Kevin J. Anderson just did a good blog on the topic of taking a chance with your work, about “Daring to be Bad” on a first draft and getting it down. Read his blog here, it’s short.
Kevin credits me with coming up with the phrase, but it was a catch phrase that Nina Kiriki Hoffman and I used in our early years of our short-story-per-week challenge. I think Nina might have said it first, but it was our chant. And I have repeated it over and over during the last few decades. Both to myself and to other writers.
Now in this new world of publishing, it still applies, maybe even more.
Kevin takes the phrase “Dare to Be Bad” and applies it to first drafts, using it as permission to write hard and fast on the first draft and then fix it on the next draft if it needs fixing. That works and works well, especially if you are a rewriter. And Kevin uses external deadlines a great deal to stop the rewriting and release the product, which is also great.
Nina and I were using the phrase in a slightly different way. Not 100% sure how it helped Nina, she would have to talk about that, but for me it got me out of the rewriting mode. And it helped me get the courage to send my stories out for editors and readers to read.
The base of the phrase for me is this: It takes a lot more courage to write and mail something than it does to not write, or write and not mail. And by putting out your work to editors, and/or readers, you are risking the chance that readers and editors might not like it, that it might be bad. So you are daring to be bad.
Where I have used this phrase over the years is to try to help writers who are stuck in rewriting whirlpools, never thinking anything was good enough to mail, so thus never making any real progress toward selling their work. At some point, if you write first draft or ten drafts, you have to take a chance and mail your work if you want readers to read it. At that point you must “Dare to be Bad.”
Of course, there are no real repercussions of mailing a story that fails. No editor reads anything that doesn’t work and no editor will remember your name if your story doesn’t work. Most of us (editors) have trouble remembering the names of the authors and the stories we have bought over the years, let alone the stories we glanced at and form rejected.
And there are no real risks in putting a story up on Amazon and Pubit and Smashwords yourself. If the story sucks, if your sample is bad, or your cover sucks, or your blurb wouldn’t draw flys, no one will read it or buy it or remember you. No real risk to you. Sure, no sales, but no real risk either.
But alas, new writers (and I was no exception) are all afraid of mailing our work to editors or putting it out for readers to read. New writers think that some editor with an empty desk like we see in the movies will pull up the manuscript, read every word, realize it sucks, and then put the new writer’s name on a blacklist and send thugs with guns to the new writer’s house to kill their cats. Or worse.
The reality is that no one notices, which I suppose for some people is worse. But there are no real risks.
So I used the “Dare to be Bad” saying as a way to jump my brain over the made-up fear that kept me from mailing and kept me rewriting things to death. I wrote one draft and then instead of tinkering with it, I had a first reader find the typos and the mistakes, fixed those, took a deep breath, and mailed the story while repeating over and over, “Dare to be Bad.” I was convinced that every one of those stories I mailed sucked beyond words, that they all needed to be rewritten just as I had been doing without any success for seven years.
But I still mailed them.
I would also turn every story into a workshop after I had mailed it to an editor. The workshop, of course, would back up my fear that the story sucked beyond words and I needed to fix a hundred different things about it. Then I would sell the story and be very, very glad I didn’t listen to the workshop or my own fear.
In those early years, with “Dare to be Bad” I never fixed a one of the stories I wrote unless an editor asked me to. And I still need that saying at times now to mail something. I just keep writing new stories and mailing them. And in hindsight, when the stories started selling, somehow I managed to hold the fear under control and not go back and touch any story. In fact, in those early years, I became so militant about not touching a story (because I had to in order to climb over the fear) that I got angry when some editor wanted me to rewrite or touch-up a story. I always did it, but because I was so intense about the “Dare to be Bad” I got angry every time in those early sales. (I never let the editor know I was upset, but my poor friends around me sure knew. (grin))
When I look back at it, I can’t believe I actually managed to swim so hard upstream against so many myths. Knowing that Heinlein and Ellison and Bradbury and others did it the same way helped me, but mostly it was the “Dare to be Bad” chant that pushed me week after week after week.
The New World of Publishing
It takes a huge amount of courage for a new writer to put their work out into the real world. It takes one hundred times more courage to put out first drafts that you are convinced can be “fixed” and “polished.” But for seven years my fixing and polishing had gotten few stories written and finished and no sales. Mailing first drafts got me a career. “Daring to be Bad” got me a career, such as it is. “Daring to be Bad” has paid the bills for over two decades.
And now we move into a new world where sometimes writers can take a chance and put up stories on sale directly to readers. Writers can become publishers. The bad stories will sink without a trace, the good stuff will find readers and get some word-of-mouth and good reviews and sales.
So many writers I hear these days talk about the “noise” of the internet, the fact that so many writers are putting up their own work that their little story won’t be able to find an audience. Of course, I want to tell them (but seldom do) that all New York publishers are also putting up the writers they buy, so the quality of fiction for sale on the internet is very high, as high as it is in any bookstore in the land. So it is much,much worse than even the noise they can imagine.
But all that “noise” again means there is nothing really to lose. And nothing really to fear. No one will notice if a story sucks.
So back to “Dare to be Bad.”
There are always fears of one sort of another, fears that turn into excuses, to not put your work in front of editors or readers. So let me list a few “excuses” here just for fun that “Dare to be Bad” chant might help you with in getting your stories either on editor’s desks or for sale electronically.
And note: Let me just take these excuses right down Heinlein’s Rules.
1… I don’t have anything to write about, and I have trouble thinking of any idea. Maybe the fear of writing is stopping you and you just need to sit down at the computer and dare to be bad. Writing something is better than not writing. (Heinlein Rule 1: You must write.)
2… I can’t seem to find the time to write. Yup, we all had that problem starting out with day jobs and family. But if there are no major emergencies going on in your life, maybe you really don’t want to be a writer if you can’t find the time to write, or maybe you are just afraid of what you might write. Bluntly put, you need to just sit down and dare to be bad. (Heinlein Rule 1: You must write.)
3… I write, but I can never finish anything. Yup, I know all about these excuses. You can’t figure out the ending, or you get bored and jump to another project, or the project just feels awful about halfway through. If this is happening to you (happens to me all the time), you really need to dare to be bad. It takes courage to finish a project even when you think it sucks. Far more courage than it does walking away from it and quitting. (Heinlein Rule 2: You must finish what you write.)
4… Story isn’t good enough, it needs another polish. Sure, some writers need to do more than one draft, but if doing another draft is an excuse to not mail it for fear of the story being rejected or not read by readers, and this fear has a bunch of your stories sitting in files not mailed, maybe you might want to think of not doing that final polish and daring to be bad and mailing the thing. (Heinlein Rule 3: You must not rewrite unless to editorial demand.)
5… I write and finish stories, but I can’t seem to get them to editors or find the time to learn how to put them up electronically myself. Here is where the real rubber hits the road, the real fears I talked about above hit each of us. Dare to be bad. It takes a vast amount of courage to get your stuff to editors or readers, even though there are no real threats coming back at you. No one notices if something is honestly bad. And maybe that’s the biggest worry of all, that no one will notice. And if that’s the case, run from this business now. Your ego is way, way too big to survive as a writer, either through traditional publishing or publishing your own stuff. (Heinlein Rule 4: You must mail your work to someone who will buy it. (Modern addition, put it up so readers can buy it.))
6… I mailed the story, got five or so rejections on it, so it must stink. Wow, again, if you give up after only a few rejections, you might again think about another career. But now, even if you do give up after a few rejections from editors, your story can still find readers. All you have to do is learn to do a cover and format your manuscript correctly and get it up on Amazon and other places. There is no reason to ever retire a story these days. Again, no one will notice if it sucks and if it doesn’t suck, it will find readers. But to get to those readers, you must dare to be bad. (Heinlein’s Rule #5: You must keep your story in the mail until someone buys it. (Modern addition, get your story for sale directly to readers and give them a chance to buy it.))
Courage
The phrase “Dare to be Bad” is a phrase that allows you to gain courage. Sometimes you just have to let go and dare to suck.
Someone pointed out to me once that Babe Ruth not only held the home run title for decades, but also the most strike-out title. Luckily for him he had no fear of being bad. He just stood up there and swung at the ball. That’s what I did every time I mailed a new story. I just stood up there, swallowed the fear, and took a swing.
Every writer, without exception, has mental issues with courage. Long term professional writers have figured out ways over and around or through the fears. For me, putting my work out there is always a challenge because so many of my stories have personal themes, personal fears. I still use “Dare to be Bad” as a chant to get me to mail things, to put up stories electronically, to even write the new novel or the next short story.
It takes a lot more courage to try and fail than it does to not try at all.
Go ahead, dare to be bad and see what happens. Mail a story to an editor without rewriting it to death. Put a story up on Amazon on your own. Try new things, experiment, take chances. You really have nothing to lose.
Step up to the plate, take a deep breath, and swing.
And who knows, just as I was, you might be very surprised at the positive results.
I agree. I write for me, so if I can read it twice and still enjoy it, the story is good enough. Imagine my surprise, when I followed your advice and put it on smashwords and it started selling.
Thank you so much for your good advice. Hopefully, the more I write the better I will get. Well, that is the plan.
I’ve been waiting for this post.
I’d like to add one other thing that has helped me–keeping clear the difference between “I wrote a bad story” and “I’m a bad writer” and “I’m a failure as a writer.”
All too often our minds make the logical connection that: “I wrote a bad story therefore I’m a bad writer therefore I’m a failure.” However, that’s a logical fallacy. The three things have little to do with each other. There are plenty of examples of bad stories written by good writers and good stories miraculously produced by bad writers. Furthermore, while it’s very hard to fix a bad story, there are proven ways to stop being a bad writer. So the fact that I wrote a bad story today says nothing about whether I’ll write a bad story down the road.
As for “failure”–heh. When I’m dead they can declare me a “failure” as a writer. Before then would be premature and after then, I doubt I’ll care. The only one who can declare me a failure before I die is me. So my choice is whether to make that declaration (consciously or unconsciously) or say ‘screw it’ and write the next story anyway.
Big Ed, what keeps hitting me when someone says they wrote a bad story is “Who says it’s bad?” And even more “Who makes anyone the judge of a story being good or not being good?”
There is no universal line that a story has to cross to become “good.” And no universal thing that makes a story good or bad. That is all left-over from the idiocy that started in 1890s and continued on through the class wars where only the “good people” could read and if you read those “pulps” you were lower class. And also only books in hardback, given the stamp of approval by some critic or university program was “good” and anything written by storytellers in pulps or lower level magazines was bad automatically.
So I hate that writing a bad story idea as you stated it. A writer is the worst judge of their own work. Even if you believe every story you wrote sucks and is bad (like I did at first and sometimes still do), you still mail it like it is the best thing you have ever written. There is no proven way to stop being a “bad writer” as you said. And what your friends and first readers think is bad might be what makes you famous if you have the guts to mail it, the ability to dare to be bad.
Big Ed, you said, “There are plenty of examples of bad stories written by good writers and good stories miraculously produced by bad writers.”
Just to be clear, that was the part I was objecting to. Under whose authority was a story deemed bad or good???? All of us have tastes, sure. And beginning writers think that quality is a set thing, so they are stunned when they read someone like Clive Cussler. Cussler novels sell millions, yet 90% of all new writers I have met don’t think he can write. As I said, luckily there are no universal good stories or bad stories.
However, your personal taste can make you not care for a story and call it bad, or really love a story and call it good. That’s just personal taste and nothing more. For example, I have yet to be able to make it through the first book of Harry Potter. Clearly that’s my personal taste that has nothing to do with good or bad in any frame of reference beyond my own tastes. Luckily for all of us, JK didn’t have readers like me around her that she listened to.
That’s why it is critical to mail everything, to dare to be bad, dare to ignore even your friends and family and first readers and workshops. Ignore them all and mail or publish everything, because you may write the next Harry Potter. And if JK would have listened to a friend like me or her agent at the time, we would as a culture be far poorer.
Good post. One I need to hear. I can write a novel in a month (just finished my fifth NaNoWriMo) but it seems to take me months to edit it. Guess I need my own personal editing month, where I fix the typos, obvious plot holes, one chapter a night until its done. Have a beta reader read it, tweak, then get ‘er out there.
My current process just takes too long, even to fix the typos and grammar issues.
But I guess even that too is part of the “dare to be bad.” I’ll have to remember that. Thanks.
Glad it could help a little, R.L.. There are no correct timing or way to fix a first draft. Kevin in his post defines how he does it, Laura had defined how she does it. And everyone here knows how I do it. (Besides fixing typos, I don’t look at it (grin)) The key is that at some point we all say “Enough.” And we release. And that’s where, at least for me, Dare to be Bad comes into play more than in other areas. But that’s just me.
I remember back in 1980 or so the Twilight Zone magazine did a new writer contest. I was convinced I was going to win that contest. I wrote two stories for it over six-eight months, both about 3,000 words, both rewritten and polished at least ten times until I was convinced they were perfect. The only two stories I did in those six plus months. (Luckily, they are long lost to the house fire.) Of course I got a form rejection on both. And of course, I never mailed them again. (I had every myth and cliche down to a science during those years.)
A couple years later, after I had stopped rewriting and polishing every story, I ended up selling a number of stories to the Twilight Zone Magazine and it’s sister magazine. But by that time I was no longer eligible for any new writer contest because I was selling too much, all stories that had never been rewritten. Go figure.
I just dared to be bad. But that takes more courage than I even want to think about. It was far, far safer to just polish and rewrite because then when I mailed the stories I knew they were perfect. I didn’t have to take a risk of a story being bad because I had polished it to perfection and if an editor didn’t buy the story it was the editor’s mistake for not seeing the wonderfulness of my perfect story. Yeah. I believed that. Honest, I did.
Now I just never worry about a story I just finished. I just put it out there and write the next one. And repeat. And I ignore anyone who says a story is not perfect because I just don’t care. I did the best I could when I was writing it. That’s all I can do. If I rewrote it I would make it worse and that wouldn’t help me or get the next story written. Besides, another person’s tastes don’t much matter to me these days. And that is wonderfully freeing, to be honest.
I gotta echo this. I’ve got a story I tried to sell a few years back, a recasting of a Talmudic story from the villain’s POV. It earned several very angry rejection notes–in one case, from an editor who was personally offended by the temerity of the piece. I got gun-shy and trunked it for a while.
Eventually, because I needed to fill a hole in my podcasting schedule, I produced an audio play version that got an excellent response from my audience, so I put it up on the reprints churn–same results: personalized angry rejection notes. Something about it made editors very squirrelly, though only one actually articulated her beef with it.
Putting it up in the e-markets this week, it’s sold 12 copies in 4 days, and someone has already emailed me informing me that they’ll be blogging about it soon. I’ve come to the conclusion that it is just a very peculiar niche story with a limited, but potentially quite enthusiastic audience. Without the determination to be bad in public, it probably would have sat in a drawer.
Now, to apply that to the other story that I’m slightly embarrassed about…
-Dan
Daniel, I had a number of stories like that. My favorite all-time rejection was from Asimov’s Magazine back after it first started. I sent them a short story called “Flawless Execution” and the rejection I got said simply, “We’re sorry. We do not wish to pioneer new roads into tastelessness.”
I loved that rejection. I sold the story the next time out to Damon Knight for the Clarion Awards anthology and it became my first professionally published short story, out just ahead of Writers of the Future.
I’m not satisfied unless I’ve clogged up every available market (as listed by Duotrope’s Digest) with works appropriate. It’s a glorious churn.
I have to admit, my feeling about people with issues 1-6 is, “Fine. Don’t write, don’t polish, don’t finish, don’t submit. What does it matter?”
I’ve a rough idea of HOW =MANY= people want to be writers (i.e. almost everyone I’ve ever met in my entire life), so I don’t think one person more or one person less matters. Ergo, I don’t care whether any given person writes. We’re always going to have a surfeit of aspiring writers and writers, and also a surfeit of new books, many of them good, whether or not this or that person writes.
Thus I’m not someone to ask for supportive or productive advice about problems 1-6 because if you can’t even do THAT much without being urged and prodded and morally supported–if you can’t do the absolute BASICS of this profession without being nudged or shoved, i.e. writing and submitting, writing and submitting, writing and submitting—then my own reaction is that you’re not cut out for this life and should do something else as a profession. (And not being cut out to be a writer is no worse than not being cut out for any other profession or lifestyle. I realized in my twenties that I was not cut out for the profession which had by then been my consuming passion for ten years–acting. And it didn’t kill me. I was fumbling and directionless for a couple of years… then I started writing, and realized now I had found the work I -was- cut out for. So I’m not sympathetic to people getting melodramatic or resentful about the notion that they might not be cut out for their dream of writing professionally. A LOT of people in all walks of life have dealt with such a dilemma, after all.)
Laura said, “I have to admit, my feeling about people with issues 1-6 is, “Fine. Don’t write, don’t polish, don’t finish, don’t submit. What does it matter?””
I’ve gone through that same attitude at times over the years. I think every long-term pro does because we just get tired of the “poor pity me” talk from new writers who don’t understand we all went through the same thing and remember it clearly. But then I remember I had help along the way getting past some of these roadblocks. And they are just roadblocks for some writers. For many, they are killers, but for some, like me, they were roadblocks until I found the right way for me. Every writer has to find the right way for them if they are going to continue. And I have to admit I had help in my early years. I had Algis Budrys and Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm pulling no punches at all. Being blunt, sometimes shaking their head because I was so stupid, but always telling me what they thought in no uncertain terms. (And I’m not talking about critiques of stories. In fact, that element was the least important in hindsight, but wow did I think it was important when I got one of them to read a story. No what was important was the life lessons and business lessons.)
And I have admit I sometimes learned from negative examples from them as well. Algis Budrys not writing anything new puzzled me for decades and I used that as an example of how I didn’t want to be. I learned from Jack Williamson and Fred Pohl that if you just kept writing and hung around and kept things published in whatever form or magazine was available at the moment, you would end up with a long career.
And I learned from all of them that there were no secrets. They were all just people doing their best. And that was the most eye-opening of all lessons they all gave me. I got lucky and got to know them and others and learning they were just people working hard at what they loved allowed me to step back and look at these roadblocks all writers face. So these days I believe that just because a writer at one point in their career can’t get past #1-6 doesn’t mean they won’t and become a long term writer with just a little help over the blocks. Maybe not so much help, maybe just directions on how to climb over. Each writer has to do the climbing himself.
But that said, if a writer won’t learn business, won’t understand that they are running a small business, then I give them no hope. None. The writers I turn away from are the writers who want someone to take care of them. Those writers I know are lost completely and even if they did sell a few books won’t be around in ten years. As AJ once said about a writer like that, “Why bother to learn their names?” Yup.
The sign a workshop made up for me because Kris and repeated it so often, that we put up in every workshop for five years, that now hangs over my office door is the key.
“You are responsible for your own career.”
I love this mantra. It is especially apt for the writer who takes his/her work seriously. The temptation is to obsess and take it too seriously.
Searching for perfection is just another way of not trying.
PV said, “Searching for perfection is just another way of not trying.”
Wow, do you have that right on the money with fiction writing. The best any of us can do is just our best at the moment of writing. Give the story everything we can when we are writing it. Past that, trying to make a story perfect is just an excuse to not move forward. Exactly. Thanks! Well said.
“No editor reads anything that doesn’t work and no editor will remember your name if your story doesn’t work. Most of us (editors) have trouble remembering the names of the authors and the stories we have bought over the years, let alone the stories we glanced at and form rejected.”
I’ve observed for over 20 years that a very common phenomenon among aspiring and new writers is that they DRASTICALLY underestimate how busy editors (and agents) are, how many people and projects and emails and submissions and phone calls and meetings they deal with daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly. How many people they nod and smile at, at conventions, and say, “Sure, send your submission to me.” How many days they decide it’s time to clear the desk before the weekend and wade through 50-100 submissions that day. How many dozens of messages are in their in-box when they get back to their desks from one of the many meetings they participate in in-house each week. How many hundreds of messages are in their in-box when they get back from a long weekend, a couple of sicks days, a blizzard, etc. How much of their personal time is spent working, in an attempt to keep up with their insane workloads.
And, yeah, Hollywood plays a big role, IMO, in people’s mistaken assumptions about editors and agents. (I wrote a NINK column about it a year or two ago–blame Hollywood, I said!) I believe that movies and TV shows are where most people’s vague notion of how publishing works come from… and film/TV depictions of this lifestyle and this industry are absurdly inaccurate. And one inaccuracy so common that it rarely even gets commented on, which exists as a perpetual underlying assumption about this profession, is that editors and agents are the writer’s close personal friends. The writer is always stopping by their offices or homes without warning (when, in fact, I’ve never had the faintest idea where any of my editors or agents lived; and -I- have always lived at least 800 miles from their offices) to drink their booze and talk about personal problems (my editors are not interested in my personal problems; all they want to know is “how is the book coming?”–my agents were not interested in my personal problems, either, and since I hardly knew them, I can’t imagine why I would have TOLD them about my personal problems!).
Editors and agents are business acquaintances of writers. Sometimes business friends. (That is, even if the relationship is very friendly, once you’re no longer doing business together, you usually only speak once in a great while after that.) These are also usually long-distance relationships between people who seldom see each other. I can’t introduce someone who asks to my agent (well, because I don’t HAVE one!) or editor because -I- very rarely see these people; and when I do, it’s at meetings arranged well in advance, either when I visit NYC or when we’re both at the same convention. And while, yes, we may chat in a friendly way by phone or email–we only START that discussion because we have to talk business, the discussion is always primarily focused on business, and the bout of communication ceases when the business is concluded or resolved.
Additionally, as Dean noted, the Hollywood portrayal of editors’ and agents’ professional lifestyles is completely misleading. Such as those big empty desks and in big luxurious offices. Editors’ offices are cubby holes that are piled to the rafters with work, MSs lining walls, production sheets and post-it notes pinned up, callback sheets, memos, schedules, calendars, correspondence, P&L calcuations, MSs, MSs, MSs, rolodex, books, spiral notebooks, reports, mail, etc. Their desks are archaeological sites of paperwork. They’re very busy people working in very ordinary offices (which, if they’re in Manhattan, means SMALL) which are claustrophobically overstuffed with their work. And if they had a writer who ACTUALLY kept dropping by their offices without warning to discuss personal problems, this would be a serious problem, because humoring such behavior would be no more realistic or appropriate for them than for anyone else trying to work while one person (of the dozens they work with) kept pulling such a stunt.
So, no, in the REAL world of editors and agents (as opposed to the Hollywood world), they don’t remember who sent them MSs they didn’t like or want to represent/acquire. A writer can only suppose they might because the writer has no IDEA how many MSs editors and agents reject in the course of a week or a month.
Laura, thanks a bunch for that great and clear description of how overworked editors are. Well said and clear.
Dean,
The wisdom in this post is amazing. Thank you. As someone who has been blessed enough to sell nine books so far, with another three book deal about to go into negotiation, I am often paralyzed by how terrible I think my writing is. And I only mention that to say that the fear doesn’t end once you sign your first deal. In fact, if anything it adds pressure because now money is involved (especially if you don’t have a day job as a fall back).
I appreciate an earlier post where you said that the writer isn’t in a good position to judge his/her own writing. I agree with that whole-heartedly and yet I still allow myself to be tormented by a voice in my head that tells me I’m no good . . . that I’ll never sell another book — and that if I do, the publisher will regret the decision sooner than later and the public will vomit a storm of criticism online to ensure my career will end.
It’s all nonsense. My hope is that like you, I’ll be able to look back and say that I’ve been a full-time writer for two decades. But even if I don’t, the sun will still rise tomorrow. Either way, I’ll be able to say I went for it . . . I put myself out there for the world to judge. It’s terrifying on one hand, but if we don’t risk failure, we’ll never succeed.
Thanks, Dean!
Jon S., I actually think that the fear is much, much worse after you sell some things. I was not immune to what you described. I remember thinking, “I have a career, I have a reputation, I make my living at writing, if I don’t write something as good as before I will lose all of that.” And of course that thought just froze me solid. I finally cleared it by realizing that not writing was the best way to kill a career, and my reputation was all in my own head, no one else cared in the slightest, and I could make a living from something else if I had to. I got back to just doing my best and daring to be bad in both content and mailing and things worked out fine. But wow, I have to admit that was the hardest point for me, after I sold a bunch of books. Weird, but true. It made me realize why so many writers sell one or two or ten novels and vanish. I almost did the same thing just from the fear factor of not being able to write up to some mythical and made-up standard in my own mind. Weird, but alas true for far too many professionals in the early years.
Dear wrote: “We’re sorry. We do not wish to pioneer new roads into tastelessness.””
LOL! Love it!
An editor who had commissioned a short story from me then refused to accept it, declaring it “a piece of shit.”
About a year later I placed it with a market that paid me almost double what I’d have earned for the story if that editor who had commissioned my “piece of shit” had accepted it.
Laura, yup we all do that. Kris just recently had an editor tell her a story sucked in no uncertain terms, so she got annoyed, sent the story out as the first chapters of a novel, and sold a three book deal right out the door from the story that sucked. I love it when I push an editor’s buttons with a story and get them upset over the story because that means another editor will love it and fight for it.
Dean,
We have different arguments to get us to the same place. If someone says, “I wrote a bad story,” you’re objecting to the characterization of it as bad. I’m saying, “So what?” “I wrote a bad story” is wrong or irrelevant or both when it comes to submitting stories and trying to build a writing career.
Big Ed
Yup. Since the master class I’ve had “Dare to be Bad” posted up on my wall along with “Your Are Responsible For Your Career” and “The quality of a book or story has nothing to do with the quality or the experience the writer had while writing it.”
And right next to that sheet of paper is the sheet with Heinlein’s rules.
Once you accept the dare it makes everything so much easier. No more hesitation or agonizing over a manuscript, just send it out (or post it) and then get back to the next story.
“It takes a vast amount of courage to get your stuff to editors or readers, ”
Actually, I have never had any trouble with this, I’ve never found it takes any courage at all to send out a submission. Here’s why: I started my adult life trying to be an actor, and that means AUDITIONING.
Having been through this myself, I am willing to GUARANTEE that if someone does some professional auditions for paid performance work…. then submitting your writing to professional markets will NEVER AGAIN seem scary.
I have always found submissions VERY easy because… I don’t have to SEE the editorss (or agents’) faces while they’re judging my work, I don’t have to SPEAK to them, I don’t have to see them conferring, and they’re not looking at ME while they evaluate my work. They’re always hundreds (or thousands) of mile away, they’re always looking at a MS rather than at -me-, and I don’t have to worry about screwing up due to nerves in the submission (whereas this is a constant fear in auditions, beacuse it’s all always in REAL TIME, rather than on a piece of paper you had every opportunity to polish and finish on your own clock in the privacy of your own home).
You also don’t get thrown real-time curve balls in submissions; even if an editor wants you to rewrite and resubmit, you find this out while sitting at home, and you have time to think it over and (if you choose) work on implementing it. Whereas in auditions, you’re often asked to do cold readings, in front of strangers judging you. Then you’ll be asked to make adjustments to your cold reading and/or to your prepared audition pieces, because they want to see how well you take direction–and you’ll making these on-the-spot, unplanned, real-time adjustments to your work in front of total strangers actively judging you. (And, in many cases, taking notes while you work and leaning over to whisper to each other while you’re there.)
Go through that for a year, with people who’ve already seen 30 or 70 or 400 people for the role before seeing you, and whose weary expressions reflect this… and submitting your prepared, polished, final work to distant, faceless editors who will communicate with you by mail or email… loses ALL possible fear factor.
Laura, I can only imagine doing auditions for acting because I could never actually do it. The fear would shove me down into a messy puddle in the middle of the stage. So yeah, after going through that, sending in a story is no issue at all I can imagine. (grin)
Last year, I realized I had less time to write my submission for a writer’s workshop than I realized. In fact I had a single day to write 14 pages. I was determined to participate and so I wrote quickly without looking back. I didn’t have time to do more than a quick check for typos before getting it out in the mail that evening.
At the workshop when I mentioned to M. J. Engh and Harry Turtledove how little time I had spent on the submission, it was funny to see the jaws drop of the other participants and M J and Harry smiled and said that they were even more impressed by what I had written.
I’d like to say that that was something new for me but it isn’t. I view rewriting like rebuilding a sever layer salad. If I messed up early on and I have to dig down to get to the problem, I’ve ruined everything that was built on top of it and I might as well start over.
Admittedly this has a little to do with basic laziness. I don’t want to do that work all over again and secondly, I’d rather write something brand new than rehash and second guess something already finished.
My problem has more to do with finishing what I start and the discipline to get my Butt In Chair and write. I’m working on it.
CL, you wrote, “My problem has more to do with finishing what I start and the discipline to get my Butt In Chair and write.”
Seems an external deadline helped with the problem with the workshop. (grin) I also had that problem and of course, no time since I was working three jobs. But one fine day about this time of the year I got tired of hearing my own excuses and set up the challenge with Nina Kiriki Hoffman to do a short story per week and mail it that week. Starting January 1st, 1982. An external deadline I couldn’t afford to miss.
I love external deadlines. I never miss them when given by editors.
So those of you with a problem like CL described, figure out ways to set up external deadlines with real consequences.
And speaking of deadlines, you folks do understand, I hope, that the WORST thing you can do after you sell a book is miss a deadline. The absolute worst. It doesn’t matter how perfect you want to make the book or how much you fear a flawed book getting into print, the damage you can do by missing a publisher’s deadline is far, far worse than any damage that could be done with a flawed book. Just saying.
This one really cuts to the heart of “speed writing,” (that’s the term my prof used in my college fiction classes), but you can extrapolate that even further into “speed business.” It’s not that you’re being careless with the quality and rushing to market; you’re being deliberate, disciplined, and ultimately respectful of your own time. I’ve forgotten to respect my own time so much over the past 20 years, it’s depressing to think about.
Dean, many thanks for putting these chapters together. I only just discovered them last week, purely by accident (someone pasted a link in a blog unrelated to fiction writing and I remembered your name from back in the day when I tried to crack Pulphouse — came close!). I started my career in fiction but veered almost exclusively into nonfiction in the past ten years — mainstream magazines, service journalism mostly, and a bunch of how-to nonfiction books. But I always pushed forward writing novels in dribs and drabs when I could no longer look at my nonfiction.
What makes your myth busting chaps so compelling is that even though I worked for three of the biggest book publishers for many years, and the biggest men’s magazine brand in the world for even more years, the myths remained for me. I didn’t know it until I read your stuff. Amazing. Revelatory.
My former agent (I did not fire him, we remain friends, he just decided to return to writing/editing during the downturn because he couldn’t sell a thing) sent out my most recent novel to 30+ places over the past year. Three editors loved it enough to fight for it. None of them won. The rejections came from their bosses and the sales force and all said the same thing: “Too male. Women won’t come to this book.”
Amazingly enough, one editor, after rejecting it, came back to us 6 months later asking if it was still available because he wanted to try again with the bosses. The result was the same, but now I’m thinking, “I’ve got something here.” I don’t know how big a something. But knowing what I know from working at publishers, editors simply don’t remember books like that unless they were somehow moved by them.
So now my agent search has stopped (many thanks again to you and Laura Resnick). I’m gearing up to do two things: A) try to establish a more legit writing platform via a blog on the mag’s website where I used to work and hopefully generate a readership that can be pointed to a story or ten they might like (big men’s magazine, novel’s “too male,” makes sense, right?), and B) figure out who might be left in NYC to send this book to, while also formulating how I might epub or POD.
It’s exciting again. Thanks for kicking open this door, brother. The funny thing is, I always thought the door was steel. Nothin’ but balsa wood painted gray.
Mike Zimmerman
Mike, more than welcome.
But interestingly enough, men’s books still sell and sell well in many aspects of publishing. More than likely the stories that got that kind of comment weren’t finding the right market. That kind of comment from an editor usually means “Wow, this was good, the writing was good, but the story doesn’t fit my line.” So they then just come up with a reason and clearly the too male aspect of your book is clear, so that’s their reason. So flip that on it’s head and market the book that way, market it as a man’s man book right from the start and see what kind of response you get from lines that are not afraid to publish for men.
A writer friend of mine wrote a book that every guy who read it loved it with a passion, but women didn’t. So the writer had a female agent who wasn’t excited about the book and sent it to all women editors who hated it. I kept saying to this friend “Get it to a male editor.” The writer never did and the book, a great book, sits in a drawer to this day. All the writer had to do was find a male editor or two. There are a few left in publishing somewhere, I’m sure.
Mike, weirdly enough, one more point. Two of my last books that I wrote that got published that I can talk about (meaning not under hidden pen names or ghosted) were both men’s books. The Hunted was a thriller of four men going on a raft trip and running into terrorists, published by Random House/Waterbrook. And right before that I did the book for the movie Rundown, a men’s thriller, for Pocket Books. I also did a couple of the men’s westerns under pen names and one of my thrillers under pen names is a men’s thriller series. Weird now that I think about it. And I did eight young adult books that never got published that were done for boys with boy characters. Until you said that I hadn’t really stopped and realized just how much men’s fiction I was writing over the last four or five years. Weird.
BTW, maybe there’s another publishing myth in my post: “Men Don’t Read.” Last I heard, the breakdown in readership was 48 percent male, 52 female. And that men are currently the bigger percentage of ebook buyers because guys are more willing to early-adopt cool new toys like Kindles (Wall St Journal had that nugget a while back). But I can speak from personal experience to this myth since most editors/publishers I’ve dealt with try to make every book as appealing to a female readership as possible, because that’s the bigger potential market. True? I can’t say for sure. But it feels true — try to sell a book that’s deemed “too male.”
Okay, Dean, that Asminov’s rejection has had me laughing for the last five minutes. I totally have to read that story now.
Damn, now I want harsh personalized rejections. I’ve only gotten the nice ones. (grin).
Well, I just finished a NANOWRIMO project myself. Most of it, admittedly, is world-building, so I’ve got a lot of story to write, but it will eventually go out the door next year.
I do have one minimum quality standard that I’d suggest: if something is so bad that *I* don’t particularly want to reread it, it gets canned. After all, I’m going to have to read the damn thing at least four or five times, checking for continuity, typos, idiot mistakes, and trying to remember what I said all those months ago.
If I’m not enjoying rereading it, why bother? After all, I’m the only guaranteed customer of my own work, and I’m going to pay more to read it than anyone else ever will (in sweat equity terms, at least).
The NANOWRIMO project is a good example. Along about September, I had a great setting but a crappy story. So I scrapped the story, kept the setting, and started asking “why would anyone be crazy enough to live there?” And therein lies a much better story, I think.
heteromeles said, “I do have one minimum quality standard that I’d suggest: if something is so bad that *I* don’t particularly want to reread it, it gets canned. After all, I’m going to have to read the damn thing at least four or five times, checking for continuity, typos, idiot mistakes, and trying to remember what I said all those months ago.”
Wow, if I did that I would toss away everything I wrote, so I just flat don’t agree. And if I had to reread what I wrote four or five times I would find a new job. Ughhh. Why would you think you had to look at your work four or five more times??? I don’t even reread it when I fix mistakes my first reader finds. I just flip to the page, fix it, then flip to the next mistake. I have done a “fix draft” of an entire novel in an hour. And I look at copyedits from publishers to make sure no one was rewriting me. I don’t reread the book at that point either. And in proofs I just make sure nothing was dropped or added or repeated, so I don’t reread it then either.
Dean, this is huge for me and a very timely post. I have no problem writing. I love to write. I’ve pushed myself to the point where I am downright cranky if I don’t get my writing done for the day. I can even finish a story. But I almost always stop right at the point where I have to mail it out. Oh, I’ve got a few out in the mail, but by no means do I have all my stories out and I stall in between rejections. I always tell myself it’s due to time, but I think you hit the nail on the head. That little voice in the back of my brain tells me it sucks and I’ll never sell it so why bother?
Why bother? I wanna make money off of one of my favorite past times. It’s embarassing to tell people I’m a writer but I don’t have anything published. Time to suck it up and dare to be bad.
Dean, this post is really important to me right now. It’s something I already know. I tell others this all the time, but I still need to hear it.
And “bad” isn’t just about rewriting and quality issues. I like to write “off-genre” stuff. And not cool cutting-edge stories. Frankly I like to jump the rails in very unsophisticated ways. I write a mystery that’s a western (and not a high-falutin’ serious historical western, but a light shoot ‘em up like on TV). I like to write non-fantasy stories in made up universes. I actually like old fashioned melodrama.
Daring to be bad includes daring to be unsophisticated too.
Camille
My minimum standard is if I HATE it when writing AND glancing over it for typos, stupid errors, I get rid of it. (and I usually only do that once unless I have a huge foundational premise error, in which case, I’ve got to do it twice to see if I can tweak that error out of existence)
This is primarily because I may be headed into business with writing, but I do it because I LOVE it. If I hate a story, I don’t want to put that out into the world as a matter of principle. And all the revision in the world ain’t going to fix that, only rewriting from scratch.
Fantastic post, Dean.
I need the “Dare to be Bad” boot in the rear to a) write, b) finish stories, c) send them out (and/or publish them), and d) KEEP them out. “Dare To Be Bad” and Heinlein’s rules combined kills several writing myths just ding-dong dead.
I *can* sometimes make a story better by rewriting, but that way lies madness. I tried that and woke up ten years later still tinkering on the (ever-freshly rewritten) first three chapters of the same novel. Better by far to apply what you learn as you write new stories and earn something from them while learning if you notice you fall into this type of writing.
I have gotten to the point that I can’t stand to reread my own work because I’m sick of looking at it and living in it while writing it. I want to go in there and fix it up, or trash it entirely, and I know that’s perfectionism crazy-talk. So after years of not selling, and not producing anything, I won’t reread my own stuff except to fix typos and make sure I have a good first and last line. Now, I know to move on and harness the drive to work on something new, and apply whatever I’ve learned to that new project.
I can’t say how much I appreciate you, Kris, and the other writers who reach out and back to help the clueless newbies to the field. You don’t have to, and yet you do, and eventually, some of us get the message and break the stranglehold of the myths. Thank you.
(After reading this post, I sat down and wrote two pages, chanting “Dare to Be Bad” to myself every time my fingers slowed down. Heh!)
As for the male/female readership, I actually thought male writers had the edge in writing male fiction–because women will usually cross gender lines to read books with male MC POVs, thus doubling a male hero title’s readership, whereas males tend to be reluctant to read about female MCs, or even female authors (eg The Harry Potter books, with the male lead and gender-neutral author name, and Lee Child’s huge female fanbase for his Jack Reacher series), but that may be anecdotal evidence rather than real fact.
And? I need to find a Nina Kikri Hoffman-like partner to get some real deadlines in, heh.
I’m always surprised by the number of people who hate their writing after they write it. I mean, intellectually I understand it, but I can’t actually bring myself to write things I hate in the first place.
If it was worth writing in the first place, it’s worth keeping. The key is to remember what it was that drove you to write it.
There’s the difference between idea and execution. And sometimes, we’re just now talented enough (yet) to get the execution right. And like the poor little new writers we are, we just keep hammering ahead anyway.
That’s because you usually don’t hate it WHILE you’re writing it (well, there are times…lol)–you hate it AFTER you’ve written it, at least I do, because it rarely matches up to what I had in my head, but I’m getting over that. Now I mostly hate having to work with it instead of just writing something new and trying to pull off whatever I wanted to pull off in the new work.
Thanks to Dean and Co, I now know that as long as a writer keeps sending stuff out for sale or publishing, it doesn’t matter how they feel about their work. It’s along the lines of “The quality of a book or story has nothing to do with the quality or the experience the writer had while writing it” and that the writer’s not the best judge of their own work’s appeal to readers. Let the readers decide, and get on with the next story, is the lesson I get from Dean on this.
Sam, here is how I have always handled the problem (and still do) of wanting to tell a certain story and not feeling like I got it right. I mail the story, then just write it again, using the same idea, sometimes even the same characters. For example, I did that with my jukebox stories, missing the first time, mailing it, missing the second time, mailing it, missing the third time, mailing it (sold that one to the Twilight Zone Magazine), missing again and again. I have now written a good dozen plus jukebox stories, all with the same basic idea of going back to a memory of a song and how we all sometimes wonder how life would change if we could change some decision in our past. Nine or ten of them have sold. I’ve put some up here for free. I still don’t have it right yet, so there will be more jukebox stories as I tackle the idea once again.
I did that with a vampire story with a lover who aged in a nursing home. The first try I missed but mailed and sold it. It’s called Tumbling Down the Nighttime. So I took another shot at the idea, wrote In the Shade of the Slowboat Man, got Nebula final ballot and have made upwards of $15,000 off that second try at the same idea.
Thank heavens I didn’t just rewrite the same story over and over and thank heavens I didn’t do what some of you suggest and tossed the stories away. I just mailed them and tried again with a new draft of the same idea.
Writers are the worst judges of their own work. If you think you missed on a story, more than likely it’s your subconscious trying to stop you from mailing it because you crossed a line, wrote something dangerous or something your mother wouldn’t approve of. Thinking your story fails after you finish it is an excuse to not mail more times than not, caused by the fear. If it failed for your personal goal for either missing the story or for not having craft skills enough to make it work, mail the story anyway and try the idea again later. It really does work and takes away the excuses.
I certainly dared to be bad yesterday. 23,000 words in less than 24 hours (I grabbed a few hours sleep in there somewhere). The last few hours I was pushing 1,500 an hour, about twice my usual rate.
First step was to ignore typos. I have a habit of fixing those on the fly, and I realize it really slows me down. Second step was to just stop caring whether what I was writing was on topic or not — brainstorming, stream of consciousness, autobiography — it goes a lot faster if I’m not trying to make it up as I go along.
That latter step isn’t going to work if I need a story that makes sense, (for NaNo, it doesn’t have to) but if I think about it ahead of sitting down at the keyboard, most of it’s there anyway. And out of the brainstorming etc, I got a few story ideas and scenes I can use later.
Mind, I don’t want to try that again for a while. Nice to know it’s there if I have to, and what kind of set up I need to have it more coherent. (With practice, I might not even need so much of that.)
Sam -
You’re welcome to join the Assmoving competition at anmapfoundation.org — me and 14 other writers are all engaging in a friendly year-long bet to see who can keep the most stuff in the churn. Everyone’s in for $10 on the honor system. I actually set up the bet based on Dean’s descriptions of his contest with Nina back in the 80s. So far, at least, I’ve found it a nice little extra spur.
-Dan
Hey, Daniel, give us that link again, would you. I can’t seem to find what you guys are at with the above information.
Hi Dean,
Call me a sloppy copy editor or whatever.
I will say one thing: I’m doing a test printing on Lulu, making Christmas presents for the family while I learn how to do POD (or whatever you want to call Lulu).
The two things I found:
1. A bunch of errors crept into the manuscript while formatting it for Lulu (good lesson for me as a self-publisher: Fiddling with the font screwed up the text.)
2. While I was proof-reading again, I spent a happy few hours revisiting a story that was far more engaging than I remembered. Not a bad way to spend an afternoon.
Now, I’m quite sure that this story won’t be to everyone’s taste, but I am pretty sure that a lot of readers will get pulled in, just like I was. I’ll be publishing it soon.
Dean,
Awesome post. Being relatively new to all this I find these posts incredibly valuable.
In going through the hurdles of writing, and submitting, and dealing with rejections, and publisher’s edits I have been rather surprised at how much of this is psychological. Like almost all of it.
That hard part is not the actual writing, or coming up with stories, or grammar, or getting things out to market; it’s getting over my own shit.
I have stopped myself from following creative passions so many times because I wasn’t willing “To Be Bad” at it.
“Dare to Be Bad” is daring to be human and imperfect in public.
And if I am taking myself and my work too seriously, how can I do that? How fragile is my ego?
OK, enough of this comment (time to finish it even if it is BAD), back to writing!
Dean –
Here you go: http://www.anmap-foundation.org/?q=forum/11
Contest rules and scoreboard are the top two sticky posts, everything else is entries.
-Dan
Dean–yep, after I first read what you did with those stories in the Sacred Cows series, I made up my mind to do that from now on and send the story out and try again with a new one instead of reworking it to death. I knew from experience that reworking it got *me* nowhere in terms of stories out and sold, heh.
Dan–did you mean
http://www.anmap-foundation.org/ ?
Sam–
Yup, that’s the one.
-Dan
Dan,
Wish I’d heard about it sooner. I’m halfway tempted to hop in anyway… This sort of thing would be great motivation for me, especially with you already so far out ahead. Nothing like coming from behind to make me push a little harder!
At this point, that seems almost like an easy way to make ten bucks from someone who joins.
About the original post…
Am I the only one here who is *excited* by the prospect of getting work in front of readers? I’m just getting back into writing, these past few months, after years off. But I remember the chain rejections, and the thrill of publication (and getting a check!). It just doesn’t feel scary to me.
“Dare to be bad” is still a good mantra, mind you – it’s a great reminder of a lot of things, like the need to keep writing, the need to not prejudge the work, the need to keep putting words on paper and trusting that you’re getting the story there.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to it. It’s time to push, time to make it happen. Time to do.
Thanks, Dean! I so needed to hear that reminder just now.
Not wanting to interfere with your writing schedule, but could you write more jukebox stories sooner rather than later? I love them, and it would be great to have a whole collection of them.
Thanks, Mary Jo, actually one of the five packs of stories from WMG in the next few weeks will be called Five From the Jukebox. And I actually hope to write a number of new jukebox stories right after the first of the year, as this deadline clears. Thanks for the kind words.
It’s an interesting point about sending stories out before you workshop them. I’ve been a member of a writer’s circle on and off for twenty years, but during all that time I’ve had certain caveats when it comes to how to deal with the advice you get that stem specifically from the fact I made my first ever short fiction professional sale a few months *before* I joined that writer’s group. I know for an absolute fact that if I’d joined that group and workshopped that story prior to sending it out, I never would have sent it out and would never, therefore, have sold it. Looking back it’s really not a very good story at all – the magazine that bought it sold on the High Street, but only lasted a dozen issues – but it was a sale nonetheless. In that much, I completely agree one should send their stories out even before workshopping them.
Mind you, even now, five books into a pro career, I still have issues with the fear of rejection. Looking back, I suspect one of the real psychological advantages of having an agent is that they have to deal with your first book coming back again and again from publishers who aren’t interested, and in that respect they make for a useful buffer between the author and the cruel, cruel world. If it had been up to me, I might have given up long before my agent did, so it’s a rule that doesn’t just apply to short fiction.
I’m going to keep your points in mind since I’m one of those writers who hardly ever writes short fiction, but on those rare occasions that he does, doesn’t send it out to very many places at all before giving up. I recognised a lot of myself in there, so thanks for writing this.
Gary, I know of many pro writers who still never got past the fear of rejection. All know the fear has no basis in anything, but that doesn’t make it very real. I also hated rejection and feared it early on as well. It was only when I pushed forward and overwhelmed the system with sheer numbers that it finally sunk in deep for me that rejection meant nothing of importance, besides the line or magazine not having a spot for the story. It is very, very difficult to care about rejections when you have seventy short stories in the mail and your entire focus is to get the next story done and out under deadline. At that point the rejections become more annoying because now you have to mail the stupid thing again.
Further to working as a writer and (another oft-discussed subject here) working WITHOUt a literary agent:
A friend of mine has made a first sale this week, without a literary agent (and has no plans to hire an agent), to a respected publishing house that discarded its “no unagented submissions policy” in the past year.
Laura said, “A friend of mine has made a first sale this week, without a literary agent (and has no plans to hire an agent), to a respected publishing house that discarded its “no unagented submissions policy” in the past year.”
Yup, two in the group who have attended workshops here just made first novel sales in the last month or so, both are using lawyers to do the contracts, both sold without agents. Yeah, we have beaten on this topic a great deal over the last year, but stunning how many writers still think you must have an agent to sell a novel these days. Nope. You can sell a novel with an agent, you can sell one without an agent. No set rules, every writer is different.
“Laura, yup we all do that. Kris just recently had an editor tell her a story sucked in no uncertain terms, so she got annoyed, sent the story out as the first chapters of a novel, and sold a three book deal right out the door from the story that sucked.”
In a similar and enjoyable twist:
I was recently on a discussion panel about the popularity of humorous fantasy series, talking about my Esther Diamond series (which is being well-published and supported by DAW Books and is so far very well-received).
Also on the panel was a literary agent who had declined to represent me when I was briefly, abortively seeking a fifth agent, and who, in particular, predicted this series would be unsaleable.
Living well really IS the best revenge!
Nope, Sam.
“My minimum standard is if I HATE it when writing AND glancing over it for typos, stupid errors, I get rid of it.” — what I said earlier.
I notice WHILE I’m writing it that I hate how it’s turning out, just sometimes I get it finished anyway. And still hate it.
At that point it’s trash or rewrite from scratch for me.
Megs said, “I notice WHILE I’m writing it that I hate how it’s turning out, just sometimes I get it finished anyway. And still hate it. At that point it’s trash or rewrite from scratch for me.”
Ahhh, makes me sad at the possible classic stories we might be missing, Megs, all because you let some feeling about a story make you toss it away. That’s sad.
I pretty much hate vampire stories, but said yes to being in a vampire anthology. I warned the editor I would more than likely be near the edge of what was acceptable and he said no issue, if it didn’t fit he would be honest. So at a retreat in three hours I tackled a story I had done before and didn’t think I had hit. The first was “Tumbling Down the Nighttime” and it was in an anthology somewhere. The story I pounded out in three hours while sitting in a living room with seven other writers was called “In the Shade of the Slowboat Man.” I hated it, thought it was stupid, and if I was like Megs I would have tossed it away. Or if I was like some of you rewriters, I would have rewritten it to death. But alas I had a deadline to hit, so sent it to the editor, who also hated it and bounced it. I tossed it in a drawer, but Kris had read the story and loved it and she forced me to send it to Ed Ferman at F&SF who bought it and it made the final Nebula Awards ballot and has been made into an audio play and reprinted a half-dozen times and made me almost $15,000 in total income.
From that moment on I never let my personal feelings about a book or story have anything to do with mailing it and keeping it in the mail.
And by the way, taking a small subset of my work, the Trek novels, the novel I loved the most and thought was the best, a book called “A Hard Rain” got trashed by the Trek fans and is pretty much my worst selling Trek novel. The novel I hated, and I do mean hated the most, and thought was the worst, is my bestselling Trek novel with just under one million copies in print. That book is called Soldiers of Fear in the Invasion series of Trek. So again, even as a professional editor, I am not a judge of my own work, and if I hate the work means nothing. Nothing. Hard for my ego to swallow, sure, but true.
Kevin,
You’re not the only one who gets excited about the prospect of getting work in front of readers. I know several writers who keep going solely for fan mail. Alas, it’s easier to get fan mail by releasing the story for free on the web than to go through all the publication steps and delays. Why deal with chain rejections from editors if that’s the motivation?
I think it’s a step up to try to make a career out of writing instead of it just being a hobby on the side. That step can be scary.
Big Ed
I really, really dislike doing pitches, because I don’t feel I’m any good at them and as a consequence, I tend to procrastinate with them.
Recently, I sat on a project for two months while I screwed around and generally avoided doing anything productive with it. I finally forced myself to hammer out the pitch, and I sent it the same day I wrote.
It also got greenlit that same day. Two months of screwing around, two hours working on the pitch, and then two hours to acceptance.
So yeah.
The funny thing (or sad, depending on how you look at it) is that this is something I know. I make my living doing freelance writing and I know for a fact that writing I don’t consider especially good* is still writing that my clients love.
Knowing is half the battle, at least according to GI Joe. The other half is knowing that you know.
*One area where I disagree is that I’m pretty sure that I’m decent at judging the relative merits of my own writing. But then, most writers probably think that, so who knows?
Dadgum it, Dean, when are going to quit encouraging writers? They need to learn this is IMPOSSIBLE. No one gets out alive. Turn back!!!!!!
Scott Nicholson
Scott, LOL. I’m not sure what I do here encourages that many writers. I tell them it’s hard, that you have to learn business, that you have to take responsibility for your own career, that your own judgement of your own work means nothing, that agents aren’t the be-all-and-end-all of a career, that you shouldn’t just hand a stranger all your money, that there is a learning curve to publishing your own work, that there are a ton of bumps and roadblocks to making a living, that you can get really rich. (Okay, maybe that part is encouraging.) From some of the hate mail I get privately, I’d say that sometimes I am far, far from encouraging. I keep pointing out to writers they have been following myths. And myths are treasured things. Luckily for writing, there aren’t more writers like me or no one would be writing. (grin)
I like the mantra, too. As I’m preparing to put a book up on POD/ebook this winter, I’m having to squash my worries on a regular basis. I’ll chant “Dare to be bad” when I hit the upload button.
As for the “hate my writing” crowd: I wrote a story last February that I absolutely hated when I finished. I was trying new things and I just didn’t feel like I pulled it off. But following Heinlein’s rules (and Dean’s about writers not knowing their own work), I sent it out anyway.
The story just got a silver HM at the WOTF contest. Not a win, but it’s in the top 1% of the contest. Proof enough for me to never even consider self-censoring again.
Tom
Yeah, tom! Congrats. Now the hard part is to remember that when you finish other stories you hate. (grin)
Thanks again for the great advice, Dean. I haven’t commented much recently, because I don’t feel I have anything to add, but a huge Thank You for the great topics and advice as well as the conversations to learn even more in the comments section.
On a related topic that we’ve beaten to death–yet I still have something new to add!–handling subrights without an agent.
We talked about one of the possibilities being to sign over subrights (for a limited period) to the US publisher. Experimenting with different ways of managing my subrights as an agentless writer, this is one of the things I’m trying.
We also talked about one of the disadvantages of marketing subrights via your US publisher is that the money collected from foreign sales is credited to your US royalties (under “subsidiary rights”) rather than flowing through directly to you.
Well, it turns out… that premise is not necessarily so. It depends on the deal. In my current situation, the money flows through directly to me, rather than via royalties. IOW, when the US publisher gets a check from the foreign publisher for my subrights sales, they cut me my share of the deal and mail a check to me, rather than crediting the income to my royalty statement. So I get the cash in hand.
So this is another way in which I’m discovering that a -perceived- disadvantage of not having an agent is NOT a disadvantage at ALL.
Laura, thanks. Great point and good for people to know. I’ve had a few contracts where that was the case, but lately that has tended to be the case more in short fiction than novels. Thanks!
On the foreign sales thing…
Mike Resnick had some really great points about foreign sales (and how to make them yourself) in the “Foreign Sales” essay of “The Business of Science Fiction”. I was wondering if any of the more experienced folks here have read that book, and know whether that essay is too dated to still be valid, or whether the methods he outlined there are still solid?
(And while I’m plugging Resnick books, I read “Rejections, Romance, and Royalties” last week and really enjoyed it – nice work!)
Just as an aside on the “I-hate-my-writing-crowd” comment: I don’t hate the great, grand majority of my writing, whether or not I eye it askance with dubious uncertainty. I LOVE writing and I love my stories, which is why usually when I hate them I start over. If I was just testing things out and thus don’t have any attachment to the idea either, that’s when it hits the square file.
So it wasn’t a blanket statement I was making so much as a clarification on my comment after someone clarified it the opposite way.
And I will have to consider if there are any potential markets for some of my other stuff. I’ve got to be honest: I’ve grown a lot as a writer and this is the first time I’m really heading cautiously toward career in this. First, I’m reading everything I can get my hands on from you, Dean, and your lovely wife, ’cause I don’t want to head in blind and naive like I did last time.
Most of my old inventory is from when I was LITERALLY a kid. The book I’m editing now (due to one of those foundational errors in the entire premise– what was I thinking?) was first written when I was 17 years old. Thankfully, it’s also juvenile fiction or the 22,000 word count would still have me flipped out. (I really write SHORT, but not short stories. Those still have me mostly stumped, but I’m working on it and have finished one this year.)
The reason I am editing it is because I love it and it’s worth putting out there. Most of the stuff written when we’re kids… isn’t. Though I don’t write it off because I was also 17 when I wrote an article about sign language that got published this year in Skipping Stones magazine. (That’s a story in and of itself.)
So I don’t hate my writing. I just won’t send out stuff that has no value to me. I’m not an artiste, so to speak. I don’t care about the “literary” value. I DO care about principles and I do care about doing justice to a world I intend to add continuity to—especially as I can screw up later stories if I mess it up in something else. And I also care about coherency. I’ve been known to throw together some less than coherent pieces and I’ve always erred on the side of subtlety rather than clarity (a weakness I keep an eye out for), so that matters to me. I wouldn’t want someone to call it a classic and have my name on it even if they DID like it.
I want to do this as a job but with a certain quality standard. It doesn’t have to be GOOD. It doesn’t have to have MERIT. It just has to be tolerable. It can’t violate anything I believe in and it has to make sense and it can’t set in continuity something that’ll destroy a later story that IS working out fine in draft.
Basic standards and not about hate or even strong self-censorship. I learned earlier this year that half of my writer’s block is I was trying to write for a “purpose” and I couldn’t do it. I have to write solely because I’m fascinated with an idea or I’ll never finish it. Good thing I’m fascinated by so many things.
And thanks for the long response, Dean. I like to hear all sides of an issue so I can actually FIND a balance. It’s a lot of work learning how to loosen up after I had a huge (much-loved) writing project end in disaster when I was still young enough to be traumatized. I used to just write. That book I’m editing was written in a couple weeks. I wrote a nonfiction book in one week (short, yes, but complete). I regularly wrote and finished projects in short periods of time. I’m still trying to get that carefree approach back. And these posts are helping. A lot.
Another great post and discussion. Every time I read the phrase “Dare to be Bad,” I get Weird Al singing “Dare to Be Stupid” stuck in my head. I think I’ll start playing it whenever I get cold feet about submitting a story so I can remember what Dean and everyone said here.
If anyone wants to hear Weird Al’s song, here’s a link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMhwddNQSWQ
Heaven help me, I’ve gone and taken up Dan’s gauntlet. Nothing like starting a writing submission competition halfway through.
Should be fun!
Anyone else crazy enough to join me in trying to unseat the gentleman?