Posts Tagged ‘My Writing’

Writers Should Not Blog About Writing

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

We’re writ­ers, so we should write about every­thing, right? Not if we care about main­tain­ing an audi­ence, we shouldn’t.  Despite our deep-​​seated belief that every thing that hap­pens to us and every thought we have is inter­est­ing to oth­ers, some things writ­ers like to blog about are just plain bor­ing or, worse, por­tray them in a neg­a­tive light.  I’ve learned most of these because I’ve done them and dri­ven off read­ers with them, so don’t think I’m set­ting these down as reminders for oth­ers.  They apply to me dou­bly so.  They include:

  • Your rejec­tion let­ters.  You can use them to illus­trate a point, but blog­ging “rejected by F&SF, 8 days” isn’t very inter­est­ing.  Also, it makes you look kinda like a schlub when your blog is full of rejec­tion let­ters.  Your read­ers only need to know when you have new work com­ing out. They don’t care how many agents turned you down, or how many rejec­tions you gath­ered along the way before the sale.
  • Your word count for the day.  Good for you, seri­ously.  I know some peo­ple use this as a kind of social rein­force­ment, but per­son­ally, I can’t stand look­ing at a blog and see­ing noth­ing but a long list of short posts talk­ing about what you wrote that day.
  • Your favorite snip­pet from your work-​​in-​​progress.  Out of con­text, it isn’t nearly as neat or inter­est­ing as you think it is.  Publish the story and we’ll bask in the glow of your genius then.
  • Grammar.  Snore.
  • In gen­eral, the craft and daily tra­vails of being a writer.

I firmly believe that writ­ers should be inter­est­ing for some­thing other than being a writer.  It’s a rare indi­vid­ual who can be scin­til­lat­ing to the gen­eral pub­lic while talk­ing about the sausage-​​making of writ­ing.*     If you’re a writer, surely you’re pas­sion­ate about some­thing other than writ­ing.  Blog about what­ever that is.

Look at it this way–who is your tar­get audi­ence?  The sub­ject of writ­ing is inter­est­ing to other writ­ers and aspir­ing writ­ers.  They are not nec­es­sar­ily the read­ers you want, because there are not very many of them.  If your goal is to col­lect a fol­low­ing greater than a few hun­dred peo­ple, then you need a sub­ject of broader interest–even just the genre that you write in is more inter­est­ing than the act of writ­ing itself.

Clearly I am not fol­low­ing the advice of the last point here. I write about writ­ing for a good rea­son, and that’s because my free­lance busi­ness caters to writ­ers.   Writers are my tar­get audi­ence for these posts, so I am com­fort­able with it.  As I com­plete my busi­ness web­site, these kinds of advice posts will tran­si­tion to that site, and my per­sonal blog will become more, well, personal.

*Exempt from this advice are writ­ers with stag­ger­ing read­er­ships, such as  Neil Gaiman and John Scalzi.

ETA:

Nick Mamatas has this to say in the com­ments, and it’s a strong point:

The sub­ject of writ­ing is inter­est­ing to other writ­ers and aspir­ing writ­ers. They are not nec­es­sar­ily the read­ers you want, because there are not very many of them.

Crazy talk. There are mil­lions of aspir­ing writ­ers, and thus an indus­try to ser­vice them—several monthly mag­a­zines, a plethora of how-​​to books, sem­i­nars and con­fer­ences, over 100 degree-​​granting pro­grams in the sub­ject, etc.

Aspiring writ­ers also tend to read more widely (and deeply) than non-​​aspirants. Aspiring writ­ers are cer­tainly a large audi­ence worth cultivating.

So I  took this advice much fur­ther than I should have.  And I should point out that my advice was aimed squarely not at writ­ers who blog as a kind of per­sonal jour­nal.  I aim it at peo­ple who are look­ing to delib­er­ately and method­i­cally grow an audi­ence.  If you’re writ­ing a per­sonal jour­nal style blog, but want to use your blog to grow an audi­ence, I thnk you need to think about tran­si­tion­ing the kind of con­tent you post.

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.

5 Ways Photography Has Improved My Writing

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

That seems like an unusual idea, doesn’t it?  That wield­ing a cam­era to cap­ture sin­gle moments in time really has any­thing valu­able to add to the process of writ­ing sto­ries?   But it has, I think.  Each time I pick up the cam­era, I think about writ­ing, and each time I write, I think about the cam­era.  The two pas­sions have odd syn­er­gies between them.  There are com­mon­al­i­ties among all cre­ative endeav­ors, per­haps.  Here are a few prin­ci­ples that I feel have worked their way into my work , or become stronger, because of my pur­suit of photography.

  • 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.

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?

On Handling Criticism.

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Copyblogger recently posted an arti­cle on how to han­dle crit­i­cism. This is a sub­ject that, as a cre­ative per­son, I have spent a lot of time think­ing about and strug­gling with, so I thought I’d talk about their points tonight and exam­ine them from my own point of view.

1. Enjoy it.

Criticism isn’t always bad in my expe­ri­ence (although it def­i­nitely tends to have neg­a­tive con­no­ta­tions).  It’s mostly good for you, but some­times it leaves a bad taste in your mouth.  Basically, crit­i­cism is broc­coli.  I’ve never been one to enjoy broc­coli, and crit­i­cism is some­thing that you don’t nat­u­rally join.  Those with frag­ile self-​​esteem have a ten­dency to take any kind of crit­i­cism neg­a­tively.  The key is gen­er­ally to try and keep it imper­sonal. The crit­i­cism is not about you, it’s about the work, and remem­ber, you are not your work (that com­ment is directed at me as much as it is my gen­eral audi­ence, let me tell you…).

So yeah, I can agree with this point, if you can man­age it.  Remind your­self that crit­i­cism is an impor­tant com­po­nent of get­ting bet­ter, when it’s con­struc­tive.    And if’ it’s ter­ri­ble crit­i­cism, try and laugh about how bad it is.  I actu­ally find that the more hyper­bolic neg­a­tive crit­i­cism is, the fun­nier it is for me, and the eas­ier it is to enjoy it.

On the Escape Pod blog, we have one com­menter who never, ever says any­thing pos­i­tive.  Sometimes this com­menter is on-​​target, but the way this com­menter says every­thing is clas­sic Troll Class One.  I was irri­tated with it at first, but over time, I’ve come to find this com­menter pretty funny.  Their act never changes though.

2. Nobody’s right.

Yeah, every­thing is sub­jec­tive, blah blah blah.  This is per­haps true when we’re talk­ing about sub­jec­tive mat­ters, but when it comes to facts, that’s baloney.  Someone is right and some­one is wrong.  Generally, it is you that is wrong, and it is Nick Mamatas that is right.    In fact, that should be the main corol­lary to this point.  “Nobody’s right, except Nick Mamatas.”  You can dis­agree with this, but I don’t rec­om­mend that you actu­ally argue the point.  You will lose.

3. Some peo­ple just won’t get it.

Copyblogger makes the point that some peo­ple are “just idiots.”  This is true, but I would con­sider this an obser­va­tion of last resort.  If the crit­i­cism com­pletely misses the point, there are two pos­si­bil­i­ties (or more, but two basic ones).  One is that the per­son mak­ing the crit­i­cism has a read­ing com­pre­hen­sion below the level you wrote (is
“an idiot” is a bit strong).  The other pos­si­bil­ity is that you didn’t do a very good job of con­vey­ing it. Me, I always take crit­i­cism seri­ously and eval­u­ate it for pos­si­ble value.  Unless it’s full of gram­mar and spelling mis­takes.  Those are pretty easy to ignore, because, yeah, some peo­ple are idiots.  They make them­selves very easy to spot most of the time.  Except for stealth idiots, like Chance from Being There.  More on them some other time.

4. Look for a new idea.

I really like this point.  Examine crit­i­cism for an idea you’ve never had before.  I’ve failed to do this almost every time my work has received crit­i­cism when it comes to writ­ing.    I often get stuck in a think­ing rut and my ruts get so deep that it’s hard to see over the sides of them.  This is because I can be a real self-​​centered prick from time to time (hope­fully not very often these days).  As much as any­thing else, this point serves as a reminder to offer at least a mod­icum of respect to the ideas of oth­ers.  Just because you didn’t have the idea doesn’t mean it has no value.  (Again.  Talking to me here.)

5. Let it go.

This is the hard­est aspect of Copyblogger’s advice for me.   Some peo­ple let crit­i­cism roll off them like water off a duck’s back.  Criticism often sticks to me like a very well-​​aimed spit­ball.   I have a very dif­fi­cult time shak­ing it off even if I don’t believe it. This prob­lem prob­a­bly resides in a shaky self-​​esteem more than any­thing else.  I am eager at times to believe the neg­a­tive thigns said about my work and myself.    That’s a per­sonal prob­lem, but it is eas­ier said than done for some of us to just let it go.  I know enough to let my inabil­ity to let it go remain a per­sonal issue.  What you should rarely do, in my opin­ion, is respond to crit­i­cism that you can’t let go.    Down that path lies mad­ness and a dam­aged reputation.

People with unshak­able self-​​esteem and belief in them­selves are eas­ily the most suc­cess­ful peo­ple in cre­ative endeav­ors from my expe­ri­ence.   They don’t get knocked down by crit­i­cism and they def­i­nitely know how to let it go.  If I had to pick one per­son­al­ity trait that I would like to develop to make me a bet­ter cre­ative per­son, it would be a true and deep belief in myself.  I’m work­ing on it, but I know that it’s not always there, and so I have a ways to go.

I had some jus­ti­fi­ably harsh and unhappy crit­i­cism on some of my work wait­ing for me when I woke up this morn­ing.    I was let­ting it really get to me at first, until I stum­bled upon this post over at Copyblogger, and it reminded me of the lessons I have learned in the past.  I took what I could from it, dis­agreed with some of it (but under­stood the per­spec­tive of it), but ulti­mately decided that the best thing to do was to let it go and move on and try not to make the same mis­takes in the future in future work.

Obsessing over your mis­takes and your crit­i­cism doesn’t help.  That’s the most impor­tant les­son for me and arti­cles like this serve to help drive that les­son home again and again.

Federations Antho For Preorder, and My Story: The Culture Archivist Free Online

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

The anthol­ogy of Federations sci­ence fic­tion, aptly named Federations and edited by anthol­o­gist wun­derkind John Joseph Adams is now avail­able for pre­order.  Come on, you know you want it.  You can order it on Amazon and prob­a­bly some other places too.

Would you like to read my story, “The Culture Archivist?”  Well, um, how about sto­ries by James Alan Gardner or Genevieve Valentine?  Head on over to the Federations web­site for your pick of the free sto­ries.  I believe that my story will be pod­cast on Starship Sofa around the time of the release as well.

I’m fairly happy with my story.  I hope you will be too.  And even if you’re not, hey, it’s free!  You can’t lose!  And if you like it, buy the book and sup­port good short fic­tion out­side of the pages of mag­a­zines.  I’ll owe you one.  Check out the rock­ing cover!

New Roundbottom: An End to the War and a Friendship

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Good morn­ing, ladies and gents.  It’s that time again.  A new post has gone live over at the Informatitron.  It seems the doc­tor and friends have put an end to the Bird Queen-​​Boggart ordeal, but not with­out a price.   This post sur­prised me, as it runs about the length of a tra­di­tional short story. I never intended to be so… wordy on the site, but I sup­pose you can take the nerd out of the writ­ing, but you can’t take the writ­ing out of the nerd.

More good things com­ing up on Roundbottom this month.  The more mem­ber­ships I sell, the more I can pour into hir­ing mod­els and doing more elab­o­rate photo manip­u­la­tions.  So please, if you enjoy read­ing Dr. Roundbottom and lis­ten­ing to his exploits each week, con­sider buy­ing a membership.

Are there images that you want that are lim­ited edi­tions, but you don’t want to drop so much cash on a print?  I’m con­sid­er­ing drop­ping the lim­ited prints entirely at the moment.  There’s been lit­tle inter­est in them, and while I was really hop­ing that they would pro­vide the boost I need to see this project through into the com­ing months, I sup­pose I could just sell every­thing as a mem­ber­ship kit option or stand­alone small, cheap, unlim­ited prints. Anyway, enough about that.  Coming up shortly, a photo of the day.

New Roundbottom: The Carrier Snail (And Desktops!)

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Good morn­ing! It’s Monday, and that means Dr. Roundbottom has updated his web­site with yet another sci­en­tific dis­cov­ery. I’m par­tic­u­larly happy with the work on this entry, pho­to­graph­i­cally speak­ing. The Carrier Snail is quite a nice pho­tonic cap­ture if I do say so myself.

As a teaser for the kind of thing you can expect to receive as a mem­ber of the Roundbottom Society, I’ve cre­ated a set of desk­top back­grounds of this week’s capture.

Desktop Backgrounds

800x600
1024x768
1440x900
1600x1200
1680x1050
1900x1200

If you have a res­o­lu­tion that isn’t listed, drop me a line and I’ll make you one in your desk­top resolution.

In other Roundbottom news, we had a record­ing ses­sion over the week­end for the first Roundbottom pod­cast.  Thanks to the help of our friend Nate Periat, this thing is going to sound about 100x bet­ter than I ever expected it to.  You can most likely look for­ward to hear­ing that next week!