101 Reasons to Stop Writing

The previous installments of A Hierarchy of Authors (see parts One, Two and Three) covered every measurable strata of success in the laudable occupation of telling really long lies for money. (That is, of course, if you think that the noble art of storytelling can be measured at all, let alone on the basis of something as crass or as irrelevant to the true writer as monetary reimbursement, or readers.)

This is the penultimate stage of our journey. We’ve now reached the lower levels of Hell, where murderers and traitors compete with bad writers to soothe the pain of eternal damnation by drinking deeply of the Devil’s seminal emissions. If you find your likeness amongst these lower levels, eyeball to, um, ball with The Fallen One — he who created the slushpile submissions process and whose urine is mixed with the ink on every first novel contract — verily, I say, you must stop writing, ere you fall prey to His sweet seductions as He bids ye to eat from the fruit of the Tree of Vanity Publishing.

The Slushdweller

The mound of unsolicited manuscripts in the corner of every agent and publisher’s office is named after its most common inhabitant, and the strange material they exude. Most writers have to go through the slushpile, but the Slushdwellers live there, pitching tents and getting their mail redirected to 700,000 Word Vampire Novel, Thirteen From The Bottom.

The Slushdweller lives in a hovel made of rejection slips, glued together with the salivations of their own umbrage. They are proud of their hovel of rejection, having deluded themselves that walls shellacked with publisher’s letterhead and handwritten comments saying We only publish medical textbooks or Please do not send anything else ever will insulate them from the distractions of critical self-examination, creating an inspirational silence within that is in some way different from the disinterested silence outside.

The Slushdweller believes wholeheartedly that “good writing trumps all”, including any external concept of “good writing”. Yet they also simultaneously believe that publishing is a vast and insular conspiracy entirely staffed by ex-girlfriends and the teachers that hated them at school. They are convinced they are only stuck in the slushpile because they don’t know The Secret, and think “Not right for us” is code for “I love this so much that I must prevent anyone else from ever reading it.”

The Slushdweller outwardly manifests the trappings of misunderstood genius (greasy hair, coffee breath, and most of the clinical criteria for schizophrenia), but deep down, at a level of unconscious clarity they cannot tap into when writing, they do understand what keeps them in the slushpile: their writing is crap, and they have not learned a thing since they shovelled the first load into an envelope and licked it closed. But living in the slush becomes self-sustaining: disappointment becomes the expectation, so their ego is never challenged. They learn to crave the validation of the rejection slip, as the only external evidence that their thoughts even exist.

The Bottom Drawer

The Slushdweller with a sense of shame. (And by “Bottom Drawer” I mean a metaphor for a back catalogue of failed sure-fire-bestseller experiments, not your habit of doodling peachy arses on every flat surface.)

Unlike the Slushdweller, the Bottom Drawer is at least dimly aware that their writing sucks, so they prop up an entire industry of bogus writing advice, most of it written by marketing graduates who figure out it’s easier to sell 50,000 words of “You Can Do It” to Bottom Drawers with delusions of Slushdwellerdom than to sell a three word slogan to Coca-Cola. They hope their failing is some deficiency of skill, because they understand that their deficiency of talent is pretty permanent.

The Bottom Drawer is capable of waffling through entire first draft manuscripts with alarming frequency, but is thankfully incapable of writing the kind of focused prose that might come in handy to summarise and describe their manuscripts. They’re afraid of rejection, obviously, but they’re reasonably confident that they can write a novel — they’re more afraid of finding out they can’t write a query letter. Their ego is so fragile that a single form rejection may be enough to make them stop writing completely. Let’s hope so.

(Our journey concludes in Part Five.)