Writing, Editing & Journalism

5 Tips for Writing for the Literary Market

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I recently enjoyed a lovely email conversation with a local author whose book we at Caffeinated Press declined to publish. She successfully passed the first hurdle in the query chain — she had a good pitch, with a lovely sample — and on the strength of that query, we solicited the entire manuscript. Yet after reviewing her magnum opus, we concluded that the project wasn’t a good fit for us, despite that the work was well-written and certainly relevant to a West Michigan audience.

The novel included very heavy Christian Reformed themes. Too heavy for us, but not quite pure enough for the local religious publishers.

The book is worth reading. It’s worth publishing. It’s not aligned with our catalog, unfortunately. And, on reflection, I suspect the author will have a really tough time positioning the work in its current form with any publisher.

The problem that this author experiences is by no means uncommon. Writers what they write, but not everything that gets written can be positioned effectively on the open market. It’s therefore imperative for authors who intend to seek publication that their work aligns with the current market needs of publishers. (Of course, if you’re writing to self-publish, or writing for the sake of the art, this rule obviously isn’t as salient.)

Some thoughts:

  • Avoid fusion genres. A “fusion” genre is any story that mixes genres — e.g., a sci-fi/horror/romance/Western blend. The challenge with fusion is that publishers (and, much more importantly, booksellers) must pick a dominant genre category. Most retailers don’t have a separate fusion shelf, because fusion isn’t a recognized category in ISBN metadata. So if you write that sci-fi/horror/romance/Western novel, where would the book be shelved? For people interested in the genre, a mixed-metaphor novel is unlikely to attract much attention; after all, if you enjoy Westerns, do youreally want to try a Western with liberal sprinkles of sci-fi, horror and romance themes? Probably not. There’s not much of a market for fusion because people like what they like. Fusion usually works better within themed anthologies instead of stand-alone long-form publications.
  • Follow genre conventions. If you write within a genre, then respect that genre’s rules. In a romance novel, for example, the typical plot arc involves people meeting, falling in love, struggling to keep the love burning against the odds, then overcoming the barrier. A romance that consists of people meeting, falling in love, separating when the going gets rough and then agreeing to “just be friends” isn’t really that compelling. Reviews will tank, along with sales. As restrictive as genre conventions can be, for readers of genre fiction, the audience (usually) stays loyal to the genre because they expect to get something specific out of their reading experience. As a self-published author, you may deny your readers their reward at your own financial peril; as an author seeking a publisher, the publisher is unlikely to risk a contract on a potentially low-reputation, low-revenue project.
  • Didacticism is a double-edged sword. Some authors write to make a point; that point infuses whatever genre and plot/conflict matrix they elect. Didactic writing can be extremely powerful — but it can also be offputting to publishers or agents who either don’t agree with the philosophical point, or who understand that the point might poke the bear for a fairly large swathe of the potential readership.
  • Lit-fic doesn’t sell, usually. People who write poetry or literary fiction for the mass market are unlikely to see significant revenue absent criteria like being already famous, winning some sort of award or major favorable review, or publishing with a large imprint. Small- and mid-sized publishers generally don’t sell literary fiction well because there’s not a huge buyer’s market for it, like there is for throw-away romance or horror novels.
  • Biographies or memoirs of non-famous people don’t sell well, either. Your family history is interesting, but it’s unlikely to sell well with strangers. The more hyperlocal the content, the smaller the audience, until the audience gets to be so small that the project won’t even recover its production costs.

Your best against goodness-of-fit rejections? Look at what the market already supports. If you can position your work solidly within a constellation of known sellers, you’ll do a better job of convincing a hesitant agent or publisher to give you the green light.

Writing, Editing & Journalism

Multiple and Simultaneous Submissions

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When you’re ready to shop your portfolio of poems, essays or short fiction to various literary markets, you’ll encounter editorial guidelines about “multiple and simultaneous submissions.” The gist is that:

  • Multiple submissions refers to the privilege of sending more than one piece for consideration within the same issue of a periodical.
  • Simultaneous submissions refers to the privilege of sending the same piece to different periodicals at the same time.

Many publications — especially large, well-established ones, and venues that pay contributors — don’t allow multiple or simultaneous submissions. Over the first volume of The 3288 Review, we’ve allowed both, but it’s likely that we’ll restrict multiple submissions and perhaps we’ll think harder about simultaneous submits, too.

Here’s why:

  • We’ve yet to have a multiple-submission author have any pieces accepted through our blinded review process.
  • Despite our fairly short turnaround times, we hear from at least two or three authors each issue that their piece was picked up elsewhere — despite us having taken the non-trivial time to stage and review the piece.

We encourage authors to approach publishers with all due vigor. However, the first time you connect with a new editor or publisher, you aren’t likely to fully understand your new colleague’s foibles (and vice versa). It’s probably best to submit one piece and wait for a response. Later, after you’ve established your relationship, you can pitch several things at once.

Note, too, that for paying markets, there’s a certain subset of writers — not huge, but large enough — that fires a full salvo of not-quite-ready work, hoping to make some money. These inexperienced authors spoil the system for others, primarily because some of them (a) haven’t yet developed the discipline to engage with beta readers before transmitting their work, or (b) they’re chasing license fees without regard to whether the publication is a good fit for their work. The fact that none of our simultaneous submitters have had a single piece successfully pass blinded peer review, suggests something significant. As does the fact that we’ve published several authors more than once — but those writers only pitched one piece at a time.

Simultaneous submissions present a different problem. Many publications don’t allow them, although many authors don’t seem care — probably rightly so, because most editorial-review processes take a long time to unfold and often result in silence, so waiting in a one-at-at-time queue would make many authors cool their heels a very long time before they brought the piece to market. That said, peppering a lot of publications simultaneously and going on a “first come, first served” approach to acceptance might be great for the author, but not so great for editors who had to review a work only to see it withdrawn.

Simultaneous submits is probably more of a sweet-spot question than anything. It’s unfortunate to receive a piece only to have it withdrawn three days later; how many markets did the author pitch? It’s also unfortunate to have a piece linger one-at-a-time through crowded slush piles. Good judgment suggests that you don’t send the same piece to too many places at the same time. How many is “too many?” ¯_(ツ)_/¯. A half-dozen at a time might be OK. A dozen might be OK. A hundred probably isn’t. Hard to say.

Probably the biggest point to this discussion distills to a basic principle of political science: The Tragedy of the Commons. This theory suggests that independent actors seeking to maximize their own benefit will inevitably deplete an essential shared resource; the idea relates well to the relationship between authors (independent actors) and publishers (the shared resource). In a perfect world, authors should be able to pitch their stories as they see fit. And many do. But when you maximize your authorial self-interest, you compete for a small and finite amount of editorial attention. In such a situation, everyone suffers, because editors and publishers lack the capacity to effectively manage the totality of work presented for publication. The best way to avoid misusing the “commons” of the publishing world is to:

  1. Always, always, always find a beta reader or two to review your work before you submit it. Always. There is never an excuse for submitting material that contains many spelling and grammar mistakes or doesn’t conform to standard narrative style.
  2. Submit once and wait for a response — even if you have the freedom to do otherwise.
  3. Carefully strategize which of your pieces are shopped to which markets, and when, and why. Mass-firing submissions and waiting for the first nibble means you’re doing yourself a favor, but you’re sucking the oxygen out of the editorial backrooms. Every minute spent editing a piece destined for withdrawal is a minute that couldn’t be spent looking at a different piece that might have been worth accepting … had the editor an extra minute to spare. Who knows? Maybe that unfortunate piece was yours.

The decision whether to engage in multiple and simultaneous submissions isn’t necessarily a black-and-white affair. Lots of shades in the middle. Lots of choices to be made.

But as the wise old knight said: “You must choose — but choose wisely.”

[Cross-posted to Caffeinated Press.]

Philosophy, Writing, Editing & Journalism

Developing Ethically Coherent Characters

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A good story usually demands a strong plot, and a strong plot is advanced through the skillful use of conflict.

Conflict, of course, starts with characters who think and act in specific ways; their patterns of behavior set the contours of how conflicts begin, progress and resolve over the narrative arc of the story.

Five introductory points about ethical consistency:

  1. At heart, ethics relates to the process by which people make value-laden choices. When there’s no choice, or no values at stake, then the question isn’t an ethical one. For example, personal preferences (e.g., “I like cashews more than brazil nuts”) aren’t a source of moral dispute.
  2. People aren’t always consistent, but they do tend to naturally fall into one of the broad ethical paradigms. No one does the right thing all the time, and always for the exact same reason; characters like Galadedrid Damodred in The Wheel of Time simply do not exist in the real world, so their presence in literary worlds proves especially jarring. Likewise, no one does the wrong thing all the time.
  3. When pressed, people can do the “right” thing for the “wrong” reason — with wrong merely suggesting a conformance to a different (i.e., non-dominant) moral paradigm.
  4. When pressed further, people can act against their moral principles. It doesn’t happen often, however. People who frequently make bad moral choices are inadvertently telegraphing that their ethical framework isn’t as straightforward as they claim.
  5. People rarely reset their default ethical worldview. Such a change can happen, but it’s not often enough in the real world to use it as a plot device. Usually these changes follow from significant trauma or long-running psychological stress.

The most common “broad moral paradigms” include:

  • Egoism. In a nutshell: Egoists do what redounds to the greatest good for the self.
  • Deontology. Duty-based ethics (i.e., Kantianism) suggests that the morally correct behavior is that which meets a generalizable duty or universal moral rule. For example, people can agree to the maxim that “It’s never okay to lie” and therefore we have a duty to avoid lying. We must do our duty, no matter the consequence.
  • Consequentialism. Consequentialism subdivides into many different groups. Utilitarians, for example, divide into “act utilitarians” (actions are judged) and “rule utilitarians” (the rules surrounding the actions are judged). Regardless of their tribe, however, consequentialists generally agree that the morally correct behavior is that which generates the greatest good or the least suffering, for the greatest number of people. Duty isn’t usually a major consideration.
  • Natural Law Theory. The natural law suggests that innate patterns in human nature — discoverable through study of universal human behavior — should govern. Popular in the Middle Ages, this approach isn’t as common anymore.
  • Divine Command Theory. The morally correct behavior is that which is willed by the supreme supernatural being(s). In other words: Do what God says.
  • Virtue Theory. The virtues rely on the development of character and follow from the ethical teachings of Aristotle. A virtue theorist balances various virtues (e.g., temperance, fortitude, bravery) to arrive at a recommended course of action. The vices (sloth, envy, etc.) should be eradicated to grow in character and thus in virtue. In a sense, the ethically correct behavior is that which the virtuous person undertakes.
  • Care Ethics. A modern innovation, care ethics seeks to preserve the relationships among those affected by an ethically difficult situation. The outcome is sometimes less relevant than maintaining amity. A special consideration is extended to people disadvantaged by the dispute.

Important non-theories include:

  • Contractarianism. The idea with contractarians is that our only moral duties are those we explicitly negotiate with others. However, this line of thinking is just a variant of selective deontology (as in, I only have a duty to those for whom I agree to incur a duty).
  • Rights Theory. Someone who emphasis rights above all other considerations is just aping a form of deontology (i.e., giving pride-of-place to the maxim that “people ought to respect the rights of others”). Depending on the justification, it’s also a variant of rule utilitarianism.
  • Honor Theory. Approaches that emphasize honor — you see it often in urban hip-hop culture that emphasizes respect — tend to loosely follow a care-ethics framework.
  • Ethical Nihilism. If you believe that there’s no such thing as morality, or that ethics can’t be universally applicable, then you’re a nihilist. But at heart, you’re really an egoist because you’re suggesting that whatever you do is, ipso facto, morally justified.
  • Hedonism. The whole “live and let live in peace and harmony, dude” mindset follows from a variant of consequentialism with a bit of egoist seasoning.
  • The Lex Talionis. The idea of “an eye for an eye” is sometimes incorrectly assumed to be a function of the natural law. In fact, natural law focuses on traits universal among humans; it’s not a surrogate for survival-of-the-fittest fetishism.

A few other points warrant mention.

First, ethical paradigms don’t relate well to the DSM-V. For example, an ethicist might classify as a “super-enlightened egoist” someone diagnosed by a psychologist as a sociopath. Many assertions of mental illness along the lines of sociopathic personality disorder or borderline personality disorder can distill into a form of ethical egoism that the psychologist simply refuses to accept as being a legitimate moral worldview. There’s long been a tension between the ethicist and the psychologist.

Second, many people mix their metaphors. They’ll follow the duty-bound approach of a Kantian for most things, but resort to consequentialist thinking when they want a free pass that Kant won’t offer. Or they’ll follow their scripture in their personal life but follow a care-ethic approach in their professional life. Again, consistency isn’t common, nor is it necessarily a desirable trait. But to the degree that people are inconsistent, they’re often consistently inconsistent.

In practice, adherents of each of these schools might come (correctly! and legitimately!) to different conclusions given the same case study. Consider the following hypothetical:

Bob arrives at work at 8 a.m. He sees his co-worker, Sally, arrive at 9 a.m. — but he discovers that she wrote 8 a.m. on her timesheet. After a bit of peeking, he concludes that she’s been faking her time card for several months, bilking her employer out of hundreds of hours of wages. Bob considers what he should do with his knowledge of Sally’s behavior.

In this situation, people can legitimately arrive at different conclusions.

THEORY CONSIDERATION OUTCOME
Egoism What’s in it for me? Bob fundamentally doesn’t care about what Sally’s doing. He briefly considers whether to extort a payment to keep quiet or to fake his own timecards; either way, he’s not terribly invested in Sally’s theft as long as it doesn’t affect him.
Deontology What’s my duty? Bob has a duty of loyalty to his employer, so he doesn’t hesitate to report Sally to their boss.
Consequentialism What’s the best outcome? Theft of wages from an employer increases the work for others and reduces the labor budget available to others. As such, Sally’s theft is (on balance) detrimental to the company and to other employees, so Bob reports her conduct to their boss.
Natural Law What would we expect a regular person to do? By reporting Sally, Bob will uphold a universal truth that crosses cultures, that people who have been injured by theft should be made whole, and that people who violate norms of conduct should not have their transgressions ignored.
Divine Command What does God will? As a devout Christian, Bob knows that stealing is wrong, so he encourages Sally to report herself and make restitution to their boss, and to repent to the Lord.
Virtue What would a good person do? Because stealing for any reason is the mark of a weak person, Bob does not hesitate to report Sally to their boss.
Care What resolution preserves our relationships? Bob approaches Sally to ask why she’s been mismarking her timecards. He suspects that if she is struggling financially, he can help her out — but fundamentally he wants to help her stop her theft so he doesn’t have to report her to their boss.

Sometimes people get confused and think that because different people can make different ethical decisions for different reasons, that therefore morality as a concept is unworkable. Untrue. The complex moral reasoning of most ordinary people resembles the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator: One or two paradigms are dominant, another one or two sometimes crop up, and others almost never make an appearance.

If your characters consistently behave as humans would behave in the real world, then not only are your characters more plausible, but the conflicts generated by their clashes are more powerful. Never underestimate the power of base moral conflict to drive tension and keep a plot advancing. When done well, these psychological studies drive powerful reader engagement and lead to more compelling stories.

Writing, Editing & Journalism

How I Edit: Assessing Inbound Queries

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We’re now several hundred submissions into the reading window for Vol. 2, Issue 1, of The 3288 Review. As publisher and fiction editor of this beautiful quarterly journal of arts and letters, it falls to me to perform the first substantive read on inbound fiction pieces. (Elyse Wild handles non-fiction and Leigh Jajuga covers poetry; these talented colleagues receive, as I do, work that gets past the initial and very cursory “is this legit?” scan performed by editor-in-chief John Winkelman.)

Let’s begin, however, with a very important disclaimer: The content that follows offers insight into how I triage inbound queries. No two editors flay the same hobbyhorses. What matters to me, might not matter to someone else; the protocols we use at Caffeinated Press probably aren’t duplicated in toto at other small- and mid-sized publishers. My goal is to give you insight into the evaluation process, but this process is inherently subjective and you should not read my comments as suggesting a universally optimal route to sail past the first buoy. In other words: When you hear how one editor edits, you’ve heard how one editor edits, so keep your grains of salt handy.

One more thing: Our editorial-review process is blinded, so as fiction editor, I don’t know the identity of the submitter. All I see is a de-identified synopsis and the de-identified story.

OK. Enough foreplay. So here’s my process, in order:

  1. In 10 seconds or less I scroll down through the entire story to eyeball overall length and to look for obvious challenges that might bedevil layout. Stuff like embedded graphics, changes in typeface, sections with unusual spacing, etc. — all of those earn automatic rejections, because our templates cannot incorporate those variations.
  2. Less quickly — perhaps 3 seconds per page, scrolling up — I look for more subtle visual cues that the story isn’t ready for prime time. Key offenders here are paragraph length (too many long blocks?) and the use of frequent internal subheads or other non-standard breaks in narration, like numbers or asterisks or boldface type. Section breaks are neither a good thing nor a bad thing, but very many of them within a short story sometimes suggests a weakly structured plot, so my “plot coherence” antenna rises while I read. I also keep an order-of-magnitude mental tally of how often I see ellipses; the higher the number, the more likely it is I’ll reject the piece without having read it.
  3. When I’m back on the first page, I examine how that first page is structured. Does it default to a double-spaced, 1-inch-margin text area on 8.5-inch-by-11-inch paper? Does it use a conservative serif typeface at 11 or 12 points? Does it ensure that paragraphs are effected by hanging indents instead of manual tab insertions? Are there any superfluous elements (e.g., word counts) that are wholly unnecessary in an age of electronic documents? Conversely, does it appear that the writer — as evidenced by the exacting precision of the visual presentation — fails to understand that all we’ll do is copy the text into Adobe InDesign, rendering all that fancy layout work moot? Much info about a writer’s professionalism carries forward into how the first page appears. Too sloppy, or too perfect, are both a mark of an early-career author. What matters is that the content is served up in a way that doesn’t call attention to itself and doesn’t generate a clean-up nightmare when that content is imported into InDesign.
  4. Perhaps 5 percent of the time, I reject the piece after I read the first sentence. If it’s a cliché, or if it contains a spelling or grammar error, or if it packs too many facts — I stop reading. I don’t care what follows. If the very first sentence is screwed up, the story has removed itself from consideration.
  5. I ask a series of very subjective questions as I read the first page: Does the opening grab my attention? Does it belabor backstory or foray into extended set-up narration? How many syntax errors accumulate in the first 250 words? Are speech tags properly deployed? Does diction flow naturally? Does the writer use strong verbs instead of relying on passive constructions, modals or ESL verbs? How many adverbs could be deleted? Is point-of-view consistent? Is narrative voice consistent? Probably half of all stories I reject, I kill by the end of the first page. It’s imperative that authors nail their opening scene. I don’t stop reading after the first page because I’m a meanie-head who likes crushing dreams. I stop reading because I have several dozen more stories to triage and odds are above 99 percent that defects on the first page pervade the story as a whole, and I’m not going to waste my time chasing the 1 percent that were great overall but just had a weak start.
  6. Of the remaining 50 percent of stories I reject, the decision comes usually by the middle of the piece. Sometimes the first few paragraphs really nail it, but then the story veers into an all-tell-no-show narrative backstory. Dialogue appears (hopefully) and either it works or it doesn’t. If we get past the first page, the problems that doom a submission usually relate to story itself — descriptions, pacing, conflict, voice, plausibility — and not to syntax errors. People can be technically flawless writers and yet remain incapable of telling a convincing story; similarly, people can be expert storytellers yet have no real technical acumen. People who get published, however, have enough of both skills to pass by the editorial gatekeepers, or they’ve made good use of their critique groups.
  7. On occasion — again, perhaps 5 percent of the time — I reject based on the last sentence or paragraph of the story. Such rejection usually follows from a bait-and-switch where the author wanted to “surprise” the reader with a twist at the end, or some other major change to the plot in the last 200 or so words that made much of the reader’s up-front investment moot. Few stories are as dissatisfying as the ones that lack conflict resolution, or suddenly fly off into uncharted territory at the 1-yard line.
  8. If I accept the story, then the first of two evaluations has passed successfully. We “vote” on queries with a drop-down field that assigns a numerical score — a 6 means “accept strong” while a 1 means “reject strong,” indicating that the stories were either glorious or gloriously awful. Lots of pieces come in at a 4 (“accept weak”) or a 3 (“reject weak”), meaning they’re borderline. And some are perfectly ordinary 5s (“accept normal”) or 2s (“reject normal”). At the end of the reading window, we sort through stories that earned a first-pass acceptance; we identify a set number of pieces for inclusion in the issue across each of the major content categories — fiction, non-fiction, poetry — and begin second-pass evaluation. Usually, we take all 6s and (almost) all 5s. Then we look, as space permits, through the 4s and bring in the ones that show the most promise.

Put into context, your odds of publication hover around 6 percent to 8 percent. For Vol. 1, Issue 4, we received 120 fiction submissions; of those, I accepted 20 on the first pass and John contracted seven after the second pass. For Vol. 2, Issue 1, I’ve (so far) accepted three of 43 submissions, with another month to go in the reading window.

Writers tend to make the same mistakes that doom their work to the rejection pile, a manifestation of the Pareto Principle at play in the literary world. These errors aren’t unique to me as an editor or The 3288 Review as a market — editors and agents across America’s amber waves of grain see them. All the time. In no particular order, these points constitute perhaps 80 percent or more of the reasons I’ve declined to accept a submission:

  • Obvious, pervasive grammar errors.
  • Weak writing style (e.g., over-reliance on adverbs or weak main verbs).
  • Punctuation problems including putting commas outside of quote marks, using single quotes to delimit mental speech, and over-reliance on ellipses in dialogue.
  • Too much telling, not enough showing.
  • Inconsistent narrative voice.
  • Inconsistent point-of-view.
  • Extended backstory or world-building — especially long passages in narration about what different characters “always thought” or conveniently remembered about the past.
  • The primary conflict offers no satisfactory resolution to justify the readers’ engagement.
  • Implausible plot — too many coincidences, improbable character behaviors, MacGuffins, logical fallacies, etc.

The best way to protect yourself from rejections for these reasons? Find a few competent beta readers. If you’ve never edited, you might not believe it, but for those of us who’ve edited hundreds or thousands of different writers over the years, it’s obvious from the first page which authors availed themselves of peer review and which didn’t. A good peer reader will catch the typos, the punctuation errors, the humdrum prose. This “one weird trick” of revising in light of solid peer review will substantially boost your odds of landing into the 7 percent.

There. Done. You’ve seen the highlights of my process and understand the most common reasons for rejection. The question — nay, the challenge — to you, therefore, is: Are you ready to write, and to find beta readers, and to submit your work for publication? I’m eager to give people a few well-deserved 6s.

Writing, Editing & Journalism

The Discipline of Writing

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Several weeks ago, after I explained Caffeinated Press to a colleague of mine in a different industry, she looked at me with a sense of awe and said: “I could never find the time to write a book.” This, from an experienced nurse leader who single-handedly re-wrote her entire organization’s clinical procedure manual. While raising teenagers!

Sometimes people who’ve never written, yet aspire to, adjudge the novel-writing process as some sort of grueling journey that involves alcoholism and cats and occasional, uncomfortable engagement with one’s inner Emo Teen. Even people who do write sometimes view long-form composition as the literary equivalent of scaling Mt. Everest in a thong whilst carrying a mesh rucksack stuffed with a dozen angry porcupines.

But fundamentally, writing the Great American Novel isn’t much different from studying a martial art or learning to scuba dive or qualifying for the Boston Marathon: You need a wee bit o’ talent, of course, but success follows from mastery, which follows from putting in the time to advance from novice to expert.

Writing, foremost, is a discipline. It’s a thing to do repeatedly and without public accolade, just like going to karate practice four or five times per week over three or four years is a prerequisite to earning a black belt. Or like doing your 50 logged dives to get your Master Diver rating. Or like following a year-long couch-to-marathon training program to complete a long run in a respectable time after a decade as a Netflix-binging layabout. For all these hard-to-attain goals, innate talent might make the initial effort a bit easier, but success attaches to the person who does the work, even if he started from the back of the pack. Diligence usually trumps raw talent.

If writing is important to you, you’ll make time for it. If it’s not, then you won’t. Period. You’re unlikely to be successful if you don’t consistently write; you’re almost guaranteed to be unsuccessful if you spend the time you could be writing, instead whining about how little time you have to write.

Suggestions for cultivating the discipline:

  1. Gauge your own seriousness. If you want to be a writer, then you have to write. (Sensing a message yet?) If you merely like the idea of being a writer, then you’re in a whole different bucket. Are you willing to make the “you” of your fantasy life converge with the “you” in the real world?
  2. Schedule your writing time. People dedicated to physical fitness plan their lives around their gym times. Martial-arts schools offer classes on fixed schedules. Pianists spend evenings tickling the ivory. So when are you writing? Block time early in the day, or late in the evening — or even reserve half your lunch hour to sit in a quiet place with your notebook. Frequent repetition of short scribbling periods may be more useful than intermitent but longer writing sessions.
  3. Use your downtime effectively. Take the bus to work? Bring a notebook. Stuck on I-90 during a Chicago rush hour? Dictate ideas into your phone’s voice-memo app. Waiting three hours to get through a TSA checkpoint? Cry. But also haul out your Moleskin and work out the details of your next scene. Waiting for your kidlet’s ballet class to end? Tote your laptop to the studio with you. If you keep a tablet or a notebook handy at all times, there’s really no excuse to not have at least a little creative time during your day.
  4. Maintain a journal. Sometimes it helps to get “meta” about your writing. Keep a journal wherein you reflect on your growth as a writer — record stuff like how you broke a writer’s block, how you figured out how to fix a broken scene, why you might be having a dry spell or why you found a particular anecdote or quote to be inspiring. It helps to write about your craft of writing! Just like a karate student keeps an attendance card, or a diver keeps a diving log, or a runner keeps a list of personal records — so also should a writer keep journal. Exact same principle.
  5. Read difficult material. Don’t block yourself into a literary rabbit hole. Read literary journals and anthologies. Read the classics and material outside of your genre. Consume both fiction and non-fiction, prose and poetry. If all you ever read is stuff you like, you are depriving your self of the ability to see the richness of the literary world in all its various styles and themes. Focusing on “your” genre is like wearing goggles that only let you see your favorite color: The result might be pretty, but you lose the environmental context that would otherwise have helped you avoid falling to your death through an open manhole cover.
  6. Learn from St. Augustine. My favorite quote from one of the Fathers of the Church: “Lord, make me holy — but not yet.” Put differently: “I want to write a best-selling, award-willing novel — but not yet.” Take that “not yet” time to experiment and grow your craft. Errors, failures and misdirections are inevitable. Don’t despair. Setting out to write, as a “virgin author,” the next great installment in American Lit, will disappoint you. Don’t aim high. Aim low: Pepper the ground with salvos of crap. That kind of target practice helps you improve your shot from a distance — and eventually, you’ll be ready to take down the Next Great Novel.

You have no excuse to avoid writing.

[Cross-posted to Caffeinated Press.]

Writing, Editing & Journalism

Wheat from Chaff

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A few months ago, I downloaded several ebooks about editing and publishing as market research for a book proposal idea that’s been rollin’ ‘twixt my earholes since late last year. I’ve recently finished two: Jane Friedman’s Publishing 101: A First-Time Author’s Guide and Five Editors Tackle the 12 Fatal Flaws of Fiction Writing by C.S. Lakin, Linda S. Clare, Christy Distler, Robin Patchen and Rachel Starr Thomson. A few more related titles still await review on my Kindle.

Friedman’s treatment is spot-on; it’s one of the few books for which I had no qualms leaving five-star reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. Her approach is comprehensive, yet nuanced, and her advice is solid. Although I’ve been leading the editorial operations for a small press for more than two years, and I’ve been publishing and fiction-editing a quarterly literary journal for one year, I still learned enough stuff (and obtained some new perspectives!) that I thought my $4.99 was money well spent.

But this essay isn’t about Friedman’s advice, good as it is.

That other book — Five Editors — presents a tougher case. On the one hand, I’m a fan of C.S. Lakin in general; her name sold the ebook to me. And the “12 fatal flaws” are, in my view, a solid distillation of the various structural problems that diminish the manuscripts that these accomplished editors have reviewed. Indeed, I read the 12 and remain impressed by their curation effort.

But.

The five editors very helpfully offer a “before” and “after” passage wherein they demonstrate the fatal flaw and how it might be mitigated. In general, their efforts are solid; I agree that they correctly diagnosed the problems and offered specific, helpful advice. Although an experienced author might not find the entire book to be useful, an intermediate author will likely find the flaws and their corrections to be a good way to sharpen his saw. A novice author, however, will probably be led astray — because the “good” examples are astonishingly monochromatic.

By monochromatic I mean that the passages all seemed to have the exact same linguistic feel. Regardless of the fatal flaw under discussion, “good” overwhelmingly pointed to a very specific narrative voice as being ideal. This voice — rendered in third person subjective with narration intermingling dispassionate facts (e.g., “she opened the cabinet so the cat could hop out”) with non-italic mental asides from the point-of-view character (e.g., “This place is going to drive me bonkers”) — is fine, in some contexts. But it’s not normative despite being the only real voice presented with enthusiasm within the book.

It’s worth noting, I think, that the editors are also published, and several tend to write “women’s fiction” and YA. Those genres often admit to a narrative voice different from, for example, a horror story or detective fiction. However, a voice that may work for YA won’t work for all genres, and the specific voice advocated by these editors opens the door to myrid POV-confusion problems and the tendency for authors to insert their own personal snark into the story. This voice, I think, is much more open to a commingling of the POV character’s personality with the author’s personality, leaving a tell-tale thumbprint of the author’s own attitude that — if done to excess — inserts a competing metanarrative into the story. Significantly (because the trope permeated the “good” examples) it also encourages the use of rhetorical questions within narration; those questions serve as a not-at-all subtle attempt to kick the reader down a very specific plot or conflict pathway. This approach to writing runs the risk of over-proscribing the readers’ emotional engagement with the story.

(In fact, the editors were so consistently insistent that writers include “emotion” in their work that you can’t escape, based on their advice, the exact emotional response the reader is supposed to experience. The reader is denied a chance to co-create the world with the author and to walk away with an emotional reaction that wasn’t laid down in concrete by the author. It’s writing for a lazy audience, in my view.)

For what it’s worth, as fiction editor of The 3288 Review, I’m averse to accepting stories written in the voice deployed by the five editors. There’s just too much that can go wrong when inexperienced authors try their hand at it, and even for experienced writers, it doesn’t always work well. Some of the “good passages” — especially later in their book — left me groaning. I would not accept those snippets for publication.

For example:

“So.” Brady finished his sandwich and wiped his fingers on a napkin. “Are you going to tell me about him?”

Rae pictured Johnny sleeping soundly upstairs. How did Brady know? “Him who?”

“The man who put that ring on your finger.”

Right. Him. “What about him?”

“Where is he?”

“Paris.”

“Why isn’t he with you?”

“Work.”

Brady closed his lips in a tight line, and she recognized the look of frustration. “What?”

You get the picture. We have rhetorical questions, objective narration and POV-character mental asides (snarky ones, at that) woven seamlessly into the narration. Stuff like this, I typically route to the rejection pile, yet it’s presented as being the best way to write prose.

Like I said: The curated content is good, and the technical advice for fixing the “fatal flaws” is fine. But that voice — yikes. I’d think thrice before aping it.

Beyond a critical review of Five Editors, I think the real lesson here is that most of the current texts on the market that attempt to teach writers how to write, do so from a niche perspective that cannot translate into a universally useful construct. Notably, Friedman doesn’t offer much writing advice; she focuses on the business side of authorship. Lakin et al. bypass publishing altogether to emphasize writing technique, but from a situational bias that doesn’t speak to a very large chunk of the author spectrum.

The moral, I think, is that writing advice is a lot like fashion advice: If you like a person’s style, you’ll probably find their advice salutary; if you think they dress poorly, you’re unlikely to want to follow suit. While it may be true that certain writing rules apply broadly, or even universally, the application of those rules can vary widely as a function of genre and story length. So approach how-to-write manuals with care: Use them for advice, not as a template for your own writing.

[Cross-posted from Caffeinated Press.]

Personal, Writing, Editing & Journalism

Some Spring Housekeeping

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The last few months have been more hectic than most. Of note:

  • Our HEDIS medical-record review with our new processes and new vendor is winding to a halt. It’s been a lot of work, capturing roughly 17k medical records in six weeks. But preliminary rates look OK. So that’s a relief. We’ve been on a multi-million dollar journey to swap vendors for nearly 10 months now. With the end of our first-year effort now approaching, it’s time to reflect on lessons learned and to soak in the fact that I was a core leader in such a huge and politically high-profile project.
  • Two weeks ago, I spent two nights in Chicago doing NAHQ commission coordination. Interesting stuff. The association is really firing on all cylinders for it’s five-year strategic plan; now the goal is to keep everyone pointing in the same direction without stepping on toes. Details are TBD, but I may well be presenting in conferences in June in Toronto and near Baltimore.
  • And speaking of NAHQ, I’ll be in Dallas in the coming week for the Summit and for board meetings. Back to back to back to back to back …
  • I submitted a novella to Amazon. It’s an experiment; the novella is in a fringe sub-genre of erotica and it’s written under a pseudonym, using a name with no social platform and no author history. In the last eight hours, I’ve already sold three copies of the ebook and have earned $2.03 in royalties. Interesting. The whole exercise follows from a thought experiment in Jane Friedman’s excellent Publishing 101. (And no, I’m not going to tell you the pseudonym or the novella title. Like I said: fringe.)
  • My friend Brittany and her husband Steve welcomed a baby girl into their family on Thursday. She’s adorable. I went to the hospital to see mom, dad and baby.
  • Life at Caffeinated Press has had its ups and downs of late. Powering through the “painful growth phase,” I guess.

 

Writing, Editing & Journalism

Personal Slush Piles

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Interesting thing about writing: The more I uncover fascinating contests and markets through my research for Caffeinated Press’s Community site, the more I realize that most writers enjoy a handy excuse for not participating.

“Oh, that sounds so cool, maybe I should write something for it,” people say. “If only I had the time!”

Yes. Maybe you should write something. Maybe you should find the time.

Or, maybe, you should have been writing all along, crafting various short stories, poems, essays and other creative works — and even, dare I say it, editing them in advance, so that when an opportunity arises, you’ve got something ready to submit. A writer should want to write for the joy of it, after all, and not just for the thrill of chasing the next deadline.

Editors bemoan the depth and the unevenness of their slush piles. Perhaps much of that problem would be ameliorated if authors built their own well-curated, well-edited slush piles.

I say this, of course, as a bit of a hypocrite. I keep finding cool stuff to submit to, and then I keep making notes to write something to send. Although, in my defense, I’ve been keeping up the late-night writing trend; just this past weekend, for example, I polished the first 50 pages of the manuscript and developed the detailed synopsis of Aiden’s Wager, then I submitted it to the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. With a top prize of $10k and two runners-up at $1k each, but only 600 or so annual submissions, I like those odds. And I’m on track, tonight, to submit to the 2016 Fourth Genre Steinberg Essay Prize. $1k award, plus publication.

(It also helps that I’m in the middle of an unpleasant cold, so I’ve been more quiet and focused thanks to the pseudoephedrine and also too tired and ill to trudge consistently to the CafPress office to work.)

Will I win the James Jones thing? Almost surely not. Will I win the Steinberg Essay Prize? Again, probably not. But such reality is beside the point. When it’s all over, I’ll be that much closer to finishing Aiden’s Wager, and I’ll have a ready-made creative nonfiction essay I can repurpose later. For the next opportunity. Heck, maybe I’ll even edit it again, or get a beta reader or two — just to be safe.

Slush piles: They’re not just for editors.

Writing, Editing & Journalism

And Then the Words Come

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Over the last few weeks I’ve settled — somewhat haphazardly and not-at-all on purpose — on a new late-evening routine. I’ll pour myself a small martini or a finger or two of whiskey, retire to my home office, let Murphy d’Cat settle across my chest, then open Scrivener.

And then the words come.

In the last month, I’ve:

  • Continued to tweak the zero-draft version of Aiden’s Wager, my (winning) NaNoWriMo novel from 2014. I believe I’ve figured out the directionality of my first major rewrite. Less than half of the original is salvageable in current form — I’m stripping out the “torture porn” in toto and replacing it with new chapters from different characters’ points of view — but I have a strong pathway to advance that should result in more of a psychological draw for readers than a voyeuristic one.
  • Written my back-of-the-mag publisher’s column for The 3288 Review.
  • Submitted, under pseudonym, a long-form personal essay to a literary journal.
  • Submitted a short personal essay to a prominent mass-market magazine, in response to a special call for submissions about first loves.
  • Submitted a brief personal essay at the invitation of an anthology editor who’s working on a project about faith and adversity relative to various recent developments in the life of the Catholic Church.
  • Published several blog posts, both here and on the Caffeinated Press website.
  • Finalized a first-pass outline for a new non-fiction book, From Pen to Press: Bringing Your First Novel to Market. The outline includes a section-by-section synopsis of each chapter. The book, slated for 50k to 60k words, starts with writing motivation, pivots to the mechanics of prose, addresses the revision process, covers the chore of finding markets to pitch, outlines business/economic considerations, summarizes a publisher’s production cycle, dives into marketing and concludes with advice for sharpening the saw.

Four other writing-related projects are on my radar, too. I’m interested in doing the flash-fiction contest sponsored by the Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters. Fourth Genre‘s contest and the Steinberg Essay Contest — both for long-form personal essays — look fun, and potentially lucrative. And the MiFiWriters group’s annual Division by Zero anthology — themed rEvolution this year — could help stretch my fiction-writing skills. (Plus I just like all the folks at MiFiWriters.)

Sometimes we writers get dry spells. But sometimes, we’re deluged. I’m fortunate right now to be scribbling away as a monsoon of words falls upon me.

Writing, Editing & Journalism

Growing as an Author: A Reflection

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Picture it: Sicily, 1942. Marne, 1992. As a student half-way through my high-school years, I indulged the fantasy of being a writer. Much of what I wrote in those days was, believe it or not, snail-mail correspondence, primary to my aunt who at the time dwelt in Oregon. But I did other writing, too. Mostly flash fiction about powerful wizards, as I recall, inspired by the Lord of the Rings, with my content consisting mostly of scene descriptions and almost zero dialogue. That summer of ’92, as the calendar inched toward September and the resulting issuance of my driver’s license, was my final big rural summer-vacation hurrah before I started working and thinking about what happened after I graduated. It was the last time I experimented with creative writing for more than a quarter century.
In the early ’90s I wrote on a then-innovative Brother word-processing system, the WP-3400, the kind with a daisy-wheel electronic typewriter attached to an amber CRT monitor, supported by a 3.5-inch drive for storing documents. The unit is long gone, but I still have the little cube I bought to store my disks, complete with a description of which of the dozen floppies contained specific types of files: On the back, in pencil, I noted which slots held my disks dedicated to correspondence, school papers, mail merges, “author stuff,” and my diary. The Brother unit was the successor to my first typewriter, a 1930s-era Royal KMM, the kind that so enchanted me that last year I bought a replacement KMM on eBay that now sits on my living-room desk and occasionally gets pressed into service for envelopes and checks.
In college, I didn’t spend much time doing creative writing. Much of my work as a writer either focused on Latin translations (if you’ve never studied a foreign language deeply, you’d be surprised at how translating original works to and from a different tongue sharpens your sense of syntax) or journalism. By the time I resigned my editorship at the Herald, I could write an 800-word editorial in about 20 minutes, with the resulting product solid enough to go directly on the page with very little editing on its journey.
Corporate life after grad school and newspapering led to corporate documents, rendered in corporate prose using corporate fonts. Then I experienced a brief period wherein I feared that corporate life might prematurely cut me loose, so my evenings pivoted to freelancing for online service journalism websites, mostly generating short-form how-to content related to finance, technology or careers. When you write, and then later edit, 400-word freelance articles in sufficient volume, you learn even more about what does or doesn’t work with English usage.
But non-fiction and fiction are wholly separate beasts. I recall — still with a sense of wide-eyed astonishment at my own inflated sense of self — the way I dived into my first experience with National Novel Writing Month in 2011. I remember Duane telling me the details of NaNoWriMo on Oct. 30. On Nov. 1, I began to write a detective story I only sort-of thought through. But I had believed that because I could churn out near-perfect non-fic prose in large quantities in short periods of time, it couldn’t be all that hard to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days.
I fell short of my 50k goal that year by roughly 48k words. Try as I might, I couldn’t wrap my head around the right way to tell my story. The following year, I tried again, with no creative writing exercises between events to hone my craft. Again, I fell short, but by only roughly 30k words. The year after that, after dabbling with different short stories, I eked out a “win.” Last year, same deal.
None of my NaNo novels are truly complete. Sanctuary — my 2013 victory– is fundamentally solid, but Chapter 4 vexes me still and fixing it will requires a stem-to-stern rewrite. Last year’s Aiden’s Wager stands around 60k words and is targeted for 85k when it’s done. I know how to finish it because the blanks have been fully plotted, and I think the story has real legs, but I also need to strip a lot of the graphic depictions of what amounts to torture porn from the middle chapters before it’ll be safe for polite audiences.
And I’ve been published as a fiction writer, with this year’s Providence, a novelette included in the Brewed Awakenings anthology.
Now I labor as a publisher, receiving queries from authors and editing selected works. I find I’m writing more things — fiction, non-fiction — but also thinking more carefully about how those pieces are presented. I also recently perused my own writing archives to uncover various trends. Such as:

  • My personal blog has moved away from short essays on a given cultural or political topic, to more occasional but longer essays interspersed with factual updates about what I’ve been up to. The trajectory points to longer, more substantive pieces submitted less regularly.
  • I’ve grown more precise about English style even in my informal work, mostly as a reaction to the frequently committed style errors I’ve seen in some of the service-journalism editing I’ve done over the last few years. Many English constructions are common enough that most people don’t think about them, but which still get a “substandard” label by the guardians of linguistic orthodoxy. Increasingly, I default to more conservative usage.
  • I’m more acutely aware of the mechanics of long-form fiction than I used to be, and such knowledge colors how I approach a new fiction story of any length.

Let me share my evolution specifically related to the production of long-form fiction.
At first, I did what so many writers do: I sat down and started typing, tabula rasa, into Microsoft Word. Admittedly, for my first NaNo try, I did possess a vague sense of what I wanted to accomplish, but it was a back-of-the-cover blurb instead of a fully fleshed plan. I had some names and a sentence of two of demographics for my characters, but that was about it. I started the first chapter with no sense whatsoever about who the murderer was or why he (or she) did it, despite that the first chapter opened with the murder. My core learning is that I’m not good at turning on a spigot, transcribing the result and arriving at a product that looks like a coherent novel. Some writers can do it, but I’m not among their number.
With my second stab, I tried writing with Scrivener, to rely on its additional bells and whistles to keep my writing notes organized. I had a much better sense of the story arc; I knew, chapter by chapter, what the main plot sequences entailed. I also had some more fleshed-out character descriptions before I started the work of writing. What derailed me, though, were two problems. First, I aimed too high; I planned the first volume of a sci-fi trilogy instead of a stand-alone story, so when I filled in the chapters, I had to think about not just one work, but two other works that weren’t even well-considered skeletons yet. Second, I obsessed about little things far too much for a first draft. I spent a week on my opening chapter (which, I still think, was awesome, but too polished for the early drafting phase) and I spent several hours researching minor details, e.g. the physics of what happens when a grain of sand hits a person in a space suit at half the speed of light. In short: I mostly fixed the planning problem from the year before, but I got tripped up in trying to be too perfect the first time around.
With Sanctuary, I got the formula right. I planned the plot in detail, with scene-by-scene descriptions of the major plot movements or points I had to cover to keep the story straight. I walked into the story with a clear sense of who my main characters were, and I included a major subplot specifically to advance one character’s emotional development despite that the story was developed as a crime thriller. By Nov. 30, I had a complete novel in hand. And because I didn’t obsess about the details, I left myself occasional notes to fix things on a second read. One big fix requires a subplot rewrite, but … that’s the point of writing. You never let it go after a first draft, ever.
By last year, Aiden’s Wager built on my previous improvements and I fell into the rhythm much more quickly. I thought less about plot and character from a big-picture perspective, and more about nuance. It mattered to me that I got point-of-view consistent and appropriate for certain scenes. I cared that some characters changed as the story unfolded and others didn’t, and that certain characters demonstrated specific mannerisms or verbal tics. Instead of focusing on an event-driven plot, the story revolved around the main character’s rapid slip into Stockholm Syndrome and how he couldn’t quite break himself out of it without help from the family he rejected. So telling the story of the main character as he progressed from cocky rich boy to angry rape victim to willing submissive — and how he found the path back to wholeness — required more character development than plot twisting, and much more dialogue both internal and external than I was accustomed to writing. In particular, I had to write the main character’s girlfriend very carefully so that her demeanor in the early book hinted at, but didn’t telegraph, her later betrayal and then remorse.
I still have a long way to go as a writer. My “novelist voice” is solidifying, I think, and that’s an exciting place to be. I’ve already thought about what my next novel will cover — no spoilers! — and with the notes I’ve committed, I’m confident this one will be my best one yet.
Rare is the author whose very first novel gets published. Many successful writers admit to having drawers of early manuscripts gathering dust in a corner, because the craft of novel writing comes with practice. Every new manuscript that gets put into the drawer is stronger than its predecessor. Every new manuscript teaches the author a lesson about what does or doesn’t work for how he, as an artist, executes on his craft.
I know I’m a planner. I write only when the entire plot is graphed, the characters are fully fleshed and each scene has a purpose. So I have largely mastered the basics as they relate to a writer with my procedural biases. Now I’m working on more complicated things: Voice. Consistent and appropriate POV. Nailing a scene description with verbal economy. Obscuring didacticism with skillfully rendered dialogue.
I think writing is much like building a house. If you’ve never done it before, you stress over pouring the basement walls, framing the studs, running the plumbing — the basic stuff that’s second nature to a typical contractor. The more you grok the foundations, though, the more you stop thinking about the basic infrastructure that you’ve already mastered and jump ahead to the detail of the cabinetry or the shape of the marble on the countertops. The best architects looking at a field during a groundbreaking ceremony don’t think about drywall or concrete; they think about what vase will perfectly complement the leather sectional they’ve planned for the living room. So also should good authors progress so the fundamentals become instinct and they spend their creative time on the ornamentation that elevates a craftsman-like story into a work of transcendent art.
Writing coaches scold their charges: “Just write every day,” on the theory that habituation leads to success. It doesn’t. Learning from your mistakes to grow your skill matters much more than mere volume even will.