Why I Rejected Ten Thousand Manuscripts

by W. Adolphe Roberts

The editor worthy of the name realizes that he has a triple responsibility. In selecting manuscripts, he must please the public first of all. But he must also please the owners of his magazine and he must please himself. He cannot make a success of his job unless all three demands are satisfied in every issue. The first responsibility is obvious. The magazine public reads to be entertained. The editor is under an unwritten contract not to bore his following. If he does, he will lose its support as surely as would the manager of a vaudeville theater who insisted on showing wearisome, dull acts. Of course, there are publics and publics. The readers of the Atlantic Monthly undoubtedly chuckle over essays that would cause the readers of the Smart Set to groan with ennui, and vice versa. Each maga­zine must provide the kind of entertainment wanted.

It is regrettable in a good many cases that the editor must please his publisher. The latter is apt to be a businessman with poor judgment where writing is concerned. He wants commercial results from a com­modity that cannot be appraised in the terms of, say, Bessemer steel. He hires an expert to get them for him, yet does not hesitate to criticize and offer inept suggestions. So be it. After all, the publisher pays salaries and signs the checks to authors.

But, whomever else he may please, the editor must please himself. A successful magazine always has a personality, an intangible something that sets it apart from its rivals and induces buyers to select it from among hosts of others, probably equally good. This personality is shaped by the editor, who can only go by what he likes and does not like. He cannot afford to publish stories which he regards as trashy, even though other magazines may be printing fiction of the same order. He cannot, at the risk of producing a meaningless hodgepodge, give a hearing to every type of popular story. He cannot, and must not, surrender his individual critical faculty. So it is really his own personality that he puts into his magazine. If it proves to be attractive to the public, well and good. If it does not, he will soon be looking for another job.

The above explains, broadly, why I rejected ten thousand manuscripts in the two and a half years that I was editor of Ainslee's Magazine. I rejected them because I did not like them, or because I thought my readers would not like them, or because I knew that the owners of Ainslee's would disapprove. Inevitably, I turned down some that appealed to me, in deference to the tastes of the other judges concerned. But every manuscript that I bought and printed, I liked, though I by no means always regarded it as literature.

Far from exhausting the subject, however, this merely clears the way for details that should be instructive to writers.

Ainslee's, under my editorship, was primarily a fiction magazine. Each number contained a complete novelette, running to about 35,000 words, an installment of a serial and from seven to nine short stories. A series of articles about the great enchantresses of history, by Anice Terhune, had been running for many years, and I retained the feature. There were dramatic and book departments. I published an unusually large amount of verses, sometimes as many as twelve or thirteen poems in a single issue.

Manuscripts poured in on me through the mails and from the offices of literary agents. A few were sent because I had asked the authors to let me see examples of their work. The unsolicited manuscripts fell into two natural groups, the amateur and the professional. The former comprised 90 percent of the total, the latter 10 percent.

The large army of untrained and, for the most part, talentless persons in the United States who seem to be determined to become writers is a constant source of astonishment to the editor. The aspirants are well educated and generally earn their livings in semi-literary callings, such as the church, teaching, library work, etc. But they have nothing original to say, and their technique consists of a stilted imitation of classical models. I do not deny that a very few may have it in them to learn and to emerge as craftsmen. But the manuscripts which they have the poor judgment to circulate before they have acquired even rudimentary facil­ity, have no chance of being accepted. Such offerings are weeded out by the editor's reader and returned as a matter of course, though I may say that in well-conducted offices, they are given the benefit of every doubt and are conscientiously examined.

The 10 percent of workmanlike stories and articles by professionals constitutes the raw material which the editor tests and weighs, from which he selects and builds his magazine. I estimate that I hopefully examined for Ainslee's one thousand prose manuscripts. The number was not enormous, and the fact that I bought one for every three I rejected indicates that competition among writers is not quite so keen as it is supposed to be.

I had a system, by means of which it was pretty certain that I would not miss important manuscripts. In the morning the mail was placed on my desk, and my first task was to run through it. All stories by former contributors, by writers known to me by reputation or accompanied by letters addressed to me instead of to the magazine, as well as stories which for any reason seemed promising, I marked with a special sign in blue pencil. This meant that, after having been entered on the books, they were to come back to me. The others, the nondescript majority, went to my reader, who had instructions to let me see every effort which showed the least glimmer of promise.

The manuscripts I had marked were read first by me, later by the reader, only in cases where I felt that I needed to reinforce my own judgment. This system is not used in all offices, but I regard it as a good one. It eliminates a favorite complaint of writers—that the editor allows his reader too great a veto power. It proved sound as far as I was con­cerned, because I found practically all the available stories myself. Of the hundreds passed up to me by the reader, I accepted less than five.

Getting down to the final test of why I rejected three out of four of the manuscripts which were seriously considered, I list a number of reasons which applied in one case or another:

1. Although readable, they were not precisely in the vein characteris­tic of the magazine. My objective for Ainslee's was to please women and the type of man who is sympathetic to the modern woman. I was seeking to entertain rather than to instruct. Many a story that might have been snapped up by the Ladies' Home Journal was rejected by me.
2. They resembled in theme, plot or situation some story that I had printed recently, or was about to print. This does not imply plagiarism. More than one writer may be moved to write about a woman going on the stage to escape the ennui of married life, but a magazine that has published a story of this variety is not likely to want another for a year or so.
3. They were too long or too short for the theme handled, too wordy or too nakedly condensed. Both extremes are bad. The former offense, however, is by far the more common. Countless stories are spoiled by being spun out to 10,000 words when they should have been kept down to 5,000.
4. They were weak in one or more of the three essentials: character­ization, plot, atmosphere. From my point of view, the most important factor in a story is characterization. If its people are real people, the things they do are pretty sure to be interesting. Next comes plot—the adroit staging of situations leading up to a denouement. Third, the color and atmosphere of place—the mise-en-scène.
5. They expounded some theory, in which the author doubtless took great stock, but which would be likely to bore the majority of readers. Propaganda has no place in magazine fiction. Religion and partisan poli­tics are the most dangerous topics, but all "isms" are bad. If you must have a socialist in your story, let him keep his place as an actor in the human comedy. Do not permit him to occupy the limelight for the pur­pose of delivering lectures on socialism.
6. They were sloppily written. I am aware that some editors care only for the narrative quality in a story. My own tastes and those, I am sure, of my public demanded that the English language be not manhandled. I did not insist on every magazine writer being a stylist, but I required something more than grammatical accuracy. I wanted the public to ex­claim: "What well-written stories!" in addition to: "What rattling good yarns!"

The best tip I can give to authors is, that they read carefully the magazines for which they propose to write. I do not mean that they should slavishly adapt themselves to the whims of editors. They will not get very far if they do. Fiction, to be effective, must be a form of self-expression, untrammeled by the fear that some critic would prefer to have it differently presented. But if the author is familiar with the idiosyncracies of a number of magazines, he will be able to avoid many a disappointment by sending his story first to the office where it is mostly likely to be welcomed.

A study of Ainslee's through the latter half of 1918, 1919 and 1920, the period of my editorship, would have revealed that the work of several writers was especially favored. The aspirant would have learned a good deal about the needs of Ainslee's by familiarizing himself with the serials, novelettes and short stories signed by these stars.

Since I used so little nonfiction material, comparatively few articles were submitted. Amateur writers would sometimes send me accounts of personal experiences, with the comment that they were "as roman­tic," or "just as thrilling," as fiction. This showed a thorough misconcep­tion of the art of entertaining by means of narrative. Happenings in real life can be utilized by the clever teller of tales. He rearranges them and provides a climax wherever one is needed. But in their original sequence they never form a story. They are merely chronicles, devoid of plot. Were this not so, the morning newspaper, with its varied record of strange events, would be as fascinating as a magazine.

Of course, I rejected practically all the articles sent in. But really good work imposes itself, in spite of office rules against the form in which it is cast. I found myself unable to refuse a certain essay on perfumes, another on an old house, two on the frills and fancies of love. They were short, and certainly pleased many more readers than they disappointed.

In my estimate of ten thousand manuscripts rejected in two and a half years, I do not include poems. Heaven knows how many poems I turned down. Probably five thousand. The magazine had always been hospitable to verse. Consequently, a great deal of it came in. I was espe­cially interested in maintaining a high standard in this field. Poetry is regarded in too many offices as being merely "filler" material. I did not see why it should not be featured. To get what I wanted, however, I had to invite the best poets to become contributors. The daily crop of unsolicited verse was, nearly all of it, incredibly bad.

The average rhymester seems to have a passion for topical subjects! This is very well if one is contributing to newspapers, which can publish within a few days of the event celebrated. A monthly magazine goes to press a good many weeks before it appears on the newsstands. In 1918, every mail brought me stanzas dealing with the activities of the A.E.F. in France. In 1919, the favorite theme was the westward bound trans­ports. After I had read for the thousandth time that the boys were "com­ing home," followed by a line that invariably ended with the words "across the foam," the mere sight of a soldier poem drove me to distrac­tion.

To summarize, I rejected ten thousand prose manuscripts and half as many poems, because:

First: The great majority were not good enough to be published in any magazine.

Second: Of the remainder, some were not in line with the magazine's policy; some, though another editor might have bought them, did not appeal to me.