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good vs. great
Is the writing good enough? Am I good enough? It's a discussion that comes up again and again. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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.
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.
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