If We All Wrote Bestsellers?

I wrote a play. It took me two years. I was very happy with it when it was done. The characters glowed in my mind. Their fears and frustrations, jokes and hang-ups, the sounds of their voices resonated through the daily humdrum weeks after I had accomplished their entrance, performance, and exit from this world. But the play had been written, and the characters, their shapes, their fires and pulses, faded from my mind. There was no need to dwell on them any longer; I had, in fact, finished them. They were autonomous now; no loose thread remained; all inconsistencies I could detect had been dispatched; no subtlety of emotion that deserved exploration had been left unexplored; no extraneous quirk had been amplified that might cause attention to stray from the drama raging across the stage for the brief time my little men occupied it.

Sounds like one fantastic play, doesn’t it? It was for me. But out in the world it was dross, with no better fate left it than to sink rather quickly to the bottom of an enormous wide-mouthed barrel that collects such dross, and to meld undistinguished with the dregs made up of all the plays all the world’s would-be playwrights have ever written. It is a formidable layer U.S. Federal fracking could never deplete.

The fate of my play, though common, was brutal. Having finished the poor thing, I would have liked to see it on stage, with talented actors whipping into those words light, movement, sound. But no. Before any theater would consider making the enormous investment a production of my, or any, play would require, the play had to be recognized as the work of the hour, of the year, of the century, at least since Godot, and honestly touted as poising spectators for ninety minutes on the brink of hell for a good long look into the blaze and perplexity of perdition, or into the blaze and perplexity of the human condition, or perhaps into both at once, since they are, in fact, so much of the time, one. But my play was about a little boy determined to march and play his whistle in the Memorial Day parade so he could go to summer music camp. He’d get lunches there. After his mom left, he didn’t get dinner anymore. When school closed for the summer, he wouldn’t get any meal at all if he didn’t go to that camp.

First step in introducing my play to the world: enter a contest that reviews 1,500 manuscripts over a weekend with a staff of four – showing their dedication, you see, by tackling so much so quickly with so little, or maybe they do have better hedges to clip but were told to sacrifice one weekend a year to maintain the reputation of the theater as being open to fresh voices, fresh material, and the legions of unknowns who are too stupid to stop inundating them with both.

So did I win? No. Was I runner-up? No. Was I included in the list of 75 honorable mentions they so charitably drew up? No. Why do I live? I don’t know. Do I realize what a worm I am? Yes, I have realized that.

There is help for unpublished wretches like me, and with tens of thousands of us out there, we have finally been identified as an exceedingly profitable audience for books bearing such compelling titles as “How to Write a Bestseller,” “Why You Aren’t Published (Yet),” “Why You Aren’t Published Even Though You Have a Masters in Creative Writing,” “How to Publish Without Having a Clue,” “What’s Wrong with Your Prose,” “What’s Wrong with Your Attitude,” “What’s Wrong with You,” and “How to Write a Query Letter No One Can Refuse.” If we granted the books the credence their titles invite us to, we should then have to give serious consideration to the moral responsibility of absorbing this venal knowledge, much as the alchemist must search his soul before accepting the keys to black magic. Just imagine enabling all living authors – and those who, considering themselves authors, buy the books – the ability to write books destined to be bestsellers or to formulate query letters no one can reject. The threat posed for today’s consumers might just be worse than Warhol’s soup can.

Besides all these powerful books, there is live chatter ready to assist. Internet groups will come up with a plot for you. Discussion bevies are eager to develop your ideas. Loners cruising at high blood sugar levels will be happy to comb through your story and point out unaccountable changes in the hair color of your major characters. But don’t be afraid. The worse it is, the higher the praise will be. I saw an entry last week by a man who evidently could not speak the English language – in other words, his first language was something else – who had just written an essay in English on how to make a living as a freelance writer writing in English. It was not a joke. In fact, he requested feedback from this piranha group of writing professionals. (No criticism implied. All writers are piranhas. They have to be sharp, rip things to shreds, get to the bone, twang the nerve, and prod feigned death as does the might Rhino, with the coveted horn.) The author got his feedback and some of it was credible: terrible punctuation; uncalled-for spelling mistakes, considering spelling checkers today are free and will run automatically; ungrammatical to the point of incomprehensibility; maybe the author had better go learn English first, then hire a pro to edit and proof his stuff before he sends it out next time.

But the majority of reviewers concluded with a highly disappointing and surprising belly-up, let-it-not-be-me prevarication: praise for the man’s courage to share his work (assuming he knew it was so terrible, which apparently he did not, which means no courage was involved); praise for his honesty (what honesty?; they all said no one could understand what he was saying); then the most heinous reveille of all – let’s see more! That remark put the lie to all the rest of the criticism. Here was a brood of snipers praising work they admitted was wretched, adulating it for honesty when they all confessed they could not understand it, requesting more. It was a shamefully transparent ploy to lure the succulent victim into exposing flesh again on which they could sharpen their claws once more. But the people in our world are complicated and the world is sad. There were more wrinkles to it than that.

It was like this. The prose of this English-as-a-second-(or third)-language (ESL) guy was bad, but bad for reasons they could number. That was reassuring, settling, a tonic to be presented finally with a target whose bull’s eye they could hit with every shot. What a rush to feel your sense of professional competence shoot skyward. Whereas their work – each and every one of those poor Simons, or they wouldn’t be spending their time not just reading, but answering correspondence posted here – has been rejected ad nauseam for reasons they can’t understand, because their work is good, competent, interesting, sensitive, complex, current. It’s just not hip. Or get-down sexy. Or wretched enough (like this guy’s), while preserving a detectable grammatical strain (our guy failed here) to alchemize it into that ever-sought-after eccentric, maybe repugnant, but understandable, immediately recognizable, and – the black magic – ineluctable voice. Their work does not win contests among 1,500 contestants and even the judges who worked so hard that weekend can’t say just why they were rejected because, well, they don’t remember the entry. They don’t remember most of the entries. They do remember the winner and the winner’s nationality because it was so politically tidy, and they remember the runner-up and the runner-up’s nationality because it was not politically tidy, and they also remember they were admonished to stiffen the upper lip and take that gamble in order to make it evident that they didn’t care if their selection of winners was politically tidy or not, and they also remembered those two winning candidates and their work, first of all because they won, and second of all because they were the focus of discussion right before that wicked weekend when they had been fresh and actually looking forward to that weekend of hell, of which a savvy playwright might write sometime.

So here they all virtually gather at this Internet watering hole, not the judges, but the victims and rejects of those judges, who happen to be the world’s pick of highly skilled, querulous, semantically-touchy, hyper-grammatical word freaks, who after and anticipating rejection really have nothing much to do but catch sticks their masters throw for them into the woods. Who of them could resist – or to be accurate – how natural that at least one of them, for that is what happened, just one of them actually heckled (it sounded like heckling): ‘stick that sizeable, sweet butt of yours up into the air just once more, sir.’ We’ll see how well our ESL author understands his second language: either he will, or he won’t.