Teresa Nielsen Hayden is absolutely right, this is what editing is all about:
Yes, you get cynical, because you see one submission after another that says “Read this, it’s great!†Only it’s not great, it’s anything but great, it’s passable at best; and the passable ones are a tiny fraction of the many, many, many submissions you see. Then one year you open yetanotherenvelope, and ZOMFG it’s the real thing!!! Overcome with joy, you fall over backward and wave your arms and legs in the air in that wholly ravished “Do with me what you will†kind of way. OMG OMG OMG it’s Maureen McHugh, it’s Stephan Zielinski, it’s Jo Walton, it’s wonder beyond reckoning. It’s the real thing. It’s what you live for.
She brings it up in response to all the hoopla surrounding Susan Boyle’s stunning recent performance on Britain’s Got Talent. Sometimes, real talent just gobsmacks you upside the head. If Sturgeon’s Law applies — and it seems to apply nowhere so well as in the fiction slush pile, let me tell you — you can’t help but be floored when you’re lucky enough to stumble upon that ten percent that isn’t crud.
There is the question, of course, of whether we should be so surprised what that non-crud comes from someone like Susan Boyle. Do we find her story uplifting because she has a beautiful voice, or because we think she looks like somebody who almost certainly couldn’t? On this week’s Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me!, guest panelist Tom Bodett joked that the moment he teared up at Boyle’s performance was “when I questioned my own moral character.” It’s that subtext of “oh wow, ugly people can do beautiful things” that he found disconcerting. Host Peter Sagal quipped, “Tom, if it wasn’t for ugly people doing worthwhile things, there’d be no radio.”
But I think it’s a valid concern, and it’s one that’s echoed by Dennis Palumbo, who asks the very simple question: What if Susan Boyle couldn’t sing?
The unspoken message of this whole episode is that, since Susan Boyle has a wonderful talent, we were wrong to judge her based on her looks and demeanor. Meaning what? That if she couldn’t sing so well, we were correct to judge her on that basis? That demeaning someone whose looks don’t match our impossible, media-reinforced standards of beauty is perfectly okay, unless some mitigating circumstance makes us re-think our opinion?
Real talent is rare enough without the assumption that it can only come in certain packages. If ninety percent of everything is crud, why on earth would you want to further limit your sample size like that? It can be exhausting to wade through that ninety percent — most of it well-meaning, honestly attempted, but crud nonetheless — but imagine missing the opportunity to discover those ten-percent gems!
Of course, there are plenty of cynics ready to say those gems are ersatz, to call bullshit when something seems too perfect, too good. And maybe that’s okay; a healthy dose of cynicism is necessary for survival sometimes. Personally, I happen to think Boyle is the real thing. Maybe there’s some spin after the fact, and maybe Simon Cowell was feigning his surprise. But you know what? Who cares? The woman can sing.