Reject slips from my past

One of the hazards of being a writer are the reject slips. 

Here's an example:

A reject slip: not even the original, but a carbon copy.

I did not start out collecting reject slips.  I started out intending to be published.
I would send an unsolicited article - all neatly typed - to magazine editors and they would get the help to send it right back.  It would include one of these little notes.


I collected reject slips for many years

It was a kind of ping pong game with envelopes - back and forth - with the postman as neutral observer.


My first acceptance letter

Then, one day, Woman's Day editors did not send the article back.  Instead, they sent an unfamiliar sight: a small envelope with an acceptance slip inside.
It was party time, and the postman even ventured a smile. 
We both calmed down when the magazine only used one paragraph of my story.
Nevertheless, I felt that I could, as a published writer, be able to count on a career in journalism.


I did not sell another word for the next two years

And not for want of trying.

Check out the original signature. I'm thinking of selling this one on ebay.

And so it went on.
After an article was returned, I would read it through and somehow see it afresh.  I'd rewrite it and submit it to another magazine.  Some articles would be rewritten 10-15 times, and then sent on their way.  It became a routine.
Why I stuck with it, I don't know.  I had no axe to grind, no angst, no deprived childhood...


My background as a writer 

I was born to middle income parents - an accountant and a secretary - and brought up in a beach suburb that was famous for having the second longest railway station in NSW.
My childhood was forgettable: I was not battered, orphaned or starved.
My mother recalls that I was a happy child until my little brother dropped my very favourite teddy bear into the lavatory pan.  My mother retrieved it, boiled it in the copper for several hours, then pegged it by its ears on the clothes line.
Possibly this was the trauma that later drove me to write.
I grew up and followed my mother's footsteps, becoming a shorthand/typist, then wife, then mother of two children.


The Writing Class

I was pregnant with my second child when I joined a writing class which met every Tuesday night. We all had to take turns to read what we had written during the week, and when I read my piece out, the class laughed.  Not because it was bad, but because they found it funny.  That was when I discovered that I was writing humour.  I had not seen it like that.  To this day, no one has twigged that I am in deadly earnest.
That writing class also taught me about writing.  Not how to write.  Just things about it.
To my surprise, I discovered that everyone did not write in the same style as I did.  Somehow, I had expected that we would: instead they each had their own distinctive - and instinctive - style and viewpoint.  As such, we broadened each other's horizons.


Life as a Learner Writer

At the same time, I was sending my unsolicited articles to magazines.  I was a learner writer.  It was my apprenticeship.  To learn to write, I had to write, and rewrite, then send it into the market place to test it.  If it came back, I had not got it right yet.
In those years, I was, without realising it, learning to write.


My Second sale

Then I sold my second article.  I had sent it out nine times, rewritten it nine times and somehow the mood changed. Editors did not return it with a printed reject slip.  Yes, they returned it, but with letters.  Nice letters, saying 'sorry'. This, I knew, was encouragement.
Finally, someone bought it.  Paid $60 for it, and I think I bought a coffee table with it.
Thus encouraged, I sent that same editor more articles, and she bought some, returned others.
I took note of what she returned, and I was learning another thing about writing: what the market wanted.
It applied then.  It applies now.  I have to guess what an editor will want.
And writing comic articles was even trickier, because there were no rules.  What one editor liked, another found silly.


The regular gig

Around this time, I was offered a regular column in the (now defunct) Australian Home Journal.

And that's when I finally twigged that I wrote a 'column' style which was why my articles were difficult to sell: they were casual, they were opinionated.

I wrote that column for four years...

I had to come up with one idea a month, a saleable idea, a funny one, written to a deadline.  Australian Home Journal ran it on the inside back page, often with a cartoon.  Here's what it looked like...

During that four years, the editors changed three times, and each one reviewed my column, no doubt intending to chop it.  They didn't.  Not sure why.
But by then I knew that I wrote, not so much for a magazine, but for an editor.

TO BE CONTINUED...