NEW WRITING Poems & stories chosen by distinguished authors In each magazine we invite a guest author to select her favourite poems and stories from hundreds submitted to Mslexia. Read two of Val McDermid's selections, plus an extract from her Essay. You can also browse previous New Writing topics. • How to submit to New Writing New Writing THE GARDEN Guest Editor VAL McDERMID introduces her pick of poetry and prose on the theme of The Garden WHEN it comes to creative writing, we tend to assume the Romantic position: it’s all about inspiration, the words, ideas and stories that spring from our hearts and heads. We writers have this notion of ourselves giving shape to the protean mish-mash of images and emotions that swill around inside us until we have created something uniquely ours, something that, though individual and particular, will also speak to our imagined readers, giving them both pleasure and pause for thought. That’s how it is for most of us for most of the time these days. But there’s another kind of writing too. Writing to commission isn’t just something journalists do. Nor is it something to be despised. Shakespeare knew all about it, as did Dickens and Dr Johnson and hundreds of others. Every playwright and screenwriter lives by it. I’ve always seen Mslexia’s themed calls for submissions as a kind of commission, the kind that can be paradoxically liberating. When it comes to writing, it’s easy to get stuck in a particular groove; we find our comfort zones and we cleave to them. But every now and again we need something to kick us out of our rut and make us fly by the seat of our pants. Speaking from my own experience, it took a commisson to get me to write a short story that wasn’t about crime. It was as if it liberated me from my usual concerns and gave me permission to experiment. I look at it now and think it’s probably the best short fiction I’ve written. We should learn to embrace these violent evictions from our routines. For the complete essay, and for Val's full selection of poetry and prose on the theme of travel, read issue 33• Subscribe! Read a story & poem chosen by Val McDermid Snakes and apples by Elizabeth Rutherfor-Johnson In the garden by Rebecca Goss
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