Slush Rants

IV
Rejections

Here at Vulgata, we tend to produce personalized rejections; we say why it is that we don't want a particular story, not just "Pass." or "Thank you for your submission, but unfortunately due to the large volume of fine submissions that we receive we are unable to accept every story that comes our way..." (Yes, I know I haven't been as detailed or personal recently, and I've written a couple of "Thanks, but no thanks" rejections -- it's not to be taken personally. It's because I'm going to be given birth shortly.

We've had some unhappy campers recently, so this is the deal with the personalized rejections: it's not because we're spiteful, or vindictive, or because we think we know better than you what you want to write, or because we have too much time on our hands and no life and we're losers with nothing better to do. We're actually very busy; I homeschool four going on five children, I have a writing career of my own, and I'm trying to acquire all the skills necessary to be completely self-sufficient. Usually I'm writing that personal rejection to you at four in the morning, on little-to-no sleep, and it's biting into the time that I could be spending doing battle with the laundry monster (my arch-nemesis and the bane of my domestic existence.) It's not for my benefit.

I write personalized rejections because I am a writer. I have a large collection of rejection slips of my own, some of them personal, some of them form, some of them encouraging, some of them critical. I value the ones that tell me why my work didn't make the cut; they give me the information that I need to improve my writing, and to improve the chances that I will place a story with a particular market.

Now, everybody knows that different editors are looking for different things, etc. etc. This is true. When I say "I found that..." or "I think your story could benefit from..." I don't mean "Your story is objectively flawed and it will be rejected by every editor that sees it, I think you are a loser, and I hope that you develop interphalangial gangrene so that you will be medically prevented from producing any more of this drivel," I mean, "This is why your story doesn't work for me." Another editor may disagree. Your story may be exactly what he's looking for, and he may snap it up. However, as you have decided to submit to Vulgata, I'm assuming that you have an interest in having your work published in our magazine, so I think it is a courtesy to let you know why the work that you sent us wasn't a good fit here. This saves you the frustration of sending one story after another to my slushpile without understanding why you're always getting turned down, and it saves me the trouble (hopefully) of rejecting one story after another for more or less the same reasons.

Occasionally, when I tell a writer why I didn't want his/her peice, I get a nasty response. Sometimes I get told that I didn't understand their story, or I get a long diatribe about the praise that the story has received elsewhere, or I get told that editors are stupid and don't know a good thing when they see it. This is juvenile and unprofessional.

a) If I didn't understand your story, then I suspect that my readers will also not understand it, and that makes me disinclined to publish it. It is your job to put your story into a form that I will understand.

b) If your friends liked your story, or your English professor liked it, or your professional writing mentor said it was the best thing you'd ever written, that's great. They can publish it. Their opinion is not going to alter mine.

c) Editors know their audience, and they know what they like, and that's what they're looking for. They have no reason to publish anything else.

- Melinda

III

Fishing For Inspirations

The first and primary duty of the artist is to have an inspiration. There are writers, even very successful writers, who get away with skipping this step; they have an idea, and they flesh the idea out with their intellect and their store of stock devices, then they write it up with a certain amount of polish, and off they go. A successful story. But they are not artists. Art is the process of turning an inspiration into a finished work – and for that, you must begin with an inspiration.

How do you get one? A lot of people assume that you just have to be born with a certain genius. Some people have it, some people don't. If you have it, you're an artist and ought to be given laurel wreaths the moment that your pen hits the page. Of course, as anyone familiar with the daily grind of the literary life knows, that's absurd. Still, the question remains: where do you get an inspiration?

David Lynch uses the metaphor of fishing, and instructs us that we must go out into the deep waters if we are going to catch the big fish. It won't do to sit around building sand-castles on the beach, or dipping your toes in and trying to bring up minnows. You have to set out into the deep, you have to put down a line, and you have to wait for an inspiration to bite.

What ocean it is, exactly, that we go out fishing in is difficult to say. Whether it is the subconscious, the collective unconscious, the Realm of Forms, or the mind of God, is a question better left to the metaphysicians. The essential property of all fishing expeditions in the world of inspirations, is that they have to begin with a pushing off from the shores of reason. So long as you are trying to “come up with and idea,” you are still building Versailles out of pulverized rock crystals. Inspirations do not, in their raw form, make sense. They do send a thrill along the spine, and you can feel immediately that there is something there, on the other end of the line, fighting against you; that it is a real and vital thing, and that it lives.

Once you have caught one, whether it is large or small, you have the beginning of an art work. Naturally, it is not a completed work in and of itself; it is a raw fish. Everything else that an artist does – the gruelling effort of perfecting craft, the hours of practicing similes and rhymes, the effort of filling out character sheets that tell you the shoe-size and favourite ice-cream flavour of your heroes – is necessary to get the fish from the boat to the table. After all, guests don't generally like to be presented with a slightly smelly tuna that's staring at them from out of its pristine, shining skin. Even raw fish dishes are served in delicate, bite-sized portions with soy and wasabi.

But the essential thing, the first thing, without which you will never make a tuna sandwich, much less Sole à la Bretonne avec les Champignons, is a fish.

- Melinda

I have found, as my confidence as a writer grows, that I have an increasing tendency to neologize. More and more frequently, my arguments with my spell-checker are not about the i-before-e fallacy, or the notion that judgement ought to be spelled without the intermediary "e", but over whether pish-piddle and Islamogoth are words.

There is a certain pure, childish delight to be taken in putting together the notes of language into fresh sequences that have never been played before; it is an aspect of play which the post-moderns have abbrogated to themselves, but which in fact is in evidence in every era, and is practically the rule in Shakespeare.

Yet there is a trick to a good neologism. Almost any thought or idea that you might want to express probably has a reasonably effective English word that will convey it; the essence of the neologism must lie in some other aspect of literary devising. Perhaps you want something oneomatopeic to convey a sense of childish wonder or to give your work a Beatrix-Potteresque note, "quick as a wink, the mouse squik-squiked under the door." Or maybe there is a particular image that you want to convey that isn't quite contained in the traditional language. Maybe it's a matter of metre: "verdurous" was almost certainly invented by a poet when neither "green" nor "verdant" would fit. Perhaps you want to convey a certain set of denotations that are not present in the ordinary term, as when one calls a charlatan a "flim-flam man." Or perhaps you want to make a word into a joke, as when referring to an idea as "paleoconservative."

The essential thing is that the new word must be justified. A juxtapositional, self-refuting, uber-post-post-modern neologism will only work if you have a context that calls for it. Sticking it in the middle of a line of poetry or prose, in a position where "ugly" would do just as well, is pretentious. Inventing a word and putting it in a context where its meaning is entirely unclear, except to you, is worthless. The joy of neologism ought to be shared: just as when a child discovers a brand new kind of rock hidden in a shoal on the beach, she runs and shares her discovery with everyone who will give her ear, so the good neologist must show, not tell, why their linguistic invention is worth having discovered.

- Melinda

Sexual language

I'm sick to death of this, so I am going to make an official pronouncement that I will not accept any poetry that contains the following words: erection, orgasm, hard nipples, limp penis, colliding bodies, falling pants, or electro-sexual magno-rocket. (If you are Leonard Cohen, I may consider an exception.)

You might assume that this is Catholic prudery; I call it editorial ennui. The problem is not that the sexual imagery is shocking, avante guard, subversive, edgy, daring, bold, or immoral. The problem is that it is trite.

In the seventies, if you said “Jesus came to me in an orgasm of light,” that was alarming. The Faith and Modesty League of every small town you went to would be out in force to raise up a lamentation onto heaven – or at the very least onto the Mayor of the town – trying to oust you and your disgusting poetry from their pure and virginal coffee shops. Today, every single other revolutionary post-modernist has already thought of it. I know. I read poetry slush.

This means that the words are entirely stripped of their power. It's like the word “fuck” in the conversation of a drunken Scotsman. It doesn't mean something disturbing or exploitative. It doesn't even mean something mildly offensive. It has precisely no meaning at all. It's just punctuation. Ditto in modern poetry, particularly modern poetry that uses sexual language in random combination with non-sexual objects for no reason whatever. If you write me a line like “The water-tower shone orgasmic in the light of the phallic sun” I will not be decieved into thinking you are clever. I will know perfectly well that it is shit. And that is the reason for the rejection letter.

- Melinda

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