-
Fiction Branding… Part 2
When To Think About Branding… Being a fiction writer is a fine balance in your head of being completely creative and telling the best story you can while at the same time holding in check all the critical voice stuff that says everything you are writing is crap. Long-term professional fiction writers have this controlled completely in one way or another. Early stage and middle stage fiction writers fight the battle with every story or novel. The key early on is to clear out or hold back the critical voice while trying to stay out of the way of the creative voice. Most writers fail and thus have short careers.…
-
Editor and Reading Observations… Part 12…
Rejections Mean Nothing… Sending stories to editors is a game, one worth winning if editors start buying your work. It is fantastic free advertising for your overall work and you actually get paid for it, and then can republish the story later. All win-win-win… But so many writers take rejections from editors personally. I hear it all the time. And that is just flat wrong. No editor I know rejects a story and remembers the writer and puts some sort of blame on the writer. We can barely remember the writers we buy. Stories we reject we don’t care about in the slightest. Let me give you some help hints…
-
Editing and Reading Observations… Part 11…
What Do You Do With All These Suggestions? To answer the question bluntly… You write the next story. None of these 20 or so observations are meant in the slightest to get you to take a story and rewrite it. Wow! What a horrid waste of time. These observations are for your creative voice, so that on your next story and the one after that you might not make the same mistake, or at least not make it in the same way. Also, these observations are to maybe help you spot where you need more craft learning and practice. (Practice is called writing the next story.) And thirdly, to help…
-
Editing and Reading Observations… Part 10…
Character Issues… I am reading slowly through all the Pulphouse submissions. So if you haven’t gotten anything from me yet, don’t worry. Got two things about characters I have observed in stories lately that just drive me nuts. Again, most of my story returns are for reasons I have talked about in the first nine parts of this series. But these two character problems tend to crop up about one out of every twenty or so stories. Born on Page One… To be honest, I had this writing problem in my first years. The character has no past and shows no opinions that would have been formed in the past.…
-
Editing and Reading Observations… Part 9…
Bad Choices by the Writer… In previous parts of this series, I have been talking about why I will stop reading a story. I have mostly focused on craft issues in the telling of the story. Craft issues can be solved with learning and study and putting a lot of words through your fingers (combined at the same time with the learning and study). But for this part, I want to talk about the lack of understanding by the reader of two major elements of commercial fiction… 1…THERE ARE READERS ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORDS… In the early stages of writing, writers only focus on the words and…
-
Editing and Reading Observations… Part 8…
The Problems I Talked About in the First Parts… Are still the majority of why I pass on a story, or why a story does not hold me as a reader. No depth, information flow, wrong character and so on. But the last couple of days I found and remembered a couple of other things. Now, understand, there are no real rules in writing. If you are a skilled enough storyteller, you can make just about anything work for readers. But the key part of that is “skilled storyteller.” So really skilled writers can make these two problems work. Writing in Second Person… You know, the writer got so arty,…
-
Editing and Reading Observations… Part 7…
Buying Stories Can Really Slow An Editor Down… Here is what happens when I find a story I want to buy. First off, the writer makes me read all the way to the end and I like the story and it fits Pulphouse. Great! Always fun and exciting for me. But then I can’t just go back to reading. Why? Because I would be comparing the new story to the great last one I just read, and that would not be fair to the next writer in line. I really, really work to give every writer who sends in a story the exact same chance. Just the same as I…
-
Editing and Reading Observations… Part 6…
Kris and I Have Fun Brainstorming… These days it is usually over lunch, working out stuff we need to talk about in a workshop. (We never talk about our own writing… just never… she has no idea what I am working on and I have no idea what she is working on… You all should protect your own writing in the same way.) But we do talk a lot about publishing and teaching, all the time actually. Tonight I was sitting here at my business computer, getting ready to work on a publishing product when Kris walked by and mentioned the series of Editing and Observations I have been doing.…
-
Editing and Reading Observations… Part 5…
Kris Gave Me This One… And I noticed it right off the last few nights of reading after she mentioned it. This one is a little more advanced than just needing to add depth or pacing or information flow. This one is “Why should the reader care?” Be honest with yourself. You have read or started to read a book or story and just shrugged. and put the book down. And the best sign of this problem is that the reader can’t remember anything that happened in the story just shortly before. The reader just doesn’t care. The writing might be fine, good depth fine pacing and so on. But…
-
Introduction to A Class About Learning…
A FIFTY YEAR PERSPECTIVE OF LEARNING… As I said last night, this year marks 50 years since I sold my first two short stories (and started selling a lot of poetry as well.) Over those 50 years, I was stunningly lucky to have some amazing mentors (who also became friends.) Jack Williamson, Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm, Algis Budrys, Harlan Ellison, Frederick Pohl, Julius Schwartz, and others. As I said, stunningly lucky. So I figured that since I am still around after 50 years of selling fiction and they all told me a lot of great stuff, I am going to do a nine-week class talking about and telling stories about…