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Happy New Year!
January 9, 2014
We all MAKE resolutions for New Year. Some are for personal betterment, some for emotional and spiritual growth, and some for professional gain. We all want to better ourselves and that’s great. But guess what? The New Year is upon us. How’re we going observing those resolutions?
As a writer, what resolutions did you make for 2014? Was it to get a certain amount of short stories published? To win a competition or residency? To score a book deal with a publisher? Or possibly just to finish that book that’s been idling on your computer for X number of years?
Writers are – unfortunately – at the whims of the publishing industry. Writing a short story isn’t like building a birdhouse. You can build a birdhouse, advertise it in something like the Trading Post or try to sell it at one of the various markets, and as long as you’ve done a reasonable job and you’re not asking too high a price, you’ll probably sell it. If you gave it away for free, there’ll probably be any number of takers.
The same doesn’t happen with a story you might write. Your story could be the most brilliant story in the world, it could be the story of the YEAR, but if it doesn’t click with that one reader who’s usually the gatekeeper of submissions at any journal (or publisher), then it’s not going to go any further. We’re at the mercy of subjective appraisals. Offer your story for free, and they’re not going to be interested.
So any resolutions about trying to get published in X amount of journals, or trying to get published in a certain journal, or trying to win a competition or residency, or trying to score a book deal are fraught with peril, if not outright setting yourself up for a fall. It’s important YOU manage expectation. Whilst there’s no reason you can’t do any of these things and it’s awesome to have aspirations, it’s unwise to hedge all your emotional fortunes on success being your outcome. It’d be like going to the roulette wheel and putting all your money on one number. Is there a chance you’ll win and strike it big? Yes. But the odds are small. More importantly, you have no control of the result.
So as writers we need to seize control of those opportunities that gives us the very best chance of realising those dreams.
Do you want to finish something that’s just been sitting on your computer for-seemingly-ever? Well, it’s not going to finish itself. We can’t go out for a coffee and expect it’ll all be done for us when we get back. The only way to finish something is by making the commitment to finding the time and using that time to do so.
Yes, we all have lives, some more hectic than others. Some of us have households to run, kids to take care of, pets to walk, and all that. But look hard enough and there are pockets of time. It might only be a handful of minutes here and there, but if that’s all the time you have to make use of, then that’s the time you should make use of. It’s not about lamenting the opportunities you don’t have – e.g. a couple of leisurely hours every evening – but capitalising on whatever chances you do have and learning to habitually make the best of them. It’s the only way anything will ever get finished.
And once it’s finished, you know what comes next: revise.
At a recent workshop, a leading literary agent claimed there are more writers than there are readers. This figure might be inflated nowadays by bloggers, etc., but that’s still a scary proposition. Think of all the writers out there. Whilst it’s not impossible that you might’ve produced gold first or second up, it’s unlikely. So revise, revise, revise. Revise until you’re sick of it, get feedback on it, then revise, revise, revise again.
In all likelihood, you’re going to get one chance to submit to a particular market. One chance. That market isn’t going to want to hear from you a month after they’ve rejected you because you’re now claiming you’ve reworked your story and it’s even better. They have too much stuff to read to be awarding second chances. Make YOURS stand out from THE pack by revising and polishing it until it shines. Take advantage of your one chance.
It’s the BEST way to be true to any resolutions you might hold for 2014 as a writer.
Good luck!
LZ.
Reading: Part 2
December 19, 2013Reading as Recreation
- ‘When I was your age, television was called books.’
– Grandpa
The Princess Bride.
I’ve never understood people who don’t read. From as early as I can remember, I had a book of some sort in my hand – as a kid, they might be comics; then stuff like the various adventures of Asterix & Obelix, or Tintin; then novels.
There’s a relationship that you get from a book that you just don’t get from any other form of storytelling entertainment. That’s not to invalidate those other forms. There’s always great television series playing. Tune in and you devote yourself to them. It’s not unusual to discuss what happened with friends or family. When we’ve been impressed, how many times have you prefixed a question with, ‘Did you see …?’ or we debate the actions the characters took or what might occur next. If it’s something terrible, we’ll deconstruct it.
It’s the same thing with movies or theater. We’ll sit in a cinema or theater, amongst strangers, and share the experience. If it’s particularly good, we might chorus with laughter or shrieks or sit tensely. If it’s horrible, we might groan or – the more audacious amongst us – might mock it loudly. Afterward, we’ll go through the same examination of the stories and characters.
One of the strengths of these mediums is that they’re very visually and aurally-oriented – particularly in contemporary film and television. There’s very little filmmakers can’t do with CGI, creating worlds and effects that would’ve been impossible just ten years ago. Aurally, both are about more than sound effects (impressive in their own right), but also about the scores.
Watch any film John Williams has scored – e.g. Jaws, Star Wars, ET, Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark, amongst others – and listen to how the music sometimes not only adds a new dimension to what you’re seeing, but breathes life into it. Many of the people responsible for the early cuts of Star Wars (including George Lucas himself) felt the movie was flat. When John Williams’s score was added, the movie came alive.
Another example is Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Hitchcock originally wanted the famous shower scene to occur without any musical backing. Composer Bernard Herrmann scored it anyway. Hitchcock was furious, but when he heard the score – that tune that’s become so iconic – he changed his mind (and would later pay Herrmann twice his fee as a bonus for the overall score). Could you imagine that shower scene without it?
But there are things that can go wrong in television and movies and plays, as well as all their derivatives (musicals, webisodes, etc.). As with books, the story itself can be lacking, the pacing can be odd, the plotting could be uneven, it could be haphazardly told, and so on. Specific to these mediums, actors might be miscast (e.g. Bonfire of the Vanities), performances could be bad, effects might be laughable, etc.
Books themselves aren’t infallible. Just as we might’ve seen bad television or films, we’ve all read bad books, or books which haven’t resonated with us, (even if they’re regarded as classics). But – for mine – their strength has been the intimate relationship they create with you as a reader. It’s a marriage of you and the book. The words are a framework for your imagination to fill in the details. From there, you are immersed in the book’s world – a world that might be impossible to realise through any other medium.
Similarly with the story itself. Books can span millennia. Characters can begin as babies and we can witness their whole lives unfold before our eyes. Stories can be told disjointedly. There’s nothing a book can’t do, their only parameters the author’s imagination. Whilst film and television can do some astonishing things, there are – and probably always will be – limitations.
Then it’s just you and the story. Even the author themselves can become anonymous at this point, or only be represented through their voice. A bad book can help you even the legs on that uneven table. A good book takes you away until there’s nothing but yourself in this unfolding world. You are a disembodied spectator, becoming more and more invested until, with regret, you have to leave the story. Ever read a book and rued the pages are running out? Not a lot of other forms of entertainment can generate that sort of lament.
The best thing is you can take a book just about anywhere and dip into it anytime – read it on a train, in the tub, on the toilet, waiting for a doctor’s appointment, or whatever the case might be.
Reading’s something you can always do. And there’s always a new story waiting.
LZ.
Reading: Part 1
December 13, 2013Reading for Writers
There are various reasons why reading is a worthwhile recreation, particularly if you’re a writer. Reading complements the very act of writing as an educator of how to develop your craft. Don’t think you can be a writer without reading. If you think that, you’re deluding yourself.
If you’re a writer, here are some reasons why you should be reading …
It teaches us punctuation
Well, how boring is that? But it does. I picked up pretty much all my knowledge of punctuation from reading. When I studied, I was taught only two additional things, (that a full stop goes inside a sentence self-contained within parentheticals, and the use of semicolons in lists containing commas). Everything else I picked up through reading over the years. It mightn’t seem important to some. Why should it? Get published, and some nifty, anonymous editor will put all the damn full stops in place. But a knowledge of punctuation helps you to understand how words can work, and how punctuation (and its use, and placement) can affect the tone of sentences.
It teaches us how sentences are put together
You might protest you know how to put sentences together and you probably do – at least in your own style. But give the same assignment to five different writers, and they’re all going to execute it differently. Some might use short, punchy sentences. Others might have a lyricism to their words. Some might be languorous, developing mood and setting. There’s no limit to the alternatives and it’s instructive to see how different writers construct their prose.
It teaches us about characterisation/setting and description
How do you describe characters? Do you perform an information dump, unloading paragraphs of descriptions once a character is introduced? Or do you seed in the information gradually? Are your descriptions straightforward? Or do you use similes? With a character’s history, do you digress to relay their backstory and how they got to this point in the story? Or do you offer it piecemeal, or trigger it only when the character has some correlation to that bit of history, e.g. when your character picks up a picture from the mantel?
How about setting? Do you handle that similarly to characters? Are their sprawling, Tolkienesque descriptions? Or are they short and sweet? Do you find neat little twists on how to describe things, like Cormac McCarthy? Or are their rich but evocative little details, like Inga Simpson? Look at how different authors describe characters and settings and think about how you do it.
It teaches us about structure
Are your stories purely chronological? Do you intersperse them with intermissions, like Stephen King’s IT? Does you story run in reverse, as occurs with Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, where the lead character gets younger and younger as the novel progresses? Is the chronology disjointed, like Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five? These are just a handful of examples, but there is no limit to the way a story can be presented.
It teaches us about pacing, plotting, and sub-plotting
This might seem silly, but it’s interesting to see the way different authors handle the pacing of their books. In Julian Barnes’s The Sense of Ending, the first half of the book is dedicated to protagonist Tony Webster when he is in secondary school. In the space of a couple of pages, Barnes advances the protagonist to the point of a retiree, and the second half of a book is spent with the protagonist trying to puzzle out a mystery regarding one of his schoolmates. JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye all takes place over several days. Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet unfolds over decades. How do you deal with time?
What about plot? Do you have a proclivity to axis the story around one plot, with all the characters revolving around it? Or are their subplots unrelated to the main plot? All the characters in The Sense of Ending exist to serve the protagonist. In The Catcher of the Rye, everything revolves around Holden Caufield. But take something like JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and whilst ultimately every character is dedicated in the fight against Sauron, they all have their own arcs – Frodo and Sam are attempting to destroy the Ring, Merry serves King Theoden, Pippin serves Lord Denethor, Aragorn is attempting to become a king … and that’s just a smattering of what occurs. In George Martin’s Game of Thrones series, there are numerous characters whose threads evolve disparately.
These examples could go on, and it might seem all that’s happening is a listing of techniques that can be drawn from other books. But this is the point: reading can teach you some amazing things. You don’t have to dissect a book, or analyse how it’s constructed. Just through reading we absorb that information.
Sitting down and writing and writing and writing is a great educator in itself. We hone our skills and get to experiment, find out what works for us and what doesn’t, where our strengths lay and where they don’t, et al, but through reading, we open our minds to possibilities we might not have otherwise considered.
And it can be a lot of fun, too. But more on that next week.
LZ.
Handling Criticism
December 5, 2013
If you’re going to be a writer, here is something you need to learn – and accept – very quickly: not everybody is going to love what you write.
You could spend hours, days, weeks, working on a story, you may consider it pristine, friends and family might tell you it’s brilliant, your workshopping group may praise you effusively, but that doesn’t guarantee that once it’s out in the world it’s going to be accepted or, if it’s accepted and published, that everybody will like it.
In any sort of artistic endeavour – e.g. writing, music, storytelling – we are all at the whim of subjectivity. We see this everywhere. Avatar is the highest-grossing movie of all time, which validates its popularity, but not everybody likes it. Everybody bemoans the success of Fifty Shades of Grey and the Twilight saga, many question the quality of their writing, but there are people who love these books. People loathe the talent on a TV show like The Voice, whilst others love the music.
Subjectivity is also something we experience firsthand in running [untitled]. There are stories we reject and mightn’t think enough of which we later see popping up in another journal, or placing in a short story competition. Conversely, I’m sure we’ve accepted stories that have been unsuccessful elsewhere. This would be the case with other journals, agents, and even publishers.
Everybody has different tastes.
As we go through our writing lives, we have to learn to divorce ourselves from any destructive opinions, especially if we are (and most of us are to some extent, when it comes to our work) sensitive to criticism. There could be ten opinions of our story, nine of them glowing, and we’ll focus on the one which isn’t and let that gnaw at us.
Writing’s difficult. It’s not easy to sit in front of a blank page or blank screen and conjure an entire story from nothing. Talk to any wag at a party and tell them you’re a writer, and they’ll usually regale you with how they’d like to write a book, as if the act of writing simply required spewing any words and ideas onto a page, oblivious to the need for plotting, characterisation, motivation, structure, finding the right words, the right sentences, the right flow, the right evolution, et al.
Submitting’s little easier. Many writers are apprehensive about putting their work out there, worried that rejection will lead to invalidation. For those who do submit, they’ll lead a thankless existence waiting for journals (or publishers or agents) to respond, trying one after another until finally breaking through with an acceptance, (although acceptances usually remain the exception, rather than the rule).
Many – or at least many others who don’t understand a writer’s need to write – will question why writers do it. There’s (usually) little remuneration, less acknowledgement, and the most gratification we do get is from the accomplishment of completing a story and believing (or perhaps hoping) that it works. Because of the subjectivity of art, whether it works (and whether the story is itself complete) is harder to define than the product of, for example, a cabinetmaker, or a car-manufacturer, or whatever the case might be, as their goals have set parameters that have to be met, whereas storytelling is an abstract thing – no two people would tell the same story the same way.
Time and effort aside, we put a lot of ourselves in our writing. And whether our stories are brilliant or not, whether they’re accepted or not, whether they’re loved or not, we should be proud of that.
So don’t take criticism to heart.
LZ.
Your Story: A What-Not-To-Do Guide
November 27, 2013
One of the more enjoyable aspects of being an intern is getting to read submissions. Being a reader is like going on a blind date; you hope that the time you spend ‘getting to know’ a story leaves you feeling content (dare I say, satisfied?) and that your potential suitor doesn’t turn up with their collar flipped up or talk too much during the meal.
There are a lot of submissions, and this year alone I have read hundreds of stories, most of which were eventually rejected. While the subjects, styles and structures were diverse, many of the unsuccessful stories had elements in common.
As a writer, I know how hard it is to pluck up the courage to submit your work to a publication; I know, too, the intense feelings of disappointment and frustration when your work is overlooked. However, as an intern and budding editor, I am able to step back from a story, put any emotional attachment or sympathy aside, and see a story for what it is.
Authors out there, whether you’ve submitted your work to us or not, give your story a once-over and consider if it is ready to be judged.
Here’s my guide to improving your chances of making that all-important, great first impression:
- Don’t use every big word you know, particularly in the first sentence. I think there is a misconception that proving you can write in a ‘literary’ style will make you seem like a skilful storyteller. Simple language draws people in a lot quicker than you may think.
- Don’t give us too much exposition. Establishing character(s) and setting(s) is vital, but it’s easy to overdo. When you’ve finished writing a draft, take a break from your work. Read it a few weeks (yes, weeks) later. If the story doesn’t start until two pages in, there is too much exposition. On a related note, throughout the story, don’t overlook where you’ve given more detail than the reader actually needs.
- ‘Don’t use seven words when four will do.’ This is, embarrassingly, a quote from Ocean’s Eleven (2001). Nevertheless, it is sound advice. Brevity is a virtue in the literary world. (The first thing I check when I open a submission is the word count. Stories over 4000 words really need to justify their own length to be seriously considered by me.)
- Don’t mimic anybody. You are not [insert your favourite author’s name here]. Trying to ‘channel’ their voice always – always – comes off sounding awful. Play to your strengths and write the best way you know how.
- Don’t try to be controversial. Shock tactics do the exact opposite of drawing the reader in. I’ve read so many stories that start with some sort of physical or emotional explosion that I don’t even flinch anymore.
- Don’t submit your story without editing it. You may have heard the saying ‘Writing is re-writing’; I’ll expand on that by saying ‘re-writing’ means workshopping, editing, re-drafting and/or proofreading. Your favourite author has an editor. You should too.
- Don’t underestimate the power of grammar. Improper use of punctuation makes your story – regardless of how good it is – more difficult to read. If you’re unsure how to use a semicolon, please don’t use it. Please.
I hope that didn’t come off sounding negative or overly critical. My intention is to help you improve your work and better the chances of it being accepted. Whatever you do, know this: you must stay true to your voice – this is what reaches the audience, what keeps them invested.
Remember: [untitled] is a vehicle for popular fiction in short story form. We respect writers, but we also have a difficult task whittling thousands of entries down to a handful. It’s possible that your work is fantastic but simply doesn’t fit into our publication. Don’t give up – every story is worth telling and every story has its place in the publishing world.
HK.