Writing

Irrelevant Details

/ Shane / Leave a comment

I think one of the best ways to improve on your own writing, is by reading really good books. Even little things, like how dialog is formated. Unfortunately, I almost always forget to pay attention to those kinds of details when I’m reading, especially if it is a really good book. I get too sucked in. And on one hand, I’m not sure I want to change that. I kind of feel like once I start noticing all the little technical details of writing, I will never be able to go back to just being a fan and getting sucked in.

However, I have been trying to remember to keep an eye open for some of these details, and one really struck me the other day. Something that I almost always forget to do in my stories: include irrelevant details.

It’s little things, like how a character thinks how that particular shade of blue reminds him of his mother’s eyes, or little myth or religion things, like how a the sounding of a bell will remind someone how he was raised to believe that the sound of a golden bell will drive away evil spirits. The thing is, those don’t add to the story directly, so I don’t think of them. However, they do add a lot to the story indirectly, by making the setting richer. They make it seem like there is a lot more to the world than we are seeing, that the characters have thoughts and memories and histories that we don’t know about.

And really, that’s how a real person thinks. These little stray thoughts that don’t mean anything are always shooting across our consciousness for no reason. If I were a character in a novel and someone was seeing what I was thinking, these little out-of-context thoughts would be all over the place. So not only does it make the world have more depth, it also makes the viewpoint character more believable.

Finally, this technique can be useful in a more direct way. It’s a good way to introduce things that are important down the road. If a character thinks, “I haven’t had this much fun since Martha died”, then the reader can reason that his wife is deceased, which may become motivation for some decision later in the story.

So perhaps I should say “seemingly irrelevant details”, since we don’t want truly irrelevant details cluttering up our story. We want the story to be as tight as possible, with no wasted words. But every once in a while, a couple of these details sprinkled throughout the story can really add a lot.

So, in the future, remember to keep the irrelevant details in mind!

Best Rejection Ever!

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Best day so far of my publishing career! I got a signed rejection from Asimov’s. Best. Rejection. Ever.

For those of you not in the know, when you submit a story to magazine it enters what can only be affectionately refered to as the “slush pile”. All of the unsolicited manuscripts (and there are more than you can believe) are tossed in a pile which has to be sorted through and read by poor souls hoping against hope that something, anything, of value can be found. The vast majority of this sea is crap (including, in some cases, my submissions). But every once in a while, a gem is found in the slush pile and passed into the hands of an editor.

It turns out, this particular story of mine was just such a gem.

Normal slush rejections from Asimov’s get a form rejection letter. I have several of those to prove it. This rejection had my name in it and was signed by the editor. Now that’s something I don’t see every day! It’s not exactly publication, but it’s only 1 step below. And this isn’t from just any magazine, it’s from Asimov’s. One of the big 3. The first magazine I ever submitted a story to.

I’m sure (hoping) that one day I’ll look back at this post and laugh at myself. But in the meantime, I have great hopes for the story, as well as future submissions to Asimov’s. Lets hope that this one wasn’t a fluke, but the beginning of a trend.

Onward and upward!

Writing roadblock: she’s just not that into you(r writing)

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Every time I read the “how I made it” story of a successful author, it inevitably contains a part about how supportive their wife has been. Believing in them when no one else would, supporting them for years when they were making no money, bending over backwards to take care of the trivialities of life while their head-in-the-clouds husband whiles away the hours on nothing. Now granted, some of them are on their 2nd or 3rd wife, but either way, they had someone who made their success possible.

Must be nice.

For some reason, Sara just isn’t really into it. In retrospect, after she read my stories, she just really had no opinions. I was positively begging her to rip them apart, or tell me which ones she liked, or really anything at all. Her reaction was always, “Eh. I don’t know.” Not exactly what I was going for. So the first obvious sign of her apathy was that she hasn’t been reading my completed stories. At first I was bothering her about it, but at some point I realized that if she didn’t want to read them, I wasn’t going to force her. So I stopped bringing it up, and let’s just say she hasn’t been begging me.

Now this doesn’t really offend me, but it seems very odd to me. If she was doing something similar, writing, or blogging, or painting, I would be falling all over myself to see it. I would just be curious. I wouldn’t be doing it to put on some sort of show of support, I would really be honestly excited to see her creative output. So her lack of interest just seems very atypical to me.

That has been the main thing, but there have been a few other things as well. For example, we were talking about rearranging the basement, and I mentioned that it might be nice to move the computer upstairs. That way, she could have the laptop, but I could still write on a computer. Currently, I write all of my first drafts long-hand in notebooks, to avoid hogging the laptop (this will probably be the topic of some future post). I don’t feel like it is fair for me to hog the main computer all the time, but it also slows my first drafts down quite a bit. So I thought moving the other computer upstairs, where it is more accessible, might be a nice compromise. But Sara refused on the grounds that the computer desk is ugly. Well, it is ugly, but that seems like an awfully severe position to take!

I can definitely see that writing time can cut into family time, or household chore time, etc. Maybe it has to cut into that kind of personal time in order for it to be successful. So I can see how someone might become sort of annoyed with the whole deal. But at this point, I don’t think it has really negatively affected her in any way. And she’s not really anti-writing, more just apathetic towards the whole thing.

So needless to say, she doesn’t need to worry about any dedication pages in any upcoming novels. How about you other writers out there? Is your significant other supportive or not? In what way? How important is it to have the support of your spouse?

Where are the blogs for writers like me?

/ Shane / Leave a comment

I have been making the “writer blog” circuit for a while now, seeing what’s out there and learning what I can. There is so much advice to be had, really good advice, that it is amazing. And all of them agree: to become a writer you must sacrifice. You must work and scrape and toil for 10 years in obscurity, raking in rejection after rejection, broke and barely surviving, often depending on the good will of those around you. If you have the tenacity to somehow make it through this, chances are you will end up making a living on your writing. Blog after blog is filled with the story of the now-successful writer who spent his early years working crappy job after crappy job, unmarried, childless, friendless, but cranking out a story a day until they acquired enough writing time to really learn the craft.

This is fantastic stuff. The sacrifices most of them made in their lives to get where they are, the top of their craft, is truly astounding. At this point in my life, I am not willing to sacrifice everything for writing. What about people like me? “Hobbyists,” they would sniff. “Permanent amateurs who will never reach the heights of The Craft and will never be able to quit their day jobs. Pathetic.”

But what about those who don’t necessarily want to quit their day job?

To be honest, I like coding as much as I like writing, and I make a fantastic living at it. So I’m going to throw away a good job that I love to make less at a different job I love? That doesn’t make much sense. Sure, I could make it big, become a best seller, but how many millionaire authors are there? How many millionaire computer programmers?

So this begs the question, are authors a bunch of bloated wind bags who are full of crap? Yes. Yes they are. They go on and on about The Craft and how they’ve “just got to write” and then turn around look down at the hobbyists for not making the noble sacrifice they themselves have made. In other words, it’s really about elitism and money. This is especially puzzling from genre writers who already complain about the same elitism applied to them from the “literary” world. What if I know that only writing part-time will double the length of my journey, and I’m more or less okay with that?

Writers like to paint this issue in black and white. Either you’re sacrificing everything for the craft, or you’re not an Author. There are no minor leagues. Far and wide, they sneer their battle cry, “If this sounds too tough for you, then quit right now! You’ll never make it!” What’s wrong with being a college player who dreams of the pros, but may never get there? Why would you discourage them from playing? Yes, chances are they won’t make it. But does that mean we should eliminate college football because it’s not the pros? I think a couple million people would be surprised to hear that nothing good came out of college football.

Look, if we were all really just concerned about The Craft, then we would encourage as many people to write as often as possible. But if we’re really concerned about making a living, then it is in our best interest to use scorn, derision, awful rumors about the barriers to entry of the field, and any other method possible to discourage people from writing. This keeps down the competition.

I am trying to break in for a lot of reasons. I like to improve at everything I do, even if I won’t ultimately make a living at it. And I can dream as big as the next guy about hitting a long shot. Most importantly, I am a person who needs constant outside validation. Ask my wife. And if I make a little cash on the side, I’ll take it.

Even if it’s not enough to quit my day job.

(P.S. Actually though, it is really hard and you should definitely not submit to any of the markets I submit to. Thanks.)

Does blogging help with Author Voice?

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Something that many beginning authors struggle with, is finding their “voice”. I’m not talking about character voice, I’m talking about the voice used for the words in between the dialog. Basically, how does one construct their sentences, what types of words do they use, what is the word rhythm, etc. Another way of thinking about it is, if you know me, and you read what I wrote, is it natural to imagine it in my speaking voice?

Every person has a unique way of talking, but when they sit down to write they have time to analyze each word. Often, instead of writing the way they talk, they write the way they were taught to write, or the way they think they ought to write. Writing like another famous author might be technically correct, but it isn’t interesting. That author already exists in the world. Publishers want something unique (unless you are ghost writing or something like that, obviously in that case you are trying to suppress your own voice).

This search for “voice” has taken on almost an epic meaning. Writing teachers and writers just past the newbie stage spend a lot of time talking about it. In fact, writing in your own voice is the most natural thing in the world. The hard part is un-learning everything you ever learned about how to write, and go back to your natural state. The ironic thing about your voice is that the more you think about it, the less you are able to grasp it. Therefore, most exercises designed to help you “find your voice” usually involve writing really fast or in a stream of consciousness to bypass the rational part of your brain and engage the subconscious.

Now, this is not something I ever really had trouble with (at least, that’s my opinion, I’m certainly no expert). I always tend to write how I talk. Maybe this is because not-thinking is sort of my default state of being, I don’t know. But my other theory relates to the title of this post: does blogging help find one’s “author voice”?

In all the posts I’ve written on this blog, I was not attempting some formal writing exercise. I was writing very informal, in a very “talky” sort of style. So, after all this time, I’ve had a lot of practice writing in my own author voice. Therefore, when I sit down to write some fiction, I naturally fall into that. Since I don’t have any sort of writing degree, I have had less “formal” training than a lot of beginning writers. Maybe years of blogging are actually *better* education wise, because I have less to un-learn.

So maybe there is a benefit to blogging after all! Maybe it is not just a waste of time, as many authors claim.