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Not Enough Hints For Mrs. Golightly
by Alex Keegan
(Follow-up to Disease of Competence)
I recently picked up a second prize in a magazine competition, then in
the issue announcing the winners I read from a subscriber: "Dee, A Dancer
stood head and shoulders above the other competition entries. It's the
only time I have ever been moved to give nine out of ten for a story."
PS, this is neither about my writing or my story...
Another reviewer wrote: "Dee, A Dancer gets under our moral
body-armour and imparts an unacceptable feeling which robs our black-
and-white judgment of absolute certainty...sensitive writing. A third
reviewer wrote "I like the neutral tone to convey powerful stuff,"
another thought Dee was the most enjoyable story, but awarded marks to
another for originality. Then a fifth reader said, despite awarding
top marks: "the husband doesn't know what's wrong, fair enough, but I was
frustrated that he, the writer, couldn't have dropped more hints that the
reader could make sense of".
Yet, to others "Dee, A Dancer was insubstantial."
"Depressing and self-conscious" and another "didn't understand the
end. Was it only this reader or did others think that the last
paragraph had slipped in from another story?" And third critic said "Dee,
A Dancer tried confusedly and unconvincingly to relate."
If I ever actually understand that last sentence, I promise to
let you know, but ignoring that, the whole experience leads me to wonder
and to worry about the state of much of the short-story market. I have
talked in the past about the "disease of competence" and at least three
editors have confided in me that they daren't "push it too far", that
they often dare not print material which taxes the reader at all. They
tell me wanting quality is all very fine, but not at the expense of a
readership. Though I might pretend to understand this, what this
eventually means is that the safer (and often lack-luster) "decent"
stories, find their way into the magazines, competitions are often won by
these safe and easy (but smoother than the others) stories, and the
readers think this is the norm, the top end of the mid-quality literary
canon. Beginners imagine these are the story types to aspire too. The
result? More blandness, and yet more authors dropping in hints that the
character wouldn't know (terrible art, but we must keep Mrs Freda
Golightly of Chiswick happy. She votes!)
Alice Munro would struggle, Borges would be laughed out of the room,
Carver would be dismissed probably because he was "too thin".
My question is, where, below the top five-six American
magazines, and the few dozen magazines based on American University
campuses does a writer go if she wants to push beyond the easy-to-swallow
general fiction that is often seen in many of the small British
magazines?
I can take three of my stories, one near my best quality, rich and
literary, a second, lighter, less ambitious, and a third a
lightweight, relative failure. If I enter these three in a
competition I can predict the outcome. The best flops, the mid-range is
short-listed and the make-weight gets a prize! This hasn't happened just
once, it's happened maybe five, six a dozen times. Why?
One why is "readers". Many volunteer readers for
competitions, those who narrow down four thousand entries to a more
manageable couple of hundred stories, have been raised on the mid-range
"easy-to-swallow" magazines I've already mentioned. Many are writers or
aspiring themselves. Often, I think, they choose, not the best work, not
the most enjoyable, but the best works that they could imagine themselves
writing. That is, if it's tough, if it's something currently that bit of
an extra reach for them, it's dismissed as "arti-farty" or "intellectual
junk" or perhaps "self-conscious" or "MFA stuff".
The result? Even if the final judge is Saul Bellow, what he gets to see
are those stories where we've put in the crude make-it-easy-for-Freda
bits, removed a few allusions, kept it under the glass ceiling. The poor
judge gets two-hundred plain vanilla me-too stories, stories that (ask
any judge) he can't remember a month later.
But does Ray Carver's "A Few Good Things" get forgotten? Do people
forget the baby in "The Shawl" or the abortion scene in "Differently,"
the fisherman's boots in "The Ledge"?
I know the owners of magazines have a terrible dilemma, but doesn't
something need to be done? Reader, ask yourself. Think of the copies of
little magazines you have on your shelf, or the ezines you've read. Now
close your eyes. What stories do you remember? Which ones got under your
moral radar, which ones subverted you, changed you, even if only for a
while. Can you remember ANY of the stories?
Someone once said, "Be one per-cent different and they call you a
genius, be two-percent different they call you mad; five per-cent
different and they kill you."
The problem with much of the short-story market, particularly the
competition-driven market is "different" never means "tougher",
different never means asking the reader to think, to move through
emotional application, into a greater realization, change. Different
means, the same plus a one-liner, what I can do, with a twist.
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**British Crime and Literary Fiction Author Alex Keegan is
publisher and editor of the British literary magazine, Seventh Quark. He is creator of the five Caz Flood novels: Cuckoo
(Headline Books, St. Martin's Press), Vulture, Kingfisher,
Razorbill (Headline Books) and A Wild Justice (Piatkus Books)
which all feature feisty female private investigator Catherine "Caz" Flood.
Cuckoo was published in the U.S. by St Martin's Press, and
was nominated for an Anthony Award as best first novel. His prize-winning short stories have been featured in
numerous publications including Mystery and Manners, BBC Radio 4,
Blue Moon Review, Southern Ocean Review, and The Atlantic. He is a Contributing Editor for
The Internet Writing Journal. You may click here to
see all of Alex Keegan's available books on Amazon.co.uk. He may be reached by email at alex.keegan@btclick.com. His website can be found at
alexkeegan.com and his blog can be found here.
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