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Announcement: Clarion West Write-a-Thon

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This announcement comes from Cassie Alexander, author of the recently-released Nightshifted, who is helping run the Clarion West Write-a-Thon.

Sign up now for Clarion West’s ninth annual Write-a-thon!

The ninth annual Clarion West Write-a-thon is open for participant sign-up now through June 16. Every summer since 2004, famous authors and emerging ones have announced their six-week writing goals on individual web pages hosted by Clarion West. People publicly state what they’d like to do for their own writing over the six weeks that the workshop runs — either word count, pages written, chapters edited, anything writing related is perfect. And then Clarion West gets donations from their supporters when those goals are met.

Michael Swanwick and several others have offered Tuckerized story appearances to their supporting donors, and award-winners Vonda N. McIntyre, Rachel Swirsky, and Nisi Shawl are already signed up. The goal is to have at least 200 participating writers by June 16; four supporters have offered to give Clarion West $2000 if that happens.

More details on how the Write-a-thon works and how you can take part are available at www.clarionwest.org/writeathon.

Clarion West is a 501 c 3 nonprofit organization which presents writing workshops for those preparing for careers as professional writers in the fantastic genres.

If you were looking at a way to encourage yourself to write this summer — for a good cause, no less! — the Write-a-thon is it.

Debunking the Myth of a Strong Opening

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John Klima previously worked at Asimov’s, Analog, and Tor Books before returning to school to earn his Master’s in Library and Information Science.  He now works full time as a librarian. When he is not conquering the world of indexing, John edits and publishes the Hugo Award-winning genre zine Electric Velocipede.  The magazine has is also a four-time nominee for the World Fantasy Award.  In 2007 Klima edited an anthology of science fiction and fantasy stories based on spelling-bee winning words called Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories.  In 2011, Klima edited a reprint anthology of fairytale retellings for Night Shade Books titled Happily Ever After.  He and his family live in the Midwest. You can follow him on Twitter @EV_Mag.

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There are countless writing books and countless lists of writing tips that trot out the same maxim again and again: make sure your story has a killer opening.  I’m here to debunk that myth.

It’s not that your story doesn’t need a strong opening.  There are countless times when I’ve read submissions where the story doesn’t start going until the five or sixth page, and in a ten-page story, waiting that long to get going is death.  There isn’t much room, get going!  On the same token, I’ve read almost as many stories that have a great opening that just fall flat by the end.

I’m not sure which bothers me more.

Let’s break down why this myth gets trotted out time after time, why it actually matters, and in what ways it doesn’t matter.

First, the reason that this myth consistently makes its way into writing advice is that it’s meant to convey to you the importance of keeping the reader reading.  If you have a catchy opening, the reader will be sure to keep turning pages, right?  And we want readers to keep turning pages and digesting the words we wrote, right?  Of course we do.

In some ways then, a catchy opening makes perfect sense.  Give the reader something intriguing, and off we go.  And catchy doesn’t necessarily mean explosions, nudity, action sequences, and the like.  A catchy opening can be slow and deliberate.  So let’s change the word ‘catchy’ to ‘compelling’ since ‘catchy’ implies forgettable pop tunes and we don’t want our stories to be forgettable.  Think of Henry James and how deliberate and slow-paced The Turn of the Screw is (if you haven’t read The Turn of the Screw go do it; for all its brevity, it’s still arduous and slow, but worth it) and still how compelling it is:

“The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child.” – Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

Whew!  That’s a long opening sentence.  You finish it virtually breathless much like the literary audience listening to the tale.  I know that James isn’t for everyone, but for me, that opening sentence made me keep heading down the page to learn what the tale was that left the audience breathless.  But the opening isn’t full of action and excitement, in fact, it’s rather confusing.  But it still works to keep the reader reading.

I work primarily with short fiction, so a strong opening is particularly important to me.  When working at 10,000 words and less, there’s not a lot of space for exposition and you had better start moving into the story proper from the first sentence.  I continually see stories that take a few pages to start, and by then you’ve already lost your reader.  The writer typically has one paragraph to grab my attention and keep me reading.

So we should put all our efforts into making the opening as best as we can, right?

Well, no.  Not if you’re going to forego making the rest of the story strong, too.  The trick is that your story needs to be strong from beginning to end.  A strong opening followed by a weak end is just as much a failure of a story as a weak opening with a strong end.  Writing a poor opening means you lose readers who don’t wait for your story to get going.  Writing a poor ending means you’ve ticked off a bunch of readers who decided to stick with you to the end.

I know that’s easier said than done, but unfortunately for you, there’s no way around it.  Your story has to open strong and finish strong, whether it’s 500 words or 500,000 words.  Look at your strong ending, can you replicate that language and strength in the beginning of your piece?  Can you start your piece later and just cut your current opening?  Take your strong beginning and sustain that language and power through to the end.  If you can’t pinpoint what makes something strong, let someone else take a look at your writing and help you.

The best, and yet most difficult, advice I can give is to set the work aside and come back to it after some time.  One night might be enough.  If you can do it, write something else (this obviously works better with short fiction) and then come back to the first piece.  You’ll no longer be in that world and you’ll be reading it closer to how a reader will see it instead of your brain filling in gaps.

Heck, I’m guilty of telling people to write strong openings to stories.  Just don’t spend so much time working on the start of the story that you give the rest of it the short end of the stick.

 

 

Stalking the Wild Sentence

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Peter Brandvold has written over seventy fast-action western novels under his own name and his penname, Frank Leslie.   Follow of his blog here.

Finding that first sentence of the day can be as bracing to the writer as that first up of coffee, but it’s sometimes as hard to find as the strike zone for the aging fast-ball pitcher or as elusive as wild asparagus for the natural foods forager.

Sitting down to the soft, menacing whine of his machine, the career-scribe stares at the blank screen and sees nothing but his own bewildered eyes staring back at him.  Two lone eyes in a vast sea of white.

Gradually, the eyes get wider.

And wider.

They are suddenly no longer the wordsmith’s own eyes but the eyes of the moron he suddenly fears he’s become.  “Eee-gads!” he cries, fists clamped to his temples.  “My career is over and I have only a few chapters left on this oater I’m writing!  No delivery check for me, and they’re probably going to force me to return the advance money I’ve already frittered away, as well!”

The scribbler’s heart pounds like musket fire in a Civil War reenactment battle as he wonders if they’re hiring down at Target.

Where are those slippery devils, those glistening little hand-cut and polished jewels, those sentences, hiding?

Sometimes, at this point, the writer must become the Euell Gibbons of his trade, don his metaphorical hiking boots and walking stick, and light out for parts known.  Yes, into the wild he’s explored before.  Into the woods where he’s found those toothy little word-lions roaming free in the past and managed to throw a loop around them and haul them home to the cheers of his relieved family and the yips of his happy curs.

My version of this primeval forest is usually as close as my own office bookshelves or sometimes even my bedside night table.

At either place I can usually find all the books I’m in the half-conscious habit of returning to on those frustrating mornings I find that I need my pump primed.  Sometimes, all I have to do is flip through one or two of these tomes, reading a few of the sentences in each–usually by writers who have struck major chords with something deep inside my writer’s ear before, firing the spark of creativity inside my desperate soul–and suddenly I become a cat pouncing on a mouse.

I’m Hemingway in Africa.

Paris Hilton on Rodeo Drive.

It’s weird, the books I find myself returning to.  These are the books I’ve read and reread so many times I know them almost by heart, but they’re not at all what anyone who knows I’m a fast-action, blood-‘n’-guts western writer would expect.  Most days, there’s not a single oater among them.

Today I found three books at the top of the stash I return to most often and thumb through repeatedly, searching for the sounds that are going to ring my own bell.  And one or all of these almost always rings it.

Here are the titles:

Red Smith on Baseball.

Lights on a Ground of Darkness by Ted Kooser.

One Man’s Garden by Henry Mitchell.

Yeah, that last one’s a freakin’ gardening book.  And aside from throwing a few shrubs in the dirt now and then, I don’t even garden!  The thing is, I’m not reading for content but for the sound of the writer’s words arranged with such seeming effortlessness into graceful sentences.

I’m needing to hear the writer’s voice and see the images that that voice paints in my head.  For some reason and almost all the time, hearing and seeing those sentences written by folks I consider masters of the trade helps me use my own voice and my own images to write this essay, for instance, as well as the scenes in my own western novels.

Here are two sentences by sportswriter Red Smith from his essay, “A Man Who Knew the Crowds,” that got me going yesterday:

When the iceman cometh, it doesn’t make a great deal of difference which route he takes, for the ultimate result is the same in any case.  Nevertheless, there was something especially tragic in the way death came to Tony Lazzeri, finding him and leaving him all alone in a dark and silent house–a house which must, in that last moment, have seemed frighteningly silent to a man whose ears remembered the roar of the crowd, as Tony’s did.

Thanks, Red.  And Henry and Ted.

You’ve helped me more times that you could ever know turn that moon-like desert of the white page into a flowing field green with wild asparagus!

The Highs and the Lows of Becoming an Author

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Cassie Alexander is an active registered nurse. Nightshifted is her debut novel, coming out through St. Martin’s Press on May 22, 2012.

I was trying to think of the best way to present this piece without it being frontloaded (or backloaded!) with pain and sorrow. I’ve decided that alternating is best. Presented for your pleasure, or sympathetic pain, here’s the highlight reel of the best decisions and worst decisions I’ve ever made in my 15 year writing career.

Best: Getting an agent

I know, because I’m out there on the internets, that there’s a school of thought that says that now that Amazon’s our new publishing overlord, agents are a thing of the past.

That’s simply not true.

Let me tell you some of the fabulous things my agent, Michelle Brower, and her agency, Folio Lit, have done for me: sold a trilogy at auction, getting me three times as much money for it as was originally offered, obtaining sales of foreign rights to Germany and France. Reading my contract and making sure it was favorable to me, and having the agency lawyer red-pen it to make it even moreso. (Not that Macmillan was out to get me, but generic boilerplate is not always great.)

Those are things I simply couldn’t have done on my own. No way, no how.

And beyond that, she’s read all of my books, sometimes before my editor has, and offered really insightful advice that I was happy to take. She’s helped me come up with a sales proposal for another series, based on her knowledge of the market with her insider ability to see trends, an opportunity I would never have had on my lonely-own.

I’m always bemused when people say they can go it alone. Technically, you can, and yes, a bad agent is worse than no agent, but there’s no way I would have had the opportunities for success that she’s given me without her.

Worst: Getting a Book Doctor

In my weak defense, this was Back In The Day. But I wish someone had told me this sooner, so here, learn from my pain.

Once Upon a Time there was a Well Known Author who had a Spectacular Agent and Purported Ins at a Publishing House. He was also a book doctor, for the small small price of a thousand dollars.

I scrimped and saved until I’d earned that money — I think I had a ten buck an hour job at the time — and sent it and my manuscript (one before Nightshifted) off to him with the hopes that he’d see my intrinsic genius, give me amazing advice, and herald me to his agent and the publishing house he was associated with. It would finally be my in.

Yes, I was naive. And hopeful/desperate. You know, how new writers sometimes are.

Obviously, none of those things happened. Instead, he had some personal drama just after I paid him… and so he took my money and never responded to me. Ever.

I was understanding (naïve! Hopeful! Desperate!) about his personal drama, and I waited. And waited. And waited. After a year when it was clear I wasn’t going to learn the secret handshake from him, I demanded my money back. It took another 6 months to get. When I was eventually repaid he overpaid me, which felt like some sort of hush money to be quiet about his lack of services rendered to me. But, yeah. Overall, a bleak period in my nascent career. (For the record, he no longer offers those services, or I’d out him in a heartbeat.)

I learned then what I ought to have already known, that there’s no shortcuts in this career. Which leads me to my next best decision…

Best: Not Giving Up

I had so many opportunities to give up along the way. The first World Fantasy I went to was in 98, and I’d already written a book by then. Nightshifted (the one that sold) was my tenth book. I’ve had at least 500 rejections for short fiction, probably more, and over 150 agent rejections total over my entire career. 56 of those were for Nightshifted — the one that sold.

I had friends not get what I was doing, relatives and ex-husbands think I was crazy. I stopped telling people I was a writer because after enough times sharing it, I knew the decision tree subsequent conversation would follow — they’d want to know where I was published, and I wasn’t, and then there’d be an awkward silence I’d try to fill by explaining that that wasn’t all that unusual. (Somehow you can be an artist without having gallery shows, and you can be a musician even without a band, but if you say you’re a writer without a book in your hands, hmmph.)

If I’d ever said, “You know, maybe this writing thing isn’t working out for me,” there wouldn’t have been all that many people who’d have tried to stop me. Luckily for me, I was too stubborn to quit.

Worst: The Times I Did Quit

Or, I gave up too soon.

It wasn’t until really late on in my career I realized how often people — even pros! — had to keep submitting stories. I was giving up on submitting stories way too soon. I’d get four or five rejections from professional magazines and then trunk the story, and write a new one. Always writing new stuff was great experience, yes, but I should have been better about sending out the old.

Same for novels. Mind you, a large proportion of this was pre-internet making all the agent searches easy, but… I’d send a book out to 5-10 agents, they’d say no, and then I’d send it into the Tor slushpile to get lost. I didn’t persevere. I didn’t run things into the ground. I’m not sure it would have changed my career much, as Nightshifted is clearly the best thing I’d written up until that time, but it would have been good for me to keep trying.

Best: Going to Conventions

Writing is such a lonely art, and so few people understand why you’re compelled to do it. Going to conventions and meeting other people who take writing seriously gives you the freedom to be among their number, permission to take yourself seriously. That’s always been something that I’ve battled, and am battling still with an increasing sense of irony. Going to conventions really helped me to feel like a Real Writer. Being around people who do what you do and get what you do and why you do it is energizing. I’d come home from a World Fantasy or Worldcon high on being a writer for weeks at a time. It gave me the self esteem about being a writer that I wasn’t able to give myself internally (having known that I’d received 5 rejections that week) or acquire through external measures, such as getting acceptance letters.

At conventions when I was with writers I felt like a writer and it was good for me.

Worst: Flirting at Conventions

In the Venn Diagram of my life, there was a brief period where I was single and attending conventions. The overlapping zone of time was not pretty.

I wrote a lot of SF early on. It’s hard enough to be taken seriously as a woman who writes SF, muchless one who flirts. I don’t think this is fair or anything, but it is what it is, and the brief window of time when you’re at a writing convention is not the place where you’ll manage to overturn the social hierarchy. It’s a shame, because it’s completely a double standard, in that guys can flirt and no one thinks less of them…but be a girl that does it, and suddenly you’re not the SF writer who also sometimes flirts, you’re just a flirty girl. Or, worse yet, a girl trying to flirt to get ahead. Which for some people, negates whatever career progress you’ve made — “no wonder they published your story, you showed clevage.” Gah.

Some people do manage to use their convention time as a pansexual smorgasbord of opportunities. I wasn’t one of the people who could do that well, and in retrospect, I wish I’d never tried. (Except for that one time when it worked out reallllly well. He knows who he is.)

Best: Making Writing Friends

The end result of all the conventions I went to, and online message boards and mailing lists I hung out on, was making writing friends. People I could email on bad days, send stories to, chat ideas out with, get support from when the rejections came in, and celebrate the few successes. While my real life friends are supportive, they don’t bone-deep get it the way my writer friends do.

Conventions and writing groups led me to Daniel, who is my alpha reader for all of my books now, who sees them all when they’re still in progress. (And who yells at me when I’m not writing them fast enough.) He’s a writer, but I met him through his wife who was in a writing group with me at the time. We clicked, and I’m very very very pleased to get to have his input in on all of my books now. He’s really made my writing shine.

And you’ll find in your career that no matter where everyone started, that the people in your social cohort rise together. I think that’s a direct relationship to the critiques, support, and understanding we offer one another. Together, we become our own liferafts and we rise with the tide.

Worse: Being Jealous of Friend’s Careers

Because my heart is not a stoic island. The more awesome people you know, the higher the chance that one of them will be zomg-amazing-bestselling-award-winning awesome. And while I’m always 99.99% happy for their success, especially when as a friend I’ve had the closest seat to their efforts, that .01% of jealousy can be a very bitter draught.

It’s not something I’m proud of. It isn’t that I don’t think they deserve their success, it’s just that I wish/ed that I could be as successful too. Fifteen years with not much to show for it wears a person down. Mostly, I try to remind myself that they’re awesome and deserving, and that eventually my time will come. Hopefully, I’m right.

And because I want to end on a high note, the final best:

Best: Having My Own Book Come Out

Nightshifted sold at the end of 2010. It came out in Germany earlier this year, which has been awesome — but I can’t wait until it finally comes out in the US. That’s going to be a best for sure, the second that that I can finally see it in a bookstore!