Getting to yes
None of us at The Big Roundtable are or ever will be “the cool kid.” Which is OK, fine — no, it’s good. Because all those cool kids you remember from 90s movies, their M.O. was “no.” (As in, no to color, no to school, no, you can’t hang out with us.)
Just over two years ago, a few months before we launched, Michael Shapiro, Mike Hoyt, and I struggled over how to maintain The Big Roundtable’s spirit — a home for writers, regardless of the writer’s experience or story’s subject — while upholding the highest standard of quality for the stories we publish. We hypothesized that the difference between a story that comes alive and one that doesn’t is the difference between a writer who’s happy and one who isn’t.
A happy writer is one who’s free to write in his or her own voice, and so we decided that, to the best of our ability, we would try to unburden our writers by committing to them and their stories, whether their pieces came to us flat, flabby, or perfect, thus alleviating the pressure to sound like someone they weren’t. In the way that there’s a New Yorker or New York Times Magazine-style story, there is not a Big Roundtable-style story. There is only narrative nonfiction. If there was a diamond in the rough, we were going to find it. And we hoped that in doing this, our writers would feel free to be happy and to just…write.
And if it weren’t just the most obvious thing, the writers did do better work and enjoyed the process more when they were free to be themselves. For that accomplishment I credit wholly Hoyt and Cissi Falligant, our editor and senior editor, respectively, who are two of the kindest souls you’ll ever meet — and who want to say “yes” to writers who are willing to commit. And as editors, well, you’ll never meet a more skilled and complementary team.
It’s easy to say no…to someone whose writing you can’t hear in your own head, who didn’t come recommended by anyone, who’s never written long, someone who writes about things you’d prefer not to read. It’s so easy to say “no” and then ask for more submissions from the ever-replenishing pool of hungry writers. By saying “yes” instead of “no,” you’re making a commitment.
But we don’t like to say “no.” We’ve been on the other side of “no” too many times ourselves. If you commit to us, we’ll commit to you.
Originally published at thebigroundtable.tumblr.com.
