Specificity; or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Just Keep Writing

Among the aspects of short story writing that I never appreciate until it’s slightly too late are the pros and cons of writing to specific markets and briefs. I don’t just mean the different styles of different magazines: that’s a far more subjective and hard to gauge thing, in my experience, as what I might consider to be ‘dark’ or ‘character-driven’ writing may simply not match the expectations of the editor who ends up reading it. In those cases I submit and see what sticks. Largely it doesn’t, but give it time.

No: I mean the specific markets; the themed anthologies, the hyper-exact needs of very select publications. The need, say, for a sci-fi story that’s specifically about trains, or that’s set in our world within the next century of space exploration, or even in the specific setting of an upcoming RPG. Most of the time, when I see these calls for submissions, I simply can’t fulfil these briefs. I either don’t have a story that fits the bill, or I don’t have the time to write one to the order. I do my best to work on one project at a time, so that I actually get things finished (with my apologies to multiple rambling shorts that languish, awaiting their endings) and usable – so to that end, especially when, say, finishing the redraft of a trilogy conclusion, I do my best not to stop what I’m doing and chase a different narrative altogether.

But sometimes the concept grabs me. Sometimes I see a theme and the ideas just blossom, unlooked-for, in my mind. Sometimes – as actually happened twice towards the end of last year – I see a themed call and just sprint for the keyboard, and several hours later I realise that I’ve skipped lunch, should really have responded to all those work emails already, and have a fully-formed short story in front of me, tailor-written to that shining, inspiring theme. Those are good days. Those are among the days when writing feels that little bit like magic.

So far, this may sound very much like a pro, not a con. The con, however, comes later. The con comes long after I’ve submitted the story, when I actually receive… a rejection. A rejection for a story tailor-written to that highly specific brief. A story that, without that specific brief behind it, suddenly doesn’t seem to fit anywhere at all.

The thought that comes is, of course, what the hell do I do with this now? Because it’s days of work seemingly down the drain, seemingly now completely pointless. Who else is going to read this story, if not the people it was specifically written for?

Can you tell this happened to me recently yet? It did. It’s annoying. It’s frustrating. It’s depressing. But, as I remind myself through the very process of typing this post, it is not the end. Because even if I have to do a little filing-off of, say, RPG-specific serial numbers and terms, the story that I’ve written is still good.

I wrote a story for an anthology themed around future wetware, weird and wonderful neuro- and body-technology. It got rejected from that call. I sat on it for a little while, then submitted it again. That story was Blank Slates, published in Shoreline of Infinity. A few years later I entered the Jim Baen Memorial story contest with a piece of what I thought was seriously good near-future sci-fi… and though I did make the first cut I got rejected. Now Great Martian Railways is in Analog.

Even if it seems too specific, even if it misses that shining, perfect market, what you’ve written is still good. You might need to tweak it, you might need to adjust or even change whole sections, but if you’ve written something you think is worth submitting to a call, then there is something good in there, even if it’s buried under what now seems pointlessly targeted. Edit it, sit on it, think about it, change it. But never give up on a good bit of writing.

So I’ve filed off those serial numbers, and tried again. Because I reckon this is a good bit of storytelling, and somewhere out there is somebody who’ll agree with me. Probably.