When Your Writing Just Doesn't Fit

I feel like I've been writing fiction for a long time. Not counting that time when I went to the lake with my grandparents and started working on a mystery novel when I was all of nine or ten, I've been concentrating on writing fiction for the last six or eight years. I would take my Underwood portable typewriter with me when I worked at the factory. Got some strange looks from folks, as I'm sure you can imagine. The life of a writer is a perfect fit for my personality and who I feel like I am.

But sometimes stories come out of me that I don't know what to do with.

The story that won me Editor's Choice at Relief Journal is still a mystery to me. I don't know where that story came from. I read it again when I got that issue in the mail and although I recognized the words I had written, in some ways it didn't feel like it was mine. At that point, it really wasn't. It had grown up and gone out into the big, bad world on its own. It had become its own "thing," wholly separate from its creator.
I wrote a story the other day and had planned to submit it to a contest. I let a few trusted readers look at it, though, and they confirmed my own suspicions: it's not really a literary story. It's pretty conventional—conventional narration, conventional dialogue, conventional emotional arc… More of a mass-market piece than a "literary" work. I know, labels shouldn't really matter. "Literary" is just an arbitrary adjective to describe work that tries (whether it succeeds or not isn't so much the issue) to go beyond the conventional and explore areas of human experience in new (and sometimes fresh) ways. This story doesn't really do that. It's just a plain-ol' short story.

I wrestle violently with the ogre of wanting to be A Writer That Matters. I set for myself a lifetime goal: to have something I've written be anthologized in a college textbook. It's an ambitious goal; I look through the authors that have stories in the various literary anthologies I have collected over the past several years and I doubt whether I have what it takes to play in that league.

But maybe that's short-sighted. I really would like to make a full-time living as a fiction writer so I can get out of web development entirely. Most of the writers in those anthologies, while respected for their craft, are not John Grishams. They probably have no desire to be. I think there's a lot to be said for focussing on the purity of your art at the expense of commercial viability. But somewhere, there's a tight-rope to walk. Somewhere, there's a line you spend time jumping back and forth across so you can be respected for your art while allowing yourself to be commercially viable so you can continue to do your art.

One of the things I've considered doing, in addition to writing short stories and novels, is to get into writing screenplays. A couple screenplays could give me the income I need to keep writing the more "artistic" works. I've been toying with the idea of writing a screenplay for quite a long time. I think it fits my personality very well because screenplays are a shorter, more concentrated form of story-telling. My writing also tends to be very visual. I doubt I would have a lot trouble transitioning the same skills I've learned writing fiction to the more visual medium of film-making. It's also a market that doesn't have as bleak an outlook as that of fiction in print.

At any rate, I'm not giving up on this latest short story. I'm a little disappointed in myself that it's not more "literary" than it is, but I feel like it's a story that has some mass-market potential because it's much more accessible than a lot of stuff I've written lately.

If nothing else, I'll just have to say to myself: "you did the best you could, so be happy with that."

Unfortunately, I rarely am.