101 Reasons to Stop Writing

The open-air slushpile at a major New Orleans-based publisher. (Photo: FEMA)

International Slushpile Awareness Month is an annual celebration of the unsung heroes of the publishing process: the Slush Readers, those hardy adventurers who pan for gold at the edges of the vast wasteland of sediment at the mouth of the River of Unreadable Shit.

Without them, modern publishing would be entirely (instead of mostly) written-to-formula potboilers from established hacks, cash-ins by Internet celebrities, political gasbag rhetoric assembled by interns, and stream-of-consciousness doorstops where the glue is still warm.

For writers, it’s also a chance to think about the Slushpile, and your place within it. Are you truly expecting that someone will jump at the chance to publish/represent you, or are you just hoping for validation and a free critique? Is your work really that one-in-a-thousand that deserves consideration, or are you merely hoping to skip the next nine-hundred-and-ninety-eight drafts?

For editors, agents and assorted slush readers: we feel your pain.

Previous Coverage

For those of you who missed last year’s event, here’s a roundup:

• International Slushpile Awareness Month: They screen out the unpublishable, the unpalatable, the unreadable short stories and novels, in search of that one manuscript in a thousand that is original, well written, proofread, spellchecked and printed in 12 pt Courier, and which might be good enough for agents and publishers to invest time and money to release to a public who might be willing to pay to read it.
• Top Ten Reasons You’re Stuck in the Slushpile: #10. You addressed your submission to "The Slushpile".
• 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.
• Reason #14: Youre Speling is Atrowshus: A sizeable proportion of every slushpile is comprised of randomly, punctuate’d, fonetikly riten first drafts so bad, so head-shakingly wrong that they would make proofreaders weep and copyeditors resign, if they didn’t initially make slush readers shudder with fear as they drop the submission into the Burn This pile.

We also ran a couple of polls. You can view the original results, and vote (again):

• Poll: What Do You Think of the Slushpile?
• Poll: What’s the longest you’ve waited for a response to a submission?

Slushpile Demotivators

We’ve published several Slushpile-themed Demotivators here at Reasons Central:

Click on the images to see a larger version, download wallpaper, or add a comment.

International Slushpile Bonfire Day

International Slushpile Awareness Month culminates on May 31 with International Slushpile Bonfire Day, a universally-recognised tradition where agents and publishers take the opportunity to hand over their accumulated backlog of unsolicited submissions to Nature’s own impartial and inexhaustible reader, the naked flame.

ISBD in 2007:

• Announcing International Slushpile Bonfire Day: It’s an opportunity for agents, publishers, their assistants, readers and interns to meet, socialise, vent, and publicly exorcise the curse of their profession, the thing that has made the offices unworkable, their schedules and budgets incalculable and their front doors impassable: the unsolicited manuscript.
• ISBD For Editor, Agents, and Slush Readers: If you’re new to the biz, or your office is too far from the nearest organised bonfire, or you’;re hopelessly agoraphobic, fear not. You can still join the festivities.
• ISBD For Writers: Without a doubt, deep in the shadows of your fragile heart, you know that some of the stuff you’ve written has all the literary merit of initials carved in a tree the day before a forest fire. Why not discover the healing powers of ISBD for yourself, by making your own contribution?
• Breaking News: International Slushpile Bonfire Day a ‘Blazing’ Success: 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.
• Five Years Later, Did We Learn Anything? Paul Riddell explains the origins of ISBD, for those of you who can stand the metafiction.