And then I get to the part where they say, And wouldn’t you like to write us a biography? And I say very politely: No, not really. But, you know, I don’t think it was really a question.
So I went and looked up what I wrote back when I was applying for my PhD scholarship, which is still moderately relevant, and has the benefit of bearing evidence of my short-term memory from six years ago. This is important because I have this bizarre mental glitch where I can only ever remember the first thing I published/won an award for and the most recent. Everything else is a blank. I have no idea why. Maybe it’s just because it’s all for short fiction, which I don’t really care about. So I think, You gave me money? Excellent. I’ll go away now. La la la. And then the whole thing falls out of my head.
So all I have left is this vague recollection that I sold things for very small amounts of money that barely folded, or won awards that paid in book vouchers. I can point to the books I bought with the vouchers… I couldn’t tell you what I wrote that earned those vouchers though…
So I read my 2006 biography and went, Oh hey, I forgot I wrote that. And also, That was terrible. I am glad it’s now thoroughly out of print. But at least I have something to write in my biography other than, I usually only submit shorts when someone bribes me, and when I finished my doctorate I forgot pretty much everything I’d ever done in sheer relief. I don’t think that’s a great sales pitch.
What I really want to say is, I published some things and I won some things, but they were mostly local, thoroughly obscure or, you know, things I’d rather no one knew I wrote, could we forget about it, yes? But if I actually say that I sound pretentious and if I just tell them I’ve done nothing of note it sounds like I’ve never done anything, which is only true in my head where I think it doesn’t count unless it’s a novel.*
I wish I’d learned to write it down when someone paid me for my work rather than just doing a dance of glee and running away with the money very quickly. This is like doing your taxes for the first time and realising it might have been helpful to keep your receipts…
* And I know that’s a dumb position to take. It’s just that short fiction isn’t really my area. I don’t read a lot of it, I don’t write a lot of it, and I’m not particularly enamoured by my own attempts in the area. I like narratives where there’s time to explore, for the characters to evolve. I want to be sucked into a world I don’t want to leave. And I don’t want to be spat back out again fifteen minutes later. But suggesting we ignore the entire field is horrifically unfair to those who do write it, love it and are great at it. It still counts. It’s just… different.
I really, really wish I could do both: write/love novels and short fiction. This would be so much easier.
platform thing 
Sassamifrass (@sassamifrass)
19/04/2012
I can sympathise with this, because I think I’m coming to realise that the areas I really enjoy are live storytelling, short fiction/poems, and choose your own adventure style text adventures. A lot of my half-finished novels are turning into these because it just works better for me.
I mean, I’d like to make these ideas into novels one day (I think). But I really feel that most of my stories would be better told in other mediums, and would be better served as becoming a novelisation later. Which goes against the mental image I had of what being a writer was. For me being a writer = novels. And all the poems and other stuff I did was just because those kinda happened without my conscious decision to make them.
I think it has only been in the last six months that I’ve started to realise that maybe writers can be legitimate writers by writing interactive fiction and comedy skits. Still have trouble with this, but slowly coming around. It’s not something I hold other people to, just me.
Kandace Mavrick
20/04/2012
I think there are so many different types of writing and people tend to just zero in on specific ones. When I was a kid and I told people I wanted to write they invariably responded, “Ah, journalism!” and then I made rude remarks because I can DO journalism but it drives me batty because it feels like writing backwards — dropping the most important thing in the first sentence and then working down from there.
Luckily these days there are so many more opportunities from different styles, but in many ways the publishing industry is still geared towards more traditional approaches. But progress! It is being made!
…and it helps that writers are generally speaking fruit bats and ‘legitimate’ is not a word used near them that often, so we have a bit more freedom to wave words around at will than we might otherwise, and you can usually just figure out the medium that works for the story you want to tell and run with it. Of course, convincing someone to PAY you for it… but that’s a problem no matter what or how you write 😛
Sassamifrass (@sassamifrass)
20/04/2012
Ah, I had the “Oh, journalism!” thing too. So I did work experience at a newspaper and decided that journalism was definitely not my cup of fondue.