Writing Gooder

I’ve been hunting for a publisher for a few months and I always have to look at the cover art of the books they’ve already printed. Not to be a jerk about it, but this one made me swear off the publisher just because I fear what they’re artist would do to my novel.

From the art perspective we already have a poorly done 3-d mesh of a woman. Her hair is being blown by some random physics engine. Her feet are not proportionate to her body and if you look closely you can see that her calf is really inside her thigh.

It’s bad enough the horrible name of vampire is being smudged by these little love story soap operas. But now we cant even manage to make them look halfway decent. Perhaps a figure drawing class is in order. And some sort of fashion class because that outfit is so last season.

As a lot of you probably know (I hope!), I publish a literary magazine called Blinking Cursor twice a year. So twice a year I open up for submissions and ask people to send me their poems and stories, and guess what?  It’s that time again!

Anyone can email me their work, and I’m open to absolutely anything as long as it’s PG-13 and, if it’s a story, 1,o00 words or less. To get a feel of what the magazine is like you can read it, because each issue is free to download. The magazine is currently on its fourth issue and has published over seventy writers, including some members of YWS, so you’ll be in good company. I love reading everyone’s submissions and choosing the best, and the submissions just get better each time. So far I’ve gotten more submissions with every issue and I fully expect to get even more this time, and I don’t want to be disappointed! So get over to http://www.blinking-cursor.co.uk , read the guidelines (in fact, read them twice), and send me your best work! And here’s a hint: I’m partial to a metaphor or two.

First of all, I want to say upfront that I am actually a writer. Sort of. That is, in the literal sense, I write a lot. Poems, stories, engineering reports… I’m very versatile! In fact, I like to think I’m actually pretty decent, as far as general writing goes! However, nothing freezes my blood as much as being introduced as a writer to an unsuspecting person. Why? Because, inevitably, the conversation will go like this:

“You’re a writer?”

“Er… yes.”

“What do you write?”

“Poems and stories, mostly.”

“Oh really? What kinds of stories?”

“Well…”

It’s at this point someone, usually a family member or a close friend, will suddenly appear and say, “She’s written a novel too!”

“Oh, really? What is that novel about?”

Introduce: the awkward pause.

…sound familiar?

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A few years ago, I wrote a short blog post about how cursive writing is falling by the way-side (in the USA at least).  But forget about that; what if an entire generation was growing up forgetting how to write, period?

Things aren’t that bad, but the Associated Foreign Press has a news story about how teenagers and 20-somethings in China are forgetting many of the thousands of characters in their language.  Overblown?  Yes.  Distressing? Not so much.  Learning Chinese character writing is one of the hardest writing skills to learn in the world, and until very recently, the domain of the elite.  Excerpt follows after the break.

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There are a lot of writing sites that actively enforce proper capitalization as well as good style rules when it comes to titles.  In large part, such rules are enforced due to aesthetics.  Having a forum full of properly formatted titles is a lot like having a clean, organized room.  Yet, I’ve always thought it’s a bit misguided.

For one, an author may have a perfectly good reason for not following the proper style rules.   The Pursuit of Happyness by Chris Gardner is one such example.  There, the author based the title of the book off the name of a daycare, which misspelled ‘happyness’ in its name, that he used to leave his son at during the day.

But for another, the title is a good indicator of how an author feels about his own work.  Whenever I see a literary work on the Young Writers Society with a shoddy title, I know the author does not care about the work he posted.  Plus, if you can’t bother to write a proper title – something that only takes a minute – then what does that say about the likely quality of the work?

And that is why the title is so important: it’s the first indicator to the reader of how the author feels about his work and about the quality of the work.  That indicator is extremely important as it lets the reader know whether or not to spend the time necessary to read and review the work in question (which is why YWS doesn’t actively enforce rules concerning titles of works).  So if you’re not spending time on your title, you may want to rethink your priorities.

Not listing these in any particular order; these are just some very good desktop backgrounds that you may enjoy as a reader/writer.

To see the full-size image, simply click on it.

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I’m not exactly sure when the whole grammatical convention of writing ‘he/she’ came into being when the gender was unclear, but I imagine it’s a pretty recent development.  For centuries (millenia?), you always wrote ‘he’ if the gender was not known.  But of course, doing that is no longer tenable.

So instead at some point, someone decided that from now on, we must write ‘he/she’ or ‘his/her’.  This idiosyncratic style of writing quickly caught on and became a grammatical convention.  But, it’s time to stop this.

In writing, we should strive to remove as many unnecessary words as possible (and not a word more).  This is especially true in academic writing (even though a great many academics have missed the memo…), but it’s also true in creative writing.  Using five words when just one word will do is nowadays regarded as absurd.

And this is seen very clearly with cases of ‘he/she’.  So instead of using two words when just one will do, just go with your gender.  If you’re a guy, use ‘he’.  If you’re a lady, use ‘she’.  Or, do the opposite.  It doesn’t matter which gender you go with as long as you’re consistent throughout the piece you’re writing.

But lets stop the he/she stuff.  It’s unnecessary, breaks the flow of whatever you’re writing, and is becoming absurd.

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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