Half a glass, by Micah Ferris

After the pile of rejections, once something is finally in cold, hard print – what then? Choosing to send out snippets of one’s own work can be incredibly daunting. After all the preening and polishing; once the writing has been left to air for an appropriate amount of time, the scissors have been taken to it and it has been hacked apart and put back together again, its author may feel it time to release it into the wild.

To the new writer, the first rejection slip feels like a papercut to the wrists. At this time, there is something hugely liberating about sitting down and licking stamps and sending off one’s offspring – poems, short stories or chapters/drafts of a novel – accompanied only with their own self addressed envelopes.

Once published, what may seem whole and in a state of clean completeness may stand out as awkward and vulnerable when in print, either on paper or virtually: stark black on white. Once in print there is little room for correction.

That non-existent comma, the wrong word or the one that should have been edited out is now permanently attributed to your name. Once in print, there is something definite about the writing. It exists in a vacuum, date-stamped, signed and sealed. It is rare that I hear of a writer, new or experienced, who adores every single piece of work contained in their book, or every part of their story.

To the new writer, publishing is like getting a tattoo. The older you get, the worse it looks. Painful in the beginning and a mark of youthfulness in the future. Each reader of your published work, for a very short period of their life will have looked through your words at the world and come to some conclusion about your point of view. Countless readers will have judged you.

But it is often the small beauty in the imperfect that strikes a chord with the writing’s ideal reader. Not every reader will enjoy the quirks of a particular piece. What is garish, nonchalant or awkward to one may scream brilliance to another. It may only take one peculiar phrase or a single, well-penned idea. On the flipside, the piece that is abhorred must be a very strong piece indeed to command such a strong response. And, at some stage, an editor somewhere will have thought it worthy of exposure. 

George Orwell wrote, “Ultimately, there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.”

Either way, it depends on your outlook. Me, I am an idealist. The glass is always halfway. It can appear fuller or more relinquished depending on perspective and that – that, my dear reader is the trick of it! It is quite simply, a matter of taste.

 Micah Ferris will be a regular contributor on The Brit Writers and Writers Everywhere blog