"To try to summarise my own experience: The more truly your work comes from your own being, body and soul, rather than fitting itself into male conventions and expectations of what to write about and how to write it, the less it will suit most editors, reviewers, grant givers, and prize commitees. But among all those are women and men, to whom the real thing, the art, comes first: and you have to trust them. You have to trust yourself. And you have to trust your readers. The writer only does half the job. "