Category: writer development

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Self-Editing For Dummies

  By editing, publishing, writer development, writing life

By Kadellar (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia CommonsOh, calm down, I’m not really calling you dummies. But after thinking about my post the other day regarding the dearth of attention paid to editing lately, I realized that some portion of the blame must come to rest on the author, as well. The better we are at self-editing, the lesser our dependence on outside editors to catch all those little things that are dragging our stories down. Which, of course, puts us in a better light–both when editors and publishers read our submissions, and when our work (eventually, hopefully) finds its way into the hands of our readers.

So–how do you become a better self-editor?

1. Practice. Repeat after me: the first draft is not a finished work. Yes, you may complete your first draft in a rush of adrenaline and endorphins and think it’s the best thing anyone has ever written, anywhere. It’s not. Never send out something until that first fine rush has ebbed and you start to doubt. Once the doubt is there, you can start looking for all the things that are wrong, and begin to fix them. And fix them, and fix them, and when you think they’re fixed, see #2, below.

2. Other Eyes. My friend Steph has a great post over here about the necessity and value of first readers. The more eyes you can get on your work–knowledgeable, practiced eyes–the more chances you have of finding those things that editors will (or should) only fix later anyway. So those problems won’t be there to trip up your readers later.

3. Tools. Don’t underestimate the value of your word processor’s built-in spell-check and grammar-check; at the very least, they should make you slow down and look at possible problematic areas of your work. But they’re only the very minimal basics. One tool I love is Cliché Cleaner. Run your work through this handy little program to find clichés, overused expressions, and internal repetitions. It’s amazing how much one tool like this can help you clean up your work. You may have your own favorite cleanup tools–just don’t forget to use them.

4. Distance. Remember that first rush we talked about, that comes with completion of your first draft? One way to avoid falling victim to its siren song and sending your story out too soon is to get some distance from the work. Let it sit until it’s no longer totally fresh in your mind–a week, a month, even longer if you have the luxury. There’s nothing like coming back to it with some heightened objectivity to clear away the tint of those rose-coloured glasses.

5. Humility. No matter how competent or skilled a writer you are, you will always benefit from remembering that you are not perfect and neither are your early drafts. Expecting that your work will need polishing allows you to see its flaws more easily. Accepting that others will spot problems that you haven’t seen will make you more open to using their suggestions wisely.

For more advice on good self-editing, I highly recommend Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne & Dave King. Got your own self-editing favorites? Share them in the comments!

Image courtesy of Kadellar (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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Where Have All The Editors Gone?

  By editing, publishing, writer development, writing life

Okay, okay, I know that all the editors have not gone away. I know that there are many dedicated editors out there slaving away in the word mines to help writers wrangle their manuscripts into things of beauty. I do not want the entire Internet editorial community to descend upon me, angrily wielding their blue and red pens as weapons of vengeance.

But.

I detect a noticeable lack of editorial input in far too many of the books I read these days.

If you follow me on Goodreads or take note of my occasional reading update posts hereabouts, you’ll know that I am not a snob when it comes to reading. I read traditionally published books, I read self-published books, I read e-only books, I listen to audiobooks and self-produced audiobooks. If it sounds interesting to me, I don’t quibble about the format or the provenance, I’ll give it a try.

In fact, I will even cut some slack to the authors who are self-pubbing, to a certain extent. If the writing and plotting and characterization and ideas are strong overall, I can forgive a few little grammatical or syntactical missteps. I usually find it a bit sad when a story fails to reach its full potential due mainly to a lack of editing, but it won’t make me bail on the story.

But traditional publishers, I have to say: I hold you to a higher standard. I expect that you will have given your authors the benefit of proper editorial input. You are supposed to be the “gatekeepers”, after all; the setters-of-standards. This is not to say that I expect to love every traditionally published book–there’s no accounting for taste, and there are plenty of (IMHO) bad tradpub books. But regardless of how far they fall short of my expectations in story or plot, I expect them to be line edited.

And I am disappointed, with increasing frequency of late.

I expect words to be used properly. “Occupied” is not the same thing as “preoccupied”.

I expect you to weed out repetitions. When the word “faience” comes up five times in three pages, it’s kind of noticeable.

I expect that characters’ names will remain the same throughout the story.

(Sadly) I could go on. But I won’t. Maybe I’m just in an editorial frame of mind lately, having recently finished an intense bout of line editing for Unearthed. And I won’t say I caught everything there, either. But if traditional publishers want to continue to publish good authors–if they want to be thought of as some kind of legitimizing force in publishing, I think they owe their authors something. And their readers, too.
 
I think they need to spill a little more corrective ink on those manuscripts. Or soon there’ll be nothing at all setting them apart. And then where will they be?

Image courtesty of jppi.

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Yard Sale Writing

  By ebooks, publishing, writer development, writing life

So, we’ve been getting ready for a big family yard sale in the past few weeks. It seemed to me that there should be a blog post in there somewhere–you can relate anything to writing, right?

It actually wasn’t that difficult to find the connection. Yard sales are all about things that one person is finished with, but still have value to someone else. It’s related to my recent post about reusing words, too, although that’s more about turning one kind of project into something else.

Reprints are one application of yard sale writing. After all, if Editor A liked your story enough to print it, then Editor B might like it just as well. Editor B is not getting a story that’s as new and shiny as it was for Editor A, so the value might be slightly diminished, but it’s still a perfectly good story. And for readers outside the circle of those reached by Editor A’s publication, it’s every bit as new to them. Many of us have stories we’ve sold or published previously, but are just waiting around on a hard drive somewhere to find a new home.

Many writers have started to find “yard sale” money by looking back at older works to which they still have or have regained the rights. E-publishing can sidestep the whole issue of finding an editor/publisher and allow the writer to deliver their product directly into the hands of the smart yard sale shopper. After all, stories show little sign of wear and tear or being “previously loved.” I did this myself last year* with my short story collection, To Unimagined Shores. These were stories that had been professionally edited and vetted and reached an audience–but not the entirety of their possible audience. They still had lots of life in them.

The other way to put yard sale stories to work is to offer them as free samples of your work. Everyone loves free, and everyone likes a chance to sample things before they put their money down. One downside of e-books is the lack of ability to browse, the way we do in bookstores, sampling a paragraph here or a page there. Free excerpts, however, make a great way to introduce readers to your writing, so they might be more likely to make a purchase of your newest work.

So the next time you have a chance, peruse your hard drive, notebooks, and list of previous publications for some yard sale writing. You might be surprised at how shiny it can be if you dust it off and put it on a new shelf.

* Updated in 2018 to add: I now have a second collection of short stories to add to the list, The Cache & Other Stories. Still recycling those tales!

Image courtesy of snowflake5

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Title Fight

  By current projects, just for fun, personal, writer development, writing life

This is not one of mine.

In a recent interview I (and a number of other authors) did over on the Third Person Press News Blog, one of the questions was about story titles–specifically the title of the story each of us had in the new anthology, Unearthed, and more generally, when and how we get our titles.

The title of my story in Unearthed is pretty simple: “The Cache.” It’s a story about what happens to two characters who go geocaching and find more than they bargained for, so the title seemed a no-brainer. However, it’s probably one of the least interesting ways to get a title that I’ve used, so I thought I’d elaborate a little here.

My two favourite ways to get titles are: 1) have the title come to me before I even know there’s a story to go with it, and 2) find a pre-existing line of verse and take the title from it (either directly or slightly twisted). The first way is a product of serendipity, so it can’t really be planned. It can be coaxed, to some extent–by thinking maybe in very general terms about a theme or setting and just letting the words dance and mix and float around until they coalesce into something. But most of the time it just…happens.

The second way, I go about very methodically. I surf over to Bartleby.net (although I’m sure there are other searchable verse or literary databases out there) and start running searches on keywords that have something to do with the story or story idea. I jot down everything that speaks to me, and then usually at some point I know I’ve got the one I need. Some of the titles I like the best have come out of this process: One’s Aspect to The Sun, Spaces Sharp and Bare, and To Where the Aether Failed. (I see, looking over my list of stories and novels, that this method seems to work best for novels. Huh. I never noticed that before.)

Other titles have come from the subject line in a spam email (Operant Moon), online generators (The Murder Prophet), and song titles (The Light of the Silvery Moon). And then the rest…I guess mostly from a word or phrase that comes out of the story or story idea itself. Sometimes I don’t even know how the title ties in to the story for sure until I’ve written more of it.

I rarely change a title. Maybe it’s a holdover from the old superstition that it’s bad luck to change the name of a horse or a boat, but once a story has a title, that’s usually it for me. In truth, I can think of only one that I changed on the suggestion of an editor. So thus far I guess I’ve been lucky.

Writers, what’s your favourite way to get a title? Readers, do titles ever turn you off before you even read the back cover blurb?

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The A-word

  By personal, publishing, reading, writer development, writing life

No, not that a-word. This past week or so I’ve been thinking about advertising (and promotion) and the various ways writers go about it.  Interestingly, I also read two posts on the topic; one from Chuck Wendig (http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2012/04/25/let-us-discuss-the-nature-of-book-promotion/), much of which took place in the comments, and one from Joseph Devon (http://josephdevon.com/2012/04/words-advertising-book/7130/), where the author discussed things he has tried and what has worked for him. All of this is very interesting reading if book promotion is something on your mind. And interesting to me because I am really not all that good at it myself (but that’s not the point of this post).

I’ve also been wrestling with the decision of whether to un-follow a couple of authors I follow on Twitter. Now, I actually read things on Twitter; I don’t just follow folks willy-nilly so that they’ll follow me back. This indiscriminate-following sort of use, I think, removes Twitter from being the solitary writer’s equivalent of a water cooler (I think it might have been the aforementioned Mr. Wendig whom I saw first refer to it that way), and turns it into a big echoing abyss where everyone is shouting into it but no-one is listening to what comes out.

The problem with these particular authors and the way they are using Twitter is this: they tweet solely about their books and the books of others in their network(s). Over and over. And over. One even makes a point of saying that he rarely goes "off-message." This, I suppose, is meant as a selling point for authors to use him to promote, but to me as a follower it has the opposite effect. It says, "you are never going to hear anything other than these promotions from me." Whoa, dude, way to tell me you’re going to be boring to follow.

Now, it’s not that I’m uninterested in independent or self-published or discounted-for-promotion books. I’m not a reading snob and frankly, especially of late, I’ve frequently put down a bad "traditionally-published" book in favour of a non-traditional but more interesting/better-written one. I’m a big fan of independently-produced audiobooks. It’s not that I don’t want to discover more of this engaging writing that flies under the tradpub radar.

BUT. I don’t want a steady diet of plugs for it in my Twitter stream. It’s "social" media, folks, not "commercial" media.

So, how can authors use Twitter (and other social media) effectively? It comes down to three things, I think: personality, value, and balance.

First off—you, the author, are a real person. Don’t be afraid to be that real person in your social media participation. The most interesting writers I’ve found on Twitter have a personality; they are not just ad-pumping avatars. It’s entirely possible their online personalities are nothing like their real-life personalities, but at least they present one. Sure, they mention promotional stuff when they have something new happening, but it’s not all they talk about. Imagine if you were at a party and an author talked about nothing but their new book and their friends’ new books. After half an hour you’d be sidling away or out the door, thinking about a different a-word. So if you wouldn’t do it at a party, why do it in another social venue?

Second—value. My favourite people on Twitter are those who often point me to other interesting things or people on the internet, or write about other interesting things and tell me about that. It’s a big, big world out there, with lots to discover and share with your friends. It also offers another glimpse into the things that you as an author find interesting, and if I, as a reader, know that we share some common interests, then maybe I’ll be more likely to think you might write a book I’d like to read.

Third—balance. Find a good balance between personality, value, and advertising. Too much of anything is going to upset that balance, but a nice mix of the three will make your advertising and promotion much more palatable and actually likely to make someone act on it.

And…if you’d like to see how I try to mix it up on Twitter, you can always follow me @sdramsey.  Just, y’know, sayin’.

Photo credit: xenia at Morguefile

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Relationship Help for Writers ~ Collaborators

  By writer development, writing life

I Thought I Was Writing The Dialogue!
Also known as Collaborators

Some writers never collaborate on publishing projects, but many do. You might co-write something, co-edit something, or work with another writer or writers on a writing-related endeavour. The touchstones for successful collaborating are 1) understanding yourself as a writer and 2) respect, again.

Before you decide to collaborate on any type of project in any capacity, you should have a good understanding of yourself and your attitude as a writer (and possibly, as a person).

  • Do you work well with others?
  • Can you readily reliquish control over decisions?
  • Can you admit that there is more than one “right” way to do things?
  • Can you discuss without descending into argument?
  • Do you know how to pick your battles?
  • Do you always have to be right?

If you want to collaborate with someone else, your answers to the above questions should be:

  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes
  • No

If those are not your answers, you may not be ready or able to collaborate well.

If these are your answers, ask yourself one more question: “Do I respect the writer/writers I’m considering working with?” That respect is an essential element in any collaborative relationship, because regardless of the benefits (economic, promotional, etc.) you feel you might derive from a collaboration, it is doomed to fail if you don’t respect your collaborator. If this all makes sense to you and you agree, then maybe a successful collaboration is in your future.

The details of a collaboration will vary widely from project to project. You may each take on different roles by playing to your respective strengths, or you may take a more egalitarian approach and simply split the workload fifty/fifty. The workload allocation may simply evolve as you begin the process, or you may work it all out and set it down in writing at the outset. Whatever allocation works for one current project may be quite be different for another project, even if you’re working with the same writer. The details are always up for negotiation, but the respect needed for a successful working relationship is not.

All Inter-Writer Relationships Come Down to One Thing
Also known as “That Writer”

The main thing to keep in mind when dealing with other writers at any stage of your career is that you don’t want to be THAT writer. You know the one I mean, although there are many different values of “THAT.” It could be the writer who thinks his genre is the only important or worthwhile one. Or the writer whose first drafts are so perfect, she disagrees with all constructive criticism and can’t imagine that an editor would want to change a word. Maybe the writer whose way of doing things is the ONLY way. But you get the idea. THAT writer. Treat your fellow writers always with respect, tolerance, and support, and you won’t be THAT writer. You’ll be the writer that everyone likes, respects, and is pleased to work with.

Except, of course, the jealous ones.

That’s it for our inter-writer relationships! Next class we’ll look at a new sort of interaction…the kind you have with Editors.

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Re-evaluations ~ The First Mistake

  By current projects, personal, writer development, writing life

It didn’t take me long to uncover the first mistake in my previous time-organization plan. Because yes, I did have a plan before. In fact, it had two elements. I had a detailed calender laid out in Outlook, blocking off each day into segments, and I also had a “daily slog” list in Evernote, with little checkboxes and everything, so that I could keep track of what I was accomplishing. As well as notes in Evernote for projects, to-do lists, time tracking, etc.

So why wasn’t that working? Why did I still seem to have no time to write?

Very simple. Writing was not the first thing on my list every day.

I’ll say it again: writing should have been higher on the list.

See, my thinking was, get all of that other stuff out of the way first (like website updates, blogging, submission tracking, etc.) and then have a clear mind and conscience heading into writing time. For me, however, that just doesn’t work very well. Because all those other things can 1) take more time than one expects, and 2) lead into other things that will take up even more time. And then before you know it, all the chore time and all the writing time have both been used up.

Why didn’t I see this before? I think because I kept telling myself, “once you get all this out of the way, THEN you’ll have more writing time.” But that’s just a trap for the unwary, because, like housework and laundry, all that other stuff is never finished. I was only fooling myself that things could ever get better under that system.

This seems so simple and self-evident now, I feel rather foolish even admitting it. But that’s the only way I’m going to learn. So, step one, I’ve rearranged my Evernote list to better reflect my priorities. I’ve set time limits for non-writing jobs and pulled out my timer program. It’s only a first step, but I think it’s a good one.

Photo by Mattox (http://www.sxc.hu/profile/Mattox)

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Tales of Tales ~ Part 7: Common Ground

  By current projects, ebooks, personal, publishing, reading, To Unimagined Shores, writer development, writing life

Staying on the science fiction side of things, today I thought I would talk a little bit about “Common Ground,” another story in my collection To Unimagined Shores.

I actually can’t recall the “inciting incident” or the idea spark that led to this story. It’s based around a colony ship arriving at a new planet to find that it’s not as empty as the colonists expected. It also has a lot to do with parenthood, and I suspect the idea first came to me not long after our daughter was born. I do vividly remember lying awake one night thinking about the story and how excited I was to start writing it. There was a particular idea in it that, at that time, I thought was one of the best things I’d ever come up with. It’s a magnificent feeling, when you know you have a great story idea and it’s just waiting to come to life under your fingertips. The wonderful feeling doesn’t always last, and the story doesn’t always turn out to be as fabulous as you thought it was going to, but those moments of excitement and the feeling that you really have something are priceless.

“Common Ground” was published at Nuketown in 2001. Later, in 2003, the aliens from “Common Ground” formed the basis for one of the alien races who showed up in the novel I was writing for National Novel Writing Month, “One’s Aspect to the Sun.” I had obviously enjoyed writing these aliens. They were one of the first really well-developed alien races I’d created, and they have stayed with me. Years later an editor would tell me, “You really do write great aliens.” She wasn’t talking about these aliens in particular, but I’m quite proud of that comment, and it makes me strive, whenever I create an alien race, to make them very believable.

Once past the end of the garden we saw the cave. A dozen yards distant the shrouded entrance gaped blackly in the rock wall. And under a natural outcropping, half obscured by shadow, stood three aliens.

My stomach churned. My own breath made a hollow whistling sound in my throat. These were the creatures who had our babies. I could not even see them clearly yet, but a fist of fear tightened in my chest.

One of them held up a hand, but we had already stopped. The others were armed, not overtly menacing but standing easily erect, perhaps five feet tall and garbed in wrapped shirts and loose leggings.

The apparent leader gave a short speech, the words a tumbled gibber of growls, yips, and barks. It ended on a questioning note.

It’s the last day to enter my contest to win a copy of To Unimagined Shores. Click the link to get all the details, and take a moment to enter. Or if you can’t wait, you can buy a print or ebook copy (in multiple formats) from thirdpersonpress.com, amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, or Smashwords.

Image “Planetfall by Moonlight” copyright 2010 by Sherry D. Ramsey

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Tales of Tales ~ Part 6: On The Road With Fiamong’s Rule

  By current projects, ebooks, personal, publishing, reading, To Unimagined Shores, writer development, writing life

Writing some stories is an uphill slog from start to finish, while others are so much fun to write that they practically seem to write themselves. “On The Road With Fiamong’s Rule” was one of those pure-fun stories for me.

Yet another of my stories that was idea-sparked by an anthology call, this one was originally written for an anthology looking for road trip stories–with, of course, an element of the speculative thrown in. The idea of a human-alien partnership in that road trip materialized quite quickly, as I recall, and as I said, the story seemed to write itself. This was one that I actually finished before the anthology’s deadline date, submitted and had accepted. Alas, something went wrong with the project, the anthology itself never made it to print, and I had to send the story out looking for another home. Such are the vagaries of the writing life.

The good news is that it did find another home, in the premiere issue of the Canadian Neo-Opsis magazine. If you look carefully, you can actually see my name on the cover. That was a first for me. Cool!

This story doesn’t follow a strict chronological timeline–there’s a fair bit of jumping back and forth between the “present” of the story and flashbacks to the past and the events leading up to the story’s “present.” I think I was experimenting a bit when I wrote this one, and I’d probably just been reading something that recommended starting a story “in medias res”–in the middle of the action. To illustrate what I mean by that, here’s the opening:

The worst moment of the whole trip came just before three a.m. on Friday. I stood in the driving rain, mud seeping insidiously into my shoes. The alien’s outline looked enormous in the dark, and the tire iron in his hand even more so, silhouetted against the probing glare of the police car’s headlights. When the cruiser had driven past a moment ago I thought we might be in the clear, but no, it had turned and was coming back.

My credit card was still being held hostage by the jerk at the service station and I had lost the rest of my ID in the motel fire. We had to make it to Ottawa by noon the next day or the entire mission could fail. I had about thirty seconds to think of something to tell the police, and if I didn’t get rid of them quickly, the alien would give himself away and we’d both be in the soup.

What was I, a previously normal at-home-mom of two, doing here? Tim was going to be furious when he found out.

Definitely the worst moment of the whole experience. Well, except for what happened later.

“In medias res,” indeed. I think I might have been testing to see just how far into the action one could really start a story. :)

If you missed the earlier blog post, I’m currently running a contest to win a copy of To Unimagined Shores. Click the link to get all the details, and take a moment to enter. Or if you can’t wait, you can buy a print or ebook copy (in multiple formats) from thirdpersonpress.com, amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, or Smashwords.

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Tales of Tales ~ Part 5: The Ambassador’s Staff

  By current projects, ebooks, personal, publishing, reading, To Unimagined Shores, writer development, writing life

Keeping to the SF side of the equation, I thought I’d take a look today at “The Ambassador’s Staff.” This story was originally published in the anthology Thoughtcrime Experiments. There’s a lot of interesting data on the website, compiled by the editors during and after the process. If you’ve ever thought about putting together an anthology, it makes a very interesting read. You can also read the entire anthology there.

Funnily enough, what I didn’t realize when I submitted the story to this anthology, was that they were particularly looking for stories that had been previously rejected by other markets. I don’t know how I missed that, but I did. This was actually the first place I’d submitted the story, and it was accepted. Oops!

The editors liked it, but wanted me to rewrite the ending to some extent. They gave very clear suggestions, but my first reaction was panic—they wanted it done over the weekend! At first I honestly didn’t know how to tackle it. But after some calming breaths and a hot drink, I got to work, and the editors were happy with the result.

Where I live, there’s talk from time to time of building a launch base for boosting things up into orbit—apparently our geographical location makes it a prime spot for this. It has never materialized (and I somehow doubt that it will, although I would love to be wrong about that), but I did start thinking…what might it look like here in a hundred years or so, if such a thing were built? The result was Cape City, a spaceport town. The other big idea in this story came from—spam! The subject line of a spam email made me imagine a drug called Level…and once again, two ideas clicked and decided they needed to be together.

I followed him to the door and he headed into the street. I watched him through the window, weaving his way through the folks milling around the spaceport, a few going to or from jobs, more just wandering—the street vendors, the homeless, the dealers and the Levelers.

One of those was sprawled in the doorway of Kugar’s video shop across the walklane, and I could tell the way he just stared, not moving, not blinking, that he was Leveled ‘way up. Kugar wouldn’t like that, but if he wanted the Leveler moved, he’d have to pick the guy up and carry him away. Once that white liquid finds its way down their throat or into a vein, they’re living in an alternate reality, and they don’t see, hear, feel or care anything about this one until they come back down.

I sighed and turned away from the window. The joke is that Leveling is the furthest you can get from Earth without actually boarding a ship. If I’d gone off-planet when I’d had the opportunity—well, who knows what would have happened. But chances are I wouldn’t be living in a tiny apartment above my office in a place like Cape City. Even if it was my own office.

“The Ambassador’s Staff” mixes genres, something I’ve realized I really like to do. This one puts a sort of hard-boiled female detective character on the streets of a spaceport town. I’d like to do more with this character as well, and I have a couple of ideas percolating. When she’s ready, I’m sure she’ll tell me how they turn out.