{"id":743,"date":"2011-01-27T11:37:46","date_gmt":"2011-01-27T16:37:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.old.caraghobrien.com\/book\/?p=743"},"modified":"2011-01-31T11:25:13","modified_gmt":"2011-01-31T16:25:13","slug":"slush-pile-code","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/writing\/slush-pile-code\/","title":{"rendered":"Slush Pile Code"},"content":{"rendered":"

Warning. \u00a0This is not an inspirational post for the faint of heart.<\/em><\/p>\n

I believe in the slush pile.\u00a0 It\u2019s one of the purest forms of meritocracy left to us.\u00a0 You don\u2019t get credit for effort.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t count that your work shows promise.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t matter that your teacher gave it an A or that you earned your MFA. The slush pile makes no apologies and accepts no excuses: if your manuscript isn\u2019t good enough, it doesn\u2019t get out of the pile.<\/p>\n

\"\"The clear simplicity of this is not always happy to accept.\u00a0 On a different snowy January night, three months before I turned 30, I hit a low point that saw me sitting on the kitchen floor, my back against the stove, crying into my snotty sleeves.\u00a0 I\u2019d been writing seriously for eight years.\u00a0 I was teaching adult ed and raising kids with my husband who was then in his post-doc.\u00a0 I had one romance to my publishing credit, just enough that it stuck in my relatives\u2019 heads so they could always ask cheerily how the writing was going. I\u2019d found an agent through a grad school connection, so I thought I was out of the slush pile, but when she sent around my literary novel for me, it was rejected.\u00a0 I wrote another literary novel and she sent that one around.\u00a0 That one was rejected, too.\u00a0 My agent wished me the best and cut me loose.\u00a0 I had wasted my twenties trying to become a writer, I thought.\u00a0 I was an utter and total failure, plus my sleeves were all snotty.<\/p>\n

Mine is not the story of the girl who persevered, redoubled her efforts, overcame all obstacles and decades later, reached her dream.\u00a0 The point is, my writing wasn\u2019t good enough, and there was no guarantee it ever would be.\u00a0 It took me far, far too long to learn that I wasn\u2019t going to earn a living as a writer or as a professor who wrote novels on the side.\u00a0 Yet I did realize that happiness was in my own control.\u00a0 I had a loving marriage and three great kids, and I went back to school to become a high school English teacher, which gave me meaningful work I relished and students I loved, too.\u00a0 I did keep writing, but I recognized it as a hobby, an art I enjoyed, not a career path.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that now I\u2019m out of the slush pile.\u00a0 Have I told that story somewhere already?\u00a0 (I can tell it next week if anyone\u2019s interested.\u00a0 (Slush Pile Part Deux<\/a>.))\u00a0 Having work as a writer for now, however, has not made me delude myself.\u00a0 I\u2019m aware that the publishing business is fickle, and if my agent can\u2019t sell my next project profitably, I\u2019ll look for a new teaching position, which will be totally fine.\u00a0 Happiness is still in my control, and nobody else\u2019s.\u00a0 That\u2019s what the slush pile, in code, was really telling me.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m writing this today because I wish I\u2019d known, that night on the kitchen floor, that I was going to end up happy.\u00a0 I wish someone had written a blog back then to tell me this.\u00a0 If your writing is making you miserable, if you\u2019re submitting stuff regularly and it isn\u2019t getting picked up for publication, if you\u2019re stuck in the slush pile, it\u2019s all right to accept what it really means: your writing isn\u2019t good enough.\u00a0 It might not ever be.\u00a0 Go discover something else that makes you happy and do it.\u00a0 You deserve to be happy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Warning. \u00a0This is not an inspirational post for the faint of heart. I believe in the slush pile.\u00a0 It\u2019s one of the purest forms of meritocracy left to us.\u00a0 You don\u2019t get credit for effort.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t count that your work shows promise.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t matter that your teacher gave it an A or that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[37],"class_list":["post-743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-writing-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=743"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":746,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743\/revisions\/746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}