Bitter Irony: honesty

When an editor (i.e. me) says "not quite what I'm looking for," she may mean:

This is so poorly proofread I can't believe you thought it was ready for publication.
I'm underwhelmed.
I didn't get it. Was that supposed to be a pun at the end?
I'm underwhelmed.
This isn't even the right genre what the heck people it's in the magazine's URL/header!
I'm underwhelmed.
This is a perfectly good story. However, I know what I want for my magazine and I know this isn't it, though I can't give a specific reason why or how.

What I've learned today while reading slush:

A lot of recent submissions to Mirror Dance and Lacuna have been underwhelming.
There is no polite way to say that someone's writing is underwhelming.

Monday, August 06, 2012

editing, honesty, preaching to the invisible choir

I have never been good at _________ honestly.

Fill in that blank with whatever verb you wish. Speaking. Writing. Blogging. Especially blogging. I am by nature a private person, and that’s been reinforced by insecurity in the face of the all-knowing Internet, where your every factual error can be dissected across eight time zones in eight seconds. I have been afraid of offending people, I have been afraid of breaking some unspoken law of blogging—and so I have been vague, two-dimensional. Dishonest.

Four years ago, when I was in high school, I wrote a novelette called “For a Breath of Fresh Air.” It remains one of the most autobiographical things I have written. The opening scene takes place in the study of a mansion overlooking a mental hospital. That mansion is real, and that mental hospital is real. And as I type this, someone I love is in that mental hospital.

I have never been good at talking about mental illness honestly.

Four years ago, putting the words “manic depression” in a notebook, in a piece of fiction, was one of the bravest things I ever did. My understanding of bipolar disorder was—still is—woefully inadequate. All I knew was that it was terrifying to live with, terrifying to talk to, terrifying to watch. It is about unpredictability, about spending every hour of every day in a state of dread because you don’t know what the person you love will do next. It is about throwing yourself into your writing, your make-believe, because that is a place where you have some measure of control. It is about reading a list of panic-attack symptoms when you are sixteen and saying oh, that’s what that is.

It is about learning not to speak honestly. To say “I’m late because of a family emergency” when you mean “I’m late because I’ve been tramping through a swamp for two hours, looking for a missing person.” To say “I guess I didn’t have time to read that chapter” when you mean “I read that chapter three times, but I was thinking about the scary things someone said to me this morning and that’s all I’ve been able to remember.” To say “My life is on hold for a little bit” when you mean “Someone I love attempted suicide.”

So here I am, trying to blog honestly.

I am reading submissions to Mirror Dance and Lacuna as quickly as I can, but some days I can’t get to the computer because I am tramping through a swamp or talking to police or visiting someone in a hospital. I owe stories to several fabulous magazines, but I haven’t written anything decent since April, for the last month I haven’t put pen to paper at all. I have an unedited short story sitting on my hard drive that I can’t look at because it takes place in a mental hospital, and that’s one place I’ve seen too damn much of recently.

So there, all-knowing Internet, is what the inside of my head looks like. I have probably broken several unspoken laws of the internet. I have certainly broken several laws of good writing. I really don’t care. I have done what I set out to do in this post, and now I can get back to work. I feel good right now.

Honestly.

ETA: For those of you worried about my own well being, rest assured that I am not as angry, sad, or scared as this post probably made me seem. I am very, very frustrated, but typing this out--getting the inner monologue out of my brain and onto the page--has helped tremendously. Now, seriously, time to get back to work.

Thank you for listening.

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Wednesday, August 11, 2010