By Chris Paling
Published by Constable
If lockdown has given you aspirations of literary grandeur, beware — a life of penury awaits. Chris Paling’s A Very Nice Rejection Letter is an unexpurgated insight into the battle to become published. What’s more, the financial details are not pretty. An incumbent of Grub Street since the 1980s, Paling spent years pitching novels and film scripts in a profession he admits is “perpetually in crisis, overburdened by vanity and under-served by talent”. His self-deprecating musings are divided into three diaries, with the reader arriving in his life in April 2007 to be told: “Writing income for the year . . . minus £300.”Later we learn of his annual sales summary, covering seven novels published by Random House — minus 45, due to returns. “Forty five fewer novels than an unpublished writer. No mean feat,” Paling observes dryly. His income from public lending rights, the money authors receive from libraries, isn’t much better. His most recent book, Reading Allowed (2017), a non-fiction title about working in his local library, was borrowed 4,515 times but only earned him £384.68 — 8.52 pence a pop.
Fortunately, for most of his working life Paling didn’t have to feed his family from such sums. His day job was as a BBC Radio 4 producer for Start the Week, Midweek and Stop the Week (known fondly in-house as “pluggers”, “nutters” and “wankers”). He would write on his commute into London from Brighton, with the advantage of being able to plunder people’s conversations. As the author Posy Simmonds once told Midweek listeners: “People are so kind . . . they talk so loudly.”Disadvantages were noise, discomfort and points failures at Redhill, although home distractions could be just as disruptive. What Paling quaintly labels as “displacement activities” included leaf sweeping and biscuit eating. Copy that had been left alone for too long was approached tentatively “wondering if it has died or is just resting”.
Like all good diarists Paling’s musings are funny, tender and uncensored, even when he falls ill and the diary pivots into what he calls “look at my pain” prose. It’s a shame he never pursued a living as a columnist or satirist because this seemingly is where his real talent lies. (Of his eight published novels, all failed to “trouble” the Booker longlist.)Yet his recollections remind us that almost every writer finds the storytelling process gruelling. He quotes Kingsley Amis, who likened novel writing to taking a journey from London to Edinburgh without a map, while Thomas Mann pronounced: “A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” Paling himself deems all writers flawed — otherwise they would get on with the business of living, “rather than watching other people live and writing about them”.So what drives him on? He describes the world of fiction writing as a place he could “participate in without embarrassment or humiliation. I wasn’t afraid in this world — and I’ve sought sanctuary in it ever since.”
For those equally driven to write, Paling helpfully sprinkles his diaries with “Publishing Rules”, which surely need to be Blu-Tacked to every hopeful novelist’s laptop. My two favourites are rule 17, “Autobiography is fiction and vice versa”, and rule 18, “Writing is rewriting”.
Worse than the endless rewriting — one piece of Paling’s work was redrafted 20 times — is the invariable email silence that follows. Despite the book’s title, there is little evidence the publishing world of today bothers with such social niceties as rejection letters. Paling’s selection in the appendix are all pre-Nineties, the best from a BBC script editor in 1979, who wrote: “Forgive me, but this isn’t within sight of being an acceptable script . . . It would be hypocritical — and unhelpful — if I said otherwise.”When it comes to such letters, Paling sides with the literary giant Saul Bellow, who believed they taught writers to say, “To hell with you” and carry on regardless.
Which is admirable, considering the first — and as far as we know only — offer Paling’s publisher made for worldwide rights to this very book was the ungenerous sum of . . . £7,500.