Rejection Letter

Dear Mr Frank,

Your terrorising persistence has paid off, I’m bound to admit, and I have read your MS.

In your obsessive determination to be heard, it may not have occurred to you that I am a busy man and that consequently I do not like to waste my time or have my time wasted by others. I am not the sort of editor who, impressed by a fellow’s rare ‘pluck’ or ‘spirit’ will forego the due process to which all other applicants must submit. Nor do I subscribe to that pernicious fallacy which convinces every idle dreamer in the cosmos that any ambition can be achieved as long as it is desired with sufficient earnestness. This is, tragically, a myth.

After reading your MS, to have merely filed it in my litter basket would have confirmed my time as wasted. Only by writing to you with an exhortation could that be avoided. My exhortation to you then, Mr Frank, is to cease in your bid to be a writer immediately. Your submission demonstrates quite clearly how inapt a course this is for you.

You must be made to understand that there are writers in this world and there are non-writers. There is a line in one of Gogol’s tales – The Portrait, I recall – which tells of a sad soul who came to know of “that terrible torment... when a weak talent strains to show itself and fails; that torment which passing beyond the border of dream, turns into a fruitless yearning... and which makes man capable of terrible evildoing”.

Over the years I have encountered not a few of these fragile souls – I consider it an occupational hazard – and while it is true that they would all profit immeasurably from such advice as I am giving to you, the fact is that I do not have the opportunity to respond to even a tithe of them. However your case is an extreme one, which compels me to take all the preventive action in my power.

A total inability to write literature does not obscure the poor deluded attempter’s sincerity and striving. I readily perceive these qualities in what you have written, Mr Frank, but this only makes the failure of your enterprise all the more poignant. 


You must know that what you have produced is of no artistic merit at all.

My dear man, you are setting yourself up for a life of unrelenting anguish if you persist in your hope of being a writer. Only once previously in modern times has a figure of such startling inability risen to literary prominence. His name was William McGonagall and he has been a figure of international derision for nearly 200 years. Surely this is not what you want for yourself?

The world is full of possibilities, and there are many endeavours to which you may apply yourself with resultant success and satisfaction. Literature is not one of them. And so, with your very best interests as my guide, I urge you to discontinue with this course of action. Your well-being, indeed your very sanity, may well depend on it.

                                                                                                Yours most sincerely,

P L S Vokov

F&F Chief Commissioning Editor

                                                                                                                 

Multi-coloured paragraphs

All over the world people are leaping out of bed in the morning to build great bridges and skyscrapers, to write award-winning books and songs, to discover new fundamental particles of matter, to kill or be killed for honour, to deliver babies, save souls, to debate to their Platonic essence the mysteries sleeping beneath the surface of everyday life, to bang each other senseless on supersonic aircraft, to dance themselves into whole-body orgasms… and I look out of my window feeling very close to nothing about the bounteous, complex, beautiful, grotesque world showreeling past my eyes. I long to be doused in cold water. I long to fuck off into the wilderness, climb on a winged horse and gallop out of the atmosphere, past the Milky Way, to the end of the universe, and there to pierce through its outermost membrane and into the annihilating light beyond.

But it’s just not me.

You feel sunk and that you are a waste of atoms, then an empty ultimatum. You’ll do it now or not at all. No more of the ‘I wanner be a rider’ shite. Hopes telescope to the present. All your worst fears about being an empty vessel brought up close. But you can’t go back. So you throw yourself into something without really knowing what it is. Even though you feel as if there’s absolutely nothing to give, as if you’ve proved beyond doubt that you’re incapable, that all you’re good for is cleaning up after people and keeping time… you just keep moving the pen and scribbling on. It seems like you’re annihilating yourself in the process. You’re spilling yourself out until you’re not there anymore. It’s just this constant scribbling, this eyeless, you-less effusion. But you push and push, and the brain starts to respond and the body starts to respond. Suddenly you find that you have emerged. New. Not unhappy. Not desperate… It’s like sodomy for the first time… unsure whether what you’ve done is good or bad. You’re the same but different. And you feel as if you were right to do it, right to push on without knowing what you were doing, because there’s mystery and wonder and ecstasy that you’ll only ever know if you take your clothes off and join the party. And then the drugs wear off and that old shame throbs red raw...

A feeling that I’m getting away with it, having everything my own way, every urge, even the most idle desire, answered punctually and to satiety. Life isn’t like this, ergo, I must be some sort of genius. And so inner smile becomes outer swagger becomes uncontrollable arrogance, til I’m thinking and saying things that make people think there’s something ugly about my soul. From here to shame, from shame a return to ‘penitential loneliness’, then up the Sysiphian slope again, in search of that place where everyone smiles at you and thinks you’re a ‘great guy’.