Essay

Cover Letter Writing Blues

by Sylvia Van Nooten

Cover letters can mean the difference between your work being read and being tossed callously into the nearest wastebasket. As important as they are, I hate writing them with a dark and dreary passion.

Worse than suffering from writer's block is the act of writing cover letters. Writer's block passes with time, but I see no hope of cover letters ever becoming passé. Writing cover letters makes me feel stupid and small, as though I were begging some faceless entity (read: editor) to acknowledge my pitiful existence. "I'm important, really!" is what I am saying, generally in a less clear but more literary way.

The computer screen looks blander than usual on the mornings I have set aside for preparing manuscripts to send out. Blank and glassy, it resembles my own countenance; it too has no expectations of satisfaction. I switch on the computer and it makes a banal hum. I am cursed before I have even begun — surely writing cover letters is a metaphor for the seldom-published writer's existence.

Cover letters are manifestations of hope often written when you feel no hope at all. Still, you cling stubbornly to the belief that you will soon be published, so you must try again. After six years of writing, I feel that I cannot quit now. My identity is so wrapped up in writing that I would disappear if I stopped. (I did try to stop once but only succeeded in thinking about writing.) Writing is like an addiction.

However hopeless I might feel, the letter must be written and so I do my homework. I research the market, and ensure that my piece fits the style and content of the magazine to which I am submitting it. I know the editor's name and I check the magazine's web site where I can read a sample article or two. The large brown envelope with its clean white SASE is sitting primly on the desk waiting for me to provide it with innards.

Finally, I am ready to write the cover letter. Typically, at this moment, nothing moves in the thought department (unless phrases such as "mental constipation" or "Hey Jiminy Cricket!" constitutes movement). Mewling softly, I begin typing anyway:

Dear Editor,

I am nobody. I have no qualifications. I do not have an MFA and I have only one previous publication, a short story published three years ago. Despite this, I am asking you to read the enclosed short story titled "Pathétique" (2,000 words). Included is a SASE. The manuscript is disposable.

P.S. Please hurry with your reply, as I am dying from untreatable syphilis contracted while I was working in a bad part of town doing research for an article that never sold.

With a touch of the Delete key, this attempt disappears into the bowels of Mr. Computer. It is obviously not what will be needed, although it makes me snicker in a sullen, foolish sort of way. For a few minutes I think about downloading some new software, the kind that claims to arrange your submissions into neat and orderly files. But then, I think, "Who needs to have their failures organized anyway? What kind of sadist writes that kind of software?!"

This tangent consumes about ten minutes. Today, it is followed by a daydream in which I explain my work to a thrilled and admiring crowd. My wisdom astounds me (although I remain touchingly humble), as I am vaulted skyward into the fairy realm of the "best thinkers of our time."

A writer's hope is radically schizophrenic. No wonder it does not die; it simply takes on new shapes and manifests itself in other forms of writing. Like submission-organizing software.

Now, where was I?