What's Good For Me Is Good For You

(or maybe not)

A few weeks ago, on a monosyllabic social media platform which will one day be the stuff of half-remembered legends, a writer (let us call them Funes) posted about publishing a lot of pieces in literary journals this year. Somewhere around fifty. Another writer (I will call them Treviranus) saw this post, and disapproved. In fact, Treviranus argued that fifty publications was too much even for most careers, never mind years. Anyone publishing this much, this fast, must be putting out — and here, let us agree that Treviranus might have chosen their words a little better — slop.

In these hard times, it’s nice to have a good old fashioned social media spat of high emotions and low stakes. Despite all the people who had loudly quit the platform, there were still enough writers around to argue about how one should publish, if it matters how one publishes, and if any other writer should have opinions about it. A lot of people re-tweeted and quote-tweeted and sub-tweeted and did the thing where you screenshot someone’s tweet so that they can’t erase their wrongdoing. Tweets were deleted. Account were locked down.

Treviranus did have a bit of a point in one respect. Not all publications are of equal value to a writer’s career. A piece in a single high prestige journal can secure more future opportunities than a handful of poems or stories or essays in less prominent outlets. It is often worth taking the time to polish a literary work and give it the best chance it has of gaining maximum attention, pay, or prestige, depending on what currency is most valuable to you.

Early in my scholarly career, I struggled with the question of whether to take advantage of easy publication opportunities (say, a conference proceedings) or to revise the same work into a more ambitious essay and send it to a top-shelf journal. It wasn’t always easy. The competitive journals often had long wait times — a year was not unusual — and in most cases the answer was no. When searching for a job, or, later, trying to build up enough of a publication record for tenure, sending an essay to a journal like that can feel like gambling. So I understood the principle.

But here is where Treviranus was wrong. Literary journals and magazines also have long wait times, if they ever get back to you. In purely mechanical terms, it might seem like a good strategy to polish one short story or poem or essay for ages, to send it to the New Yorker or Granta, wait for half a year, then send to another top place when it’s rejected, and so on down the line. I suspect this works very well for some people. But some writers need the experience of publishing in order to keep their creative juices flowing. Also, some writers need to write a lot of different pieces in order to write well, rather investing a lot of time into revision. For those kinds of writers, the pressure to make one perfect gem can be inhibiting.

It is easy to give advice. It’s even pleasurable to give advice. “I’ve done this thing successfully, let me tell you how to do it.” It can be a gift, and these days, a viable commercial product. But giving advice on how to have a creative life is tricky. People work in such different ways, and they also do so under vastly different material circumstances. The artist with a full time job or with care responsibilities simply cannot work the same way as the artist who is supported. Some writers work through careful planning, and some work instinctively — and some adapt, as I do, the strategy to the project.

Then there’s the fact that the same artist might find that what worked five years ago no longer works today. Once upon a time, I made time for non-academic writing by waiting until my family was asleep on a Saturday night, and hunkering down at my computer for hours with a supply of Ritter sport, gummy bears, exactly one glass of wine, and cold, cold Coca Cola. Now, everything about this scenario strikes me as horrible, and would destroy my week.

We need to be willing to adapt our creative strategies to suit our lives, our changing bodies, our duties and pressures, and the needs of each particular project. This is why the only good advice I’ve ever heard about writing was: “try lots of things and pay attention to what works for you.” But I want to go further — I also think we need to understand that submitting work and publishing it is part of the creative process, not simply something that happens once it’s done. For one thing, editors and agents and other readers also get their hands into the work. But also because for many writers, the one single most precious resource they have, or need to have, is confidence.

Treviranus was right about the value of trying for high profile publications, but wrong in the larger sense of what it takes to sustain a writing life. The most important skill a writer has to cultivate is the ability to keep coming back to a blank page or screen and begin the process of building something out of words. Most of the time, no one has asked for those words. No one is waiting at the door, reading glasses in one hand and a wad of bills in the other, begging for those words. The masses are not writing to the manager of their local bookshop demanding to find those words on the display table. So what strange alchemy of compulsion and faith can bring a person — like Funes, like me, maybe like you — to work at this unnecessary craft? Whatever the recipe, it’s worth holding on to.

Thank you for reading. And if you’ve read this far, I’d love to hear how your creative or intellectual process has changed over the years.

Irina

Updates

• I’ve contributed an “annotation” to this month’s Harper’s Magazine. The topic: the trove of newly decrypted letters by Mary, Queen of Scots.

• Mary Wellesley and I have a new podcast at the London Review of Books called “Medieval LOLs.” It’s short and free and sometimes funny (I like to think). Listen to our episodes on Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale, Latin cussing, Old English riddles, and French fabliaux.

• I have a poem called “Dionysus at 3 p.m.” in the latest issue of the Southwest Review.

• Four new columns are up at the Times Literary Supplement: on medieval stress-busting, the pain of watching other people suffer, crossword puzzles, and terrible beauty.

• I wrote about my favourite fictional academic for Times Higher Education. He’s Russian, he’s bald, and he just wants to throw a party.