101 Reasons to Stop Writing

International Slushpile Awareness Month is your opportunity to take a moment and think about the slushpile, and what you are doing about it.

The “slushpile” is a necessary evil in the publishing industry. Depending on your role, it may be more necessary than evil. To misquote Winston Churchill, “it may be the worst form of [submission process], except all those others that have been tried from time to time.”

Agents, editors and other slush readers regularly claim that the thrill of finding that one quality submission makes up for the slog through thousands of sub-literate cookie-cutter knockoffs, in the same way that telemarketers claim that the one person who says “why yes, I am interested in changing my long-distance carrier” makes up for the thousands of hangups, death threats and “why don’t you get a real job, you cold-calling motherfscker”. But you know if it really was that exciting, they’d read through it faster.

Writers, of course, hate the slushpile, but at the same time they hope to float to the top of it. They want the slushpile to work (for them), mostly because they’re too lazy to self-publish, and they just want to win the Next Big Thing lottery. But they hate the whole submission process, because it forces them to accept that people cannot see between the words on the page to what they “really meant”.

The problem with the slushpile isn’t the capriciousness of editors, the sadism of agents or the philistinism of slush readers — it’s the incapacity of the bottom 99% to realise that they are nowhere near the top 0.1%.

I’m calling for a Slushpile Armistice, an end to the partisan bitterness which prevents people on both sides from properly accepting blame for their part in the slow downfall of publishing.

Here’s what you can do.

Writers

1. Remember, and repeat as necessary: The slushpile is not the enemy. You are. What’s keeping you in the slushpile is your inability to detect the flaws in your execution.
2. Stop submitting. At least, give your work the redraft you know it needs.
3. Go through the list of agents and editors you routinely submit to, and delete the ones that don’t take the genre you write.
4. Read and follow the submission guidelines.
5. Just stop submitting.

Agents/Editors/Slush Readers

1. Before you open the next query or submission, take a moment to reflect that this represents the hopes and dreams of another human being. Perhaps this is their first submission, and there’s an actual piece of their soul embedded in the words. Perhaps they’ve been down this road enough times to have their own postal worker, and they’re only one “Not right for us” away from seeing if the nearest emergency room takes unsolicited submissions. Whoever they are, they’re somewhere on the continuum between youthful naïveté and paranoiac despair, and no matter how carefully you word your response, it’s going to push them a little further toward the latter.
   Fsck ‘em. Your listing in Writer’s Market might say “accepts unsolicited submissions”, but that wasn’t meant as an invitation to shred a Harry Potter hardcover and randomly glue the pieces together. You shouldn’t have to waste time putting a form rejection into an SASE to let the same writer know for the fourth time that your company publishes peer-reviewed psychology articles and has no plans to expand into young adult SF erotica. You shouldn’t have to deal with the health implications of submissions written in human blood, not always belonging to the writer.
2. Blog frequently about the downside of working the slushpile. Maybe some of them will take the fscking hint.
3. Work with your peers to develop a form rejection letter completely bereft of emotion or subtext. I’m sure you know a few writers who could help.
4. Insist on a signed disclaimer, available on your website, indicating the writer has read and adhered to the submission guidelines. Change the date on it every month.
5. Stop publishing the mediocre junk that makes each new generation of bad writers think they have a shot

Our target this year: to reduce the average slushpile by 25%. Let’s put aside our differences and fight the good fight, people.