Archive for the ‘Writing Advice’ Category

Why Hasn’t Story Itself Changed with the Web?

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

The struc­ture and nature of short sto­ries haven’t really changed in the dig­i­tal age, as far as I can tell.  They’re still told the same way mostly, same per­spec­tives, in roughly the same amount of time ( around 3–7000 words).  E-​​zines are for the most part  straight for­ward adap­ta­tions of the print mag­a­zine for­mat, to vary­ing degrees.  PDF mag­a­zines are iden­ti­cal to print mag­a­zines, except they’re read on a screen instead of on paper, or even printed off by some. E-​​zines like Strange Horizons make use of basic hyper­text fea­tures, but the sto­ries them­selves do not take advan­tage of of any of those fea­tures except in rare occasions.

Flash fic­tion, or sto­ries under 500 words, has seen a boom online, with elec­tronic mag­a­zines such as Brain Harvest spe­cial­iz­ing in them exclu­sively.   Personally, I don’t find such short sto­ries very sat­is­fy­ing very often, despite my involve­ment with the Daily Cabal, (which you should check out if you do like flash fic­tion).  I don’t think I’ve ever writ­ten a really suc­cess­ful flash fic­tion story.   I would argue that flash fic­tion is even less pop­u­lar than reg­u­lar short fic­tion, which is pretty unpop­u­lar in the first place.

Continue read­ing ›

5 Rejection Horror Stories

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Rejection hor­ror sto­ries are like the camp­fire ghost sto­ries told to other writ­ers in hushed tones, per­haps over drinks at a hotel bar, but more likely over an email or instant message.

No, that’s not right.  Unlike ghost sto­ries, which seek to strike fear in the lis­ten­ers, these hor­ror sto­ries are meant to make us feel bet­ter.  The hor­ror comes from what was rejected, how it was rejected, and who was rejected.

I think most writ­ers, espe­cially those just start­ing out, col­lect these sto­ries to act as ward and charms against the fear of fail­ure that so often plague us as the rejec­tion let­ters mount, even those who have been writ­ing for decades.  Here are some of my favorites:

1.  Ursula K. Le Guin’s famous rejec­tion letter

The whole is so dry and air­less, so lack­ing in pace, that what­ever drama and excite­ment the novel might have had is entirely dis­si­pated by what does seem, a great deal of the time

The book being rejected?  The Left Hand of Darkness, a book that sub­se­quently found a pub­lisher and then went on to win the Nebula and the Hugo.   Read the full rejec­tion let­ter on Le Guin’s website.

2. J.K. Rowling’s long march to publication

Daughter Jessica was three-​​years-​​old when Joanne sent off her first fin­ished man­u­script. “Into the enve­lope it went, off it went and back came a very prompt response, say­ing ‘No, thank you.’ And then I got another rejec­tion let­ter. “The funny thing is they didn’t upset me because I had that back-​​against-​​the-​​wall men­tal­ity. By this time, I was on a teach­ing course. I knew I was going to have incred­i­bly lim­ited time to write and I just thought, ‘Well, even if what you end up with is a file full of rejec­tion let­ters, you know you tried.’ “The first agent sent me a let­ter back say­ing, ‘My client list is full’ – lit­er­ally! “No ‘Dear Madam’ and no ‘Yours sin­cerely’, and if I sound like I bear a grudge, I do because I’d sent my man­u­script in this beau­ti­ful plas­tic folder and I was broke and I didn’t have £5 to spend on a plas­tic folder and she sent it back with­out the folder and she wrote, ‘No, thank you.’ And with a hand­writ­ten PS, ‘The folder you sent would not fit in the enve­lope.’ And I just felt, ‘Well, buy big­ger envelopes, then.’ I was furious.

Even the best-​​selling series in recent mem­ory was rejected numer­ous times by agents and edi­tors. The truth is, something’s great­ness is not read­ily appar­ent.  You just have to keep look­ing until you find some­one who believes in your work as much as you do.  And if you don’t believe in your work utterly, why are you even both­er­ing to sub­mit it?

3. Flowers for Algernon– Gold’s Rewrite Request

As part of the larger essay “Thus Our Words Unspoken” (1994), Malzberg relates the story (as told by Robert P. Mills) of how Daniel Keyes’s clas­sic story (and one of the best SF sto­ries of all time) “Flowers for Algernon” came to be pub­lished, and pub­lished in F&SF. It seems Keyes had sub­mit­ted it to Horace Gold at Galaxy. Gold said he would pub­lish it only if Keyes made one cru­cial change: that Charlie not end up an imbe­cile at the end of the story, but remain a genius. Keyes refused and trunked the story. Then, on a shared train ride with F&SF edi­tor Mills, Mills asked Keyes for a story. Keyes thought imme­di­ately of “Flowers” and began to describe it to Mills. Mills found it inter­est­ing, asked to see the ms., and upon read­ing it wanted to pub­lish it … with one change. Keyes, assum­ing the worst, begged Mills not to ask him to change the end of the story. Mills said no, that the change he wanted was to add a girl­friend for Charlie. Keyes, relieved, agreed to the change, and we all know the rest of the story.

Dave Truesdale recounts this story, which I think is a good para­ble about stick­ing to your vision.  If you sac­ri­fice your vision for the sake of being pub­lished, then what’s the point?  Be per­sis­tent, but polite, but also will­ing to accept change sug­ges­tions from an edi­tor that makes sense.  Most of my sto­ries have been made bet­ter by an edi­tor.  But I’ve also turned down rewrite requests that I didn’t feel were in-​​line with what I wanted to do.  I lost money, but I felt bet­ter about myself.   But good lord, could you imag­ine a Flowers that turned out the way Gold wanted?  It would have been a travesty!

4. Brandon Sanderson– 13 Failed Novels

“I spent nine years try­ing to get pub­lished.  During that time, I wrote thir­teen nov­els.  I even­tu­ally sold the sixth, Elantris, and got a con­tract from Tor for another tril­ogy after Elantris.”

Brandon Sanderson is the cho­sen one, lit­er­ally, picked to fin­ish the long-​​running and unfin­ished Wheel of Time series.The man wrote a baker’s dozen of nov­els before sell­ing one! Can you really argue that stick­ing to it and being per­sis­tent doesn’t pay off in the face of that fact?

5.  Just about Every Other Author You’ve Ever Heard Of

Stephen King’s Carrie was rejected for being “dystopian.”   Rudyard #*(@ing Kipling was rejected and informed that he didn’t know how to use the English lan­guage!  Dr. Suess?  Too weird.  H.G. Wells War of the Worlds?  Too scary and dreadful.

If there’s a writer who has never once received a rejec­tion, I haven’t met him or her.  Everyone gets them.  And they suck, I won’t deny it.  I’m lax about sub­mit­ting my work because they tend to ruin my day, but even still, I know I shouldn’t let them.  They don’t mean much of any­thing beyond one editor’s (or maybe a cou­ple), or an agent’s opin­ion.  Have some faith in your work.  Keep at it, try­ing to get bet­ter.  One day, that rejec­tion let­ter you’re expect­ing will turn out to be some­thing entirely different.

Special thanks to John Joseph Adams for help­ing me find cita­tions for some of these famous rejec­tion stories.

4 Wonderful Tools for Writers in the Digital Era (That Aren’t Word Processors)

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

As a designer, I’m always stum­bling across use­ful resources and tools online, but for what­ever rea­son, I find fewer tools that really exist to help make writ­ers’ lives eas­ier.  That doesn’t mean they aren’t out there.  It just means you have to dig a lit­tle deeper.  Today, I thought I would share some tools that can make cer­tain aspects of the writer’s life a tad easier.

1. Dropbox

If you’re any­thing like me, you don’t always remem­ber to run your back­ups.  With recent com­puter trou­bles, I’ve been mak­ing a much big­ger effort to back­ing up every­thing of impor­tance.  About six months ago, I started using Dropbox and I haven’t looked back.

Dropbox is an online ver­sion­ing and backup sys­tem.  You install drop­box on your win­dows or mac com­puter and every­thing in the folder called “My Dropbox” is con­stantly uploaded to the server.  When you make mod­i­fi­ca­tions, it keeps a record of these changes and you can go to the web inter­face and load older ver­sions.  Accidentally over­write a file?  Dropbox can save your butt.  It has saved me on more than one ocassion.

Even bet­ter, Dropbox can be installed on mul­ti­ple com­put­ers, keep­ing your drop­box folder synced up to all of the machines.  Whether you’re on your office com­puter or your lap­top, you will have access to your files.

Finally, Dropbox users can share fold­ers with one another.  We use this fea­ture exten­sively at Escape Artists to deal with our pro­duc­tion files, con­tracts, and var­i­ous busi­ness doc­u­ments and resources.

My biggest con­cern when I first started using Dropbox was that it would con­stantly be upload­ing my 50+ megabyte pho­to­shop files, and my band­width would be devoured.  It actu­ally tracks the dif­fer­ences, though, and only uploads the changed bits.  I’ve never noticed Dropbox being a hog of my writing.

There’s a free 2 giga­byte account, which should be more than enough to pro­tect your writ­ing doc­u­ments.   I pay for the 50/​gb a year plan for $99 per year because I truck in larger files.    Dropbox is avail­able for Mac, PC, and Linux.

2. Evernote

I work across 3 dif­fer­ent com­put­ers, and keep­ing my research notes in an easy-​​to-​​access for­mat, while main­tain­ing flex­i­b­lity and a vari­ety of for­mats, isn’t easy.  That is, until I dis­cov­ered Evernote.  What I was look­ing for orig­i­nally was pro­duc­tiv­ity soft­ware to help myself imple­ment the GTD method.  What I found instead was a very use­ful pro­gram for orga­niz­ing all those lit­tle bits and pieces of things that I need to access from time to time.

Evernote works on a very sim­ple sys­tem of note­books and notes.  You can add tags, and just about any kind of media into a note.  You can clip entire web­pages into a note, or just the URL.  You can make screen cap­tures very eas­ily.  And then the real power is, it’s con­stantly back­ing up your notes to the server, and sync­ing them with all machines you run it on.  There’s a usage limit for free accounts based on data trans­fer, but I’ve never even got­ten halfway there.  I don’t tend to use much in the way of mul­ti­me­dia files though.

Not only do I use Evernote for sort­ing and keep­ing track of things like research notes, sto­rynotes, and so on–I often start writ­ing my blog­posts there.  Any kind of doc­u­ment where the for­mat isn’t nec­es­sary, that I want to be able to access from any­where.  You can even record voice notes with the iPhone app and they will be synced to all your machines.  I used this fea­ture to take down some notes on my novel project while I was dri­ving across Kansas alone.  Very use­ful feature.

There are a few things about Evernote I do find lack­ing.  For one, you can’t sort note­books into col­lapsi­ble hier­ar­chies.  I would really like to be orga­nize my notes in a sim­i­lar fash­ion to my email pro­gram.   You can kind of fake this with saved searches for tags and so on, but I don’t really need a more detailed sys­tem of orga­ni­za­tion than notebooks/​folders.

Evernote is avail­able on Mac, PC, and iPhone. It has a very nice web-​​based inter­face as well.  If you have an inter­net con­nec­tion, you can get to your notes.

3. Sonar

I don’t use this one cur­rently, but not because there’s any­thing wrong with it.  I just don’t have enough sto­ries and sub­mis­sions out that I need to keep track of any­thing.  Sonar is a PC-​​only data­base specif­i­cally designed for keep­ing track of your sub­mis­sions.  It’s genre agnos­tic, as far as I remember.

Some fea­tures include:

  • color-​​coding
  • list subs by the work or by market
  • sortable
  • auto­matic daily backups
  • Until the per­fect online solu­tion comes along, Sonar is my pick for track­ing submissions.

When I start writ­ing and sub­mit­ting more actively again, you can bet that Sonar will be my go-​​to track­ing software.

4. Bubbl​.us

Bubbl​.us is a mind-​​mapping web­site.  It has a slick, easy to use inter­face, and you can export your maps out in a vari­ety of image for­mats or even HTML.

My pri­mary use of Bubbl​.us is to cre­ate site maps for free­lance web­site gigs.  However, I do use it from time to time to explore var­i­ous notions in a work in progress story.  I find that the mindmap­ping method really helps me brain­storm when I’m work­ing on things like world­build­ing or plot.

Being browser-​​based, it’s cross-​​platform, and it’s free!  It’s hard to beat that.

5 Lies Writers Believe About Editors

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

At least in the sci­ence fic­tion com­mu­nity, there’s a lot of false com­mu­nity wis­dom float­ing around about the edi­to­r­ial process.  Some of them may have been true once.  Some were prob­a­bly invented to mess with the heads of noobs.   Some of them are care­fully nutured lies, like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.   Well, no longer.  I’m here to tell you the truth, no mat­ter how ugly it may be.

LIE #1:   Editors give every story fair con­sid­er­a­tion. OR:  Editors reject sto­ries with­out read­ing them at all.

The truth is, the slush is deep, and it’s rarely an editor’s favorite part of the job.  Why do you think so many places have slush readers?

Every story doesn’t get fair con­sid­er­a­tion.  Not every story deserves it.  If you can’t be both­ered to read the sub­mis­sion guide­lines and fol­low them, it’s an easy rejec­tion.  If you have five gram­mar and spelling mis­takes in the first two para­graphs, it’s an easy rejec­tion.    If it’s a story about vam­pires, and I hate vam­pire sto­ries, it’s mostly an easy rejection.

Most sto­ries get at least a page out of me. Then I skip to the last 3 para­graphs, if I’m feel­ing gen­er­ous.   Some get less.   Some work is so obvi­ously bad that it’s star­tlingly easy to know it’s not going to work.  But every story gets looked at.  Nothing ever gets rejected with­out being par­tially read.  Honest.

LIE #2:  Editors never reject a good story.

I rejected plenty of really good sto­ries at the Fortean Bureau.   I’ve even rejected a cou­ple at Escape Pod.  The rea­son is pretty sim­ple: edi­to­r­ial vision or scope.   The Fortean Bureau was look­ing for a par­tic­u­lar kind of story.  Your space opera, no mat­ter how good, was never going to appear there.  Likewise, we don’t accept hor­ror or fan­tasy at Escape Pod.   If the story is good, and sucks me in, I will rec­om­mend send­ing it over to the other editors.

Stories get rejected for being too long, too short, too sim­il­iar to another story the edi­tor has already bought… there are as many rea­sons for rejec­tion as there are sto­ries.  And not all of them involve you mak­ing mis­takes.  There are aspects of the process that a writer can­not con­trol.  Best to just relax about it.

LIE #3:  Editors don’t fos­ter new writ­ers like they did in the old days, and don’t care about new talent.

John W. Campbell was a med­dle­some bas­tard who sent his writ­ers spe­cific ideas for sto­ries.  He was not what you call a “hands off” kind of edi­tor.  He wrote his fair share of sto­ries, and some of the tales I’ve heard about him make me think that he was often think­ing as a writer as much as he was an edi­tor.  He wasn’t afraid to rewrite some­one else’s story.

For what­ever biz­zare rea­son, some peo­ple wish edi­tors would take that level of inter­est in their work, and  they lament that edi­tors no longer fos­ter new writ­ers, giv­ing them the kind of con­struc­tive crit­i­cism that leads to their per­sonal growth.  Everything for writ­ers was just won­der­ful back then but these edi­tors today are jerks!

Not true.  Campbell may have had time to do this with a larger per­cent­age of his sub­mis­sions, but the field was smaller then.  Today, there are tens of thou­sands of writ­ers all try­ing to break in to the same pub­li­ca­tions.  We sim­ply don’t have time to give per­sonal feed­back to each sub­mis­sion.  These days, some­times the best you get is an encour­ag­ing rejec­tion.  My first came from Stanley Schmidt: “I like your writ­ing, so I hope you will send more in the future.”  Not very spe­cific, but it does the trick.  It tells you that you’re on the right track.

As much as I give Gordon van Gelder a hard time for his oppo­si­tion to online media, the man writes a very suc­cinct and help­ful rejec­tion let­ter.     Even the form let­ters have a sys­tem to them to help you fig­ure out why the story was rejected.  I always simul­ta­ne­ously feared and looked for­ward to his short notes.

Editors do build a sta­ble of writ­ers.  The rea­son most peo­ple don’t see it is because by the time you come along, the edi­tor has already estab­lished a group of authors he or she can count on.  But short story writ­ers in par­tic­u­lar are always going on to write nov­els, so open­ings do occur from time to time.

If you really want feed­back on your work, join a work­shop or cri­tique cir­cle.  It’s not the editor’s job to help you become a bet­ter writer.  Sometimes, we’re help­ful, but we can’t do it for everyone.

LIE #4:  Editors are peo­ple too.

“Editors are just like us.”  No, we’re not. You don’t have a nev­erend­ing stream of bad writ­ing com­ing at you day in, day out.    You get to read for plea­sure, select­ing mate­r­ial that has been through at least one fil­ter.  Whereas you turn on the tap and get a stream of nice drink­able water,  we put our mouths to a sewer pipe and hope to get at least one swal­low that won’t give us rag­ing diarrhea.

I know the sen­ti­ment of the phrase is meant to imply that we’re not god­like arbiters of taste, mak­ing and break­ing careers on a whim.    But edi­tors do wield power.  And it changes us.  Generally it makes us ill-​​tempered and eas­ily dis­tracted by shiny objects.    I’ve yet to feel god­like, but I’m not rul­ing out the pos­si­bil­ity.  Maybe when some­thing I’ve pub­lished wins a Hugo, I will ascend to Asgard.

LIE #5:  Editors (and crit­ics) are failed writers.

As a rule, no.  A lot of us are mod­er­ately suc­cess­ful writ­ers.   Some of us have never wanted to write and never will.  There are a few who have started out as writ­ers and given it up for the editing/​publishing game (Gordon, I think), but not all of us have.

We’re not dri­ven to become edi­tors out of bit­ter­ness.  We all come to the posi­tion for dif­fer­ent rea­sons, but I think most of us start out as opti­mistic and hope­ful.  We think that maybe we have a vision for a type of story that nobody else has seen before.  We day dream about find­ing writ­ers that amaze us and pub­lish­ing them before any­one else.

It takes a pecu­liar sort of ego to take up edit­ing.  And thank god.  If it wasn’t for edi­tors, we’d all have to sort through the kind of self-​​published garbage that made it pos­si­ble for Geocities to stay in busi­ness for so long.  I shud­der to think of a world with­out editors.

And finally, a well-​​known truth:

You can bribe an editor.

Most of us are broke and dri­ven to drink copi­ous amounts of alco­hol.  See the sewer pipe anal­ogy above.  That gives us a weak­ness you can exploit.  Next time you’re at a con­ven­tion, go to the bar, and buy a drink for your favorite edi­tor.  Make sure you do it early on, because seven or eight drinks in, we’ll never remem­ber your name.   We’ll be lucky to wake up in the right hotel room, or even the right state.  Who bought the drinks on a night like that will be the least of our con­cerns when we wake up naked atop a desert mesa cov­ered from head to toe in blue paint.

Putting a name to a face, along with a men­tal data­base note of “bought me a beer” doesn’t hurt.  One of the things that makes edit­ing eas­ier is pre­tend­ing that the sto­ries aren’t all writ­ten by human beings with heart.  Sometimes, we have to put that out of our minds.  And if you find a way to politely shat­ter that illu­sion, well, it can be good for you.  But only if you are likely to start sell­ing sto­ries anyway.

There are no great secrets to being pub­lished.  Read lots.   Write sto­ries.  Lots and lots of sto­ries.  Submit the work until the sto­ries are either accepted or rejected by every mar­ket you could bear to see your name asso­ci­ated with.  That’s pretty much all there is to it.  Everything else is basi­cally unimportant.

7 Strategies for Making Time for Your Creative Pursuits

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

it’s my under­stand­ing that there are some peo­ple out there that still have a job and have fam­i­lies they like to spend time with. I’ve heard of such peo­ple. But seri­ously, once, I had a day job too. I do have a fam­ily I love to spend time with. So I know a lit­tle bit about how hard it is to find time to do the things you really love while spend­ing a lot of time doing the things you have to do to make every­thing else possible.

Making time is an inter­est­ing turn of phrase. It almost implies that if we just con­cen­trate, we’ll man­i­fest extra min­utes or hours out of noth­ing. The truth is, every day has 24 hours, 1,440 min­utes, 86400 sec­onds. Except for those weird days that don’t because of time changes. We’re not going to be mak­ing any more time. We have to make do with the time we have.

Being a suc­cess­ful cre­ative pro­fes­sional, whether you’re only doing it on the side of a big­ger gig, or you’re a full time free­lancer, requires some unique time man­age­ment. There are a mil­lion meth­ods out there, a mil­lion tools, all about how to man­age your time effec­tively. There’s a rather large pseudo-​​cult around “Getting Things Done.” I’ve exper­i­mented with it, but I didn’t find that it was the right man­age­ment sys­tem for me. I wanted some­thing a lit­tle more organic, and some­thing that takes into con­sid­er­a­tion that some of us have jobs where we’re actu­ally expected to be on email more than an hour a day.

I’ve yet to hit upon a par­tic­u­lar method­ol­ogy that works for me, but var­i­ous tips and tricks have col­lected in the recesses of my brain in the time I’ve been doing this. Here are some of the strate­gies that work for others:

  • The Early Riser: get up before any­one else in the house does, stum­ble to the com­puter, and work before you brain even fully comes online.
  • The Late Night Insomniac: wait until every­one else in the house has gone to bed, and then get your work done before stum­bling off to bed.
  • The Minutes Stealer: work a lit­tle here, a lit­tle there. Have a daily goal, and squeeze out what time you can in places. This kind of spo­radic approach.
  • The Lunch Breaker: most peo­ple with full time jobs get lunch breaks. An hour to yourself–if you don’t have errands that need to be run, and you can prac­tice your cre­ativ­ity with­out spe­cial instru­ments– is valu­able. It’s built right into your day. This some­times means giv­ing up a meal though, which I’m against on prin­ci­ple. You can’t sac­ri­fice your health for pro­duc­tiv­ity. They’re not inter­changable cur­ren­cies in the long run. You’ll get shorted even­tu­ally, some­times badly.
  • The Sacrificer: Like to play games with friends? Or do you like to watch a lot of TV? Sacrificers give up TV or video games in order to ded­i­cate that time to their art instead.
  • The Vacationer: some peo­ple will take time off from their job, hole up in a room, and pound out a project in a week or two weeks. Believe it or not, some peo­ple can write a novel in that time frame, but I sus­pect they do a lot of plan­ning and research ahead of time, and use the vaca­tion time purely for get­ting words on the page, ink on paper, paint on can­vas, etc.
  • The Unemployed: you have all the time in the world! Except now that you don’t have a job get­ting in the way, you have errands to run con­stantly. Errands mul­ti­ply in the absence of a job, it’s ridicu­lous. Being unem­ployed, so far in my expe­ri­ence, doesn’t make it any eas­ier. You still have to fol­low the basic strat­egy, which is this:

All strate­gies involve tak­ing time you already have and retask­ing it to your new purpose.

There may be some peo­ple whose lives are so absolutely full of jobs and fam­ily that they lit­er­ally can­not spare any time for their art, but I doubt there are many of them. Most of us have time some­where in our lives. It’s just a mat­ter of iden­ti­fy­ing the time and com­mit­ting it to the use you desire most.

Do you use a strat­egy to make time for your work that I haven’t men­tioned above? Share it with us in the comments.

5 Books on Writing and Science Fiction That Made Me a Better Writer

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

In the spirit of other posts this week, I thought I would share with you five books that I keep handy still when I’m try­ing to write fic­tion. Some of these books have imparted their lessons already, and some still have a lot to teach me. Each one of them has been use­ful for dif­fer­ent rea­sons, but I rec­om­mend all of them if you’re seri­ous about fic­tion. Some of them I rec­om­mend even to estab­lished writ­ers. Read on for the details.

Creating Short Fiction by Damon Knight

Strong sto­ries are made from things inside you want­ing to get out.

This was one of the very first books on writ­ing sci­ence fic­tion that was rec­om­mended to me. Damon Knight and his wife founded the Clarion Workshop. If any­one knows about cri­tiquing writ­ers sto­ries and teach­ing peo­ple to write, it’s this man.

I love the tone of this book. It’s encour­ag­ing while being real­is­tic. It’s writ­ten in a very relaxed style. One notion from this book that I found par­tic­u­larly valu­able was the con­cept of “Fred.” Fred is where Damon Knight’s ideas come from. What he means is the sub­con­cious. I’ve found that writ­ing for me is very much about the strug­gle and coop­er­a­tion between my con­cious and sub­con­cious minds. Damon puts it in sim­ple terms that made it clear to me that the lit­tle back-​​of-​​the-​​mind feel­ings were impor­tant to the process, and how impor­tant it is to lis­ten to Fred, to feed Fred, and gen­er­ally keep him entertained.

I’ve had prob­lems with my Fred lately, and I think that’s because I let my Fred become pre­oc­cu­pied with other mat­ters. But I’m work­ing on get­ting him fed up again, and lis­ten­ing to his whispers.

Another area that really helped me was the sec­tion on struc­ture. Damon explains some dia­gram­ming tech­niques that can be very help­ful. But there’s some­thing great on nearly every page, and I found it incred­i­bly help­ful early on.

Science Fiction: 101 edited by Robert Silverberg

Mastery of craft is a mat­ter of process, not of a sin­gle blind­ing moment of attain­ment: you go on work­ing toward it all your life.

I am not one to advo­cate that new writ­ers have to read the clas­sics of the genre before they get started. Frankly, I find a lot of the so called “Golden Age” to be bor­ing and very out­dated. However, There is some­thing to be said for read­ing the great sto­ries of the past, and this book does a pretty good job of find­ing gen­er­ally good sto­ries, but also sto­ries that teach a par­tic­u­lar les­son. Through it all you also get to learn about Robert Silverberg’s early career. It doesn’t work like that any­more, but it’s still inter­est­ing if you like sci­ence fiction.

The book’s an anthol­ogy, a how-​​to, and a mem­oir rolled into one tome. And if you think the rejec­tion let­ters you get today are bad, wait until you read the notes that Horace Gold sent Silverberg. Silverberg’s dis­sec­tion of the sto­ries con­tained within are quite fan­tas­tic to me, and that he was able to find a tech­ni­cal flaw in Bester’s “Fondly Fahrenheit” is damned impres­sive. It’s a minor one, but he uses it to illus­trate an impor­tant notion about para­graphs being con­nected to one another.

The Science of Science-​​Fiction Writing by James Gunn

Honore de Balzac dis­cov­ered that a char­ac­ter did not exist in fic­tion until that char­ac­ter had inter­acted with another char­ac­ter, and Gustave Flaubert dis­cov­ered that noth­ing exists in fic­tion until it has been located in time and place with an appeal to at least three senses.

I spoke about James Gunn as a teacher ear­lier this week. He’s not nearly as faux-​​discouraging in this text, and it’s quite nice. There’s a bit of an old-​​fashioned feel to this book, and I even dis­agree with some of the things that Gunn says, such as the notion that main­stream fic­tion dis­counts Darwin entirely. I think this may have been true in the past, but maybe not so much these days. A lot of the notions of SF have been coopted by the main­stream since he wrote the book, I think.

This is a good middle-​​level text, I think. He approaches con­cepts like char­ac­ter and plot in a very sen­si­cal way, and some of the his­tory of sci­ence fic­tion is very inter­est­ing from an enthusiast’s stand­point, even if it won’t tell you how to write a bet­ter story.


Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maas

A great fic­tional world is a sum of details that to most read­ers are unknown.

This is an odd one for me to include because I haven’t fin­ished the book yet, but Even half-​​way through, and it’s already had an impact on the way I am think­ing about my novel projects. I don’t feel that this book will help that much if you’re just start­ing out, because it paints a fairly broad brush. I think Maas assumes a cer­tain level of expe­ri­ence here, even talk­ing about his book in terms of estab­lished nov­el­ists look­ing to take their work up to the next level.

It’s really his dis­cus­sion of rais­ing the stakes that has sunk its teeth into me. He even says that if there’s one thing that will make a story more pow­er­ful, it’s to raise the stakes. Now in sci­ence fic­tion, I think it’s eas­ier to take this too far. You can put the entire planet or uni­verse at stake in the right sit­u­a­tions, and it’s hard t dra­ma­tize those very well in my expe­ri­ence. But through the sim­ple act of con­tem­plat­ing the stakes, I’ve pushed sev­eral recent bits of writ­ing into a much more inter­est­ing place. I’ll report back on more of this one when I’ve man­aged to fin­ish it.

Story by Robert McKee

In life, expe­ri­ences become mean­ing­ful with reflec­tion in time. In art, they are mean­ing­ful now, at the instant they hap­pen.

For under­stand­ing sto­rycraft, and the struc­ture of sto­ries and plot, there’s no bet­ter book than this. I return to this book time and tmie again. It is so rich with under­stand­ing of the nature of story that my mind can­not con­tain its full impli­ca­tions in a sin­gle read. I pick this up from time to time and flip to ran­dom pages, always learn­ing some new les­son. Robert McKee uses a lot of screen­writ­ing exam­ples here, and osten­si­bly it’s ori­ented towards that, but don’t let that dis­uade you from pur­chas­ing this one. It’s beyond fan­tas­tic. I don’t use this term often, but if you are just start­ing out with writ­ing, this is a must-​​read.

Buy The Books

So those are the books that I have sit­ting next to me as we speak. I have to buy a copy of the If any of these sound inter­est­ing to you, and you’re not boy­cotting Amazon, please con­sider buy­ing the books through the links I’ve pro­vided here. It will help sup­port me writ­ing more posts like this one (although less obvi­ously com­mer­cially crass). I’ve applied for an Indie Books affil­i­ate but haven’t been approved yet, and will use that affil­i­ate in the future for this kind of thing in addi­tion to Amazon.

Getting Started Writing Science Fiction

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Today, we move back to dis­cussing writ­ing, specif­i­cally, the begin­ning of a writ­ing career.  Considering I’m barely out of that phase, it’s really the only phase I feel con­fi­dent in dis­cussing.  So:

Read Bilal wrote last week:

I have been read­ing sci­ence fic­tion and fan­tasy for a long time. Given that I am a sci­ence grad stu­dent I also have some sci­en­tific back­ground. I come up with ideas to write a sci-​​fi story or novel. Then I think on them and develop a gen­eral direc­tion how­ever, time lim­i­ta­tions, English being my sec­ond lan­guage and gen­er­ally poor writ­ing skills (I don’t think peo­ple like sto­ries that sound like aca­d­e­mic papers) pre­vent me from doing any­thing with them. Are there any options out there to col­lab­o­rate or a way to start writ­ing? Thanks.

Whenever any­one brings up this sub­ject, I am reminded of an inci­dent from my child­hood when I was first show­ing inter­est in sci­ence fic­tion.  In about 8th Grade or so, the three junior highs held a joint writ­ing con­fer­ence for kids like myself.  They put us into sem­i­nars with authors based on the gen­res that we were inter­ested in.  I got to meet some great writ­ers and get some feed­back.  And I met James Gunn, and I’ll never for­get it.

James Gunn was not like the other writ­ers.  He came in swing­ing for the fences.  “Most of you here will never pub­lish a sin­gle thing,” was pretty much the first thing he said to us.  He pro­ceeded to explain, in detail, why it was dif­fi­cult or impos­si­ble to sell sto­ries at our age.    Why, if we could, we should give up writ­ing all together and find some­thing bet­ter to do.   He went on in this fash­ion for an hour, and I have a mem­ory, per­haps false, of some of the kids cry­ing.  Me, I was excited.  Because I could see exactly what he was doing.  He was test­ing us to see how seri­ous we were.

At the end of the class, he gave us his mail­ing address and said if we were still inter­ested, he would cri­tique a story for us.  I took Mr. Gunn up on that.  I expected at the time to receive a Mamatas-​​style sav­aging of the story.  Instead, I got back a very kind and thought­ful set of line com­ments for what was prob­a­bly a truly awful, awful bit of juvenelia.

So when peo­ple ask me about writ­ing, I think of James Gunn, and I think that per­haps I should do every­thing I can in my power to dis­suade you from tak­ing up writ­ing, espe­cially writ­ing sci­ence fic­tion short fic­tion.   Reasons why you shouldn’t:

  1. The pay is crap.  The pro rate is 5 cents a word, but can some­times go higher.  What was the pro rate in the 1950s?  3–5 cents a word.  You will not get rich, or even pay the bills, writ­ing SF short fiction.
  2. It’s hard, and it takes a long time to get good at.  I’m a rel­a­tively fast learner, and it still took me 5 years of writ­ing every week before I started to con­sis­tently write well enough to sell the work.  And it’s hard work, so it’s easy to fall out of habit.  It’s not like rid­ing a bicy­cle.  You can for­get, or at least get a lit­tle rusty.
  3. It will iso­late you from every­one you know.  Because it won’t be your job, but a side gig, you’ll be doing it in your spare time.  Spare time means you sac­ri­fice things, like time with your fam­ily, or time with your friends.  You might give up TV like Jay Lake.
  4. You’ll read a lot less than you used to.  That time can be spent writ­ing! Ironically, one good way to get bet­ter at writ­ing is to read a lot.
  5. Rejection sucks.  You’ll get rejec­tions.  A lot of them.  I think I heard once that Michael Swanwick has never been rejected, but the rest of us have hun­dreds of them.   Sometimes, they’re kind, and some­times they’re nasty and make you want to never write again.  See, even the edi­tors will test you.
  6. Nobody reads sci­ence fic­tion any­way.  Like, what, 4% of books sold are SF?  And short fic­tion, the biggest mar­ket has 25,000 sub­scribers last I checked, and prob­a­bly fewer now.  They’ve been shrink­ing con­sis­tently for years.  It’s a niche pur­suit at best.

Still with me?  The prospect of dying alone, pen­ni­less, in the gut­ters doesn’t frighten you?  Well, then you have the infec­tion, and the only thing I can do is try to give you some advice to help you progress through the stages of your illness.

First of all, don’t worry about the lan­guage issue.  If you can learn to tell a story, it doesn’t mat­ter what lan­guage you write it in, and edi­tors will look past some some­what clumsy writ­ing for a great story.  You could write in your native lan­guage, and find some­one who knows English bet­ter to translate.

Starting out, I do not rec­om­mend you try to col­lab­o­rate (except maybe with a trans­la­tor).  You need to mas­ter plot­ting, char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, theme, world build­ing, and a dozen other skills, and you’re not going to do that if you’re shar­ing your writ­ing duties with some­one else, in my opin­ion.  These are things you will learn on your own.

Being a sci­ence grad­u­ate stu­dent is an advan­tage.  Editors are hun­gry for hard sci­ence fic­tion sto­ries.  If you can write them, you are prac­ti­cally guar­an­teed a career.    But remem­ber, they have to be good sto­ries first.  If you write a bad story with cool sci­ence, it doesn’t do you any good.  It’s going to be rejected.

As far as start­ing? Open a word pro­cess­ing pro­gram and type words together to form sen­tences, and sen­tences to form para­graphs.   You will prob­a­bly be ter­ri­ble at first.  99% of writ­ers are.  But the truth of it is, you get bet­ter through the act of writ­ing.  Jay Lake likes to say that writ­ing is a mus­cle and it needs to be exer­cised.  I agree with this notion.  The begin­ning of any writ­ing career is going to be about sta­mina train­ing and build­ing up some bulk.    You’re not going to be com­pet­ing in the Olympics for a very long time (to strain the metaphor).

Ideas.  You’ll hear this from every­body, so I might as well break the news to you.  Ideas for sto­ries are a dime a dozen.  Ideas can help put a story over the top, but they are not a good foun­da­tion for a story.  The foun­da­tion for a story is, well, story.  The com­pelling events of a prob­lem and the peo­ple that attempt to solve it.  That prob­lem could be built around a great idea, but with­out the peo­ple and their attempts and fail­ures to deal with it, it’s just an essay or a sci­ence fact article.

I thought when I was start­ing out that I was hot shit when it came to ideas.  I thought I had the best ideas of any new writ­ers I knew, and that it was all I needed.  I wish I could go back and start over again, real­iz­ing that the ideas should have taken a back seat to learn­ing storycraft.

Read and absorb every­thing.  Because once you become a writer, your brain becomes a black hole with a vora­cious appeti­tite for ideas and infor­ma­tion.  When I go to the doctor’s office, I don’t read SF mag­a­zines.  I pick up the mag­a­zine deal­ing with a topic I know the least about, say, Woodworking Monthly, because I never know if I’m going to want to write a story about a wood­worker.   A guy who builds cab­i­nets for a liv­ing doesn’t at first seem a likely can­di­date for a pro­tag­o­nist, but you’ll learn how to do it.  You’re going to use every bit of knowl­edge you ever obtain.  Your entire life becomes one giant research effort.

After all of that and  you’re still inter­ested in writ­ing?  Okay then.  Go, you have my bless­ing, what­ever that’s worth. Do it.  Put your butt in a chair and start typ­ing, or writ­ing with a pen, or what­ever method you pre­fer.  Do it, and do it con­sis­tently for sev­eral years.  Read every­thing you can–not just SF, but the classics.

I look for­ward to read­ing your first pub­lished story.  Drop me a line when it comes out!

So how about you all?  Do you have any inter­est­ing sto­ries to share about when you were just start­ing out with writ­ing, or what­ever career you pur­sue?    Any tips to add to mine here?

The Perfect Cover Letter: things to do and don’t

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Where “per­fect cover let­ter” is to mean the cover let­ters that work best for me in my edi­to­r­ial capac­ity at Escape Pod.  I may very well con­tra­dict the writ­ten guide­lines of Escape Pod when I describe what I believe to be the per­fect cover let­ter for a mag­a­zine sub­mis­sion.  If my advice is fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent, I will get those updated.  Also, I have no idea what con­sti­tutes a good cover let­ter for sub­mit­ting your novel, but I imag­ine there are a lot of folks out there that can explain that to you.

So here is what I both put in my cover let­ters and what I would like to see in cover let­ters attached to sub­mis­sions I read, as well as some things I don’t want to see, and yet occa­sion­ally and most unfor­tu­nately do.

Do These Things

  • Contact Information.  A no-​​brainer.  If we can’t write you back  to accept or reject your story, the whole process falls apart.
  • A sub­ject line that starts with the word SUBMISSION: .  A lot of ran­dom junk can end up in the sub­mis­sions box.   Your story can eas­ily be mis­taken for that if you don’t put the word SUBMISSION in front of it.  This makes it eas­ier for us to sort, and any­thing that makes the editor’s job easy to do is some­thing you should do.
  • A salu­ta­tion with the editor’s name.  When in doubt, pick the edi­tor in chief.  Do not address “Editor.”
  • Here is the most cru­cial ele­ment that is often done badly.  A short one sen­tence list of recent pub­li­ca­tions, specif­i­cally any well known and accepted major pub­li­ca­tions.  This cor­re­lates mostly to pay, but some mar­kets have high pres­tige and lower pay. More on this in what not to do.
  • I think it’s okay to men­tion if you’ve attended a major work­shop like Clarion.  It is a neu­tral point with me, maybe a slight pos­i­tive.  At the very least, it tells me you’re serious.
  • For Escape Pod, where and when the story was orig­i­nally pub­lished.  We  do accept unpub­lished work, but think about your odds here.  Your story, which has not been tested, is going up against pretty much all the fic­tion that has ever been pub­lished, ever.  Originals are going to have to be really spe­cial.  Besides, we’re like free money if you crack a major mar­ket with a good story.  Selling to us first may pre­vent you from sell­ing to them later, but not vice versa.  We encour­age you to try print mar­kets before us.
  • A quick thank you, sign off, whatever.
  • Optional:  pro­vide me a con­text for who you are.  If we met at a con­ven­tion and shared a drink at the bar, it can’t hurt for you to remind me of that. It won’t nec­es­sar­ily help, but  it pro­vides a pos­i­tive context.

Don’t Do These Things

  • Do not include a sum­mary of the story.  I don’t know who is teach­ing writ­ers to do this for short story mar­kets, but if you find out, tell them I said stop or I’ll kick them square in the kid­neys.  Nothing is a surer sign to me of a writer who doesn’t know what they are doing than when I open up an email and am pre­sented with a sum­mary of the story before read­ing it.  DO NOT DO THIS.
  • I can­not stress this enough, but let me try.  DO NOT DO THIS. List every pub­li­ca­tion and every sale or credit to every for-​​the-​​love, semi-​​pro, and local news­pa­per pub­li­ca­tion that you have ever had.  Also every award nom­i­na­tion,   and that one time your mother gave you a com­pli­ment.  Remember here that  your cred­its bit should not be more than a para­graph.  If you have the cred­its to impress me, I most likely already know who you are and what you’ve pub­lished.  If you don’t have those cred­its, list­ing cred­its that I haven’t  heard of  does the oppo­site.  It’s the Bambi rule as applied to sub­mit­ting your work.  If you don’t have some­thing nice to say about your­self, omit it.  Here are the awards I care about:
    • Hugos
    • Nebulas
    • The Campbell
    • BSFA
    • That Canadian one
    • Writers of the Future, if it was actu­ally printed
  • Do not include non­fic­tion cred­its.  Your abil­ity to write an arti­cle does not  tend to have much bear­ing on whether or not you can tell a good story.  Sorry, I don’t really need to know about non­fic­tion credits.
  • Please do not tell me that this is your first sub­mis­sion ever or that you are unpub­lished.  If you leave out the cred­its bit, which you should if you have none, then you’re doing your­self a favor.  We know what it means, but it doesn’t draw as much atten­tion to itself as when you state it.  I am a con­scious and a sub­con­scious crea­ture, and I don’t want that knowl­edge influ­enc­ing how I approach your story.  Because it is true:  if I have faith in you as a writer, I will come to your story with more faith, and will be will­ing to look past a few early mis­takes to see where the story goes.  With writ­ers who are still green, those early mis­takes are not likely to be over­come later in the story.

And Now, The Truth

Some edi­tors will tell you that they don’t read cover let­ters at all, or at least until they have already read the story to the point of mak­ing a deci­sion.  I used to be in the for­mer camp.  I read them now at Escape Pod because I am look­ing to sort out and pare down my back­log quickly.  I search cover let­ters for pub­li­ca­tions in major pro­fes­sional venues, from authors who work I am famil­iar with, in order to set them aside for later read­ing.  Does this help them get pub­lished in Escape Pod?  Not as much as you might think.  Just because Stan Schmidt liked a story doesn’t mean I will.  And cer­tainly vice-versa–I have the rejec­tions to prove it.

Cover let­ters are the very first impres­sion your story makes on me.  I would like to say that I take each story as it is, but cover let­ters in all hon­esty can do three things.

  • No influ­ence.  A neu­tral cover let­ter.  This is what you should aim for.  Informational.
  • Hopeful.   You’re a vet­eran of the field and this story was nom­i­nated for the Nebula last year.  I will admit to being hope­ful about the story.
  • Discouraged.  You’ve botched the cover let­ter so badly, so I don’t have much hope that you’re going to nail the story itself.

Yes, we are influ­enced by a bad cover let­ter.  And we get excited about cred­its from big­ger mar­kets.  But none of these are the sole basis of how we judge your sub­mis­sion.  We still read the story, or as much of it as we need to anyway.

Remember that it never counts against you to just leave them off entirely (but please still include the con­tact infor­ma­tion).  When I was just start­ing out, I didn’t even write a cover let­ter until I had a few sales from mar­kets the edi­tors would know.  Then I started includ­ing my very short cover letter.

So I hope that’s proved a lit­tle use­ful.  What do you think about cover let­ters?   Have you had good or  bad expe­ri­ences with them?  If you’re an edi­tor, feel free to point out in the com­ments where we dis­agree.  I don’t really pro­pose the above as th

You have the rest of today to hit me up with ques­tions over on Tuesday’s post.  I’ll be announc­ing the win­ner of the copy of Federations on Monday.

How to Build a Good Critique Group

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

So, to con­tinue the theme of writ­ing advice, we move on to another ques­tion from Monday’s thread, this time from the LJ mir­ror by alaneer:

Here’s a prob­lem: how does one go about find­ing a small crit group whose mem­ber have to give crits in less than 2–3 weeks? Or form­ing a crit group like that.

This is a good ques­tion.  I  have no idea how any­one man­aged to learn sto­rycraft  in the age before the inter­net.  SF writ­ers were prob­a­bly spread over as much geog­ra­phy as they are today, so how did they cri­tique each other?  Postal mail?  In-​​person work­shops?    They’d have to meet some­how in the first place.  Ah, so they went to cons?  Those cost time and money.  Luckily,  we were born at a time where we could take advan­tage of nearly free, instan­ta­neous global com­mu­ni­ca­tions, and that means find­ing peo­ple will­ing to be in a cri­tique group is the least of your prob­lems.  Finding the right peo­ple is much more dif­fi­cult.    Here are some tech­niques that have helped me.

Join one of the larger estab­lished work­shop groups such as the Online Writer’s Workshop or Critters.    Personally, I’m an alum­nus of the OWW.  So is Sarah Prineas, Elizabeth Bear, Charles Coleman Finlay, and many oth­ers.  There’s lit­tle doubt in my mind that the expe­ri­ence of putting your work tho­rugh the OWW will improve it.    Will it get you a book deal or a pro sale?  Maybe.  You’re doing most of the work, but if you lis­ten to what peo­ple have to say, I think you will come closer sooner than you would have on your own.

When you first join these work­shops, you’re just throw­ing stuff at the wall and see­ing what sticks.  You have no idea who is going to read your story and pro­vide a cri­tique, at least in the case of the OWW.  While you’re wait­ing, you should go find work that you think is at least at your level of skill, if not sev­eral lev­els higher.  Provide a thought­ful cri­tique.  They won’t always return it, but some­times they will see some­thing they like in your work as well, and this is how you start build­ing ind­vid­i­ual relationships.

I no longer use the OWW, but I have kept in touch with many of the writ­ers from that work­shop for the pur­poses of cri­tiquing and of course due to the fact that they’re my friends.   In any large group work­shop, I think tal­ent has a way of find­ing like tal­ent.  Groups are formed within, and they can be exported eas­ily from the larger work­shop.  You will out­grow together the lower-​​level issues that work­shops address par­tic­u­larly well.

Another option is to just ask authors who you admire if you could trade cri­tiques with them.    This is how Jay Lake and I ended up trad­ing com­ments on each other’s stories.

Jay taught me a very valu­able notion, which was par­tic­u­larly help­ful when I was writ­ing a story a week or more and still look­ing for feed­back.  That was to build a list of first readers/​critiquers, but make sure they know you don’t expect them to read every­thing you send out.  And vice versa.  Sometimes peo­ple have time, some­times they don’t.  In an ideal sit­u­a­tion, you’ll have enough peo­ple on your list that each piece of writ­ing you send out will get you sev­eral solid cri­tiques that will help you revise or deter­mine whether to send the story out at all.

I don’t really believe in form­ing groups per­say anymore–although I have been part of them from time to time, and I sus­pect groups like Blue Heaven are really great for what they do.  For the way I write, I just pre­fer to build indi­vid­ual, one-​​on-​​one rela­tion­ships.  Any time you get more than four writ­ers in a group, you will have pol­i­tics, and I have lit­tle tol­er­ance for that myself.  Maybe you like it? If so, form a group, set up a list-​​serve for email and go to town.

Any of the meth­ods above will help you with your ulti­mate goal, which is find­ing peo­ple with which to col­lab­o­ra­tively improve your work.   Also, you’ll prob­a­bly make good friends.  But I should point out, a good cri­ti­quer is not nec­es­sar­ily a good friend, and the oppo­site is often even less pos­si­ble.  Depending on how you react to the crit­i­cism, you end up hat­ing your best cri­ti­quers, but in a broc­coli kind of way.

Good luck.  Anyone who is inter­ested in trad­ing cri­tiques with me need only drop me a line.  I can’t agree to do so with every­one who asks, but I try to do so. I have a lot less time to cri­tique now that I am edit­ing Escape Pod.

Five (and One Silly) Ideas For Avoiding the Paradox of Choice in Writing

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I have often writ­ten about a con­cept pio­neered by Barry Schwartz called the para­dox of choice.  Basically, the idea is that the more choices you give peo­ple, the more likely they are to be par­a­lyzed with inde­ci­sion.  It’s eas­ier to make up you mind when you have fewer choices.   In yesterday’s post, C.S. Inman asked the fol­low­ing question:

When I begin a story, I do a good job with char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, with set­ting up engag­ing con­flicts, with pos­si­bil­i­ties for com­pounded prob­lems and solu­tions. From what they tell me, peo­ple gen­er­ally want to keep turn­ing pages.

Unfortunately, when I’m writ­ing past the “begin­ning” I have dif­fi­culty choos­ing which plot options should take up those sub­se­quent pages. The “mid­dles” of my sto­ries are a cross­roads where I feel like no mat­ter which path I let the pro­tag­o­nist take, I’m miss­ing some­thing bet­ter on one of the other paths. It doesn’t help when I some­times fin­ish a short story (or a chap­ter of a novel) and real­ize I have to delete 2,000 words and go a dif­fer­ent direc­tion because it’s totally awe­some, and how didn’t I see it before I wasted all that time?

Do you have any ideas about how I can either 1. Stop being a pansy and just pick one and like it or 2. Discover which path is going to be the most sat­is­fy­ing BEFORE I write the wrong one?

First of all, don’t be dis­cour­aged by this. The para­dox of choice hap­pens to every­one. I can’t tell you how many times I have stood in front of the fridge and stared at the con­tents right after shop­ping, unable to make up my mind what to cook.  In writ­ing, it’s no dif­fer­ent. What’s hap­pen­ing here is that you’re com­ing to a point where you have too many choices about the direc­tion your story can take. The key  is to nar­row down your choices, and to do so in a way that you make deci­sions and choices about the direc­tion of your story that result in a good story.  Here are a some ideas to help you do this:

  1. First of all, keep in mind that there’s no “best” solu­tion. You’ll like one more than another one day, and the next day, you’ll think the oppo­site. It’s of course all very sub­jec­tive. So relax about it and just get your first draft out. As other ideas occur to you, keep a par­al­lel doc­u­ment run­ning, and jot down your alter­na­tive paths that come to you. After your first or sec­ond draft, go back and see if explor­ing any of those notions will be any better.
  2. It can help some­times to not only have a begin­ning to a story when you start writ­ing, but to also have an idea of an end­ing. I used to think this was impos­si­ble for me to do, but the more I write now, the more I real­ize that most sto­ries only have a few sat­is­fy­ing end­ings avail­able to them once you know the setup. It’s much harder to write a story in which the pro­tag­o­nist fails at suc­ceed­ing against their cen­tral story prob­lem. It’s not impos­si­ble, but you need to know you’re going to do that when you set out writ­ing the story, because there has to be some sat­is­fac­tion to the reader in their failure–they have to suc­ceed at some­thing greater, some­thing they didn’t even nec­es­sar­ily know they wanted–but the reader should have had an inkling along the way even if the pro­tag­o­nist did not. Foreshadowing is much eas­ier to do if you know what you’re fore­shad­ow­ing. You can always write to the end and then go back and add the fore­shad­ow­ing in in a later draft, or–
  3. Maybe you shouldn’t think of those 2,000 words you cut as wasted. Some writ­ers (not many) can write a story in a sin­gle draft, and make minor edits, then send it off and sell it. Me, I have found that I write any­where from 3–10 drafts of a story before I get it accepted some­where. Without fail, the more drafts I put into a story, the more I stand a chance of suc­ceed­ing in my ulti­mate goal, which is see­ing the story pub­lished. The key here is to adjust your expec­ta­tions and to give your­self room to exper­i­ment. The 2,000 words that don’t make it into a final draft of the story can be just as impor­tant, if not more impor­tant, than the ones that do.
  4. There’s a gen­eral rule of thumb that’s often offered as writ­ing advice, which is, when you need to make a deci­sion like a char­ac­ter aspect, or a plot ele­ment, you should not go with your first notion. Or your sec­ond. Or even you third. It some­times takes push­ing past the first sev­eral ideas that come to mind because the ideas that most eas­ily come to mind are typ­i­cally cliches. Even if you at first don’t think they are, keep push­ing for an alter­na­tive anyway.Try writ­ing a story in which each time you need to make a deci­sion, before writ­ing, you come up with three ideas, and dis­card the first two you think of. See where that leads you.
  5. When faced with which direc­tion to take with your plot, I some­times go with a pretty sim­ple rule: which direc­tion will be more wildly fun? If you’re more of a lit­er­ary bent, I sup­pose you could choose which direc­tion will more prop­erly illus­trate the theme or explore the nature of your char­ac­ter. Stop and con­sider your deci­sions in light of what your goal in telling the story is. Whichever direc­tion will raise the stakes the most with­out being ridicu­lous. You can’t risk the world or the uni­verse in every sin­gle story, but you can almost always raise the stakes more than you think. Higher stakes often lead to a much more com­pelling story.
  6. If all else fails, you can always flip a coin! Or roll a die. I will admit to hav­ing rolled the dice lit­er­ally when hav­ing trou­ble mak­ing a deci­sion about a story. Hey, it works in RPGS, right?

Ultimately, I think a com­bi­na­tion of all of the above can be put to use. I’m just going to guess here, but I sus­pect Inman is not an out­line writer. I started out writ­ing sto­ries with­out an out­line, and actu­ally, many of my sales were writ­ten with­out one. Now, I almost always out­line and write pretty exten­sive world build­ing notes before I start the story. It’s pos­si­ble that sim­ply mak­ing the switch to writ­ing from an out­line, even for some­thing as short as a short story, will solve this prob­lem for you. Either way, enjoy it the process. It’s a huge part of what makes writ­ing so much damned fun.

If you have a ques­tion about any of the areas I write about here on the blog, or even areas I don’t, add them to this post from yes­ter­day. You can win a copy of Federations, the new anthol­ogy edited by John Joseph Adams con­tain­ing my story “The Culture Archivist.” I’ll be tak­ing sug­ges­tions on that post until Friday, and will declare the win­ner on Monday. There have been some great ques­tions so far, and I look for­ward to hear­ing more.