trade secrets

You didn’t hear them from me. You heard them from Andrew Franklin:

One of the first things every editor is taught is that the rejection letter should be final, that is, it should not give any opportunity for a response. When you return the manuscript you never want to have to think about it again. So it is fatal to suggest that, for example, the plot is quite good but needs work in the closing chapters, or that there are too many characters, or that the dialogue needs work. Send these suggestions to the writer you don’t want and you are entering the long-term relationship from hell, because in three weeks the manuscript will come straight back at you with the changes you have recommended. So publishers use euphemistic - all right, let’s be honest, weaselly - phrases when rejecting manuscripts, like “not quite right for our list” or “would not fit our publishing programme”. The clear subtext is that the manuscript is unpublishable and the writer should consign it to their bottom drawer. For ever.

Andrew Franklin is British. He lives in England. That’s across the Pond, so not to worry—surely things are different over here, eh?

However, Franklin’s revelations are as nothing compared to the weirdly entrancing and supremely self-serving imagined “revelations” of one John Barnes about the real identity of TNR’s mystery writer “Scott Thomas,” who made the U.S. military look so bad:

I think I have a pretty good guess as to who “Scott Thomas” is – not his identity but what sort of person the Thomas-hunters should be looking for — based mainly on looking at his writing and at the social context of The New Republic from my unique perspective. I seriously doubt there is another consulting semiotician who is also a book doctor and part-time agency reader, and doubt even further that there is another one who has  read “Thomas’s” New Republic piece.

Credentials firmly established, Barnes goes on to speculate about the type of person who might have written the piece:

He (it is always a he) is an MFA candidate or recent graduate at one of the big-name creative writing programs in the USA, sometimes in poetry, usually in fiction, and increasingly in “creative non-fiction” (the litsy byline that “feature writing” took on when it moved uptown, became significant, and stopped having lunch with its old buds at the newspapers).  Usually he is in his mid-twenties and is probably among the bright stars in the tiny constellation (and complicated pecking order) that MFA programs create.  His particular niche in that social ecology will be the Big Talent With Big Balls, a role that requires some claim to a “dangerous” or “edgy” past, meaning some connection to interpersonal violence and to having seen some gruesome sights.  (Being recently back from combat duty in Iraq, particularly if the young man is a reservist who will be going back for another hitch there, would certainly fit the bill nicely – at various times I have known such characters to claim to be motorcycle gang members, to have smuggled cocaine into the US in small boats, and to have competed as Ultimate Fighting professionals).

Sounds like someone has been reading way too many manuscripts from the slush pile.