Posts Tagged ‘Writing Advice’

A few choice quotes from Nick Mamatas’s STARVE BETTER

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

On story “hooks”:

The start of a story, its first para­graph, should assure the reader that they are in capa­ble hands.  The begin­ning of the story should tan­ta­lize, not hook, the reader.

On the use of scene breaks:

If a scene break were a phys­i­cal item, it would be an 800-​​pound gong.

Ever since read­ing that line, I now men­tally hear an audi­ble GONGGGGG every time I see a scene break.  Thanks, Nick!  You’ve ruined my brain.

On end­ing stories:

That’s how you end a story: with a) a bang and b) leav­ing the reader hun­gry for more.

These are just small sam­ples of the wis­dom con­tained within, per­ti­nent things I high­lighted and noted in the Kindle app while I read.  There’s so much more.  Nick writes with a com­bi­na­tion of vit­riol and patience that is unique. He has what you might call a “no non­sense” style, and he has a rep­u­ta­tion for being a bit caus­tic.  But he knows his stuff.  He’s one of the best edi­tors (and a fan­tas­tic short story writer as well) work­ing in our lit­tle field today, in my opin­ion, and he puts up with my stu­pid ques­tions constantly.  .

You can buy the book here.  I highly rec­om­mend it.  There were swaths of it I had read, but reread­ing them turned out to be very valu­able.  I read it in one long sit­ting last night, and the ebook is priced affordably.

Next, I’m read­ing a cou­ple of things—Farwell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler and another thing for work.  Chandler’s descrip­tive pas­sages are the best thing.  Ever.  He wins at descrip­tions.  Everyone else is a run­ner up at the county fair.  Of descrip­tions?  Crap. 

See?  He would have said that better.

Nathan Ballingrud Visits a Writing Class

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Nathan Ballingrud is a phe­nom­e­nal author, and his blog on writ­ing has been hit­ting them out of the park lately. This lat­est post had at least one bit that res­onated for me strongly:

God knows there are times we think we’re geniuses, but I think most of us spend a lot more time con­vinced of our own unwor­thi­ness. That can fill the mind with a killing ice. What you have to do is nearly impos­si­ble. You have to write any­way. You have to have faith that you’re wrong.

Go read it.

It’s got to hit you in the GUTS!

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Imagine I’m a ‘tough-​​as-​​nails” new­pa­per edi­tor from the olden days.  Which ones?  The fifthi­rourties.  For max­i­mum impact, read the fol­low­ing in a fast-​​talking, no-​​nonsense voice.  This is how I heard it in my voice as I told myself this morning.

Listen, kid.  You gotta lis­ten to me on this.  Your writing’s not bad. You know how to tell a story, but lis­ten.  You’ve got poor choice some­times. No, no, don’t get offended.  Deadlines are dead­lines, and you take what you can get.  But you’re never going to win the Pulitzer until you fig­ure out that what­ever you’re writ­ing about, it has to hit you right in the guts.    Knock the wind out of the reader.  It’s gotta have their stom­ach twist­ing and turn­ing in sym­pa­thy.  You grab them by the guts with your first line and you don’t let go until you’re through with them.  The human condition’s all about drama and con­flict.  Conflict and drama.  All our damn lives are hard, and one of the pre­cious few things in life that makes it eas­ier is know­ing some­where, some poor bas­tard has it worse than you.  Remember the old motto: if it bleeds, it leads. 

I’m a cere­bral per­son. I avoid emo­tional and social drama and con­flict like the plague.  The prob­lem is, my per­sonal avoid­ance of it turns up in my work.  I have to stop that right now.  So my the fast-​​talking news­pa­per editor-​​in-​​my-​​head is going to be giv­ing me this speech every day until it becomes sec­ond nature.

Just thought I would share that with some of you in case you need it too.

An Editor’s Perspective on Rejection

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Since I’ve taken on the gig of man­ag­ing edi­tor at Escape Pod, I’ve been relearn­ing a lot of things about being an edi­tor that I had for­got­ten in the time since clos­ing th Fortean Bureau. I’ve been think­ing a lot about rejec­tion let­ters, and rejec­tion in gen­eral, but not from my usual per­spec­tive as a writer, but now as an edi­tor. It’s inform­ing the way I think about rejec­tions as a writer as well.

It’s Not Personal

Rejection let­ters aren’t per­sonal. I find it very hard not to take them per­son­ally because by god, I wrote the story, I poured my self onto the page, and so it hurts to see that rejec­tion come in most of the time. My sto­ries are like the mind-​​prosthesies I never really asked for. And they trans­mit pain like any real limb. Er, so to speak.

Doling out rejec­tions, many to fine writ­ers whose work I love in a gen­eral sense, it’s really hit home. The rejec­tion is always for the story at hand, and it’s not about you. Great writ­ers get rejected. You will too.

I walk a very fine line in try­ing to avoid offense with my rejec­tion let­ters. How much detail does a Hugo-​​nominated writer need when you bounce his or her story? Do they need a rea­son other than, just didn’t sync up with my inven­tory needs at this time? I don’t want to be in the busi­ness of hand­ing out writ­ing advice in my rejec­tion let­ters. I tend to err on the side of less, rather than more, infor­ma­tion. Which brings me to my next point.

My Rejection is not Writing Advice

Most of the time, my rejec­tion let­ter says the same sim­ple line: “didn’t grab me.” I stole this one from F&SF, because it’s suc­cinct and a polite way of putting the truth. When I write this, it means that I did not fin­ish your story because I got bored with it. Sorry, but that’s the truth. And that’s why I don’t write what I lit­er­ally mean in the rejec­tion let­ter, because I am not a cal­lous mon­ster. When I do pro­vide feed­back as to why I am not buy­ing a story, it’s just based on my per­sonal expe­ri­ence of read­ing the story. Every edi­tor brings their own pecu­liar biases and inter­ests to the table. There are some ideas that always grab me more than oth­ers. Biological SF will win out over aster­oid min­ing every time, until you write that aster­oid min­ing story that proves me wrong.

New writ­ers should most def­i­nitely not be look­ing for writ­ing advice in their rejec­tion let­ters. Other writ­ers, and a cri­tique group, are the best way to gain this insight. It’s not the (short fic­tion) editor’s job, espe­cially not today, to cul­ti­vate the writer’s tal­ent. We sup­port your tal­ent, but we don’t have the time to fer­til­ize it. You need to turn to other sources for advice.

I can under­stand the impulse to seek feed­back from edi­tors. Writing is a soli­tary game, and it’s hard to find meth­ods with which to mea­sure your progress. How do you know if you’re get­ting close?

Again, time to be blunt. You’ll know you’re get­ting close because the edi­tor will tell you. When your rejec­tion let­ter asks for more of your work, that’s not just being polite. That’s because we think you have the chops and we’re just look­ing for the right story. When rejec­tion let­ters turn from “didn’t grab” to “didn’t work for me, for the fol­low­ing rea­sons” that’s a step up.

Trust me, the pain is only begin­ning when you’ve made those first cou­ple of sales. You’ll want more, and if light­ing has struck a lit­tle early, it can be painful to go quite a while afterwards.

At the same time, if you go from encour­ag­ing rejec­tions to a non-​​encouraging one, it doesn’t mean you’ve back­slid. It prob­a­bly just means the edi­tor has got­ten a bit too busy to give you spe­cial attention.

I Liked It, but I Didn’t Love It

I get to buy 52-​​ish sto­ries a year, and I prob­a­bly select those from ten times that many at least. This means I am not only look­ing for good sto­ries, but I’m look­ing for sto­ries that leave an impact on me. I reject a decent num­ber of good sto­ries, because I can’t use up all my slots buy­ing just good sto­ries. They have to be good, plus some. That spark is the most elu­sive thing you’ll seek as you develop as a writer.

I per­son­ally haven’t bro­ken past this phase. My rejec­tions are very often in the “this is a good story, but I didn’t like it enough to buy it” vari­ety. I sell oca­sion­ally, but this is my career wall at the moment. I think I’m close to under­stand­ing why, but I may never know, and I may never take the step for­ward. Especially if I don’t write more than I have been these past few years.

Doesn’t Fit My Needs at This Time

This is very sim­il­iar to the “like it, didn’t love it” rejec­tion let­ter. Under dif­fer­ent cir­cum­stances, I might have, prob­a­bly would have, bought this story. But maybe it’s a bit dark in tone, and I’ve been buy­ing way too many of those lately. Maybe at the moment, I need more light-​​hearted pieces. Maybe I bought an aster­oid min­ing story shortly before you sub­mit­ted yours, and they’re too sim­i­lar in sub­ject matter.

This is the “shit hap­pens” rejec­tion let­ter. I find they’re the hard­est and eas­i­est to take at the same time. They’re frus­trat­ing, but at least you can put these to the capri­cious­ness of fate, rather than your own per­sonal skills. It helps.

So that’s a lit­tle bit of the think­ing I’ve been explor­ing regard­ing rejec­tion as I work to select sto­ries for Escape Pod. It’s def­i­nitely given me a bet­ter per­spec­tive on my own rejec­tions. If it were pos­si­ble, I would rec­om­mend every seri­ous writer find a way to read slush some day. Not only do you learn to spot the most com­mon mis­takes, you start to get a lit­tle empa­thy for that poor soul on the other side of the transom.

What Is a Podcastable Story?

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Greg Van Eekhout asks:

Thoughts on what kinds of sto­ries trans­late well to pod­casts and what kinds don’t?

First of all, full dis­claimer. I am the man­ag­ing edi­tor at Escape Pod, the sci­ence fic­tion audio pod­cast. I’ve been doing this job for about 3 or 4 months now, and I am by no means an expert on to topic. I can only com­ment as to my per­sonal tastes here. I reserve the right to change my opin­ion as I learn more about my job and what seems to work.

I can talk much more eas­ily about what does not work well in pod­casts. Here are a few things:

  • Typographic weird­ness, of the sort you would see in The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
  • Fiction that plays with for­mat­ting in some way–fake news report, branch­ing dia­logue, and so on. This would be great if we pro­duced audio dra­mas, but Escape Pod approaches pro­duc­tion in a very straigh­for­ward nar­ra­tive fash­ion. I’d love to do more radio-​​drama style read­ings, and we have one com­ing up that was recorded live by Steve Eley at a con­ven­tion. But the pro­duc­tion that goes into a reg­u­lar episode is dif­fi­cult enough.
  • Stories that have a lot of very short scenes and lots of jump­ing around in time.

The last one is the one I’m least cer­tain about, but I find that sto­ries that go back and forth in time can be a bit more con­fus­ing in audio for­mat. On the page, it seems eas­ier to orga­nize the events into a chrono­log­i­cal order, but when lis­ten­ing to a story, it is harder to do this. I’m not say­ing it’s impos­si­ble, but it’s def­i­nitely some­thing I pay atten­tion to.

Okay, so what works par­tic­u­larly well? Here are some gen­eral ideas:

  • A strong, unique per­spec­tive or voice. It’s my expe­ri­ence that some of the most pop­u­lar EP episodes have been from a very unique char­ac­ter, such as a bomb dog or the AI that resides in a soldier’s hel­met. These sto­ries are often in first per­son per­spec­tive. That’s not to say that I find first per­son bet­ter than third per­son. First per­son cou­pled with a really unique and orginal voice stands out very well. Like it does in reg­u­lar fiction.
  • All the other, usual things that make a story good.

Other than the few things I think don’t work that are spe­cific to the audio for­mat, I use basi­cally the same cri­te­ria for select­ing a story in audio that I would for select­ing in print. I have some restric­tions unique to Escape Pod, such as length. I can’t tell you how many times I remem­ber what I think would be a great story fo rthe pod­cast, only to look it up and find out that it was a novella. It’s some­thing I’d like to see us do more of in the future, but I’d want to pay more for them and pos­si­bly seri­al­ize them over the course of two or more episodes. It’s some­thing I think about a lit­tle when I have time.

If you lis­ten to pod­cast fic­tion, what do you think? What kinds of sto­ries really work well for you in audio? Try to focus on the things you think work par­tic­u­larly well, and cite spe­cific exam­ples if you like. This will make up for my rather under­de­vel­oped list. If you have some­thing crit­i­cal to say about a par­tic­u­lar pod­cast story, share it on the forums over at the ‘cast or send it to our feed­back email, as a favor to me, please.

Reader Questions: How Do I Decide How Much Work to (Self) Publish Online?

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Let’s kick off reader ques­tion answer week with a real doozy. CDThomas asks:

I don’t have a web­site or blog. And I don’t know if I want one.

I under­stand if I’d cre­ate a blog for nat­ter­ing on, but most of that itch gets scratched by Twitter. I’m not much of an essay writer, because I think I find oth­ers who say what I’m think­ing bet­ter than I would.

That leaves self-​​promotion, pos­si­bly, of my fic­tion (plays, poems, short sto­ries). If I don’t want to go the full Doctorow and Creative-​​Commons license every­thing, then how do I decide how much of my work to pub­lish online?

I’m not going to be the type of writer who obses­sively searches for online theft, but I need to find a way of talk­ing about what I’m doing before I’m pub­lished reg­u­larly by mag­a­zines, online or oth­er­wise — learn­ing how to be part of a writ­ing SF/​F/​H com­mu­nity, I guess, but with­out my ques­tions get­ting lost on web boards.

First of all, I don’t think every writer needs a web­site or a blog. Anyone who says they do is prob­a­bly sell­ing some­thing (to para­phrase The Princess Bride). Now, I sell web design ser­vices, but I would never try to sell a writer on a blog/​website if they didn’t have any inter­est in main­tain­ing or updat­ing it. It sounds like you know what you like, and that’s Twitter. That’s great! You can do a lot to build a rep­u­ta­tion and an audi­ence with just that ser­vice. I tend to rec­om­mend a more com­pre­hen­sive strat­egy. I think of it as being like fish­ing. You can fish all day in one spot if you want, and you’ll catch fish. You’ll catch fish if you change up your lure and move around too. Now, read­ers aren’t fish, but poten­tial readers/​fans can be found in a lot of dif­fer­ent places. Unlike fish­ing, you can be in mul­ti­ple places at one time. So it’s more like hav­ing a cou­ple of poles in the water.

Okay, that metaphor is stretched to the break­ing point. Moving on.

I used to blog rarely, think­ing basi­cally that I didn’t have any­thing unique to say. But I don’t think that’s true of any­one, espe­cially any­one who writes. Why do we write if we’re not com­pelled do to do so by a need to share some­thing we feel is unique? Everyone has some­thing unique to say. Maybe not on every topic or issue, but every­one has within them, in my opin­ion, the poten­tial to write a great and grip­ping blog. Sometimes this involves liv­ing a very pub­lic life, shar­ing your deep­est embar­rass­ments. Sometimes, it means shar­ing the lit­tle bit of knowl­edge about writ­ing you’ve gar­nered. But if you’re sure, no big deal. You don’t need to have one. Nobody’s going to order you to have one.

Now, how do you decide what fic­tion to release online if you don’t want to go the full Creative Commons route and release absolutely every­thing? My opin­ion is, unless you’re really, really cer­tain of it, don’t release it online unless it’s been pub­lished some­where. I’ve writ­ten pos­si­bly a hun­dred short sto­ries. But only about a dozen are avail­able for any­one to read out­side of my close friends and fam­ily, and only one of those was self-​​published online.

It’s hard to build authen­tic­ity as a self-​​publisher. It’s not impos­si­ble, but the thing is, there is a lot of stuff to read online. People are look­ing for rea­sons to key in on things to read, and just throw­ing your writ­ing out there all on its own can be a very hard way of build­ing authen­tic­ity. I’m not say­ing it’s impos­si­ble, but I per­son­ally wouldn’t want to go that route.

Now, say you’ve sold a cou­ple of sto­ries. You might want to release some of them online, but let’s back­track and remem­ber that we don’t have a web­site. How do we release fic­tion online and get it out there to be read if we don’t have a web­site? Well, you can throw up a quick free web­site with a ser­vice like Blogger or LiveJournal. Or you can sell your fic­tion as down­loads with Fictionwise. Or you could upload it to Scribd and take your chances. There are a lot of ways to put your work out there with­out hav­ing a web­site, but you take your chances with each one of them. It’s really, really hard to get peo­ple to pay atten­tion to you online.

I find that it’s best to try online reprint sales first.  Might as well get some money from it, right?  That’s more respectabil­ity than just pub­lish­ing it online your­self.  Most sites will archive it for a long time.  The pod­casts like Escape Pod, Drabblecast, and Starship Sofa  are another great way to get your fic­tion online in basi­cally a per­ma­nent fash­ion.  The main dif­fer­ence here is that some­one else is lend­ing cred­i­bil­ity to your work by select­ing it for their pub­li­ca­tion, as opposed to you putting it up on your per­sonal web­site.  If one place lik­ing a story gives cred, imag­ine that two places means even more cred.  Same prin­ci­ple behind the Year’s Best antholo­gies, I think.

As to how much of your work should you get online?  That’s up to you and I can’t give you a sat­is­fac­tory answer.  I per­son­ally try to get every sin­gle story online via the ways I’ve listed above.  If I can’t sell some­thing as a reprint or pod­cast, I’ll for­mat it nicely on my web­site and throw it up myself.  Especially if I want to do a cool illus­tra­tion to go along with it.  Once you’ve made all the money you can from a story, why not put it out there for free?  Stories are dis­pos­able most of the time.  If you write a story so great that you can resell it dozens of times, then, well, some­one will post it online for you whether you want them to or not.  Try Googling the title of a clas­sic SF short story, and you’re likely to find a boot­leg copy online on some poorly policed .edu site as much as any­thing else.  Might as well be the per­son to be in con­trol of it, right?

The last aspect of the ques­tion above deals with how to become a part of the com­mu­nity and take part in a con­ver­sa­tion with­out being lost amongst the noise. This is very easy. I’ll break it out in bul­let points.

  • Pick four or five blogs or forums and haunt them. Check them every day if you can.
  • Provide help­ful answers to ques­tions. Key word here is help­ful. Don’t be neg­a­tive or crit­i­cal unless it’s asked for. Talk about your­self and your work only if it relates directly to the topic at hand. Be pos­i­tive. Try to find a unique per­spec­tive on the posts you com­ment on.
  • Do that over and over again. You’ll get a rep­u­ta­tion quickly.

There are other ways, but I think this is the eas­i­est way. It involves putting in a lot of time, but being a part of a com­mu­nity isn’t easy. I have a really hard time keep­ing up with all the writer blogs and forums I would like to read in an ideal world. I try to stay on top of a few spe­cific ones as best I can. I’m not very good about my sec­ond point of advice, so bear that in mind, but I think if I could do things over again, that’s how I would approach it.

I hope some of these answers prove help­ful. If any­one else has any advice for CDThomas, please share it in the comments.

Revising Short Fiction is for Suckers

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

I’ve heard a lot of dif­fer­ent opin­ions on the sub­ject of revi­sion over the years. The one that has stuck with me was the opin­ion of, I think it was Heinlein. This author wrote one draft, dropped it in the mail, and never looked back. I don’t know what his rea­sons for this were, but I know what a mod­ern writer’s rea­sons would be, espe­cially when it comes to short fiction.

It’s all about time man­age­ment and cost/​benefit analy­sis. Because sto­ries are pur­chased not based on the time it took to write them but how many words they con­tain, the actual hourly wage you make varies depend­ing on how much time you spend on a story. And the more time you spend, the less money you’re making.

For exam­ple, I gen­er­ally write first drafts at a speed of 1000–2000 words an hour. At a mod­er­ately decent payrate of 5 cents a word, that puts me at $50 an hour, if I were to sell my first draft. That’s a very nice hourly wage. Each draft you do, and each hour you spend rework­ing your draft, is reduc­ing your poten­tial hourly income. Spend as much time revis­ing as you did writ­ing the story, and now you’ve cut your hourly in half. Spend three times as long revis­ing the story as you did writ­ing it and now we’re talk­ing work­ing at McDonalds wages. I guess it’s bet­ter than dig­ging ditches.

However, I per­son­ally am not a writer who can churn out a sell­able first draft. I find the story in revi­sion, much like Pixar does. Partly this is because I often start writ­ing a story before the idea has fully fer­mented. Partly this is because I write so fast when I am on the first draft that I miss good oppor­tu­ni­ties. It’s only in sub­se­quent drafts that I can tweak the machin­ery of story into a form that actu­ally runs.

When I first started out writ­ing, I was with Heinlein all the way. One draft, and be done with it. And I sold a cou­ple. I also never sold dozens. When you think about it, was that really mak­ing me any more money as a writer? Almost cer­tainly not. It’s prob­a­bly a wash, if I sat down to fig­ure it out.

These days, I not only redraft and redraft, I also sit on sto­ries for months or years. Yesterday, I broke out a story that I wrote almost 2 years ago and began revis­ing. It’s prob­a­bly now on draft 5 or 6. And it’s most likely still not there.

These days, I’m much more con­cerned with mak­ing money from my writ­ing than I was before. That’s because I have no reg­u­lar source of income. So I’m look­ing at the Heinlein way again. It’s wish­ful think­ing though. I’m not a first draft writer, and that’s okay. Even if my hourly wage works out to be some­thing akin to min­i­mum wage, it’s still bet­ter work than just about any job that actu­ally pays min­i­mum wage. Unless that job has health insurance.

What’s your approach to revis­ing? What’s the longest you’ve ever tin­kered with a piece before send­ing it out?

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?

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

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bonus Photo: Whassat?

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

It’s been a pro­duc­tive week­end so far. I don’t know if I will go out tomor­row at the crack of dawn like today. I’m wiped out, have a migraine, and have been so busy pack­ing for the impend­ing move (6 blocks away) that I should prob­a­bly stay in and get some work done on a few side projects. I really like the week­end rit­ual of head­ing out in search of good pho­tos, though. I feel more in touch with nature than I have in years. I some­times think that giv­ing up on the biol­ogy field did some dam­age to my soul that is tak­ing a very long time to heal.

Even if I don’t go out tomor­row, the com­ing week is going to have some absolutely great images. This is one of the lesser ones. I try not to post the really good ones on the week­end because a lot fewer peo­ple read this site over the week­end. Anyway, I hope you enjoy.

Bonus Photo: Whassat?