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.

You might think that the internet would lend itself to shorter stories, on the assumption that the internet has shortened our attention spans.  I don’t really believe that. I think we have mostly the same attention spans we did before the web began to dominate our entertainment time, but we’re a lot better about evaluating content quickly to determine if it’s worth our attention.  Scanning is the new reading of the 21st Century.

Early on in the web days, there was a lot more experimentation with the idea of hypertext fiction, which in my experience is basically a glorified “Choose Your Own Adventure” (CYOA) made with links rather than “turn to page X” instructions.   I’d argue that for “choose your own adventure” stories, the web is a better format than print, but– choose your own adventure stories were just a relatively crude form of interactive storytelling, and video games are a more evolved form of the same thing.  CYOA  books are not printed in nearly the same quantities as they were when I was a kid in the 80s.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the rise of video games has corresponded with the fall of CYOA books. Wikipedia’s article on CYOA references a company called Chooseco that purchased the rights to the original CYOA books, but when I tried to visit the site for said company, all I found was a GoDaddy redirect. I think it’s fairly safe to say that the Choose Your Own Adventure format is effectively played out.

Stories told in an e-mail-like format are really no different from the epistolary format, which has been around since the letter itself.   Wikipedia puts the first epistolary novel appearing in 1485 or so.   Over 500 years old.  So the e-mail format nothing much new, just a slightly different take.  The language might be a bit different, but that same back-and-forth exists, generally written in alternating or single-thread first person present or past-tense.

Some have experimented with Twitter and its 140 character limit.  “Twitter zines” like Thaumatrope publish these stories regularly.  I wrote a serialized story in the twitter format, using the nature of Twitter itself as an aspect of the story, called #futurejer, to what I think was probably varying degrees of success.  Ultimately was the form of story changed by this?  Not very much, I suspect.  It’s just an extremely serialized tale, probably.

I suspect that the ideal format for telling stories online may be the online comic strip.  It is:

• easily scannable, generally read very quickly
• serialized in bite-sized chunks
• visual-rich multimedia, using images to convey ideas faster than words alone can.

Except in maybe a few rare instances, however, it doesn’t take advantage of the hypertextual nature of the web to tell stories, however, so perhaps there has really yet to be a story told that truly utilizes all the strengths of a web format.

I played around with writing comedic comic strips in college, and while my strips generally weren’t great, I learned a lot about rhythm and comedic timing, especially in the 3 panel format.  (I also learned that rarely do two people have the same sense of humor. )  But the comic format as it’s used today mostly gives words over to pictures entirely.  Dialogue, maybe some very basic exposition text, but otherwise, the story rests in the artwork.

What about alternate reality games (ARGs)?  Are they a new form of storytelling?  Or are they simply more interactive fiction or gaming, rather than stories?  As much as I have read about them, I have yet to be fully engrossed in one as it played out, so I can’t really describe the experience.  Have any of you?  Where do you think they fit into things?

In a sense, my Dr. Roundbottom project (currently shamefully fallow)  is a bit of an ARG, leaning more towards an illustrated storytelling style.  Where it differs in an interesting way is that it’s open to audience involvement.  I encourage the readers to adopt characters and personas, to communicate with the characters of the story via the website, and the story changes and adapts to their suggestions, incorporating them into the more traditional narrative aspects.

I don’t know what the ideal format in which to tell a story online is, and this post hasn’t gotten me any closer, but Iam nearly certain that it’s not the same format as the print short story.  We read the web differently than we read magazines or text on paper.  Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I leave as an exercise for the reader.  But there are definite differences, and I think we should be considering, as writers, how to better utilize the format to share our tales.

Then again, maybe stories have been honed into the format that they are in because it’s the most “fit” format.  Natural selection has discarded everything else and left us with the ideal specimen?  What do you think?  Have I left out any attempts to use the web to tell stories differently?  I’d love to hear about them.

That’s what I thought, until this past winter, when I became determined to break the cycle and keep using my camera past October. The result has been a considerable step up in the quality of my landscape photography in particular, but in general, I feel that the effort has improved me in several ways.

Realization: Cold can Be Beautiful

The first effect that this had was forcing me to find beauty in landscapes and objects that I do not ordinarily find beautiful. The color green is perhaps my favorite, followed by red. I’ve never much cared for the cold blues, but I felt that it was limiting me to be so restrictive in the color palette that I liked.

Out here, you don’t get much choice. If you don’t like cold blues and grays, you won’t find much to photograph in the winter.

I still have my preferences for vibrant greens, but I’ve learned how to see the beauty in ice and snow better in the past winter than all the years before added up. To get good at this, I had to really stop trusting my auto-exposure meter in the camera and learn to take shots and adjust my exposure as much as a stop up or down. Snow turns out an ugly grey on auto most of the time because of the nature of camera sensors and their preference for 18% gray (some say 12%.  Either way, it makes shooting white subjects harder). This means you need to force the sensor to bump it up in a predominantly snowy scene. You can sometimes fix this in Lightroom, but I’m trying more and more to get it just right in the camera, or as close as I can.

After playing around with the technical aspects of shooting in the winter, I realized that I had some really fantastic mountain vistas I could be capturing, so I started to take landscape photography more seriously than ever before. Which leads me to the next point.

It Forced Me to Get Up Before the Sun

At a certain point, cold is cold. And with my newfound interest in landscape photography, I realized, the best light really is during the “golden hour.” There’s an hour after sunrise and an hour before sunset where you get a nice, warm, low-angle and diffuse light. The quality is unmatched by nearly any other light as far as landscapes go. I’ve known this for a long time, but I had always had a really hard time motivating myself to be up early enough to be in position for the sunrise, especially in the winter.

So cold is cold, and if I’m going to be out in it, being out in it a little earlier doesn’t really hurt much. Because I was working on an east coast schedule, I found it very easy to rise around 5:30 or 6 AM to be out in the mountains in time for the great light.

Being Up Early Makes Animals Easier to Photograph

If you go for a drive in a national park in the middle of the day, you’re going to see some wildlife, but it’s going to be pretty inactive. Grazers will be hunkered down chewing cud and won’t make for great shots. You’ll be incredibly lucky to see a predator. And of course, the light stinks, so photographing anything results in harsh shadows and a generally unpleasing look, unless it’s really cloudy and you’ve got a sky that has turned into a giant softbox, but even then, if you want any sky at all in your shot, it’s going to look pretty bland if everything’s just white from the horizon up.

Shooting landscapes in Rocky Mountain National Park at dawn, I realized, like a dummy, that the elk herds were most approachable and most interesting around the golden hour as well. I began to follow a pattern of shooting the sunrise for landscape work, and then moving down to lower elevations to set up and photograph elk.

Again, shooting wildlife with a telephoto in low-light conditions? Not easy. Technically, I had an incredibly hard time getting a decent exposure in focus. I had to learn how to wield ISO better. I hate shooting at anything other than 100 ISO, honestly, but my telephoto isn’t fast enough to make good use of the light. Even with in-body stabilization, I had to learn better methods of bracing my camera from the car, and I was forced to finally spend a little money on a good, decent carbon-fiber tripod. The legs can be locked into 4 different positions, it’s light weight, and it allows for a more sophisticated ball-head mount.

Shooting in less than ideal conditions really does a lot to make you think about how to get better. I spent a couple of trips and came back with nothing remotely good. Under exposed, blurry from camera shake, or worse. I could have been discouraged, but I loved being out there so much (annoying tourists not withstanding), that I kept at it, and slowly my work began to improve.

In the end…

In the end, I feel like I’ve taken my technical skills up a notch. I’ve learned to utilize natural light better than before, and I don’t trust my camera to give me the best exposure automatically in every situation. I’ve learned better methods for stabilizing my camera by hand, and when to increase the ISO to get more light. I learned a little bit about animal behavior and how to take advantage of it, but I still have a lot to learn about wildlife photography (and a lot of time I need to invest into it).

Would I have learned some of these things if I had put up the camera in the fall and waited for spring? Maybe. But I wouldn’t have learned them as quickly and in the same combination. Some I might not have learned at all, and my goal is to be a well-rounded photographer.

Pushing myself outside my comfort zone for a winter paid off in spades. I hope that some of the photographs I’ve included in this post have helped drive home that point. All of these were taken in this past winter.

Do you have a story to share regarding how pushing yourself outside your comfort zone helped you improve at something? Share your story with us in the comments.

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.

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.

• Economy
  Powerful photographs can be created with very simple elements.  Isolating your subject, focusing on it, and eliminating areas of distraction.  The principle comes easily in photography after practicing for a while.  Then, when I return to the page, I start seeing things with the same eye for economy.  This sentence isn’t really necessary.  What’s really important in this scene?  What can I simply hint at to provide depth, without distracting from my primary purpose?
• Balance
  Visual images carry weight, and a well-composed image balances this weight to be pleasing to the eye.  Plots require careful balance too, between the prelude, rising action, and denouement.  Too much of one and the balance of the story can be thrown off entirely.
• Focusing
  You would think that focusing these days is a matter of half-pressing the focus button and letting the camera automatically capture the subject.  For a lot of photos, this is all you have to do.  But sometimes, you need to change your focal points.  Sometimes, you deliberately want things out of focus for effect, to convey a mood.    It’s easy to rely on the camera, but mastery comes when you push past the automatic settings and into the deeper features of the camera.

  Pushing past the automatic settings in writing means discarding early ideas, and digging deeper for more essential truths.  Writing not on autopilot, but with careful consideration, tweaking until the mental image is just right, with the subject in focus, and distracting elements not.

• Capturing Action
  Capturing action in photography requires a quick trigger finger and being in the right place at just the right moment.   You have to plan ahead, choosing your angle and hope for the best.   I find that I plan my scenes now like I plan my shots, ahead of time, thinking about the best angle to approach from, and how I can get that important moment down on the page
• Hinting at a Story
  In some of my photography, I actually want the image itself to convey a story.  The little details of an image, background elements, tiny details, the way light hits just right to lighten or darken a mood–everything in your image can add up to tell a story, to hint at events that happen before and after the frame has snapped.  In writing, I think it’s important to know what came before a story, and to be able to work in those details that create a piece that feels like a small glimpse of something larger, something connected to a greater continuity.  I often say that your story should be about the second most important thing to happen to your character.   If their life starts when you start writing, then they aren’t as interesting and rounded as they perhaps could be with back story.  Too much back story, however, and your story can become bogged down in what was and not what will be.  Just like how photographs can hint at a story, you take a light touch with this aspect, developing your back story and world building just enough to give the impression of something larger, without trying to force the whole thing onto the reader

Do you find that your interests teaches you unexpected things about one another?  What intersections between different arts and activities have you discovered, and what have these discoveries illuminated for you?

Some day, I’ll write about how writing and fishing have many things in common.   For one, both require tremendous amounts of patience to get what you what.

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.

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?

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.

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.

This is probably one of my most popular science fiction stories, and for whatever reason, I’ve never got around to getting it put online.  With the spare time I have lately to work on my skillset, I decided to do a fun poster illustration for the story and a hopefully easy-to-read layout.

The story originally appeared in the May 2005 issue of Interzone, edited by Andy Cox.   It’s my first print magazine sale.

So without further blathering, here’s the story and the illustration:

The Kansas Jayhawk vs. The Midwest Monster Squad by Jeremiah Tolbert.