Shimmer author Milo James Fowler joins us this week, to talk about the writing challenge he created, thanks to Ray Bradbury.

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What makes someone a literary legend? Does he have to live long enough to see his work become popular? Outlive his critics? For many writers in the past, a true fan base only developed posthumously.

Not so with Ray Bradbury. Novels, short stories, poetry, plays—his body of work is loved the world over. But once upon a time, he was just a struggling young writer in love with the craft. He wrote a short story every week, polished it up, and submitted it to a magazine. Rejection letters flooded in, mainly due to his prolific submissions. But there were also acceptances along the way, and they inspired Bradbury to keep doing what he loved: telling stories as only he could.

Seeing him at the Escondido library in the fall of 2009 was a surreal experience I’ll never forget. He spoke about being a “lover of life,” and that, for him, writing was always a labor of love. He told us that night, “If you can write one short story a week—doesn’t matter what the quality is to start, but at least you’re practicing. At the end of the year, you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones. Can’t be done.”

A year later, a reader commented on my blog that I seemed to be announcing a short story publication every month. I responded by saying that compared to Bradbury, I was nowhere near as prolific, but that someday I hoped to follow in his footsteps.

“Someday” turned out to be 2011.

It was time to take the proverbial bull by the horns and see if I could do it: write and submit a new story every week. And since misery and joy both love company, I decided to invite fellow writers Simon Kewin and Stephen V. Ramey along for the ride. Thus, Write1Sub1 was born. Now with over three hundred participants this year, we’re still going strong, and I can honestly say I’ve grown as a writer because of this challenge.

W1S1 has forced me to take my writing seriously and carve out a chunk of time for it every day. It’s also taught me how to deal with a deadline—how to write fast and revise slow, and to get my work off the hard drive and into an editor’s inbox. Along the way, I’ve created some of my best work. “Soulless in His Sight,” appearing in Shimmer #15, is one example from Write1Sub1 Week 9 last year. It’s a story I’m proud of, but it’s just one of 52 that wouldn’t exist without this challenge and our supportive community of writers.

Thank you, Mr. Bradbury, for inspiring us. You told us it could be done, and you were right

Write what you know…they all say it! Author Cassie Alexander stops by to tell us why writing what you know can be so awesome and can take your writing to the next level.

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For me, the best stories are firing on three pistons – they’re good, interesting, and true.

Goodness is a matter of storytelling skill. It has everything to do with pacing, voice, the rise and fall of action, and emotional resonance. Interestingness is all about novelty – new people, new places, new emotions. And truth is about being honest with your reader, and yourself.

The ability to tell a “good” story (for my limited criteria above) is acquired through time and patient practice, and is a longer, vastly different post. Same thing for emotional truth. But interestingness is something you can seek out and find. And what better place to do that than in your job or passionate hobby?

I never intended to write books about being a nurse while actually being a nurse. I went into nursing as a career to have a part time job I could afford to live on, while having enough free time to write. I assumed I’d be nursing at night, and writing science fiction during the day, and for a while that’s what I did.

Friends encouraged me to use the frankly absurd work stories I accrued in fiction, and for a year or two I said I couldn’t. Things were too weird, no one would believe me, and I didn’t know enough about nursing yet to write with any authority – I felt too new. All that ended the night I called a doctor to ask for more sedation on a patient who was crawling out of bed. The doctor clearly didn’t believe me, and left me hanging – I practically had to sit on this patient to stop him from extubating himself all night. I got off the phone too angry to breathe, and my first thought was, “That’s it. You’re going in a book.”

After that, I started writing Nightshifted – and that scene is pretty much the introduction to my book.

Now, Nightshifted isn’t completely truthful, in that it’s completely factually accurate in every way. I mean there are vampires in it for crying out loud. And honesty and the urge to not get sued compel me to note that there’s no one event or patient in Nightshifted that comes from any of my working life, etc. etc. etc. (Which you’d think would be evident from vampires, but you never know.)

However, being a nurse gave me the opportunity to sprinkle Nightshifted with moments that were interesting, loosely based on experiences I had, and with emotions that were true. And anything that you’re passionate about can provide you with those opportunities too.

You don’t have to have a job in your field, you can be an enthusiastic hobbyist or dedicated researcher. It just needs to be something that you’re into. If you’re writing something historical and researching it is a drag…why are you writing it? Ditch that project and find one you’re really interested about.

Everyone knows something interesting about something. Work with yourself until you find it – or with other people until you find theirs. (This is how I have survived many long trips with chatty people on planes.) And even if you look at your life and think it’s plain – consider how you would be under vastly different circumstances. You could be an accountant…dealing with ledgers on a colony ship. Or a teacher with a classroom full of aliens. Or a nurse – working on a floor with vampire exposed humans. You get the picture.

Every authentic experience you have as someone In the Know – be it in health care, law, cooking, parenting, teaching, quilting, bronco-busting, you name it, is an experience that you have had that other people might not have had before, that readers will want to share through you. There’s also probably a themed romance or mystery series in there for you to publish in, too.

The key to using that knowledge – to make readers excited to go on your same ride — is to filter it appropriately.

Have you ever read a text book? Or read somebody’s draft that read like a text book? There’s a temptation as an expert to overshare – after all, you really know what’s happening in a courtroom! Only…as most of us know from jury duty, the vast majority of that stuff is deadly dull. Same thing for the hospital. I get so excited to write accurate scenes sometimes. I’ll think, “And here is the one book in all of fictiondom that will teach everyone how to start an IV!” (Note to self: if you have ever sat and honestly wondered, “Why has no one ever written this before!?” think very, very hard. There is probably a reason.) Cue angels singing above at the genius of my completely new scene. I write it, content – because being overly accurate feels really good. Word count racks up. You don’t have to wonder what’s coming next, you know, because you’re dryly describing it, like an Ikea instruction manual. And then you reach the end of the page, and realize all your facts have done nothing for your plot and you have to delete it all.

Unless my imaginary patient has iron skin which makes an IV start impossible and which’ll be a plot point later, there’s no point to having it in there. Iron skin = bullet proof? IV = way for poison to get in? If it doesn’t come up again, it needs to go.

Another good way to pull facts and minutiae in, is to use them in relation to a character’s emotional state. What if, instead of my character dryly describing wiping skin with alcohol, she’s trying to start an IV on a crying child and her own baby just got kidnapped by werellamas? That’s a great moment for your character to have some personal revelation about the nature of protecting children, or a mental infodump about “If only my own child were here crying, and I could comfort them like this mother, I wouldn’t have to worry about who is looking after her on this, a full moon night.” Then we’re advancing the plot via characterization, and explaining the factual activity, which is a nice way to block a scene. (Oh, for the good old days when everyone could endlessly smoke, and thus always be doing that with their hands!)

I used to be scared about writing things that could (were vampires real) happen. I felt like I’d be trapped. But over time I realized there’s a beauty in the constraint of facts, and I find that research used really helps my stories grow. Instead of having a vast open plane (actually and metaphorically) my characters could travel through, where anything could happen at any time, and who knew what would happen next, facts gave me a fence line to follow. I know characters can realistically only cover so much distance in a day, or fight with certain weapons due to the time period, or have certain pop culture references. It’s much easier once you’re set into a certain time and place to know how things will have to flow – after running for 20 hours, my protag will have to hide out and sleep, where at, oh, that park that I know is there in my fictional town – where the werellamas roam! Plot spools out from plausibility which comes from personal knowledge.

I was also worried about being found out as a fraud. You do want your writing to be as plausible as it can be – you don’t want your cowboy to tame the dragon he’s bronco-busting overnight, if it’s actually a three day saga in real life. (Real-ish life.) Or, your character to be resuscitated sheerly by CPR when the actual chances of that happening are abysmally low.

But there’s also no use in worrying about pedants, if people using CPR like magic on TV have shown us anything. Most people won’t know when you lie, if lie carefully. Only you can tell if you’re working as hard as you can to make your story work within the constraints of personal knowledge. If you are, don’t let your facts hem you completely in. Sometimes you have to bend facts to fit the story. It is completely okay. And hey, if you’re in outer space or using genre tropes, oftentimes you can consciously handwave out of it anyhow. If you’re telling your story right, people might notice but enough other things will be going right not to care. They’ll be so consumed by the fact that your protagonist has almost found her daughter at the werellama ranch that they’ll flip to the next page anyhow, and your well told story is more important than any single fact.

If you are the boss of your research, and you can keep plot foremost in mind, then beach-comb as many truths to use from your own job/hobby/research-addiction as you can, and you’ll be golden.

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Cassie Alexander is an author and a registered nurse. Her debut novel Nightshifted is out now through St. Martin’s Press.

David Erik Nelson joins us this week to talk about his new cookbook, Punk’d Squid, in which there are many recipes for sauce, secret and otherwise. Fear not, Dear Reader: you can make them all with two hands and/or ten fingers…

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I want to talk about voice–about your capital-V Voice as a writer, and the little voice of each specific piece you write–but first I want to tell you about how this guy I know makes steaks.

He goes to the butcher and buys a few good cuts of beef.  Back home, while these steaks drain on the cutting board, he makes his “sauce.”  This sauce consists of Worcestershire sauce, malt vinegar, salt, pepper, brown sugar, ketchup, maybe barbecue sauce, whiskey (or whatever he finds in the cupboard), beer (maybe), wine (why not?), soy sauce, and season salt.  He marinates the steaks in this sauce for an indeterminate period, then sears them briefly on a high-BTU gas grill.

If you’ve spent any quality time in the kitchen, then you see how absurd this “sauce” is:  It’s five-plus kinds of salt, four kinds of sugar, four kinds of vinegar, the beer is mostly water . . . it’s a crazy hash.  The result is okay, I guess–it’s hard to go wrong with salt, sugar, and vinegar (which is why it’s in basically every bottle in your refrigerator door)–but it doesn’t particularly taste like a cut of fresh venison, or like grass-fed Delmonico, or like freezer-burned chuck roast.  It doesn’t particularly taste like anything.  That meat might as well be pressed tofu or a slice of Quorn (both of which, incidentally, I like just as much as I like a quality steak; I’m an equal-opportunity consumer).

I bring this up because I used to make steak the same way–because everyone is inclined to throw “just one” dash, sprinkle, and dollop into every recipe to give what we imagine is a distinctive little flourish that screams “This is ME!”  And we don’t confine this impulse to the kitchen.

Listen: Voice isn’t gravy.

It’s not something you pour over a story once the meat and veggies–the plot, the characters, the setting–are cooked and ready to plate.  Steampunk isn’t alt-history slopped with a ladle of cogs and dirigibles; literary fiction isn’t YA with the last half of the final chapter cut off and a schmeer of 50-cent words.

The voice of a piece–and your Voice as a writer–arises from stripping everything else out, not piling more crap on.

Right on the face of it, I’m sure this sounds absolutely absurd. On the one hand, all I’m basically giving you is Strunk and White’s nearly century-old chestnut to “omit needless words” (Rule #13).  On the other, the guy saying this–to whatever degree he might be at all notable–isn’t noted for sparing the verbiage.

Nonetheless, that’s what I’m saying:  My voice, which you no doubt hear in your head as you read these words, isn’t the result of all the words I’ve crammed on to this page; it’s the result of all the words I’ve left off of pages over the last 20-odd years (up to and including this one).

Take, for example, Poor Mojo’s venerable Giant Squid.  For about a decade I co-wrote Giant Squid advice columns on a weekly basis, usually a few thousand words, occasionally a dozen-thousand words or more.  Over the course of those ten odd years we wrote upwards of a million words of Squid.  (To this day it shocks me to say that; there are several complete and unpublished novels tucked in there.  There are so many pieces of Squid that I come across columns I totally forgot we wrote, and get LOLed by them all over again.  I’m like an Alzheimer’s patient, hiding my own Easter Eggs.)

In part, this project began as an exercise in puking all over the Strunkian edicts we’d been schooled in.  It was the ’90s, and we’d been trained to be “lean” literary writers, bare-knuckles chaps like Carver and Hemingway.  “Feeding the Squid” was our attempt to exorcise ourselves of the lush, verbose, oratorial 19th Century voices that still rung in our heads from our public-library boyhoods.  We were trying to write the Twain and Lovecraft out of our bones.

This exercise immediately sets you on the horns of the Voice Dilemma: In order to work, a piece needs to be long enough to carry the data readers want (i.e., the story, the info, the facts, the Truth, the fire).  But each word is cumbersome to read; it adds drag and saps the reader’s momentum.  So, every word has to add value slightly in excesses of the energy it demands. (If you had a single-sex education and are male, your English teacher might have introduced this to you as the “Skirt Rule”; with apologies: “All writing should be long enough to cover what matters and short enough to be interesting.”)

There is no room for superfluous words.  Nonetheless, even journeymen writers have a tendency to cook up a perfectly edible lil tale, and then finish it by slathering on the voice gravy–or, at the very least, to think of their “Voice” as being encoded in some little non-essential flourish they “permit” themselves, rather than in the undecorated main course they’re being paid to proffer.

The result is a goopy, unpalatable mess.  It can be “interesting,” but take a second to think about all of the things folk say were “interesting” rather than “good.”

FYI, this tendency–to make the meal then slop it in voice gravy–doesn’t just go for squidified Deadwoodian said-bookism.  We tend to treat any voice this way, even the leanest gumshoe banter: we write our story, and then cram in “dolls” and “molls” and “heaters” and “mickeys.”

Your Voice, even an overblown Giant Squid of a voice, is the result of reduction: You write from the start with too many words; too many tangents; too many footnotes; and three modifiers for every miserable, skinflint, parsimonious noun.

Then, once your fat, rosy-cheeked baby is finally born, cooing in her hospital blanket, you put her on the table, flay her, and into the stockpot she goes.

I cut my teeth on Stephen King and David Foster Wallace.  As I’ve gotten older, what’s really struck me about the two–who aren’t generally grouped together–is how much they fundamentally have in common as writers:  1. They both bring remarkable clarity to remarkably complex situations (in the case of King it’s his ornately multi-threaded novels, and for DFW it’s in his treatment of the intricacies of popular culture and mathematics; I don’t feel like DFW’s fiction is a paragon of clarity by anyone’s measure).  2. They do this in a voice that is at once casual and precise.  I know that sounds nuts: Both are guys that regularly top the 1000-page mark without batting an eye or apologizing.  But look at those pages, those sentences, and you see that their voices arises not from decorating workmanlike prose, but in shaving down a mound of logorrhea to the vital words that make the sentences go.  They don’t write long because they are slathering on a bunch of frosting and garnishing their books with radish rosettes and spiral-cut beets; they write long because they’ve got lots to say, and a lot worth saying.

And they both have voices that are casual and breezy and distinctly theirs.  You know you’re in a King story in seven words, even when it’s under the name “Bachman.”  You know you’re in a DFW essay–or a parody there-of–before you make it to the first footnote.

Listen: I take it back–Voice is gravy:

Voice is the economical result of not throwing anything away, but instead boiling and scrapping until what you have left is as concentrated as possible, a half-once of liquid with more flavor than the chops you started with.  Every good story will make its own gravy.

And your Voice emerges from the process of cooking up story after story after story in the same iron skillet, until that skillet is so seasoned that you don’t need oil to fry an egg, and any steak seared on it comes off tasting like it put you back $50 at a necktie establishment, even though you didn’t even bother to sprinkle salt on the pan prior to sizzling.

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 David Erik Nelson’s fiction has appeared in Asimov‘s and Shimmer, and in anthologies like The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded. His celebrated steampunk novella Tucker Teaches the Clockies to Copulate is now available for Kindle through Amazon (and other formats at davideriknelson.com).  He co-created Poor Mojo’s Giant Squid with Morgan Johnson and Fritz Swanson, and regrets nothing.  Look for the Giant Squid in the upcoming anthology Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution.

Squid illustration by PLuNDeRPuss!

Author Lisa L. Hannett joins the Shimmer blog once more, with very extremely good awesome writing advice that you can put into action today!

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Michelangelo, that Renaissance jack-of-all-trades, is given credit for one of the most famous observations about the art of sculpture. “In every block of marble,” he says, “I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to other eyes as mine see it.” His now-iconic David is considered the ideal representation of the male form, not just because it is massive (even in the Middle Ages, size, apparently, mattered) and not just because Master Buonarotti was a whiz when it came to wielding a chisel, but because you can’t pinch an inch on young David. Trimmed of all fat, skin smooth and firm, hands placed just so to effortlessly prevent gravity from wreaking havoc with those muscular marble arms — this statue is a triumph of hewing away the rough walls and revealing the perfection trapped inside.

Great short stories writers all get a case of the Michelangelos when it comes to crafting their narratives. Although not everyone will immediately see the fully-formed shape of a story (Michelangelo’s a bit of a show-off in that respect), most will practise the same process of “hewing” the artist describes above. Through redrafting and revising each piece, writers of short fiction act the way word-sculptors should: shearing away all the flabby bits, they reveal only the story’s most essential elements, releasing striking images from the prison of sluggish prose.

But how do these word-sculptors do it? It doesn’t matter if you’re writing fairy tales or splatterpunk, space opera or paranormal romance, there are at least five ways you can tighten up your paragraphs and transform them into things of beauty.

Be active, not passive

Writing in the passive voice can waste words. Get your characters off their butts and make them do, instead of having things done to them. Saying, “Sunscreen was slathered on the albino’s skin” could be trimmed by telling us “The albino applied sunscreen” and it also makes us stop wondering who it was, exactly, that did the slathering in the first instance. (Sure, it could’ve been the albino, but then again it could’ve been a poltergeist with a penchant for zinc creams. There’s no indication, in the first sentence, whether it’s the former or the latter.) Writing primarily in the active voice will also allow you to use the occasional passive construction for dramatic or emotional impact. For example, if your protagonist is consistently described in active terms — “Her sword sliced the mutant’s head”; “His song hypnotised the court” — then using the passive voice at moments of crisis can underscore his/her loss of power — “Wounded, she was captured by the mutant king”; “When his voice faltered, he was cast out by the courtiers…”

Using active verbs to describe your characters’ actions can also help prevent awkward or flabby phrases. Early in James Joyce’s “The Dead,” for instance, “Gabriel could be seen piloting Freddy Malins across the landing.” Freddy isn’t “pulled along by the elbow,” nor is he “dragged by Gabriel across the landing” — instead, Gabriel “pilots” Freddy. This concise description instantly conjures up the image of one man directing another, but it also gives us a sense of Gabriel’s personality. He doesn’t guide or lead or assist Freddy; he pilots him. This active verb effectively sketches the characters’ movements, while simultaneously conveying Gabriel’s desire to steer people and events to suit his own purposes. Choosing exactly the right word — a process Flaubert refers to as selecting le mot juste — can tighten up your sentences, with the added bonus of adding dimension to your characters.

Let one word do the work of many

Taking the time to find le mot juste doesn’t have to be something you do in the first draft. If you’re someone who writes quickly, just to get the story down, then keep at it! When revising, watch out for words like very and really and extremely, which often crop up in that first mad burst of writing. Some authors, such as Susanna Clarke, pepper their stories with very. In the first few pages of “The Ladies of Grace Adieu,” we are told “The second Mrs Field and Cassandra were very pleased with each other and soon became very fond of each other” and “Miss Ursula and Miss Flora were very prettily behaved children” and there is also mention of “a very short letter,” “a very fine day,” “a very smart barouche,” “a very slovenly fellow,” a song played “very badly” so the pianist was “very reluctant” to play at all… and the onslaught of very continues throughout the collection. In Clarke’s case, this overabundance of very (as well as quite and rather) adds to the tone of the work — the wordiness is part of the point. But for those of us not recreating the verbosity of Regency literature, then choosing one perfect word instead of many can only benefit our prose. When tempted to use words like very, really, and extremely stop and ask yourself if there is a more effective way of conveying this idea. Is it very bad or abysmal? Is it extremely hot or searing? Is it really funny or hilarious?

The same applies to the general use of adjectives and adverbs. Most of us have been advised to use these descriptive words sparingly — because, in most cases, one word can do the work of many. If the sun is shining brightly, then perhaps blinding or dazzling will expresses this more accurately. If spilled blood is vibrant red, we may want to know the precise hue: is it crimson or scarlet or vermilion?

Cut down on speed bumps

A few other culprits can slow down your prose: that or so that, and then, and and so can act as visual speed bumps, subtly interrupting the flow of your sentences and paragraphs. As with very and its pals, you don’t have to eliminate these words and phrases altogether — but use them with intent, not out of habit. “She stirred the potion so that it would boil and then poured it into a bottle that sat on the workbench” makes perfect sense, and we can certainly visualise what’s being described. Even so, the sentence is sluggish. Removing these speed bumps creates quicker action: “She stirred the potion to boiling before pouring it into a ready bottle on the workbench.” More often than not, going back over your story and deleting that (and rearranging the sentence to accommodate this deletion) will cut down on your word count and tighten up your sentences.

Paying attention to how you use dialogue tags, even simple ones like “he said” and “she said”, can also change the story’s pace. Like commas, these tags can slow our reading, allowing our minds the time to process what our eyes have just scanned. These pauses can be used strategically to suggest a character’s hesitation or reluctance — “Well,” he said. “I guess you were right.” — or to build tension — “Luke,” Darth Vader said, leaning over the fallen Jedi, “I am your father.” However, when writing arguments and other moments of heightened emotion, getting rid of these indicators, as Robert Shearman does in this passage from “Pang,” adds a sense of immediacy to what’s being said.

She frowned, gave it a little thought. “No, I’m pretty sure it’s stopped.”

“But you can’t, one day, after fifteen years…”

“Seventeen years.”

“Seventeen. Good God, is it really?”

“Oh yes.”

“Seventeen. God. Well. Even more reason.”

“You must feel the same way,” she said. “Just a little. Don’t tell me I’m the only one.”

We don’t need the “he saids” and “she saids” after each line to know who is speaking here. And, more importantly, without them this exchange is quick and tense — the way you’d expect a breakup to be.

Borrow someone else’s eyes

Once you’ve completed your revisions, get someone else to read your story and give you feedback. And though I’ve no doubt your mom is awesome, she might not offer the most critical feedback… “That’s nice, dear,” she’ll say. “What a weird mind you have.” Other writers, on the other hand, are ideal critiquing partners. They’ll see repetitions you’ve overlooked a hundred times, no matter how sharp your editing skills. They’ll point out the verys and reallys and extremelys you thought you’d eradicated, and slice through flabby lines with fluorescent yellow highlighters. Plus, they’ll grant you access to their own word hoards, letting you know things like “an entrance to an underground mine which is horizontal or nearly horizontal” is actually called an adit — one word instead of twelve! You’ll expand your vocabulary and watch your sentences shrink, all in one fell swoop.

Let it breathe

If you can, take a step back from your work, give it some distance, before sending it off to a publisher. Give yourself time to regain the objectivity that is inevitably lost after spending so many hours intimately involved with a story. Let the rose-coloured editing glasses come off before giving your work a final once-over. Break up with your darlings — doing so will make it much easier to kill them. And if you still can’t kill them after a few days, you may at least be prepared to put them on starvation diets.