Bitter, Not Humble

By Tim W. Brown

I’m shopping my fourth book, a comic historical novel set in 1830s America. Another week,
another rejection letter arrives.

Admittedly, my work is quirky. All my novels share a dry, almost arid, sense of humor. I poke
fun at things that people take very seriously, such as politics, corporate life, academia and
especially art and literature. I’ll be the first to confess that my writing isn’t for everybody—a lot
of sacred cows get butchered. However, I can confidently say that it resembles nothing being
published today. I would think that this would be attractive to an editor motivated to publish
something with an unexpired freshness date.

But no. The commercial fiction market continues to be led by tiresome psychologically driven
novels, which have been predominant, oh, forever. Otherwise, “transgressive” content is the
trend. If your protagonist is a dick-less man or a dildo-clad woman, and he/she/it is sufficiently
sympathetic, then editors might pay attention. Have readers really gotten so jaded that only
characters from extreme subcultures capture their interest?

A couple of years ago Poets & Writers Magazine published the profiles of several young editors
at major houses. To a person they declared they were on the hunt for new and different fiction.
Yet when presented with such work (mine, for example), editors young and old reject it. They’re
clearly in cover-your-ass mode — they take zero chances to preserve their career prospects.
They’re not interested in advancing literature, only themselves and the media conglomerates that
employ them.

Indeed, editors younger than I, say, in their 20s and 30s, don’t get my work at all. Coming of age
in the post-Raymond Carver era, they wouldn’t recognize what a damn picaresque novel was if it
reared up and bit off their tits. HELLO! Character psychology isn’t uppermost in my mind;
rather, social manners and cultural clashes are. Sometimes I fear that mine (I was born in 1961) is
the last truly literate generation.

What’s the alternative to commercial publishing? Art for art’s sake literature published by
academic institutions. Only language matters to these people —fuck plot, character and setting—
the more surreal and nonsensical the better. David Foster Wallace is the most mainstream
exemplar of this tendency in which logorrhea is confused with genius. Christ, can nobody write a
decent yarn anymore? Am I the only writer who feels swallowed down a publishing black hole
wherein my work isn’t commercial enough for trade publishers and not “experimental” enough
for academic presses?

That leaves the small press. Here you’d think that risk taking and bold thinking were paramount.
But small press publishers often don’t get it either. My observation has been that when they’re
not publishing fiction for microscopic niches, they’re publishing cookbooks and gardening
manuals or, worse, rarified letterpress editions of poetry or, the very worst, poorly conceived and
designed chapbooks. The single area for which there seems to be an unlimited publishing market
is crappy poetry that is evenly distributed among academic journals and grassroots presses.

I realize that the above rant sounds like sour grapes. Readers are probably thinking, “If your
writing were really that good, it would find a publisher.” But my work has in fact been published
—by magazine editors looking for writing that’s not been workshopped to death in MFA

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programs and by one brave book publisher that actively sought new, challenging voices. (Alas,
he closed up shop a few years ago, frustrated by distribution hassles.)

Only lately have I been stymied in my publishing efforts. Is it too much to ask that editors open
their minds, meet us writers halfway in trying to understand what we’re doing, and not
summarily reject our work because it doesn’t fit the publishing herd’s preconceived notions?
They may be surprised and sell a few books.

Addendum: The book alluded to in the first paragraph, the continued rejection of which prompted
the frustration expressed in this essay, was eventually accepted by an award-winning small press
and is scheduled for publication in 2010.