Writing for The Market

I sometimes decide, in the course of writing, that an emerging story is turning out to be the sort of story that such and such a publisher might like. That’s fine as long as I like it too.

In the early years of Flame Tree, I thought my views must be pretty much aligned with their senior editor. I have been known, as a result, to write or edit with Flame Tree in mind. I managed five Flame Tree anthologies, and would effectively have disqualified myself from WotF on Flame Tree alone, had I not also been securing a number of other pro publications at the same time, including three with AE. However, latterly, Flame Tree have been bringing in outside editors, so that now I can’t sell them a story to save my life.

This is not the place to digress into politics, but I did once stand for parliament, and I still believe that I stand more or where I always did, it’s just that no political party stands there any more. Not only could I not stand for election these days, I can scarcely find anyone to vote for.

It is always possible that I have taken to writing rubbish and lost the knack that I once had. But it is more likely, I feel, that fashion and conformism are enjoying a popularity boom. I sometimes wonder whether there is a correlation with the number of students taking the sort of creative writing courses that produce the opposite of creative writing.

I don’t know, because I never took a creative writing course, but I do know that in my days at Oxford, university professors would never have clubbed together to pronounce a public “excommunication” of a colleague for “heresy” in the way they did not long ago.

I rather fear that the frontier between education and indoctrination was crossed a long time ago. When I taught philosophy, I always said that I was not concerned with what my students concluded, but with how they concluded it. If they came to me with prejudices and went away with a capacity for reasoned justification, I used to consider my job done.

I’m sorry, but I have no wish to write more of the fashionable stuff that is already churned out to excess. And luckily, I can eat without having to do so. I acknowledge that this makes me fortunate.

I remember that Monet was reduced to painting still more water lilies so he could swap them for a car service, while Van Gogh only ever sold one painting during his lifetime. And yes, I have made the pilgrimage to Arles.