The world doesn't need another story (or poem)

The world doesn't need another story -- it's a point that my mentor and thesis director Kent Haruf used to make to me and my fellow fledgling fiction writers on a regular basis when I was studying at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (gulp) getting close to twenty years ago.  Kent didn't say it to be mean (he's one of the kindest, gentlest people I know), but he wanted to emphasize that if we wanted to be writers, the drive would have to come from inside of us.  No one would care, no one would even notice if we stopped writing -- and certainly no one was going to beg us to get back to it.

Kent was a graduate of the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop; he went through it at the same time as novelist John Irving, and he used to claim that besides him and Irving, none of his classmates ever published anything after earning their MFA from Iowa.  They apparently needed the incentive of producing for an instructor and to get a grade and finish the degree, but once those fairly concrete incentives were removed, they didn't appear to produce anything.

Just this morning I was indulging myself in reading the Master, William H. Gass, and I rediscovered his take on this very issue in the preface he wrote more than thirty years ago for the republication of his classic collection In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories (originally published in 1968).  Gass wrote,

The contemporary American writer is in no way a part of the social and political scene.  He is therefore not muzzled, for no one fears his bite; nor is he called upon to compose.  Whatever work he does must proceed from a reckless inner need.  The world does not beckon, nor does it greatly reward. [...] Serious writing must nowadays be written for the sake of the art. (Nonpareil edition #21, xviii)

 He must proceed from a reckless inner need.  Indeed.

One of the reasons I've been thinking about this fact is because of the writing workshop that my writing friends -- Lisa Higgs, Tracy Zeman, Meagan Cass -- and I have been leading this summer in Springfield, Illinois.  It began back in May and will run through the beginning of August, with us meeting about every two weeks to discuss issues related to writing prose or writing poetry.  More than forty people registered to participate, but the numbers have dwindled steadily and I suppose we'll end up with about half that original number who will actually stay with it all summer.

Frankly, it was to be expected.  What prevents most people from writing who feel that they want to write is the lack of reckless inner need, as Gass called it.  I have no research to back me up, but I'm going to say that most writers live in households (or maybe situations is a better word) that don't understand their desire to write and don't support it, and perhaps even discourage it, maybe deliberately or maybe accidentally out of ignorance.

For nearly all of my adult life, I lived in a house that didn't get it and spent a great deal of energy discouraging it.  Had I simply stopped writing, things may have been easier at home in some ways, and certainly no editor would've called wondering why I hadn't submitted anything for a while.  But that was simply never an option for me.  I have to write, regardless of whether anyone is reading it or publishing it.

So if you think you want to write, you have to foster that reckless inner need.  For me, being a responsible person, I had to find time to write when no one would care that I was doing that instead of something else, which meant early in the morning.

Perhaps you're fortunate enough to live in a situation where people support your writing, or at least they're not working against it; if so, then it's a matter of developing a routine whereby you find yourself notebook in hand or laptop open every day.  Some writers give themselves page or word goals (they're going to write two pages a day, or 2,000 words, something like that), while others (like me) set a time.  I write for thirty to forty minutes each morning during the academic year, longer in the summer but rarely much beyond sixty minutes.  For folks starting out, it can be as little as a half page or five minutes.

The important thing, if you're serious about writing, is to stop being your own largest obstacle.  Make the time and the psychic space to write ... do it for yourself, do it, as the Master said, for the sake of the art.

tedmorrissey.com
Weeping with an Ancient God
Men of Winter

Beware posting to a blog or Facebook

This summer my writer buddies Lisa Higgs, Tracy Zeman, Meagan Cass and I will be leading a series of workshops at The Pharmacy in Springfield, Illinois, and in the process of setting up the online components of the workshops it was underscored for me just how careful one must be about where and how one's writing appears online. As a writer, I've just taken for granted that everyone is aware of the need for caution, but it's occurred to me that maybe doing a post on the subject wouldn't be such a bad idea.

Here's the thing: Journal editors almost always want what's termed "First Rights" for your work, meaning that they want to be the ones to publish your story or poem or essay, etc., for the first time; then after it appears in their journal, the rights revert to you, the author, who can then do whatever you want with it -- see if an editor who does "reprints" will take it, or offer it to an anthology, or include it in a collection, or post it to your own blog or website. (Book publishing, by the way, is far more complicated, and contract language varies widely as to what authors can do with their own work after it's been taken by a publisher.)

Just using myself as an example (because it is, after all, all about me), later this year my publisher Punkin House will be releasing my book Weeping with an Ancient God, which is a novella and story collection. The novella will constitute about half the book, and it hasn't been published previously, except for the first chapter, which appeared under the title "Melvill in the Marquesas" in the online journal The Final Draft (now listed by Duotrope's Digest as deceased), in the fall of 2010. In truth, I mainly sought a journal publication for the opening chapter in hopes of sowing some interest in the novella, which was originally slated for publication in 2011.  The Final Draft, however, only left "Melvill in the Marquesas" up for about three weeks before replacing it with another fiction piece (by someone else); and -- now, frankly, this is strange -- its editor didn't archive previous editions. So the stand-alone chapter disappeared off the Internet within a few weeks of its publication; and since The Final Draft was only online, that means my piece was in essence gone for good, leaving next to no opportunity for sowing interest in the forthcoming novella and story collection.

Luckily, since The Final Draft only had First Rights, I could do what I wanted with "Melvill in the Marquesas," so I "reprinted" it at another blog that I write, called 12 Winters Blog, thus archiving the piece online myself. As far as the stories collected in Weeping with an Ancient God, they're a dozen short stories that have appeared in various literary journals, all of which only took First Rights, leaving me free to include them in this book, with the usual understanding of my acknowledging where they appeared originally.

It's typical to try to publish individual chapters of books before the book itself is published (for example, with my novel Men of Winter I'd published three of the chapters as stand-alone pieces before the book found a home at Punkin House).

Before the advent of web publishing, journal editors tended to discount publishing in a really, really small outlet as publishing at all.  In other words, if you had a poem or story that appeared in a newsletter or tiny in-house magazine of some sort (like a college-campus lit journal or student newspaper), then you could still submit it to larger circulation journals as an "unpublished" piece, thus legitimately offering their editors First Rights. I suppose this may still be true, but only if those tiny outlets are traditional paper publications.

However, the web and specifically blogging have cast First Rights into a whole new light. Because even the most obscure of blogs (like mine) could be read by thousands (millions, billions?), journal editors now consider posting to a blog as publishing and thus eliminating the piece from further publication consideration, other than in those rare journals that are willing to do reprints.

Moreover, I've recently seen in submission guidelines the specific reference to blogs and Facebook as examples of publishing that prohibit a piece from being considered by a journal. The mention of Facebook caught my attention in particular because the site and co-sponsor of this summer's workshop series, The Pharmacy (with the Vachel Lindsay Association being the other co-sponsor) has a Facebook group called The Pharmacy Literati whose members routinely share work on Facebook to get feedback from other members of the Literati -- and, really I suppose, anyone who happens upon it.

I've been mindful of all this while setting up the online components for our workshop. We want participants to be able to post their work electronically in order to get feedback from the workshop leaders and from each other, but I didn't want to use the public-access blog that I've set up to broadcast information about the workshop, just for the reasons I've outlined here. I didn't want a workshop participant to share a poem or short story, only to discover later that he or she couldn't then submit that piece for journal publication because it had appeared on the workshop blog.

I considered closing down public access to the blog once the workshop participants were set, but that didn't seem like a good idea for all sorts of reasons. So what I've decided to do is to establish a private chat site via Google Groups which will allow workshop participants to share their work for critique without its being simultaneously published on the blog. Of course, the terrain of online publishing shifts underfoot minute by minute, but I think this Groups site will accomplish what we want for the workshop without risking coincidental publication of participants' work.

Obviously, this post has mainly been focused on our workshop to take place here in Springfield, Illinois, but the issue of posting to a blog or Facebook as a type of publication, and thus eliminating the opportunity for granting First Rights elsewhere, is one that all writers should consider.

tedmorrissey.com
Men of Winter

Terminology I: literary versus genre writing

I'm cleverly titling this post "Terminology I" because I know it's not going to be exhaustive. I want to talk about some of the more common terms associated with shopping your work to potential publishers, but I know (gods willing) there will be future posts that deal with other terms. The first terms I should deal with are "literary" and "genre." For lack of a more useful definition, literary writing (either fiction, creative nonfiction, or poetry) is, well, serious; while "genre" writing describes work that fits into various categories like science fiction, western, romance, horror, and so forth.

The problem with these definitions is immediately obvious: they imply that genre writing isn't serious writing, but that's clearly not true. Science fiction writing, for example, is very often serious (leaving be the fact that serious itself is a slippery term). And, for that matter, literary fiction can involve science, it can be set in the West, it can involve romantic relationships, it can describe events that are horrific, and so forth.

Nevertheless, this blog will discuss placing literary writing -- just because that's the sort of writing I do, so that's what I'm familiar with in terms of trying to find outlets for it. But even if you're writing what you feel is genre material, I hope this blog can be helpful to you too. For one thing, there are issues that are universal when it comes to seeking places to publish your work. Also, there are many journals that embrace all kinds of writing, and they expressly state that they are wanting to read genre work as well as literary.

Another reason why this blog may be useful to you even if you're writing what seems to be "genre" pieces is that, while I say I write literary fiction, it doesn't always fit neatly into that category. Much of my work is historically based. My novel Men of Winter, for example, is set (maybe) in early twentieth-century Russia. My novella Weeping with an Ancient God, which I plan to bring out next year, is fictionalized biography based on the life of author Herman Melville and set in 1842 (I published an excerpt of the novella under the title "Melvill in the Marquesas" in The Final Draft). Another example is my short story "A Wintering Place", which is a sequel to Mary Shelley's gothic horror/science fiction novel Frankenstein, and the story appeared in the lit journal Eleven Eleven.

So, in short, I have experience placing pieces that blur the line between literary and genre.

That seems enough for now. Shortly we need to talk about where to search for outlets and how to determine fairly quickly if that outlet may be well suited to your style of writing.

tedmorrissey.com