“For several days I have been unable to put your book down... The rejection of this book will remain the most serious mistake ever made by the Nouvelle Revue Française and, since I bear the shame of being very much responsible for it, one of the most stinging and remorseful regrets of my life.”
André Gide to Marcel Proust after turning down Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way)
A tablespoonful of rejection every day, twice a day, all your life, without fail. That’s what you ask for when you set out to be a writer. Whatever your perceived position, there is someone out there telling you you’re not good enough. For the untouchable biggie, it could come from being nominated but not awarded, being third on a Bestseller List or flying to a litfest venue (economy class because your publisher is a skinflint) and finding yourself seated on stage next to a two-bit humour writer from Besant Nagar.
The middle-level guys get it via bad reviews – or, worse, no reviews – unanswered phone calls to the publisher, ignored mails to journals, three-and-a-half attendees at book dos, no invites from litfests and seeing their books go free with two packets of Kurkure in the remaindered section of bookstores.
But worst off are the entry-level guys: a bubbling ocean of first-time writers crashing head first into the seemingly unbreachable literary walls of New Delhi. The way the publishing scenario works today, the self-destructive bunch who’ve written a book or two (which haven’t exactly given Chetan Bhagat sleepless nights) can be included in this list, too. Poor suckers all, manuscripts ready and dying to see them in print. For them, life is a Himalayan avalanche of rejection with no Indian army to pick up the pieces.
Are you paid to be nasty?
Recently, a writer friend of mine, anxious to get her novel published, called me for advice from another time-zone. Imagine her desperation and naiveté if the only person she could go to was this little-known writer from backwoods Madras whose USP is that his mother-in-law owns a gun.
Her problem: after a moderately well-received first novel, she was finding no takers for her second, completed more than a year ago. All her queries to overseas agents and publishers had been met with those terrible twins of rejection: funereal silence or polite, well-worded, encouraging, ‘not for us’es.
But the kid was a sport.
“Krishna,” she said, “some of those rejection letters are so encouraging, I want to frame them.”
While her mother-in-law procuring a firearm would have been the next logical literary step in my opinion, I gave my writer friend the names of a bunch of agents in India instead. Some I knew and others I’d heard of.
The very next day, I woke up to my phone ringing. It was early. Perhaps, it was the Nobel committee, apologising for their gross oversight and informing me my all-in-one Nobel was in the mail. It wasn’t. It was my writer friend.
“I’ve sent you mail. Please read it,” is all she managed to say before hanging up. I barely understood her because she was sobbing like her pup had just been run over.
The mail was a forward. It was from one of the agencies I’d mentioned. Their response to her had been instantaneous. Here’s an extract:
I’m no stranger to hate mail. Writers aren’t. Even unknowns like myself. I’ve received hundreds – ranging from an octogenarian woman’s doubts in re my parentage on account of the bonda I allegedly stole from her at a book do, to a gentleman called Jignesh Prem Babu who has informed me via a grammatically groundbreaking review that he’s looking for me with a machete and will eventually find me. So big deal, I wear an abdomen guard 24/7.
But the random, meaningless violence perpetrated by this agency on a writer whose only fault was sending them her MS is the literary equivalent of a drive-by shooting organised by a gang with automatic weapons to snuff out an unarmed six-year-old.
Sure, you have troubles, but…
I get what a successful literary agency, or publisher for that matter, goes through today. Everyone wants to be a writer. I’m sure every day for them is like the climax scene in The Party where Peter Sellers unleashes a flood of unstoppable lather that washes away everything in its wake, including a band that refuses to stop playing. Except in their case, it’s manuscripts. (Maybe that’s why it’s called a slush pile.) Hundreds of them, coming at them, on and on, showing no signs of slowing down, unsolicited, put together in unreadable fonts, with mind-numbingly unpublishable stories.
But that’s part the job, isn’t it? Actually, it is the job. It’s not so much an occupational hazard as the occupation itself. Those messy, badly bound stacks of mayhem in your storeroom, got rid of from time to time at a per kg rate via the pulpwallah or eaten by silverfish, are your ore. It’s your job not only to dive in, mess around in the muck and pick up the nuggets but to treat what’s left over with a tiny bit of respect. You see, whether you want to admit it or not, each of those A4 abominations is no less to the sender than her pancreas, only child, nest egg and signed confession, all rolled into one.
Is it fair to want to hit pay dirt without giving dirt its due?
(To that someone out there itching to tell me it’s all digital now, there are no bundles and bundles and I don’t know my verso from my rectum, don’t get literal on me.)
Coming back to my friend, it’s obvious from the mail that the agency didn’t want her book. What then, in the name of spot lamination, was the thought process behind the vitriol?
They wanted to make a better writer of her? Or a better woman? They thought she had potential and needed tough love? They thought if she did a rewrite according to their suggestions, not them, but someone else, less important, less discerning, would find her worthy of being published? They wanted her next book to be better? They wanted her to kill herself? I don’t know.
History is strewn with writers who’ve killed themselves for less. Not enough literary agents yet. At least not enough to start a support group.
Or does it say more about the agency than the writer?
An overzealous intern maybe, testing out his or her newfound poison pen and showing the boss how cool she or she is? A who-the-f&%#-cares attitude, perhaps, because the mail is private anyway? Or, a bit of “who’s this writer chick and what can she do, huh?” Or, hey, maybe a case of “we’re it, baby, we are gold, we can say what we want”? Maybe just chronic haemorrhoids?
You tell me.
Let’s take the case of my humour writer buddy, P.G. Bhaskar. When he wrote his first novel, the soon-to-be immensely successful Jack Patel’s Dubai Dreams, and sent it to a well-known agent, this is what she said: your writing needs to be more stylised (?), the Dubai office scenes are not in tune with current corporate reality and your ears are too big (okay, I made up the last bit). And this to a man who’d been a corporate type in West Asia for over a quarter of a century, from a woman who’d never held a corporate job in her life...and she charged him twenty grand for it.
“Why should I pay for insults when I have a teenage son?” is PG’s lament.
I hear you, man.
Another humour writer buddy, R Chandrasekar, author of the bestselling The Goat, the Sofa and Mr Swami has an almost-identical tale. Except in his case, apparently, he was too tall and had a scratchy moustache. He was charged 10k though, on account of the fifty per cent student discount he requested and got, good man. Same agent, no doubt. I think we humour writers need to unionise.
The point, dear agents and publishers, is this.
You have the power to reject. Do it nicely, no?
And another thing. This one is for the little whippersnappers that populate the offices of agents and publishers, dressed in ethnic gear and droopy earrings, walking around like they’re perfect bound. Don’t start off your careers being cynical and lazy. No point championing Anuja Chauhan, Meena Kandaswamy or Manu Joseph, fine writers though they most certainly are. We know they’re wonderful without your FB posts and Twitter twaddle. They did it without you, before you. Tomorrow, if you switch sides, they’ll continue to do so, in spite of you.
So you think you can spot great writing?
Be a talent scout. Be the first to like someone, a no one. Believe in them, champion them, nurture them and put up with them even when the going gets tough. The really good agents in all fields, be it sport, music film or literature (in India, we can include publisher-editors) – I won’t tell you their names, you ought to know who they are if you’re in the business of representing talent – became who they are championing little, unknown guys before anyone gave them a chance, and continue to do so even if some of them have floppy hair, aren’t from the West, don’t have VIP parents, aren’t bankers, well-known journalists or politicians in power and haven’t earned them one rupee so far.
Krishna Shastri Devulapalli has written two novels (Ice Boys in Bell-Bottoms and Jump Cut) and a play (Dear Anita). His one and only agent is K. Munusami of West Mambalam, who recommends Jeevan Bima.
We welcome your comments at
letters@scroll.in.
André Gide to Marcel Proust after turning down Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way)
A tablespoonful of rejection every day, twice a day, all your life, without fail. That’s what you ask for when you set out to be a writer. Whatever your perceived position, there is someone out there telling you you’re not good enough. For the untouchable biggie, it could come from being nominated but not awarded, being third on a Bestseller List or flying to a litfest venue (economy class because your publisher is a skinflint) and finding yourself seated on stage next to a two-bit humour writer from Besant Nagar.
The middle-level guys get it via bad reviews – or, worse, no reviews – unanswered phone calls to the publisher, ignored mails to journals, three-and-a-half attendees at book dos, no invites from litfests and seeing their books go free with two packets of Kurkure in the remaindered section of bookstores.
But worst off are the entry-level guys: a bubbling ocean of first-time writers crashing head first into the seemingly unbreachable literary walls of New Delhi. The way the publishing scenario works today, the self-destructive bunch who’ve written a book or two (which haven’t exactly given Chetan Bhagat sleepless nights) can be included in this list, too. Poor suckers all, manuscripts ready and dying to see them in print. For them, life is a Himalayan avalanche of rejection with no Indian army to pick up the pieces.
Are you paid to be nasty?
Recently, a writer friend of mine, anxious to get her novel published, called me for advice from another time-zone. Imagine her desperation and naiveté if the only person she could go to was this little-known writer from backwoods Madras whose USP is that his mother-in-law owns a gun.
Her problem: after a moderately well-received first novel, she was finding no takers for her second, completed more than a year ago. All her queries to overseas agents and publishers had been met with those terrible twins of rejection: funereal silence or polite, well-worded, encouraging, ‘not for us’es.
But the kid was a sport.
“Krishna,” she said, “some of those rejection letters are so encouraging, I want to frame them.”
While her mother-in-law procuring a firearm would have been the next logical literary step in my opinion, I gave my writer friend the names of a bunch of agents in India instead. Some I knew and others I’d heard of.
The very next day, I woke up to my phone ringing. It was early. Perhaps, it was the Nobel committee, apologising for their gross oversight and informing me my all-in-one Nobel was in the mail. It wasn’t. It was my writer friend.
“I’ve sent you mail. Please read it,” is all she managed to say before hanging up. I barely understood her because she was sobbing like her pup had just been run over.
The mail was a forward. It was from one of the agencies I’d mentioned. Their response to her had been instantaneous. Here’s an extract:
...the narrator isn’t likeable, and nor is the prose very readable. It seems to meander on almost self-indulgently, and it’s not good enough to justify that indulgence. The story, or what is told of it in the synopsis, does not seem as though it would work as a commercial novel, and frankly the writing isn’t good enough to place it in lit fic category. The characters seem unlikeable as well and overall, I don’t find anything compelling – not the story, the characters, or the writing – to continue reading it. Also, the ******** overtones seem very contrived and not at all integral to the writing itself...
I’m no stranger to hate mail. Writers aren’t. Even unknowns like myself. I’ve received hundreds – ranging from an octogenarian woman’s doubts in re my parentage on account of the bonda I allegedly stole from her at a book do, to a gentleman called Jignesh Prem Babu who has informed me via a grammatically groundbreaking review that he’s looking for me with a machete and will eventually find me. So big deal, I wear an abdomen guard 24/7.
But the random, meaningless violence perpetrated by this agency on a writer whose only fault was sending them her MS is the literary equivalent of a drive-by shooting organised by a gang with automatic weapons to snuff out an unarmed six-year-old.
Sure, you have troubles, but…
I get what a successful literary agency, or publisher for that matter, goes through today. Everyone wants to be a writer. I’m sure every day for them is like the climax scene in The Party where Peter Sellers unleashes a flood of unstoppable lather that washes away everything in its wake, including a band that refuses to stop playing. Except in their case, it’s manuscripts. (Maybe that’s why it’s called a slush pile.) Hundreds of them, coming at them, on and on, showing no signs of slowing down, unsolicited, put together in unreadable fonts, with mind-numbingly unpublishable stories.
But that’s part the job, isn’t it? Actually, it is the job. It’s not so much an occupational hazard as the occupation itself. Those messy, badly bound stacks of mayhem in your storeroom, got rid of from time to time at a per kg rate via the pulpwallah or eaten by silverfish, are your ore. It’s your job not only to dive in, mess around in the muck and pick up the nuggets but to treat what’s left over with a tiny bit of respect. You see, whether you want to admit it or not, each of those A4 abominations is no less to the sender than her pancreas, only child, nest egg and signed confession, all rolled into one.
Is it fair to want to hit pay dirt without giving dirt its due?
(To that someone out there itching to tell me it’s all digital now, there are no bundles and bundles and I don’t know my verso from my rectum, don’t get literal on me.)
Coming back to my friend, it’s obvious from the mail that the agency didn’t want her book. What then, in the name of spot lamination, was the thought process behind the vitriol?
They wanted to make a better writer of her? Or a better woman? They thought she had potential and needed tough love? They thought if she did a rewrite according to their suggestions, not them, but someone else, less important, less discerning, would find her worthy of being published? They wanted her next book to be better? They wanted her to kill herself? I don’t know.
History is strewn with writers who’ve killed themselves for less. Not enough literary agents yet. At least not enough to start a support group.
Or does it say more about the agency than the writer?
An overzealous intern maybe, testing out his or her newfound poison pen and showing the boss how cool she or she is? A who-the-f&%#-cares attitude, perhaps, because the mail is private anyway? Or, a bit of “who’s this writer chick and what can she do, huh?” Or, hey, maybe a case of “we’re it, baby, we are gold, we can say what we want”? Maybe just chronic haemorrhoids?
You tell me.
Let’s take the case of my humour writer buddy, P.G. Bhaskar. When he wrote his first novel, the soon-to-be immensely successful Jack Patel’s Dubai Dreams, and sent it to a well-known agent, this is what she said: your writing needs to be more stylised (?), the Dubai office scenes are not in tune with current corporate reality and your ears are too big (okay, I made up the last bit). And this to a man who’d been a corporate type in West Asia for over a quarter of a century, from a woman who’d never held a corporate job in her life...and she charged him twenty grand for it.
“Why should I pay for insults when I have a teenage son?” is PG’s lament.
I hear you, man.
Another humour writer buddy, R Chandrasekar, author of the bestselling The Goat, the Sofa and Mr Swami has an almost-identical tale. Except in his case, apparently, he was too tall and had a scratchy moustache. He was charged 10k though, on account of the fifty per cent student discount he requested and got, good man. Same agent, no doubt. I think we humour writers need to unionise.
The point, dear agents and publishers, is this.
You have the power to reject. Do it nicely, no?
And another thing. This one is for the little whippersnappers that populate the offices of agents and publishers, dressed in ethnic gear and droopy earrings, walking around like they’re perfect bound. Don’t start off your careers being cynical and lazy. No point championing Anuja Chauhan, Meena Kandaswamy or Manu Joseph, fine writers though they most certainly are. We know they’re wonderful without your FB posts and Twitter twaddle. They did it without you, before you. Tomorrow, if you switch sides, they’ll continue to do so, in spite of you.
So you think you can spot great writing?
Be a talent scout. Be the first to like someone, a no one. Believe in them, champion them, nurture them and put up with them even when the going gets tough. The really good agents in all fields, be it sport, music film or literature (in India, we can include publisher-editors) – I won’t tell you their names, you ought to know who they are if you’re in the business of representing talent – became who they are championing little, unknown guys before anyone gave them a chance, and continue to do so even if some of them have floppy hair, aren’t from the West, don’t have VIP parents, aren’t bankers, well-known journalists or politicians in power and haven’t earned them one rupee so far.
Krishna Shastri Devulapalli has written two novels (Ice Boys in Bell-Bottoms and Jump Cut) and a play (Dear Anita). His one and only agent is K. Munusami of West Mambalam, who recommends Jeevan Bima.