Staying Human

Quote of the Day: "I'll make a beast out of myself, get rid of all the pain of being a man."
--Avenged Sevenfold, Bat Country
(Best. Title. Ever. Expect forthcoming story by that name. Seriously. I don't know what it will be about, but it will be awesome.)

*Note: Apologies for not posting yesterday, my computer started spitting errors about memory not being referenced at bla bla broken broken and I spent all night fixing it. Bah. Humbug.

I was originally going to put up a different quote from that song, but the one above just fits better with the theme of the blog today.

I sent out probably 100 rejection letters today. No joke. It was an interesting process because it became completely automated at some point. I scanned the offending query letter for pertinent details like name and address, completed the rejection letter, and put it in an ever-growing stack of "To-be-sent".

Usually when I send these things out I take the time to read a bit of the query letter. I'm genuinely interested in who this person is, what they wrote, how they structured their letter, and why they didn't make the cut. See my previous blog post about the manuscript from the wrong genre for proof.

But when I'm pumping through zillions of rejections all at once there just isn't time for that sort of thing, and it's easy to forget that this pile of paper in front of me represents someone's months and years of hard work, maybe even their lifelong dreams and ambitions.

It was a sobering realization, because I'd hate to think that at some point I'll forget what it's like to dream about getting published, either through working in publishing or by simply not trying to get published myself for too long. Maybe it's as important for publishers to moonlight as struggling authors as it is for struggling authors to moonlight as publishers. Something to discuss with the industry after I've succeeded at both, I suppose ;-p.

At any rate, I decided that someday, when I have a real job, I'll print out a little poster that says something along the lines of "Remember you are crushing dreams" and pin it to the wall of my cubicle. It should be a cheering reminder on bad days of the absurd power I wield, and a sobering reminder on good days that my rejection might be the worst thing somebody is going to get in the mail for a very long time.

Oops

Quote of the Day: "Shake shake, shake shake-a shake it."
--Metro Station, Shake It

Just a quick post today, about paying attention to guidelines. As some of you may know I've been working on a World of Warcraft themed short story for a contest they're running. Unfortunately, I made a very big, very rookie mistake. I didn't read the instructions correctly.

They have a length restriction for submissions...makes sense, right? Otherwise who knows what sort of massive stories people would send them. It says 3000-7000 characters. So I, used to having my length restrictions come in words, assumed it said words. Just skipped right over that "characters" part, and wrote a solid story of about 4100 words. Then when I went to submit it it wouldn't fit in the little online box they have, and I discovered my mistake.

If anyone is curious, my story is 22000 characters. Oops.

That's not a cuttable amount of material. I thought briefly about going through and axing just about everything in there except for the one brief initial scene it was built around, but then I realized I'd have a crappy story. And a crappy story is just as likely to get published as one three times as long as it's supposed to be.

So I've settled on breaking it into parts and submitting them separately (the European website says this is okay, and the U.S. one is mum about it, so hey...maybe they'll still read it) in the spirit of my mantra: "Write good fiction and the rest will come."

The moral of the story is read instructions carefully, especially when dealing with a market you're not used to, because you never know when someone will do something crazy like put their length limits in characters instead of words.

Send it to the right place...please.

Quote of the Day: "My angel wings are bruised and destroyed."
--The Smashing Pumpkins, Today

I had a bit of a sad moment this week. A manuscript came through that looked quite interesting, interesting enough that I wanted to read it at any rate, but was just not something the company I'm working for publishes.

It was a memoir (possibly fictionalized, the cover letter was pretty tough to decipher) of a mixed-race woman's experience growing up in Tennessee in the early part of the 20th century. Sounds cool, right? Well, judging by the few pages I skimmed, it was. She had a great voice and it seemed like it'd be great.

But sadly, I had work to do, so I just sent along the "Sorry, we don't take this genre" formulaic rejection letter and went about my day. Had I not written a note reminding myself to blog about it, I would have completely forgotten about the manuscript by the end of the day.

I'm think I've said this before, and I'm sure others have said it, but I'll say it again: you don't want your manuscript going to place that doesn't publish or represent its genre. Even if this was pulitzer-prize winning literature, my house simply doesn't have the setup necessary to publicize and do a good job publishing memoir. If we were to take a manuscript like that, it would essentially be condemning it to wallow in the dirt for x number of years before someone important finally read it by accident and it blew up---probably long after the deaths of anyone involved.

And why would you want to do that to your book?

Letting the Reader Create the Character

Quote of the Day: "Wait, wait, tell me we're all gonna be okay. Would you be better if they took this city away?" --The Crash Moderns, Where'd All the Scene Girls Go?

I think I've blogged before about how I think that part of creating good characters is leaving room for the reader to develop them in their minds, so that every reader's character is different (this, in my opinion, is why movies made from books never work out as well as the books---the character on screen never exactly matches the character in anyone's head). This goes double for minor characters--the little ones like I talked about on Monday, that don't have huge roles but can nonetheless be very memorable.

Today at work I ran into a manuscript that had really great minor characters. Part of this was that they were just likable. They seemed like nice people and had cool little quirks, a la Monday's post. But another part of what made them so good is that their characterization essentially consisted of some dialogue and the nicknames given to them by the protagonist, who couldn't speak their language and thus didn't know their real names. Aside from that, the reader was left to generate their own character.

It just struck me as a stroke of genius (and I could have squeezed the word "strike" into that sentence I would've had the trifecta! Damn!), because I'd never seen it attempted before, let alone pulled off so well. Oh, and on top of that, the way the nicknames were applied also told volumes about the character doing the nicknaming. Brilliant! I think that's another thing to keep in mind when creating characters. Obviously not everyone can pull this trick in their story itself, or it wouldn't work...but it's worth knowing what your characters nicknames would be, if a sassy time traveler happened to come back and nickname them. It's like distilling a character down into its one-word essence. Wonderful little trick. Some from my novel, for the benefit of those who've read it:

Len- Dreadlilocks
Leramis- Mr. Serious
Dil- Sunshine

etc. etc. etc.

Enjoy!

Quick-dry Characters

Quote of the Day: "Don't hold me up now, I can stand my own ground. I don't need your help now, please don't hold me down."
- Rise Against, Prayer of the Refugee

So I talked a little bit in my last post about adding shallow layers of character development that can nonetheless really make a reader grab onto a character quickly, and I want to talk a little more about it today.

It's something I've been noticing as I've read my eight million books this summer, both at work and for my research. Most romance characters tend to be, um, pretty stock. But every once in awhile I catch one who has something different. It can be totally arbitrary, shallow, and unimportant, but it's enough to get me interested and make me interested in the character until he or she develops enough for me to really start caring. Sort of like an appetizer, if you will.

Some examples from work:
A romance heroine who nicknames all the Scotsmen who abduct her when she travels back in time (Yes, you read correctly. Time-travel romance is a hot seller, baby!).
A horror villain that dresses in a trenchcoat and fedora and has no face.

They were just different enough to grab me and keep me reading until I really got hooked on the deeper aspects of the characters in their respective stories--and those things are quick, easy, one-off bits of character development.

But the writers of the Dragonlance series, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, are really the king and queen of this. And what's most key is that they do it with minor characters, so that you're not just loving the main characters, but every once in awhile you get someone totally new and awesome and unexpected, like free ice cream with your meal at a restaurant. Some examples from them:

An irascible wizard who can't remember his own name.
A dirty little dwarf that speaks like a child and falls in love with a different wizard.
A dragon so old his teeth have all fallen out.

The last two of these are minor characters, they only get a few pages and don't have much an impact on the story, but they nonetheless help draw you in and get you excited about what you're reading, and I wouldn't be surprised if they wound up being some people's favorite characters. I call this sort of characterization "quick-dry", because it's fast and simple, but oh so incredible when it's done right.

It's something I'm still struggling to figure out how to work into my own writing. I can see two ways of going about it: one is to add in more one-off characters with cool quirks to them, but that's not something I really want to do, and the other is to add little quirks to my main characters that make them initially intriguing. I've been going through and giving them hobbies, recently, and hoping that I can work those into the story in a cool enough way that they'll grab people.

Not sure how long it will take me to get this working, but I've recognized it as an incredibly powerful tool, so I thought I'd share it.

Science and Fantasy

*New Blog Feature! Since I've been drowning in good music this summer, I'm going to start putting quotes from whatever song I happen to be gorging myself on at the top of my blog posts. We'll see if it sticks, but I'm hoping it will be a good addition. :-)*

Quote of the day: "We live on front porches and swing life away, we get by just fine here on minimum wage. If love is a labor I'll slave 'til the end. I won't cross these streets until you hold my hand." -Rise Against, Swing Life Away

This is something that has been dawning slowly on me this summer, as I read through a few different fantasy novels and ponder what makes them good.

One thing I've realized is that while science isn't the focus of fantasy the way it is in science fiction (especially hard science fiction), leaving it out of a fantasy world is being inexcusably negligent as an author. It can add so much to a world.

I first got an inkling of this while finally getting started on The Golden Compass, which isn't high fantasy, but still---the pseudo-science it mixes in with its magic is just very cool. So that got me thinking about science and fantasy, and I realized there are some very cool instances of it in more fantastic works (Final Fantasy Tactics, actually, is what sprang to mind), and that it would fit much better in my world than I had imagined.

I had sort of left science out of my world completely, but as I got thinking about it and adding more layers of depth to my characters (though depth is an interesting word to use, because the layers I'm thinking of adding are fairly shallow--easy, interesting bits of characterization that readers will be quick to pick up on and say, 'Hmm...' about. More on this in a later post), I realized that it would make perfect sense for my main character to be a tinker of sorts---someone who enjoys looking behind the scenes and seeing how gadgets work, because a big part of him is analyzing the world around him, and the one sort of naturally lends itself to the other.

And that meant adding science into my world, which meant addressing the question of exactly how far along technologically they were. I had sort of just gone with the stock fantasy thing---knights and armor, wood and stone, etc. etc., but I realized as I contemplated it that that was very limiting. There was no reason behind it, it had just been an easy choice as I started to build my world.

Damn those initial easy choices. Someday I'll write down a list of all the ones I made and had to go back and revisit later, for the benefit of anyone else who's going about building a world of their own.

Pet Peeves

Today it's time for me to share one of my personal pet peeves/common mistakes in writing that I hate. And yes, I call it a mistake, regardless of its grammatical gray-area status, because it makes me cringe.

Said pet peeve is the use of the words 'this', 'these', and 'now' in a past tense narrative. These words are all, as far as I'm concerned, present tense pronouns. "This was", "These were" or "Now he had to" just sounds wrong, unless you're making a narrative aside. Those are grammatical constructions we use all the time in verbal storytelling, but they just don't work on the page.

I'm writing about this because I spent all weekend reading the Dragonlance Chronicles for my research project, and they are guilty of doing this in freakin' spades. Then I got to work today and found, in the midst of a manuscript that made me cringe for many other reasons, someone that at least used 'that' and 'those' and never said 'now', and I literally breathed a sigh of relief when I realized I wouldn't have to deal with that for the next 3 hours as I plowed through it.

Here is an example from Dragons of Winter Night that will, hopefully, illustrate my point to the world.

And so, "like the other scum," as Raistlin observed, the companions floated along upon the tides of war and were deposited in Flotsam. Here they hoped to find a ship that would take them on the long treacherous journey around the northern parts of Ansalon to Sancrist--or wherever--

Compare that to:

And so, "like the other scum," as Raistlin observed, the companions floated along upon the tides of war and were deposited in Flotsam. There they hoped to find a ship that would take them on the long treacherous journey around the northern parts of Ansalon to Sancrist--or wherever--

Hopefully you can see for yourselves what I'm talking about. The addition of one little letter makes a HUGE difference in the flow of the text. I couldn't find an example of 'now', but I still have one book left to go and I'm sure they'll use it. I'll rip the sentence when it does, but for now, just trust me that it's a superfluous word and cutting it out will yield a 100% increase in the quality of your manuscript.

...in other news, I apologize for any double 'r's...my 'r' key is apparently broken, making me sound like a pirate from time to time.

Whether 'Tis Nobler...

To stick to your guts and create art that nobody that cares about now but might make a huge difference later or keep your aesthetics elastic but the impact you want your art to make on others fixed. That is the question.

...and boy, is it a doozy. Briefly, I'll explain the merits of both positions as I see them, and then which one I support.

First: Sticking to your guts.
The upside is that, obviously, you never know what people are going to need ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred years from now. Maybe the art that you create doesn't mean anything to anyone but you now, but it could still change the life of someone you've never met. Don't you owe it to that hypothetical person not to change your art? Don't you owe it to yourself not to change your art?

It's a very romantic position, to me. It assumes that what you create will outlast you, and that what you create does have the power to move people, it just has to find the right people. And there are plenty of examples of people whose work didn't mean anything to anyone until their death. Just ask the guy who wrote A Confederacy of Dunces.

Second: Adapting your art to reach people now
Big upside here is that it's a much more manageable process, and you can measure whether you're doing it well or not. You also have the option of choosing your audience, of saying "I want this group of people to realize this" and then figuring out how to do it. Your work is also much more likely to reach future generations, since if you're successful it will be produced and reproduced in spades, and is thus much more likely to wind up in the hands of someone ten, twenty, a hundred years down the road.

It's a more practical position, I think, and a more selfless position. You're not saying, "I know what art is," you're saying, "I want to help people in this way, and this is how I can do it." Of course, there's also the downside of knowing if you've failed. If your art doesn't reach its target audience, you may die knowing that, and that would suck.

Personally, I go with the second position. It just seems like there's a lower probability of self-aggrandizement and losing touch with reality, with what you really mean to do. If you tell yourself "This thing will be great someday, I know it" for long enough, you may wind up lying to yourself just to keep the dream alive. And while that's alright for you, it doesn't do much for anyone else, and it certainly doesn't do anything for your art.

Just my personal opinion.

Fort Minor Leads Us All to Publishing Gold

Alright, I fully admit that I'm cheating tonight---but I'm exhausted on account of mosquitoes, early waking, and a long drive, so I feel fairly justified in posting a link to Nathan Bransford's blog.

Nathan talks, in part, about how difficult it is to discern what makes a book good and what doesn't. This past week on vacation I got asked by a lot of people, when they learned that I'm working in publishing and looking to write professionally as well, what it is that makes a good book, and quickly learned that what they meant was "What makes a successful book?"

And I told them more or less what I think Nathan is saying: "Nobody knows."

Now don't get me wrong, I have a massive, gargantuan list of what makes a BAD book, and I know a good book has few to none of those things, but I still don't know what really makes a great book, or a successful book. And neither does anybody else, or someone would have cornered the publishing industry.

If I were to try to break it down, however, I'd say that what makes a successful book is best described by a Fort Minor song: "10% luck, 15% skill, 20% concentrated power of will, 5% pleasure, 50% pain, and 100% reason to remember the name".

So let's go through those various things in order of what an author or publisher has control of.

1.) 20% concentrated power of will
-Obvious. It takes a lot of work on the part of both an author and a publisher to make a book successful. Without that work it just won't happen. The key word here may be "concentrated"--for both author and publisher, the more focus and attention the book gets, the more likely it is to succeed.

2.) 50% pain
-Also obvious, and ties neatly in with #1. There will be painful moments. For the author it may be rewrites after they realize their first, second, third, or "final" draft sucked. For the publisher it may be convincing the marketing team that yes, the book is publishable and yes, it is worth the budget they're asking for, and yes, yes, yes, into infinity. Publishing is a group effort, and getting other people onboard isn't always painless.

3.) 15% skill
-I put this one down at #3 because it's only partially controllable. Obviously skill matters, in both author and publisher, and skill can be honed, developed, controlled. But some people are just born with skills that others aren't, and that can't be controlled. So while specifically honing your skills is still very important, it's not as important (imho) as working on #1 and #2 (which, incidentally, will lead to you honing your skills ;-p)

4.) 5% pleasure
-Mike Shinoda may have been hyperbolizing a little when he said producing his song was only 5% pleasure...I sure hope so. I personally find my writing to be more like 10 or 15% pleasure, at least. But then again maybe that's my problem. At any rate, it's important to take pleasure in your work. After all, if you don't enjoy it, you won't be able to focus, get through the pain, or hone your skills for very long. Not to mention you won't enjoy life while you're at it.

5.) 10% luck
-Obviously the least controllable. But NOT the least important. In terms of being a runaway success, I'd actually say it's the MOST important. Sometimes a book hits at just the right time. Sometimes it hits at just the wrong time. The production period for a book is long enough that what may have been positioned perfectly at the time it was written might be old hat by the time it's published. There's just no way of accurately predicting these things. Trying to predict markets in general is what keeps stock analysts working 80 hour weeks and up late into the night (trust me, I'm rooming with one). And publishing is not immune to that unpredictability.

6.) 100% reason to remember the name
-This one really comes AFTER you're successful, and you can't control it at all. For a lot of authors it comes after their deaths. I had another discussion this week about art and whether 'tis nobler to create art that you think will reach people now or create art that may reach people after you die, and I'll talk about that later (maybe tomorrow, maybe next week). But either way--whether people will remember your name or your book's name is completely out of your control (despite being maddeningly important to long-term success), so try not to worry about it.

So what does all this mean? Work hard, I guess, but realize your limitations. There are plenty of things beyond your control that will effect how successful your writing is. Everyone has their own reasons for writing, and I'm not going to knock yours if it's reaching the bestseller list...but you need to realize that you can do everything right and still not get there and be okay with that before you go in, or else you may wind up very unhappy.

The Rules Apply Until...?

*First a quick aside, I'm going on vacation for a week tomorrow. I may or may not come back with any new insights and wisdom, but I will come back rested and with clean air in my lungs...and God knows I could use that.*

One of my bosses today came to me with a submission that said "I have purposefully ignored your submission guidelines..." or something along those lines. She likes to bring these things to me and share how ludicrous they are, and every time a part of me laughs, a part of me wants to cry, and a part of me is horribly embarrassed because I, too, once made mistakes like that.

So that got me thinking, at what point do the rules stop applying to you?

...trick question. They never stop applying to you. They simply change based on who you are. And if you don't know which category of rules you fall into, it's safe to assume it's not the "I can ignore submission guidelines" category. In fact, go with the safest bet and follow them all, because that's actually your category.

Besides which, why on earth would you want someone who doesn't publish books like yours to publish your book? They won't have the experience, marketing connections, or infrastructure in place necessary to make it the best it can be.

Believe me, I understand the seductiveness of the "But it's so great that they'll love it, and then since it'll be their only project like it and something brand new they'll love it even more and work harder on it and I'll be their big breakout success and fame, riches, and women/men will ensue!"

It's a wonderful fantasy, but it should stay that way. The reality is that if a publisher decides to launch a new line, or publish a new genre, or expand in a different direction, their submission guidelines will reflect that, because they'll want to launch with more than just one book. They want to build their brand so that when people see their logo on a book they know what they're getting. And they don't want to surprise those readers, even in a good way. "Oh, that looks interesting but I'm looking for a romance" doesn't pay the bills. "Oooh, there's another fabio lookalike!" does.

I would say that's sad but true, but I'm not even so sure it's sad. Trust me, if your book is good enough it will get picked up by a publisher who publishes things like it. If all of those publishers turn you down, it's time to go back and rewrite or move on to the next project. Trying to force your book out into the world if it's not commercially viable is just committing career suicide. Even if you love it and can't make it any better, just put it aside and write something new. After you're a rich, famous, successful author, you'll have publishers asking you for any piece of prose you can dredge out of your files for them, and then after you die they'll keep asking your estate for the same. If you need a fantasy, focus on that one, because that does happen...just rarely.