The Whine List

I've become a fan of Mur Lafferty's podcast "I Should Be Writing" which is a great source of encouragement for writers labouring in the wilderness - that would be me. It's good to hear about the experiences of someone going through the same hassles I am and Mur has lots of level-headed advice about the trade.

But in this podcast she said something that experience tells me is not true. Writers, she said, should try to get better at what they do because the better the story they write the more chance there is that someone will want to publish it.

I've no quibble with the assertion that writers should study their craft and hone their abilities but, I've got to say, that will have almost no effect on the saleability of a story.

I'm driven to say that because of a comment that turned up in a recent rejection - yet another which was of the "almost but not quite" species. The comment was that the whole picking of which stories to publish was such a subjective business.

Until I read that I'd harboured the fantastical notion that an editor presented with ten stories for five slots would pick the five best - by which I mean the most technically adept, the best written. But I have been foolish and deluded. Editors pick what they like to read. By which I mean crap gets published all the time.

It strikes me that it would be perfectly possible to go through an entire writing career turning out technically flawless stories but never getting anything published because no editor liked any of them quite enough. Tobias Buckell said he got rejected 500 times before he started to make it. I hope it does not take me that long. I've just hit 100 rejections after three years. So to hit 500 I'll have to do this for another 12 years.

The days after I realised all this have been dark - I've really considered giving up. Especially when I worked out that since I've supposedly been getting better at writing the ratio of acceptances to rejections has got a lot worse. Significantly so.

I've said before that my motivation hinges on whether I get a good response to what I put out and at the moment I'm not. Now though I realise that the only person I need to please is myself. I feel quite liberated and what I write has changed a lot. Getting published is a bonus that luck has a lot to do with. And I have to believe in luck. How else, to paraphrase Cocteau, how can I explain the success of my rivals?

The rules for the game

In no particular order...
Be specific - sardines being grilled is better than fish being cooked.
Use active and direct verbs - he walked rather than he was walking.
Avoid abstractions - such as horrible, violent, frustration.
Make every scene and sentence count.
Use the minimum amount of magic/hi-tech to get things moving.
Adverbs - Gah, away with them.
Reveal character by action. Put characters in situations that force a response.
Do not hide information. A surprise works better if no-one suspects it is coming.
Experts plan to the end.
Dialogue - Do not let it meander. Conversations are great ways to show character and attitude.
Elaboration of motive - a character's actions should reveal more about them, what they are doing and why they are doing it.
Write for yourself and no-one else.
Writers write - try to make progress every day.
Keep an ideas notebook with you at all times.

Off the leash

I've often wondered if I'm too polite when I write - perhaps it's the curse of my middle-class upbringing. Certainly, it's something one reviewer accused one of my characters of being for his impeccable behaviour during a scene set on the NY subway.

But it was reading The New Weird that really got me thinking that I needed to throw out at least one baby and its bathwater. The book is great on the history of the New Weird and why it came into being. One of the main motivations is dissatisfaction with Tolkienesque type fantasy and the limitations of that form.

I've said before I have problems with elves but my wish to write something different always felt like I was breaking the rules and, to be honest, I felt a little uncomfortable doing it. This is despite the fact that I'm a huge fan of China Mieville (Perdido Street Station is a breath of fresh air) and many other alumni of this field. I just didn't get why they did it and the anthology clued me in.

I'm aware that many books/stories have appeared before now that had a whiff of New Weird about them but it's the extreme nature of the form that defines it - to my mind. The heady mix of insanity, bodily awareness, cityscapes, Dickensian character-building and love of language is hard to mistake once its salient features are pointed out. It is also utterly convinced by its settings - no clever, clever post-modern awareness of the story as a story here.

Reading the anthology also chimed with comments from other writers about their development. Many speak of the moment when they found their voice and started creating the stories they were put here to write.

I certainly feel that a big change has taken place in what I write - I'm no longer ameliorating what I write to fit the conventions. Away with them. Give me liberty or give me daeth. The story I'm working on at the moment has flowed out of me so quickly that at times I feel like a witness more than a writer. It feels more honest. I have no idea about whether it is any good - though the strength of its voice will be a plus.

The changes means that some of my fears about writing have gone in that I feel so much happier about the stories I'm producing. Writing was starting to feel a little formulaic prior to this realisation. And one story very much of the old school keeps getting bumped as I work on these others. But those fears have been replaced by others which centre around whether it is any good at all. There is a lot more at stake too as they are far more personal. Time will tell whether the change means I get more published. But I'm happier than ever about doing this.

Pause for thought

It's fair to say that commas and I have never got on. Perhaps its the way they lie insolent on the line like a drunk in the gutter, perched between the respectability of the pavement and the out and out seediness of sprawling in the road. Whatever. I use them like I use pepper on pasta - the dish looks better with it and occasionally a crumb will land in the just the right place to counterpoint the taste of the sauce. Was that metaphor too tortured? I hope so.

I'm not sure why it is that commas and me are such strangers. I'm a whizz at spelling but I have no recollection from my school days of the laws of commas being drummed in to me like spelling - though the fact that I read like a crazy person might have helped my ability to spell.

This admission is perhaps something of a surprise given where I work and what I have done for a living for the past 15 years. It's perhaps a comment on the sad state of prose in the papers or simply that, even if I do not know, many of those that I have worked with do. Subs are a boon!

Lots of the comments I've got on stories I've put together recently have focussed on commas and my cavalier (ab)use of them. One story was critiqued by an English teacher and, this is going to sound a little odd,I got a real thrill to find out where they should go. It really changed the way the lines read. I'm a long way from being like Proust or Oscar Wilde who, it is said, having removed a comma from one line pored over the text for two days and then put it back in. At least then, the story goes, they knew why it was there.

That very kind reviewer pointed me to this site and it turns out there are rules for using commas. I always thought it was something much more abstruse but no. There are proper places where they should be used. Cool. That OWLS site is fab in other ways too - it has lots of great advice for novice writers. And the more I write the more I realise that's what I will always be.

Get on with it

I'm not sure why but three times in the last two months a story has descended on me almost complete - ideas, settings, dialogue, scenes, structure - the whole lot has bubbled up from some hidden spring.

It has happened before but not with such intensity nor for such a sustained spell. Perhaps the planet is passing through a region of space loaded with inspirons like the Perseids. Dunno. All I do know is that I've produced two or three tales in a very short space of time.

I don't mention this to disingenuously suggest that I am struggling under the burden of my talent which often leaves me breathless and marvelling at my own splendour. And I don't really want to complain about it though stories which arrive in this way are no less clear of problems than ones that have to be wrung out word by word. They still need honing to do their job properly. Lots of the words that look stellar in the light of the early dawn as I scribble them on the paper I keep by my pillow fade during the editing process. Lots get cut out.

It has to be said though that I feel something has changed. SDL, my touchstone for these issues, said that in his writing there came a time when he felt he had some kind of breakthrough and his writing improved a lot after that even though outwardly it read very much the same. I don't know if I've gone through the same process but it feels a bit freer and the sense I have on what needs to be done to a story seems deeper. Time will tell whether that will translate into published stories, or glory, sales.

But as Ze Frank and the level-headed Mur Lafferty have said ideas can very seductive. "Brain crack" is what Ze Frank calls them. I keep wanting to hare off and chase those ideas down instead of getting on with finishing the story I'm currently working on. It's all too easy to keep chasing ideas, which pretty much always look brilliant, than it is to get on with the graft. But it's been said that the difference between writers and everyone else is that writers write, others don't. I guess to that you can add that one similarity between writers and everyone else is that they have ideas, the difference is that writers ignore a lot of them.

Killing to be kind

I've not written that many stories (19 for those keeping count) but I've recently had to carry out the unpleasant task of pensioning off a couple of the older ones. I've had to do it because I've run out of places that I want to submit them - though that's not to say there aren't more places where they could go.

The decision comes about for a couple of reasons. I typically have about 8-10 stories circulating at any one time. I could have more out there in the ether but the administrative and mental overhead of keeping those flying is about the limit of what I can cope with. I also have a lot of respect for the stories and submitting them willy nilly anywhere and everywhere would not feel right. It has to be said that not all markets are created equal - I'm aiming for a particular section of the genre media and going beyond that would dilute that focus. (Can you dilute a focus? Hmm, perhaps not.)

Anyhoo some of the stories that I've pensioned off are pretty old and were first written three years ago. I'd like to think that I've got better since then so they are not the best advocates for what I can do.

But I look back at affection with those stories even if they are slightly tarnished in memory because they have racked up so many rejections. Mothballing them does not end their usefulness though. They are peppered with useful phrases and ideas that can find a home in another story - one key idea from the retirees became catalyst for a flash story that has been accepted.

There are some that I'm planning to re-write too as I really like the setting and framing idea that got me to dream them up in the first place.

Plus I learned something while writing them and they kept my name in front of editors that I am trying to impress and convince to publish my stuff. Given that, so far, I'm keeping to my stated ambition to write a story a month losing one or two is not so bad. Though I'm going to face a real crisis if any of my work gets published as that will punch a hole in the numbers available to send out.

Sympathy is the very devil

As I close in on 100 rejections I can see a trend emerging in the letters and e-mails that accompany those stories that don't quite make it.

I can sense I'm making progress in that more rejections express the hope that I'll keep bothering those editors with my stories. Perhaps its rejectomancy to read too much in to that but given the thin nourishmnet from the big table I've had so far those crumbs taste pretty good. Cuspy? Look it up in the dictionary and it'll have my picture next to it.

Three of the rejections I got recently all mentioned failings of character. Those letters mean more than most because they do chime with what I think about where I am at. I now know I can handle setting, structure, dialogue and I'm getting a handle on action.

But character? Hmm - I know that the characters I write are pretty thin.

So I turned to the web and my collection of "how to write" reference books for help. To paint good characters SDL says I need to show them performing actions that are "habitual, purposeful and gratuitous". Reading that I realised the importance of action - in the sense of putting a character in places they must react rather than a sword or gunfight. People reveal themselves by their action otherwise they are just being shuffled from place to place and looking blankly on.

Also important, say folks like Orson Scott Card, are telling details - habits or incidents from a character's past to round them out. Then there are the elements revealed in dialog beats - reactions or additions to the words and the attitude a character brings to events.

I also found this great note by Jim Kelly about how to go about it. There's great stuff here - about how telling in a short story is okay but showing is important too. Probably the best advice he gives is to try it and keep on trying until it works. Writers learn by doing rather than be being told - they are not alone in that.

But I also came across the frightening information that Iris Murdoch felt she had never mastered the art of creating good, for which read sympathetic, characters. And that chimes with what I've felt reading Murdoch, her characters feel like exquisitely made mechanical people rather than living, breathing individuals. Where that leaves me I'm not sure. Perhaps I'd better go and find out. So, if you'll excuse me...