Toni Morrison’s Rejection Letters
"No" is Always an Uninteresting Answer
My Nightmare
This week’s newsletter is about rejections. It is prompted by an article about Toni Morrison’s rejection letters she wrote in her time as an editor at Knopf.
Someone having access to and examining all of my rejection letters, as this writer did with Morrison’s, is somewhat of a personal nightmare. Rejection letters— nowadays rejection emails—are fairly mundane correspondence and, entertainment-wise, are probably not that far above reading someone’s emails as they try to schedule a meeting. While I’m proud of plenty of editorial letters and notes I’ve penned for their insights or cleverness, rejection letters are fundamentally not a good form for creative output. The exception is when a manuscript is an extremely close call (in the business we call this a “revise and resubmit” so a rejection letter becomes, essentially, an editorial letter). Why is this? Although heartbreaking to writers everywhere, the reasons for rejection are fairly banal, even if Nobel-winner Toni Morrison is writing them.
Reasons for Rejection
The basic reasoning for any rejection boils down to “this doesn’t work for me”, but can be surrounded by an infinite level of artifice. Reading the article, Morrison, largely considered one of the greatest writers to ever live, was no more immune to this banality than your average editor is forty years later. She gives reasoning like “describe people and events from a distance instead of dramatizing them”, “the scenes are too short and packed too tightly”, and “it needs a lot of work to give it the energy a story must have.” Reading her carrot to this criticism, “[this] story is certainly worth telling [but…]” or the title of the article “there is no point in my being other than honest with you” was basically like reading back sentences that I’ve written in some form dozens of times.
Some rejections do stand out for their thoughtfulness and consideration, and it is clear when someone has read and engaged seriously with a book, but even “good rejection letters” are kind of bland. Morrison is kind and encouraging, and fairly vague, as most editors are when sending rejections, and this is not disingenuousness. But neither is the criticism offered in rejection letters particularly helpful or insightful to writers in isolation. The reason for this is that the underlying reason “doesn’t work in total” morphs into one or two elements that an editor (or literary agent, or magazine editor) will hone in on in rejection letter. A novel generally works if all the writer’s choices make sense together and falls apart entirely if a few of them don’t.
This is why it is important for writers to get more than one opinion and more than one read if they can. Popular opinion isn’t always right, but if readers have the same technical issue, the problem is likely real.
Hurdles
The second way to think about rejections as it relates to publishing is about the concept of hurdles. Last year I did a whole March Madness bracket gimmick about this, basically, asking the question of what is the hardest kind of book to write if you want to publish and be a successful writer? If you’re writing “commercial” types of books, the bar is lower as a matter of course— break out your sexy dragon academies. If you’re writing experimental poetry, it’s highly unlikely you’ll reach bestsellerdom no matter how good you are.
But the concept of hurdles comes up in other ways besides genre or category. Writers, understandably, get pretty aggrieved for instance when the idea of “platform” arises (followers, industry connections, previous publications, etc.), especially fiction writers Trust me, I don’t like it any more than they do (and honestly the idea of platform comes up rarely in fiction in my experience, being more of a bonus that a necessity) . But platform has just become a more acknowledged part of these often-invisible thresholds that writers need to exceed before getting book deals. Let us not forget that platforms and networks were always relevant in publishing—instead of “have [x] social media followers” it used to be things like “be drinking buddies with the publisher or another famous published writer.”
If you have zero ways to publicize your book, aren’t wealthy, and have no connections to the publishing or media industries, especially for nonfiction writing, you have to be a really exceptional writer. If you are the most famous person on the planet, a major publisher will print your personal group chat as a novel. And then there’s everything in-between— have a little platform, get a little more grace on the quality of the writing or entertainment value. This is extraordinarily unfair of course as in practice, as it doesn’t mean that great books don’t get published as the common handwringing alarmism goes, but ultimately that two pretty decent books end up having wildly different publishing trajectories.
For editors, the market also plays a role whether you work at a for-profit or non-profit. Economics limit publishers and editors, which was a frustration that Morrison had back in the 70s and 80s, as the article touches on. Morrison bemoans not being able to publish short story collections, poetry, or experimental work, but that’s because she worked for one of the biggest commercial publishers, Knopf. If editing boundary-pushing work was Morrison’s true desire she could have joined an independent press, which still successfully publish these types of books to this day. The business model of the publishing house and even the editor’s individual title at the company (the more senior the editor the more they are expected to spend more money and buy “bigger books”) determines what an editor can take a chance on. But publishers and editors of different stripes are often not in direct competition, they’re just made to swim in entirely different pools. Morrison could no more publish ten short story collections a year than an editor at a small press could spend a million dollars on a potential blockbuster novel.
Other than “this didn’t work for me”, all of these different kinds of hurdles are another completely legitimate reasons that editors decline projects. It benefits no one if an editor takes on a project that they think is “pretty good” in an extremely difficult category where the author has no way of selling the book either. Everyone ends up frustrated. If a rejection letter gives a market or category reason along with a technical reason, the receiver of the letter should interrupt this letter not as “your work is bad” but something more akin to “I don’t think this is good enough, given the subject matter and the author”.
The More Things Change
What struck me most about the article is that Morrison faced basically the same issues that editors do today when writing rejections. We want desperately to see the good in every manuscript and yet it is less than 1% of projects that cross our path that we are able to pursue and even fewer that we are able to work on. Markets get in the way, corporations get in the way, other in-house readers get in the way, less-than-perfect writing gets in the way, and so does father time. Editors have even less bandwidth to read and evaluate manuscripts than in Morrison’s day due to the administrative burden that editors are expected to carry, although it’s not like she had a lot either—“[Morrison] apologized to one author for responding almost a year after her manuscript landed on her desk.” A reminder, if anything, that there are many great writers out there, but no matter the writing prowess of the editor, there are thoughtful rejections and kind rejections but there are no great ones.