Kaze: You Must Remember This

I may never have received the kind of rejection slip the legendary literary rejectee Snoopy used to get (“Dear Contributor, We are returning your dumb story. Note that we have not included our return address. We have moved to a new office, and we don’t want you to know where we are.”), but even the most diplomatic rejection slip feels like . . . well, you know what it feels like.

Back in 1982, freelance writer Chuck Ross retyped the screenplay for Casablanca—every movie lover’s favorite picture, the picture in which Rick tells Ilsa that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world—and submitted it to 217 movie agents to see if they’d be willing to represent the script.

Nope, they said. Thanks, anyway.

A few sample comments from the folks who actually read the script:

“I gave you five pages to grab me—didn’t do it.”

“Too much dialogue, not enough exposition, the story line was weak, and in general didn’t hold my interest.”

Three agents said, sure, they’d take on the screenplay. (The fact that these were movie agents who didn’t realize it was Casablanca they were reading is, of course, almost existentially troubling.)

“Story line is thin. Too much dialogue for the amount of action. Not enough highs and lows in the script.”

As for the other agents, the ones who said no: Whenever they come up in conversation it’s to remind us that we could write the best story ever (I know this was a movie script, but the principle—trust me—is applicable to the publishing world as well) and run into scads of “professionals” who’ll treat it like a dead mackerel. 

But on the other hand, assuming you do your job, which is to write the damn thing to the best of your ability—not to see it published, but to write it the way you were intended to by Mother Nature or Gordon Lish or your Mom or whoever it was who made you who you are—someday it may just happen to pass before the eyes of an editor who’s not too busy to read it and who’s in a hospitable mood and whose literary tastes and/or commercial purposes would, happily enough, be fulfilled by putting you into print. 

So finish that story and be proud of it. Whether it’s published or not may hinge on sheer serendipity.  But, published or not, you wrote it—you wrote it—so never get down on yourself.  You must remember this.

And Merry Christmas to all you readers and writers.