Nov 15, 2022
I Destroyed My Most Personal Story. Here’s Why
To thine own self be true.
Moments before writing this, I deleted all copies of the most personal story I’ve ever written.
Currently, the last copy of that story lies in the hands of a publication that has rejected me 59 times out of 59. I fully anticipate that this will be the 60th rejection — and when that happens, this deeply personal story will exist no more. The only people who have seen it are me and the various and sundry editors who thought it wasn’t up to par.
Before I explain why I’ve done this, I need to address one or two other things.
Many months back, I read an article by a frustrated author explaining why, if you are a failure, it’s only because you are too good to be successful. Your work is simply too complex, too sophisticated, too skilful to be appreciated by the rabble. In reality, you should be happy that no one wants your work.
Apart from being a textbook definition of the term “sour grapes,” it was also the second most pathetic thing I’ve ever seen. Number one on that list was the comment section, full of people not only agreeing, but praising the author for being bold enough to speak a bold truth. “Cringeworthy” doesn’t quite capture the feeling of those comments, each of which echoed the self-congratulatory tone of the original author.
For the record, there is nothing “bold” about telling Americans that they’re perfect and that everyone else needs to change. It’s absolutely the safest sales pitch on Earth. But that’s not what makes it so pathetic.
If you have decided that you are “too good” for success, you have committed yourself to a life as a loser. You have done this because your ego is too delicate to acknowledge that you might have something to learn from a commoner. The moment you submit to this particular fantasy is the moment you quit growing as an artist.
I know the feeling. There are plenty of people in this world who are, in my opinions, bad writers — worse than me, at least. Yet, some portion of these people are more successful, in some cases far more successful, than I am. When confronted with these people, I have a choice. I can retreat into comfortable self-delusion, as the aforementioned commenters have opted to do. Or, I can attempt to learn from them — after all, these people must be more skilled than me in at least one aspect.
From these hacks, I have learned a few things. Most significantly, I learned that the “craft of writing” is bullshit. Craft is something you pursue to impress other writers. Readers don’t care. But the fact that readers don’t care about craft isn’t because they’re stupid or classless, as so many people seem to assume. No, it’s because most people don’t read fiction because they have some desire to worship the author. They read to feel something.
Storytelling is innate to the human condition, and it is inextricably tied to emotion. People are moved by story because, in some way, it speaks to the common thread of humanity. We have all known pain, joy, fear, sorrow and anticipation, and good stories capture at least one of those feelings. The heart of story is about forming a link between the characters and the reader. The worst hack in the world understands that, if only subconsciously.
On the other hand, many authors of literary fiction don’t understand this, and I believe it’s primarily a matter of choice.
I like to use musical analogies in situations like this. A popular hack story is like a cheesy love ballad. Yes, it’s simplistic and hackneyed, but set your snobbery aside and it’s not so hard to understand why it might appeal to someone. We all know what love feels like, and we also know what it feels like when love goes away.
Most of the lit-fic stories I’ve read are more like three-minute guitar solos. You know the ones I mean — where the guitarist plays a large number of chords very quickly and the audience becomes bored after around twenty seconds.
Why does an audience become bored during such an impressive display of technical prowess? It could be because they’re simpletons who don’t appreciate the raw talent it takes to perform like that. It could also be because it’s a hollow demonstration. It is technical talent used not to evoke an emotion, but to intimidate the audience. In fact, the intent behind such a display is to build a wall between the artist and the audience, one which says I’m better than you, now you know it, and you’d better pay me my due.
The more lit-fic I read, the more of this attitude I can sense. There is no intent behind writing these stories except to demonstrate the author’s superiority to his intended audience. In fact, some of these authors sneer at the very concept of building a connection to the audience. It is essentially elitist work, and as such it is actually meant to confuse and fluster the typical reader.
Now, I used to write speculative fiction, and spec was once seen as the antithesis of this. These were adventure stories, meant to evoke some feeling of excitement — the thrill of exploration, the fear of the unknown, the anxiety of an unknown future. It was hack writing at its absolute finest. But things have changed in recent years. The science fiction “prophet” of yesteryear has gradually given way to a generation of would-be speccy Prousts who are more interested in demonstrating their magnificent skill than anything as banal as telling a story. Sadly, the current crop of editors seem to have likewise decided to go in this direction.
I’m not excessively proud. After years of having my work rejected for having good stories and being “technically well-written” but being insufficiently impressive in some nebulous way, I changed course. I started imitating the work that was published, bending my own style in a literary direction. Eventually, I abandoned speculative fiction altogether in favor of pure literature. I no longer liked my own work, but I’m not above selling out if it makes me some headway.
As I made this transition, I wrote a very special, very personal story. The title of this story is “Those Auld Kings in Raiment Pine.” It was under a thousand words and yet it took close to two weeks to write it, a few exquisitely spun lines at a time.
I chose to write this story for a reason. Literary editors may not appreciate the human condition, but they do appreciate pain — they love it, in fact. They love it because tragedy and suffering are often mistaken for depth, and this is a type of human who wants nothing as much as to appear deep. So I gave them pain. I gave it to them in spades.
It still wasn’t good enough. “Those Auld Kings in Raiment Pine” was rejected left and right by publications that were perfectly content to keep picking up shallow, bland pieces with cheap writing gimmicks (seriously, writing a whole story without end punctuation was vacuous when it was first done; now it’s vacuous and cliche) and I came to hate the snobs working behind the scenes at those places.
When I wrote spec, this is what I called the Dumping Phase. Having had a piece I worked very hard on rejected by every respectable and semi-respectable publication in existence, I have come to hate it and no longer want to see it. The easiest way to get it out of my sight is to find some fifth-rate publication (often some random person’s blog) that takes everything that’s sent to it. The career benefit is negligible; the real upside is that I don’t have a loser dragging me down.
Spec stories are seldom personal. If I’m getting shot down because I wrote an old-school space exploration story at a time when soft psychological science fiction is in (or vice versa), or because editors keep reading their own politics into something that wasn’t political to start with, then it’s not such a big deal to dispose of it. By the time I’d reached the Dumping Phase, I’d likely written another five or six pieces and would have another in a few days. The only thing I’d lament is a little bit of wasted time.
It’s a lot harder to throw away something that’s a piece of yourself — or so I thought. Truth is, deleting “Those Auld Kings in Raiment Pine” was incredibly easy.
Before I started writing this article, I had a clean narrative of this situation. This was a signature piece that I inked in blood, and I would rather burn it than see it degraded by appearing on some obscure website where it would be read by nine people.
The truth is less theatrical than that. The truth is that I hate “Those Auld Kings in Raiment Pine.”
I don’t hate it because it’s bad — to toot my own horn just a little bit, it’s a beautiful piece of writing. I hate it because it’s not honest. Oh, there’s emotion in it, but there’s no emotional connection. Every word — the symbolism I hate using, the motifs that don’t belong in a story this short — is one more brick in the wall separating me from the reader. This is a story I wrote in a synthetic style in order to impress a pack of philistines whom I don’t respect in the slightest.
And now, the last copy of that story is in the hands of said philistines. Specifically, the ones who run Flash Fiction Online. Normally I don’t mention publication names because it’s bad form, but there’s a reason I’m making an exception here. I don’t plan on writing about this topic again, regardless of the outcome. If you are invested enough, the only way you’re going to know is to wait a few months, click that link and see if a story called “Those Auld Kings in Raiment Pine” by Andrew Johnston was published.
If it never shows up, then that means it’s gone and the snobs have slammed the door for the 60th time. But I don’t care enough to revisit it. It’s theirs now — a phony product made for a phony audience. So be it if they want to destroy it.
Incidentally, you may have been wondering why I put so many pictures of mountains in this article. I’m not going to explain that, but I will say this: If the story gets published, you will know the significance of the mountains. If not? They’re just pretty things without meaning — just like my competition.
