Have You Read My Manuscript? by Thomas Washington

After a limp attempt at resuscitating an essay in progress—the desktop has oodles of them, my own intergalactic debris orbiting the stars, perpetually out of reach—I beat the path to the refrigerator and then the television, where I'm captivated by a story about a plump teenager who wants to join the cheerleading squad. Although she confirmed the viewer's suspicion that she didn't have the stuff to be “one of them,” I was still pulling for her. Most of us need to be part of a cluster, especially in high school. Her head distended from ear to ear in the shape of a Granny Smith apple, as though a vice were squeezing her crown and chin. Her stubby legs and arms made hurdles an impossible dream. Still, she signed a contract with a coach who backed his rigorous training reputation by promising “he'd make her somersault through hell before she pyramided to heaven.” The camera eye followed her through a ninety-day training period, rounds of fasting, weightlifting, jump roping, and running the track circuit. In between, she cried in her pillow. She threw pots and pans at the dog. Tears poured down her cheeks when she told us about the terrible names the kids called her: tub-o-lard and fireplug. Over and over, she tried splits, aerials, and bananas, and each time she crashed, tumbling back on the mats with a goofy look. “One more time!” the coach ordered. “Jump and kick! Jump and kick!” Watching her repeated stunts, I was nearly moved to tears, but reality television's sadistic venue always forces the viewer to walk the emotional tightrope between pathos and ecstasy. I sided with the latter when she toppled off the mat for the hundredth time in two days and called it quits. This high school cheerleading squad will be better off without her, or so the viewer believes by the snarls and whispers behind the scenes.

After the episode, I reviewed my track record list, a database of essay submission dates, number of essays launched, target publications, and the “nice letters corner,” a catalog of editors who scribbled a kind note underneath the rejection statement. The track record sheet is a cross stitch of hopes pinned to the whimsy of creative output and an editor's wand of acceptance or refusal. And as I somersault my way aboard the pyramid of the literary marketplace, I recognize an uncanny resemblance between me and the hefty cheerleader. Like her desire to do splits among the ranks of her high school peers, I'm still applying for membership into the club, the network of professors, editors, readers, writers, and critics who make up the literati. Junior colleges take me on as an adjunct in their English department. They toss the crumbs out to me, the Saturday morning and Thursday evening classes, which convene on satellite campuses in the middle of a cornfield forty-two miles from home. High schools call me at 6:00 am to substitute for a day, but they are never willing to extend a year's invitation. Editorial posts for newspapers or magazines elude me, even after hundreds of submitted résumés. Once, an editor from a sports publication in Chicago hired me as a freelance proofreader. He handed over a thick packet for my first assignment, a 150-page book on soccer coaching with an index of rules. I'd never proofread anything before and thought fishing out typos and applying the standard proofreader's marks completed the process. The editor never contacted me after the first project. It's the silence on the other end that wounds the most. One MFA program, as another example, returned my application and writing samples intact and without comment.

Meanwhile, my SASE's complete their flight back to my mailbox with the dead certainty of a homing pigeon. Probably, I have no talent for writing about the habits of bumblebees, bats hanging upside down in Kentucky caves, or sustaining the muse in a 7,000-word essay that dotes upon the first page of a musical score during a concert. I envy people who do. My writing lacks the patience and the detail of the genuine artist. Instead, my work is roughshod, like chain sawing in an English garden rather than getting on one's hands and knees to cultivate the green.

Months ago a high school art teacher invited me to dinner. Her husband is an English teacher and poet who also leads monthly writing workshops in the public library. After dinner, he invited me to his study, where he wanted to show me a first edition of Whitman's Leaves of Grass. I noticed his collection of literary quarterlies first, though, shelved tidily above his work space. I'd never met anyone who kept copies of quarterlies, much less wrote for them. We created an instant bond: a pair of middle-aged men who kept running tallies of monthly submissions and a budding collection of published works, tiny trophies in our private spaces, which no one would ever read or care about, except us. It was like being a kid again, when a new friend pulls out his butterfly or stamp collection and you realize that a personal hobby can sometimes cross over into communal worth.

And here is one irony behind trying to enter the literati circle, of pinning one's hopes on the literary quarterly marketplace. Like the joy of reading, writing is largely a hobby. One scribbles poetry, essays, or short stories for oneself, really, just as one reads for oneself, builds model airplanes for oneself, or builds birdhouses. We say that “old Mr. Walker collects arrowheads. It's his personal hobby.” And then we have an image of the doddering Mr. Walker traversing a midwestern cornfield with his eyes glued to the ground, fully injected with the hope of turning over a Pottawattamie Indian prize. Or we find Mr. Walker in the upstairs den on an autumn afternoon, rearranging the collection once again, completely distracted from the world's larger ills.

The fiction writer or essayist can't leave it at that. Whereas Mr. Walker is happy as a lark with his arrowheads, the writer not only wants someone to fuss over his work in progress, he also has a compelling (sadistic or egotistical?) need to push it off on others, mainly editors, student readers, or, as a last resort, an unresponsive family member. We're solicitors. Our patron synonym is “lawyer.” The only difference between us and an attorney is that instead of pleading or counseling the cause of a client in a court of justice, we plead our own cause: our manuscripts. We persuade, entreat, persistently petition, and importune. We approach and accost. It's by no coincidence that the word's Latin root sollicitus means “troubled,” and here the adjective “solicitous” takes an especially ominous turn: one who is anxious or concerned, full of desire. Eager. The writer/solicitor is on a par with the Fuller Brush salesman and the now discharged telemarketer.

In the self-centered madness of submitting batches of four poems or 6,500-word essays against one-or two-percent acceptance rates, sixmonth waiting periods, and in between, the long days of insufferable silence over the email transom, we still think we deserve a certain VIP status, like a regular guest at the hotel bar. Unlike any two-bit salesperson, we have a pathetic sense of disregard for our client, the literary quarterly itself, if only because we never have to look at the editor eye to eye. In theory, we don't even have to subscribe to the publication. It's not as though the editors and publishers are not on to us. One publication that I've sent work to always includes a quote by Thomas Kennedy at the bottom of the rejection letter. It reads, “Writers are notorious for failing to support their own. How many . . . buy or even read literary magazines?”

And thus another irony behind trying to muscle my way in on the editorial coterie. Besides the Homeland Security Department or the CIA, what other professional establishment besides literary editors operates in such covert fashion? I've never seen an editor, never set foot in any one of the hundreds of campus addresses to which my submissions make their final descent before completing the round trip back to the mailbox. Their shadowy existence assumes biblical overtones, akin to Job's entreaties to that punishing and invisible (yet potentially compassionate) God. But what is it, exactly, that the pushy writer hopes to be a part of, ultimately? We can ignore this line of questioning by saying, “We write because we must,” i.e., the world is such a mad place that our only recourse is to hide at our desks and vent. One can at least understand the teenage cheerleader's desire to identify with part of a more glamorous pack. It's a frog leap into peer recognition. A published manuscript, on the other hand, is passed around to family members during the holidays, like a swim team trophy from junior high school. Those who do actually read your work never see you. They probably don't even bother blowing up a mental picture of you while they read your work. This imperceptible connection intrigues me, if only because I believe that a large motivation for writing is ego-driven. As much as I want to think I write for myself, because I have to, I'm still expecting more, maybe a small parade of readers and editors in front of my home on 127 Garfield whenever someone accepts a piece. At the tail end of it, a child could push a red wagon filled with the various literary quarterlies that were kind enough to include me.

This silence on the other end, the lack of a discernible picture on the other side, has forced me to create my own scenario after I've licked the stamps and sealed the envelope. Logistics are the obvious starting point. At the rate of hundreds of manuscripts falling out of the sky each day, or more likely, a thousand envelopes per week, how do editors and their moat of student readers avoid drowning in the onslaught? Isn't it likely that on a bad day or busy day (and what day wouldn't be busy?) the managing editor instructs a student reader to cart whole piles of envelopes to the incinerator, with the same ease with which an army general instructs his corporal to shoot a line of blindfolded POWs?

More likely, a pair of readers strolls over to the campus mail room each morning and hauls four or five bins on a dolly. “There's the next load for you in the corner,” the mailroom clerk says, “right next to the bundles of inserts that no one will get to. Let's hope there's something in that pile that's worth more than the inserts, eh?”

The readers return to the office, and on the way, they look at the three bins and know a nugget is waiting to be panned among the grit. “That's what makes the work such a bitch,” one of them might say. “Dumping whole bins to the incinerator is to miss that one piece out of 100 or more.” The dolly bar bangs against the door again, adding another chip in the paneling. The dolly passes a kitchen outlet. The sink topples with dirty mugs. Coffee cake crumbs and someone's lunch bag sit on the counter. Coffee grounds burn on the boiler plate and the smell lingers on four stacks of envelopes piled on a desk, each of them twenty inches high. An editor peeks out between two piles and tells the reader to stack the additional bin load in the corner. Later that afternoon the mail room will telephone and ask that someone in the editorial office please return the bins because the postal clerks don't have any place to put the additional 500 envelopes, which just arrived.

Here is where the process gets murky, where the film reel snaps off the spool and the voice dies that slow-motion death. We assume that a student reader has gained a sharp enough eye to turn around a manuscript within sixty seconds. (Likely, the editorial office bandies myriad terms of the trade around the office. Some readers are known as “ace turnarounders” for their skill in fishing out the first flaw within five seconds and repacking the manuscript back to Muskegon, MI.) The dead giveaways must be abundant: no SASE, handwritten copy, three typos in the first line, the word “cat,” or just a crummy first paragraph. (Is there any one element more revealing to this dubious process than the SASE? It's attached to the back of the fifteen-pager like a cancerous adenoid. Including this with the submission carries as much hope as passing your phone number off to a girl you met in a bar.) Logically, then, writers could expect to see their work returned home with the speed of a boomerang. This has happened to me a few times. Just when I've settled in with the hope that my nugget has found a safe place among the stacks, it reappears in the mailbox, coughed out like a hairball from the cat's mouth with a rejection slip copy that looks low on toner.

There is a deafening finality in the rapid turnaround. Short of scribbling profanities up and down the cover page, I sense it is one of the few options of recourse that an editor has against the writer, And, invisible editor, if you've bothered to read this far, I'm begging you to scribble a word or two of truth, no matter how much it hurts, rather than the lie, which reads, “This rejection is no reflection of you or the manuscript itself. We get hundreds . . .” The disclaimer that a rejection is no reflection of one's character is a lie that no writer worth his or her salt (and there probably aren't many ) really believes. If the impudent writer sends his work halfway across the country to a publication that he likely does not read, then why is he not willing to admit that the inevitable rejection mirrors his character? If an essay or piece of fiction does not reflect our temperament, then what does? We accept the fact that the clothes we buy reflect personality. Aren't those plastic black shoes that businessmen wear or the off-blue sports jackets indicative of poor taste? Surely a piece of writing that one labors over between ninety minutes or ninety hours should qualify as an integral part of one's nature. The work is, in fact, the writer.

Since I rarely do have my SASE's returned within one week, though, I assume my work is finding its way up the rung. I used to think that anything over ninety days boded well for my work. First, the student reader sticks a gold star on my submission for “shows promise.” One month later an associate editor passes it on to the managing editor's desk with a note on the cover page that reads, “I think we need to contact him for publication soon. Great piece here. Very original. Let's go with it.”

The more likely scenario takes us back to the slush pile, to that neglected pile of bins in the corner of the office. Ninety days or more simply means that the ace turnarounder did, in fact, send your piece packing after a ninety-second scan. It was number 5,322 in a line of submissions dating back to last October, just when the leaves turned red and started falling off the trees. I confirmed this scenario with a publication that allows electronic submissions and an “online status check.” This online submission center includes the date when the piece was received, the article title, and its status. For the last 101 days now—I've been checking the status since day five—my submission status reads “awaiting review.” To amuse my fancy, let's figure that this publication receives seventy-five electronic submissions per day. This means that on the day I submitted my 6,500-word nugget, this publication already had 7,575 pieces queued up before mine, ninety-nine percent of which vanished into cyberspace with the delete command.

Presumably, the publication has employed this electronic tool to speed up the turnaround process or to save the trees. Either way, it seems an ingenious approach, although if I were heading up the editorial crew, there would be a disclaimer.

“We will contact the writer only if we are interested in the work. Otherwise please understand that your submission was not accepted, i.e., our delete button is the greatest weapon against writers since Pac Man.” •

Thomas Washington is a journalist and essayist. His writing has appeared in Salon, The Boston Globe, and most recently in The Massachusetts Review.

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