But, as Byron said, I digress.
In summary, many thanks to Brit Mandelo at Strange Horizons magazine for taking the time out of a busy schedule to personally respond in detail when my story was rejected. Thanks to you and your fellow editors' feedback I have a very good idea of where my weaknesses are and I'm encouraged to try again with a different story in the future. :)
So, better late than never:
I hope that, if it resonates with you, you go right now and sit down and do something creative that brings you closer to your life goals.
Enjoy! :)
Today's Mood Puppy is a Mood Saber from our first litter, pictured here all grown up at a year old. I feel like my writing is growing up, too, in important ways, and I owe it all to a very difficult short story.
It took me a long time to develop enough of an eye to see the flaws in my writing. The short story I workshopped at Viable Paradise in 2010 was the main tool of that learning, and it occurred to me last night that I was lucky that I did put all that time into it instead of something else. Here's why.
Areb Dar (the short story) went through at least five major edit/rewrite/revisions and countless small tunings. All while I was working on finishing the raw rough draft of my first novel and writing the roughs of other stories and mapping out the next novel, I also would take the old story out here and there and futz with it. When I got useful or specific feedback from my rejections, I re-examined the story in that light and tightened it. Those of you who have read my previous posts on this subject know that it was by turns frustrating, exhausting, and sometimes outright depressing to keep going back.
Yet I did--because I really believed in the story. I believed in what it was in my head when it was born, and in what it could be.
There are a lot of sources that say that once you start sending a story out you should just do so. You've surely read it, that advise against stopping to edit between submissions. I have to argue with that, because during those early submissions, I sensed that the story was still not quite there. At the same time, I did not yet have enough experience, enough of a feel for my craft, to pinpoint how to fix it. The time that elapsed between submissions and the feedback I got and the work that I was doing on my novel was invaluable toward fueling the back burner that the pot of this story simmered on (and it was always simmering, somewhere in the back of my head).
When I finished the most recent draft of Areb Dar, in October, I sent it to all the beta readers who had seen earlier versions for final feedback. Somewhere in that last set of revisions, something clicked in me and when I read it over I knew that I had leveled up. I was finally happy with the story--or as happy as I would ever be with it at that length. (6200 words, for those wondering. I still think it has enough potential complexity to fuel a novel in the future, but for now I'm not going there.)
So how exactly was I lucky? Well, think about it. Last night I was working on my second novel. I was also jotting down scenes and ideas for editing the first novel. Between paragraphs, it suddenly occurred to me: what kind of shape would I be in, going to edit East of the Sun, if I had not grown so much via working on Areb Dar? It was hell at times, working with the short story--and the novel is twenty times as long, and much more complex. I imagined, for a moment, how lost and depressed I might have become if I hadn't cut my teeth on those 6200 words.
So despite the fact that Areb Dar is not yet published, and may not be ever (such is the gamble of the freelance writer), I am currently thanking my lucky stars for the long education I got from my short fiction. Areb Dar, you have been a bastard of a story to work on, but I love you.
Now get published, dammit. I want you out of the house!
It has always been my tendency to "write long". My first drafts are meandering; I let my brain play with images, let myself restate things a couple times in different ways in the hopes of teasing out a gem or two that I might really like. Much like my vocal chatter, there is never a problem with not having enough! In my novel, this meandering helped me keep going through scenes, and later I got a better idea how to attack some of them. But in short stories, long is a detriment. Short stories need to be tight, close, breathing-in-your-ear kind of intense so they can distract you and suck you in quickly and keep things moving. There is no room for meandering, no room for flights of prose. I was beginning to feel like I was thrashing around, going nowhere useful. I felt like short stories were going to beat me.
And I couldn't let that happen. In my genre, getting a story or fifteen published is a good way to break in. I love my novel--and previous published stories to my name might give it a better chance. I needed to get over this short story issue. I sensed it was a big block in my writing.
Bad beginnings and writing too long--so how were these related? Where's the breakthrough?
Breakthrough there was. I took a short road trip this weekend and long periods in the car have always helped me free-associate ideas. So it came to me--a way I could cut out that pesky beginning in Areb Dar entirely, a way I could pick up at the first scene I really liked. AND I could cut out some of the chaff from later on if I could combine two other scenes and slot the substance of them in together!
Yes, this is a simple concept. Making your scene do double or even triple duty--instead of three weaker scenes, try to figure out a way to accomplish the same thing in one. Voila! Your prose tightens. Things move faster! And tension tends to rise, because you're not meandering.
This idea is discussed in many writing books and forums. But as with many things, you can understand the idea in your head and still not get it at a gut level!
I finally clicked on it yesterday. I stopped at a rest stop on the way home and scribbled notes. I woke up this morning and I began to CHOP. And to rewrite. And for the first time in a long time, it felt good to come to the page.
I have historically been split on the idea of writing buddies.
When I was a kid I was still in that foolish frame of mind that said you should never tell anyone your ideas because they might steal them. I suppose that concept finds ready soil in the self-centered mind of a twelve-year-old (and some of us never quite shake it!). I wrote in solitude—and in longhand, a habit which I still turn to when I'm having trouble with a scene or sentence.
In high school I learned the joy of hanging out with someone else who loved writing. Paul was a poet, and we would challenge each other by passing long notes full of our latest efforts or excerpts from song lyrics we especially liked between classes. It was, for the first time, fun to experience a sense of community and to think that maybe having someone else around to help one focus was a good thing. It certainly did make me productive. I don't have any of those poems anymore, but I do remember quite a few of them and the images sneak into my fiction every once in a while. Now I wish I'd kept more of them. I am always learning that as a writer, nothing is ever wasted.
In college, and afterward, I backslid. I went to writing as to a refuge—a refuge from friend drama, from relationship stress, from the undermining doubt about where I was and what I was going to end up with in this education thing—and whether it was even what I wanted to have (I was an art major—such doubts are warranted). When emotion storms tried to swamp my boat I made a beeline for the computer. I wrote solo, in the dark, by candlelight if possible (another habit that remains with me today if I'm having difficulty with a very atmospheric or emotional scene).
After a series of low-level supervisory and management jobs (during which I did my best to dig out a short story or The Novel and try hacking away at it again, sporadically) I said screw it all and moved to the east coast to try my hand at being an artist. Much to my surprise, I succeeded (at the cost of much of my sanity, and my credit rating). After a brief bounce back with the parents, my level of newly-developed skill and niche painting fame won me my current job. All those years and fears and here I ended up an artist anyway. But…I still wanted the writing thing.
And so when I met a couple of writer friends down here who actually worked at stuff and occasionally finished it (instead of abandoning projects for months or even years as was my habit), I started hanging out with them and talking writing. Strangely, this led to actually writing. And then, to actually attempting NaNoWriMo (and failing; I still hadn't given myself permission to write absolutely horrid first drafts). And then to working on new stories. And to WINNING NaNoWriMo. And finally to finishing stories, and getting accepted to Viable Paradise XIV (thus giving me MORE potential writing buddies!), and then finishing my first real novel this year.
During the course of all of this, with hindsight being the type to walk up and smack a girl in the face, I have noticed a few things about support and writing buddies that I wish I would have known back in college. They might have slid me a few inches further along the tightrope. In that spirit, I offer them here.
1. Share Your Ideas (but not too much). There is a fine line between talking over a new concept with a buddy and sliding into ONLY talking about the project and never actually working on it. My current writing buddy and I often get around the most dangerous point of this by only mentioning the project after we've started it. After that we bring up things that we're specifically happy with or having trouble with as we progress. It's just enough to get some feedback, to keep us moving, and to make us go back and dip our brains into the story if we've been neglecting it.
2. Try Writing Communally. This doesn't work for everyone and there are days it doesn't even work for us, when people are just too distracted and the rest of us let them pull us into the Happy Land of Cat Waxing. But done right, in true NaNoWriMo style, you get a couple (or a gang!) of friends together and you set a writing challenge—either a certain number of words or a time limit. We do time limits, and then compare word counts at the end of the half hour or hour. This absolutely guarantees that you WILL be productive, dammit, or by God you will be shamed. And you should NEVER underestimate the motivational value of potential shame.
3. Try Setting a Writing Night. Life happens. Stuff distracts us. And the evil doubting Inner Editor wants us to believe that our writing is never as important as the other stuff in our lives. Well, bullhooey! Try giving your Inner Editor a good kick in the chops by scheduling a weekly Writing Night! This has really worked for me, because I'm a terminally busy person. Unless I hound myself it is way too easy for a day to slip by (oh, I'll make it up tomorrow) and then another day (well dang it, there's the weekend, right?) and then the weekend attacks (news at ten) and all the days after become a blur and writing has gone out of my head again (until I get really grouchy and depressed and it takes me half a day to realize that it's because I haven't written in two weeks). Writing Night MAKES me sit down and touch base with my current project at least once a week. At which point, guilt and motivational shame can kick in (see 2, above), especially when paired with writing challenges. And I can ride that momentum for a day or two after, at least—even more if I check in regularly with my writing buddies!
4. Try Never to Consider Yourself Above or Below Your Writing Buddy. Even if you're lucky enough to hang out in a coffeeshop and scribble with the ghost of Ray Bradbury, never let yourself get hung up on it. For a while when writing with my current buddy I was guilty of thinking that I'd progressed farther along in my writing than he is. This is a horrible trap because just because someone is still working on their own writing doesn't mean that they can't see the gaping flaws in yours. And then there are the one or two free cards everyone gets. Buddy one might suck at dialogue but her ideas are fresher; maybe she'll inspire you. Buddy two might create amazing worlds but can't get away from standard fantasy tropes, and you can help each other out if you like to push the boundaries but suck at settings. Buddy three might be Neil Stephenson (if so, I hate you), in which case you may spend most of your writing time together wondering why you find it equally plausible that he could be a college professor at Miskatonic U or the leader of a fanatical cult that performs all their rituals in encrypted mnemonic code (possibly while wearing stylish black leather trenchcoats and katanas). Either way—if you're hung up on how your work compares to the writing of your buddies, chances are you're overlooking a chance to learn something from the people around you (like, why "Clang"?).
But I digress.
At the back of it all, nothing is ever wasted (except perhaps when the North Coast Grand Cru gets opened). Sit down and write with a buddy—in person, in chat, via email—and see how your writing habits might benefit.
I've decided not to write the title for this post until I've finished it, because for once I can't settle on one. But if, dear probably-fictional reader, you perused my previous post, you know already that I want to talk about NaNoWriMo tonight.
NaNo's been vilified by some and praised to the skies by others. If you honestly have no idea what it's about, here's the website:
National Novel Writing Month (and they run Camp NaNo during the summer, too!)
So, the essence of the argument...does NaNo demean the novel form? Does it not take writing a novel seriously enough? It doesn't really talk about anything like plot structure or convincing dialogue (though these things do get discussed in the community forums, by participants, and certainly in private writing groups like the one I have with my writing buddies). Certainly NaNo does encourage every underhanded trick in the book to inflate your word count (everything from typing pages out of the dictionary to repeating the sentence you just wrote infinitely until you think of a new one!). Word count is king. Not tension or structure or dialogue or believable characters. You dive in and even if you hit your head on a rock you keep going.
I will admit that in many ways I can understand the arguments leveled by the anti-NaNo crowd. After all, is it really laudable to teach people not to just write fiction--but to write mounds and mountains of possibly BAD fiction?? Not like there's a shortage. There's certainly enough of that already floating around. It's like one of those gigantic trash islands meandering around in the Pacific. And I'm sure that I've contributed my share in past NaNoWriMos (dare I recall the horrible plotting in my attempted Urban Fantasy? Though that's less of a sin in that genre than no sex scenes, these days).
NaNo lovers counter that argument by pointing out that because of their beloved Month of Writing Dangerously, more and more kids are getting into writing early. People all over the world converge in November...to write, and to share their experiences writing. People are embracing writing. They are expressing their love of the word and gaining a new appreciation for the books they are reading. So WHAT if the majority of it stinks?? Anne LaMott would remind us that everyone writes shitty first drafts (except for the people that we really, really hate). And, if we do it right, it sets us up with an obligation to succeed.
And it is for this latter reason that I love NaNo, attempt to succeed at NaNo every year, and--in two of those years--even "won" NaNo--which is to say I managed to write 50,000 words or more in 30 days. And now I finally have my title--because it is why NaNo works for me that keeps pulling me back to it.
It's the sense of obligation. It's hard to sustain that, writing purely for me. It's even hard to sustain it when I try to make goals with my local writing buddy Jarrad. But dammit, introduce a community of zillions of people (some of whom actually know me and, I am filled with paranoid certainty, are tracking my progress on the page every day even as I am tracking theirs and swearing under my breath), give me a cute little word-count widget that tracks my progress on a graph, and send me pep talks and give me a website to waste time on, and by all that's holy I'll write. I'll write every day. And if I DON'T write every day then I will bust my ass making up words on the days when I come back to it. Much as I, in fact, am doing on this blog, having missed two days due to puppy-shipping shenanigans.
NaNo doesn't care about my shenanigans. It does not care if I have little puppies chewing my toes off right at this minute. It is still going to point the Mighty Gauss Rifle of Shame at my head, smile, and politely suggest that I am going to look downright pathetic if I don't get my butt in that chair--THIS MINUTE, MISSY--and write.
And I love the dang thing for it. I love the fact that it browbeats me into ignoring my disappointment in myself. ("Woe is me, for I have not written any words for the last three days and am indeed a poor specimen of humanity," I say. "Shut up and catch up," says NaNo.) It short-circuits, for me, the subconscious danger of wallowing in my small failures. And because it is so very effective at that, I end up being more productive than I would have dreamed during the average month of November.
So this past November I used NaNo to get 50K words in on East of the Sun and now in four days I will use it again to start on West of the Moon. I will be counting on the dang thing to shame me into not just 50K, but 100K words this year. With dogs, husband, work, hobbies, friends, art, and video games, that's a helluva lot of shame, folks. And maybe it's the masochist in me. Or the failed Catholic.
But I suspect I'll be enjoying every damn minute.
It's all Jarrad's fault.
Well, okay, really it's all Gwen's fault, but Jarrad has contributed to that fault by asking me to use our Weekly Writing Night to blog instead of working on actual stories or novels. I probably shouldn't have told him that I'd committed to doing this. Drat.
Jarrad's blog, for those interested (shortly to be updated!): Jarrad, my writing buddy and a guy with a great turn of idea.
So I've got a bone to chew tonight, much like this entry's Mood Kyrie above. That bone to chew is with people who apparently believe that any writing you're doing as a beginning writer has any possibility of being a Waste of Your Time.
I haven't had anyone come out directly and say this, mind you. But when you mention to someone that you have almost finished your first real novel and they are enthused until you mention it's the first of a series--and they get That Look in their eye, and then they open their mouth--then you know what's coming. In this particular circumstance I brightly interposed, "But I'm learning so much!" That seemed to work. But wait. Why should I have had to say that at all?
I shouldn't, is the answer. Let's face it. A crapton of people think about writing. Some decent proportion of those actually talk about writing. Fewer actually attempt writing, be it fan fic, articles, endless blogging (ouch) or starting a short story or, gods forbid, a novel.
Then fewer still actually FINISH the short story...and a fraction smaller still finish the novel.
So what makes another writer or aspiring writer or person who thinks they know all about writing even though they never have taken the muse by the balls (well, aren't I permitted to have a male muse?!?) think they can walk up to me and insinuate that I'm wasting my time not working on something "marketable"??
So that has led me to this blog entry, wherein we will examine the Top Ten Reasons Why Writing Anything You Feel Like Isn't A Waste of Your Time.
10. Words on the page is words on the page.
9. If you're not cat-waxing, you're making progress.
8. The writer is probably the worst judge of whether what they're working on is worthwhile.
7. Did you learn something from typing this? There you go.
6. Even the worst piece of drivel coming out of my keyboard teaches me what NOT to do!
5. I'm establishing the habit of writing something, anything, every day.
4. Writing anything reduces the fear factor tied to coming to the blank page every day. Or the end of the paragraph where you're not sure what comes next.
3. How are you ever going to get published anyhow unless you try things and fail or succeed?
2. No matter what you are writing...you are WRITING. Do not question. Do not double-think yourself. Just DO it. And let the putting of words on the page make you happy. You are doing what you've dreamed of. Let go of the anxiety and let yourself believe that your words are worth something!
And the number one reason why writing what you feel like writing, "marketable" or not, is worthwhile:
1. Because George R.R. Martin told me so. So unless one of the other writers who I really admire--like maybe Neil Gaiman, Neil Stephenson, or William Gibson (and I would include Ray Bradbury and Anne McCaffrey except that, /sad, they would now have to do so from beyond the grave)--get on this blog and tell me George is full of it, I'm going to stick to that, thanks.
Actually I can thank George for Numbers Eight and Seven. He and his wife Parris where nice enough to treat me to breakfast when I was traveling through Santa Fe earlier this year, and he tolerated a writing question from me--because I WAS worried. I was working on East of the Sun and West of the Moon, and realizing that it was actually two books. "Is this a waste of my time?" I asked him. "It's probably not salable. I'm a nobody."
George told me that--though in his opinion short stories are still the way to break into the writing game--the important thing was to finish the project I was working on. No writing is wasted. You are developing your craft, seeing what works, what doesn't work. You are learning. And he told me that some of the things he wrote that he thought weren't all that or were too weird were some of the things that magazines or publishers turned out to be interested in.
So there you go. And really it all comes back to something I wrote in my journal as I was just starting East of the Sun : DON'T JUDGE THE WORK.
It isn't for you, the writer, to judge the worth of anything you're working on. It's your job to communicate, to regale the reader with the best prose you're capable of writing, to catch the passion you feel for the subject and tie that into the prose. Beyond that--don't worry about it.
Just keep writing.
Tomorrow: Why NaNoWriMo keeps drawing me back to it. Stay tuned!
Well my good friend Gwen (who was my roomie at Viable Paradise XIV) called me out recently on the fact that I haven't posted here in ages, and I PROMISED her that I would make a post today for all my faithful, probably fictional readers. That's not to insult any of you who might be non-fictional readers, it's just that I prefer to go ahead with the assumption that I am shouting words into the void. Less pressure. On occasion, yes, I do find it relaxing to imagine that I'm also just a brain in a jar. But I digress.
The truth is, though I have not been blogging, I have been writing. I have been submitting short stories--very irregularly, and I hope to improve on that. But more than that, I have been raising a litter of puppies, one of whom you can see above in all her rampant adorability (which I seriously did not believe was an actual word when I typed it, but m-w.com assures me that I'm within my rights on that one). The puppies are now all going to new homes save for one, and I feel like I actually have my brain cells back enough to expound.
So, yes, stories. And raising puppies. And finishing my first full-length (over 100K words) novel, actually.
I'm a big fan of NaNoWriMo and nine months ago in November 2011 I decided to try a project that has been dogging my creative brain for many years now. It's a fantasy reboot of the classic Norwegian fairy tale "East o' the Sun and West o' the Moon". The story is quite classical, in fact, since part of it appears to have been inspired directly by the myth of Cupid and Psyche. So I'm re-writing it in the tradition of Robin McKinley's "Deerskin", taking the rough particulars of that tale and placing it into its own fantasy world. A lot of other fairy tales make cameos. A couple of them are not entirely Norwegian, but if they can steal Cupid and Psyche, I can steal a favorite Germanic fairy tale or two. Yes?
Suffice to say that in the grand and colorful tradition of the Norwegian folk tales there are Bear Kings and troll-hags and clever foxes and cunning young women and a young man who gets in over his head. Said young man is a bit of a storyteller and so there are interwoven in the story internal stories in the tradition of Watership Down (one of my top five all-time favorite fantasy novels), that expand upon the mythology of the world and may enlighten the reader or hint at certain story elements.
That's cool, but what's the point, you all ask? Okay, so the point is, since this IS a blog about writing and learning things, I did actually learn a lot in writing this book, both about myself and my methods of working (or not doing so...cat waxing, anyone?) and about writing a novel. I am proposing a project for myself for the next week. Every day I will sit down here at this blog and write about something I learned writing this book.
Why only a week? Because in a week or so, the August session of Camp NaNoWriMo kicks off, and I will be launching myself into the second book, because I couldn't tell all of the story in just one book. So Book One is East of the Sun, Book Two is West of the Moon. There may also be a third book, cautiously entitled The Bear King's Daughter, which will deal with things similar and yet outside of the scope of that particular fairy tale.
Now, I have friends who will lecture me that as a starting writer with no short story credits to my name, I am a fool to be writing a three-book series. I will issue my rebuttal to this tomorrow, in Day One of my Week of Write-Blogging. Stay tuned!
