Writing

Showing Progress

/ Shane / 2 Comments

I just wanted to follow up and clarify a little bit why an Honorable Mention would be seen as encouraging. After all, above Honorable Mention is Semi-finalist, Finalist, and Winner (not to mention Mega-Winner, the grand-prize winner chosen from the 4 quarter winners). So Honorable Mention is pretty far from winning, right?

Well, I could go into the statistics and number of entrants, etc. but that is not what makes me feel good. What makes me feel good is a sense of progress.

Normally, you can’t really see any progress being made. For one any particular story, you never know who’s going to like it and who’s not. So you send it out all over the place, but a rejection doesn’t necessarily mean it is bad story. For example, a story of mine that didn’t get anything in Writers of the Future made it all the way to the editor at one of the big 3 magazines. So it’s pretty much hit and miss, or luck*. And, since the story isn’t changing as you send it out to each different place (at least mine aren’t), then getting an acceptance on the story doesn’t prove anything other than you hit the right editor on the right day, since that particular story isn’t improving every time you send it out.

So for the most part, you are either accepted or rejected, yes or no, and no real way to tell how close you were to a yes. And even if you get a yes, that in-and-of-itself doesn’t really tell you much.

Well, that’s not exactly true. With a little rejectomancy, you can get a little sense of progress here and there if you submit consistently to the same market. Maybe your stories start out as form rejections by the slush readers. Then you start to get some personalized notes scribbled on there. Maybe you get a higher-form rejection, where your story was passed on by the slush readers. Maybe you start to get personal rejections from editors. Finally you make a sale. Of course, you don’t have to progress through these steps to make a sale, and not all markets do it the same, but if you do find yourself going through them, you do get some kind of feedback that your writing is improving. (I suppose you could also look at acceptances over time, but that implies you actually get acceptances.)

However, with Writers of the Future, there is no doubt. It’s not just a yes or a no. There are levels. You can actually, quantitatively see how close you were to a yes. And now I am one step closer than I have ever been. I might have a long ways to go up the ladder, but today I have proof that I am at least on the first rung.

*Don’t get me wrong, you make your own luck by putting yourself into a position to get lucky…if you have 10 quality stories out there, chances are you’re going to get lucky more often than if you have 1 bad story.

Squee!

/ Shane / 2 Comments

Finally scored my first Honorable Mention from the Writers of the Future contest!

When I first started entering the contest, I thought an Honorable Mention would be a slam dunk. I didn’t necessarily expect it on the first try, but from the casual way people mention it (or mention how they’ve never done worse than an Honorable Mention), it didn’t seem like that big of a deal. I was even kind of hoping for better.

However, my first 4 attempts resulted in a a big fat nada. Zip, zero, zilch.

In the end this might have worked out for the better, since I have a much greater appreciation for what it means to get an Honorable Mention. At first I wondered what I did wrong. I even wondered if perhaps I missed the notification or something. What an idiot I was! In the year and a half that I have been submitting, I have come to learn the truly staggering amount of submissions that they get. Also, the people that are very active on the forum might not be an accurate picture of the “average” entrant.

In any event, getting something, even an Honorable Mention, sure feels pretty good after all the rejections. Getting a win, even a pseudo-win like this one, motivates me to do even better. And seeing my name up on the blog doesn’t hurt either.

No, the contest is definitely tougher than I thought. That’s going to make it all the sweeter when I win.

Voice

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Voice is something that a lot of authors and writing teachers spend a lot of time talking about. I’ve even talked about it before.

However, I recently came across some posts by author/teacher James VanPelt about teaching voice that are about the finest posts on the subject I’ve ever seen. I am going to reproduce some of it below, but please see the original posts here, here, here and here. The part below is taken from the first one.

Basically, the question is, how do you develop voice? Well, that is the million dollar question. But Jim has some real concrete tips that I think are worthwhile:

– Put the writer on a linking/helping verb diet. No more than two to a page, say. By forcing writers into action verbs, you also force them to make specific choices. Not, “The day was nice,” (argh!), but some sentence based on an action verb that shows a nice day, like “Children laughed on the jungle gym.” There’s a zillion ways that “the day was nice.” As soon as writers choose a way to show it, they choose among the zillion. Their choice marks the beginning of voice. Distrust an overuse of am, is, are, was, were, be, being, been.

– Put the writer on a passive sentence diet. Here I mean the grammatically passive, the silliness of “The ball was kicked by John,” or my favorite, “My eyes were opened by me.” I’m not sure why passives creep into so much school writing, other than writers will put the effect in front of the cause because they see the effect first. Students will also commonly leave the cause out altogether. The passiveness of “The law was debated,” “The discrimination was done,” “The punishments were taken” infect their writing with unattributed actors performing faceless deeds.

– Outlaw “very,” any pronoun ending in “thing,” most of the “ly” words, and for crying out loud, don’t let them use a broad generality without having earned the right by piling up enough specifics first. The student who writes, “We shared everything,” can only say so after a solid paragraph of what they shared. A list that includes a vinyl collection of Vivaldi, turn of the century tea cozies, an appreciation of the Dutch masters, and a fondness for truffles stands miles away for the “everything” they shared if that list includes bootleg compilations of garage/punk/techno/emo mp3s, metal windup toys from 1950’s television shows, temporary tattoos done in henna, and a secret vice of fried pork rinds dipped in warm velveeta.

This is all advice I’ve seen sprinkled around elsewhere, but something about this list really struck a chord with me. I don’t know if it was his particular examples or what, but it makes sense. Most people say something like, “Don’t use passive voice” but he explains why you shouldn’t and how it will help your voice if you don’t.

Thanks Jim! (even if you don’t know that you helped)

Self Publishing

/ Shane / Leave a comment

One of the constant debates in the publishing world is whether or not to self publish. This has been rehashed ad naseum, so I’m not really going to go over all the issues. I just wanted to weigh in with something that I haven’t really seen anywhere else.

Self publishing? Not for me.

I understand self publishing if you’ve just absolutely got to get your words out there. If the most important thing to you is to get your book out there. As for me? I don’t want to be read, I want to be validated.

You see, I don’t really care if anybody reads my stories. I’m going to write them anyway, even if its only for myself. But what I do want is to be told that my writing is good enough to make the cut.

Of course I think my writing is good enough. Most every writer does (its what keeps you going). But I’m also not the person to judge. And I want to be judged against the hardest possible competition. If my work is rejected, then I could say the judges didn’t know what they were doing and I could go off on my own. But I know that deep down inside that I will never feel validated until I get one of them to admit (even grudgingly) that it’s good writing.

Some people would say, “Self publish, and let the buyers decide!” Okay, go ahead. I’m just saying it’s not for me.

The Long Short Story

/ Shane / Leave a comment

I have a story that weighs in at about 12,700 words, and I am really having some trouble finding a home for it.

There are a lot of venues that take long stories in certain genres, such as literary, high fantasy or straight up science fiction magazines. However, I would classify this particular story as horror or dark fantasy, and these are apparently genres that are not very friendly to novelettes.

After sending it to a small handful of pro markets who accept longer pieces, I’m looking at token payment or “for the love” (i.e. non-paying) markets to find someone who will entertain the length. The thing is, I think this is one of my stronger stories, and I’m not ready for it to sink all the way down to token or no payment already! For some genres, like short science fiction, there are so many pro and semi-pro markets, that even my very first stories are circulating at high pay magazines. Stories that I don’t consider as good as this particular story.

So what do I do? I’m not completely sure yet. I’d hate to trunk a story after just a few submissions. On the other hand, I’d hate to sell the story for little or nothing if it never really got a fair shake at a higher pay rate.

In the meantime, I’m trying to be a little more inventive in my searches, looking for outside-the-box markets that I don’t normally submit to. For example, literary magazines that aren’t specifically genre magazines. I feel like this makes the most sense in this case, and is also the advice I would probably get from long selling pros. I might be at a disadvantage being that they might not look favorably on genre stories, but on the other hand, my genre story might be the only one in the slush, and might be a welcome change of pace.

You never know if you never try. I know for sure I won’t sell it if I stop sending it out.