Rants

November 1, 2005

New FAQ Items

I'm not in the USA. Will you accept my manuscript?
Yes. Send us a postal card with your email address. We will email you back with a foreign submission code and instructions for submission by email.

Where should I send my query?
We don't take queries.

Why?
We don't want to read your hype about your story. We want to read your story. Send your story.

So I should send my query where?
To your mother. To the Pope. To Hell. Somewhere it will be read, because we don't read them here.

But I really want to send a query.
We really will throw it away.

How about if I send a query by e-mail?
We will throw it away.

Can I send my MS by e-mail?
Only if you live outside the United States. We do not accept e-mail submissions from authors inside the United States.

Why?
Because we mark up the submissions we get and write notes on them and send them back. (Yes, we actually critique submissions.) We can't do that well by e-mail BUT to send a foreign submission back, we must fill out customs papers at the Post Office, and that is 1.5 Royal Pains. So foreigners get a break.

But e-mail is so much easier to send.
And it is easier to throw away.

What address should I send my MS to?
Where should I send my foreign permission request?
3418 Morgan Ave. N.
Minneapolis, MN 55412-2336
USA

Is there any other address I should send it to?
No.

Are you sure?
Is there some page on our website showing a different address? Did someone tell you something different? Is some page on our website confusing you? Please write the webmaster about it.

November 1, 2005

A Year of MSS in Review (2005)

I just read over my replies and critiques to everyone who sent us an MS in the last year, and I have some observations. If you are a writer who wants to submit here, please pay attention.

Tell your story
Almost everyone who submitted a novel had a "prologue" at the beginning of their book. Of course, I don't want to read a prologue (what comes before your story), I want to read the logue (your story). Please, just tell me your story.

I understand the curse of backstory. Believe me, I do: I have been coaching a fellow for a few years now, and mainly I have been saying, "Tell your story." You see, he has several tens of millions of years of history all mapped out, and he knows it to whatever level of detail he likes—and that's a log jam for him. "How can I say this without saying that? How can I say that without these? How can I say these without those?" etc., to infinity and beyond.

I finally told him, "Imagine a baby born on your world right now. What does the baby know about any of that? Do its parents sit it down and tell it ten million years of history? Or does it just muddle along, knowing what it knows, wondering what it wonders, stumbling when it stumbles? Doesn't it have an exciting life of exploration and discovery? Can your reader have the excitement of exploration and discovery with it?" That seemed to break his log jam.

Now I say unto thee, O ye of backstory curse, tell your story. Unless your protagonist reads the prologue, too, it doesn't know what's in the prologue, so why should the reader know what's in the prologue?

There is some small chance you named your first chapter "Prologue" because you thought that was how it is done. That is not how it is done. That is a fad. Name your first chapter "Chapter One" so readers will know it is the first chapter and not a prologue. Woe unto the author who falleth into the Pit of George Lucas, where #1 is #4, and #5 is #2, and #7 is…#7, now that I think about it.

It is also possible you decided the only way to get an editor interested in your book is to bait a hook and throw it out—your prologue. It contains a tidbit of the exciting part, the climax of your drama, something to tide the reader over the dull parts until the interesting part gets there; some reason for the reader to continue past the mandatory "setup" portion of a novel's form to the part you really wanted to write anyway.

Let's look at the movie Alien. How does it start? Does it go credits, parasite exploding out of John Hurt's chest, everyone killed, the end? No. It starts with the crew waking up. Well, you do that every day, so that can't be exciting. But wait—waking up is unusual for them. And so it goes:Yaphet Koto and Harry Dean Stanton are pestering the others for a raise, for the gods' sake, for an everyday thing like a raise when the parasite explodes out of John Hurt's chest. At dinner, no less. Life as usual…almost.

Let's turn that around. What do you think it's like on the parasite's homeworld? You think they spend all day exploding out of hosts' chests? Nah—all the hosts would be dead by now. Yeah, they probably go down to the 7-11 and get bad coffee; worry about how they will clear their throat and not burn a hole in sidewalk when they spit; get takeout for the kids because they are running late from work; have some dental work done on that inner mouth bicuspid; SSDD on Parasite Homeworld, where the parasites are nothing special. They are only special outside their own nothing-special place, and you must show what place they are in for them to become special to the reader. Show normal and build up to abnormal and keep me interested and screw that prologue.

The Most Popular Story Line Ever Sold
I'm beginning to wonder if authors are reading the same set of books before they begin to write, because I see the same kinds of plots over and over. A couple of years ago, the plot was, "I am a California upper-middle-class suburbanite teenage girl who is transported to a fantasy land where I am mistaken for the Promised Princess. No one will believe I am not her, and to get back home, I must undertake a great quest. So I tell everyone I am the PP and that we must undertake a great quest. I grow up a lot on the quest and get home (or not) and am happy. Did I mention there's a cute prince? There is. It adds a certain romantic tension to my story."

(For those of you who are about to complain I am oversimplifying and thereby pulling the teeth of an interesting story, I give you Hamlet: "While I was at college, my uncle killed my father and married my mother and SO did not get caught…" Notice the whole death/incest/injustice thing is already working, and that's just the backstory, which comes out when a ghost appears. The ghost is the normal/abnormal thing working, just like I said, and the "exploring it with the protagonist" thing, too.)

This year, I had a lot of "woman alone" stories: "I am a woman alone. I am alone because my husband works a lot, or I just went through a bad divorce, or my boyfriend's picture is in the dictionary next to the 'psychopath' entry. I can't reach out to others because I am so hurt. But I must, especially to that neighbor who is so nice to me, because I am alone and I want to find love again. I also have some kind of special power or potential. Maybe I see the future, or I'm connected to a serial killer, or I can sense an ancient evil. I'm also usually pregnant so I can blame my problems on hormones or a protection instinct or like that. I often have a cup of tea in front of some big window, look out, and muse on my past for the reader's edification. Anysway, the nice neighbor is usually the antagonist and trying to rip the baby from my womb or something; and any cute but creepy guy turns out to be not all that creepy and the one who really helps me escape the Plot Device."

Yes, these plots were very much the same. Unfortunately, the characters were also very much the same, as you can see by my summary. Since there are a maximum of 36 plots, and since clever story mechanics lead to soap-opera-dom, your story should focus on character and what it means to be human. I frequently wrote things like, "Why am I interested in this character? What if this character had died in a car wreck three months ago? How would your plot device play out? And how would your story be different? If not different, then your character was no one special, and that weakens your book. If your character was not special but somehow protected from things like car wrecks, the protector is a deep structure in your book that needs to be brought out. What else is this protector up to? Is it a person, that is, something with a history of deliberate action; or is it like gravity, dumb but subtle and pervasive, bending us to its way (literally)?" Focus on your characters and try to examine your own presuppositions about your book.

Style vs. Content
It appears many authors choose a way they are going to write—a style—before they choose what they are going to write. It's as if they say, "I'm going to write a fantasy novel. Fantasy novels sound like this: 'the great forest of Delbinwyn strode across the plain to the sea, its vast bulk broken only by the River Dlebniywn, which ran, in force, to the capitol of Eldnibnyw, Ledibnnwy.

Mighty Ledibnnwy sat, upon a bluff, assailable only from the river's side, where walls stood tall, strong, and redundant.' So, I'm going to write my story about a farmer with that sound. 'Delbyrt, son of Eldbyrt, stood tall upon his farm. It ran from his stone house, the family manse for 150 years, down fertile fallow fields to the Byrtdel River. It was the time of planting, and the sun's yet-weak rays were only just warming the sacred earth. "Moo!" bawled Bossy, the dominant ruminant of his herd. "Moo!" Delbyrt laughed aloud. "And a mighty 'Moo!' I moo unto you, Bossy!" She tossed her behorned head in confusion.' Man, that sounds great!"

Uh, yeah. And the story was…?

Putting style before content also leads to other troubles. For example, if you're puffing your literary cheeks on every paragraph, it's hard to write an action scene. You write "His furry flanks were soaking wet and very hot and great, black flies were buzzing about on the little wound openings the solid, heavy bullets had bored into his broad, tawny hide, and his big yellow eyes, narrowed to slits with viscious hate, and looking straight ahead, only blinking his massive lids when the terrible pain came again and again as he breathed, and his long, sturdy claws dug deeply into the dark, soft sun-baked earth. All of him, great pain, pernicious sickness, black hatred and all of his remaining brute strength, was coiling, tightening into an absolute concentration for an overwhelming rush. His great ears could hear the hated men talking their talk and he waited cooly, gathering all of his great powerful self into this secret preparation for a deadly charge as soon as the despised men would come into the tall grass that hid him so well. As he heard more clearly their man voices his whiplike tail stiffened like lumber to twitch and jerk up and down, and, as they came warily into the edge of the grass hiding place, suddenly, a rough, coughing grunt exploded from his throat and he charged full speed at them."

The original passage reads: "His flanks were wet and hot and flies were on the little openings the solid bullets had made in his tawny hide, and his big yellow eyes, narrowed with hate, looked straight ahead, only blinking when the pain came as he breathed, and his claws dug in the soft baked earth. All of him, pain, sickness, hatred and all of his remaining strength, was tightening into an absolute concentration for a rush. He could hear the men talking and he waited, gathering all of himself into this preparation for a charge as soon as the men would come into the grass. As he heard their voices his tail stiffened to twitch up and down, and, as they came into the edge of the grass, he made a coughing grunt and charged." (From "The Short, Happy Life of Frances Macomber" by Ernest Hemingway.)

The Bad Text misdirects the reader from the action by detailing everything that can be detailed (almost every noun has an adjective in front of it). It distracts from the lion's reasons and actions. It's like being so close to a painting that only the brush-strokes are visible; you must step back and lose the individual strokes to get the power of the full image. Yes, Starry Night turns on the crude quality of the brush-strokes in it, but Van Gogh was trying to control your eyes, and the visible physicality of the strokes work like the walls of a maze, channeling where you look. His content—the swirly nature of the sky, moon, and stars—determined that style. Content before form.

But be careful. If you give unusual weight to one part of your content, it can distort your story. For instance, one MS I received read, "An imposing male figure came out of the fog." Why was it a male figure and not a man? Imposing in what way? Tall? Big? Both? It turns out the main group of characters were all mice, and the author didn't want to give that away until a later part of the book. So, it's a "male figure" and not a man, and the author is trying to convince me of the relative proportion of this figure, so I'll know he's big even though mice are small. In Watership Down, who's the biggest rabbit? That's right, the one with the knot on top of his head. Bigger even than General What's-his-name. Does the fact he is a rabbit keep me from believing he's the biggest damn rabbit I'll ever see? No. In my mind, he's the size of a tank, and he's still as small as a rabbit. If your content is subordinate to a plot device, be careful, or it may pretzelize your prose.

Your Book Should Make Sense
Now, I'm never going to write back to you to say, "Ghosts! Ha!! Everyone knows there's no such thing as ghosts!" or "Faster-than-light space travel! Get real!! We don't even have a patch on a theory of a science to produce a technology that could travel faster-than-light!" or anything like that. When I say, "Your book should make sense," I mean it should make everyday sense.

For example, I recently read an MS in which the protagonist was a social worker. She was held up as a paragon of social-working virtue, always putting the kids first, even if she had to cross powerful interests to do so. In the third scene of the book, she waits in her car for a patrol officer to accompany her on her next call. Neighbors have reported children being beaten in the house next door, and the house is in a bad neighborhood, so she wants protection. The officer arrives, and they spend the next 15-20 minutes sitting first in her car and then in his, talking about their relationships, angling for a date, etc. Glad the kids were so important.

In the next scene, she spends 30 minutes investigating the report. When she tries to question the drunken father-figure, he attacks her with a knife. She must defend herself. Gee, I guess there really isn't a cop around when you need one—even if you bring your own.

Almost every book I get has this kind of hole. Sometimes it's small (wasn't he already sitting down?) and sometimes it's big (Why is the spaceship control tower acting like they just saw his spaceship? Don't they have RADAR or LIDAR? Didn't he file a flight plan before he left Mars? Almost all planes, even light one-seaters, must file a flight plan. Could he possibly take off from Mars without telling someone? Doesn't his spaceship have a transponder that shows his ship ID?). Sometimes it comes up because you're highlighting something that isn't part of your story and isn't important (if the tower control guy isn't a hard-ass, the other questions don't come up, so cut that scene out). Read your own book as if it were a movie, and see if the moments and the scenes go together. Think about the implications of what you write for the world you are writing about, and see if they make sense.

Spear-carrying
There has been some movement to replace this phrase with the phrase "fact dump", but I like the original. A slang term from theater, "spear-carrying" evokes the image of the warrior with a spear who enters the throne room and states, "I have just come from the front," which lets the king say, "What news of the war?" and the spear-carrier then relates everything the audience needs to know to understand the play. That's a good, clear image, and you should look for those spear-carriers in your book.

Do you remember I said a character said about herself, "I often have a cup of tea in front of some big window, look out, and muse on my past for the reader's edification."? The musing part is the spear-carrying. When facts start coming out of somewhere—a character or the narrator or an ass—that's usually a sign of spear-carrying. It's bad because it isn't your plot; it isn't your character; it isn't a world action (like a thunderstorm or a sunset); and it isn't a character action. Since those are the only things that should be in your book, you've jammed in something that doesn't belong.

Now, a clever author will find a way to make those facts belong. One way is to make them part of what characters do. For example, in El Dorado, John Wayne and Robert Mitchum are good friends, but they haven't seen each other for 10 years. If John Wayne starts saying what he did, that's spear carrying; so when John Wayne says, "Let me tell you what I've been doing for the last 10 years," Mitchum says, "No, let me tell you," and proceeds to demonstrate he's been keeping track of John. When Mitchum offers his tale, Wayne turns the tables and does what Mitchum did: demonstrates he's been keeping track for 10 years. Now we know what we need to know about who these guys are, but what we know came out of who they are—good friends who are interested in each other even if they are separated. The character-motivated fact dump proved who they are and informed the audience.

You see this kind of thing work again and again. The first few minutes of Mission: Impossible is spear-carrying, and that's OK because spies need dossiers. Most police procedurals have someone dumping facts about a suspect, a victim, a case, etc., which is acceptable, because that actually is how police behave. Scientists can give lectures, doctors can consult, and so on. A function of character.

But how many pulp-science-fiction characters does it take to change a light bulb? Two: one to change it, and one to say, "As you know, Bob, late in the 19th century, the search for electric illumination was at a fevered pitch…" So, it can go badly. Any time a sidekick asks for information, you're in trouble. Any time a "known expert" begins pontificating, look out.

It's also a problem if your spear-carrying interrupts the flow of your story. I often see authors write like this, "Lord Blin drew his sword, his long, black hair trailing in the wind of the storm, the raven tresses a chromatic counterpoint to his silver cloak and silver armor inlaid with gems, and thrust. Lady Libn, her gossamer chainmail glinting in the lightning, reflecting a spiderweb of energy on her high, aristocratic cheekbones, parried." This is an action scene. He thrusts, she parries. Why water that down with spear-carrying about their looks? Imagine a movie made that way: Arnold picks up a gun, and the camera pans over his pants, shows how they are tucked into his boots, goes along his boots and back up his pants, jumps to his wrist, spends a minute or so on his watch, and he shoots. Pretty dumb. Stick to the subject of your scene and bring out facts about the characters as necessary.

(If you want to see a classic spear-carrier turned inside-out, watch The One and Only with Henry Winkler. He portrays a man playing a guard in a pretentious and overbearing play called God's War. When he is done, the play's audience cheers.)

Exeunt Omnes
I think that covers the biggest flaws I saw this year. There were others, but they were usually unique to the book is question, like a particular flaw in a particular character. If you can eliminate these problems, you are much more likely to make the first cut.

November 15, 2003

Writing From the Inside Out

I want to talk to you a little bit about writing a story. (I don't really care how long a story you are thinking of—anything from a novel to an aphorism will do, as long as it tells a story.) Some of these things have been banging around in my head, against my head and each other, and it's probably true that having them out will reveal some thread that holds them together, so here they are.

I think you should write a story from what interests you about it. When I "feel a little prayer wheel turning", I usually ask myself what it is that has set that wheel in motion. What happened to me recently that stirred me up? And I follow that as far as I can, hopefully back to the story.

I hope you will note carefully that I said "stirred me up." Sometimes the wheel turns because I'm upset—mad or frustrated or hateful—but sometimes I'm downset: it's such a beautiful day, or I see some woman that makes my heart halve its time but double its sound, or something else joyful. I'm all stirred up, and that's what I'm looking for.

Now, part of writing is searching for that feeling, that stirring; and part of writing is learning to hear its tiniest whisper. People don't realize it, but it's true. If you're lucky, that stirring comes on like a hurricane and you run like hell for the keyboard and you hope it doesn't burn your brain or blunt and bloody your fingers before the blow is over. But there's beauty and joy in the gentle breeze, and you can learn to tune your ear to that intimate breath by writing when you have the slightest inclination to write. In my own case, if I'm of a mind to write a sentence, I do; and if there's more, I type until it stops coming out. What I got for that, and what I say you'll get, is an increasing sensitivity to the stirring and an increasing skill in bringing out what it is that's stirring you.

I think a lot of people start with an idea, try to run with it, and hit the wall. I often have people say to me, "Listen, I had a great idea for a story," and they tell me some setting and some people in it and some constraints in the setting that give the people trouble (what your English textbook calls your "conflict"), and I say, "OK, then what?" And they throw up their hands or shrug their shoulders, and so much for their story.

Well, what interested them in that fragment of a story in the first place? If it was some of the ideas, then the right thing to do is follow the idea—stirring and pile up more ideas on this thing. If it was the setting, then pile up more settings. If it was some relationship between the characters, then pile up more relationships. When the pile gets big enough, it becomes like a jigsaw puzzle, and you can sort through the pile of pieces and see which ones fit up against what you've got and set the others aside. You can always try them again later, because they might fit each other and you can see that better when you've put some of them in place. The advantage over the real jigsaw is that you can always make up your own pieces when you need more—pile on more of whatever it is that's got you right now, and try to fit them in again, and so on. (I guess I don't really need to lecture you on jigsaw puzzle technique; I just wanted to line out the metaphor a little so you can run with it yourself.)

Let's take one example. Let's say the person I'm talking to says, "Well, it seemed really cool!" OK, cool is OK, let's go with that. What else is cool to you? And I don't mean you should make a Mac-Davis-esque "I like little baby ducks" list. I mean you should stick to the subject (your story) and the context (your story) and say things that might happen (in your story) that would be cool. Make a big pile of cool things and start sorting through them. "It would be cool if they had two heads; it would be cool if they had webbed fingers; it would be cool if they could only eat Jell-O™ brand gelatin desserts..." etc. It's your list of cool—it's what you're interested in—it's what stirs you.

In hopes of spurring you to it, I'll tell it to you as it happened to me today. There's a young lady on campus I love to look at, and she takes her lunch about the same time I do. Actually, I have changed the time I take lunch so I can get there about five minutes before she does and sit across the quad from her and steal looks. In case you didn't get the message, I'm on about her; and in case you're worried, I treat her like a living painting. You wouldn't get bent if I were going on about Mona Lisa right now, but you might get bent if I said I had crossed the velvet rope to feel the painting. Well, I haven't crossed the velvet rope, and I don't intend to. I'm admiring the brush work, end of story.

She normally takes the whole hour with a friend, eating and smoking and talking; but today, her friend buggered off early, and she brought out a book. My heart kind of leapt up because now instead of "Portrait of a Girl Taking Lunch with a Friend" it was "Portrait of a Girl Who Likes to Read."

Or so I hoped. I went back to my own reading for a minute because I'm trying to steal looks, to get them artfully even thought I want 'em by the bushel basket. When I look up again, she's really reading the book—after ten years of riding the bus and watching all manner of humanity reading books, I can tell: she's really reading it because her head is bending way too far forward so she can look down at the book. Her head drifts down a touch more, so she might be asleep, I guess, but then she turns the page and doesn't lift her head so by the very gods she is reading that book.

YES! Sweet! She likes to read or she wouldn't be so neck-bendy caught up in it. And so I have my little fantasy about talking to her about reading, which I know will never happen because I'm staying on this side of the velvet rope and I'm over here and the painting's over there and that's how it is. But I pick my fantasy up (not too tightly—kind of like a squirmy puppy), and all that feeling I had I bring back here to the keyboard and I write it down and I build up to it and away from it, and it makes a story. Or part of an essay, like this one.

I wrote from what stirred me.

Sometimes it's small. I've been listening to crows for a long time, and I heard one make this kind of a clatter the other day. I'd never heard that before, ever, and that was an amazing moment. Or I looked at the color of a peach once, the rich, dark red of ripeness and the red-freckle change to the paler sunless side (which is golden none-the-less), and that veneration of color found its way to a morning in a market in a Gulf-coast city in the American south. Sometimes, it's small.

And you write from what you hear or see or feel that stirs you, and you learn to hear better, see better, feel better—and you write better, because it's authentic, and people can tell that. They really can. And they can tell when it's the other way, too—all cardboard cutouts and paper dolls you are merely putting through the motions.

If you accept what I say, then I've trapped you. It takes a certain level of maturity, a certain sentience, to be able to have your own moments and just experience them and yet also be able to re-enter those moments and see how you looked to yourself in them. I don't say conscious here—there are plenty of writers who aren't conscious of their process but still have it firmly in hand, even if they keep that hand in shadow—I don't say conscious, but I do say mature, sentient, self-referential. I might mean self-reflective, but I'm going to stick with self-referential because I intend you to refer back to yourself and what stirred you.

A baby can't do that. A baby jams the food in its mouth, and it's either good or bad, swallow or spit. A baby doesn't have enough discrimination to set aside the rush to feed and take the time to taste. It's something you have to learn, and will you get better at it if you don't do it? No. You have to practice and mature and mature your taste.

Oh, I trapped you again: the only way to mature your taste is to vary what you eat. You have to take the optometrist's approach: better like this, or better like this? Which means you have to read what you like to see why you like it, to find out what stirs you in what you like to read. How did the author do that? Then you have to read a little away from what you like so you can highlight the flavors of what you like—something to compare to. Better like this, or better like this? You want fries with that? You know, I go to White Castle once or twice a year and order a Gut Bomb just to clean out the system; and every so often, I read a really bad book for just the same reason. But I don't just jam it in, like a baby; I taste every underdone and overdone morsel in that miserable excuse for brain food, and I learn from it.

You have to read your own work the same way. It's easy to get close to a particular word or phrase—I've had to cut five "gems" out of this essay, and I'm about to cut another one in the paragraph immediately above—because it's your baby, it came out of you, you gave it life; but sometimes your baby doesn't tell your story. It sits there and goos and looks cute, but it directs the reader away from the thing that stirred you up, so...it's got to go. Some writers get all colicky and try to spit up on you when you tell them that, and their only hope is that they will grow teeth and learn to chew their own food and move on to taking nourishment from things with substance.

Another part of this is looking back from today at what stirred you or didn't stir you yesterday. I just remembered studying "Cargoes", a poem by John Mansfield, when I was a high school freshman. We were doing meter and rhythm and onomatolliteration and all that, but it didn't really seem to apply to the poem. I couldn't figure out why, then; but it's quite clear to me now, some donkey's-years later: Mansfield intended to show how we think of the past as being finer and more noble; and how we perceive our present as being workmanlike at best. He reflected that in the words he chose for each stanza: each one moves forward in time, and each one becomes more harsh and more choppy, until he's finally talking about lumps of coal.

I think it's important for you to understand I haven't read that poem since I read it then, and I didn't find it on the web before I wrote this. I'm writing down what I remember from yesterday, and I'm writing about missing something as a child that is almost crudely obvious to me as an adult. Other than the coal thing, I really only have my images, and now I understand them, and I understand the feelings he was trying to evoke. At the time, we plodded through a mechanical analysis, and I got nothing.

So, I make my final run and loop back to the still, small and how to respond to it. Three paragraphs ago (the one that ended with "substance"), I took a toilet break, and while I was...toileting, let's say, I thought of Mansfield's poem. I certainly could have shoved it aside, rinsed, dried, and returned to typing; but I asked myself why I was thinking of that now, now, of all times, now. Why now? Can it mean anything? Is this the finer exhortation of the Muse? And yes, it turned out, that rapping as if someone gently tapping was the wind, but something more. Images from my childhood, a re-interpretation as an adult, a little Ah! about someone else's work that I might now bring to my own.

Ah! you might be saying. Ah!

Or so I hope.

September 14, 2003

Trimming the Fat

As before, you have good core skills that need to be polished. One thing I can see you need to polish is cutting out cool things you love that don't have anything to do with the story. I was just going on about this to my son because he's been stage managing a play directed by the woman who wrote the play. Well, the director has to take a much harder look at the play than the author does, because the director has to make it work in the real world. Something that reads great might not speak great; or it might be impossible to have a character on one side of a stage and then on the other in the time allotted; or whatever. The director has to spot all those things and eliminate them while conserving the author's intent.

When you are the director of what you have written, it's hard to cut any of your baby out. You have the same problem here: to be a professional, to have pro quality work, you have to approach your own story with a directorial eye, and sometimes something cool has to go. I remember Niven and Pournelle wrote that they moved an entire planet just so they could keep a cool line in one of their books; but sometimes it has to be the other way around—the planet can't move, and the cool has to go, and you have to conserve your intent.

That kind of requires you to know what your intent is. I say "kind of" because there is a head-long or pell-mell quality to writing, and I don't want to say that quality should be eliminated. When the Muse is riding Her horse, let Her ride. (It's often hard on the horse, but there's always a good story to tell later at the horse bar.)

When the ride is over, it's another thing. You have to be able to say what your intent is, or you have to be able to sense it and tell when it's been violated or diluted. In this way, prose becomes like poetry, where changing a single word can make or break the work.

The problem is (if I may paraphrase) poesy is the last refuge of scoundrels. While that doesn't make every poet a scoundrel, it does mean an editor has scoundrels to root out as they try to hide themselves behind the pristine monolith they call their text. The text and the story are not one unless you have genuinely achieved poetry in your prose. Few authors have, and it falls on us as authors to learn to purify the text until it is whatever it needs to be to tell the story in the way we intended and nothing more—or less.

Now, you may be saying, "I did that. I read it and read it and hacked on it and stuff. And you say it isn't good enough. So why bother?" Because it's a skill, and that means it takes practice. You have to learn to read your story in a disinterested way, the way a law judge is supposed to look at a case on trial. You can't be saying to yourself, "Oh yeah…here comes that really cool part," and then ignore what's happening in your story right now because it's only holding you up from the cool part. The cool part might not fit in this story, and you can't ignore that either. You have to have a sense of the story as a whole and keep and cut with that whole in mind, disinterested about what's cool and what's not.

I also detect two other things in this story, and I'm rather reticent to say anything about them because I'm really only interpreting shadows. The first of these Damon Knight points out in his early fiction, and I see some of it in my own, so you should look at yours for it, to wit, fantasy fulfillment or "my personal dream" stories. In Knight's case, he says, he was an only child and lonely, so one of the first stories he ever wrote was about a boy who invents a duplicating machine and makes many copies of himself. The story petered out because he didn't really have anything for them to do after that.

(Sidebar: Waterston wrote a very funny Calvin and Hobbes set on this very thing, and what made it work was Calvin's own recalcitrant personality—he wouldn't take orders, even from himself, and he got himself into a lot of hot water. What did the dupes care? They hopped back in the box, unduped themselves, and left original Calvin to take the rap. Knight also wrote an entire novel called A for Anything about what would happen if such a duplicating machine was invented. So, even failures have some potential.)

In your case, I think the personal fantasy thing is, "All my problems will be overcome by a miracle from a distant place outside me." In thinking back over whichever stories I've read, there's often a quality of "I'm just kind of living my life, which kind of sucks, and then this thing happens to me, and it completely changes everything, and I succeed." The magic microphone, Mozart from the sky, and now being the chosen one. You can decide for yourself if I'm brimming with caca, but if I saw it there, it may be there, so look close.

The second of these is putting your character in the situations you believe happened to you emotionally. I'm not saying these things did or didn't happen to you as represented; I am saying that kind of writing tends to be one-sided because the antagonist is always unreasonably mean and the protagonist is always unreasonably a victim. Believable writing has to have some perspective in it, so you have grant some humanity to the antagonist or the antagonist is merely a juggernaut and might as well be a tidal wave because a tidal wave is inhumane and unstoppable. Antagonists aren't unmotivated cutouts acting on your emotional stage, even if that's how you perceive the antagonists in your life.

Short version: you are writing in some of your own blind spots, and you'll have to look in them to get the depth you need to go pro.

That's the overall case as I see it. My specific comments are in the green pages. Keep writing—with all my complaints, your idle doodles are still better than the last nine months in the slush pile. The difference between you and pro is about 50 hours of writing.

August 11, 2003

A Sour Belly

Some of you, I'm sure, have been wondering where your manuscript went when you sent it to Stone Dragon. That would go as far back as, well, almost a year ago for the slush pile, and maybe up to a year and a half for one particular person who sent me a book by email. The story you are about to hear is true—only the nothing has been changed to protect the innocent.

Yeah. Well, after doing Stone Dragon for, I don't know, three years of startup and six years of doing it, I hit what is called a Bad Patch. Now, if you have ever hit a Bad Patch, you know that you always think it will be over tomorrow, but it never is, but you can't see that, and then you wake up and it's been like almost 730 tomorrows, and the Patch is still Bad.

So. At that point you say to yourself, "Self, maybe it is that I should just stop doing this since this Patch is Bad and doesn't really seem to be going away on its own, like that one rash that one time." And you look at the ways you could stop. One way is you could announce that you are still in business but not really looking at MSS right now; but then you remember 1) it took almost two years for people to stop sending things to your old address even though you had pretty well decapitated someone on live network television to get the attention you wanted when announcing the address change; and 2) most of the sites that carry information about you seem to be run by Other People Having Bad Patches. Therefore, if you said that, you would probably not be able to unsay it between now and the time the next Dino-Killing Asteroid hits the Earth.

OK. Another way to do it would be to quit. That would mean 1) you were a quitter; 2) you had wasted almost 10 years of your life on being a quitter; 3) all this totality of hours done by your webrat would be, in the Shakespearean mode, for naught; 4) you were a quitter. At this point, I was kind of thinking like George Gobbels: "I know my limit, but I always get drunk before I reach it."

Well. Now that slush pile is taking on the aspect of a big, kraft-colored monolith, all tall such; and you are taking on the aspect of a prehistoric hominid monkey thingy, all tool-less and such, and it's like all you can do is try to fearfully poke at the BKM and try to lick it or taste it without it (doing a thing monkeys fear) to you. There is much ooking and squeaking, and the occasional scream of being improperly displaced by another ooking squeaker. (This latter was strictly a matter of form as you are the only monkey in the editorial offices at the time.)

Hm. And one day, you come back from work—whatever kind of work it is that a hominid monkey thingy does all day (it was prehistory, which means no one kept track of the hours they worked or what project they worked on)—and the BKM Hip Mo Tizes you and makes you whip copies of The Elements of Style at the image of a writer slaving over a hot wordprocessor; and makes you tie an MS into a knot; and makes you laugh an evil laugh outloud until the neighbors call a Certain University to see if a Certain Book has been Borrowed and Read at Home Without Proper Protection.

Then it's like totally the next morning and your mouth tastes all like envelope glue (after you pry it open) and there's this pile of pencils and now you know what they are for so you lay into the slushpile and beat holy hell out of every MSS in the thing.

Hup. And then you get this idea: if you go to a convention, you could bring the pencil down totally and completely hard on some author's head, and it would be all OOK! and SQUEAK! and the author would be all SCREAM! So you do, in a bar, because that's a water-hole, and you and all of the other editors are dancing around and beating the dead author with various writing implements (because it's so obvious now what they all are for) and poking it a lot and drinking bourbon. And it turns out to be good for the author (being dead, that is) because, like L. Ron Hubbard, this author did its best work after being dead, and it wins the Hugo, the Nebula, the Tiptree, and the Some Other Good Award posthumously for the 20-book trilogy written posthumously.

Koff. And that's the truth about why you had to wait so long to get your MS back. That and the fact that I really had a sour belly of people's over-written books, especially anything that reads Prologue on the first page.

July 20, 2003

Read Your Manuscript

A good editor works to conserve the author's intent. A bad editor often tries to emboss an author's work with his or her own frustrated impulses. A good way to protect yourself from a bad editor is to edit your own work before it gets to an editor.

Can you do that? You probably can. When your work is complete, wait a few days—a couple weeks is good—and read your work the way an editor would: from front to back as if you had never seen it. Try to get an overview of your work, a feel for the story as presented, a feel for the characters as presented. It's no good to read the story with your full knowledge because the editor and your potential future reader only have your book as presented.

Is your story consistent as a whole? If not, why not? Where is the hole, the jigger, the inconsistency? Are your characters who they are throughout the book? If not, why not? Where are their holes? (If you wrote them with holes, then their holes have to be consistent and not have holes, either. This is the core of tragedy, for instance: the character has a fatal flaw that cannot be overcome.)

You also have to look at individual scenes to see if their content and context match. I was watching Justice League for what turned out to be the last time. There was a hurricane or something in Metropolis, and its winds were so strong that a full tanker truck was blown sideways off a bridge. That's pretty strong. Superman and Wonder Woman caught the truck, set it down, accepted thanks, etc., when WW hears a girl crying in a nearby tree. Somehow, the wind that poleaxed a full tanker truck hadn't blown this six-year-old into the next county. Well, OK, whatever. WW flies—yes, flies; herself, not in her plane; don't ask—flies the girl home, the tearful/fearful reunion, accepted thanks, etc., and WW flashes on her family problems and girlhood. Superman says to her, "You look kind of sad." Please to be excusing me for the interrupting of the scene, but are you having an encounter group with your superfriend in the middle of a hurricane?? Aren't there lives to save? The content and the context didn't match.

You also have to look at individual sentences. Bring me the scripture of a god and I will swear upon it what I now relate is true: I actually received an MS that actually contained the sentence, "It was the kind of air you would never notice, except it hurt to breathe it in." The author's cover letter claimed his book was a dramatic comedy, but I don't see how this sentence fits either bill (dramatic or comedy). It seems like a tragedy to me—a sentence with a fatal flaw that cannot be overcome.

So, read your own manuscript. Be mean to yourself but not unreasonable—you know that's what I'll do—and fix the problems before they get to me.

January 4, 2003

Don't Lose Your Audience

I rejected an MS from a fellow a while back, and I rejected it (in part) because I couldn't tell where it was going. I had no sense of what is called "profluence", which is a fancy word for "story line." I couldn't tell if the characters were going to turn right or left or have lunch or fall over dead. There were other things wrong with his MS, but for me, that was a big reason to reject it.

I got a screed back from him—his comments on my comments. One of the things he said was (and I'm quoting from memory since his letter isn't right in front of me), "You'll never know where my book is going. I've written it with so many twists and turns and surprises, you'll never be able to figure it out." That told me he had missed my meaning entirely.

I'm reading a book right now called The Hypnotic Brain (Peter Brown, ISBN0-300-05001-1, Yale University, 1991) about hypnotherapy and social communication. He's been going on about rhythm in speech, both poetic rhythm and empirical, measurable rhythms in human speech. As an analogue to that, he's talking about music. On page 58, he says, "The temporal organization of music relates to a physiologic internal sense of time. To be satisfying, the sound must be both predictable, meeting the framework of expectations, and novel, providing slight differences from those expectations. The slight violation of expectancies produces a state of arousal and a cognitive push to resolve the incompleteness." (Emphasis added.)

In plain English, the music sets you up for one thing and knocks you down with another. While its getting ready to knock you down, you're waiting for it, hoping for it, looking for it about as hard as you can. You want to keep listening until you get what you were waiting for—or the signal it will never come.

That's what I was trying to say to the author about his book, and that's what I want to say to you about your writing, whether story or novel or something in between: write to set me up and make me believe it's going one way; make me want to keep reading until I get what I was waiting for, hoping for, looking for; but knock me down with the difference—or the signal it will never come.

October 10, 2002

Rejected!

Rejections are just another part of the biz, like missing a pass in football or getting an out in baseball. A successful baseball player only does his job 30% of the time, and a player who's 40% successful is considered legendary. This is mostly because players at-bat are competing against another professional, the pitcher, whose job is to make the batter fail.

It's much the same at writing: when you send in a story, other professionals are trying to get your spot at the publishing house. To you, that's the same as "make you fail", even though it's not really about you. So if you can win 30% of the time, you're good; 40%, and you're legendary.

September 15, 2002

How Was Your Day?

It seems unlikely you'll have heard anything about this, but just in case: my building blew up a little bit yesterday (09/10/02) and we were all rushed outside. There was an accident under a venting hood, and when the sprinklers came on, one of the heads failed and delivered 7,000 gallons of water in a couple hours. Our floor was a little damp, but the ones below have taken more serious damage. The two guys under the hood were burned mild and medium, and no one else was hurt, incl. yrs. trly.

The hard part was that my keys and stuff were in the building, so I couldn't use my car. About 10:30, I realized the fire and HazMat people wouldn't be done for a while, so I thought I would eat lunch, except my lunch and all financial instruments were in the building, too. I had also forgotten my wallet that morning, so I walked to Dinkytown to see my friend, Bucko and borrow $10 for lunch. "Hey, my building blew up a little, so can I borrow some money to eat?"

I ate and we talked and I went to the BioMedical Library for an hour to review some books. When that was done, I stood around for an hour watching the hardhats and clipboards talk to each other and not tell us anything or anything.

At that point, a coworker gave me a ride home. After she left and after I tried the locked doornob on the back door, I realized I didn't have keys to get in. It's not like my wife sleeps the sleep of the dead, but she only hears certain things; and she was never going to hear the sound of me knocking on the door over the sound of the roofers putting a new roof on our house. So I went to call the clerk at her store to ask her to call and call until The Beast Who Sleeps was awakened by the tintinnabulation of the bells, bells, bells, bells, bells.

Unfortunately, our neighborhood once had a largely-undeserved reputation for drugs, so the phone company, at the behest of the Po Leece, came around and killed all the payphones. (Damn dangerous, those payphones. Turn your back on them, and they're dealing and banging. Phones these days got no respeck.) The one I finally found a half mile from our house took my money and ignored me. I shook it to try to get it to swallow the coins and acknowledge—it was actually loose on its post—but no such luck. So I went home.

Fortunately, it was a little after 1500, and my wife had a 1630 appointment, so she was up by that time and let me in. But not until after she had seen me sitting on the porch and then made her coffee and then wondered what I was doing on our porch reading *Ghost World* instead of working.

In the words of Willow Rosenberg, "I'm fine. Fine. Finey McFine," so don't worry. Just another day, with joy, in Mudville.

September 14, 2002

Today, I Threw Your Manuscript Away

Today, I threw your manuscript away. You see, I got a little note from the Post Office that I had to come there and sign for something. I run a business, and the only folks who send me things I have to sign for are the Department of Revenue and the IRS. I don't screw with them so they won't screw with me.

I left work early today to get this sign-for thing. Yeah, believe it or don't, I have a day job because if you want to make a small fortune in the publishing business, you start with a big fortune. I don't have a big fortune, so I have a day job, and I left that job early to get to the Post Office before it closed.

See, the letter came to an address I haven't used for a year, which again makes me think it's the government. I always have trouble getting them to believe I moved, so I figured they forgot again. But you know how the government is: whatever happens, it's your fault, not theirs; and I don't screw with them so they won't screw with me.

It turned out to be your manuscript.Well, that was a relief. At least it wasn't the IRS with an undomesticated lepus ensconced in a nether orifice over whether I'm cash or accrual. So, sigh of relaxation.

Then I threw your manuscript away because the guidelines clearly state "if you make us sign for it, we won't sign for it." You made me leave work early and cross town at rush hour and sign for your manuscript because you didn't do your homework and you didn't read the guidelines.

Whip! Thunk! The very satisfying sound of your MS hitting the can as hard as I could throw it, completely unopened in every way. I got your initials and your state off the envelope, and that's all I got from your MS.

No, I am not nice. I'm a publisher. I embody evil. The Devil is always standing around me muttering, "Why didn't I think of that??" Sauron takes lessons from me. Morgoth looks up to me. I drive Cthulhu nuts. I follow my own submission guidlines and today, I threw your manuscript away.

May 25, 2002

Do Your Homework

If you're writing a book about a particular subject—vampires or werewolves or whatever—please do your homework. There's a very large body of work done on these subjects already, and it's good to know who your literary ancestors are. Reading what others have done will not weaken your writing, it will strengthen it and give you new ideas.

For example, when you read The Dracula Tapes (which you may consider the grandparent of Interview with the Vampire), it's quite clear that author Saberhagen is very, very familiar with Dracula, the source material. The story is Dracula, but told from the vampire's viewpoint. He's rather sympathetic to himself ("I wouldn't cross the eucharist because I'm a good Catholic…if I ever find out which priest violated the sacraments and gave the wafers to Van Helsing…"), and he makes excuses for his behavior. Of course, you'd have to read Dracula to know communion wafers (eucharist) can imprison vampires; or that wolfsbane repels them (not just garlic); or that certain carnations and roses are also offensive; or that it's a crucifix, not a cross, that protects you.

Saberhagen also introduces a new idea in vampires: they can't enter unless invited. Yep, that's his idea, and not a week ago, I saw "Spike" in Buffy the Vampire Slayer bounce right off a threshold because he hadn't been invited. By reading the source, Saberhagen got ideas. Why can't Dracula get in Lucy Westenra's room unless she opens the window? Why can't he just become a mist and slide in, or summon rats and tunnel through? Must be some kind of constraint…

Now, you're probably afraid of IBDS (It's Been Done Syndrome), but let me tell you, it's my job to have read a lot of stuff, and you'll be more derivative by not reading the source and its faithful companions. For example, Roger Zelazny wrote a short story in which the owner of an occult shop invites a vampire into the back room from the alley. Now, in Saberhagen's universe, you can't ever un-invite them, so Zelazny has the owner say, "This one room. This one time." If he hadn't read Saberhagen, he couldn't have had the idea to make the entry restrictive, an element that made his story distinctive and not derivative.

Read broadly, too. Cross-fertilization is good. I didn't much like the film version of Interview with the Vampire, so now I'm thinking about doing a version of it with Jonathan Harris reprising his role as Dr. Smith from Lost in Space and taking Brad Pitt's part. I can easily see him after his wife dies, and after the girl vampire dies, and, well, over the centuries throwing the back of his hand to his forehead and exclaiming, "Oh, the pain! The pain!!" On top of that, Harris can be quite menacing, so maybe he could do Tom Cruise's part, too…

See, I'm on to an interesting plot: twins, separated at birth, one becomes a vampire and one is mortal…you take it from there.

August 19, 2001

From a recent letter: Re: writing

Thank you for your help and information. You gave me the most of all the people I e-mailed. Yes I am very bad at grammar probably cause I'm young and I got my street slang and stuff that I use which comes out when I write cause I use it so much. Again I thank you for you tips and your guidance. I will get the book you mentioned from my library.

Glad I could help. Granted that you are young and you got your street slang and stuff, let me soften one of my blows: when I wrote you about your grammar and spelling, I didn't assume that, so I let you have it. Most people who bother to write a letter write it in what is called "performance English", which is what teachers are always trying to teach in school.

Only they don't know it—they think they are teaching "good" English. They are really teaching an English that a mountain man from Vermont can use to talk to a Hispanic woman from California, and so on—an English for all Americans to use in public. That English isn't "good", and it certainly isn't any "gooder" than British English, which is very, very different from American English but is still "good." Your street slang isn't "bad", it just isn't "performance."

So I let you have it over "performance English" because most books are written in "performance." Now, if you can write a book in "street" and get your point across, go for it. A good book in "street" that moves people is way better than a bad book in "performance." Let your story tell you what to use, "performance" or "street".

cjs

May 22, 2001

From a recent letter:

Sorry to bother you, I am seventeen years old and I want to make an attempt at being a writer and would like to start parcticing now. I would at least like to information or connections now before I get my degree's in university. I would like to ask you where I can send a book that I write to get published or edited, I'm don't want to toot my own horn but I will, It is worth it for the company to look at me, I can write well and will. If you can help me in any way pointing me in the direction I am trying to go in, please write me back.

Thanks for writing.

A couple of things. First, the information you want is at the library. Look for a book called *Writer's Market*. It lists who publishes what and where to send it. I believe it has subdivisions for everything—novels, magazines, anthologies, etc. Should do you a world of good.

Next, if you want to be a writer, then you should write. That's what writers do. They don't know people or have connections now or know where to send a book—they write. If you don't write, then the other things don't matter because you don't have anything to send in. So, write, and worry about that other stuff later.

Third, the best way to practice is to write. Did I mention writers write? It's what they do. At every opportunity. For example, your email contains a number of errors (one word misspelled, one word missing, one plural/possessive confusion, one grammatical error, etc.), and just think: you could have used this email as a moment to hone your craft, to say concisely and precisely what you meant; instead, you said, "I'm don't want to toot my own horn…" So be a writer with everything you write.

The next best way to practice is to read what you like to read and try to figure out what the writer did that made you like it. The third best way is to read what you don't like and figure out what the writer did that made you not like it. And so on.

Finally, if you do write something and you don't want to sell it, then be sure to send it with a cover letter that reads "It is worth it for your company to look at me." That sentence is to your writing as the wooden stake is to the vampire.

This is hard, but you need to face it: everyone who writes thinks they write pretty well, or they wouldn't have sent it in. Who says, "Gee, I just wrote a 500 page pile of crap. I think I'll send it in."? Nobody. My advice is to write; write your story; write what interests you and what you want to write about no matter who complains about it or what they complain about; send it in; and prepare to be rejected.

Most MSS *are* rejected. 98% of them are rejected. They are rejected because they're bad, because it was raining, because the editor has a headache, because whatever. But if you don't write and you don't send it in, you don't have to worry about any of that—or anything else about the writing business.

Do the hard part first and get it over with: write something.

cjs

April 7, 2001

Why We Like Good Books

I agree with Jack Woodford: the novel is the biggest playpen ever invented; but I also agree with the Christian apologist Paul: freedom is the freedom to do good. Use the freedom of the biggest playpen to make the best book you can, not just any book that will come out. Any book will fit in this biggest playpen, but books are a dime a dozen—good books are not.

March 30, 2001

Just Tell the Story

Please. If you have a story that's tense or scary or ominous or whatever, tell the story and let it tense me or scare me or ominate me or whatever. Mood is OK, I ain't got problems with mood, but look at Lovecraft: I screamed aloud that I was not afraid; that I never could be afraid; and others screamed with me for solace. That's so simple it's worthy of Hemingway, and I almost wet myself when I read that the first time.

And Poe: The thousand insults of Fortunato I had borne as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge. Dood. Someone is extremely fuqqued up and dangerous. And Poe again: "Listen to me," said the Demon as he put his hand upon my head. There's a lot rolled up in that, and the more I unroll it, the scareder I get.