A Giraffe Among Horses

How to be publishable

Dear Sonal,

How do I make my writing more publishable?

I have done an MFA in an effort to become a successful writer, but my program at the time was not a kind place for me. The things I wanted to write about, talk about, think about weren’t what everyone else did. They all found my work difficult to understand, and there was so much criticism.

But everyone else has been publishing, and I have not. Everyone else is accepted, and I am not.

My relationship with writing has been strained, but I want to figure out, how do I become a successful writer? Not just in the ‘oh, this is very personally fulfilling sense’ but in a ‘books I have written on the shelves for sale’ way? I know I can write, but how do I succeed?

Sincerely,
Unacceptable Writer

Dear Unacceptable Writer,

To paraphrase the saying, “Hell is other writers.”

Oh, I know. Writing community is important. But we aren’t talking about your community right now, even if they are the writers who have been around you recently. These are other writers, not your community, but you know them. You’ve read their work, and it’s…. fine. Not terrible, but not amazing either. So you cannot for the life of you understand why they are getting all the conventional markers of success checked off, the things you haven’t yet acheived. Publications. Agents. Maybe even awards. You just don’t get it.

And so you conclude, the problem must be you. Your writing. There’s something about it that’s just wrong. You like it, but for everyone else, it’s somehow too weird. Too experimental. Not literary enough. Doesn’t appeal to white dudes enough. You don’t quite know what’s wrong, but clearly it’s something, and no matter what you do to take in everyone else’s feedback and improve the story, you’re getting no where with it.

Because how are you going to make a career out of being a writer if you cannot get a damn story published? How do you make this your life’s work, if no one wants to read it? You’re willing to make compromises in what you write if it will get you where you want to go, but it’s not going anywhere.

Listen to me, my dear Unacceptable Writer. I understand why you believe the problem is you, but it’s not you. You can’t be acceptable when you are exceptional.

Because you are, in fact, exceptional. (This is the part where you scoff because you don’t believe me. Scoff away.)

I haven’t read your work, but if you’ve been through an MFA program, I know you can write. Oh sure, maybe there’s a craft thing or two you need to look at a little more, but you can put a sentence together, and then revise it into a better sentence. You know about making characters and painting scenes and keeping a story moving. You have the tools.

And if everyone in that MFA program, over and over again, found your work hard to understand, or were simply uninterested in the things you were interested in, I know you know who you are as a writer. You know what you want to put on the page. You’ve stuck to that through the program—whatever it is, it’s a powerful thing for you that you need to explore. Even if no one around you gets it.

It’s just that the frustration of putting your heart and soul on the page only for everyone around you to say “huh?” over and over again has gotten to you. You’re thinking that everyone can’t be wrong and surely they must have some good advice for you. But the solution is not to put something else on the page. It’s to change who is around you.

Publication is a matter of four things: Taste, Timing, Talent and Tenacity. (What can I say, I love alliteration.) You have talent—you can craft. You have tenacity—you keep trying despite everyone around you saying “I don’t get it.”

The difficulty you have is with taste, specifically, that you are writing among people who do not appreciate yours. And this is why your writing confuses them, while their writing is simply “meh” to you. You are a giraffe among horses.

You can’t sell a giraffe to people who want to buy horses. They have no idea what to do with you. If they have suggestions for you, it would be to try changing to something that looks more horse-like and see if that helps. But you can’t shrink yourself into something you are not.

You need to go out there and find someone who loves giraffes.

They’re out there. Maybe not as many of them as people who want horses. But you can find them. Keep sending work out. Find other giraffes and see where they hang out. Who loves them? You do, certainly. Their existence is part of why you are a giraffe too. Perhaps you think you couldn’t possibly be as beautiful and as special a giraffe as they are. But they were once a wobbly baby giraffe like you.

Now you may be thinking, okay great, I will embrace my giraffeness, I will stretch out my neck and gaze proudly over the savanna, but… how does a giraffe make a living in a world that wants horses?

Some of that is a question of timing. Sometimes the world is ready to embrace a giraffe. You’ve seen that happen before… that inventive and experimental book that somehow managed to defy all expectations and succeed wildly. Sometimes, a giraffe gallops so beautifully that people realize that this is what they really wanted from a horse.

(Sometimes a metaphor is stretched beyond all recognition, Sonal, give it a rest already.)

But truthfully, conventional success in writing is not something we have a lot of control over.

All we can do is keep writing, and keep exploring the wild and beautiful places in the world where a giraffe can be at home, and write about them too. We can apply for grants and residencies and teach and work a day job, and somehow put an art-centred life together, at least in pieces, in fits and starts, in stumbles and sprints.

And during those times that we fall, we might still wonder, wouldn’t it be so much easier to just be a horse?

But there’s no point trying to be what we are not. What would be the point of a life with writing at its centre, if we can’t write in our own voice and our own truth and put our own heart and soul onto the page?

Your relationship with writing is going to be fine, Unacceptable Writer. It’s simply suffering from the strain of not feeling able to be itself. Your success does not lie in trying to beat out everyone else running the same race, but in exploring the treetops and showing the world what only you can see. What can giraffes tell us about giraffe-life that horses completely ignore? What is it like to be a giraffe in a horses’ world? How would the world be different if it were made for giraffes?

And then who knows? There’s a funny thing that happens when we are our truest selves on the page: we connect to more people.

Who knows? One day you may find a bunch of horses stretching out their necks and trying to be more like you.

(Meanwhile, enjoy these fun facts about giraffes.)