A categorical hiatus

A few months ago I drafted a short fiction and was reasonably satisfied with it. It came to about 550 words. Meanwhile I’d identified a journal that I thought would be a good match. On revisiting their guidelines, I discovered a peculiar hiatus between their categories of ‘microfiction’ (max 250 words) and ‘short stories’ (min 1,000 words), with nothing in between. That’s a considerable swathe of people’s potential output that is being dismissed apparently randomly.

I’ll have more to say about categories in an upcoming post, but here I just want to describe the consequence of this discovery. I decided to revisit the story and, without padding or detracting from the overall read, see if there were any threads that could be developed.

To put this a different way – I was consciously and cautiously allowing an extraneous, non-artistic criterion to influence my work.

To my genuine surprise, it worked, in that I teased out and developed another dimension to the story which I was happy with. Now I’m wondering if I’ve been cured of my ‘compression obsession’ or whether, more probably, my approach to finalising a text has just been broadened in an unlikely way. The revised story has been submitted. If it’s declined I’ll have another look at it, which in turn could be another interesting experience.

This hectic lottery: more on the dejection of rejection

I’ve been reading an absorbing set of short essays by writers on the theme of rejection, organised and published by the esteemed Irish journal Stinging Fly. Among the numerous insightful observations I especially liked this:

the writing life is populated by myriad small humiliations, with, now and again, a larger one. We make ourselves vulnerable every time we write honestly, every time we bring a piece of ourselves to the page (Danielle McLaughlin).

Street level sign

Several of the contributors make the point that rejection is a chance to revisit a piece and possibly improve it, but most of their attention is on resilience against the emotional blows. For myself, having experienced several instances of profound and damaging workplace bullying in my professional life, I don’t find literary rejection traumatic by comparison. It's also the case I think that as an endurance athlete, I know there will be real troughs and bad patches any time I take on a challenge (otherwise it’s not a challenge) and I’ve learned a lot about how I personally respond to the most severe setbacks in life. There is always a hint of despair that is genuine and incontestable and brings everything to a halt (otherwise it’s not a severe setback). Then a period of just about managing to sustain an impersonation of a potentially-social human being. After which, somehow, the power of resilience emerges, which it usually does, in my case, forcefully and without reversion. With this modicum of self-knowledge, as a writer I’m lucky in that rejections tend not to floor me at all. Yet.

It's also the case that I have four grandchildren and my contribution to their development is far more important than my reactions to these distant decisions and I will not be caught moping.

Nonetheless, I do find it a little hard to come to terms with an unexplained rejection of a piece that’s as good as I could make it and in my view an ideal match for the journal in question, which they have taken six months to get round to declining. Otherwise, yes, rejection is largely a function of the sad economics of literary publishing and competition in the market: too many writers, too few suitable publications, and over-stretched volunteer editors.

I also have a few texts, which I consider to be my better pieces, that I probably won’t send off because I don’t perceive it to be a good use of time (organising good submissions takes time and energy). The ‘style’, if I may call it that in shorthand, does not fit with what I see being published or asked for. I observe that where some journals claim to welcome experimental or hybrid material, they have a fairly specific take on what that means, usually in terms of form on the page or eccentric content, rather than, say, internal structure. These pieces that I hold back may be exceptional or they may be rubbish (I shudder at the likelihood that they could end up described in terms like ‘undistinguished’ or ‘predictable’): I certainly can’t tell, although I’ve received positive feedback from reader-friends, albeit with the occasional expression of perplexity. So they will most likely drift in a cloud folder until after I’m dead. My hope is that because I’ve had a few other texts published, someone will think that bringing them down to the surface to be shared could be rewarding.

In most of the occupations we pursue, there is never a perfect match, and seldom a good match, between ‘natural’ ability and success. Potential great sportsmen and women give up after school or college for whatever reason, while lesser mortals commit; people who can sketch with skill may never be given a set of paints; some who can act or sing or play an instrument just don’t get or are not given the opportunities; people with raw poems in their heads are too busy raising children while holding down two jobs. Meanwhile, many with the extra resilience and luck manage to achieve and gain recognition, so that their work is shared, and in most cases we are all grateful for that. What then of the art that is lost in this hectic lottery? It’s rather like a principle of nature – it overproduces (OK, I’m thinking seeds not pandas here) and what dominates are not necessarily the ‘best’ by obscure criteria, but survivors for an inexplicable complex blend of reasons.

Previously:

Do different kinds of writer experience rejections differently?

The everlasting NO

On the invention of words

In a box in my loft there exists a copy of a poem that I wrote at age about 15, to win some school prize. I think it was also published in the local newspaper at the time. What’s interesting is that it contains the following invented words: ‘fellswooping’ (referring to a ‘fellswooping hawk’) and ‘smithereened’. The latter has reappeared a couple of times in more recent pieces.

From OED Historical thesaurus

So it seems I was inventing words even 55 years ago, or at least generating verbs from nouns. Other examples occur in several texts I’ve written in the last couple of years. Sometimes this can be for poetic effect or for convenience. Often I think it’s also because the language available to us is inadequate for our needs, and it surprises me that this is seldom acknowledged. We behave and write as if language is like a complete box of materials with which we can accomplish all we could possibly need, and all we have to do is apply carpentry to make whatever we want. Thankfully, that’s not the case—language itself allows and encourages its own expansion, so that we can express more and learn more.