How Do You Know if You're an 'Emerging' or 'Established' Writer and Does it Matter?
“Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad – including your own bad.” - Doris Lessing
We love to label ourselves, and as writers, there’s no escaping this. Some days, as a writer, I feel like I’m in the ‘Doing Great’ category, and other days it’s more the ‘What Am I Doing Exactly?!’ category. The labels of ‘emerging’ and ‘established’ don’t even come into it.
When researching this piece, it was interesting to discover these terms aren’t blanket. While in Australia, they seem to be very prominent, I found fewer articles and guidelines around these labels in the US and the UK.
So, what do they mean, and should we care?
What Does ‘Emerging’ Mean?
There are no hard and fast rules on how you measure yourself as an emerging writer. From everything I’ve read, it seems that you might consider yourself to be an emerging writer if:
You’ve had a few articles or stories published in peer-reviewed publications or anthologies.
You publish semi-regularly, online or in print media.
You’re entering competitions and being long and/or short-listed.
What Does ‘Established’ Mean?
Again, there’s no definitive point here, but a lot of what I read on the subject indicated that you’d be considered an established writer if:
You’ve had at least one book published.
You’ve been nominated for an award or awarded a place in a competition.
Based on both of these - it doesn’t seem like there’s too much to what label you might pick for yourself. Although - as with much in life - the lines can be blurred.
Are They Really Important?
I would argue, no: not really. In the grand scheme of writing and depending on how and why you write, labelling yourself in this way isn’t that important. Ask yourself, do these labels impact your writing practice? If the answer is no, then they don’t matter.
They do matter, however, in some contexts. Namely, if you’re attempting to apply for grants, some competitions also stipulate that they’re solely for emerging writers. Many of these grants and competitions will include their definitions of what they consider to be ‘emerging’. For one competition I looked at, they allowed writers who had one published book to their name to view themselves as ‘emerging’ - but not if they had more than one book published.
These labels also become somewhat restrictive in how we think and approach the ideas of ‘emerging’ and ‘established’. Emerging conveys a sense of youth and newness - and there are plenty of writing competitions that advise they are for emerging writers under a certain age. For example, The New Yorker’s Twenty Under Forty, Granta’s 20 British Authors Under 40, The National Book Award’s 5 Under 35, The PEN American Emerging Writer’s Prize (writers under 35), and Narrative Magazine’s 30 Below Contest.
Kim Winternheimer talks about the dangers of the age divide in the ‘emerging’ and ‘established’ writer labels in an article for The Masters Review. She advises:
“Ideas that are “new” and “fresh” — both terms that sell well and generate attention — are easy to associate with youth. But consider the practicalities preventing people from dedicating the time to write until later in life: jobs, families, and education are just a few of many examples that, when examined, amount to rich histories. Older authors have the benefit of knowledge from experience, and they bring maturity, perspective, and emotional honesty to their writing.”
The other thing to consider is the category of writing you’re involved with. I enjoy writing flash fiction and short stories, and I’ve had a dozen or so stories published online and in print anthologies, as well as taking a few longlist places along the way. In this context, I might consider myself as emerging. As an article writer, I’ve hundreds of articles published widely across various platforms - I wouldn’t consider myself ‘emerging’ in the same way. I also like to write haiku, and while I’ve had a handful of poems published, I’m neither emerging nor established - here’s where the term ‘early’ writer creeps in.
So, do we use the labels to blanket ourselves, or can we be picky? And what if you choose to self-publish? Stephen Wright, in an article for Overland, advises:
“If you self-publish via a website, then you can never emerge, and self-publishing doesn’t have the same status as being accepted and edited and distributed by a national publisher.”
Wright also asks us to question who the terms are even for and who they benefit in the long run.
Defining Yourself
Becoming a writer and moving into a place where you might feel comfortable enough to call yourself a writer is a tricky path to take. We all know this; it’s no secret. And out of all the reading advice and guidance articles, books and blogs I’ve read in these past few years, the biggest thing that has stood out to me is to define ourselves in our own ways.
In her Longreads article, Jenny Bhatt discusses the arduous journey from polished career professional to full-time writer in her forties and the complex Indian-American cultural considerations that stood up along the way. She talks about how she came to terms with forging her own pathway despite this:
“A few years ago, the writer Zadie Smith was on the Desert Island Discs podcast. Having once been a 22-year-old wunderkind with an award-winning debut bestseller and now a writer in her 40s, she said, “. . . there’s no replacement for experience. You can’t fake it, you can’t fictionalise it. It won’t develop your heart, it won’t develop you as a person. It’s a kind of game that you can play on the page, but it’s not the same as being alive. Being alive is a very radical thing; it’s much more difficult . . .” Listening to this podcast again recently, I realised I’m still integrating those radical, impossible-to-fake lessons and insights gained over the last six years. Doing so is also a critical rite of passage before I can truly begin the next new journey.”
The trouble with labels is that they can lead us to think we’re not successful or achieving anything of value if we fail to live up to the checklist dot-points required to meet them. If you never ‘emerge’, are you even a writer? What if you stay as ‘emerging’ your entire writing career, despite your best efforts? Does this make you a failure?
We know the world of writing is far more complicated than that. Yes, these labels serve a role in some contexts, but you get to decide whether those contexts are ones you want to enter. A quote keeps entering my mind when I find myself becoming too wrapped up in labels, judgements, and external factors. It reminds me that sometimes it is vital to put all those things to one side and just to keep walking towards the things that fuel me:
“I am walking in the general direction of things” - Mary Ruefle.
