Alyx Dellamonica’s photostream on Flickr.
Just a random assortment of images from my various travels over the last few weeks… enjoy!
Alyx Dellamonica’s photostream on Flickr.
Just a random assortment of images from my various travels over the last few weeks… enjoy!
Thursday’s words came to 360 on the story and 696 on the novel, bringing my total to 4024 words.
And I posted the following sentence from the story temporarily known as “Wetness” to M.K. Hobson’s Buck for Your Best Sentence challenge:
“Blue-tinted, mad-eyed, with the monstrous slickness of a newborn, it flailed, trying to gain control of its storklike legs.”
First, Clarion West Write-A-Progress: (Sponsor me here!)
Total= 2968
June 22 – 609 words (novel)
June 21 – 942 words (novel)
Meanwhile, participants, M.K. Hobson has pledged a buck for your best sentence.
I have successfully grown, ripened and eaten three strawberries in my deck garden so far this summer. There will be more, potentially quite a few of them. Many, unfortunately, will be mutant berries like this fellow here:
I attribute this to the insect warfare raging out on the deck. The garden’s just big enough to support a lively colony of ants, you see, and they are enthusiastic aphid farmers. Each spring when the tulips have come and gone they pack the strawberry stems with little black aphids, so that each stem looks like a miniature football team huddling under a green umbrella. I retaliate by kidnapping unsuspecting ladybugs from the neighborhood fennel plants, and dropping them at the base of the strawberries.
I didn’t think this had worked at all this year, but about two weeks ago I went out and found a ladybug laying eggs on my pansies, and a few days ago I dropped a ladybug in the berries only to realize that there was nothing there for her: all the little black huddled dots were the husks of aphids that had been sucked dry.
So the berries took a hit, but I’ll still get some deliciousness out of it, not to mention the entertainment value derived from the carnage.
Once you have critiques in hand from a workshop, how do you take your first-draft story and turn it into a marketable commodity? Which criticisms do you take to heart, and how do you decide which to set aside?
At every stage of the writing process, your instincts must work hand-in-hand with hard-won skills. The good news is that as you write, workshop, and revise stories, these instincts and skills will naturally improve. Practice really does make perfect! The more you read and critique the work of others while simultaneously exposing your own fiction to critique, the better you will become at polishing your work.
A reasonable plan for starting on post-workshop revision might go like this:
At the end of this process, you should end up with a list of things you are going to do to the story… one that doesn’t include the criticisms you have decided to set aside.
Set that list out of sight and start revising the story. Don’t look at it again until you feel as though your draft is coming together. Then compare the work you’ve done with the list you’ve made. See which problems you haven’t addressed yet, decide whether they are still valid, and keep at it until you have–in one way or another–dealt with every item.
At this stage you should have a nearly marketable manuscript, and it is very worthwhile to do one or two more passes through the story at this stage specifically to polish your prose. (More on prose here!)
Marketing
With almost all of my classes, the final assignment is to create a marketing plan for your piece–to identify a number markets that might be interested in publishing your fiction… and figuring out which of those markets to try first, second, third, etc.
Before sending out your manuscript, have a look at Vonda McIntyre’s manuscript preparation notes. Follow them scrupulously unless the specific market guidelines are different… in which case, do everything the editors ask.
Questions to ask when seeking markets for your story:
What is your chief goal in marketing the story? Are you chasing your first sale? Do you want a market that will qualify you for membership in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America? Is the pay rate a higher consideration than the relative prestige of the market? Are you willing to wait on a good market with a slow response time, or is a fast acceptance or rejection important to you?
If you have read this magazine or this editor’s anthologies before: Is your work like the fiction that appears in this market? Does the editor publish writers whose work is similar to yours?
Is the market appropriate? Does the market accept the genre of story you have written? Does it have a minimum or maximum word length? Is it on any “dead market” lists?
Novelists have a luxury that short story writers do not enjoy: they have fifty to a hundred thousand (or more) words in which to achieve their desired effect on readers. Those working with the short form of fiction labour under many of the same obligations: we have to create a universe, populate it, and paint a workable story on its canvas… but we have to do it at about one-tenth of the length. On the plus side, short story writers don’t usually have to explore the extended history of the world they are writing in, let alone generate maps! In short fiction, we rarely have to generate subplots for our stories, script extensive biographies for our principal characters, or create and educate readers in alien languages.
Many novels open slowly–they still have hooks, but a chief concern in beginning a novel-length work of SF often lies in establishing atmosphere as well as providing extensive setting and character details, giving a reader a sense of the novel’s milieu, establishing the author’s prose style, and setting out the principal symbolic and thematic elements of the piece. Stories do some of these things, but swiftly–we must introduce our story elements in a few paragraphs and then get on with the business of moving our conflict forward.
The trickiest issue in pacing short fiction, of course, is that your prose cannot seem breathless or rushed: unless you are writing an action sequence or another type of quick and choppy scene, your story has to feel unhurried; the reader must have time to breathe. Nobody wants to be quickly ushered through a plot and dropped off at its ending without so much as a wave goodbye. Somehow you have to provide a leisurely tour of your setting and a strong sense of your characters while carrying us swiftly to the story’s conclusion.
The key to the unhurried brevity demanded of short fiction is the power of suggestion. Letting small details suggest volumes about your world and its people is tricky, but it is also a technique well worth learning. Examine how various SF writers accomplish this in the assigned readings and other stories; then look at your own work and see where your strengths lie.
If you can evoke your setting with a well-placed phrase here and there, if you can help a reader understand your character’s motives with the right snatch of dialogue or telling action, you will have more words left free for critical story issues: character transitions, exposition on the trickier elements of your SF concept, and polishing your prose to make the story a seamless and suspenseful whole.
Questions to ask about pacing: