Then there are the contests. These are held by various publications, usually once or twice a year, and involve cash prizes. They attract a lot of entrants, partly because of the possibility of being able to declare yourself a winner, and partly because there’s virtually no other way to be paid for publishing a short story. You heard me. We’re all doing this for free! Unless you’re publishing stories in glossies like the New Yorker or Harpers, or unless your work’s been solicited by a major literary magazine like Narrative or Tin House, you are paid only in copies of the publication itself. Contests, by the way, cost money — there’s usually a $10-20 entry fee. This money generally goes into the prize-pot, and a magazine will typically give you a year’s subscription in return, but yeah: You’re paying to play.

(Note: You don’t generally have to pay to submit to a literary magazine in non-contest situations.)

(Note 2: Most people working at literary magazines aren’t getting paid to read this stuff, either. No one’s getting rich off of publishing short stories and poems, and I’m doubtful there are many publications with swanky offices, despite what you see on Gossip Girl.)

So that’s what the modern short-story writer is doing: He or she is submitting stories in hopes of getting them published. If you are published, the hopes then are that a) an agent or book editor will see your work; b) the staff at the literary magazine will like your story enough to nominate it for Best American Short Stories, The O’Henry Awards, and/or The Pushcart Prize; c) there will be a way for your friends and family and Twitter followers to read the damn thing. In 2012, most literary magazines at least have websites that describe what they do, which is a huge step up from the old days, when you had to buy an annual volume called The Writers’ Market.

It’s occurred to me, more than a few times over the years, that all this is a very odd way to reach readers. I’m not sure it hasn’t ever been done this way, practically since the birth of the short story as a distinct literary art form, but while every other aspect of life on Earth has changed since Raymond Carver and Anne Beattie were publishing in literary magazines, the way the magazines themselves function has not changed. Readership for these things in 2012 have got to be made up either of people who’ve published in them, or people who wish to publish in them. (With an additional few readers who are in agent/editorial positions and are looking for new talent.) I’m sure there are laypersons who still subscribe to literary magazines for their reading enjoyment; I simply have yet to meet one.

The question, then, is: Why would anyone want to go through all this just to be published in a place that will not reach actual readers? And if you think I’m just being a whiner, ask yourself whether it would make sense for a band to try and get a different record deal for each new song they’ve written — especially if all the record labels marketed mainly to other musicians.

Again: I know This Is How It’s Done. But Jesus H. Christ, it makes me crazy. As a writer, I want readers. And that’s all I want. That’s all most writers want. But if you’re a short story writer, you spend a lot of time trying to get your work published in places that don’t actually have access to the one thing you want. There’s an attitude in some parts of the literary world (and the actual world*) that short stories are cute little pieces of “practice fiction,” that they’re training wheels for novelists. This view is partly why they’re so widely used in MFA programs. And more MFA programs with more student-produced stories has meant more short stories in the world. All to be published and read by other short story writers.

I’m not sure what the solution here is, but I’m interested in finding one. I’m working on a novel, sure, but I don’t think I’ll ever stop writing stories. And I’ll be forever grateful for the literary-magazine editors out there, not only the ones who published my fiction but also the ones who sent me shitty, mis-cut semi-squares of paper with smeared inkjet rejection messages. The six who published me, you gave me the other thing a writer wants, which is a feeling of legitimacy, of community. The 90-plus who didn’t, you made me want to try harder. And maybe that’s also what this process is about? You probably wouldn’t get any good at something if you could succeed at it immediately. Imagine if you wrote something and everyone you showed it to said, “Wonderful! Let’s share it with the world!” You’d have no impetus to get better at it. So while I think there’s something deeply flawed with the goals and reach of our once and current gatekeeper system, I don’t think having such a system is necessarily bad.

Next week, I’ll talk more about legitimacy, as well as the ever-looming spectre of Self-Publishing. The idea of DIY carries a completely different weight within the worlds of literature, film, comedy, and music, and it’s one most writers I know are constantly wrestling with. In the meantime, let me know: when’s the last time you read a short story? And where did you read it?

CORRECTION: The original version of this post contained a non-fact about Glimmer Train, saying that it charged for standard (non-contest) submissions. This was an error on my part, and I apologize. Glimmer Train does not charge for submissions during January, April, July, and October, and they will actually PAY $700 for accepted standard submissions. Sounds good, and again: I apologize for not having my facts straight.

*When my neighbor found out my book had been published, he congratulated me. Then he said, “Well, let me know when you write a novel!”