I recently received an acceptance (from a magazine I won't name) after having my story short-listed for awhile. The acceptance said that they would be sending along some notes on the manuscript for me to go over before publication.
When the story arrived with their notes, I felt like I was given a failing grade in junior high. All of these notes, redactions, reasons why things didn't work. I don't mind saying that the first thing that kicked in for me was the writer's ego. Frankly, I wanted to just flat out say no. Maybe it has just been a long time since my college workshop days, a long time since I've had peers workshop my stuff at all. Maybe it is because so many literary magazine/site editors these days are simply "yes or no" folks and I very rarely am asked for revisions. Whatever the reason, I am positive that much of the blame rests on me. But my first reaction was more towards the flight end of the fight vs... internal debate.
And then I sat down, printed out both versions (yeah, I still prefer paper to screen if I want to actually think about what I'm reading...) and read them together. And you know what? The editor was right. What they proposed made the piece a lot leaner and meaner. There were less needless tangents, less extraneous words. The story got to the point and stuck there. It was much stronger for their "interference." The editor was absolutely right.
What I'm unsure of still, however... While the piece is stronger, I do feel in a way that my "voice" or style was edited out of it to a point. I know that this has been discussed at length by people so much more well-spoken than I, but it's definitely something playing on my mind. Are we (the collective we, though I suppose I am particularly referring here to the Western We of the literary community) editing the writer out of the work? I don't suppose I'm one to talk since I regularly go on tirades against strangely-denoted dialogue in fiction, but I wonder how much of their individual style most writers are willing to let go of in a particular piece in order to see to it that it actually ends up in a form that might be read.
(I will say as an aside that I did suggest a couple of changes that I felt reintroduced some elements of the style I had in the story initially and the editor was happy to work with me. This is definitely not a tirade against this particular editor at all - I am quite happy to have worked with them and wish that I had this sort of dialogue with more editors, honestly.)
At any rate, it's a question that is keeping me occupied lately. I would love to hear thoughts in the comments section if anyone feels the spirit move them.
In other publishing news, I received my contributor's copy of Firewords Quarterly today and it is an absolutely beautiful little perfect bound volume. I definitely recommend checking them out at firewords.co.uk and incidentally, the editor suggested a change to the poem that appeared in this issue that absolutely worked and made it stronger - and made it even more authentically match up to what I would consider as my "voice." So there you go, I suppose.
Friday, August 22, 2014
Wednesday, August 6, 2014
A Tale of Two C.C.'s
So, here I am, trying to (re)break into the print world. Now, typically, I would go off on a tangent here about how lonely the publishing world is. But is it possible that there are two of me?
Not exactly, it turns out, but I was surprised to find another C.C. Russell out there a couple of weeks ago. I was bing-ing my name (googling is a much better verb, but I'm a cheapskate and I like getting gift cards for doing searches, so I stick to Bing) as any vain author would do to see if my recent story publications were out there yet. I found that if you don't modify the search (I usually search for C.C. Russell poetry or C.C. Russell fiction or somesuch), the first entry that pops up is:
C.C. Russell, author of Beautifully Broken
Hmmm. Well, while that sounds a bit like a title I would have used in the 90's (Who am I kidding? I'd probably still use it...), I didn't write it. But... but... OK, I admit - as silly as it sounds, it was a little bit of a crushing moment. Ever since I started using C.C. as my pen name in '92 (Thanks, Jen.), I've been looking forward to seeing just that: C.C. Russell, Author of... Honestly, it kind of sucked to have it be someone else (absolutely no offense to that other C.C. Russell out there - kudos to you.) and it made me sort of have an existential "name" moment. Should I give up on the initials and just go by Craig? Come up with a different pen name entirely? Certainly, I'm at a point of fame (or lack thereof) that any options are really possible. While I've published poetry and stories here and there for a couple of decades (Holy crap, I'm old), it has been many years since my last chapbook was availably for anyone to purchase.
I ended up really considering the whys of C.C. I started out using it because it sounded more "writerly" to me, as silly and basic as that is. Quickly, though, it became more. As I took gender studies classes and read books like Jeanette Winterson's amazing Written on the Body, I became more and more interested in gender as an author and how your characters are seen based on the gender that readers attribute to the author of a piece. I enjoyed writing stories with female narrators or with characters of an indeterminate gender. Leaving my name genderless, I felt, brought less "baggage" to those characters and stories. (It was also interesting to see what editors and other writers who first met me through my words expected me to be.) It did create a couple of awkward moments (I was invited to contribute to a couple of women's writing anthologies in the mid to late '90s, which I definitely took as a compliment), and I never seemed comfortable with people calling me "C.C." in person. It almost created a second identity for me and I have found that to be both useful and off-putting at times.
I strongly considered dumping C.C. and going less formal. Craig Thompson and his most-incredible graphic novel Blankets taught me that it's ok to write under that name, after all. But in the end, I've decided that I'm sticking with it, keeping the pen name. Hopefully, there's room for two C.C. Russells in the author world.
Not exactly, it turns out, but I was surprised to find another C.C. Russell out there a couple of weeks ago. I was bing-ing my name (googling is a much better verb, but I'm a cheapskate and I like getting gift cards for doing searches, so I stick to Bing) as any vain author would do to see if my recent story publications were out there yet. I found that if you don't modify the search (I usually search for C.C. Russell poetry or C.C. Russell fiction or somesuch), the first entry that pops up is:
C.C. Russell, author of Beautifully Broken
Hmmm. Well, while that sounds a bit like a title I would have used in the 90's (Who am I kidding? I'd probably still use it...), I didn't write it. But... but... OK, I admit - as silly as it sounds, it was a little bit of a crushing moment. Ever since I started using C.C. as my pen name in '92 (Thanks, Jen.), I've been looking forward to seeing just that: C.C. Russell, Author of... Honestly, it kind of sucked to have it be someone else (absolutely no offense to that other C.C. Russell out there - kudos to you.) and it made me sort of have an existential "name" moment. Should I give up on the initials and just go by Craig? Come up with a different pen name entirely? Certainly, I'm at a point of fame (or lack thereof) that any options are really possible. While I've published poetry and stories here and there for a couple of decades (Holy crap, I'm old), it has been many years since my last chapbook was availably for anyone to purchase.
I ended up really considering the whys of C.C. I started out using it because it sounded more "writerly" to me, as silly and basic as that is. Quickly, though, it became more. As I took gender studies classes and read books like Jeanette Winterson's amazing Written on the Body, I became more and more interested in gender as an author and how your characters are seen based on the gender that readers attribute to the author of a piece. I enjoyed writing stories with female narrators or with characters of an indeterminate gender. Leaving my name genderless, I felt, brought less "baggage" to those characters and stories. (It was also interesting to see what editors and other writers who first met me through my words expected me to be.) It did create a couple of awkward moments (I was invited to contribute to a couple of women's writing anthologies in the mid to late '90s, which I definitely took as a compliment), and I never seemed comfortable with people calling me "C.C." in person. It almost created a second identity for me and I have found that to be both useful and off-putting at times.
I strongly considered dumping C.C. and going less formal. Craig Thompson and his most-incredible graphic novel Blankets taught me that it's ok to write under that name, after all. But in the end, I've decided that I'm sticking with it, keeping the pen name. Hopefully, there's room for two C.C. Russells in the author world.
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