Comments on: Revising Short Fiction is for Suckers

By: Erika

Erika — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 22:37:02 +0000

This has been a really interesting discussion! To address your original economic perspective, what I’m seeing in the comments is that short fiction serves the purpose of a loss leader. Just like the $10.00 dvds for sale at Best Buy, the purpose of short fiction is to entice people to support your bigger, more profitable forms of writing.

I think this is also what the cow analogy was getting at. Albeit in a looser, more liberal arts fashion. (I say that with love, having a liberal arts degree myself.)

By: Josh English

Josh English — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 22:30:55 +0000

Dean Wesley Smith told another writer (who was sitting next to me, so he may have been addressing both of us) the way to win WotF was to wait until 24 hours before the deadline, write a story, spell check it, and toss it in the mail.

I think the general idea is to get to the 1-million-word mark. Submitting during this period is up to the author, and for some success comes early. For others (like my, sadly) success is delayed until I write through my “garbage period.”

By: Tim Pratt

Tim Pratt — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 22:09:05 +0000

You don’t necessarily sell a story just once, either. The life cycle for one of my stories generally involves the first sale, some number of reprints from zero to a lot (to foreign markets, reprint anthologies, whatever), often a sale to a podcast magazine, and eventual appearance in a collection; I get paid for every one of those steps.

By: James

James — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 20:26:41 +0000

I think the story a week deadline was a great way to jolt me out of a rut of not finishing anything, and to make me believe that I would always be able to find a new idea to write about. Previous to that I’d written a story I loved and then got hung up trying to match it.

Ultimately I’m always trying to write the best story I can, it just I don’t know how to do that yet!

By: Jeff Spock

Jeff Spock — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 14:29:02 +0000

Huh.

The world has changed since Heinlein sold unrevised stuff. And I doubt that his apocryphal chairmaker would have tried to sell something that hadn’t been sanded, stained, and varnished. I blush at the idea of writing a story and assuming it would be good enough to send it straight to JJA without revision, much less to Van Gelder. Crazy talk.

I also think that the reality is that nobody makes a living on short fiction. At Clarion we were told that someone — I think it was Swanwick — decided to go for a year making a living only with short fiction. He ended up clearing around ten thousand dollars, if I recall correctly. Hard to call 800 bucks a month a living, and that was a Name.

So while I like the cow image, it seems to me that short fiction is done for love / reputation / self-marketing. And that it is revised before it is sent out…

By: Jeff VanderMeer

Jeff VanderMeer — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 21:18:36 +0000

Er, “on this planet,” that should read.

By: Jeff VanderMeer

Jeff VanderMeer — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 21:17:56 +0000

Greg makes some great points. When we look at only the strict monetary value of anything connected to writing, we often miss the point. Well, first of all, the reason to write fiction in the first place, which should be for the pleasure and art of it most or all of the time. But also because of those hidden benefits and those hidden opportunities. This year, I sold a story to Conjunctions, a major literary magazine. They only paid $125 for a 4,000-word story. But it put me in front of a different readership, and I’m still reaping benefits from that. And Conjunctions as a pub credit will help open the door to other opportunities as well. In addition to the stuff that falls into your lap, I see it as *consciously* thinking about the subsidiary benefits of where and how you sell a story, and trying, like a chess player, to extrapolate several moves ahead.

I personally don’t believe in the story a week thing. It’s a good way to turn out competent but not great fiction, and very few writers get away with it to any degree.

Ultimately, we’re on this what, what? Maybe 75 or 80 years. Of that time, maybe 40 years is prime writing time in terms of energy and desire. After that point, we’re all dust anyway. So, why not make it count as much as possible.

Which I guess is another way of saying I always think of income from short stories as a kind of bonus–something unexpected. I never figure it into my budget.

JeffV

By: James

James — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 08:17:49 +0000

I hate revising but my best stories have had lots of revisions.

A couple of years ago I took the “Jay Lake” approach and wrote a story every week for a year. The result was interesting, lots of stories, many of them underdeveloped, some of them good, some of them bad, many of them repetitive. Did any of them need revising? Yes, probably all of them except the flash stories. I’m still working through many of them.

Since then I decided to try and focus on quality, and I’m not sure its worked! So maybe I should go back to blasting out the stories first draft style?

Don’t know. The more I write the harder it seems to get.

By: Hmmm. Money and Fiction. | Spontaneous ∂erivation

Hmmm. Money and Fiction. | Spontaneous ∂erivation — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 06:27:10 +0000

[...] at Jeremiah Tolbert’s blog, I made a rather inept comment on his recent post about how spending too much time revising short fiction can cut your time/benefit ratio. Especially in terms of making money from [...]

By: Matthew Sanborn Smith

Matthew Sanborn Smith — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 01:14:57 +0000

Here’s something else I wanted to say and since I can’t do a rewrite of my first post, I’ll have to settle for an addendum.

There are many times that I don’t even know what my story might be about until after my first draft. I don’t mean the plot, I mean the deeper, human stuff, the chord-striking stuff. The first rewrite I do is about getting all of that first draft in line with what I discovered the story is really about.