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Twenty years ago this month, I was in New Orleans to receive an award for my writing. I’ve been thinking about that moment as we return to classes. Whatever subject you teach, you most likely find yourself in the position of judging the quality of students’ prose. Indeed, for most of us, the grades we award at the end of the term will depend largely on how well our students express themselves in writing.
Here’s how the award I received in 1996 came about. I had published a couple of books in the previous decade and then gone through a dry spell. I was the financial support of two small children, teaching full-time and stealing time for writing the way most novelists do, in bits and snatches mostly late at night and before dawn. My literary agent had drifted away. Slowly, over the years, I had accumulated a series of stories that I worked and reworked — as a story collection, as a first-person novel, as a third-person novel, as a triptych — until I felt, in my late-night addled brain, that the manuscript might be ready for prime time. I shipped it off to a contest and waited. I waited so long, and with so much else on my plate, that when the call came to tell me that I had won, I thought it was my jokester of a brother-in-law, pulling my leg.
The prize was to be awarded in a gala ceremony in the French Quarter, and the fabulous organization sponsoring it flew me into New Orleans, picked me up in a limo with champagne in the back, put me up in a hotel whose nightly rate amounted to twice my monthly rent, and fêted me at several parties over the weekend. I had never before experienced such attention. At one long evening reception, so many people came up to speak with me that I never made my way to the table heaped with food, so that I slipped out of my fancy hotel room at 1:00 a.m. to fetch a turkey sandwich at the deli on Canal Street. I had never been to New Orleans before; walking the colorful streets of the city, I felt a surge of energy that I had not experienced in years, and the day I was to receive the award I actually pulled out my new laptop and began a new project.
But here’s the rub. At the reception following the gala, a middle-aged lawyer introduced himself to me as my first reader. The way the judging of this prize worked, he explained, was that a small army of volunteers read the full-length manuscripts that came in, four at a time, and chose one of the four to move up to the next round. The final arbiter of the contest, a well-known writer, received the top 40 or so from which she picked her favorite. This lawyer — let’s call him Mr. B — was an enthusiastic reader, and he stepped up to read one foursome after another. Finally he brought back a quartet of manuscripts from which he had chosen, as instructed, one finalist, and he asked if there were more entries to read. Just four more, he was told, and they needed a quick assessment to move the contest along. He took the manuscripts, but called the office several days later.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t make up my mind. Two of these novels seem equally good to me.”
“Just shut your eyes and point to one,” he was told. “The judge has already read the other finalists and made her selection, so you’re just deciding who gets to be a finalist. We need a choice by tonight.”
“I don’t do things that way,” said Mr. B. He canceled his afternoon’s appointments. He went to a café in the French Quarter and ordered a glass of red wine. He did his best thinking, he explained to me at the reception, sitting at an outdoor café nursing a glass. For hours he went over the two manuscripts he liked. He jotted down notes about one, then notes about the other. He compared the plots. He compared the styles. He couldn’t choose. He was just a lawyer and an avid reader, he told himself, not an expert. Finally, as the sun lowered, he decided to read just the first page and the last page of each novel manuscript. He based his decision on his feelings about those four pages, and he brought his selection back to the office of the organization.
“Great,” they said. “Not that it matters, but now we’ve got closure.”
They sent that manuscript to the judge. Reading it, she changed her mind. That manuscript was my novel, and I got the prize.
“But what about the other manuscript?” I asked Mr. B. “The one you liked just as well?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Didn’t even get to be a finalist,” he said.
Partly on the basis of the award I won, I secured a new literary agent and a two-book contract from Simon & Schuster. I’ve gone on to publish a fair handful of fiction and nonfiction. But had the lawyer’s taste been different, I wouldn’t even have known how seriously my work had been considered, or how close I had come — just as that other contestant, whoever he is, may never know.
One can argue that this contest’s process was flawed, but I have sat on a number of award juries since that September, and I can testify that no process is perfect. Nor is the process by which we judge, and grade, student writing. I’m not saying everything comes down to a coin toss. There are clear markers of good writing, some of which we discuss in this blog. But there come times, too, when luck and preference enter in. My conversation with Mr. B humbled me, as a writer. I like to think it humbled me as a teacher, too. Sometimes I sit, virtually if not literally, at that café, and I read the pages, back and forth, and try to remember that someone’s fate may rest with how I feel about the beginning, or the middle, or the end.