Don't Be Afraid To Get A Second Opinion
By Madonna Dries Christensen
Writers, are you feeling down because another editor returned your manuscript? Perk up; it's not rejection, it's an opinion. We all have opinions. You read a book and think it's a page-turner; your friend wonders how it ever got published. Most likely, it was published because the writer persisted until she found an editor who had a favorable opinion.
William Soroyan must be the master of persistence. He supposedly accumulated 7000 opinions before his first acceptance. The Guinness Book of World Records reports the greatest number of rejections of a single manuscript is 106, for World Government Crusade, by Gilbert Young.
James M. Cain's novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, was so titled because with each of its many returns, the postman rang twice.
An editor said of Joseph Heller's Catch-22, "I haven't the foggiest idea what the man is trying to say." Tony Hillerman's The Blessing Way was returned with this advice: "Get rid of the Indian stuff." Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth manuscript came back with this message: "Regret the public is not interested in anything on China." The book won the 1932 Pulitzer Prize.
The award for the most succinct rejection goes to Look Homeward, Angel (Thomas Wolfe). It read: "Terrible." Runner-up is Gandhi: A Memoir (William Shirer): "Too elementary."
In 1937, a writer was told, "Too different from other juvenile books on the market to warrant its selling." That was Theodor Seuss Geisel’s delightful And To Think I Saw It On Mulberry Street.
Emily Dickinson was told, "Queer, the rhymes are all wrong." Ms. Dickinson had only seven poems published in her lifetime. Now, her verses fill a plump volume.
In the late 1950s, a young woman left college in Alabama and moved to New York City, where she worked as an airline reservationist to support herself while writing a novel. The editors at J.B. Lippincott liked the manuscript but thought it shapeless. A Christmas gift of money enabled the author to take time off from her job to revise the manuscript. Finally one editor said, "The book might not sell even 20,000 copies, but we love Nelle." They published Nelle Harper Lee’s first and only book, To Kill A Mockingbird. It won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize.
To mark its centennial, Doubleday Publishers surveyed authors, journalists, booksellers and educators to select the ten most influential books published in the company’s 100-year history. Topping the list was The Diary of Anne Frank (1952), once rejected because, "This girl doesn't, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift the book above the curiosity level."
Also on the list was The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (1906), considered by one editor to be fit only for the wastebasket. "The improbabilities are so glaring that even a boy reader would balk at them."
Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Books (1920) made the list. Kipling had been told, in 1889, about an untitled submission, "I'm sorry, but you don't know how to use the English language."
Opinions such as these sometime lead to self-publishing, not as new a concept as we might think. The Elements of Style, was privately published in 1918 by William Strunk, Jr. (with E.B. White). The original and its revised editions have sold more than twelve million copies. In case you haven't heard, The Elements of Style is the writer's bible. If you don't own a copy, hie thee to a bookstore immediately, read the slim volume cover to cover, and keep it within reach on your desk. It could help deter negative opinions on your work.
Beatrix Potter couldn't find a publisher for A Tale of Peter Rabbit so she used her savings to publish the book. It sold so well that a publisher who earlier rejected it, took over. For more than ninety years, Peter Rabbit and his friends have delighted children and adults.
Another self-publisher was Edward Fitzgerald, who translated The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. After waiting a year for word from a magazine editor, he retrieved the manuscript and took matters into his own hands.
Mothers of writers do not suffer foolish publishers gladly. After a collection of poems by e.e. cummings was turned down more than a dozen times, his mother published it.
Thelma D. Toole took publishing matters into her own hands after her son’s death. John Kennedy Toole, distraught over endless rejections of his satirical novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, committed suicide in 1969 at age 32. One publisher had called the novel "obsessively foul and grotesque." His devoted mother continued submitting the manuscript and found a patron in writer Walker Percy, who loved the book and got it accepted by Louisiana State University Press. In 1981, A Confederacy of Dunces won the Pulitzer Prize. It still sells today.
Such is the power of mothers. A statue of the novel's protagonist, Ignatius J. Reilly, has a place of honor in front of the Chateau Sonesta Hotel, the New Orleans building which housed D. H. Holmes department store from 1849-1989. The $23,000 bronze sculpture, standing under the old department store’s clock, depicts the opening scene of the book where the obese Reilly waits for his mother. Clutching a shopping bag, he’s wearing his trademark hunting cap with ear flappers, flannel shirt, baggy pants and neck scarf. The hotel features two suites named for native son writers. Guests in the Tennessee Williams suite receive a copy of A Streetcar Named Desire; guests in the John Kennedy Toole receive a copy of A Confederacy of Dunces.
So take heart, writers. When your manuscript is dropped in your mailbox, again, and again, don't take no for an answer. Seek another opinion, and another. If need be, as in William Soroyan's case, 7000 opinions.