Submitting to The New Yorker

...or being completely talentless.

Spending a week trying to write was a confronting experience. Wonderful and heartening, yes, but also full of doubt and uncertainty. About the point of it, about one’s ability–

Every day on retreat we–Anna, Katherine and I–would sit at the dining table or lie horizontal on the sofa in front of the fire and we would tap away at our laptops, listening to the sounds of productivity, soaking in each other’s energy and creativity by osmosis. 

Katherine and I joked before the week began that we love to doubt ourselves for months then write a story or an essay in a day and immediately want to pitch it to the New Yorker. We are either talentless or awaiting the Nobel Prize for literature. 

Spoiler alert: we both submitted something to the New Yorker. 

As I said last week I made the decision to prioritise time doing something that I don’t get paid to do and no one is asking for.  Purely because I want to do it. We’ve been talking about the business of publishing–the mercenary side of the industry that looks for potential writers with huge Instagram followings or keeps publishing the same crime fiction because they can plaster a well-known name on the cover (even if that name hasn’t written the thing). I wonder: is this the romantic bit? The bit that we associate with a cosy cabin in the woods, a flickering candle to write by and the sound of a quill scratching at parchment. Jo Marsh in her attic. 

The act of creating is thrilling. Most of us want to feel that there is a point to our existence and besides relationships with the people in our lives, our output (creative or otherwise) is perhaps the next best thing to solidify a sense of purpose. I love writing and I am coming to realise that the simple act of having an idea can be one of the most powerful things a human can experience. Proust wrote, “Ideas come to us as the successors to griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure the heart”. I’m trying to write an essay about this quote, actually, about the fact that when my dad was in hospital one of the only things that kept me upright was the fact that I was still reading and feeling strangely, counter-intuitively inspired. 

To be in community with people with the same purpose is thrilling, too. And, more often than not, people who have exactly the same doubts and worries that you are feeling. It should not be underestimated. I am not really a ‘friends holiday’ kind of person. When one of my friends had their hen party in Ibiza she said to me privately ‘Claire, I’m really not expecting you to come to this.’ It’s not that I’m antisocial, exactly, or adverse to fun (lol, she hopes), but I do have a bit of an aversion to too much time with other people. I always feel a certain level of anxiety and pressure when I’m around people and, though I love the social element of it, I can come away from a social interaction feeling exhausted. Sure, there are certain friends who I would be more than happy to hang out with for extended periods of time, namely because they would share my interest in spending most of our time drinking coffee in nice cafes and eating good food. But this has been different even to that, I think, because of our shared focus. We want to be together because the accountability, support and *excellent chat* are, I would venture, important components of any week, but we also know that we are here to spend time for ourselves. There has been a perfect meeting of both the individual and the communal. It is a strange thing to write with no real purpose. To not truly know if what you’re writing is any good. To share our doubts – our fear that even if something we write does get published it might still be an embarrassment – has been very helpful. And I wonder if there is a lesson in that. We can’t be on retreat all the time, unfortunately, but we can inject a bit of its magic into normal life…perhaps? 

I want to create space for the ideas that could heal me in bad times and make me in good. I want to submit to the New Yorker and Granta but I don’t want that to be my only focus. I want to remember that the romance of creating something is often at the beginning. That creating for creations sake is an act of injecting beauty into the world and–man–do we need to keep injecting beauty into this fucked up world. And that if it isn’t beautiful yet, that’s okay too. That reading, watching and experiencing other people’s art is about opening ourselves up to those ideas and to perspectives that could, if you let them, change everything. 

In my day job as a book publicist I talk to authors constantly about what they are creating and, crucially, why. The response is always different and it is always interesting and important. 

We filled the fridge and the cupboards with cheese, salads, bread, eggs, crackers and snacks to be grazed on throughout the day. We spent our days silently working away, getting up to make a cup of tea or find something to eat whenever our stomachs told us to. We went to the beach for walks to remind ourselves we had physical bodies as well as overly wrought minds and that the cold Norfolk wind could blow any lethargy anyway. Each night we took it in turns to cook while the others read by the fire. Then, after dinner, we read each other’s work and gave feedback. 

What a lovely week! All this to say, I am grateful. I have written two short stories that may or may not be good (we think they are good) and we await a response from the New Yorker…