EVERYBODY has a novel in them, so the old saw says: but then so too does everybody have a pancreas. The question is, can the book be got out? More important, maybe, can it be published once it is out? Every year thousands of would-be novelists hope so and, having urged their stories out onto paper, they send them away on a whim and a prayer to publishers. Maybe, just maybe, these few, dear manuscript pages, cinched together with lengths of twine, will catch the eye of someone, somewhere, with a publishing program.
Plucked from the unsolicited many, one: it happens. Every so often a novel rises up off the slush pile and makes its way into the world between hard covers. When it does, it's the silvery stuff of publishing myth: as if unearthed alive in a graveyard, the writer is marvelled at as a true discovery, just as the discoverer, whether daring editor or attentive editorial assistant, is considered with new respect, a judge of talent with a power of literary insight never before suspected.
Not that any of that happens much, of course. Mention unsolicited manuscripts around publishing people and their eyes roll. So many of them and so few of us, they seem to say; with the wave of a hand over one shoulder, they suggest untold swamps of submitted materials, dangerously fermenting down dank stairwells.
"You can't keep up," says Philippa Campsie, editor-in-chief of Toronto-based Macmillan of Canada. "We're not accepting unsolicited fiction - we're just understaffed. Last year, the last year we accepted manuscripts, we got more than 600."
"We vacillate," says Doug Pepper, executive editor at Random House of Canada, also in Toronto. "Normally, we would accept unsolicited manuscripts, but, because of a lack of manpower and time, there's only so much we can absorb before we have to shut the gates. Officially, we haven't accepted unsolicited manuscripts since December 1990."
Still, the word's hard to get out, and the slush piles mount. Pepper estimates that new manuscripts come in at a rate of five to seven a day. Staff will open them, have a first look, send out a notice of receipt yes, we have what you sent us, yes, we'll give it our best consideration - and add it to the accumulation. No dark secrets there; ask to see the slush pile at Random House or Macmillan and they won't take you downstairs to some administrative beyond, but instead show you carefully ticketed files in cabinets, or bookcases where submissions are quietly stacked. Pile this may be, but, to look at, there's nothing slush about the slush pile, no compost of paper and typewriter ink and human inspiration in wet decay.
It's not just novels that come in. Autobiographies, self-help, cookbooks, cartoon collections, manifestos, horoscopes: submissions arrive in every conceivable subject and form. "A good percentage of the stuff is just not publishable," Pepper says. "A smaller percentage is good and publishable, but not necessarily something we'd take a stand on - stuff none of us has fallen for head over heels."
"You quickly determine whether it's for anybody," says Bob Hilderley, publisher of Quarry Press in Kingston, Ontario. "Then you quickly determine whether it's for you.
"I can handle most stuff in about five minutes," he says. "I can quickly look at it and say, this just isn't at all what we're interested in. The person hasn't even had the courtesy to discover what kind of publishing company we are - they've just taken a directory and sent something to everybody. Or they've thought, Oh, my grandmother lives in Kingston so I think I'll try this publisher. Or, I told this story to my daughter and she liked it, so here it is. And that's instant - you can just smell the rank amateurism."
"Certain people have misconceptions about what a publisher is for," Pepper says. "We're not a public service; we're not in this to tell people how they should write a book, or how to fix it once they've written it. And a lot of people don't have the
slightest idea of what constitutes a book: there are a lot of typists out there."
If many of the manuscripts that pass over a publisher's transom are serious proposals in which the writing just doesn't measure up, there are also a good number of submissions from the fringe. Writers, for instance, who have written thrillers all in adverbs. Who claim to have home and office cures for deadly diseases. Or evidence of worldwide conspiracies. Writers who, to sweeten their overture, include slabs of cake they've baked, or photographs showing more of themselves than even their physician has seen.
"It's really quite a grab-bag," Campsie says. "But that's why you can never really stop looking." Says Hilderley: "I would feel somehow out of touch with things if I stopped looking into the slush pile entirely."
Examples of writers who've arisen off the slush pile aren't exactly common currency. In recent memory, count the American novelists William Vollman (Andre Deutsch in England hooked his first novel, You Bright and Risen Angels in 1987) and Mary Cahill, whose novel Carpool was published by Random House (US) last year. And then there's Bob Hilderley. If he'd given up on his sense for the unsolicited, he'd be short at least one fall title this year: an official biography of Neil Young, by John Einarson.
"He phoned up from Winnipeg," says Hilderley, "and said that he had the authorized biography of Neil Young. The note sat around on my desk for a couple of days and then I thought, Ahh, I'll call this guy just to see what kind of lunatic thing this is.
"And it was true - he really had this book that he'd written with Neil Young. True, it didn't just come out of the blue he'd seen the book that Doug Fetherling did with us on Canadian songwriters, and thought that we were congenial. There's nothing nicer than an inquiry that comes in that says, "I read somebody's book that you published, really like it, thought you'd probably like my book."
You who sent away your novel to a publisher six months ago, take a memo: there on the slush pile your manuscript may be growing old, but there are publishers like Hilderley who do keep on searching for a heart of gold.
