The editor of Fly Culture magazine, Pete Tyjas, doesn’t like me. Before he started up FC, he ran an online fishing ’zine with the trout-bum title, EatSleepFish, which invited contributions from anyone, although most came from fellow fishing guides. It was non-profit, and non-paying of course.
When four or five years ago Tyjas set up Fly Culture he publicised it on Flyfishing.co.uk. I’d heard that contributors would not be paid so I raised this with him on the forum. I was quite persistent and he didn’t like that. But fair dos, he did start paying for articles once income was sufficient.
I don’t think he’s forgiven me though. The magazine makes a bit of a thing about looking after fish, which is all right and proper. ‘Grip and grins’, the corny fish and captor portraiture, are discouraged; photos with the fish held close to the water for its protection and absenting the angler’s mug are preferred. This does make for more attractive fishy snaps, although close-ups of fish heads and fish tails are rapidly becoming the new corny.
So I was a little amused to see a picture appear on my Twitter timeline of Pete holding a fish and grinning beardily at the camera. I don’t follow him but sometimes other accounts pop up depending on all sorts of algorithms designed to throw junk your way. So I replied, somewhat mischievously, ‘Is that a grip and grin?’ Turns out he blocked me for that. I think I must have touched a nerve.
Nice fish, Pete
No great loss of course as I’m not wildly interested in the Tyjas outlook. But it does illustrate once more how sensitive many are to the mildest criticism, especially among those inclined to a bit of hypocrisy. Since Fly Culture trails environmental credentials, it behoves the editor to practise his preaching. Fishy photos are trivial, but less trivial are the foreign fishing trips (on one of which this snap was taken) published in the mag, and the large truck I know he drives. A bit of consistency would be good, but when he can’t be consistent he should not get upset when it’s pointed out.
I no longer subscribe to fishing magazines and rarely buy single copies. Sometimes a kind soul will pass on theirs to me when they’ve read it. Otherwise I get just the odd one when I have some time to pass in a café and a newsagent is handy. I don’t feel too good about this; fishing magazines don’t sell in huge numbers and I feel I should support them. But after finding the new issue arrives with the previous barely read, I can no longer justify the cost.
The reason magazines go unread, other than lack of time, is that the content, with the odd exception, is not the best, as I’ve written about before. So often I’ve struggled to get beyond the first paragraph. I find myself moving to the next article only to turn the page yet again with only a paragraph or two read. Why is this? The quick answer is nearly all lack any kind of narrative draw, the quality that prompts you to read on, the interest that carries you to the end of the piece before you know it. This kind of readability is rare and probably always was, although I can’t comment on the very old magazines like Angling and Creel. Maybe they were better. Sales were a little better then. Today I’d be surprised if more than three percent of anglers read fishing magazines.
There can be many reasons why a fishing article is not up to snuff. It could be the author has nothing of interest to say but I think it goes deeper than that. Most topics in fishing have been written about already but it is possible for a good writer to make the familiar engaging. The last magazine I looked at, Trout and Salmon, the best-selling of the fly fishing periodicals, is a mix of instruction and where to fish articles with a bit of soapboxing. By the time I’d stumbled through the content I was struck by how many of the pieces could have been written by the same person. I wonder whether writers on angling read anything but fishing magazines because they all sound so similar.
The skill to write a flowing narrative is uncommon though there are some obvious faults that contribute to a bad article. One of the great obstacles to good writing is hackneyed phrasing. I don’t just mean the obvious screaming reels and bars of silver; nearly all articles are scattered through with those stylistic tics that have you groaning and turning the page: ‘the anticipation was palpable,’ ‘come on in leaps and bounds,’ ‘wet a line’ and numerous others. No one seems to fish for fish anymore, they ‘target’ them as though packing a gun instead of a rod. Distortions to time figure regularly: ‘time slowed,’ ‘it was timeless,’ ‘time ceased.’ It doesn’t — time carries on as normal; trying to capture a moment through lazy clichés is a narrative killer. Latinate words are preferred to the Anglo-Saxon, ‘initially’ a particular favourite (‘Initially I baited with’). Are fishing writers too bombastic to use words like ‘first’? Superfluous adverbs like gently, softly, methodically are used too much, deadening the writing yet more.
If this copycat writing isn’t bad enough, a lack of prose rhythm is evident in so many books and articles. Fluid prose is harder to achieve and requires a good ear. Few seem to have one. So the combined effect of all these flaws is an article that might be pictured as a ploughed field after heavy rain than a smooth path full of interesting things to see. The two current magazines of a more literary bent, Fallon’s Angler and Fly Culture, might be expected to offer articles of a higher standard. The quality is variable, with the added problem of authors trying to write in a literary style and convey a spiritual aspect to their fishing. This leads to a lot of overwriting with plenty of description piled on more description and too many laboured and inappropriate metaphors and themes. Have the contributors never heard of less is more? Discursions on favourite food and drink, especially coffee, films, television programmes and all manner of foot-staring are far too common distractions from the fishing. As Tom Fort pointed out in Fallon’s Angler: many angling authors think they can write movingly, but they can’t. At some point you wonder whether they really believe what they’re trying to say. One reason I like Fort’s occasional articles is because there are no pretensions.
Not all the writers who appear in these publications are bad. Some are very good but appear only infrequently, so infrequently I forget their names. Of the regulars in Fallon’s Angler, Dexter Petley and Chris Yates are the best by some distance. Petley, misanthrope and antidote to the French Tourist Board, is unusual in the life he leads and this is reflected in his writing. He knows how to put a sentence together and always writes with interest, more often about his life, expressed in angling metaphor, than the fishing. Occasionally he overdoes it but his articles are amongst the few you can read straight through. Yates is one of those rare authors with a good ear for prose, even if his subject matter is more everyday than Petley’s. Both are practised writers with several books to their name.
Fly Culture excels more in its photography and tends to specialise in destination fly fishing, a euphemism for long haul holidays (jet pollution included). Many of its writers work in the fishing industry as guides or tackle ‘consultants’. Unfortunately the majority write with the same limitations, although it rings the changes more; there are no contributors with a regular slot, whereas Fallon regulars produce about one third of articles per issue. On balance I think Fallon’s Angler is the better magazine for variety, length and of course its star writers.
The puzzle is why the editors settle for so much indifferent or plain bad writing appearing in their pages, especially given they print some very good work. I suppose the answer must be they don’t think it bad, or there are too few good articles coming in. Or perhaps they know the readership likes to read this kind of stuff: it is said that many people talk in clichés so perhaps they like to read clichés too. Maybe anglers like to hear the sound of singing reels and see the rods bent double in their imaginations. I can’t make it out. I recall an editor praising a contributor as a fresh voice, but that voice relied heavily on expletives and an American kick-ass style. Nothing fresh about that in my view, one kind of tiresome writing replaced with another.
For me the fishing article world is too insular, most of the writers feed off one another and I suspect they read little outside of fishing. To be really good at something you need to put in the hours and learn from good examples, and the good examples are to be found in the wider world of literature. Now I am done with angling magazines except for the occasional impulse purchase. I don’t expect to find much to hold my attention beyond a few nice photographs and the odd proper writer once in a while.
The Secret Angler 