Years ago I was roped into judging a poetry contest that shall remain placeless and nameless in order to protect the guilty. On the appointed day at some time mid-afternoon I showed up to find myself in company with one other judge, a dedicated poet whose work I knew and respected. He and I were faced with several towering piles of poetry submissions and were told to select our winners by early that evening. We had, as I recall, three or four hours, sans supper. I became a wee bit tad upset, if only because I hate to miss a meal. I considered that we had been stuck with an impossible task, comparable to that of spinning a massive pile of straw into gold.

“Not to worry,” said my Rumpelstiltskin poet friend. “We can eliminate most of this quickly, because if the first few lines suck, it’s not going to get any better, right?”

Immediately I felt truth resonate like a carillon of bells. “Right!”

So grabbing a poetry submission, he scanned the first stanza, stuck a finger deep into his mouth, made a gagging noise and tossed the sheet of paper aside. I did likewise, minus the gesture and the noise. We both settled down to our task, and within an hour we had eliminated all of the poems except a few dozen that did not suck.

Relieved by our progress so far, but still feeling a bit daunted by our responsibility, I asked, “Now what?”

“Now we read the whole poem, and when we get to the end, we ask, ‘So what?’”

“Ah!” Again truth resonated through me. I sat back in my chair and read the remaining poems in full and with pleasure, because they were well written. My Rumpelstiltskin poet friend and I passed them back and forth, making sure that we each got to read them all.

Then we considered them one at a time by asking, “So what?”

For most of them the answer was, “Nothing.” So nature is beautiful, so what? So life passes too fast, so what? So you’re feeling sad and blue, so what? Tell me something I don’t already know. Like a long-legged fly upon a stream my mind moves upon silence. . .

That last bit is the opposite of “So what?” I borrowed it from William Butler Yeats, as an example of poetry that might have made me sit up straight.

My Rumpelstiltskin friend slumped in his chair the same way I did in mine. “In most writing contests,” he said morosely, “the entry that wins is the one that just didn’t lose.”

“The least bad?”

“Exactly.”

But we were lucky. We actually found a few real winners, well written and with significant content – although not so significant that I remember any of the poems anymore.

Why, decades later, do I so vividly remember this experience? What, as the teachers would say, did I “take away” from it? Or, more succinctly, so what?

Here’s what.

I’m well-published among fiction writers. I’d like to think that at least some of my books are winners, not just the manuscripts that didn’t lose. But I still have manuscripts out there circulating, more often than not being “declined” (the slightly less brutal euphemism for “rejected”). Are Rumpelstiltskin editors, faced with an overwhelming mountain of manuscripts, handling mine much the way my poet friend did: finger deep in mouth, gagging? Dreadful thought. But even more humbling: are editors applying the “so what?” test to my stories? Are mine tales told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?

I’m sure you recognized that as a quote from Shakespeare. From "Macbeth," to be exact.

So what?

So every thought is a double-edged sword, cutting both ways. Yes, okay, most of us published writers are the ones who just didn’t lose, and we will be forgotten. But we don’t know for sure. I mean, realistically, do you suppose Shakespeare ever dreamed he would still be quoted in the twenty-first century?