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!

A long time ago I was working with this computer programer, a guy I honestly didn’t like all that much. He was stiff and conservative and thought I was a hippie freak. One day we were stuck having lunch together and I tried to make conversation by asking what he liked about programming. Suddenly his face lit up, he looked rapt and engaging. He spoke of ideal computer code. It was compact, easy to understand and did exactly what it needed to do in as few lines as possible.

Elegant code

I hadn’t thought of it before, but we designers strive for elegance too. He and I found a little common ground that day. Recently a newer writer in my writing group asked how one should show setting to the reader. I think he was looking for an exact answer like, “Describe at least two things per scene. Use no more than four sentences, but no less than three words.” Of course the answer isn’t that static or simple. Each story needs different things.

Elegant setting has just the details it needs to put the reader there

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

Neuromancer – William Gibson

Sure, each writer will create setting in their own way, I might do it with simple direct language. Maybe you’ll do it ornately. As always, when you’re writing the first draft, just write. But when you’re rewriting that second draft, you should interrogate each detail.

Does it add to the scene? No? Cut it. Does it contribute to the larger story? Is it clear? Is it interesting? What’s the right balance for that story? Do you have too many details? Not enough? Is your character in a blank room? Do you only have visual details, but no smells or sounds?

Newspaper comic creator Ernie Bushmiller, who did “Nancy” for decades, was famous for using just the right amount of detail. He would draw three rocks to show us there were “some rocks” in the background. Always three. Why? Because two rocks wouldn’t be “some rocks.” Two rocks would be a pair of rocks. Four rocks was unacceptable because it would indicate “some rocks” but it was one rock more than was necessary to convey the idea of “some rocks.”

Elegance

Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.

Waiting – Ha Jin

As you look over your writing, you might find elements to combine. Can something be visually presented and also give us an impression of smell? Or texture? It might be useful to go overboard in the first draft and write every detail. Then combine and compress them, see how few words you can use to describe your scene. If you go back and forth between adding and subtracting, you’ll eventually have the exact words that show setting, you might even slip in how the reader should feel about it. Boom! You have strong elegant description.

This process applies to dialog too. Readers mostly care about how the characters feel. They want to know how the characters are bouncing off of each other and how they each view the world. Add and subtract. Once you’ve communicated just what you need to say, it’s probably time to move on. Being elegant means always knowing when to stop. Too much dialog becomes mundane. Too little dialog and the reader might not feel the character. You have to cut out meaningless small talk, mundane things like ordering food or “Hi, how are you?” Replace it with things about the character and the story.

Beyond setting and dialog, elegance applies to all aspects of prose, including structure. How is your information presented? Is each detail coming at the exact time the reader needs it? How you parse out details is like the stones in a river, you don’t want them too close or too far away from each other. You need to build a path from the beginning to the end. That same interrogative technique applies to where you place information. Look at where you bring in detail and information. Have you described a room how a person just walking into it would see it? Is the reader learning things in an order that increases tension and interest? A well structured story is as compelling in structure as it is in content. The right number of words, the right words, showing up at the right time in the right order.

Elegance.

Dear Young Writer,

I see you there, poised over the keys of your Smith Corona typewriter. Pause for a moment and read this, if you would. I know, I know, you have a lot yet to write for that English class–and I know, too, about the extra credit assignment you’re stressing over for your history class. (You’ll need a new typewriter ribbon before you begin that one.)

The stress won’t ease for a long time to come, but you will find you enjoy it. Eventually. You will like deadlines–not merely for their whooshing sound; you will like having goals. Someday, you will discover you work well enough without them, too, because the work simply bleeds from your fingers. Some days, you won’t be able to stop the words; cherish these days, because they will be balanced by others, where it seems you can’t latch onto a single word and make it do anything worthwhile.

I know you think you can’t find your way, that everything is essays and reports at this point, but take heart that you will find joy in even these. Just wait until you read Lysistrata for the first time. You will discover something you can’t even imagine. You will discover exactly what words can do and will start playing with them yourself. When friends say “you could write better than this,” you actually dare to believe them–and commit words to paper.

Your first submission will be horribly mis-sent. Do you really think the audience of Seventeen wants to read about a young girl who survives a nuclear war? Regardless, make the submission, enter the contest, and keep watching your mailbox for a reply. It’s going to be the pattern for the years to come. Write, submit, and do it all over again. The shape of the replies will change–you will actually learn how to target markets and send them to appropriate editors. You will make a blunder with your first book–ah, the arrogance of the eighteen year old who thinks she knows everything about publishing–but no worries. You will learn from this, and carry on. And wait until the advent of email…

The rejections will grow deep. People will tell you to throw them away, but I wouldn’t. I would keep them, in a folder, in your file drawer. Some years down the road, you will look at them fondly (and the way MZB scribbles “doorknob!” on your manuscript–ah, keep that one, for it is a lesson you never forget!). Don’t resent them. Each one is a step along the path. Stephen King got rejections. J.K. Rowling, too. I know, you don’t yet know that last name, but trust me, you will.

You’re going to be in a terrible accident later this year; it will change the path your life takes. Take advantage of the time you spend at home healing to write and to read. Read everything. You will be faced with a tutor, which seems a terrible thing, but this tutor will introduce you to Japanese poetry. Hold to it. It will bring you one of your best stories.

As for the extra credit piece you’re going to write about the museum rats that come to life after dark… No worries–you get an A+, and you spook your teacher enough that he asks you to read the piece to the entire class. You will hate that part–you are ever the introvert–but you do love the looks on their faces, and the way the story affects them. That you will never forget.

love,

Yourself

Author James Van Pelt recently sold his one-hundredth short story. Here, he takes a look back and shares with us the things he’s learned along the way.

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When I was a kid, I dreamed a bunch about being an adult, about being big and accomplished and competent.  While my friends talked about being action/adventure heroes, though, I dreamed about being a writer.  The idea that there could be books in the world with my name on them?  Wow!

What’s been exciting is that in many ways, I have fulfilled my dreams.  At least I hit that important milestone for me of publishing a book.

One way of evaluating a writing career is by noting the milestones: the first completed story, the first professional critique, the first submission, the first rejection (and second and third and . . . you know how it goes), the first acceptance, etc.  Milestones mark the writer’s life.

For me, I just reached a significant one: I sold my 100^th story.  To get to it, I had to start twenty-one years ago, in 1990, when, after eight years of collecting rejections, I made my first short story sale.  The editor of a little magazine, After Hours, phoned me to say he liked my story, but none of it took place at night, a requirement for stories in his magazine.  Could I please make some part of the story take place at night?  I changed one sentence, and the sale happened.  I was now a published writer, a huge milestone.

If  you would have told me in 1990, after I made that first sale, that lightning would strike me 99 more times, including sales to Analog, Asimov’s, Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales and many others; and that my stories would appear in several “year’s best” anthologies; that I would have been a finalist for a Nebula; that I would have the stories assembled in three collections; and that after 100 sales I would still feel like a newbie, I would have laughed in your face.

One-hundred sales sounded more science fictional to me than any science fiction idea I ever wrote.

So, what has 100 sales taught me?

• Nothing beats opening up a new file on the computer, putting my name and address on the upper left hand corner, spacing to the middle of the page, and then pausing to consider the title for the new, unwritten story.
• Almost every story I’ve written has started with the feeling that the idea was inconsequential, and the only reason I was writing it was that I wanted to be working until a really good idea came along.
• At some point in every story, I’ve told my wife, “I don’t know what the heck this piece is.  It’s weird and I don’t know how to write it.”
• All my stories sound better in my head when I’m in the shower thinking about where to go next with them.
• Story writing is about discovery for me: both discovering what is going to happen next and discovering why the idea is important to me.
• Sometimes I think the only reason I write a story is so I can pile up enough words to justify being really lyrical for a paragraph.
• At some point in the writing of every story, I’m convinced it’s the best thing I’ve ever put down on paper.
• At some point in the writing of every story, I’m convinced I’ve never written worse dreck.

Along the way, I’ve also heard really good advice from other writers, publishers and editors:

• Long time editor, George Scithers wrote on a rejection letter, “I hope while you were waiting to hear about this story that you were writing your next.”
• I asked Connie Willis when she signed a book for me if she should would include her top three pieces of writing advice.  Her first one was, “Never kill the dog,” which I’ve interpreted to mean, “Don’t take cheap and easy emotional shortcuts.”
• James Patrick Kelly told me that the writing of his classic, “Think Like a Dinosaur,” didn’t feel any different to him than the next story he wrote which he was never able to sell.
• Ray Bradbury said, “If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without life, without fun, you are only half a writer.”
• I was on a panel with Terry Pratchett at WorldCon and he said, “Make sure your character doesn’t suffer from plucklessness.”  I’ve always liked that word, plucklessness.

But mostly what I’ve learned on the road to those 100 sales is that I was right when I was a little kid:  being a writer is very, very cool.

Writing gives me focus.  Whether I’m reading the news or watch a mini-drama unfold in the grocery store, or overhearing a too loud conversation, I think about story, about human interaction, and about significance.  Wherever I am, I think about description.  It’s practically a mantra with me: what can I see, hear, touch, taste and smell?  And whenever I construct anything with language, I’m aware of how sound effects sense, how connotation and denotation intertwine, and how words are metaphors.

Mostly, though, I’m blessed with the permission that all writers have: to close my eyes and imagine other people and worlds, to hear other conversations, and to live for a moment in someone else’s skin.

What being a writer has done for me is to let me remain a kid, where imagination holds its own with reality, and putting my nose to the grindstone means making it all up and pretending.

One-hundred story sales later, I’ve learned that it’s okay to dream, just like a kid.

This week’s blog post is about how to write rather than how to submit, which means that it’s going to be full of advice you either don’t need or won’t take. However, knowing that what I have to say is unnecessary has never shut me up before, so here we go!

Here’s a little-known fact! Most of the stories that get rejected from Shimmer are rejected because the slush reader(s) detect a deficiency in one of the core categories on our submissions check-list. Even though Beth told me not to give away our secrets on pain of death, I have risked receiving angry emails to show you this:

Now, most stories are able to get the first eight check-marks on their own. I’m here to talk to you about the mysterious ninth requirement. (The typo on page four is so that we can make sure our copy-editors are doing their jobs.)

The ninth requirement? Character motivations. No shit.

Look.

The most awesome stories have characters doing weird and unusual things. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be fiction, it’d just be a journal entry entitled, “Stuff I did today and my feelings.” Or your Twitter feed details about every meal you consumed in the past week. You know, boring.

However, sometimes when I’m reading a story, I still find myself wondering WHY, for the love of everything good and holy, would anybody ever do what the protagonist just did.

This usually stems from a shocking lack of self-preservation on the character’s part. Not, mind you, recklessness. If your protagonist is nineteen and is on their first drunken bender, I’ll believe almost any stupid thing you tell me they want to do. (Whether I’ll actually enjoy reading said story…)

Think about oft-parodied horror movie tropes. You know that getting out of the car in a creepy, abandoned gas station in the middle of nowhere in Northern California is a bad idea, right? Especially if it’s full of creepy vehicles and you can hear howling monsters, and there are dead animals everywhere! Don’t get out of the car!

Of course, if you need to put gas in the car in order to escape, or you just don’t believe in monsters, fine. There just needs to be a reason more compelling than, “The author thought that having the protagonist fight for their life at a gas station would be awesome.”

Or, take contemporary fantasy. I never have a problem believing that the vampire character drinks blood, wants to drink blood, obsesses about drinking blood, craves blood like a heroin junkie in withdrawal – whatever. But I do sometimes get jostled out of fiction where perfectly ordinary protagonists fail to react to their exceptionally weird neighbors.

Or “twist” endings. The character will be doing whatever it is that they do through the story, until they make a bizarre and unexpected choice at the end. I mean, I like being surprised, but just because I didn’t see it coming doesn’t mean that it was good. This is why “rocks fall and everyone dies” is a joke ending.

It sucks as a slush reader. Life is hard. I’ll finish reading these stories (assuming I make it to the end, but I digress) and feel strangely sad. I usually know what the author wanted me to feel, but all I end up thinking instead is, “But why would anybody DO that?”

The first step to avoiding this problem (yes! There is a plan! With steps!) is to make sure that YOU know why your character behaves the way they do. Why does your character want to join the evil empire? Why would anybody eat a frickin’ pomegranate in Hell? Etc.

Step two is also pretty obvious – make sure that the reader knows. There are as many different ways to do this as there are ways to write, so don’t let me cramp your style. Personally, I prefer subtle approaches. For instance, feeding the reader information slowly so that instead of getting an answer to the question, “WHY?” they just never ask in the first place.

You don’t want your reader to wonder about stuff like that while they’re reading. Wondering leads to thinking, and thinking leads to escape.

Oh man. So this is where I should tell you how to do this, right? Well, I can’t. You just have to try, fail, try, fail, fail, fail some more, revise, and then give up and submit the story.

Unfortunately, if I’ve got you paranoid about whether or not your character’s motivations make sense, the best test is to have someone else read your story.

Hint 1

If several readers independently tell you that they didn’t understand your character’s motives, you have a problem. If it’s just one reader, well, maybe they were having an off day, but try not to be too patronizing. These are SF fans, so they know all about revenge being best served cold, which means you won’t see it coming.

Hint 2

“But people just do that!” NO! NO! NO! Nobody cares! NOBODY CARES! Sure, people make stupid, terrible, awful decisions for no reason every day, (How else do you explain Easy Mac?) but readerly people like to pretend we aren’t the lowest common denominator. No matter how many people you know who Totally Behave This Way, if we’re supposed to sympathize with the character, we want their behavior to make some amount of sense. Probably.

Step three isn’t really a step, but it is an imperative sentence! “Don’t be neurotic.”

The submissions we get at Shimmer tend to be pretty good, so I see more problems like this than I do submissions in which the character’s behavior makes no sense.

Essentially, if you’re TOO worried about the story and you second guess yourself, it’ll show up in the fiction. (A rough indicator is usually too much internal monologue in which the protagonist thinks about what they’re going to do and why they’re going to do it. Which isn’t to say that all internal monologue is a Bad Thing, mind.)

I’ll be reading along and the character is about to do something completely in character. Maybe the vampire next door has just captured a new victim, and your kick-ass protagonist is about to break in the door and save the victim. Great! Exciting! But then the fiction shudders to a halt as the protagonist thinks something like, “I could have just called the cops, but…”

As a reader, I then start to think, “Hey, yeah? Why aren’t you calling the cops? They’ve got guns and like using excessive force.”

That’s the last piece of unsolicited advice I’m going to give you – don’t implant doubts in the heads of your readers. Because doubting, just like wondering, also leads to thinking, which leads to escape. And, subsequently, rejection.

As always, none of this matters if you do whatever you do so well that I don’t care.

I’m supposed to leave you with some kind of question that sparks comments, but I can’t think of any.

So… hey. Go write a story, or something.

Firefox 4.0 now calls the address bar in their browser the “Awesome Bar,” which has me envisioning a bar filled to over brimming with editors and writers. New and seasoned alike, everyone has their nook or cranny, shoulders rub, they buy each other drinks and swap pages in a haze of purple and green neon while Duran Duran and After the Fire pulse in the background. Books and magazines line the walls. It’s a place everyone is welcome–because everyone has come to find the awesome.

When I first started submitting my fiction to markets, I felt like they were all against me. There was no way I would even reach the Awesome Bar, because too many friends of editors blocked the way. Oh, I could see the pulsing neon, but couldn’t dance in it. Rejections piled up; could my writing suck this much? I couldn’t fathom it–it had to be the editors! They didn’t like me and loved only their close circle, so there was no way I was getting a drink at that bar.

Then, logic intruded.

Editors Aren’t Against You

Having become an editor and seeing how this side of the process works, editors really aren’t against you. A rejection is never personal. It’s the words that aren’t right, not you, because trust me, editors are looking for the awesome in every submission. Editors need your stories, otherwise they have nothing to publish. They’re always on the lookout for that fresh new voice, and want to share it with the world. Believe this.

We Want to Find the Awesome

Every story has the potential to be the awesome before we open it. I look at it as Schrödinger’s Submissions; before I open the story, it can be both The Awesome and The Not Quite Right. The scales are equally balanced. To keep them balanced, I usually don’t read the cover letter first, and I often don’t look at the title. I want to get to that first page; I want to see if page one rolls smoothly into page two and keeps me hooked into the story. Get me to the end of the story. I hope I make it every single time.

Finding the Awesome

We never know what flavor the awesome will take. I point time and again to Grá Linnea’s caveman story, “20th Century Caveman” (Shimmer #9), because this was not a story I expected to find awesome. The title gave me pause (which is why I rarely look at them before I start reading now!). Caveman, I thought. What? Can that even work? Really? By the end of paragraph two, I was already sold. Likewise with “You Had Me at Rarrrgg” by Nicky Draden (Shimmer #12). Zombies…wait, no, a zombie love story. Really? Really.

Defining the Awesome?

Almost impossible for me, because it can be a hundred different things. It may be a turn of phrase that links the entire story together. It may be a clever premise. It may be a captivating voice. Maybe it’s a point of view we’ve never seen before, a daring twist, or sometimes it’s an amazing blend of all these things. One of the best things? At Shimmer, we have seven people reading submissions. Each of us likes something different so your chances are that much better that your writing will strike a chord with one of us.

Come to the Awesome Bar

From prior entries here, you might think that working through the slush is a terrible journey. It’s truly not, because every story has the potential to be the awesome, to be the one we take to our fellow editors, “Heeey, lookit this.” Make this be your story. We want to see you get to the Awesome Bar and have a drink with us, as much as you want to be there!

Rock the Casbah

What are you doing with your writing today to reach the Awesome Bar?

In Shimmer‘s slush pile we see a lot of competent stories, many of which deserve a home … yet don’t end up with us.

Why?

We’re weirdos. We love weird stories that still work as stories. We love compelling characters and deep emotional impact and we love love love beautiful writing.

Good prose will keep us reading, certainly, but a strong, compelling, voice will win our hearts. (Note: We still might not buy it. The bottom line will always be stories that work as a whole.)

So, what is this strong voice we love so much?

Voice can be tricky to spot in writing. It’s easiest to see in first person. Check out the first couple lines from Erin Cashier’s “Near the Flame”:

Do you hear that character? Do you already have a sense of them? When voice is working you’ll see them as a unique individual person. You’ll start to see their worldview and attitude. More importantly you’ll see them as a compelling person, someone you’re curious about.

Voice is there in third person narration too, and just as important. Voice is one of the things that makes the story unique. You can spot some authors just by the tone and voice of their work.

In Jen Waverly’s “An Organization Man in the Time Long After Legends,” we see a very different worldview and tone, even though the character isn’t narrating himself.

Is there any doubt that the two bits are two different characters? By two different authors?

So, again, what’s voice?

It’s hard to pin down, but it should be distinctive without being distracting. It should ring true without sounding boring.

Easy to say, hard to do, right?

Lot’s of new writers worry about finding their voice. Honestly, don’t worry about it. I’ll give you some hints below to avoid weak voice, but really, the more you write, the more your voice will just come out naturally.

Here’s a secret: Voice is an element of style. “Style” is really just how each of us chooses to solve our writing problems. We try to interest the reader, to convey image and feeling and mood through these little black marks on paper. I might choose a casual tight voice, you might go for dense flowery speech. How we solve those communication and visualization problems becomes our style and, to an extent, our voice. We can’t help it.

That said, here’s three steps toward finding your own voice (and avoiding weak voice.)

Learn the basics

Sure, we all say there are only guidelines in writing and you can break the rules of grammar … but learn them first. Read Strunk and White, learn about passive sentence construction, make your junior high teacher proud.

Learn the basics so you’re coming from a solid knowledge of how writing works. Then feel free to play with language, experiment and see what works best for you.

Write strong and tight

Practice saying only what you need to say. Use only words that exactly convey what you’re saying. Look at your verbs. Are they exact? Are they strong and specific?

Look at these two paragraphs, which reads more compelling?

Sure, there’s information’s there. But do you really have any sense of Hal as a person? How about this instead:

In the second version, do we have more of a sense of how Hal see’s the world? Or the narrator? Or both?

No matter how you choose to convey your story to your reader, make sure you are doing so with clarity. Choose language as much for its effect as for what it says directly.

Learn, but don’t emulate. And while you’re at it, don’t try so darn hard

You come from somewhere with a local dialect. Your parents gave you their speech patterns, so did your school, and friends. There’s no such thing as right or wrong voice, so have faith that if you’re writing directly, truthfully, and with confidence your voice will compel. Don’t feel like you have to make everyone speak in stilted strange language, but do make sure your characters talk like someone.

So, what is strong voice? It’s writing that walks a balance between directness and confidence and subtlety and uniqueness. It’s loose and playful enough to sound unique, but grounded enough so as not to throw us out of your story.

In a way, having strong voice comes from learning all the rules you can, learning from everyone you read … and then letting yourself relax and just write with energy and spontaneity. The balance is in learning enough that you can forget it all and just write.

Does it still sound hard to write with strong voice? Then write. Write a whole bunch, garner your own set of skills and problem solving tricks, your own unique balance.

Keep on learning from the best, but don’t try to copy their voice. We don’t want to hear a new Ursula Le Guin, we want to hear you.

There’s a particular kind of story that shows up in my slush pile with depressing regularity. It’s characterized by the ending. Here’s an example (and pretty bad one, at that!):

Rodney aimed his gun at the betentacled horror that loomed over him. The creature roared at him in a voice that sounded like that of his beloved wife, Sheila.

“No, Rodney, no!” the foul creature roared.

But Rodney was not fooled. His beautiful Sheila was gone, long gone; she had been transformed by unspeakable eldritch powers into this drooling, ravenous beast. He pulled the trigger. The creature shrieked in agony and then died.

As Rodney stood over the body, panting, his vision seemed to clear, and he was aghast. It was Sheila laying at his feet, not a creature from the abyss! Oh no! He dipped his finger in her blood and wrote a message on the wall.

Then he raised the gun to his temple, and squeezed the trigger.

* * *

“Ewww,” said the cop, a rookie who had never worked a homicide before.

“Seen it a million times,” said his partner, a grizzled veteran. “Just don’t puke on the evidence.”

“You mean evidence like that message written in blood on the wall? That says ‘I KILLED THE MONSTER FROM THE ABYSS. I AM NOT CRAZY. REALLY.'”

“Yup,” said the veteran. “Tragic, ain’t it? Guy reads Lovecraft, goes insane, kills his wife, then himself. Yep, that’s what happened here. You can tell because she’s dead, and he’s crazy. That’s what happened. Saddest damn thing.”

Then they went to the old cop’s retirement party.

THE END

OK, see why that sucks? (I mean besides the clumsy prose, clichéd characters, and the tired reworking of Lovecraft.)

It’s insulting. I am smart enough to figure out that Rodney killed his wife and himself without the cop explaining it. Really.

It’s disengaging. Any time you shift POV in a short story, you risk losing the reader. You’re interrupting the connection I’ve formed with the character, and it takes a lot of skill to bridge that interruption so that the reader is transported easily. How much more disengaging is it when I’ve spent the entire story in Rodney’s head, watching with horror and empathy as his world disintegrates around him, only to find myself abruptly shoved off to two new characters that I don’t know about or care about?

It’s unnecessary. If the body of the story has done its work, you don’t need an extra scene to explain. If you find that your critique group is confused by your story, the answer is not to tack on an explanation, but to strengthen and clarify the main story so that your intent is unambiguous.

It’s oversimplified. Lots of stories create tension by ambiguity throughout–is Rodney insane? Or are there really eldritch forces at work? It’s Rodney’s story, and it’s his vision of the events. Don’t betray poor Rodney’s vision by replacing his experiences with a quick summary by a bored cop at the end. Stay true to Rodney.

It’s insecure. Have faith in your story and your skill and your audience.

Slush readers are like lonely folks sitting at a singles bar: we came here to fall in love.  The odds aren’t good because the goods are odd, as the old saying goes, but there is one truth—when we start reading your story, we want it to be beautiful.  Our Hope-O-Meter is maxed out.

What is our Hope-O-Meter, you ask?  It is the internal gauge every slush reader has when he or she reads a story.  As we lay our eyes upon the first sentence of your epic tale, we are filled with the hope that you—yes, you!—will win the Nebula for this very story.

What you as a writer must understand is that our Hope-O-Meter starts topped off—but as we encounter each bit of bad writing in your story, our Hope-O-Meter drops.

When we first pick up your tale, our Hope-O-Meter looks like this:

However, as we read on, we may discover a vital issue: we don’t care about what’s happening.  And usually, that lack of caring comes because we don’t know one of three things:

• Who is this character we’re expected to follow along until the end of the story?
• What is s/he doing, and why is s/he doing it?
• Why should we care about this particular action?

If we don’t know all three of those soon, then generally speaking we’re going to lose interest.  (Great writers can break any rule, of course… but if you’re a great writer, then why are you still in our slush pile?)

As we lose interest, we start to skim, looking to see if there’s anything else that might be kinda-cool—our attention fades.  We start thinking about the other twenty stories we have to read before dinner, and wondering whether this one is going to be a waste of our time.

We’re still reading, but at this point our Hope-O-Meter has dropped.  We’re not reading closely.  We have a faint optimism that maybe you can drag us back in, but it’s not a sure thing now.  Our gauge now looks like this:

Then at some point, we hit the final bump and our Hope-O-Meter has redlined.  We know that in our heart of hearts, we can’t recommend this story to our editor and feel good about it.  And we realize that we are going to have to reject a writer — which, since we are writers ourselves, never feels like a good thing.

How long does this Hope-O-Meter take to drop?  Depends on the writer; if you’re really incompetent, you can drop it all the way to zero in the first sentence.  But for most writers, you have until about the middle of page two before our Hope-O-Meter drops to the middle and we’re pretty sure we’re not going to buy your story.

The average point at which I realize that I utterly am not going to pass this on?  Page three.  I’ll skim to the end to make sure I didn’t miss a spectacular ending–but many slush readers won’t.  Thus, beginnings are vital.

So what you’re doubtlessly asking by now is, “How can I keep that Hope-O-Meter filled all the way up?”  And the answer is, “Get me to care about your characters, quickly and efficiently.”

How do you do that?  By answering the right questions.

Let’s take some real-life examples of openings from actual slush, and talk about where they went wrong.  I’ve filed off the serial numbers of these rejected stories, rewriting the opening paragraphs so that the flaws remain but the original prose has been burned away.

Jason’s hand trembled as he crouched in the bush and aimed at the slaver on the rooftop.  The slavers had come to Juniper County to put anyone they could find in shackles, so now Jason had no choice: he had to shoot.

The slaver turned, his eyes going wide as he saw Jason.  Jason pulled the trigger; the slaver’s head burst open.

Swallowing back nausea, terrified that someone had heard, he ran for cover…

This is an action-packed adventure, to be sure, but I’m already wondering one thing: Who the hell is Jason?

Because right now, we have a guy who’s shooting slavers in defense of his home town — something most people would do, I think — but we know nothing about him.  There’s some indication that he’s not an experienced fighter — the nausea, the nervousness — but it’s also possible that Jason could just be in fear of being caught.

That “who” makes a huge difference.  We don’t need to know that Jason is a Community College Grad who went on to become an in-home accountant with a moderate business and a flair for interior decoration… But we do need to know what he’s fighting for (does he have family here?), how experienced a fighter he is (since it’s going to make a huge difference to the story if he’s an experienced woodsman vs. an accountant who’s never fired a rifle before) , and what his ultimate goals are (escape, drive the invaders out, rescue a friend).

Does it need to be in the first three paragraphs?  Absolutely it does.  You don’t need to tell; you can show by having Jason, say, be a little concerned whether this Wal-Mart bought rifle will actually fire now that he’s taken it out of the gun safe — or you can have him be confident that Ol’ Bessie will do her job.  And he’s not just concerned about Juniper County as an abstract, he’s concerned about living long enough to find his beloved son Tommy.

Again, “Who” is critical.  It may sound silly— but for most writers, if they haven’t answered who this guy is in the first three paragraphs, they’re not going to answer it in the next fifteen pages.

At six o’clock on the dot, Damien clicked off his computer and stacked his unfinished paperwork neatly in his in-tray. The desk had become untidy over the course of the day, so he lined everything up geometrically; the desk blotter perfectly parallel with the keyboard, the monitor at a forty-five degree angle.

He made his way to the elevator, observing a spot on his shiny leather shoes.  He unfolded a handkerchief to buff it clean, then pressed the exact center of the button that marked the first floor.

When the elevator arrived, Damien spritzed the air with a small can of perfume, trying to neutralize the odors of stale BO and farts pent up within …

Good job!  In the first paragraph, you’ve up that Damien as a meticulous and retentive man.  I know who Damien is.

What I lack now is a “What.”

Why are we following Damien?  I need a reason that we’re here watching him, because if all that’s going to happen is an extensively-detailed trip of his journey back home, then I don’t care.  People do a lot of mundane things in their lives, but part of being a storyteller is leaving out the boring parts.

So why are we being asked to watch Damien buff his shoes and get on the elevator?  These are unimportant moments in Damien’s life, the kind of thing he’ll forget in an hour or so — so why should we be invested in them?

Stories should not consist of insignificant moments.

I know what this author is leading up to — somewhere around page two or three, Something Unusual will happen to Damien, breaking the pattern of his everyday life — but even a “mundane” life has tensions that can be called out.

Note how this opening has no real indicators of Damien’s wants or needs, aside from a clean shoe and a fart-free elevator.  It’s a kind of weak characterization, because it does tell us what his immediate needs are without letting us know what his goals are.

However, if we know that Damien is leaving work to go to a pick-up bar to try and get a girl, then suddenly all of these mundane details take on personal shape; he’s buffing his shoes so he’ll look good, he’s spraying the elevator to avoid smelling bad for his partner.

Or, if we know he’s going to visit his dying mother in the hospital, the rituals take on an air of desperation; his mother’s illness is out of his control, but he can control his own personal space.

Regardless, the point here is that just showing what a character is like is only half the battle; we need to know what that character’s goals are early on.  What’s Damien hoping to get done?  Even if the Devil is going to show up on page three and make him an offer, give poor Damien some internal goals before the first plot point arrives!

Beatrice stirred her soup in time to the rhythm of her husband chopping wood outside. Her cousin Jack took over stirring as she went into the bedroom to check in on Cindy. As Beatrice picked her daughter up, she wriggled and grinned.

This one has two problems.  The first is that there are too many generic characters to keep track of.

Interesting characters do things that no one else would do in their circumstance; that’s why you remember them.  After all, you’d probably be unlikely to walk into a cave empty-handed to try to talk a dragon out of devouring someone else’s crops, but that’s what Jim the Dragon Diplomat does for a living!

In this case, you have four characters in the first paragraph, none of them doing anything that makes them memorable.  Anyone can chop wood, if they need to.  Anyone can stir soup or check on a baby.

So the unspoken question is, “Why are we watching these characters?  What’s going to make them so fascinating I want to spend the next 4,000 words reading about them?”  And when you have not one but four characters, each doing generic things, you’re going to forget who’s who.

But even more than that, there are no interesting story questions.  This family seems fine.  The kid’s healthy.  So again, why are we here watching them?  I’m bored and slightly confused before the end of the first paragraph!  And so the hope-o-meter just dropped by fifty percent.

Maybe if the child was sick and coughing, that’d be something of interest — a little cliché, perhaps, but sick babies are a constant problem in frontier/medieval stories, and always significant.  Or maybe if we knew that they were all preparing for the night before the werewolves came to eat them.  (Or, more mundanely, that they were chopping wood and preparing food for winter… But hey, I read spec fic.  I expect blood and alien creatures.)

The point is that I need to know why we’re watching them.  Give me a reason to care, stat!

The work will take three months, and if done poorly, risks fatally poisoning you,” Nellie explained to the scent-engineer. “So I need to make sure your skills are up to speed.” She tightbeamed a spec over to his PDA; he whistled.

This is quite an unusual request,” murmured Paco.  “Even if you granted me full access to your family’s pheromone farms, I’m not sure it could be done.” He nodded, contemplating the request.  “But if so, I’m the only man who can do it.”

That’s the attitude I’m looking for,” she said, reaching out to clasp hands and seal the bio-contract.

So we have a clearly defined set of goals, an interesting job (pheromone farms? Scent engineers?), and a good story question: these two people want to accomplish something dangerous that’s never been done before.  So what’s the problem?

“It.”

A lot of writers, for some reason, think it’s more interesting to conceal the central premise of their story and then reveal it later on.  At some point around page five or six, we’re going to finally have the Big Reveal that what Nellie is looking for is an Enslavement Pheromone to turn humans into mindless ant-drones.  Mwoo hah hah!

Unfortunately, the irritation of leaving your reader in the dark is almost never as cool as your actual central concept.  Plus, to make this sort of delayed-reveal work, you usually have to work in a lot of awkward vagueness that competent characters wouldn’t actually engage in.  As the story goes on, you’ll have to keep referring to the Big Plot (or Hidden Monster, or Secret Goal) as “it,” and have the characters ask very nonspecific questions, and so forth.

All so… what?  If they get to the end of your first section, they’ll be hooked?  Have some faith, man!  If your concept is that cool, hook them right away!  You don’t need some artificial stall to build tension.

Break right out there with having her talk about her need for an Enslavement Pheromone.  Like Catherynne Valente says, get to the Ghostpigs.  And get there quickly.

…because man, a lot of you do this.  A lot.

The woods were moist with the morning dew, as the sun rose and lent a rosy glow to the land.  A deer, ever-vigilant, stopped to drink from a placid pool.  A fish flipped out from the pool, splashing the water and scaring the deer, who bolted into the thick brush.

Lance and Judy wiped the sweat from their brows as they set up the tent…

Writers love to start off their stories with descriptions of the landscape.  They discuss the roads and the weather and the creaky old house across the way and the gables of the roof… And then, after circling the point for several hours, they get to the actual story.

To be fair, some folks can pull off the all-landscape introduction.  One of the greatest novels in recent history, Watership Down, starts with an extensive description of the landscape.  (Though that was, it should be noted, a novel and not a short story — people have more patience for novels.)  And if you have a beautiful writing style, you can effectively start out your tale with a prose poem — enticing your readers with the mere power of evocative language.

Most of the landscape introductions, however, are like this — not particularly beautiful, not particularly florid, just workaday descriptions of the place the story’s set in.  And the place the story is set in is usually not that interesting, either — the tale’s in the deep woods, or the haunted graveyard, or the dark castle, or the mansion the rich people live in, or one of a thousand stock Hollywood sets that folks are traditionally placed in at the beginning of a tale.

Now, if a story started with, “The tendril-fields were wet and pulsing, the rose-pink tentacles reaching up to grab at the spine-birds that flew overhead,” then fine, I’d be like, that’s amazing.  Tell me more. But generic descriptions of landscape are a pace-killer.

Furthermore, note how this description of the landscape doesn’t tie into the story at all.  You could pretty much start with Lance and Judy and lose nothing except for a bit of visualization — and, with some competent in-the-body descriptions as Lance and Judy set up the tent, you could create that same woodsy atmosphere from Lance and/or Judy’s perspective.

The reason Watership Down’s intro works is because we really need to know the area the rabbits live in — it’s vital to them, and turns out to be vital to the plot — and it is elegiacally written in breathtakingly beautiful words.  If you can do neither, then skip it.

The wind whipped through my hair as I stood on the high precipice of the city. The sky was a chaotic blur of neon streaks of all colors, with vehicles zipping through the air, dodging their way around the acid rain-scarred skyscrapers of Keystone metropolis. The holographic billboards blared advertisements in Japanese and English.  It all looked a little faded, like an old video game on an antique system, bright lights going to seed.

This isn’t a generic landscape description, but it is clichéd.  Essentially, what we’re looking at is the Blade Runner universe, which we’ve been to a lot of times.

Be careful when you’re writing that you’re not inadvertently ripping someone off a little too much.  If you are — and it’s not an inexcusable crime, to want to play in someone else’s tone-poems — then be sure to start the story somewhere a little more unique to you.

Incidentally, this is why a lot of editors love reading stories by non-American authors — it seems like every other story I see features a white guy in a detective’s office, or a white guy scientist in his lab, or a white rich guy regretting his past actions, or something.  They’re all generically American, almost a blank space that we’re expected to fill in with our culture.

Whereas if you’re writing a tale of, say, Medieval Africa, you have to set up the atmosphere and setting, which makes it automatically more interesting just by virtue of being Not A White Upper-Class Dude In America Doing White Upper-Class Stuff.  Even if the writing levels of the two authors are exactly the same, the story with the more unusual background winds up standing out more.

You who know the comfort of sanity look askance upon me; I watch you as you view my broken spirit and walk away.  Yet my so-called madness has opened up new worlds within me; I feel jubilation, exhilaration, exhaustion.  You may flee, but I — I see the bitter truth.

This is a particularly bad example of the trope, but this is what I call the Abstracted Emotions Gamble.  You see this particularly in Lovecraftian stories.

Thing is, there’s a big difference between “he’s insane” and “he thinks bugs crawl into his ear whenever he talks on his cell phone.”  There’s a big difference between “He’s in love” and “Every time he fills up at the gas station, he buys a single flower for his wife and leaves it on her pillow.”  There’s a big difference between “exhilaration” and “The story you spent three months agonizing over just found a home at Shimmer.”

Stories are about concrete details.  If you write about emotions as though they’re just these abstracted principles, then your story lacks all power.  When you write about characters feeling stuff, get as gritty as you can; it’ll make them more unique and pay off, and it won’t make us slush editors go, “Oh, yes, another story written by a madman who doesn’t actually sound all that insane.”

In Conclusion

Not giving us the answer to “Why should we care?” is the most common way of losing us as a slush reader, but there are a thousand others — simple grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, names that are too silly (“The Farhplock was in high dunder that day, given that the Kapl’u’rk’a had been stolen”), submissions that are clearly not a fit for our magazine, and of course the ever-popular “This story doesn’t actually start until page six.”

Best of luck! If this is of interest, let me know; I may follow up with a note on “Why did this fail?” — an essay on endings that don’t quite work.