The Human Side of Submissions

Cheryl Klein had a fabulous blog entry on Monday, touching on the difficulty some editors have with the rejection process. The entry is largely composed of a couple of paragraphs of an essay by Brian Doyle.

It's a beautiful essay, and having spent several years in the world of publishing--having worked in a publishing house and from my positions on the editorial staff of The Fieldstone Review, along with a couple of other publications--I can totally empathize with him. My favorite lines:

"So very often I find myself admiring grace and effort and craftsmanship, honesty and skill, piercing and penetrating work, even as I turn to my computer to type a rejection note.... So very many people working so very hard to connect, and here I am, slamming doors day after day."

However, as a writer who's eagerly waiting with fear and trembling, many tenterhooks involved and all that, to hear back on a novel query, I also can empathize really well with the fourth commenter to the blog post, who said:

"It's not always that a writer, especially a new one, is trying to get one up on a potential editor by sending work that is irrelevant to him/her. Sometimes, a raw inspiration to write does not come with a guide to the literary world or a guide to those guides."

It seems to me that both sides could use a bit of appreciation of the difficulties the other faces, and remember, after all, that it's humans on the other side of the desk. The editors really are looking for good work, but they're also needing to make money to stay afloat, and sometimes they have bad days.

And the writers, well, sometimes they have taken a huge amount of work just to get to this point, not to mention a huge risk and psychological oomph, just to get to where they're willing to send their stuff (I'm particularly thinking of you here, Ril--you go, girl).

There are times when both are idiots, for sure. But I'd like to think that there are--or at least can be, or should be--moments of humanity and recognition of the Other's perspective within the whole thing. I must believe so, because my writing censors work very hard to make me cynical about the whole process.

New Article Up

I'm tired, so I'm going to go back to sleep now (once again--ah, the joys of allergy-induced sinus infections), but I wanted to let you know that I have another new article up at catapult magazine. It's about the ethics of our responses to other writers, etc. when we're unlikely to ever meet them.

Brenda also has an article in this issue about community and globalization--it sort of dialogues with mine (which is what good writing is supposed to do, in my book--it's all a big conversation--and the new version of catapult now has commenting available on each article, so that it becomes even more that way. I find it fitting).

The Ethics of Fictional Material

When I went to Alaska to collect research my first novel, I made many efforts to avoid what Uwem Akpan (Nigerian Jesuit priest whose stories have appeared in The New Yorker) refers to as colonizing another's world by fictionalizing it. I walked where my fictional character would walk. I took photographs of the undergrowth in case I needed to describe it. I measured how long it would take my character to drive into town.

I eavesdropped, and I paid close attention to those around me without always broadcasting what I was doing, but I made sure my fictional characters were conglomerates of a lot of different elements. Plus, I sought to imagine my way into the motives of the characters/viewpoints I disagreed with well enough so as to represent their opinions and motives somewhat graciously.

Many people told me I was being overly particular, but I wanted to do it right so that both natives and Outsiders would get an interpretation of Alaska that was bigger than just my interpretation of it, while containing my interpretation.

And then I met academic ethnographers, and took a communication class on field research and participant-observation. I now know I have been but a babe when it comes to the ethics of observing and representing human behavior (at least when it comes to academic non-fiction under the purview of the human subjects review board).

My question is this: should any of these extra layers of ethics be properly applied in the world of fiction research, in a modified form? For instance, when it's possible, should I be letting people know about my writing project when I'm observing them? Might there be any reason to review what I do with people's stories with everyone I chat with about a topic related to my book while I'm working on it? Might taking conversational fodder, observations, etc. and using it as raw material for one's novel at any point be properly called theft? If so, what would that point be?

Any thoughts from you writers and readers?

(Oh, and to make sure I give appropriate attribution, thanks to Robin and those in COM 682F for being part of the germination of this post.)

A Different Way of Thinking Things Out

I was hanging out over at Image's "Good Letters" blog, and I was struck by the similarity of this post to some of the narrative theory I've been reading so much of lately--that is, talking about the link between fiction and its impact on lived reality. I was also glad to hear the affirmation of fiction, though I'd like to add a few thoughts and extensions to the thoughts expressed in the blog and the comments it got in response.

First, it is true narrative prose, particularly fiction, can do things academic prose can't (and that's why I write both and particularly revel in the fiction-writing task), but I'd like to also call out something both of them have in common: they both present a nuanced view of reality. One of the reasons that I both went back to school and started writing novels, after spending several years working on squishing large ideas into small words on web navigation bars, was to address questions in ways that allowed me to see the nuances of them again.

I enjoyed writing my MA in English thesis tremendously for this reason, and I hope it didn't try to explain away the creative works I was looking at, but instead helped people to have a deeper context of and experience of them. I know I was able to get a profoundly deeper experience of them while I was writing those hundred pages. I would in fact say that it's just as difficult to reduce my thesis to a journal article--both my supervisor and I tried before he suggested I send it as-is to a monograph series to see whether they'd like to take a look at it--than it would be to reduce Four Quartets' and Walden's deeply expressive ways of describing life to my thesis.

That is to say, I think that some things are simply irreducible to a few pages, and I'm thankful to live in a world where that is so.

But, to move on to my second point, I also think fiction--and poetry and creative non-fiction too, for that matter--have profoundly important roles in showing us the concrete expressions of what may happen, as well as appealing to us on levels other than the intellect. I think both these roles are profoundly important, and may act rhetorically to help us to see new possibilities.

Then again, this post is not supposed to be my dissertation, so I'll not ramble on too far in that direction, just pause and bring this back to its relevance to me as a writer and academic. The point is this: as an academic, I tend to live in my head too much--by the end of a semester's worth of classes I can feel that my feet are floating somewhere above the earth in a cloud of abstraction. Writing fiction, specifically, brings my feet back to earth (all the better that it's an imaginary earth, I say), giving me a way to think through the connection between theory and lived reality before applying anything to actual lived reality.

My fiction is of course not all, as Santiago Ramos says in the post, the equivalent of an "essay or philosophical discourse"--I'm also just playing and enjoying being artistically expressive and getting to know my characters. Still, when I write fiction, often I take a series of questions I have about the world and clothe them with an imagined reality to see what would happen. When I'm doing this, I love the fact that it helps me to test my thoughts by seeing their emotional and spiritual impacts on imaginary characters before applying them to the real world.

Yup, considering this ethical dimension of fiction, one wishes chemists and bioengineers were required to test out their theories in fictional form, trying them out sincerely on imaginary characters to see what the impacts might be, before trying them out in the real world.