Those following me on twitter know that I had an unhappy brush-off the other day regarding writing. So I decided to make a list about being a real writer to cheer myself up.
You’re not a real writer if:
- you haven’t been published;
- you’ve been published but not paid;
- you’ve been published and paid but published online;
- you’ve been published and paid in print but not in a prestigious journal
- you’ve been published and paid in print in a prestigious journal but it’s only short fiction or individual essays
So yes, I have no novel and only short fiction and maybe not in the most prestigious journals and mainly online, so what? I hate the hierarchy that I’m not real at what I do and it rankles because this isn’t the first time this happened – as an undergraduate female in a STEM field at a university that has huge problems with male privilege (which doesn’t need to be the case as where I went for graduate school in the same field was awesome and had none of the problems my undergraduate school had), I had to constantly justify why I deserved to be there when others around me with dicks didn’t. Now I have to justify that my little steps to success aren’t valid until I write the big, important novel.
Maybe I will write a novel. Maybe I won’t. But you’d think in a field that is all about narrative, that we’d be able to allow more than one narrative to define literary success.