101 Reasons to Stop Writing

Times Square: Crowds gather as thousands of rejected manuscripts are publicly incinerated.

New York (31 May) — The city’s publishing establishment came together this evening in Times Square to celebrate International Slushpile Bonfire Day, an annual festival to purge the industry’s ever-growing backlog of unpublishable manuscripts. New York’s literary elite mingled with industry professionals to swap stories of the worst of the worst writing to come over the transom, while truckloads of paper holding the creative output of thousands of untalented writers were dumped into a prescribed area and ignited.

“The fire does not judge them for their confused and inconsistent tone, language, style and genre. The fire cares only for the quality of the paper.”

NY-based literary agent Samantha Nark, co-organizer of tonight’s bonfire, explained the purpose of the event: “Every year the publishing industry is deluged with unsolicited manuscripts, far more than even a motivated human could read in a lifetime. A very few are great works of literature that you’d be delighted to read, and that we’re proud to champion into print. But unfortunately, there’s always some so stultifyingly bad that you want to un-read them. Every one of these turd pastries I have to read robs me of a little piece of my soul, and they outnumber the great stuff by a ratio of ten to one. International Slushpile Bonfire Day is our chance, as a group, to reclaim some of the sanity we’ve lost to this puerile dross.”

An estimated fifteen thousand manuscripts were consumed in this year’s bonfire — a new record, claimed Miss Nark. “This represents the absolute bottom of a very deep barrel, the sediment of a two hundred and fifty postal days of slushpiles across the city being emptied and refilled. This is the stuff even the shredders won’t touch. But the fire does not judge them for their confused and inconsistent tone, language, style and genre, their utter lack of plot, theme, characterization, or emotion, or the absence of any redeeming moral, educational or entertainment value. The fire cares only for the quality of the paper.”

“The kind of person who refuses to correctly interpret ‘No unsolicited submissions’ is not going to take it well if they find out their precious manuscript was evaluated by a marshmallow on a stick.”

Agents and editors in attendance at tonight’s event all requested anonymity when interviewed, citing fear of reprisals from unpublished authors.

“Officially, we support everyone who chooses writing as their form of artistic expression, and feel privileged to have the opportunity to help guide their work into print,” said literary agent and industry veteran Kirby McCauley of the Pimlico Agency. “Unofficially, and off the record, some of the stuff in that pile was redrafted by being eaten, washed down with tabasco and vindaloo, then excreted onto fresh paper. My agency has had a full client list since I don’t remember when, but we still get this putrescence by the barrowload. The kind of person who refuses to correctly interpret ‘No unsolicited submissions’ is not going to take it well if they find out their precious manuscript was evaluated by a marshmallow on a stick.”

Charles Ardai, editor of Hard Case Crime, agrees. “Unpubs, as we call them, are a fickle lot at the best of times, but some of them are downright psychotic. They either think that their book is the best thing written since the Bible — sometimes including the Bible — and we should lick their boots for letting us read it, or they think it’s a pile of garbage too awful to be read quietly in a roomful of dead dogs, but they still expect us to read every damn word of it and reply with encouraging platitudes. If any of them knew I was here torching their babies, I can’t imagine the volume of nasty letters, emails, voicemails and conference accostings I’d get. I mean honestly, what part of ‘Hard Case Crime’ suggests we’d be interested in a passionate love story between two middle-aged greengrocers on a cooking holiday in Tuscany? I started a retro-themed crime imprint specifically because I never wanted to read the phrase ‘gay Hobbit’ in a query letter.”

Author Tom Wolfe was on hand to chronicle the event for the New Yorker. “I call this event the ‘Bonfire of the Inanities’. My editor told me that if it didn’t have ‘by Tom Wolfe’ on it, my last novel would’ve ended up here.’

Stephen Jayson Harris covers the New York literary scene for Guns & Ammo magazine. He once mailed himself to Random House to test their response time to unsolicited submissions. He was returned unopened.