Famous Rejection Letter #1

I thought I would start a series of posts for this class about rejection letters that were received by famous and successful writers, in order to remind you that it's tough for everybody and rejection is part of the publishing game. You're going to need a pretty thick skin.

First up: Ernest Hemingway

Those of you who have heard me rant about how much I hate The Sun Also Rises (but have learned more from the study of that novel than from any of EH's others) will understand why I felt a little twinge of sympathy and a simultaneous ping of happiness reading this. For many reasons, I suppose.

So, here it is:

75 Wiley Street
New York, N.Y.
U.S.A.

June 14th, 1925.

Dear Mr. Hemingway:

Thank you for sending us your manuscript, The Sun Also Rises. I regret to inform you that we will not be offering you publication at this time.

If I may be frank, Mr. Hemingway -- you certainly are in your prose -- I found your efforts to be both tedious and offensive. You really are a man's man, aren't you? I wouldn't be surprised to hear that you had penned this entire story locked up at the club, ink in one hand, brandy in the other. Your bombastic, dipsomaniac, where-to-now characters had me reaching for my own glass of brandy -- something to liven up 250 pages of men who are constantly stopping to sleep off the drink. What Peacock & Peacock is looking for, in a manuscript, is innovation and heart. I'm afraid that what you have produced here does not fit that description.

A great story, Mr. Hemingway, is built on a foundation of great characters. I had trouble telling yours apart. Remind me, which is the broken-hearted bachelor who travels aimlessly across Europe? Ah, yes! They all do! As I understand it, Jake Barnes is intended to be your hero. A hero, Mr. Hemingway, is a person the reader can care about, root for. Jake Barnes is too detached, too ineffective; I doubt he'd have the energy to turn the page and find out what happened to himself. I take exception, also, to your portrayal of Mike. There is nothing less appealing than a character who sits blithely by while his wife sleeps with half of the continent. I have not yet said anything about Brett, your only prominent female character. As a woman, was I intended to identify with this flighty girl who takes in men the way the others take in after-supper coffees? Let me tell you, Mr. Hemingway, I did not. Your languid characters deserve each other, really, each one is more hollow than the next.

Of course, I doubt it's possible to create a three-dimensional character with such two-dimensional language. Have you never heard of crafted prose? Style? Complexity of diction? It's hard to believe an entire novel's worth of pages could be filled up with the sort of short, stunted sentences you employ here. Let me be specific: at the start of the novel, you sum up a key character, Robert Cohn, with just five short words, "I was his tennis friend." This tells us nothing. Later, when Jake is looking out on the Seine -- the beautiful, historic, poetic Seine -- you write, the river looked nice. Nice? The river looked nice? I dare say my young son could do better!

In short, your efforts have saddened me, Mr. Hemingway. I was hopeful that by 1925, the brutes would have stopped sending me their offerings. We at Peacock & Peacock, are looking to publish novels that will inspire. God knows, it's what people need at this time. Certainly, what is not needed are treatises about bullfights and underemployed men who drink too much.

Sincerely,
Mrs Moberley Luger
Editor-in-Chief


Ouch. I bet he needed a drink after that. The good news is that rejections are rarely so harsh these days, and even though it was pretty mean, he still went on to publish that novel and build a career on it. So he got the last laugh.

What do you think? Leave a comment below.

Get to Work

A mistake that beginning writers often make is when they forget that their character must exist in a world that resembles our own: the character must eat and sleep, and must therefore have money to buy groceries and pay rent, and must therefore have a job.

Some amazing poems and stories have been built around a character's job, and that's what you should try for in your exercise today.

To start, make a quick list of jobs that you find interesting or jobs that you've done before. If you're having a hard time coming up with that, try going back to a newspaper site and looking at the classifieds, or typing in the words "most interesting jobs" or "jobs in (my home state)" or a similar term into a search engine, and see what pops out at you. When I do this exercise and go to the classifieds of my local paper, I get: dental assistant, short order cook, diesel mechanic in Antarctica???!! Whoa.

I'm not sure I'm qualified to write a story about a diesel mechanic in Antarctica without a whole lot of research, but it'd be fun to try. Or I could honestly start a story with any of those occupations.

Pick one. Next, make a list of details you know about that job. What kind of clothes does that person wear on the job? What hours do they keep? What's the pay like? How do you get that job? What kinds of skills does it require? This might take a little research, but you don't have to do a ton of research, just enough at this point that you can imagine the job.

Now make a list of things that could go wrong on this kind of job or a mistake that the person could make on the job. Remember how we've been talking about how conflict is what drives stories.

And finally, write a scene that opens with something going wrong at a character's job (i.e., the moment that the "moving" action of the story begins.

So maybe, in my scenario, I could write a scene that starts with a dental assistant who just erased a patient's entire file, or accidentally cut a patient's lip, or a patient groped her while she was cleaning his teeth--oh, that would be perfect and terrible, being groped by a patient, ack, and I'm sure it happens.

And now I have the seed for a story.

As you write this scene you'll have to fill in the details and ask questions: Has she worked on this patient before and noticed anything? Who else does she work with? Would someone come to her rescue or not? Is she the sort of person to exact revenge? What tools does she have at her disposal to do something about this problem? What will the consequences for her actions be?

You may find in writing that this scene feels like it will lead you off in another direction, with the work problem not really being a big deal, but allowing you access into a character's life. Or the work problem might be what the entire story is about. It could go either way.

Remember that you can also choose to continue the first line exercise, do the news story exercise if you haven't already, or try your hand at one of the generating exercises in the Dropbox file. Or, if you already have a story rolling, you could write a page to continue that story.

Whatever you choose, have fun with it, and I'll see you on Friday!

Writing Exercises

Hello y'all

I just uploaded a file called "Generating Exercises" into the Exercises section of our class Dropbox. For tomorrow's class, you can do one of these exercises or the one that I will write about below, take your pick. Try to write about 200-250 for the exercise (about 1 double spaced page) or more, if the muse clobbers you.

The generating exercises are based on the idea of imitation, the way an artist will study the brushstrokes of another painter in order to learn his art. So you basically imitate this other writer in their first sentence / paragraph, and then move forward on your own from there. I have written two published short stories that have started from exercises like this, and my take on it is that, more often than not, I end up revising out the imitated section, but it gave me the seed for the story that got the ball rolling.

The other option is to do my "Stories in the World" Exercise, which is one I typically give my intro students (so forgive me if some of what I say seems elementary here, and pay attention to the italics sections where I am addressing you, my 404 class, specifically):

Stories in the World

 

In her interview after her published short story "The Story of My Life," (which is one you've read if you had me for Intro, about a girl who has a famous activist mother) Kim Edwards discusses how a seed of the story started to grow in her mind after she read a news story about protesters who had their children lie down across the driveway of an abortion clinic. It was this detail of the story that resonated with Edwards, like a tiny shard of glass in her mind, an image that she returned to again and again.

The world is full of these kinds of details, and they are ripe for opportunities in good literary fiction. So for your writing exercise this week, let's look for details that strike us in a similar way.

Let's start with the news. Track down a good, old-fashioned newspaper, check a website like CNN.com, watch your local news hour on television, or check the websites for a local paper from your hometown or, if you like, from Malibu (this is the Malibu Times, click here). I often find the seeds for good stories in local news as opposed to national news, because those stories often deal with individuals from a setting that I'm familiar with, but national news will definitely yield results as well, so you might want to scour both types.

You're looking for a detail, something that strikes you emotionally or intellectually.

You don't have to go for the most dramatic or gratuitous or "newsworthy" thing. Just a detail, a moment that makes you stop to think. To wonder. To place yourself momentarily in the shoes of someone else, as Kim Edwards did in her story, wondering, "What if?" What would it be like to be one of those children who was forced to lie down in the driveway?

Take a few moments to jot down some of the details of this news story, especially whatever specifics you can find about the element of the story that resonates for you.

(In spite of my warning about not going with the most dramatic thing, most of my intro students will choose the story about the woman who drowned her children in a bathtub or the boy who was locked up by his family in a dog kennel for a year over the story about the woman who was sentenced to 40 days in jail because she stole $2700 from her boss at the Kwik Serve or about how the champion of the watermelon-eating contest at the state fair wept when he lost this year. Not that good literary fiction can't be written about all of these pieces of news, but writing literary fiction about big, graphic events is much trickier to do than writing about smaller interactions between characters.)

Then try to ask yourself, "what if?" Try to imagine a character who is part of this story--or a story like it--you don't have to stick with the exact story just as Kim Edwards doesn't reference the exact protest that she read about. How would that person interpret the events that occurred differently from the average person reading / watching the story unfold on the news?

Now write a scene.

A scene, to try to define it, is a set of actions or conversation that takes place in a single location, like a scene from a movie, only written in prose paragraphs. Scenes usually have dialogue (because characters talk to each other in scenes) and something of significance must happen in the scene, to move the story forward. "The Story of My Life," for example, starts with summary, not scene, where she throws in a tiny little what I would call demi-scene in: "You've got that wrong. You're thinking of my mother." Then she moves to a section where we see her mother on the evening news (which is not really about the main character, but a description of her mom), and finally, at the very bottom of 58 to the top of 60, we get an outright scene: Nichola and Sam watching her mother on television.

That's a scene.

(Sorry you have to do this without the context of the story, but you get the idea, right?)

You can construct your scene however you like. You can start your story with a bit of summary instead of a scene, as Edwards does, or a description, like Edwards' second section, or simply leap right into a scene, which is where the majority of short stories begin. You can imitate Edwards in a way, if you like, as a beginning painter might imitate the brush strokes of Van Gogh. You could structure your story so that your main character feels defined by the life and "newsworthiness" of someone else. You could even start with the line: "You'd know me if you saw me." You can try out the first person present tense, which will make the reader feel as if they are watching the actions as they unfold: "We are sitting together on the sofa, drinking Coca Cola and eating animal crackers."

Or you can take the story in an entirely different voice and an entirely different direction.

Just make it your own. Try to get down 200-250 words, which is about a page, double spaced.

A couple of warnings, before I turn you loose:

Edwards is successful in writing a story that deals with the topic of abortion and protests because she always keep the camera focused solely on the characters and their development, rather than try to get preachy or judgmental of the characters, which tends to turn off your reader. As readers of fiction, we like to come to our own conclusions about things, so any attempt to try to write to a specific theme in literary fiction is quite likely doomed to fail.

If your news story implies a kind of judgment or will by its nature ask the reader to take a side, take your cues from Edwards. Tread lightly. Focus on the characters, not on the issues.

Stories that are very dramatic, like a murder, for instance, are likewise difficult to get right in literary fiction, because our tendency can be to sensationalize the details. It's not off limits, but again I say: Tread lightly. We are trying to write literary fiction, and that is going to be character-based. It will not look like a horror movie.

Have fun with it. Don't get too stressed or spend too much time trying to think it through. Imagine a character and start writing. The story can present itself to you as you go.

Email me or text me if you have questions, as usual. Or leave your thoughts in the comments for the whole class to weigh in on.

Now get writing!

So, to boil it down for you 404 students, find a news story and write a scene that is based in some way on the story. Bring in a printed copy of your page (or a page from the Generating Exercises) to class on Tuesday.

I'll see you then!