Friends: More Will and Magna Stories

Cooked Goose

They said no more stories, no more novels, we don’t want anything of yours anymore, your novels don’t sell, your collections do even worse, each of your books gets panned more than the last one, find another publisher if you can but you’ll be wasting your time and ours if you send another work in.

I phone several editors at different publishing houses and they all say the same thing. They’ve read my reviews and sometimes my stories and books and I should feel lucky I even got my work published and reviewed. Try another profession — that’s our advice. If you feel you must be in the arts, try music or mixed media or something like that — acting, because occasionally your dialogue hits the mark, for about three sentences in a row, but please don’t bother sending us any of your manuscripts.

I write a short story and think this is one of my best and send it to a magazine and finish the novel I’ve been writing for a year and make a few copies of it and send these to publishers and begin another novel and write more stories and send these to magazines and I get back rejection slips and letters from magazine and book editors all saying please don’t try us again, be so kind as to solicit beforehand whether we want to read your work, your fiction is not only unsalable but just plain unworthy — the syntax and bad taste, the characters, the grammar, style, form, content, language, writing, wording, everything, you’re deceiving yourself, you’re taking up our valuable time which we could much better be using to read novels and collections by other writers — our own and newer writers we’ve asked to send their work in.

I finish the novel and send the two new novels out and write more stories and another novel, which is the third part of the trilogy to the last two novels, and send this work out separately to some publishers and all three together to other publishers and the few literary agents I haven’t tried yet and my stories to magazines and anthologies and a collection of my last twenty stories to other publishers and they all return my work saying just about the same thing. This isn’t for us and we don’t see any other house publishing it either. You’re fooling yourself and should get out of writing fiction or at least take a couple years break from it. You had a professional writing career going once but something happened along the way to stop it that is probably as unexplain-able to you as it is to us, even if it isn’t that rare. Maybe you should try finding a job in journalism or adver tising, publishing, publicity or technical or medical writing. If you feel you have to make a living doing fiction, try writing a popular novel. Something about outer space or a detective or erotic novel or a book for kids — anything but what you’re writing now which we know was intended to be serious fiction but just doesn’t come across at all that way.

Manuscripts come back and I continue to write. I finish another story collection in a year and my fourth novel in two years. The fourth novel continues where the trilogy left off, so I now not only have another novel to send around but also a tetralogy. Comments come back with my manuscripts. I start a new novel. Royalty checks from the early promising works of mine have stopped coming in. Anthologies that carried my early stories are now out of print. I am out of money. Utility companies are threatening to shut off my gas, lights and phone. My landlord says tough as he knows life has been for me over the past ten years, he’ll have to have my six months back rent or throw me out. I’m evicted. A city marshall breaks down my door and takes all my furniture and clothes away to sell for whatever he can get from them to pay back part of my rent. I try to keep my typewriter but two of the marshall’s assistants pull it out of my hands. A locksmith puts new locks on my door and laughs when I ask for a set of the new keys. I’m left with several shopping bags of my manuscripts and what’s in my pockets.

I sit on the front stoop of the building I lived in. The mailman comes, doesn’t see my name on the letterbox anymore and drops a few envelopes of returned manuscripts on my lap and says goodluck. A woman brings me a sandwich and glass of water and says “I’ve heard you typing for years across the air shaft and wondered what you were writing — term papers for university students, hate letters to the mayor — but never figured it for fiction till the mailman just told me it was. I’ve always admired creative people in all fields and they have to eat no matter how much they’re nourished by their pursuits, isn’t that so?”

“They also need a place to live and work in, so would you please by any chance have a spare room for free for a couple months till I really get back on my feet?”

“That I think would be carrying my support for the arts a little too far,” and when I tell her I’m not hungry for her food now though do thank her for it, she takes the plate and glass home with her, leaving the sandwich in one of my shopping bags.

Night comes. I suddenly get a good idea for a short story. I take a pen and pad out of my pocket and begin writing it. A policeman pulls up in a car when I’m halfway through the story and says the landlord and a few tenants and neighbors complained about my sitting on the stoop for so long and looking a bit seedy with all those bags and my worn work clothes, so I’ll have to move.

I cross the street and sit on the sidewalk curb and finish the story. It’s the first story I’ve written entirely by hand in twenty years. I tried to keep the writing neat and pages clean but it still doesn’t look too good. The pen ran out of ink and when I continued to write the story by pencil, lead smudges along with my fingerprints soiled several pages.

I take one of the envelopes from my returned manuscripts, cross off my name on the front and write the name and address of a popular magazine and put the story in it and drop it in a mailbox. It probably won’t get there without stamps and if it does and the magazine pays the postage due on the envelope rather than handing it back to the mailman, it probably won’t get accepted, but you never know. The magazine might think it the best story I’ve sent them and give me a good deal of money for it and a contract to get first look at every story I write for the next few years. It’s happened to other writers who have placed stories in that magazine and I never thought their work was any better than mine.

Suddenly an idea comes to me. The streetlight’s bad where I sit and the weather’s gotten windy and cold, so I find a quiet-enough bench at the bus terminal and begin a new novel that has no relationship to the last four. I write all night and the following day, nibbling on my sandwich sparingly to keep away debilitating hunger for as long as I can, and think this novel might end up being the best one I’ve written so far.