It would appear that getting published is less the result of offering high-quality work and more in being able to slavishly-adhere to arbitrary and oddly-specific rules of formatting! Like Academia, publishers are incredibly ridiculous and pretentious in their emphasis upon trivial criteria.
It does. That said, I've not been impressed with anything published since 1962. I mark that year specifically because by that point Faulkner and Hemingway died and literature entered a period of stagnation. There are a few exceptions, like Yukio Mishima and Murakami (both non-western). I've sampled Palahniuk, Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, and Salman Rushdie but was put off by the colloquial style and vulgar language. At least Kerouac had class when he described hedonistic activity. I wonder if we will get great fiction in the coming decades, stuff that is just as good as the classics and not merely 'good enough' in absence of anything truly brilliant.
Sounds like great fodder for an article. I'm a fan of writers such as Jane Austen, Victor Hugo, and others of that era who appreciated language. These lit mags, especially those wanting that abomination called "flash fiction," are dragging it all down. Social media is playing its part, too, I'm sorry to say.
It would appear that getting published is less the result of offering high-quality work and more in being able to slavishly-adhere to arbitrary and oddly-specific rules of formatting! Like Academia, publishers are incredibly ridiculous and pretentious in their emphasis upon trivial criteria.
An astute observation. Small wonder that self-publishing, including here on Substack, is so popular.
Indeed. I tell people two things now: just self publish, and don't try to make money from writing. If you accept that, you might get somewhere.
Kinda sad, though. It takes a lot of effort to write good fiction. Sigh.
It does. That said, I've not been impressed with anything published since 1962. I mark that year specifically because by that point Faulkner and Hemingway died and literature entered a period of stagnation. There are a few exceptions, like Yukio Mishima and Murakami (both non-western). I've sampled Palahniuk, Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, and Salman Rushdie but was put off by the colloquial style and vulgar language. At least Kerouac had class when he described hedonistic activity. I wonder if we will get great fiction in the coming decades, stuff that is just as good as the classics and not merely 'good enough' in absence of anything truly brilliant.
Sounds like great fodder for an article. I'm a fan of writers such as Jane Austen, Victor Hugo, and others of that era who appreciated language. These lit mags, especially those wanting that abomination called "flash fiction," are dragging it all down. Social media is playing its part, too, I'm sorry to say.