Hi, folks. I’m Daryl Gregory, and I’m writing this during one of the busiest weeks I’ve had this year. I’ve got several comics scripts due, I’m writing material to support the launch of a new book, and the first chapters of a new novel are due in a few weeks.

But that’s okay. That’s the point. Because the most important thing I’ve learned about writing as a career is this: Put yourself under the gun. Back yourself into a corner. Promise things you’re not sure you can deliver.

In short, say yes.

You see, I have self-discipline issues. If I don’t have a deadline, I goof off. I fritter. I start checking Twitter every ten seconds. And it was much worse when I was first starting out.

When you’re unpublished, no one is waiting for your next story, or your first novel. There is no ticking clock, except perhaps in the tapping feet of your spouse or partner as they wonder when the hell you’re going to finish something. It’s quite possible to wallow about like this for years. After all, life is busy. There’s your day job, and the kids, and that new series on HBO. And there’s the undeniable fact that if you don’t finish, you can’t truly fail.

I used to tell people, “Oh, if only I was locked up in a cell with a typewriter, I could finally get some writing done.” But because I was afraid of committing a felony (and afraid they’d never give me a typewriter), I had to give up on the prison fantasy. Instead, I started putting myself into situations in which I had to deliver, or suffer pain and humiliation.

Here are a few of the things that worked for me, and maybe they will for you, too:

• I took a fiction writing class at the local college. I finished three stories in that semester, and two of those became some of my first sales.

• I joined a writer’s group, and suddenly there were several people waiting for my next story. Social pressure works, friends. We are all chimps.

• I went to a writing workshop. There are many fine workshops, but I went to Clarion East. This is chimp pressure in hot house conditions, and the only surprise after six weeks was that we weren’t throwing feces at each other. (Okay, maybe a little feces.) The experience changed my life, and made me realize that I had to get serious about writing.

But the most important thing I ever did was 24 years ago, when I told my fiancée that I wanted to be a writer. Amazingly, she believed me. And once she believed me, I realized I had to sit down and write, or I’d be a liar. While I’ve since lied about many things—“Feces? The other guys started it, honey!”—I’ve at least made good on the writing promise. For some reason she’s still married to me.

These days, I say yes to assignments that I don’t have ideas for, and agree to deadlines that are awfully tight.  And when I’m working on a story, I write at gunpoint, too. I deliberately put myself into jams on the page that I have to write my way out of. My outlines have gaping holes that must be filled with plot. Characters have to be invented when they walk into a room. Events and dialogue must be invented on the spot.

But this isn’t news, is it? It’s only an extension of what you do as a writer every time you sit down. The sentence doesn’t exist until you type it.  So get typing!

Me, I have to go check Twitter now.

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Daryl Gregory lives in State College, PA, where he writes programming code in the morning, fiction in the afternoon, and comics at night. Raising Stony Mayhall was published June 28, 2011 from Del Rey Spectra. His first novel, Pandemonium, won the Crawford award for best first fantasy and was a finalist for the World Fantasy award. His second novel, The Devil’s Alphabet, was named one of the best books of 2009 by Publishers Weekly. His first collection of short fiction, Unpossible and Other Stories, will be published by Fairwood Press in October, 2011. He writes the comics Dracula: The Company of Monsters (with Kurt Busiek), and Planet of the Apes for BOOM! Studios.

You will have heard some of these before–I know you have, but have you tried them? I challenge you do so this week! Time’s a wasting. Get cracking.

Driving to the story

You’re so hypnotizing
Could you be the devil?
Could you be an angel?

From the opening of “E.T.,” Katy Perry poses questions that hook you into the song. Who is this person? Is he the devil, is he an angel? How could a person be both things? The contrast captures interest keeps you there until the last beat fades away. She leaps in, she doesn’t take a country drive to get to her point.

Your fiction should do the same thing. Aunt Catherynne told you not to hold back on the ghostpigs, right? So why are you still doing it? Don’t bury them on page five. The editor may never get there. Be specific, be clear, and start with your devils, angels, and ghostpigs. Hook your reader.

Passive Voice

You open my eyes
And I’m ready to go
Lead me into the light

The more active you are, the more specific your sentences become, and the more specific your sentences become, the more engaged your reader is.

Perry doesn’t say “you were opening my eyes,” or “you were leading me into the light.” She doesn’t say “I was ready to go.”

“I am ready to go” rules the day. Strike the “was.” Look for strong verbs. Stronger words mean stronger characters and stronger actions.

Shorthand Description

Boy, you’re an alien
Your touch so foreign
It’s supernatural
Extraterrestrial

Here’s one point where I thought pop and fiction might diverge, because you have a smaller canvas when it comes to a song, but! In fiction, it feels like a cheat when a writer says “She was beautiful” and offers nothing else in the way of description. Why is she beautiful? What makes her beautiful to the POV character?

Though you get small bits of description at a time in a song, it contributes to an overall image of a scene, character, setting. Perry layers “E.T.” with description to build an image of an alien (though she also tells us outright that he really is an alien):  touch so foreign, magnetizing, different DNA, fill me with your poison, powers, lasers, and…apparently he vibrates!

Expand the initial thought; there are more layers to “beautiful” or “alien.” Explore them.

Non-Endings

Take me, ta-ta-take me
Wanna be a victim
Ready for abduction

It’s clear throughout the song what the ending of this story will be; girl goes off with her alien–she’s ready to be a victim of his abduction! Will they live happily ever after? Based on everything that came before, it seems so.

In short fiction, I too often read about an interesting place filled with interesting characters and conflict. That last paragraph should seal the entire deal with a shiny bow, but often, it ends with “And the alien set out to abduct his human lady love.” Really? Seriously? Does a story end with someone setting out to do something? This feels like the beginning, not an ending.

Also: if you’ve seen the video, you’ll know about the ending, which turns the entire story on its head and has it make a new kind of sense. Fiction should do this more!

Magically Delicious

You’re so supersonic
Wanna feel your powers
Stun me with your lasers
Your kiss is cosmic
Every move is magic

Sometimes, you do want an adverb, but overall, I’m inclined to avoid them. While my first drafts are riddled with adverbs, they’re something I destroy on an edit. (And see, made an edit there: “seek to destroy” was my first option, but seeking wasn’t active of me. They are something I destroy, period. Doesn’t that feel better?)

The lyrics here need no modifiers as they are strong enough on their own. Supersonic powers; lasers stun; the kiss cosmic, the moves magic. It’s active, it conveys characters and situation both. When you kill adverbs, you get stronger adjectives: cosmic, magic, supersonic. And stronger words mean…stronger characters and a stronger piece of fiction.

Get to it!

 

Katy Perry lyrics are property and copyright of their owners. “E.T.” lyrics provided for educational purposes and personal use only.

Jay Lake here, happily guest-blogging for Shimmer on the subject of selling fiction for new writers. This post recaps a number things I’ve said before along the way, with a focus on the basics of aspiration and breaking in. I hope it proves helpful to you.

The Internet is rife with advice to aspiring authors on submitting, markets, manuscript formats, handling rejection, editor-friendly blogging: everything in the world to tell you what to do, how to do it. All kinds of strong opinions and good thoughts both.

(Which, I might add, was certainly not so widely available back in the many years when I was struggling to break in. You kids today, you don’t know how good you have it. And, hey, you! Get off my lawn!)

But really, it all boils down to one simple recipe. Write, revise, submit.

This isn’t exactly new information, to say the least. Charles Dickens probably hung out in London coffee houses telling those punk kid pre-Raphaelites the same thing. To focus on our field of speculative fiction, however, here’s what Robert A. Heinlein said in 1947:

1. You must write.

2. You must finish what you write.

3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.

4. You must put the work on the market.

5. You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.

I don’t agree with his number three, for a variety of reasons, but the rest of this advice is as solid today as it was over sixty years ago.

My version is, “Write more, finish what you start, send it out.” Lather, rinse, repeat as necessary.

But the key to all of this isn’t simply doing these things for the sake of having done them. It’s doing these things in a consistent, repeatable manner over a long baseline of time and effort. Simply put, if you write one story a year and send it to one market a year, you’re not likely to see a lot of career impact. A couple of famous exceptions spring readily to mind, so if it works for you as well, go for it, but that’s a low-return strategy for almost all the rest of us writers out there in the world.

For that consistent, repeatable manner to succeed, it requires frequency as well. What I’ve often referred to as ‘psychotic persistence.’ As Rita Mae Brown famously said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” That’s also the definition of writing success. (Not to mention parenting success as well, but that’s a topic for another time.)

Much like learning a foreign language, or taking up a martial art or a musical instrument, writing and selling fiction requires practice. No one is born a literary genius, any more than they are born a black belt or a first chair violinist. That same psychotic persistence that has you writing and sending out will also give you the room to stretch your skills and improve your output.

In my own case, I spent the decade from 1990 to 2000 workshopping semimonthly. I brought a new story almost every time, 20-24 stories a year for those ten years, except for the period of time when my daughter arrived in my life. I sent my carefully crafted fiction out diligently, managing to collect an entire trunk full of rejections in the process. (Which I still have in the garage, for posterity’s sake.)  In 2000, I moved from Texas to Oregon and found a new home at a weekly workshop. That fall I began a new rubric of writing a story every week. I kept that practice going for almost five years, until I became consumed in the process of writing novels, at which point I essentially substituted production goals for finished manuscripts as my metric for self-evaluation.

All in all, between 2000 and 2005, I wrote close to 300 short stories.

That is psychotic persistence.

But it’s also smart, guided persistence: Listening to critique feedback from my workshop and first readers. Paying attention to editorial feedback from markets. Reading my first glimmerings of critical response from observers in the field.

Most of all, though, it was me writing in a consistent, repeatable manner.

My point again being, this process is not for wimps. It requires intense focus and dedication far beyond any rational measure of the available external validation or overt rewards.

This practice of constantly writing and sending has a happy side effect of inuring oneself to the impact of rejection. The more rejections you receive, the less each individual one can sting. Our one-story-a-year writer will invest an enormous amount of time and effort in each send out, and feel the impact of the response acutely. Our fifty-story-a-year writer collects rejection after rejection, reducing the sting and increasing the opportunity for those rejections to transition into acceptances.

As for Heinlein’s third rule, “3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order”, I do disagree with that. There is a difference between rewriting/revising and polishing. It’s a very rare first draft indeed that doesn’t require at a minimum some basic line editing and revision. It’s an unusual first draft that can’t benefit from some quiet time in a drawer, followed by a thoughtful revisiting after sufficient time has elapsed for the immediacy of the story has vanished from the writer’s mind. But not rewriting at all? Maybe it worked for RAH, but I don’t recommend that as a practice, either. And believe me, it took me years to think my way around that corner.

Note that I’m not actually advocating that everyone reading this immediately start writing a story a week. That’s what worked for me. It might work for you, it might not work for you.

What I am advocating, specifically, is that you write more. That you cultivate persistence. That you recognize the fact that without consistent practice and production, breaking in to the field as a professional writer is simply a lot less likely to happen. Make your own luck by making your own words.

Write more.

Sean Wallace, from Fantasy Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, and a plethora of other fabulous projects (including twin girls), joins us this week on the Shimmer blog!

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Every once in a while, we get an author who has gone over the line, and done something so horrible that they either get banned or receive a stern talking-to or are simply ignored. It happens very rarely, though, considering the hundreds of submissions received every month, maybe only representing less than one percent of the total slush.

But I’m going to tackle five that boggle us here at Fantasy Magazine / Lightspeed Magazine, stuff that drives us bonkers and occasionally over the edge, and might have unintended consequences. (Editors talk!) So, here we go, with the five don’ts of submission blunders:

This represents the worst of them all:

Don’t brag, after we’ve rejected your story, that you immediately resold it to another market and then gleefully dance on our graves because we failed to acknowledge your God-given brilliance. I mean, WTF? It’s just downright tacky, unnecessary, and rather bugs the hell out of us, because it shows a level of unprofessionalism. We’re less likely to take a more studied look at your next submission. Oh, we’ll remember you, but for all the wrong reasons.

Next,

don’t argue with us, unless you want us to go Mamatas on your ass. (A pale-imitation of Mamatas, I grant you, but you still won’t like it!) I don’t care what it is, you shouldn’t be engaging with the editor on any level. And we won’t respond. You’re just wasting your time and energy, and you could be using those resources to write another story to later send in. That’s all we care about.

Which leads to the third don’t:

Don’t bother thanking the editor for the speedy rejection/reading your story/whatever. Just send another story more to our taste. We don’t have time to process emails, really. It’s just filling up the inbox, and usually gets automatically deleted every thirty days. We’ve got lives and families to attend to, and unwanted emails are going to get the (lack of) attention they so rightfully deserve.

Fourth,

don’t ask us to give you feedback. We’re not a writing workshop. We’re not a writing organization. We’re not your teachers. That’s what they’re there for. Use them! Magazines, on the other hand, are businesses, and in these days and times it’s not efficient for anyone to give detailed rejections, not without sacrificing response rates . . . and for us, responding quickly to your submissions is the greatest service we can do for you, which segues into

. . . our last don’t:

for the love of all that’s unholy please don’t attempt to question our submission return rates, or accuse us of running a scam, because we process your submission incredibly quick. The rates are what they are because of the time and energy the slush team puts in, and everyone works very hard so that it doesn’t pile up. (And it’s a pain in the ass when this happens!)  Usually a half-dozen times a year this crops up, where a disgruntled author bemoans that there’s no way that we could have processed their story in only a few days or even less. (I’ve been known to reject stories as they come in, which can be a few seconds after they drop into the system.) Most magazines have a slush reader, or even many. For the magazines I’ve worked with, we even have a dozen or more busy slushing, which makes for an even faster process. Every story gets its time under the sun; some stories get a quick glance, and some get a longer study, but every last story is looked at. There is no conspiracy, no scam. It is what it is.

So, if you can avoid these five major blunders you’ll be making a slush-reader or editor out there incredibly happy, and really, at the end of the day, isn’t that what you want?

Hallo everyone! I’m Shalene, the newest of the Shimmery people. I squinkled (a method of extreme coaxing) my way into the Shimmer slush pile a few weeks ago. Ever since I’ve been diving in and out of stories, gulping down first sentences, middle-paragraphs, and endings, burbling like a happy beluga.

I’m reading everyone’s work.

I’m loving it.

And now that I’m a little bit settled in and getting comfortable, I’m getting delusions of grandeur—in short, a wish list of what I’d like to see more of in stories, and I’ve even provided litmus tests so you can figure out if your story contains these elements.

Things Shalene Wants in Stories:

1.   Wooing 

Reel me in with the first few paragraphs of your story. Keep me interested, engaged. I’m going to read your story three or four times anyway, but if I have trouble looking past the first few pages, then probably a casual reader won’t make it to the end. In general establishing a concrete situation (who, what, where, why) is much more compelling than nebulous (if beautifully written) sensations that force the reader to really work to figure out what’s going on.

Litmus test: Give a friend who likes reading the genre you’re writing the first few pages of a story. Tell ‘em someone else wrote it. Ask them if they want to read more.

2.   Reason

One of the challenges of speculative fiction is that the world exists within your head and the reader can’t make any assumptions about what does and does not hold about your world. It’s your job to make understanding the world as easy as possible for your reader. Lay out what is different and explain how it works.

So, Googity is a ghost and slapped the king of ghosts upside the head during a moment of insanity induced by too much grape juice.

Okay, is Googity insane, or would do most ghosts go loopy after drinking grape juice? And if they get loopy, how does ghost society view Googity’s actions? Understandable given circumstances, but shocking? Beyond the pale?

Litmus test: Give an honest friend (the kind who tells you what your haircut really looks like) a highlighter and your story. Tell ‘em to highlight the parts where they lose interest. Right there is where things have stopped making sense, or you’ve info-dumped which leads to 3.

3.   Simplicity

The other challenge of speculative fiction is over-explaining. Too much information about your world and you risk boring the reader. (Tolkien fans may disagree. They also read The Two Towers.) The reasons why things are happening in the world is important, but rule of thumb only include the bare minimum needed to make the story understandable.

Okay, Googity slapped the king because grape juice makes most ghosts lose control of their inhibitions.

No need to explain this is because the sugar in grape juice causes ghosts severe gastrointestinal distress, so the juice flows towards the brain, and ultimately gets lodged in the axons and make it impossible for the neurotransmitters to fire. (Do ghosts even have axons? Ugh. See all the horrible questions this raises.)

Just make sure character motivations are in place, and cause and effect are in place.

Litmus test: See 2.

4.   Friendship

Yeah, I’m kinda introverted and all, but part of the pleasure of reading is hanging out with characters, relaxing into a story and enjoying the people no matter who they are or what they’ve done. Make your characters come alive. Give them emotions the reader empathize with, quirks that will flesh them out, preferences and habits.

Googity slaps the king. Does he spend the next few months communicating with his friends via messages in bottles because he’s too embarrassed to leave the house? Does he parade down the street with a big sign on his chest: “Slapped the King! I’m da ghost!”? How does his best friend Mizt react? What about Googity’s neighbor, Julk?

Litmus test: After your friend reads the story ask them to describe the characters to you. The characters who get mixed up or forgotten are the ones who didn’t have much of a presence.

5.   Heartbreak 

Go ahead. Don’t be shy. Make me love your story so much that I ache when it’s over, that the echo of your writing lingers in my memory long after you are finished.

There are no rules on how to do this. My only suggestion is write with great joy. Write because it matters to you, not because you want to see your name in print, or you think stories about ghosts named Googity will sell. If it seems like work, or if it isn’t fun, stop and come back later. Write about Googity because you have something to say about being or doing something stupid, regretting it and moving on. The most memorable stories have themes that strike a chord within people. Love. Loss. Redemption.

Litmus test: A couple weeks after you’ve asked your friend to read your story, ask them what they remember. The more they remember the more of an impression it’s made.

Also, give your friend cookies. They deserve it.

Happy writing!

I’ve been trying this writing thing for a long time now, and while I’m far from an expert, I’ve been around the block enough to come up with a few truisms. These are things that I remind myself of every day. They’re things that discourage me, inspire me, and keep me working. I wish someone had drilled these into my head years before I decided to become a Writer-with-a-capital-W. Hopefully they’re at least entertaining to you, if not useful.

1. There is no magic formula for anything ever.

No matter where you are in your career, you will more often than not find yourself engaged in a conversation with another writer who’s convinced that if she can do something with a certain process, if she can approach her writing consistently in a certain way, she’ll find success – usually in this case, success means publication.

The truth is, it doesn’t work like that. There is no magic formula. Not for publication, not for good writing. Even if you find a method that works for you most of the time, chances are it’s not going to stick forever. And whatever method that Jack Famous Writer uses isn’t necessarily going to work for you. Writing isn’t like building a lever, where you study the pieces and put them together the right way every time. Think of it like this – you build the lever once, and then the next time around, you have to build a better lever.

2. Your writing will not always seem as good as it was before.

I think this happens to a lot of us because when we get better at recognizing the bad, we start seeing so much bad in our own work that we can’t see the good anymore.  It happens to me all the time. First drafts suck. They’re not hard to write – they’re just bad. How can you go from a first draft to a final product that you’re not embarrassed to show to people?

Before the reality of the badness in your own writing sets in, it can be easy to think of everything you write as something amazing. Ignorance is bliss. But don’t let it fool you! You are getting better, no matter how difficult it may be to see. In fact, if you’re looking at your writing and going “blech!”, chances are you’ve definitely improved.

3. Everyone is always stressed out.

There is no part of the writing process that is easy on anyone. One of my writing partners described it like climbing a never-ending mountain. You get to a plateau and think that everything from that point on is going to be easy, but you are so wrong. Once you craft a publishable story, you have to play the waiting game. If it gets accepted, you wait for reviews. You have to write a second story, now, too, and it has to be better than the first. And on. And on.

There are no breaks. There are, as I said before, no magic formulas. It’s hard. That’s just the reality of it. But letting the negativity get to you, is the wrong way of going about this. Look around you. Talk to other writers. Everyone is as stressed out as you are. You are not alone.

4. You’ll be happier if you stay flexible.

Rigid deadlines have their place, and goals are important, yes, but if you let everything in your writing career become dictated by expectations and must-dos you’ll find yourself slowly going insane. Keep goals and deadlines in mind, but work toward them in a way that doesn’t resemble a single-minded kamikaze attack. Let your work breathe. Let yourself take breaks. Life is too short to kill yourself over anything.

When it comes to actually working, to getting the words themselves out, let it happen in any way that it wants to. I keep several notebooks (lined and unlined, big and small), in addition to my laptop. Sometimes I find a story really wants to be written on small, unlined notebooks. Weird? Yes, but it works for me. Sometimes I want to take a day off from one story and work on something else. Do I let myself do this if I have a deadline to reach, or a specific goal in mind (ie: I must finish this story before Wednesday or I am not allowed to eat cake for the rest of the month)? No. But if it isn’t crucial, I’ll let my mind wander.

5. Success is relative.

Comparing yourself to other people will never make you happy. When I was a little kid, my parents always told me, “There is always going to be someone smarter than you. There is always going to be someone better at what you want to do than you are. There is always going to be someone more successful than you. There is nothing you can do about it.” Jealousy and petty grudges will get you nowhere.

Am I saying that you need to love everyone equally and forego all righteous indignation? No. A little righteous indignation is good for your blood pressure, it turns out. The point is that having active grudges, dislikes, and “rivalries” with other writers is a waste of time and energy. You have better things to do with that time and energy. Get indignant if you must, but then walk away from that feeling, and stop. Thinking. About. It. Stop comparing yourself. Stop measuring your success against other people’s. Remember the immortal words of Jay-Z: Get that dirt off your shoulder.

What about you, readers? Do you have any pieces of wisdom you wish someone had tried to drill into your head when you were a wee writing sprout? Tell us in the comments!