Writing Gooder

We’ve all been through it: you come up with an idea that you’re really excited about and it’s subsequently all you can think about.  At first, you have a ton of energy and you may spend ample time per day on your idea.  But, the creative excitement wanes as you begin to encounter the drudgery of executing your idea.  If it’s a novel, that could mean taking hours to put down on paper what you already know in your head.  Or it could mean editing and revising your novel.  If it’s a project, then it could mean having to sticking to deadlines and filling in mundane details.  Either way, you’re filling in odds and ends for which the creativity aspect is either nil or non-existent.  Eventually, you abandon the idea and move on to something else that you’re really excited about.

This stage in the idea development process is known as the creativity plateau.  It starts off with generating an idea, being really excited about the idea, then having to do the mundane stuff.  Once we enter that later plateau for which creativity isn’t always necessary, we get bored and move on to our next great idea.  As a result, you may have scores of unfinished ideas. (more…)

After taking a month-long hiatus from YWS, I headed for the literature forums to find something to review to make my return seem official to myself. Of the topics I opened up, I was more or less discouraged from reviewing some, mostly because the topics didn’t interest me enough to keep me reading or I had a difficult time comprehending what the writer meant.

I felt I was being too critical, so I ended up not reviewing anything. But it got me thinking: what are some of the things in posts that YWS members feel deter them from reviewing? I posed this question to chat and got some interesting answers in response:

Silented1:  Long stories, lots of words, and a “Please Review”.

Most members here can tell you that if you keep your average post length at 1000 words (or less!) you’re likely to get more reviews. That’s because people generally tend to skim over a story at first glance and take it in as a whole. A large amount of words or a long page seems like a chore to read through, unless you’ve got an attention-grabbing first line that holds us hostage until the end.  If not, do us a favor and keep it short by posting your stories in parts.

People will review what they want.  Attaching a “Please Review” to the title, or prefacing it with such phrase will only make people not review. It’s the reverse psychology ordeal going there.

Rosey Unicorn: “Ignore all spelling and grammar mistakes”.

Seriously, if you forgot to revise, it’s best to put posting off until you do so. Or if you made spelling and grammar mistakes, it’s probably better to let them be pointed out in case you happen to skip over them in your own revisions. If a reviewer isn’t deterred by being told to ignore or spelling and grammar mistakes, such a comment usually fuels them to review your story, flames and all, with the sole target of pointing out spelling and grammar errors.

“Another thing that bugs me to no end,” Rosey says, “is when they [writers] give a summary at the beginning.”

Yes, writers. Please. It’s annoying. Imagine going into a movie theater and seeing a five-minute clip at the beginning of the movie that summarizes everything that’s about to happen. Would you sit for the next two hours?

Yeah, didn’t think so. Readers thrive on suspense, so you should try to keep as much of it alive as you can.

ScarlettFire: Long paragraphs and lack of spacing.

Bombarding your audience with a long paragraph will not do much good. Correction: Bombarding your audience with long paragraphs won’t do them any good.  Part of writing is in the spacing—paragraph breaks let you know when a new speaker starts talking or a new event is about to take place. Cramming everything together into one big mosh pit is tedious for us to read through because we have to decipher where you wanted to break.

Aet Linding: [I don’t like it] When work is unreadable.  If I have to take some effort to figure out how to read it, I’m not going to bother.

“If you’re bad with grammar, that’s okay,” Aet says. But, if you understand the rules of it and choose not to use it for either stylistic effect or just a lapse of laziness on your part, remind yourself that a reviewer won’t feel compelled to dedicate as much time to your piece. Punctuation, grammar, line breaks and syntax were all created for a reason.

DON’T preface your work with explanations.

No one cares if the idea is morbid and you usually don’t think about morbid things. If the idea is good, then we’ll want to read it, but saying that you generally don’t do this or don’t do that makes us feel like we can’t praise an aspect as much as we’d like to. And for the record, no one cares if you wrote it in five minutes, either. We just hope you ran a spell check.

In a story, words are what show emotion. Not emoticons.

When the main character dies, I’d really like to see in vivid description that her mother becomes so distraught that her emotion could reach out and affect how I feel about the character’s death. I really don’t want to see a yellow ball with a sideways left parentheses sign streaming blue tears from its eyes.

In favor or opposition of any of these? Leave a comment telling why, and don’t forget to include your biggest deterrent from reviewing a literary work.

Charles Stross, the critically acclaimed science-fiction author of such books as Singularity Sky (great series) and Halting State, announced today in his blog that he will no longer be writing science-fiction.

We’ve been taking a hard look at the market realities; things have been particularly grim in SF/F publishing ever since November 2008, and it has become clear that in light of a downward spiral of diminishing sales things can’t go on as before. The poor market conditions (Tim Holman of Little, Brown says the British publishing industry as a whole shipped 1% fewer books in 2009) are resulting in downward pressure on new book advances: as an agent of my acquaintance put it, with respect to advances, “five grand is the new twenty grand”.

Obviously, science-fiction publishing isn’t what it used to be.  Thirty years ago, if you put a rocket on the cover, then you were guaranteed an audience of tens of thousands as geeks rushed to buy it.  These days, science-fiction’s biggest competitor isn’t other books or even movies: it’s video games.  That leads to some unfortunate market realities.  So as they say, adapt or die.  It looks like Stross has chosen the former:

Late last year my agent and I conducted an exhaustive review of my skill-set and background, to the extent of commissioning a focus group to look into my work to date and suggest new directions.

Stross then goes on to describe his new novel:

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