Spare a thought for the serious writer

'We like twist ends'.  'We're really partial to humour.'  My heart sinks when I see those words on submissions guidelines pages.  I wonder if there's any point in submitting anything to that magazine.  

I'm not a comedy writer.  My friend Eileen Ribertson is, and her cosy crime novels are full of humour, from bickering in-laws to classic slapstick misunderstanding scenes.  Eileen was a playwright before she turned to writing novels, and her sense of the ridiculous and her sense of timing are perfect. 

Me, I can't do funny.  Occasionally I have a character make a witty comment, or a wry aside that might raise a smile, but if if its belly-laughs you're after, move along there.  I'm a serious writer.  Not 'Serious' in the sense of pretentious, but serious in that I want my writing to do more tnan entertain, more than make people laugh for two minutes.

That has to do with writing what I care about.  Writing about wildlife poaching and extinction of species isn't a laughing matter.  Neither is writing about feminist issues like access to birth control and freedom from rape.  In short, my writing explores serious issues as well as telling a story.

I do wonder if there is a reluctance these days to engage with serious writing that's more than some cheap laugh, writing that requires thought and some commitment from the reader to understand and get all the nuances from.  Time and again, funny or quirky stories win writing competitions.  And sometimes, when I analyse them, they have little of substance about them.  They're all cheap laughs.

But the power of literature is in its ability to inform and persuade people, and this is the way I like to write.  I see my manifesto a bit like the BBC's, as providing something more than mere entertainment.  I aim to show the brutality of a hacked-about dead animal that poachers have killed for greed.  To give a sense of the awful devastation that logging of rainforest trees creates.

Being a serious writer isn't the easy way to get noticed, but that's who I am.  It's who I am in real life, and it's what my stories will always be like.  Anybody know an editor who'll take challenging stories?

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives,  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com