John B. Rosenman

by John B. Rosenman

We’ve all had it happen to us. We write a story we’re pleased with, send it to the magazine or publisher of our choice, and receive the following response – or one much like it.

Sorry, but this one just didn’t work for me. It didn’t catch my fancy. Also, stories involving office life and office politics are a personal bugbear of mine: they have to be exceedingly brilliant for me to like them (I mostly dislike them).

This recent reply embodies a bugbear of my own: editors and others who reject mss simply because they fail a highly subjective sniff test of personal preference. Consider the language. Rejecting a story because it doesn’t work or catch your fancy makes sense. It’s a gut, personal feeling. But the business about “office life and office politics” seems too quirky and idiosyncratic. You might as well bounce a story because a character in it wears a plaid shirt or happens to be gay. Such an attitude can lead to narrow fiction that avoids the rich variety of life.

The personal, sometimes unreasonable preferences of editors and others, are something that writers have to take into consideration. This means reading guidelines and publications carefully before you submit to them. If you’re trying to break in to Cemetery Dance, read the magazine. If you want to sell a series to ROC Books, be sure to peruse their rules and a few of the books they publish.

Even then, though, it may be hard to break in. Magazines can be especially difficult. There are so many, and often they are radically different from each other. Then again, there are those editorial preferences, and the line between the logical and the loony is often blurred.

Dear Reader, try this experiment. Below is a list of some of the do’s and don’ts for a defunct, once popular horror magazine. You decide which of them is reasonable or acceptable when it comes to editorial preference and which of them crosses the line into something else.

DO’S

*Stories with a regional flavor, especially those set in New York
*Stories must take place after dark
*Stories set somewhere besides 1990’s earth
*Psychological H, S&S, Secret Societies, and Macabre humor

*No hard SF
*No stories about Politics, the Military or Religion, Roadkill, AIDS, People back from the dead to haunt relatives/avenge murderers
*No car breaks down, People who turn into a monster/animal (except
vampires/werewolves)
*No electrical appliance in tub, Woman seduces guy and kills him (or vice versa)
*No childhood fears, Child protagonists, Imaginary playmates, Slime monsters, circuses/carnivals/fairs
*Revenge, Ghosts, Serial killers
*Mirrors, Haunted books, Domestic strife, Cannibalism/dismemberment, Curses or Dreams coming true

What bothers me most here is that there are too many negatives. Clearly, we have an editor who has read a lot of submissions, seen a lot of repetition thematically and otherwise, and is seeking originality and freshness. I suppose that once you have read ten stories about someone dying of an electric appliance in a tub, or about a strange carnival coming to town, you’d get tired of them. Even though this was a fine publication that published some outstanding stories, if an editor excludes too much, h/she runs the risk of throwing out the wheat in addition to the chaff.

End of rant.

No, not the end. There are two areas I’d like to focus on before I take a cold shower. The first involves editorial bias against the First Person Point of View. The second concerns popular dislike of the present tense.

Here’s what one press that publishes Horror, SF, etc. says about the First Person POV:

Please note almost 95% of the novels we’ve received have been in the first person point of view. We aren’t fans of first person POV to start with, and we prefer erotica to be in the third person POV. This isn’t to say we won’t ever accept a first person POV novel, but it’s not terribly likely.

Now, I know there are markets (e.g., confessional) where first person may be essential, but quite a few publishers are biased against it. I recall one novel editor stating that the first person POV contributes to a “formal looseness,” as if using it will cause verbal diarrhea, a lack of structure, and a wallowing in personal feelings. But can you imagine Edgar Allan Poe writing “The Tell-Tale Heart” or many of his other stories in the third person? Or some first-person classics like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Catcher in the Rye being changed to third person? Something would definitely be lost! In horror and dark fantasy, first person POV is often preferred or essential. While first person does have disadvantages or limitations (e.g., it makes it difficult for the author to interpret events directly), it also has strengths (e.g., an eyewitness account can promote realism and immediacy.) I can understand a publisher preferring variety and not wanting to publish 95% of novels in the first person, but wanting to publish 100% in the third person? There’s something wrong with that mindset.

As for the present tense, you tell me how common the knee-jerk reaction is against it. I would guess that most of you have written more often in the First Person POV than in the present tense. Am I right? Sadly, as in other areas, the bias against it is based not so much on merit as on an irrational, unthinking allegiance to custom.

A friend of mine has sold several books to a major publisher. Her series involves an 11th-century Japanese detective and is written in the past tense. About a year ago, she began her most ambitious novel, a 700-pager that is not part of the series and is written in the present tense. Initially, our writers group “sniffed” at the present tense and detected a questionable odor. After two or three chapters, though, we’d come to accept it as preferable because of its poetic immediacy and intensity.

Not so my friend’s agent. While she said she loved the book, she insisted that the present tense be changed to the past. Why? Perhaps because the present tense is different and she’s old-fashioned. Also she leans toward historical potboilers that will please publishers. I guess it’s human nature to repeat what’s sold before and to avoid innovation. Don’t rock the creative boat! But in this particular case, a fine novel may be subtly weakened as a result.

I suspect that some readers will shrug and disagree with my view. After all, don’t editors and their kin have a right to their preferences? Isn’t it a fact of the fictional (and poetic) marketplace that folks like and dislike different things, and isn’t it often our differences that create variety and diversity, a genuine smorgasbord of things to read? Yes, but my major complaint concerns the number of things we say nein to without reason, and without even giving them a chance. As our very own Thomas (Sully) Sullivan wrote in his June 16 blog, “some people never get past the negativity of the birth experience and thus become literary critics,” and “some people never get past the ‘no’ stage either. They’re called . . . editors.”

Okay, what about you? What is the most bizarre or petty reason you’ve ever been given for a rejection? Ever had a story turned down because it contained an element of humor or because you used a single four-letter word? I bet there are some real doozies out there, many of them even stranger than fiction.