The dangers of research

One of the pieces of advice all writers get is that, if we want to be published, we have to study the market.  The thing is, when I do that, I come away from the exercise thoroughly depressed.

I got into SF in the 1980s.  I fell in love with the stories of Anne McCaffrey, Mary Gentle, Joan D.Vinge, CJ Cherryh.  I loved Anne McCaffrey's straightforward storytelling style, the richness of her invention of Pern and its people.  I adored Joan Vinge's The Snow Queen.  I turned green-eyed with envy over the incredibly detailed descriptions of life on board CJ Cherryh's The Pride of Chanur, and the hyper-real portrayal of the ship's operating procedures,

Recently I decided to tackle the short story market, and came up against the present-day magazine world.  And here's where I started to despair.  Call me old-fashioned, but I do like my stories to have a beginning, middle, and end.  And I want something to change between the start and end of the story.   I've lost track of the number of published pieces I've read recently that don't follow those basic rules, that aren't really stories.  The beginning never seems to change into a middle, and in some cases there wasn't even an end.  I was left thinking "is that it?" when the story ended.  They're character studies, or little vignettes, the sort of thing a novelist might write while discovering their story or getting to know their characters.  They certainly aren't story in their own right.

So now I have a dilemma.  Should I try to write like this just to get published?  I don't really want to. I like my stories to have a strong narrative drive, and for something to change in them. For me, it's not enough to show a weird planet or weird culture and say "look at this!"  I want to know why you want me to look at it.  What message does that scene contain?

For me, writing has to do something.  It has to make a point, or explore a theme.  So I won't be writing  vignettes any time soon.  And I know that some of my themes are intriguing magazine editors, because they're telling me so in their feedback.  So I'll continue to write stories with a beginning, middle and end, exploring ideas I feel passionately about.  Because that's who I am as a writer, and I'm not prepared to change that.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com