In a previous blog post (http://www.janeayres.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/how-do-you-deal-with-rejection.html
) I referred to work I recently had rejected and promised to develop this in
a future post. Today I am picking up the
thread again, and will try very hard not to end up having a rant, because the
topic I will write on has niggled me for a long time.
Literary (or serious) fiction versus genre writing (or
commercial fiction).
When I started out as a writer in my teens, I won a few
short story competitions at school and decided I wanted to be a
journalist. In fact, when I contacted
some well-known writers, this was the career path they recommended to me if I
wanted to see my work in print. Interesting. I wrote about what I was passionate about,
which at the time was horses and riding, and, a bit later, I developed a
fascination with the supernatural, often combining the two. I also enjoyed
reading horror stories. (Does anyone
remember the Pan Book of Horror Series of short stories? I used to read these avidly). In fact the first
short story I had published in a national horse magazine was about a psychotic
pony that goes unaccountably crazy at a horse show and kills another horse!
After this, I wrote a large body of traditional pony stories and serials, which
were all published in pony magazines and annuals, so I kind of pigeon holed
myself in a way. But I was doing what I
loved and I felt like a proper writer.
In my twenties and thirties, I sent out a range of other
short stories to a mixture of magazines, which included the women’s mags, and
some of the small press (and bigger press) literary magazines. I had limited success with both, faring better with small press.
When your pony stories are usually accepted by the specialist publications but your non-horsey stuff is more frequently rejected, you tend to veer towards
what experience shows you works, but I did persevere with my “other” writing for
many years, winning a few more writing competitions and getting a fair bit of
poetry (and lots of non-fiction articles) published. On the whole, “literary” success eluded me,
and I soon discovered that in the world of academia, there was far more respect
for a writer who had achieved recognition in this field than one who had
sold over 162,000 copies (translated into 7 languages) of their latest pony novel
for teenage girls. (This was Transitions, my best seller ever and
which took me into the US market). I began to develop a bit of a chip on my
shoulder and wondered if I would only be a proper writer if I won the Booker prize
(or similar), because whenever I applied for an arts council bursary or RLF Fellowship Scheme, I never got a look in.
So, back to the point, which was my recent rejection from a
literary magazine. I don’t often enter
contests or send speculative work off these days but last year, I sent off 6
of my poems (all previously published) and a short story that I felt proud of, (which
had won a literary short story award a few years back) to this magazine. My work eventually came back to me in the familiar
A4 white SAE (I used to spend a fortune on postage before emails
were invented!). It had been read “with
interest and careful attention” but “the editors finally decided not to take (them) for publication.”
Why did this sting so much?
Was it because it reminded me of those days in the past when this was a regular
occurrence? I am always telling other
writers to develop a thick skin; rejections are a fact of life for a writer. Just
keep going, there’s an element of subjectivity, someone’s opinion, wrong place,
wrong time, etc. But clearly this got to
me or I wouldn’t be writing this long and rambling post. I believed I wrote as well as many of those
already published in the magazine. Deep
down, did I think my work simply wasn’t “literary” enough? I suspected they did. And does it really matter?
As regards Treading
Water, the short story in question, you can judge for yourself, because I
put it on my blog a while back, before I (correction, it) got rejected.
My question is, am I being paranoid? Do I still have a chip on my shoulder? Does a kind of snobbery exist in some circles about genre and
commercial fiction, as opposed to literary?
And what the hell is the difference?
And does it matter? Phew. Ranting again. Can anyone give a definitive definition of
what makes something literary? Who decides?
Footnote:
There’s an excellent (non-ranty!) post about over at Jane
Friedman called “Commodity publishing, self-publishing and the future of
fiction”, which explores the role of literary and commercial fiction in the
world of indie publishing, and it has some great insights into what can be a controversial
topic.
