I made my second multi-volume book purchase yesterday and have sternly told myself “no more” until I get these read. See if you notice a trend.

First batch: Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, and Child of God by Cormac McCarthy)

Yesterday’s batch: Love Medicine and The Bingo Palace by Louise Erdrich, Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual by David Treuer, and Suttree by Cormac McCarthy

None of these are very long which is good, but they already occupy a good portion of my recreational reading for the future (yes, I have to plan what I’m going to read when I get time —isn’t that sad?) Reading the above will mean I’ll have finished all of McCarthy’s novels and will have made a good dent in Erdrich’s collected works as well.

I actually think I may squeeze in the Treuer over the course of the semester as his User’s Manual has short, highly readable essays on much of what we’re reading in my NA Novel class. When I first heard of Treuer, I thought he was making controversial arguments just to make a name for himself. Now that I’ve read some of Treuer’s arguments (which is always a good idea before passing judgment) I have to say that I agree with almost everything he says. His major argument is that Native American Literature should be read (and judged) as literature, not as ethnography. Which seems to me to be self-evident, but isn’t for a lot of people. The more I get into Native American studies, the deeper I want to dig.

Last April I wrote a post on the differences between Clarion and grad school. Rereading that almost a year later, I still agree with what I wrote. But as I am ever-evolving as a writer, my experiences make me look at things differently as well.

Clarion is a crash course on honing basic techniques. I wasn’t a bad writing going in, but I came out a much better one. I learned a lot about openings, pacing, and economy of words. In retrospect, participating in the workshop is almost like being a slush reader: there are so many stories coming at you that, due to mental exhaustion, you’re just not motivated to read. That clued me in to the fact that the story needs to work, from beginning to end, to hold someone’s attention. If the story meanders, you’ve lost.

So I think the workshop does a superior job in teaching you how to write a story that can sell. For writers, that is indeed the goal. Yet I think it’s very easy to get caught up in all the rules and forget the rule that trumps all others: you need to be interesting. I see a lot of published stories that have their flaws forgiven simply because they’re unique. And on the flip side, I think I’ve written well-crafted stories that haven’t sold because they’re not fresh enough (at least for the usual f/sf markets).

For instance, I wrote a selkie story that was very well received by all my first readers, but the rejections have come back “Sorry, we see too many selkie stories.” Even the best, most well-crafted selkie story is not going to sell to these places. (FYI, I’ve now sent this to non-traditional f/sf markets hoping that the selkie story may be somewhat unique to them.) The point is, I honestly believe there is no major flaw in this story except that it’s a bit too traditional and therefore predictable. Yet I think if I had written this exact story four years ago, I would have been banging my head against the wall wondering what I was doing wrong.

This obsession with writing a salable story has a knock-on effect on creativity. For a long while, I was only thinking about stories in terms of what I thought could sell: not too short, not too long, don’t deal with many too many big issues, make sure there’s enough of a speculative element, blah, blah, blah. I think I produced a number of very competently written stories with nice turns of phrase and whatnot and the occasional sale to highly-regarded markets gives untold confidence in your ability to write. I’m quite proud of all of my published stories.

But in the same breath, I’m tapped out creatively on targeting those top few f/sf markets. The readership has certain expectations of genre stories, but I’m tired of writing towards those expectations. Most of my work has always had surreal/fabulist sensibilities but I’ve found myself over the past couple years trying to shoe-horn ideas into a form that I thought would sell. Since I haven’t been selling stories hand-over-fist, I’ve spent a lot of valuable writing time trying (and failing) to fulfill expectations other than my own.

There’s the old saying that you need to learn the rules before you can break them. I’m comfortable with the fact that I can write pretty sentences and have a good feel for keeping a story moving. My new pledge is to only write stories that I find interesting; this includes not knowing where the story is going, not knowing why things happen, and not knowing where (or why) things end up the way they do. This throws a lot rules out the window.

Or does it? As I said earlier, the rule that trumps all others is to be interesting. The difference is that now I’m trying to be interesting to me rather than trying to be interesting to a perceived audience. I have a couple stories out right now that I think are really quite good that are getting rejections that more or less say “I didn’t get this.” That’s fine. Instead of scrapping the story or thinking it’s defective, I’m casting a wider net to include literary mags that I hope might find them interesting.

This is different than giving up on f/sf magazines. I have no doubt that all my stories could be better, but I also think that a lot of them will never be more-better enough to meet the expectations of that specific audience. If everything I wrote sold, I’d feel like I found my audience. But since that’s not the case, I’m wondering if a lot of the time my audience might be elsewhere, outside the group of mags I normally submit to.

Enough blather for now. It helps me to go back and read my posts on my writing to see where I was at any given moment in time, so I hope you’ve enjoyed (or at least tolerated) this extended ramble.

Current Mood: Tired |