SHOULD YOU CONSIDER SLANTING YOUR
FICTION TO SPECIFIC MARKETS, THE WAY
THE NONFICTION WRITERS DO?
November 1988
Just when do you start marketing your story? To what extent is a piece of fiction affected by where you plan to submit it?
These questions came up for me while writing a couple of short stories. In each, considerations arose that had to do with more than pure literary artistry. I found myself thinking not only about producing the best possible story, but also of what I would do with the story after I’d written it, and how to so write the piece as to facilitate its sale.
Now if you, Gentle Reader, are primarily a writer of magazine nonfiction, you’ll probably greet the last paragraph with a yawn and a big “So what?” Magazine articles are almost always slanted, their style and substance deliberately tailored to meet the needs of a specific targeted publication. Most are written to order, a query letter has led to a firm assignment to write the piece or at the least an invitation to proceed on spec. One of the chief reasons for querying nonfiction editors is so that one can feel free to slant an approved piece strongly in the direction of the editor who has approved it. Having secured this approval, the writer can produce a piece neither longer nor shorter than the editor would prefer, taking an approach the editor favors, and matching the tone and style and thematic approach of the magazine itself. If the piece doesn’t work out, if the editor winds up rejecting it, the author might indeed rewrite it substantially before submitting it elsewhere, with the aim of reslanting it for a new prospective buyer.
As fiction writers, we like to think we are above this sort of thing. Our stories are works of art entire unto themselves. Not that we’re ivory tower airheads; once we’ve written the stories our way, we take a hard line on reality when it comes to marketing them. But the marketing is the cart, and we take care not to place it before the horse. First we write, and then we market.
Or do we?
Let’s get specific. The first of my two stories is a whimsical yarn about a grown man who sleeps with a teddy bear. I got the idea for the story a few months back when I found myself in bed with just such an animal for reasons I don’t care to go into just now. (I have, let it be said, shared similar quarters with less appropriate companions in my day, so I make no apologies for this latest instance.) At the time I knew no more about the story than my one-sentence description conveys, so I let it brew for a while, until I felt ready to write it.
Now I was unquestionably willing to write the story for its own sake. If you’re not, you really shouldn’t be writing short stories. The paying market is so small, the rates of payment so low, and the odds against publication so high, that the entire occupation is commercially indefensible. The only way to make the business of short-story writing cost-effective is to rechannel your energies elsewhere.
All this notwithstanding, I did not even sit down to the typewriter without considering where I might place my as-yet-unwritten story. I took it pretty much for granted that the first publisher to see the story would be Playboy. I have sold there, and the magazine’s fiction editor, Alice Turner, has long been enthusiastic about my work. Moreover, Playboy is at the top in terms of payment and prestige. Even if my story should turn out to be a very unlikely bet for them, I would automatically give them first look.
The story was begun, then, with the expectation of its submission to Playboy and the hope of its acceptance. Did this influence the personality of my lead character?
I think it must have. I didn’t know much about him when I sat down to write the thing. I made him a film critic, divorced, with an apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village. Did the Playboy image and the Playboy audience profile induce me to equip him with a glamorous career and a sophisticated lifestyle? I made his marriage a childless one. Did I do so out of some unconscious conviction that a Playboy reader would sooner identify with an unencumbered bachelor than a weekend father?
When I began the story, I had no idea how it would end. (I barely knew how it would open.) The ending to which the story found its way involved my hero’s beginning a relationship with a provocative young woman with her own nocturnal idiosyncrasy. Had I had a different destination in mind for the piece, I might well have been led to a different ending. For a more determinedly serious market than Playboy, I might have rejected this ending as too pat and might have ended the story with my lad socially and emotionally isolated from others, his involvement with the bear having facilitated a process of withdrawal that began with his divorce. For a science fiction and fantasy audience, I might have had the bear take on a personality of its own, even manipulating my character emotionally and interfering in his relationships with women.
I don’t think I compromised my story’s artistic integrity by writing it as I did. I can’t think of an ending I’d be happier with, irrespective of marketing considerations. I don’t know of anything I included to make Alice happy (although as I wrote certain lines I let myself imagine her chuckling over them), nor did I leave anything out for fear of alienating her.
Still, the whole shape and texture of the story owes something to my thoughts about its future. It is true, certainly, that I wrote the story for myself. But it is also true that I wrote it for Playboy.
Now that it’s written, there’ll be no more slanting. If “Some Days You Get the Bear” leaves Alice Turner underwhelmed, I won’t revise it before submitting it elsewhere. It is not that sort of a suit of clothes, to be retailored for each prospective customer. But I can’t deny that there was some tailoring in advance.
The other piece didn’t set out to be a short story. It was going to be a book, but it wound up 300 pages too short.
A month earlier, rattling along one night from Luxor to Cairo in what the Egyptian railroad dares to call a sleeping compartment, I got an idea for a book. (I’ll write about this one of these months; it was an interesting example of how plots come to you.) As soon as we got back to the States, I set about finding a place to pitch camp and write the thing. We’re nomads these days, but I wanted to light long enough to get all or part of the book done.
Ah, well. Like the best-laid mice, this plan went astray. We settled down in Sedona, Arizona, in a rented condo, and I wrote 30 pages of the book and discovered that I didn’t have a full enough plot yet. It needed more time to fill out.
Then I remembered something. A couple of years ago I wrote a long short story about my detective hero, Matthew Scudder. (It was, coincidentally enough, my previous sale to Playboy.) Subsequently, I greatly expanded that story, from 8,500 words to perhaps 90,000, and it was published as the novel When the Sacred Ginmill Closes.
The new plot, hatched on that lousy train, also involved Scudder. While it had begun as a book idea, why couldn’t I write it first as a short story? It struck me that this could serve to tighten my grip on the plot, and to stir my subconscious so that, in a couple of months or so, I would have the secondary plot line that was lacking.
And perhaps the short story might do me some good in and of itself. “By the Dawn’s Early Light,” the predecessor to Ginmill, netted me the Shamus and Edgar awards and a place in the first Private Eye Writers of America anthology; while you can’t make a living writing short stories, this is not to say that they don’t ever pay their way.
How did I slant “A Date with the Butcher” (which is what I called the new story)?
Again, I wrote it knowing that Alice Turner would be the first editor to see it, and in the earnest hope that she would like what she saw. I also knew that I could expect a receptive reading at Ellery Queen, where a majority of my stories over the last decade have appeared, and at Alfred Hitchcock, where two previous Scudder novelettes have been published.
With this particular story, length looked to be a consideration. While Playboy has no strict length requirements for fiction, my sense of things was that a detective story that ran much past 7,500 words might seem disproportionately long. I could allow myself more room as far as the two crime fiction magazines were concerned; my earlier novelettes for Hitchcock had run 12,000 and 13,000 words.
“A Date with the Butcher” wanted to run long. Remember, it had been an unwritten novel before it decided to become a short story. I had an elaborate main plot line and I couldn’t abridge it too radically without sacrificing something.
From the first sentence, I made a conscious effort to keep it short. I left out bits of business I knew I would eventually include in the book. I skipped some scenes and summarized others.
At the same time, I tried not to leave out too much. I kept reminding myself that my paramount goal was to produce the best possible story, that if I stuck to that goal, everything else would sort itself out. The story, when I was done with it, ran around 9,000 words. It is, on the one hand, rather longer than what I would think would be ideal for a Playboy submission. At the same time, it is shorter than it would be had I intended it for submission initially to Queen and Hitchcock; I might very well have written it 15,000 words long. (This is not to say that those magazines publish many stories that long, but that I would have felt comfortable submitting this particular story to them at that length.)
I think that the story is best at its current length—but perhaps I’d just prefer to see it that way. I wouldn’t like to think that I did less than my best work out of commercial considerations, yet I can’t deny the presence of such considerations in my consciousness while I wrote the thing.
Another judgment call in “A Date with the Butcher” concerned language. Neither of the crime fiction magazines tend to print the unprintable words, or examine unpleasant subjects and details with an excess of candor. (Queen, at least, seems to be loosening up in this area; it seems to me that Eleanor Sullivan has been printing stories with themes and lines and words of late that would have been proscribed a few years ago on grounds of taste.)
I allowed myself the same license in the story that I grant myself in my novels, employing what we might in these hallowed pages call “the F word.” Again, I decided I’d write the thing my way; if an editor liked it, she could make changes, and if she didn’t like it enough to do so she probably didn’t really want it in the first place.
This column, like both of the short stories, is running longer than the publisher might prefer it. But I can’t end it without pointing out that I would not have taken the same stance 20 years ago.
Not because I’ve learned something I didn’t know then—although I sincerely hope I have. But because I am in a position now to allow myself a little more in the way of artistic integrity.
If I were just starting out in the business, if editors did not know my work and view it with affection and respect, I would be a damned fool to send Playboy a 9,000-word short story, or Ellery Queen a novelette with the F word in it. At the current time I know my work is going to get read, and that the reader, while she very well may return it, will at least be reading it in the hope of being able to buy it.
Twenty years ago this was not the case. Twenty years ago my stories had to clear the dreaded First Reader before a top editor ever saw them. First readers have to wade through crap all day long, and they reject hundreds of stories for every one they approve, and if you give them a reason to stop reading your story, stop they will. Twenty years ago, if I had a story where I wanted to use the F word, I might have used it to submit to a magazine with no taboos against the word—but I would have retyped the manuscript before submitting to a magazine with different requirements.
“Some Days You Get the Bear” has some passages and paragraphs that are by no means essential to the story. It’s a long story, and I could cut them without hurting it, and it might even be better for their excision. But I like them, and I like the story’s pace, so I left them in, trusting that this wouldn’t predispose an editor to reject the story. If a new writer showed me the same story, I’d advise him to make the cuts.
Why didn’t I make them, if only to increase the story’s chances for acceptance? Because the test I applied, finally, was to ask myself what version I’d want to include in my next collection of short fiction. I decided I wanted those passages in, so it seems to me they belong in the manuscript.
It’s worth noting, I think, that the better a magazine or book market is, the less necessary it generally is to slant for it. It is the crummiest of genre fiction that is prepared with rigid guidelines in force. And it is the best of editors who let their own sense of appropriateness replace strict guidelines in determining what they publish, and it is the best of publishers who employ good editors and give them their head. If you’re trying to sell to a medium that operates within guidelines, obviously you have to follow them—at least until you reach the stage where you can start selling to better markets.