A little while ago someone put a poll up on the main writelink forums. It asked something like would people rather be paid for a story published in a popular woman's magazine or be unpaid but published in a literary magazine?

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I can't remember the results of the poll, but I have always believed one shouldn't have to choose between the two purely for financial reasons. Obviously, in an ideal world one would be paid fairly for both. But this is a far-from-ideal world, so I've always thought the best answer for those aspiring to the literary end is to try to both.

One of my ambitions is to eventually write top notch literary fiction (Mslexia even pays for it!) but, in the meantime, I've written short stories for women's mags which have been published in eg The People's Friend. After all, practice makes perfect, and surely writing for women's mags is good writing/fiction practice (not to mention money), even if one's dream is to write quality literary fiction. Or is it?

I've been wondering about this a lot recently because I started my writing career as a newspaper reporter and now constantly switch between flash fiction, short stories and poetry, partly in search of 'my voice', partly for the practice and experience of different writing styles. But perhaps that is where I've gone wrong. Practice does make perfect, but that is not to overlook the fact that these are still different types of writing, and not all techniques are directly transferable.

As a news reporter, brevity, drama and accuracy are important. The same can be said of writing fiction, in that one should be careful of overwriting, keeping a piece interesting/dramatic and doing enough research to make sure one's story is feasible/realistic. But that is not to say that these points should be applied in the same way to both news reporting and fiction writing.

In newspaper reporting, factual details and precision are important both because they will make a report read like it has been researched properly and because, as a result, it gives it more credibility. So something didn't happen days ago but two days ago or three or four.

But switch to fiction and, as I was reminded recently, things don't necessarily work the same way. It was pointed out to me that giving too many numbers which aren't directly relevant to the plot may not only distract the reader but add to the impression that the story is being 'told' (after all that's what newspaper journalists do) rather than 'shown' (probably more what a television reporter does).

This really made me sit up and realise that though some skills may be transferable between different types of writing, one has to transfer them with care. I had always realised that my poetry and prose are influenced by the brevity one learns as a newspaper reporter, but hadn't realised how much other aspects of newspaper journalism affect my current creative writing style, sometimes for the good, other times not necessarily so.

My conclusion then is still that all practice does make perfect, but that perfection may not apply in the same way to all genres. Changing from one type of writing to another is a bit like changing the market you're writing for: you not only need to remember which rules apply, but how they apply.

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