This past winter, when I ventured out into the freelance wilds after a book-related break, I found myself lost in a fog. I emailed editors I’d worked with happily for years, people I’ve had over for dinner, folks who once solicited me with apparently heartfelt praise. I sent pitches that might have been off the mark but were at least thoughtful, concise, original, and not entirely beyond their respective purviews. I would love to tell you that I received rejections. I got back nothing at all.

At first I thought it was my personal problem, karmic comeuppance for unspecified sins. It hurt and confused me, a lot, actually, but I tried to preserve some dignity by not forcing myself where I wasn’t wanted. I struck those publications from my list and moved on. But then I learned of writers in similar straits. I talked with friends who faced the same, and read about identical slights in the posts of acquaintances and strangers, some of whom, poignantly, expressed the belief that their emails must be consigned to spam. (This was a possibility I too optimistically entertained.) Say I deserved it, say a number of us did; we’d been tardy with our drafts or pushed back on edits one too many times. But mass stonewalling of bright, accomplished people with a variety of accolades and styles and beats? It didn’t make sense to me.

Pitches that got through were (are) not free from disrespect and inattention. Contradictory feedback from an editor. Intra-masthead mess, commissioned pieces cancelled because another editor’s writer got there first. Silence. Drafts unedited for months. Work without contract or kill fee. Somehow, even more silence.

I met up with a novelist who’d had an hour long Zoom call with a book editor who was effusive about acquiring her manuscript. That editor proceeded to ghost the author and her agent.

Brainlessly, out of a sense of (misplaced?) solidarity, I launched into the usual dissembling. It’s a stressful time for everyone, editors are overworked—

“It’s just rude,” the novelist said.

This happened months ago, and I’ve thought about it every week since. The accuracy of her assessment, and the gratitude I felt when I heard it.

In 2018, at early meetings of what would become the Freelance Solidarity Project, my colleagues and I were in agreement that our working conditions were bad. Rates were opaque, capriciously determined and poorly communicated. Payment was rarely received promptly and sometimes never came. A considerable number of websites and print magazines went up in blazes set by their owners. There was no job security, no benefits, and little legal protection. With few exceptions, compensation was insultingly low. You probably know this whether or not you’re a writer. And you probably know that in the intervening years, it got lower.

My point is that freelancing has long been my hobby rather than my job, and I’ve resigned myself to thinking of any associated money as more like a birthday check from a kind relative than a wage correlated with time and effort. What disorients me these days is not increasingly modest remunerations, though some rates still manage to shock and gall, but the evaporation of norms around communication and basic courtesy, the spurning of longstanding relationships, and irresponsible handling of writers’ work at outlets that pride themselves on having high standards. The enterprise used to hang together better than this despite its many gaping tears, it really did. I was there and I remember. There was a semblance of expertise and consideration and fellow-feeling. I suppose you can feed a system through the shredder only so many times before it’s well and truly shredded.

But what is going on at the individual level? Intentional human activity, with or without funding, tends to coalesce into infrastructure and community: conferences, walking clubs, knitting circles, message boards, free little libraries. And such endeavors have energy. Participants might make mistakes or get frustrated or not know what they’re doing, but they show up with interest—sometimes, passion—and they unite together in purpose. Commoditized art is often framed as a labor of love when it falls short of being labor for profit. (For the artist, anyway; rest assured someone somewhere is getting richer.) But in all manner of publishing now it seems the so-called love is dispensed with, too. Relationships are expendable, irrelevant, and there is a sense that what is taking place simply doesn’t matter. The spirit and connective tissue that alleviated exploitive conditions is scraped out, and the whole affair becomes an exercise in listlessness, in persisting against indicators that no one (not readers, not acquiring editors, not the intermediaries who once capitalized off of links and clicks) cares. There are motions, they are gone through. But it would be fine, perhaps preferable, if they weren’t.

I’ve been baffled for months, gnawed upon by my incomprehension of why it’s gotten this bad in these exact ways, but what is there to get, what sort of secret explanation do I imagine? I know that much of what maddens me is not confined to the realm of media nor professional life. Across contexts and careers, some people act as if they’ve sworn vows to be unresponsive, checked out, unreliable, obfuscatory. And I’m familiar with the social media go-to for most undesirable interpersonal phenomena: “people are tired, y’all.” Trump makes everyone dysfunctional, the pandemic broke the social contract, capitalist immiseration never takes a day off. Moreover, everyone has untreated long COVID. I’m not saying none of this is true but it makes for a clumsy analysis or at least it doesn’t satisfy me.

Relief often accompanies a more nuanced description, and I could use some relief. So I’ve done my best to assemble a theory which I invite everyone to correct, expand, or otherwise improve.

1) Insufficient staffing means constant chokepoints.

I wait on an answer from someone who’s waiting on an answer from someone who’s waiting on an answer. It’s waiting all the way down. Instead of a pyramid arrangement, where at least you might have one or two other senior figures to turn to if someone else is unavailable, a handful of people are organized in a straight line. Due to embarrassment or discretion or negligence, the further down the line you are, the less you’re told about the delay.

2) Many of the most polished professionals (the ones who should be setting the tone, leading by example) jumped ship or got fired.

Editing is an extraordinarily precious skill. If you don’t believe it can be (usually, should be) as integral to the writing process as a work’s initial composition, you have not been edited well and I’m sorry. You deserve to be; I wish every writer was. I have worked with meticulous and wise editors who’ve been at it for decades and are still going strong, and what I learn from them lasts. They continue to impact my work even when they’re not directly involved. I’ve also worked with newer, younger editors who are smart and have great intentions, but who have clearly not been mentored or given much guidance. We’re at least ten years into the evisceration of written media, and there’s simply no way apprenticeship is taking place like it should be. Well-meaning people are forced to wing it because they don’t have access to anyone with the time or expertise to teach them.

The whole reason I began pitching again was because I had ideas and topics that were important enough, in my eyes, to merit the application of another person’s practiced discernment. Not because I wanted some byline glory (that does not exist anymore¹) or the fat paycheck (heh) but because I wanted to collaborate. What is the point of publishing if not a single benefit remains to the writer?

3) Funding comes from tasteless, amoral corporatists who keep putting their brutish hands into the editorial process.

Not new by any means but possibly getting worse? (More micromanage-y, more desperate and chaotic.) I would not be able to believe I was doing something of value in such an environment. I would not be invested in the quality of my own work nor the work I was responsible for getting out into the world. I might even actively want the work to be bad.

4) Reader indifference, and a belief in readers’ short attention spans, are self-fulfilling prophecies.

There is too much cultural material and what rises to the top mainly does so through sheer financial force, meaning visibility is short-lived, artificially achieved, and leaves an ugly aftertaste. Abundance creates choice paralysis, every algorithm suppresses outside links, and newsletters, I think, feel more assaultive than exciting. I’ve seen incredible essays get zero traction no matter how many times the author shares the URL across platforms, and I don’t know how to fix that. Readers are tired, y’all.

But part of why they’re tired is because written work is not taken seriously by the people producing it. It’s not promoted, or it’s promoted in a cynical and lazy way. It’s not edited for length, coherence, or quality. It’s given a clickbait title that has people in a rage before they read the first word. Prestige publications that should be at the vanguard lack vision and principles, and degrade themselves for a few Substack likes, which is a major problem to address separately.² If the publisher doesn’t care about what they’re making, why should the would-be audience? A writer can’t out-care the limitations of this system. That’s why we—whoever’s left who actually gives a shit—need to work together and be more respectful of each other.

5) This isn’t a theory or suggestion. It’s a request or maybe a demand, an angry one that I keep trying to tone down. Please communicate with people. Correspondence has been an essential part of human life for centuries and no one should be waiting longer on an emailed answer than they’d be waiting for an exchange taking place via snail mail. If basically all the greats spent hours (hours!!!) every day (every day!!!!) reading and responding to their mail, you can spare ten two-minute intervals to skim a message and write back a polite “no” or “let me think on this more” or whatever the situation warrants, especially if answering such emails is literally part of your job and there is no one else appointed to do it.

Obviously no one owes a response to a stranger asking for a favor, PR people spamming garbage, book club scams, stalker-y fan mail, or any piece of AI hell blasted out indiscriminately. But the jig is up on this pretense that folks are using Brick to frolick in the grass while having fulfilling face-to-face conversations that render email moot. Anyone who actually renews and refreshes themselves in such a fashion becomes better equipped to treat people with transparency and kindness. They do not return from the field more remote and withholding. Put your hair in a bun and figure it out!