Goodbye to 'The Big Man'

Oddly, and rather ashamedly, I only heard the news of the death of Clarence Clemons yesterday. How I managed to avoid this in such a media saturated world is beyond me. Needless to say, it came as a massive shock, something I'm still reeling from this morning.

There's nothing I can say that would add to the many obituaries already posted, other than to mention the transformative effect the E-Street Band's music had on me as a teenager growing up in a little Lincolnshire town once voted the most boring town in England. On the glorious evening when I first heard the Springsteen mix-tape a school mate had recorded for me I was transported to sultry New York evenings and sun drenched New Jersey boardwalks. It woke me up to a wider world and gave me purpose. I started to write my own songs and those, over many years, became stories and eventually novels...

And so I played the 'Born to Run' album in the car this morning. My four year old son and two year old daughter were soon swaying and clapping along to the music, my daughter making a serious rock musician face which was joyous really and provided some perspective. Clarence has gone but the music will remain and it will fourish wherever people hear it.

Writers and Submissions

As a writer of two published novels and numerous short stories I often field the question ‘how do I get published?’ Juggling my time between writing and teaching Creative Writing I am constantly confronted with really promising pieces of fiction. Many of my students have aspirations to be published writers. Sadly, this aspiration does not often result in publication. Many potential writers either never send their work out (for fear of it being rejected or because the next piece is going to be better) or give up after their first rejection because the pain was too much and it confirmed all of their fears.

My advice to unpublished writers is always the same. Stick at it! Don’t take ‘no’ for an answer. If your writing is good enough it will find a home. And I firmly believe that. I have to.

I’ve been writing a lot of short fiction of late. I have aspirations. I have markets I want to crack. I’ve sent three stories to Black Static this year and received three rejections. My campaign plan is to keep on sending stuff until I write a story that the editor can’t reject. When I finish a story I select a market (duotrope.com and ralan.com are my initial starting points. If you haven’t been to these sites before, now’s the time…) and I get the work sent. I expect to receive a rejection. That way, when I receive an acceptance, it is all the more rewarding, but in most cases I get the rejection I expected. Sometimes I’ll take another look at that story, give it another draft, baulk at something I should have noticed earlier, change the opening line, but often I won’t do that because the story is fine as it is. What I do then is ‘get straight back on the bike’, send the thing out again to another potential market. I’ve had stories rejected fifteen times and then accepted. The same happened with my novels.

I always tell a writer to imagine themselves as an editor of a magazine, sifting through submissions looking for a story they want to publish. In that scenario, wouldn’t we all select different stories? That doesn’t mean that everything we’d reject is awful, just that it isn’t what we’re looking for.

A writer must be tenacious in the submissions game. Be prepared to spend long hours researching potential markets, reading publications, trawling through submissions and formatting guidelines. It’s probably true that a writer needs to spend as much time on this process as writing itself…

A writer must have the determination of a boxer to get up off the canvas and take another hit because eventually, if you do that enough times, you are going to put the other guy on the floor.

What is it that Seneca said?

‘Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.’

And what did I read the other day?

'It's no use waiting for your ship to come in if you haven't sent one out'

...or something like that!

It would be interesting to get a word from Rob Redman, editor of The Fiction Desk (who recently published one of my short stories, A Covering of Leaves) on how he approaches the submissions process, how he selects stories and why he rejects others. How much of it is down to personal taste, the other stories already selected, the types of stories he sees too often etc? What other factors might influence an editor's decision?