good vs. great

[eimarra]

Is the writing good enough? Am I good enough? It's a discussion that comes up again and again. bonniers had a good post about why (from an editor's point of view), good isn't enough here.

This week, I've been hit with a number of rejections, including one from Fantasist for "Blood Brother," which I had been thinking was my best work to date. Yes, one editor's opinion, yadda-yadda. But getting a bunch of rejections while frantically trying to get taxes done at the last moment is *not* conducive to a philosophical viewpoint.

Then Monday and yesterday, slushmaster wrote about separating the good from the great. And Jeremiah Tolbert mentioned a rejection he'd gotten for a story on sustainability in the west. Oddly enough, I also had a rejection from High Country News this week, so I knew whereof he spoke. He also said that he sees a spark in others that he doesn't have, and he thinks he's done writing.

That spark is the difference between good and great, between being someone who creates workmanlike prose and being a talented artist.

Maybe.

I'm not saying there isn't a range of ability in writers, that we can all be geniuses if we keep working at it. That's as silly as saying that we can all be Olympic-level gymnasts or swimmers or skaters, or we can all understand the intricacies of braids in 5-space.

Do I have the spark? I don't know. I'd like to think so, but you certainly can't tell it from my stories to date. I do have the persistence to grind away at all of the bad habits that hide what talent I do possess.

One of those bad habits is judging a story by what I perceive as the whole. When I send a story off to a market, the editor reading the slush isn't going to do that. The editor might read as much as the first five pages, but the odds are that the decision was made on the first page, if not during the first paragraph. That opening paragraph has to give them the feeling for the entire story, a sense of excitement and interest, and perhaps even a hint of the story questions.

If you've read my story "Diamond in the Rough," you know that the beginning doesn't promise the end. It starts with a mundane scene, a girl and her father listening to a radio announcer talk to the mother of a missing girl. Other than the fact that girls go missing every ten to twenty years, and have since the town was founded, there is no hint that there is anything fantastical about this story.

I started reading Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell yesterday. He talks about "thin-slicing" reality, making snap judgements based on past experience, and the inability of most people to articulate what these decisions are actually based on. The initial example in the introduction is about a statue forgery. Experts who came and looked at it *knew* there was something wrong, just in the first moment of seeing it. The people at the Getty may have had similar responses but they ignored them because they wanted it to be real.

The obvious application of this is that when the editors are going through dozens or hundreds of manuscripts, they know just about at first glance--as in Bonniers' post--whether a story's worth publishing. But I want my story to be publishable, so I may ignore anything that tells me it's not.

The flip side is that I don't have to analyze what it is that makes a story work. I need to read the market (Hey, anyone heard that advice before?) and then look at my stories to see what gives me the same *feeling* that the published stories I like do. What stories draw me in? Sure, I could sit and analyze them, create a spreadsheet or database about commonalities. I could write up lists, as Slushmaster suggested. Or I can learn to trust my gut.

My gut's telling me I'm not at pro level yet, but I could be in the future. Yes, I have to keep writing and submitting. But I also have to write things that leave me excited when I look at them.

This probably doesn't sound very helpful to others. But it's already helped me realize how I have to change one story I started last week. It has me thinking about my works in progress. And I'm itching for a few days to go through my stack of stories that are getting multiple rejects to see which ones have the potential to really grab the reader if I rework them. We'll see how it goes.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

It seems to me that "Am I good enough?" "Is my writing good enough?" and "Is this particular story good enough for the market I'm aiming for?" are three very different questions. I know I tend to blur them all the time. I get a note that says an editor didn't choose to print a story, and I go from there to "I'll never get anything published" to "I can't write" to "I must be a sucky person if my writing is so terrible."

Not logical. But hard to stay away from.

[bonniers.livejournal.com]

That was me. I don't know why it thought I wasn't logged on, because it hasn't asked me for a password since and it says it knows who I am...

[eimarra]

I don't think I've wandered into thinking I'm a sucky person. I know I'm not the cream of the crop, no question. But I would like to be good enough as a writer to get published more often than once a year, if that. (/me smiles wryly) I know it's further between for some people, and some people never get published. But that doesn't change my goals for myself, my aspirations, my expectations for my own behavior.

[underpope.livejournal.com]

There's a fine line to walk, but the width of that line depends on your goals. If you want to just write marketable stuff without a damn for your passions, you can be a category romance or formula fantasy writer, churning out bodice busters and Forgotten Realms tomes at a rate of two every other year. If you want to be the Artiste (note the capital A) who writes with passion and concern without a damn for marketability, then accept that you'll be a starving writer living in a loft cursing the fools who are too small-minded to understand your vision.

So maybe the trick is to balance passion with marketability. Sometimes you have to make artistic compromises; A. C. Crispin mentioned having to move chapters around in her book Storms of Destiny to start the novel with a male lead instead of a female lead, in order to improve the novel's chances of selling. So how much of your vision are you willing to compromise in order to make your vision known? Hmm. Just thinking out loud here.

[eimarra]

Well, since the way I wandered back to writing was by participating in an open call for a Forgotten Realms novel, I can vouch that they're not really that easy. :-)

So maybe the trick is to balance passion with marketability. Sometimes you have to make artistic compromises

I find this an interesting comment. It's like they have to be different. Why does there have to be an inherent dichotomy?

[underpope.livejournal.com]

I just picked Forgotten Realms at random. My point is that there are indeed category and formula realms of fiction that you can spurt out without much thought or commitment or passion. Think also of the reams of chick-lit that are written to fulfill a contract rather than because the author genuinely has a story to tell.

So maybe the trick is to balance passion with marketability. Sometimes you have to make artistic compromises

I find this an interesting comment. It's like they have to be different. Why does there have to be an inherent dichotomy?

Please don't read more into my statement than I said, especially when I said something entirely different. I didn't say that there was necessarily an inherent contradiction. All I said was that sometimes you have to make artistic compromises, because sometimes there is a contradiction -- but not necessarily. This is why I said "sometimes". If your passion and your marketability line up, then you're set. Some authors, like Stephen King, have this down pat. If your passion is for something that won't sell in the publishing world, then you have to decide whether marketability is worth making some compromises.

And sometimes, of course, the passion is what makes the marketability. No one particularly cared about the plight of the poor working class in Victorian England until Dickens brought such passion to his own work.