Write

Articles about craft.

What the Editor Sees (That the Writer Does Not)

by

This post by Savannah Thorne originally appeared on The Review Review.

When you submit to a literary magazine, do you ever wonder what is happening to your work on the other end? Has it disappeared into an editorial netherworld? What exactly is taking so darn long for them to get back to you? And is it true that the longer the editors take with your work, the better they like it?

I was delighted to be published in Conclave: A Journal of Character‘s inaugural issue, and when I heard the magazine was at risk of not continuing, I took over as managing editor and have kept it going for years, incorporating e-books into the equation. When I stepped in, I found myself with a huge, year-long backlog of submissions to wade through, and as I learned the ropes, I realized I was in the unique position of being an editor and a writer at the same time. It gave me insight into both sides of the desk. What I’ve collected here is the behind-the-scenes truth about what happens to your work after it’s been submitted and some dos and don’ts to get your work noticed.

So, what happens to your work after you’ve hit “submit?”

At Conclave, like many literary magazines, your work appears in our online submission manager and sits there with a status of “received.” It will stay “received” even after a real human being opens it and glances at it. If they know it’s way off for the magazine’s needs, it may be quickly rejected. If it has a hook, is well-written, and seems to draw the reader in (and, in our specific case, if it’s based around a strong character), then the first reader forwards the file to another reader. The status switches to “forwards.” Editors can vote on it, and if they choose to they can also write notes about it

The longer an editor takes with my work, the better…right?

I’m sorry to have to answer that with: Not necessarily. In actuality, submissions come in, and although they are arranged by date, then author’s name, title, and genre, I can assure you that these things get little attention. It is the quality of the work alone that determines whether a writer is accepted—whether it’s their first time being published, or their thirtieth. The very first thing we do is open the file itself, and read it. It doesn’t matter who you are—it matters what your story says.

 

Read the full post on The Review Review.

 

What Seth Godin Can Teach Us About Book Publishing

by

This post by Jennifer Tribe originally appeared on clearprose communications on 5/14/14.

If you’ve ever read anything by Seth Godin, you know he’s not a man who’s content to just go with the flow. He’s been questioning and analyzing the business world — “poking the box,” as he calls it — for decades.

He applies that same inquisitive nature to publishing, too. Godin is the author of 17 bestselling books that have been translated into dozens of languages. He’s worked with a traditional publisher and he’s experimented with self-publishing. In other words, he’s been around the book block quite a few times.

Godin’s commentary on the book publishing industry is some of the sharpest I’ve read, and his techniques for crafting and promoting a book are often ingenious.

If you’re a non-fiction author, you’d do well to tear a page from Godin’s playbook — here’s how.

 

1] Understand that the idea is the thing

In Godin’s world, a book is a vehicle for an idea — the idea is the product — which means that right now, the traditional publishing industry is focused on the wrong thing.

[Publishers] will only thrive if they understand that an entirely new business model will have to be built and understood. And it will have nothing whatsoever to do with paper. It will be about ideas.Which is what book publishing was supposed to be about all along, right?

 

Click here to read the full post on clearprose communications.

 

Five Reasons Great Horror Stories Work

by

This post by Joe McKinney originally appeared on Moon Books on 10/5/14.

There is a fine art to scaring people, and like all art, it is the product of raw talent honed by craft and technique. No one can teach raw talent, of course. You either have it or you don’t. But craft and technique can be taught, and in the following few sections I’m going to walk you through five basic characteristics that all great horror stories share. Learn to incorporate these into your stories, and you’ll find your stories make more sense and, hopefully, sell better.

 

Creating Insularity

First, let’s talk about your story’s setting.

The key to good, memorable horror is much the same as it is in the business world – location, location, location. Many beginning writers come up with potentially great settings, be it an abandoned town, or a graveyard, or a mill, or a big scary house, and then fail to carry through on its potential. As a result, their great setting never rises above the tired old mainstays of B grade horror.

Think about all the great works of horror you’ve ever read. My guess is that, in every single one, you can point to the setting and say, “That right there sealed the deal for me. When the mother and child were trapped in that Pinto in Cujo, I was scared. When the priests entered Regan’s room in The Exorcist, I felt her bedroom door close behind me. When Pennywise the Clown spoke to the children of Derry, Maine through the drains in their bathrooms, I wanted to escape.”

But why does Stephen King’s story about a creepy old hotel in the middle of nowhere get the scares, and Joe Schmoe’s story set in a similar creepy old hotel fail to deliver? Well, think of some of the words I used in the previous paragraph. “Trapped.” “The door close behind me…” “Escape.” In every sense, the effect created is one of insularity. Through the characters in the story, we get a sense that we are closed off from the rest of the world, that we are no longer free or able to run away, that we are shut in with something very bad.

 

Click here to read the full post on Moon Books.

 

Ten Things That Make an Editor Stop Reading Your Manuscript

by

This post by Elizabeth Law originally appeared on her Elizabeth Law Reads blog on 7/16/14.

Inspired by Broadway personality Seth Rudetsky‘s extraordinary “Seth Rudetsky Reveals the 5 WORST Audition Mistakes,” I humbly offer my own List of Dreaded Errors you should try to avoid in your children’s or YA manuscript.

#1 NOTHING AT STAKE FOR THE READER This is a BIGGIE, because readers, and maybe even your editor, will forgive a multitude of sins if you’ve got this one working. Is there something in your story we’re rooting for?  A character we care about whose situation we can relate to?  Don’t give us a kid who has a lot of things to say about his life, his parents, his school, his crush, but doesn’t have any problem that pulls us through your book.

#2. THE VOICE IS TOO YOUNG, OR TOO OLD, FOR THE AGE OF KID YOU ARE WRITING ABOUT. Think carefully about what your character would notice at his or her age. And please don’t try to sound cute. Deliberately misspelling something to appear childlike, or having your character say, for example, pasgetti instead of spaghetti, may cause an editor to turn off his computer and start rummaging for an Advil.

 

#3. TRYING TO SOUND HIP, STREET OR ETHNIC IF THAT’S JUST NOT YOUR THANG. We editors implore you to cut this one out! I’ve seen Italian mothers come out with sentences that are practically “Mama mia, that’s a spicy meatball” or an Asian kid in a lunchroom say “my grandfather says, reading enriches a man, conversation makes a man shrewd.” Really? A kid in the school cafeteria would say that?

 

Today this mistake turns up most often when writers try to write in what I’ll call Black or Latino street lingo. We need diverse books, absolutely. We all agree on that. But you don’t have to try to right every wrong in your own novel. If you can’t comfortably and naturally write in a particular dialect, don’t do it.

 

Click here to read the full post on Elizabeth Law Reads.

 

Science Says You Can Split Infinitives and Use the Passive Voice

by

This post by Chris Mooney originally appeared on Mother Jones on 10/3/14.

Steven Pinker explains why you don’t have to follow bogus grammar rules.

Leave it to a scientist to finally explain how to kill off bad writing.

In his new book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, Steven Pinker basically outdoes Strunk and White. The celebrated Harvard cognitive scientist and psycholinguist explains how to write in clear, “classic” prose that shares valuable information with clarity but never condescension. And he tells us why so many of the tut-tutting grammar “rules” that we all think we’re supposed to follow—don’t split infinitives, don’t use the passive voice, don’t end a sentence with a preposition—are just nonsense.

“There are so many bogus rules in circulation that kind of serve as a tactic for one-upmanship,” explains Pinker on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “They’re a way in which one person can prove that they’re more sophisticated or literate than someone else, and so they brandish these pseudo-rules.”

Unlike past sages of style, Pinker approaches grammar from a scientific perspective, as a linguist. And that’s what leads him to the unavoidable conclusion that language is never set in stone; rather, it is a tool that is constantly evolving and changing, continually adding new words and undoing old rules and assumptions. “When it comes to correct English, there’s no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum,” writes Pinker in The Sense of Style.

Indeed, Pinker notes with amusement in the book that in every era, there is always somebody complaining about how all the uncouth speakers of the day are wrecking the Queen’s English. It’s basically the linguistic equivalent of telling the kids to get off your lawn. Why does this happen? “As a language changes from beneath our feet, we feel the sands shifting and always think that it’s a deterioration,” explains Pinker on the podcast. “Whereas, everything that’s in the language was an innovation at some point in the history of English. If you’re living through the transition, it feels like a deterioration even though it’s just a change.”

 

Click here to read the full post or listen to the podcast on Mother Jones.

 

Likeable, Relatable, and Real

by

This post by Annie Cardi originally appeared on Ploughshares on 9/17/14.

When I was a junior in high school, we read The Great Gatsby in English class. I hadn’t read the book yet, but I knew the rest of my family hated it. (They’re Hemingway fans.) “Ugh, that Daisy,” my mom said. “Who cares?” Obviously a lot of readers care about Daisy and Gatsby, but many readers also place a priority on likeability.

On popular review sites, reviewers refer to everyone from Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley to Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester to the cast of A Visit from the Goon Squad as unlikeable. Part of this is a personal taste issue, but it also deals with what kind of people we want to surround ourselves with. A novel that’s over three-hundred pages long is a fair time commitment—it can be grating to spend that much time with a character you wouldn’t want to interact with on a daily basis. Likeability is about ease and comfort and a kind of emotional bond. Connected to that is the issue of relatability, which NPR host and producer Ira Glass brought up when he tweeted that Shakespeare’s plays and characters aren’t relatable.

 

Click here to read the full post on Ploughshares.

 

4 Completely Scientific Ways To Know If Your Content Is Compelling

by

This post by Jennifer Miller originally appeared on Fast Company’s Co.Create on 9/23/14.

What makes for compelling art? Any creator who has given half a thought to paying the rent, or achieving immortality, has considered what makes art sell. We know that the notion of quality–the idea that “the best” art and marketing and media reaches the most people–is insufficient to explain what gives some creations mass appeal. So why do people–large number of people–find books, ads, movies and art works compelling? How can we know, ahead of time, what will pique our curiosity and sustain our interest? Jim Davies, an associate professor at Carleton University’s Institute of Cognitive Science and director of the Science of Imagination Laboratory wanted to find out. The result is a theory of compellingness, outlined in his book Riveted: The Science of Why Jokes Make Us Laugh, Movies Make Us Cry, and Religion Makes Us Feel One with the Universe.

Davies’s entry point into what makes art riveting, however, did not start with an analysis of best-seller lists or top-40 charts. He came to the question of compellingness through the one thing in human experience that has inspired passionate feelings (good and bad) in the majority of the world’s population: religion. “Unless a religion is compelling in some way, it’s not going to take off,” he says. “Religion has explanations, stories, rituals, and that all caters to our basic psychological proclivities.” Today, he says, we treat old religions, like the Greek myths, as though they are works of art. “Those were stories that people wholeheartedly believed. Even an atheist can look at stories from Bible and admit that they’re good stories.” So what makes religion, and its compelling counterpart, art, truly riveting? And what impact will that have on the way we create and consume culture?

 

Click here to read the full post on Co.Create.

 

You’ve Been Writing Sentences Wrong All Your Life! Find Out Why

by

This post by K.M. Weiland originally appeared on her Helping Writers Become Authors site on 9/21/14.

The sentence. It’s the building block of all books. Without it, we may have a poem, a song, a movie, a painting, an interpretative dance. But we sure as scuttlebutt don’t have a book. Most of us learn how to write (and diagram!) sentences in grade school. Out of the many potential pitfalls of writing a story, surely the simple sentence isn’t likely to be one of them. But what if I said you’ve been writing sentences wrong all your life?

And I’m not talking grammar here, folks. You can have a perfectly parsed, perfectly punctuated sentence that would have that grade school teacher of yours blushing for pride—and it can still be wrong as wrong for your novel. (I’m also not talking motivation-reaction units, or MRUs, which I’ve addressed elsewhere.)

Why We’re All Writing Sentences Wrong
So what’s with this pandemic of poor sentences? Why are even the best diagrammers amongst us at risk?

Basically, it all comes down to this: we totally take the sentence for granted. The very fact that we’ve all been writing more-or-less grammatically correct sentences for most of our lives means we don’t even think about what we’re doing. Subject? Check. Predicate? Check. Period at the end? Check. Done.

That may be good enough for your latest email to the bank. But it’s not good enough for an author.

 

Click here to read the full post on Helping Writers Become Authors.

 

How to Appropriate by Not Really Trying: An Author’s Guide to Writing Socially Marginalized Communities in Romance

by

This post by Heidi Cullinan originally appeared on her blog on 9/23/14.

I hate to start a post with a dictionary definition, but this topic needs every card laid out on the table. Let’s begin with the beginning. Appropriation is the act of using something that doesn’t belong to you as if it does.

Authors do this hourly. It’s practically our job: we’re professional pretenders. In my published career alone, I’ve appropriated more than I have time to list, but let’s tick off a few. Long-distance truck drivers. Pawn shop owners. Ballet dancers. Football players. Poker players. Italians.

Drag queens. Practitioners of BDSM. Persons with OCD and autism. Transgender women. Gay men.

Some of these things are not like the other. If a poker player reads Double Blind and feels I got something wrong, their personal injury goes no deeper than annoyance, possibly with a side order of irritation. The same goes for the truck drivers and football players and Italian families. None of these groups currently experience deep prejudice. If I screw up when I borrow them for my work, the egg is on my face alone, and they have every right to call me on it. They will do this from a position of if not privilege, at least a confidence in their semi-comfortable place in our common culture.

If I misrepresent the groups italicized above, matters change quickly. Every group listed have been significantly marginalized by the societies in which they exist, and by simply declaring themselves part of that community, the members experience prejudice, social stigma, and often outright abuse. If I screw up when writing about these groups, not only do I have egg on my face, I contribute further harm and insult to persons already bearing a full plate of social struggle. If they simply hear about it happening, that’s bad enough. But if they purchase my book to see themselves represented in a positive way, and I slap them in the face? That’s bad. That’s very, very bad.

 

Click here to read the full post on Heidi Cullinan’s blog.

 

The Craft of Voice: Part 1

by

This post by JJ Marsh originally appeared on the Vine Leaves Literary Journal on 9/8/14.

In this section, I’m looking at choices: person and tense, distinctive character voices, Point of View (POV) and how to make the reader take sides.

I assume you have a Work-In-Progress (WIP) or some material you can use to practise the exercises below. If not, use the exercises to create some, or play with an existing work.

 

Person

The most popular ways of telling a story are in first (I) or third person (s/he), although second person (you) has occasionally been used to powerful effect in such novels as Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City. Some books make a feature of switching the person. For example, in Complicity by Iain Banks, the readers only know we’re in the killer’s head by the change to second person narration. Many writers have strong opinions on which is best and why. First person aficionados cite intimacy and identification with the narrator. Those who favour third quote the freedom of being able to change characters or observe things the narrator cannot see/know. (WARNING! See POV points below*.)

Publetariat Editor’s Note: asterisk refers to another section in the full post, linked below.

 

Tense

 

Click here to read the full post on the Vine Leaves Literary Journal.

 

What’s in a Word: Emotional Atmosphere

by

This post by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff originally appeared on Book View Cafe on 8/25/14.

Like all writers, I have a special relationship with words. In my case, I love them. I am fascinated by the way they work (or fail to work), the myriad ways in which they can be misunderstood, misused, even abused by people who don’t know any better or who should know better or who abuse words with malice aforethought.

I know some writers who have a love/hate relationship with words, who claim they hate using them but love having used them. I don’t get that at all, so I’ll leave it to someone else to blog about that. This blog is about the use of words to create emotional atmosphere.

As a writer of fiction, I rise or fall on how well I can use words to create an atmosphere in which my characters live and move and in which my readers exist with them during the length of a story. Words are symbols. They are signposts. They are colors. They tell the reader how to view a place, a person, a thing.

There are two parties to this, of course, the writer has to know how to use the words, but the reader has to know how to read them. This requires a shared knowledge base or shared experience or, at minimum, a shared definition and/or connotation for the words.

 

Click here to read the full post on Book View Cafe.

 

Top 25 Reasons Your Submissions are Rejected

by

This post by Heidi M. Thomas originally appeared on The Blood-Red Pencil on 9/30/10.

Tips from the Surrey, B.C. Writers Conference (Oct 22-24). Each year agents and publishers conduct an exercise, where they read aloud the first pages of writers’ submissions to see how far they would read before it would be rejected. Here is a list of reasons for rejection, courtesy of Anne Mini, Author!Author!:

1. An opening image that did not work.

2. Opened with rhetorical question(s).

3. The first line is about setting, not about story.

4. The first line’s hook did not work, because it was not tied to the plot or the conflict of the opening scene.

5. The first line’s hook did not work, because it was an image, rather than something that was happening in the scene.

6. Took too long for anything to happen (a critique, incidentally, leveled several times at a submission after only the first paragraph had been read); the story taking time to warm up.

7. Not enough happens on page 1

8. The opening sounded like an ad for the book or a recap of the pitch, rather than getting the reader into the story.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Blood-Red Pencil.

 

Want to Successfully Publish? First, Are You a “Real” Writer?

by

This post by Kristen Lamb originally appeared on her blog on 9/15/14.

For many writers (me included), we don’t start off with the confidence to yell to the world, “I’m going to be a professional author!” Heck, I wrote a 178,000 word “novel” and still didn’t believe I was a writer. Later, I had over a year and a half of consistent blogging under my belt, multiple short stories, and newbie novels that had been at least good enough to win prestigious contests and yet….

I was not a “real writer.”

Schrödinger Writer? If you put a writer in an office at a keyboard, is the writer alive or dead (real or fake) until the book is published?

 

We’ve Come a LONG Way, Baby

The literary landscape has shifted dramatically. More avenues of publishing have opened and become appealing, thus this silly question of, “Are we a real writer?” holds far less power. Believe it or not, when I began blogging, I dedicated countless posts to answering this very question. In retrospect, I did it for me as much as for others.

I’ve always asserted that we are what we do. What is our primary career focus (beyond a necessary day job)? The second we sit at a keyboard and write, we are writers. Yet, as my first “novel” glaringly illustrates, we might not yet be a “good writer.”

 

Click here to read the full post on Kristen Lamb’s blog.

 

The Inspiration Drought

by

This post by Ed Finn originally appeared on Slate/Future Tense on 9/16/14.

Why our science fiction needs new dreams.

This piece is part of Future Tense, a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University. On Thursday, Oct. 2, Future Tense will host an event in Washington, D.C., on science fiction and public policy, inspired by the new anthology Hieroglyph: Stories & Visions for a Better Future. For more information on the event and to RSVP, visit the New America website; for more on Hieroglyph, visit the website of ASU’s Project Hieroglyph.

Why are all our narratives about the future 50 years old? We seem to be recycling big ideas as if we live in an inspiration drought. We’ve retooled Star Trek so many times, it’s starting to look like one of those 1957 Chevrolets still cruising the streets of Havana.

One reason is that writing about the near future is hard to do convincingly. Imagining life 10 or 20 years down the road requires placing the same big bets that science fiction always makes (in the future, we will all wear matching leotards!) but provides an incredibly short runway to get from now to then.

Storytellers can play it safe by depending on tropes that we have already been trained to expect: In the future people will use phasers and doors will swish open with a satisfying noise. We make a comfortable nest of assumptions and “rules,” allowing everyone to get on with the tale of young love or the hero’s journey.

 

Click here to read the full article on Slate/Future Tense.

 

12 Most Go-To Grammar Tips

by

This post by Becky Gaylord originally appeared on 12 Most on 8/19/14.

Most of us must communicate in writing — not necessarily with paper and a writing instrument anymore, yet digital media has changed only the tools we use. In fact, as new-fashioned means of communication have multiplied, so have demands for the old-fashioned skill of conveying information in writing.

See, we still write cover letters, memos and notes. But now, we also write status updates, blog posts, emails, online comments, tweets, bullets for slide presentations, captions for visuals to share on social media, and so on.

In nearly all cases (text messages aside) correct grammar matters. This is especially true if communicating for work or to a professional audience. Using correct grammar begets credibility. Think of it as an extension of appearance: Spiffy beats sloppy.

The goal, though, is to be spiffy, swiftly. And that’s the purpose of this post: It’s an organized, streamlined guide. It’s alphabetized. And, it gives one-word answers. (Example sentences follow each answer, giving context.)

So, next time you need grammar help on the fly, here are 12 go-to tips!

 

1. Accept/Except

Accept = Receive
I must accept blame for the accident because I ran the red light.
He accepted the award on behalf of the whole group.

Except = Excluding
Everyone is going except Harry.
I like all vegetables except broccoli.

 

2. Advice/Advise

Advice = Noun
The advice you gave me was really useful.
No, I don’t need, or want, your advice.

Advise = Verb
He advised her to be careful in dealing with the complicated situation.
I don’t know anything about it; please advise me how to proceed.

 

Click here to read the full post on 12 Most.