The Morning Line: A Writer's Odds

The Morning LineA Writer's Odds Jay Neugeboren (bio) By the time I was twenty-four years old, when I sold my first short story to the now defunct Colorado Review for ten dollars, I had accumulated, by my count, 576 rejections. I had also written seven unpublished novels. One cold winter morning, about six months before I received the good news from Colorado Review, and after a particularly disheartening series of rejections, I decided to wallpaper my one-room flat in Bloomington, Indiana, with my rejection slips. I read through them and sorted them out—the form letters to one side, the personal notes to the other—and arranged the slips and letters in stacks by size and color, after which I began taping and stapling them to the wall directly above my desk. In some perverse way, I believed these pieces of paper would prove to me that I was what I doubted most of all: a real writer. I would create a dazzling, ingeniously quilted patchwork made up of the words of those who were resisting me, and by having their words in front of me while I was writing, I would do them battle. I'll show the bastards! I screamed silently. I'll show them by writing stories and novels whose brilliance and power will be undeniable, and someday, when my work is published and praised, and these same editors, publishers, and magazines come around to solicit my fiction . . . To my surprise—I was, as ever, at least as naive as I was persistent—it took less than an hour of taping and stapling before I found myself falling into the blackest of depressions. I took all the rejection slips down and put them in the bottom drawer of my desk, and I brooded on my nonexistent literary career: I would never be published, and—an inevitable consequence—I would never be happy again. I did not, however, take down two sheets of paper that had been on the wall before my antic impulse took over—one that contained a quote by George Gissing I read each morning to encourage me to stay the course, and one on which, to keep track of submissions, I listed where my various books, stories, and articles were, and when I had sent them out. Then, one morning not long after I'd gotten out of the wallpapering business, when I was typing up a fresh list of what I had out on submission, and [End Page 18] after I'd typed the title of my most recently completed novel, the name of the publisher I'd sent it to, and the date on which I'd sent it out, I hit the tab key, let the cartridge slide to the left, and typed in odds—9,999 to 1. Then I typed in odds for each item, and when I got to the bottom of the page, under the column in which I'd posted odds, I listed a Best Bet, Long Shot, Hopeful, Sleeper, and Daily Double. To the left of these selections, in order to keep a running score of how my work was faring in the world, I typed in the words "THEM" vs. "US." I've kept a scoreboard on a wall near my desk for the sixty years that have passed since then, and though the odds can fluctuate wildly from day to day, depending mostly on the early-morning mood of the handicapper, stories, essays, and articles usually go out at between 500 and 1,000 to 1, poems at about 2,500 to 1, nonfiction books at about 5,000 to 1, novels at about 7,500 to 1, screenplays at about 100,000 to 1, and film rights to unpublished novels at more than a million to 1. Several times, on a canny gambler's instinct, I've suddenly gotten out of the two-dollar line, as it were, moved to the hundred-dollar window, and have sent a story or novel (sometimes with a new title) back to a large-circulation magazine (The Atlantic, Esquire, GQ) or a mainstream publisher (Holt, William Morrow), and have had my gambler...