Let's talk about ego defense.


Writers get rejected. A lot. And being rejected makes people feel bad. This is especially true when the rejection involves something that you're heavily invested in. When your work is validated, when someone says "Yes, I'll buy this lovely story!" you feel good about yourself. When you don’t get that validation--when someone essentially says "Nope, not good enough" you feel bad about yourself.

"Come on, Ann," I hear you saying at this point. "How stupid do you think we are? This is obvious."

It's obvious, yes. What's equally obvious is that most people, when they get a blow to their ego, like, say, a rejection--especially a curt form rejection--marshal their defenses as quickly as possible. Feeling bad about yourself is really unpleasant. Feeling bad about your writing is also unpleasant, especially if you're invested in continuing to write and submit. So you find a rationalization, something that turns "I failed" around into "I did everything right, my writing is awesome, it was [something else] that caused that rejection."

Obvious, as I said--except when we're doing it ourselves.

Now, the thing is, we need ego defenses. Writers get rejected a lot, and if you didn't defend yourself somehow, you'd quit. I've got nothing against ego defense. Find one that works for you and use it!

But don’t use it in public, I beg you. Especially not on the web, where Google cache and the wayback machine and screenshots make any foolish move immortal and searchable.

If you don’t realize what you're doing is ego defense, though, you won't realize that you're about to put your foot in it in a very public way. And that defense is pretty much automatic, so much so that you probably won't see it as a defense or a rationalization, but instead as "The Truth." So I recommend some introspection. I also recommend actually listening to the advice and information that established writers give out. When your image of "The Truth" doesn't match what nearly every established writer is telling you, it's time for some rethinking.

You may remember I talked about a "double mind" in a previous entry, trying to be both aware of my shortcomings as a writer but also confident in my work. The double mind comes in handy here, too. But even with that doublethink running, this is a hard place for a beginning writer to be. For one thing, it's near impossible to have an objective view of your own work, and it's nearly always going to seem better than it is. But when you're first starting out, let's be honest, your work probably isn't very good. Ego defense says, "Sure, everyone else has to go through that beginning stage, but my work is wonderful!" And then ego defense says, "So if my wonderful work is being bounced by the slushreaders with forms, over and over again for months and years, it's got to be because they're not really looking for work from new writers. My stuff is as good as anything the big guys publish! Therefore it must be a matter of who you know, or what credits you have."*

Or my current favorite variation, "Editors who employ slush readers are not giving every submission the attention it deserves, only the subs by people they know, and that's not fair."

I understand where this is coming from--I myself started out getting nothing but form rejects from slushers. And I was distressed--surely my work hadn't had a fair shot! Surely if the editors themselves had seen it they'd have recognized how good it was! The slush reader was standing in my way, standing between me and my destiny as a writer! How, oh how, could I get past the slushreader?

I know I've said this before, but I'm going to say it again. Barring an isolated case here or there, if the slusher rejects you, the editor would not have bought your story. If you can't get past the slush reader, it's not because the slush reader is standing in your way, or because the slush reader didn't give your story enough attention, or because the editor will only read stories by people she knows. The slushers at the biggest venues know what their respective editors want and don't want. If they did a bad job at choosing what to pass up, they would have been replaced by slushers more able to meet the editors' criteria.

And if you've never seen a slushpile, you really don't have any idea what it's like to wade through one. I'm serious about this. I've tried to tell writer friends what it's like, and they haven't believed me until they saw for themselves. Believe me, once you see what's in slush, you would no longer insist that it is the duty of an editor to closely examine every sub therein. I'll tell you now, and you won't believe me if you haven't experienced it for yourself, and you'll think I'm being callous and arrogant, but it's really actually true that something like ninety percent of submissions can be rejected within the first paragraph. There's another, say, five percent that have some really strong features but are fatally flawed--I remember once sitting around a table with a bunch of friends, looking at a random pull of subs from the slush of a magazine we've all heard of (Mithras, but that was enlightening) and hearing each person moan in distress, and everyone at the table going, "What?" and the groaner saying "You'll know when you read it." Five minutes later, next person groans. "You'll see when you read it." On around the table. The sub finally got to me. It was engagingly written, a fairly interesting conceit, maybe not totally original but the voice was carrying it. After pages and pages of nearly unreadable manuscripts, it was so refreshing, so pleasant, so wonderful! But instead of actually going anywhere it just...flopped. And I groaned, just like everyone else had, in disappointment.

It's almost impossible to describe to you, that feeling when I started reading, of excitement, how pleased I was to find something actually good in that stack. And how bitterly disappointing it was to find it stalling and plummeting.

It's also nearly impossible to describe to you what that ninety percent is like, the stuff you read a paragraph and know it's going to be rejected. You're thinking, "But, Ann, what about starts that aren't explosions and frenetic action? Huh? What about slow-paced pieces that are wonderful, and meant to be that way?" And I answer, "You have no idea what I mean when I say, these ninety percent can be rejected on the first paragraph. No idea." Go read slush if you can. Sol Invictus, the things people will send in to magazines! Your jaw would drop, your eyes would glaze over, and then once you recovered yourself you'd be tempted to bang your head against the wall a while. Read the whole thing? Every time? Sweet Mithras, I've done that, and I don't recommend it. Insist the editor in chief give those her full attention? Surely you can't be serious. Not at the volumes of slush the majors get, anyway.

You are not, of course, in that ninety percent. You are being rejected for other, more subtle problems. These are many and various--your idea was cliché, perhaps, or too like everything else in the pile that day, the editor is sick unto death of pirates, zombies, or zombie pirates, your premise was flawed, your characters not quite convincing enough...there are more. Heck, maybe your main character is named Eunice, and someone named Eunice just that very morning ran over the editor's dog. In short, you've got some hiccups, but you're not being rejected in the first paragraph. The slush reader probably even reads your whole story.

How do I know this? Well, actually I don't. I mean, unless I know your writing. But this is where ego defense is useful--you don't want to succumb to despair right off the bat. You want to keep plugging away, and getting better, so that if you are in that ninety percent you won't be there long, and sometimes the only way to do that and keep your sanity is to not have an entirely accurate view of the quality of your work, not at the very beginning. Everybody has to start somewhere, and while it's true some people have an easier time of it, that's not all of us. But where you start doesn't matter nearly as much as how far you go, and how far you go is going to be a function of how much work you put into it.

The work you put into it--well, maybe how much isn't as important as what kind. If you're going to fix your problems, eventually you have to acknowledge you have them.

Which leads me to another ego defense technique, and one of my least favorites ever. See, those big places that only buy their friends or people who have jumped some mysterious bar or learned the secret handshake--they're slaves to marketing and sales, they only buy safe stuff, bland work, maybe even from people who have Sold Out. But you, you have Artistic Integrity! Your Artistic Integrity is so strong, your genius so pronounced, that your brilliance is evident in direct proportion to the number of people who don't buy or love your work. Those people who sell all the time and even have fans, they're obviously not brilliant because everyone likes them, the sellouts! But you, you will never compromise your Artistic Vision, no, not even so far as to move a comma or correct a typo! You meant to do that.

Or maybe you're flexible in the matter of commas and typos--but won't consider substantive revisions. Negative critiquers just don't get what you're doing, aren't sophisticated enough to grasp the brilliance of your vision.

(Note, I'm not actually advocating taking every negative critique on board. There's a sort of art involved in figuring out what advice to take and what to leave. But if you find yourself leaving everything that doesn’t validate what you've already done, please stop and reconsider.)

Here's the thing. Artistic visions are a dime a dozen and half price on Saturdays. The trick isn't having an artistic vision. It's managing to communicate that artistic vision to other people. Now, granted, not everyone's work is going to enthrall thousands of readers. You may have a particularly quirky view of the world, something that will only engage a minority of readers--that's okay. Stuff like that has an audience, can generally find a home, even if it's not with the largest circulating venues. People who love it will, well, love it. And even people who don't love it will often recognize that it's well done, just not what they're after. Especially people who read a lot, and who make a hobby or even a living out of evaluating fiction. Like, say, slush readers and editors. So if you're at the top of your game and producing strange and quirky stuff, chances are you're going to get a note or two, rather than forms all the time, even if you don't sell to the highest paying places, or places with the highest circulations.

And you might not ever get validation from the prozines. And that's okay--popular writers, I mean the really popular ones, they have visions that a lot of people get, and that's fine and wonderful. But some of us won't ever fit into what those zines are trying to give their audiences. That's all right. The so-called big three are not the be-all and end-all of success in writing. Just because the big-name places reject something, even with a form, doesn't mean it's no good. And the editors of those publications will tell you that, if you ask them--they've all rejected things that went on to get good reviews, and even appear in year's best collections and win awards.

But if no one seems to recognize your brilliance at all, consider the possibility that it's not shining quite as brightly as you think. Don't take this as a sign to quit, or despair, or hate yourself. Roll up your sleeves and figure out what you need to do to communicate your vision to your readers. And then do that.

And keep the ego defense on the QT. Like a number of other things in life, you need it to keep going, but you don't want to do it in public.

________


* We've been over this, right? Having some sales does give you some advantages--though they're slight. Still, I'll take slight over none. And having a recognizable name leads to opportunities that would not otherwise be available. But you don't need credits or connections to sell stories--having no credits or connections will not hamper your ability to sell a dynamite story to the right editor. And neither credits nor connections will get you sales if your story isn't a story the editor wants.