The Reader Is Always Right

I received my editor's notes on SURVIVAL COLONY NINE yesterday.

She suggested a number of major changes concerning chronology, world-building, character relationships, narrative arc, plot developments, and more. My eyes nearly popped out of my head.

But the thing is, she's right about everything.

Which leads to the point of this post: the reader is always right.

I tell my students this when we're peer editing. I would say the same to any writer who's received a comment they didn't like from a critique partner or beta reader. I'd say the same to any writer, anywhere, any time.

The reader is always right.

Now, let's be clear about this. I'm not saying readers are always smarter than writers, or writers always have to listen to their readers. You're the writer, so you should, hopefully, be pretty smart and know your book pretty well. And if you don't like your reader's suggestions, don't follow them. The fact that the reader is always right does not obligate the writer always to follow the reader's advice.

In my case, of course, I'm going to follow the reader's advice. She's my editor. I'm trying to get a book published. I have one question for her concerning her comments, but once she clarifies that one point, I'm going to do as she says.

The way I'm going to do as she says is, of course, my own business. No one's telling me exactly how to make the changes I need to make.

She's just telling me I have to make them. And I will.

I think this is important advice for writers to learn. Many writers--students and otherwise--get all hot under the collar when anyone dares suggest there's something that could be improved about their brilliant prose. They storm, they pout, they sulk. And then they retaliate by not doing what their reader tells them to do. Or, worse, they refuse to show their work to readers at all, and they go ahead and self-publish something that's nowhere near ready. So there!

Yeah, that'll really show 'em.

As writers, I think we'd do ourselves a great service if we just remembered that the reader is always right. If we'd remember that, then we could focus on what we're supposed to do as writers. Not storm, pout, sulk, or retaliate. Not lash out at our readers. Not curl up into a little ball and hide from the reality of the writing life.

But listen to our readers.

And then write.

Pantsers of the World, Unite!

A Facebook friend asked me to post on the topic of writing without a plan.  Ever eager to oblige, here goes....

Conventional wisdom holds that when it comes to drafting, there are two kinds of writers: Planners and Pantsers.

The former plan everything out.  The latter fly by the seat of their pants.

Now, like most dichotomies, this one falls apart in actual practice.  There's no writer so organized that s/he doesn't wing it sometimes, nor is there any writer so carefree that s/he doesn't plan sometimes.

However, if we're thinking not in terms of absolutes but in terms of tendencies and dispositions, it's certainly true that some writers lean more toward the Planner side, while others incline more toward the Pantser side.

I'm more of a Pantser.  I like to discover what I'm writing while I'm writing it.  Part of this comes from my history as a teacher, where I've had plenty of opportunity to watch emergent writers discover their skills, their ideas, their point of view over the course of a semester or a paper or a paragraph.

But my Pantser-ish tendencies are also a matter of disposition: I find it boring and tedious to plan everything out.  I find that it limits my creativity rather than liberating it.  I know I'm going to change everything anyway, so why bother?

Case in point: my forthcoming YA novel, Survival Colony Nine, started only with a setting (post-apocalyptic desert world), a name (Querry), and a relationship (father-son).  After a few pages an antagonist emerged: the creatures I call the Skaldi.  After 150 pages or so, I decided I needed to be a bit clearer in my own mind about where the story was headed, so I wrote a series of 2-sentence summaries for the remaining chapters.  Shortly thereafter, I also decided I needed to be clear about the physical layout of an important plot space, so I drew a map.  Finally, as the character list grew, I typed up a running roster of their names.

But that was the extent of my planning.  The rest emerged through the writing and revision.

And oh, did it ever emerge through the writing and revision!  The narrator's voice settled into a rhythm, new characters popped up, relationships among existing characters morphed and solidified, the nature of the Skaldi became clear, the history of the world came into focus, and so on and so forth.  The stuff I'd planned out changed radically while I was writing it (I ended up scribbling changes on the original print-out), and even more radically through five complete revisions: one chapter vanished entirely, two others fused, scenes from still others were created anew or modified or deleted or moved.

In short, I found out what I was trying to say in the act of trying to say it.  The book ended up in a place I never anticipated when I started it, but I'm very happy with where it ended up.

Another case in point: the sequel to Survival Colony Nine, the working title of which is Scavenger of Souls.  When I started, I had only that title, which sounded kind of cool to me.  I also knew I had to take my narrator to a new place, both physically and emotionally; I had to open up his world to new vistas, new possibilities, new threats and challenges.  But what any of those things was going to be, I had very little idea.

I'm now two-thirds of the way through the manuscript-in-progress, and I have a pretty good idea of it all.  But there's still room for surprise and discovery.

The bottom line is this: there is no "right" way to write a novel.  (Or a poem, or a play, or an essay, or an anything.)  In a previous post, "Wake Up and Smell the Novels," I harped at overly restrictive advice about how to structure one's novel; here, I would emphasize that the same applies to how one writes one's novel.

If you're a Planner, you must have a good reason to be so.  If you're a Pantser, same deal.  Don't try to be a Planner when you're a Pantser at heart just because somebody in publishing told you you have to be.  And don't try to write by the seat of your pants if, deep down, you thrive on the planning process.

Be grateful that in writing, as in life, there are many roads to the realization of your dreams.

The Part-Time Full-Time Writer

I'm a full-time writer.  But I write part-time.

Huh?

Let me explain.

I've got a full-time job which, for the most part, pays the bills.  (My advance for my debut YA novel should come in handy when it arrives, but it's not going to keep me afloat forever.)  I seriously envy those writers whose fame and/or life circumstances and/or willpower and/or ability to give up creature comforts enable them to forego the "pay-the-bills" job.  Those people are awesome.

But they're not me.

When my daughter was a baby, I had a part-time job that enabled me to stay home with her two out of five weekdays.  I'm so glad I had that opportunity.  She's not a baby anymore, but we're still very close, and I'm convinced those early daddy days are what cemented our relationship.

Now, though, I teach full-time.  I have summers off and all that, but during the school year, I'm on campus most of the week.  And my circumstances don't enable me to change that--or at least, not without changing the living conditions of three additional people whose needs and desires I don't feel it's my right to ignore.

So I write part-time.  But I'm a full-time writer.

This means two things to me:

First, when I have the time to write, I write as if it's the only thing in my life.  I concentrate on the writing, logging as much solid, uninterrupted time at the keyboard as I possibly can.  I find music and television (not to mention Facebook, Twitter, and other social media) distracting when I write, so I resist the impulse to have noise in the background and multiple windows open on the computer.  When I'm writing, I write.

But more importantly, when I say I'm a full-time writer, I mean that writing is one of the things--though not the only thing--that defines me as a person, full-time.  It's the same, actually, as being a father: though I'm not with my kids every moment of the day (for which, I assure you, they're profoundly grateful), there's never a moment of any day that I don't think of myself as a dad.  Same with being a husband.  Like most married people, my wife and I are only together part-time, thanks to jobs and family and friends and so forth.  But I'm never not a husband.  It's who I am.

I'm also never not a fan of fantasy literature and film, never not a social activist and environmentalist, never not a teacher, never not a lover of language and bad jokes and frogs and gorillas.  I may never see another frog or gorilla in my life--though the former are pretty numerous at the pond near my home--but I've always loved them, and I love them every moment of my life to this day.

Writing can't be a full-time job for everyone.  But that doesn't mean you can't be a full-time writer.

(Self)-Publish or Perish?

I've been thinking a lot lately about self-publishing.

Let me correct that.

I've been thinking a lot lately about NOT self-publishing.

Many of the people I follow or who follow me on Twitter are self-published.  Some are experiencing great success; others aren't.  For those who are, I could not be more thrilled.  For those who aren't, I could not be more hopeful.

But have I thought about self-publishing my own creative works?

Not for a second.

Lest you fear that this is going to turn into some kind of rant against self-publishing, rest assured, it's not.  I don't believe that self-published work is inherently or universally inferior to traditionally published work, nor do I believe that self-publishing is going to destroy traditional publishing or tear apart the fabric of the nation.  Truth be told, traditional publishing is far more likely to destroy itself than to be destroyed by some boogie-man.

No, for me, it's just a personal preference, based on my own sense of self.

For me, there are two major factors that determined my pursuit of traditional publication for my debut novel, Survival Colony Nine, and that will, unless something drastic changes, determine my course in the future as well.

NUMBER ONE

As anyone who knows me will tell you, I'm not the world's most outgoing person.  I'm okay at presenting myself in public, but not so okay at selling myself.  I could probably get better.  In fact, I've been working on it, with (I think) some success.  By the time my book comes out in 2014, I expect to be even better.

But I'll never be as good as some people, people to whom it either comes more naturally or who are willing or able to work harder at it than I am.  In my case, I feel it's essential to have the support of other professionals whose business it is to sell authors and books.

Don't get me wrong.  I know that, these days, authors can't sit back and expect the publisher's promo machine to do everything (which is one reason I might end up employing the services of a publicist).  But for purely personal reasons, I know I'd feel totally at a loss if I were largely or solely responsible for marketing, advertising, and selling the fruits of my creative labor.

NUMBER TWO

I started out in academic publishing, where no matter how good your manuscript may be, lots of other scholars and critics are going to weigh in on it before it sees the light of day.  I'm comfortable with that model; it makes sense to me as a teacher and writer.  I believe it's vitally important to have fellow readers--and, given my background, to me that means "expert readers"--making editorial judgments.  As with the promotional side of things, so with the writing side: I don't want to go it alone.

Now, of course, self-published authors don't have to go it alone.  There are beta readers, friends and fellow writers, editors for hire, and so forth.  All of these people can help the self-published author, if s/he so chooses, to improve her/his work.

But I know myself.  Much as I believe in the power of outside opinions, I know that my desire to get my book out there might overcome my good sense.  I know I might be inclined to cut corners: skip the beta readers, or ignore editorial advice, or simply be lazy with my own revisions.  I know I need someone to push me to make my writing as good as it can be--someone who simply will not publish my book if it's NOT as good as it can be.

Hence my decision to travel the traditional route.  I could, if I chose, ignore my beta readers.  But I can't ignore my agent and my editor.  If the former doesn't like my manuscript, it doesn't get subbed.  And if the latter doesn't like my manuscript, it doesn't get published.  So in my case, I feel I need the gate-keepers, the categorical imperatives that traditional publishing provides, to make sure I don't cut corners.

I don't want this to sound as if I see the traditional publishing system as a crutch for lazy writers, any more than I see the self-publishing system as a short-cut for poor writers.  Neither characterization is accurate.  My point is simply that each writer has to determine for herself or himself which route is best.

And this means, in the end, that each writer needs to know herself or himself, both strengths and weaknesses.  You can't let either success stories or horror stories decide for you.

If you do, you may never publish.  And your creative spark may very well perish.

On Info-Dumping

I was thinking about the subject of this post recently, while reading a futuristic YA novel.  Good story, interesting premise, tense and intense opening scene.  And then, just as the scene got REALLY gripping....

INFO-DUMP

It stopped everything cold.  It lasted only a page or so, during which time the author filled us in on the history of the world that had brought the protagonist to this moment in time.  But for me, it killed the scene.  I wish the author had let us find out organically, as the plot unfolded, how the world had come to be.

That, to me, is the definition of an info-dump.  Providing information isn't bad in itself; in fact, providing information is precisely what novels do.  But when the information appears grafted onto the plot, or distracts from it, or reeks of "my readers might not know what's going on, so I'd better tell them," it's an info-dump, and it's generally a bad idea.

To give a personal example, here's a draft of a scene I wrote for a novel titled Ecosystem.  This scene occurs early in the novel--maybe ten pages in--and I tried to insert the information more "naturally" into the story by presenting it as someone's speech to an audience.  But I still think it's an info-dump.

***

I am first of the Sensors to return.  Not surprisingly, as my circuit was by far the shortest, my track the safest.  A hundred rods into the forest beyond the sward, a quick kill, the same distance back.  The others will have gone deep into the Ecosystem, to places of which I have only heard, places I can only imagine.  In time, if I’m successful, I will seek out those places as well, where the game is thickest and the dangers greatest.  In time, if I live to Aaron’s age, I will train the next generation of Sensors to plunge into the Ecosystem’s everchanging maze.

But today, I will celebrate.  The village will celebrate.  They will celebrate me.

They will meet as always in the great hall, the entire community gathered as one, with the exception of those few assigned this day to ward the periphery.  In the flagstone hearth they will light the fire that is the Ecosystem’s chief grievance against the village, that and the cutting tools with which the threshers keep the greensward from encroaching on the pavilion of stone.  The Sensors will step forward to be acknowledged, to bask in the village’s thankfulness for the risks they take on the commoners’ behalf.  In their identical uniforms of close-fitting brown fur, cut short to expose muscled arms and long legs, the Sensors will stand in a line, aloof, imperturbable, their Sense of the Ecosystem removing them always from the community they are pledged to serve.  And for the first time, wearing the same uniform as they, I will stand among them.

Then Chief Warden Daniel will deliver the customary address, rehearsing our history, reminding the populace of how the Sensors came to be.  He will talk of the old days, when humans were numerous and powerful, when their cities stretched for miles across a landscape subdued by machines.  He will speak of species driven to extinction by the hand of man, of habitats despoiled, life’s essence corrupted.  For us who have known only the Ecosystem these past thousand generations, such a picture will seem fanciful, but none of us will laugh.  And then he will tell of the rise of the Ecosystem, how unseen and undreamed of by those who thought they had secured Earth’s domination, the innumerable threads of life and will knitted themselves into one, sentience burgeoning from dim, disparate signals to full roaring consciousness.  He will speak of cities overwhelmed by jungle, of food sources turned to deadly poisons and others to deadly predators, of virulent pathogens borne by vermin and birds and insects and cultivated crops, of newly weaned livestock feasting on their owners’ blood.  It was a coordinated attack, and it succeeded.  It gave birth to the world we know, a world in which the Ecosystem rules and we who were once its masters hide in its angry shadow.

Then Daniel will talk of the relearning, how the few who were left discovered a Sense of the Ecosystem’s will, and in so doing found ways not so much to fight back but simply to survive, to establish small enclaves the Ecosystem could not breach.  These few were the first Sensors, and as they gathered the people around them there grew the first villages of stone, the first walls and firewells, the first masters and apprentices.  But the Sensors, Daniel will tell us, were meant not to rule but to serve, and once they had established those first villages they willingly relinquished their authority to become what they are today: messengers and mediums, interpreters of the Ecosystem so finely attuned to its ways only they can pass safely through its winding passages in the daily hunt for food, drink, and fuel.  They are selfless, Daniel will say, so selfless they have agreed to serve the communities of which they can never fully be a part, the communities where they can never know the joys of love and family and children.  Perhaps, he will say, his lips curling in a grateful smile, it is their selflessness that is their Sense, their abjuring of mortal pleasures that enables them to project themselves into the Ecosystem and know its will.  Perhaps, too, it is this quality that makes them immune to the Ecosystem’s snares: for when they enter it, they enter it without the concentration of self that marks other humans as objects of the Ecosystem’s rage.

When he is finished the community will applaud, and I will glance at the other Sensors who stand silently around me, and wonder if, like me, they doubt this portrait Daniel has drawn of our class.  I’ll wonder if it is me alone who draws the Ecosystem’s fire, who taunts it, who hates it beyond all measure for what it has done.  And I will wonder too if it hates me with a special fury, if it knows me not just as a human, not just as a Sensor, but as the particular concentration of self that is me.

 

But I will voice none of these thoughts.  As the village's newest Sensor, I will step forward....

 

***

 

From "Then Chief Warden Daniel" on, the info-dump takes over, not relenting until the paragraph beginning "But I will voice none of these thoughts" returns us to the narrative.  It's too much, too soon.  It tells the reader so much about the history of this world, s/he might reasonably feel there's little point in reading on; what's left to discover?

 

It's no good, and the simple solution was to take it out (which I did) and let the reader discover the world's history through action, dialogue, and context.  I kept the info-dump in a separate file in case I needed it later, but the truth is, everything I said in it emerged much more plausibly and inobtrusively elsewhere in the book, so I never needed it after all.

 

So, what do you think?  How do you define or deal with info-dumping?  Why is it so easy to fall into that trap?  I'd love to hear what others think.

Double Agent; Or, What I Learned When the First One Didn't Work Out

In a previous post, I wrote that after revising my query letter for Survival Colony 9, I acquired representation within a month.

That story is true. But it’s not the whole story.

For those who’ve struggled with agents, editors, and the entire publication process, I thought I would provide the part I left out.

My revised query letter did indeed garner a number of requests for the full manuscript. One agent seemed particularly enthusiastic to read the full—and when we talked, she seemed very much “in tune” with my book, my career, everything. It was incredibly flattering for a debut author to feel that someone really “got” my book, saw its potential, and was ready and eager to start shopping it around.

With the benefit of hindsight, maybe I jumped at her offer too quickly (there was another offer waiting in the wings). Maybe I should have been more skeptical. Friends cautioned me that this agent didn’t have a lot of experience in my genre, but I refused to listen. I was on cloud nine, and I could barely hear all those little quibbling voices from the ground.

So I signed with her, revised the manuscript in accordance with her fairly modest suggestions, sent it back, and waited.

And waited. And waited. I’d thought she’d get right back to me, telling me the manuscript was ready to go out or, perhaps, asking for a few tiny “tweaks” before she started submitting it. But I sent it back to her (much improved, I thought) in March 2012, and it wasn’t until May that I finally heard from her again.

What she told me then was devastating.

The revised manuscript, she announced, was “rough” and “slow,” and still needed tons of work. It wasn’t anywhere near ready to send out. A paid editor would have to go through it before she’d even consider subbing it. When I asked her what the going rates for such editorial assistance were, she told me it could be anywhere from 2K to 5K. I told her I didn’t have that kind of money, particularly not if I was spending it only in the hope, not the assurance, of her sending the book out. I pressed her for details on what was wrong with the manuscript, but she would only answer in generalizations: it needed to be “finessed,” it didn’t yet “sing.” We went back and forth like this via phone and email, until finally—after she told me the story was narrated in the wrong tense—I decided I couldn’t take it anymore and exercised the termination clause in our contract.

I still have no idea what happened. Maybe she, too, had leaped before she looked, snapped up a manuscript she thought was in good shape but then discovered, or was told, that it wasn’t. Maybe she was simply as inexperienced as my friends suspected, and she didn’t know what to do once she realized that. Or maybe the whole thing was a scam, a way of milking novice writers in some sort of kickback scheme. (I doubt this, however; she worked for an entirely reputable agency.) Maybe the manuscript really did stink.

But whatever happened hardly mattered at the time. All that mattered was that I felt as if my dream had been snatched away from me just when it was finally within my grasp.

I picked up the pieces, though. The first thing I did—the very next day—was start writing another manuscript, just to have something in reserve. Then, a month or so later, when I could bear to look at Survival Colony 9 again, I went back to it and revised. I decided the verb tense was fine, but there were other issues that needed to be addressed. I deleted scenes, added others, tightened the language, worked on the pacing, improved dialogue, fleshed out characters, fixed continuity errors, everything. In retrospect, being brought back to earth—however rudely—turned out to be a good thing, as it enabled me to see my manuscript through newly critical eyes. By imagining that it was as bad as she’d said (even if it wasn’t), I was able to make it much better.

And the work paid off. I queried agents again. This time I received a positive response right out of the gate from Liza Fleissig of the Liza Royce Agency. A one-month exclusive led to an offer, which I accepted. Further revisions were called for—bringing the number of complete revisions of the manuscript up to five—but this time, Liza found my changes acceptable, and she started sending the book out. Acceptance by Karen Wojtyla of Margaret K. McElderry Books followed roughly three months later.

It’s a cliché to say you learn more from failure than from success, but it’s true that in the end I benefited greatly from this experience. First and perhaps foremost, I teamed with Liza, as tenacious and talented an agent as I could have dreamed for. At the same time, I learned that every part of the writing process—not only the physical writing but the querying, the relationship with an agent, and all that follows—is a work-in-progress; it’s naïve at best, harmful at worst, to imagine a time will come when one can stop laboring to create and recreate one’s product and oneself.

Finally, in true Scarlett O’Hara fashion, I learned that tomorrow is indeed another day. I was crushed, angered, and dismayed when my relationship with my first agent went sour; I felt like giving up. I was as low that day as I’ve ever been as a writer.

But I went to bed, had some bad dreams and some good ones, and then got up and got back to work.

Query Me This

I'm hosting a publication workshop later this week in Pittsburgh (feel free to come if you're in town), and one of the things I'll be talking about is writing an effective query letter.  I don't know if I'm the world's greatest authority on this, but I did write a letter that got a fair number of agents interested enough to ask for the full manuscript, so I thought I'd offer my two cents.

The first thing I discovered about writing a query letter is that, like the manuscript itself, it's very much a work in progress.  You can (and should) revise, refine, and even completely rework it as you go along, based on the responses it's getting.  This is one reason it's important not to query every agent in the world at once; if you send 100 queries with a letter that's not working, you're left with nowhere else to go.

My first-version query letter, for example, went out to roughly 10 agents, and generated exactly zero interest.  It was the first query letter I'd ever written, and not surprisingly, it wasn't my best.  Looking back at it, I realize it was too formal and formulaic; it didn't sound as if I was excited about my book, so why should anyone else be?  It was long, packed with information, and in consequence dull; it was as if I didn't trust the manuscript itself, so I tried to tell the whole story in the query.  It also had a totally unnecessary introductory paragraph, one that began: "I am seeking representation for my Young Adult novel...."  There's no reason to include that; why else would you be sending a letter to an agent's query inbox?  The point of the query is to hook the agent, to get the agent excited about the story, not about the fact that Unknown Writer #20,000 is writing to them today.

So I did a little online research, found some good advice and some good models, and rewrote my query from scratch.  In my new approach, I followed two pieces of advice that all writers know:

1. Begin in the middle
2. Less is more

So in the new query, I plunged right into the story with an opening sentence that I hoped would intrigue the reader enough that s/he would read on.  And I trimmed the letter down to its bare bones, eliminating unnecessary sentences and modifiers, planting hints but not giving away too much, resulting in a descriptive paragraph that's fewer than 10 lines long.  I felt that this query was much zippier and catchier than the first; in the manner of a back-cover blurb, it sold my story, leaving the reader tantalized, rather than trying to tell the whole thing.  I sent it out to another 10 agents feeling much more confident in its success.

And sure enough, the day after I sent it out, the first request for the full manuscript arrived.  Other requests followed.  A month later, I had representation.  (There's a much longer story behind that, which I'll tell in another post.)  Maybe I just got lucky, but I think it was the new query that did the trick.

So here, for your enjoyment and/or edification, is my query for Survival Colony Nine.  Again, I make no claims for its greatness.  All I know is it achieved its objective.

***

Dear [name of agent]:

In a near-future world of dust and ruin, fourteen-year-old Querry Genn struggles to recover the lost memory that might save the human race.

His story is Survival Colony Nine, a futuristic Young Adult novel that follows a small band of refugees as they fight for existence in this hostile land.  The narrator, Querry Genn, suffers from traumatic memory loss induced by an encounter with the Skaldi, alien antagonists that swarm the wasted planet's surface.  Unable to recall his past or his identity, Querry is both protected and tormented by the colony's authoritarian commander, his father Laman Genn.  But there is a secret in Querry's past, one that makes him at once a target of the Skaldi's wrath and a key to the colony's future.  The discoveries Querry makes about himself, his father, and his family will change his life--and the fate of humanity--forever.

Survival Colony Nine is currently complete at 74,000 words.  I have begun drafting a second installment in a possible three-book series.  The story told in Survival Colony Nine, however, stands on its own.

I am the author of the book Framing Monsters (2005), a survey of classic and contemporary fantasy and science fiction film.  In addition, I have published numerous short stories in the fantasy and science fiction genres; these appear in such publications as A cappella Zoo, Niteblade, Farspace 2, and Cover of Darkness.

I have included a synopsis and the first ten pages of Survival Colony Nine.  Thank you for your consideration, and I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

[Me]

***

So there you have it.  I hope this model is useful to others, and I'd love to hear your thoughts and impressions.

Just the Facts?

Though the big news in my writing life of late is the acceptance-for-publication of my futuristic YA novel Survival Colony Nine, I'm also having a run of luck publishing creative nonfiction (under my moniker of J. David Bell).  To wit:

Late last year, two of my essays came out: "Watershed" (about a family excursion to sweep our local stream) appeared in Kudzu Review, and "Body Parts" (about illness, my own and others') was published in Blood and Thunder.

Later this year, my essay "The Last Days of the Frog Prince" (about my career catching frogs) will appear in the environmental journal Snowy Egret.  It's been a long time coming--it was accepted for publication back in 2011--but I think it'll be worth the wait, as I believe it's one of the best essays I've written.

Also later this year, my essay "Moon Man" (a love letter to my son, who was seven at the time I wrote the piece) will appear in The Lindenwood Review.

And finally, I just got word that my essay "Racist Like Me" (about my early experiences with race and integrated education) has been accepted for publication by a journal named--I kid you not--Toad Suck Review.

My guess is that my productivity in this genre will dwindle as I buckle down and focus on Survival Colony Nine and (with luck) other novels to follow.  But I really love the challenge of creative nonfiction, which requires the writer to tell the truth in the garb of fiction (as opposed to fiction proper, which requires the writer to make stuff up yet give it the aura of truth).  Two sides of the same coin, perhaps; maybe even two sides of the same brain.

Or simply two parts of what makes us writers, what makes us human.

How Do I Know It's Good?

My most recent post was generally well received, but a few people asked me (in private--come on, folks, post to the blog itself, or better yet, follow it!), "How do I know what parts of my writing are good?"  If, in other words, I'm recommending that writers approach writing and revision from a strengths perspective, how does one recognize one's strongest material?

That's obviously a much bigger question than I can answer in a single post (or a hundred).  But I thought I'd offer an anecdote that at least speaks to the question.

On the second day of the semester in my first-year composition classes, I give students their first assignment (a personal essay that asks them to write about an epiphany they experienced in the natural world) then have them freewrite for ten minutes or so.  When they're done, I instruct them to read over what they've written and choose the single sentence that's their best.  Then, using that sentence as the starting point (and setting aside everything else), I ask them to write a new draft.

The results?

Without exception, students report--and having looked at both versions, I can confirm--that their rewrites begin in a better place than their original drafts.

How to explain this?  Bear in mind that I teach students who, until a few years ago when our director of composition eliminated not-for-credit remedial courses, would have been placed in just such courses.  Virtually all of them hate to write; most of them struggle to read with comprehension, much less with insight and delight.  And prior to the point that I give them this assignment, zero writing instruction has taken place; I've spent day one going over the syllabus and administering a diagnostic exam.  Yet somehow, 100% of these students, writing under these circumstances, are able to identify a sentence that is their best and use it as the basis of a new draft.

Why?

Well, if I could answer that, I'd be a millionaire.  But I can speculate, and here's what I think is going on.

First: the assignment is very low-pressure.  We end up looking at their papers in class, but it's not a graded assignment, and the graded version won't be due for weeks.  So performance anxiety is at a pretty low ebb.

Second: by asking the students to identify their best sentence and to disregard everything else, the assignment removes the stigma of "bad writing."  There is no bad writing in this assignment: there's only good writing and everything else, which isn't bad but simply not utilized.  (The good sentences are usually deep into the first draft, and when we start talking about theory, I encourage students to recognize that they probably couldn't have produced their good sentence if they hadn't first produced all the rest.)  Liberating writers from the fear of badness, in other words, gives them the ability to perceive goodness.

Third and finally: the assignment is empowering, because it has nothing to do with what I consider good and everything to do with what they consider good.  The whole thing would blow up in our faces if I went around the room and told them what's good (or bad) about their writing.  But I don't, and neither does anyone else.

So there you have it: low pressure, positive reinforcement, and self-direction enable writers who lack confidence in their writing to pinpoint what they're doing well and improve their papers on the basis of it.

I won't lie to you: not every class session is so upbeat as this one.  There's a time for criticism and tough choices.  But the point here is twofold: first, it's important to start from a strengths perspective; and second, when one does so, one finds that every writer has the capacity to identify what they're doing well and to build on it.  This doesn't mean all my students will become accomplished (much less published) writers, any more than they'll all become rock stars, CEOs, or supermodels.  But they'll all become better writers, which is what I'm paid to help them become.

Bottom line: writers know what's good.  They just need the chance to prove it.

6 Things That Are Right with Your Manuscript

I don't want to turn into the guy who trashes literary agents' advice, but I must admit I'm getting a bit tired of the industry (and yes, I think we can safely call it an industry) that thrives on making writers feel bad about their writing.

I was thinking this when I read an agent's recent post titled "6 Things That Are Wrong with Your Manuscript."  The ostensible purpose of this post was to help writers identify weaknesses in their manuscripts before submitting them to agents, and thus, presumably, to help writers acquire agents in the first place.  I'm sure no offense was intended; I'm sure this agent is a wonderful person and a stellar advocate.  I'm also sure she does blog regularly on "the great things writers do and how they surprise me all the time with their wonderful prose."

But I'm not talking about all that.  I'm talking about this particular post, which is all about the terrible things writers do and how they confound her with their horrible prose.

The advice itself isn't bad: start your story in a strong place, differentiate characters through distinctive dialogue, avoid "info-dumping," etc.  But as a teacher, I'm troubled by two things: the apparent assumption that you can simply tell writers what they're doing "wrong" and make them start doing it right, and the corollary assumption that writing instruction is primarily a matter of "fixing" a set of issues that writers get "wrong."

If only it were that simple.

The reality is this: writers don't learn from being told what they're doing "wrong."  One of the agent's own rules, in the very same blog post, is: "Show, don't tell."  And there's a good reason for this advice, in writing instruction as in writing: writers learn much more from doing than from listening.  And while they're doing, they learn much more from being shown what they (and others) are doing right than from being told what they're doing wrong.

("Right," of course, is a very large and flexible term, which is another problem I have with the sort of restrictive advice that assumes there's a simple "right" or "wrong" way to do anything in writing.  But that's another issue, which I addressed in an earlier post.)

So for what it's worth, my advice to writers is to look over their manuscripts and find 6 things they've done well, 6 things they're proud of themselves for doing.  That list might start with:

1. You wrote a complete, book-length manuscript.  How many people, really, can say they did that?

And it might go on from there:

2. You've got an interesting main character.
3. There's a scene in the middle of the book that's really intense and well-paced.
4. There's a lovely phrase on page 234.
5. The description on page 13 is haunting and perfectly worded.
6. The dialogue in chapter 15 crackles.

There's probably more to be proud of, but let's start with these 6.  Now, go back through the manuscript and find the stuff that doesn't equal your best, and work on making it so.  Learn from your strengths, not from your weaknesses.

And one final word: spend more time making your writing better than you do reading about all the things that make your writing bad.

Wake Up and Smell the Novels

I recently read a troubling blog post by a well-respected—and, I have no doubt, quite capable—literary agent who specializes in YA fiction.  At the top of her list of how not to begin one’s novel, she wrote the following:

“Waking up: DO NOT.  DON’T.  Don’t even think about it.  Many of the manuscripts I get begin with a character waking up.  Why are you making this choice?  Most good stories begin with a character who has just been knocked out of their usual equilibrium or is going into a tense situation.  Surely, you can begin in a more interesting place than waking up.  And even if the character is waking up into their strange new situation, just change it.  Make them awake.  Do you really want to be exactly like everyone else I reject today?”

I found this post troubling for a number of reasons, foremost of which is that my debut novel, Survival Colony Nine, a futuristic YA, has just been acquired by a very reputable publisher and begins with . . . the main character waking up.

Now, granted, in my novel, the MC is woken up in the middle of the night by another important character (his father, with whom he has a rather contentious relationship); and he’s woken up because a mysterious, unnamed enemy is advancing on their camp; and he’s suffering from amnesia, so he doesn’t know what’s going on; so immediately you have interpersonal conflict, dialogue, tension, mystery, scene, all that good stuff.  Still, my point is this: the novel starts with a character waking up, and I think it was precisely the right way to start this particular novel.

Nor am I alone.  Quite the contrary, I’m in very good company.  One of the finest fantasy novels ever written, Roger Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber, begins with a character waking up.  Rick Riordan’s YA fantasy The Lost Hero, first in a wildly popular series, begins with a character waking up.  And then there’s that little YA novel that begins with the following four words: “When I wake up.”  Maybe you’ve heard of it.  It’s called The Hunger Games.

My guess is that the millions who bought the book aren’t going to be demanding their money back.

As a final example, another of my favorite fantasy novels, Stephen R. Donaldson’s Lord Foul’s Bane, begins with . . . a character walking down the street.  Awake.

You see my point.  For some novels, starting with a character waking up is the right choice.  For others, it’s not.  But I would no more tell writers never to start a book with a character waking up than I would tell them always to do so.

The larger point is this: writing is complex.  There are no rules so absolute that they cannot be broken.  There are rules, yes.  And there’s good writing as well as bad.  There are also personal preferences, which we all should respect.  If you’re of the no-character-waking-up preference, that’s fine.  But that’s a preference, not a doctrine, and it should never be presented as the latter.  To thrive, literature needs to be willing to take risks, to try something that’s not been done before, to challenge and upend what’s considered desirable or even do-able.  Otherwise we end up with cookie-cutter books, and both reading and writing are debased in consequence.

I’ve just begun to read blogs that provide writing advice, so I’m no authority.  But one of my current favorites is by fantasy novelist Victoria Grefer, who hosts the blog “CreativeWriting with the Crimson League.”  Her blog is low-key, accessible, friendly; she presents herself as a writer writing to other writers, not as an unapproachable sage or pundit.  She never snipes, censures, or chides; instead, she encourages and invites, using her own experience as an illustration, not an ultimatum.  I’m not sure how she feels about character wake-ups, but my guess is she’d be cool with them.

So here’s my advice to writers: start your novel any way you please.  Not every agent or publisher will want it, but if it’s good, someone out there sure as heck will.

The Things That Take a While

I wrote my first novel when I was eight years old.

It was titled “The Slowest Runner,” and it concerned the trials of a young man whose chances of winning the big race looked pretty slim.  I’m not sure how I planned to end it, considering I gave up after two chapters (a single typed page).  But I do remember that when I started writing it, I was thinking of myself as a writer, and the manuscript as a novel-in-progress.  I just wasn’t ready to finish it.

In middle school, I took another shot at writing a novel.  This time, having just read The Lord of the Rings, I produced a manuscript that was pretty conventional swords-and-sorcery fare, with humans, elves, dwarves, sorceresses, an Aragorn-esque tracker named (ahem) Nordica, a blue winged pixie named Willidrin (Willi for short), and (I have no idea why) huntsmen who looked like gigantic eyeballs with arms, legs, and feathered hats.  I don’t remember the title, and for all my searching I’ve found only a single sketch that survives.  As I recall, the book bogged down around page fifty, after the sorceress had called all the presumptive heroes together but I discovered I had nothing particularly heroic for them to do.  For the next few years, I drafted several outlines of epic fantasies I planned to write, but the outlines were as far as I got.

I completed my first novel at age sixteen.  Titled To Alter the Past, it told the story of Droman Greywolf, rightful king of a magical land, who is slain on the very doorstep of his castle as he attempts to recover the throne his father lost years before.  Through some magical process, two of the king’s followers bring the narrator, a man from our own world, to Droman’s kingdom.  There they beg him to relive the fallen king’s life in hopes that he will defeat the enemy and change the course of history.  He agrees, of course—otherwise no story—and lives an eventful second life befriending Elves and Catmen, defeating swamp monsters and witches, rescuing damsels in distress and gaining mysterious magical implements from mad hermits, before finally confronting not a mortal man but a demon from the pit at the castle gates.  That précis might make the book sound pretty run-of-the-mill, but in fact it shows a considerable degree of imagination and a fair amount of decent writing.  When a family friend who works in publishing agreed to take a look at it, though, he reacted as anyone but a sixteen-year-old could have predicted he would: “Your writing is good, very good.  But is it publishable?  Not yet.”  I was crushed and briefly flirted with vanity publishing—until I read the books the vanity press sent me and realized they were vastly inferior to my own.  I still have the complete manuscript tucked away in my closet.  I sometimes think it’s the best thing I’ve written.

Completed novel #2 came in college, as my senior honors project.  Titled Selfish People (later changed to The S.A.M.E. Semester when I sought publication), it involved the takeover of a small liberal arts college by a group of radical educators claiming to offer the benefits of their new educational philosophy to the students.  The faculty mentor who read it wrote: “This is a very creditable piece of writing.  It shows considerable fictional talent, ambition, scope, perseverance, literary sensitivity, an acquaintance with literature, and many other virtues needed for writing.  But it is not under any imaginable form publishable.”  Turns out she was right: in the years between college and grad school I revised it, found an agent who seemed interested, but then gave up when the agent went out of business and no other responded positively to my queries.  I was gearing up for doctoral study at that point, and while I still harbored the dream that I might return to novels some day, my focus had turned to writing about literature rather than writing it myself.

And so it went.  In the twenty years that followed, I published three nonfiction academic books and lots of articles, co-edited another book of academic essays, and pretty much put creative writing on indefinite hold.  I imagined a few new novels—one having to do with baseball, another with Thoreau—but they never got any farther than the fantasy novels I’d envisioned as a teenager.  I’d discovered that I was pretty good at academic prose, and it just wasn’t possible to devote attention to fiction-writing with everything else going on in my life.  So I held onto the dream, but nothing came of it.

That changed in 2008, when I finally decided I’d had enough of academic publishing and wanted to return to fiction.  I took a class at a local college to rediscover the craft (and to force myself to actually write something), started this blog, and began to compile a list of credits in fiction and creative nonfiction.  Feeling ready to try the long form again, I produced about a hundred pages of a novel with a faculty member as its main character, but stopped when I realized it was too close to my own life.  I completed another novel I really liked, a grim, dystopian retelling of the Santa Claus fable, but found that no agent or editor would touch it with a twenty-foot pole.

Then, in 2011, having read many books aloud to my children, I said to myself: “Why not try writing a novel for young adults?”  With nothing more than a name for my main character, I started writing.  The story took off.  My daughter, whom I showed some early pages just to make sure I wasn’t completely off-track, really liked it.  At the tail end of 2011, I completed it and started shopping for an agent.  I found one, revised the manuscript for her, parted company with her when her enthusiasm for the project waned, found another agent who loved the book (Liza Fleissig of the Liza Royce Agency), made some further revisions for her, then sat back and waited while she sent it out.  Trickles of interest came in, but no offers.  Liza told me to be patient.  I tried.

And then it happened: on Friday, February 22, 2013, a formal offer for my YA fantasy novel, Survival Colony Nine, arrived from Karen Wojtyla of McElderry Press.  I had turned forty-eight earlier that month.  Forty years after attempting my first novel, forty years after embarking on the dream of my life, I was finally on the road to publication.

Or maybe I’d been on that road all along.

On the day I received the offer, my wife bought me a miniature flower pot topped by Woodstock (in farmer garb) and a small sprouting plant.  The legend on the pot: “Faith is for the things that take a while.”

And that’s no fiction.

February Fiction

I've got some new fiction (and nonfiction) out, so I thought I'd link to it here.  First, the fiction: a short story titled "The Fundamentally True History of Mary Shelley, aka 'The Creature,'" which appears in the online journal The Abstract Quill:

http://theabstractquill.com/?page_id=5

Now, the nonfiction.  There are two pieces, one titled "Watershed," available online (or in print form for a trifle) at Kudzu Review:

http://kudzureview.com/2.2.html

The other, titled "Body Parts," appears in Blood and Thunder: Musings on the Art of Medicine, and is, alas, available only in print form.  But again, it's priced so as not to break the bank:

http://www.ouhsc.edu/bloodandthunder/subscriptions.asp

Check 'em out, and let me know what you think!

What the Dog Saw

I just received word that my latest science fiction story, "What the Dog Saw," has been accepted by Bellow Literary Journal. It should be out early next year.

Warning: this is the story I mentioned a good long time ago (last year, I think, when I was first writing it) that possesses a very experimental voice. It can be off-putting--though interestingly, two or three journals that rejected it said they liked the voice but didn't like other aspects of the story! I personally think it's a pretty cool little piece, but consider yourself warned.

It's also interesting to note that the editor of Bellow spent some time working with me on this story to make it better. I say this is interesting because, in my personal experience, I've found editors of speculative fiction journals more willing than editors of straight-up literary journals to work with their writers. Several of my spec fic stories, including "Cats in the Backyard," "A Very Small Child Called Eugene," and "A Chimaera Story with Four Morals," were published only after some editorial changes, all of which made the stories better, in my opinion. Now, this might be a false comparison; it might be that my literary fiction just isn't good enough to get published in the journals that offer editorial assistance, so such stories of mine aren't even making it to that point. But it might also be that the editors of journals that specialize in genre fiction have a particularly keen sense of what their readers want, and thus they are particularly invested in crafting stories to meet those expectations.

Whatever, the story's coming out soon! I'd love to hear some reader reactions to it once you see it in print.

"Aphasia" Available to Order!

Just thought you'd like to know that my story "Aphasia" is available to order in the collection Beyond the Grave, published by Pill Hill Press. The link is here. Trust me, the cover art alone makes it worth the price! And then when you add in my story (as well as all the others). . . . Well, you just can't put a dollar value on quality like that!

Aphasia

I had another short story accepted for publication yesterday, in a print anthology titled Beyond the Grave, to be published by Static Movement. The title of my story, "Aphasia," might not seem to have a lot to do with beyond-the-grave stuff, but trust me: read it and it'll all make sense! I'll let you know when it's published so you can do just that.

This'll be my third anthologized work, which I've found is a nifty way to get genre fiction in print: there are many small publishers producing many, many themed anthologies, and they're always looking for more. They don't pay as well as some of the genre magazines, but who cares? I'm in this for the love, not the money.

Good thing, too; I think my royalties from last year were a whopping $14.86. Needless to say, I don't plan to quit my day job anytime soon.

My Best Work

I've noticed something odd about the editorial guidelines offered by many literary journals. In their tips to contributors, they often say something like, "send us only your best work." Which means . . . what?

Maybe it's some kind of code. Maybe if I'd attended an MFA program I'd know what they were talking about. Maybe it means, "make sure to proofread, you moron!" Or, "send only those stories that your thesis advisor compared favorably to the works of Chekhov and Hemingway." Or, "if you've written a hundred stories, throw them all at the steps and send only the one that lands on top."

Because really, how many writers seriously consider sending their worst work to a literary journal? Yes, I suppose there are a lot of desperate writers out there (maybe I'm one of them), and I suppose there are people who jot down a story, run a quick spell-check (or not), and then flood the markets with the thing. Given how many journals accept electronic submissions these days, this is relatively easy (and cheap) to do. So I guess, in this light, the journals are just trying to protect themselves.

But my guess is also that it doesn't work. Because those few writers who adopt the above approach are not going to be dissuaded by such editorial advice, and the rest of us are not going to be helped by it.

I'm confident that most writers, the vast majority of writers in fact, are sending their best work--the best work of which they're capable. That doesn't mean it's going to be great; but the fact that it isn't great doesn't mean it isn't their best. The majority of writers, even those whose stories are not very good, are not trying to annoy and infuriate editors by sending inferior stories; they're sending their best, and it's precisely the job of editors to determine which stories among the innumerable "my bests" are actually the best.

I've written lots of stories. Most of them I consider to be pretty good. A few I know are awful. And many I consider to be my best. But I'll be darned if I know how to make my best better. The only way I know to get better as a writer is to keep reading and writing, and so that's what I do--but should I sit on these stories forever, hoping that in years to come they'll meet someone else's hypothetical standard of "best"? Or should I send the work I consider to be my best at present, knowing that as I continue to write, my best will get better? The stories I send out for possible publication are the best I can do right now, and so it's not particularly helpful to tell me they're the ones I should be sending. That would be like me saying to my students, "Send me your best paper." What other paper would they send me?

I think it's time for some honesty here. Don't tell us on the editorial page, "send only your best work." Tell us, "send only the best story ever written, the single story most likely to be immortalized by the bards of the future." If I saw that advice, I'd know not to submit my stories there.

Instead, I'd submit to some market that's willing to consider my best.

Racist Like Me

I just received word that my memoir "Racist Like Me," accepted roughly a year ago by the print journal Smash Cake Magazine, will be appearing in the journal's inaugural (March 2011) issue. It's been a long time coming, but I think it'll be worth the wait!

If you're interested in preordering the issue, here's the link. Word has it that this will be a double issue, with lots and lots of cool stuff, and at $8 it's a steal.

And for those who can't wait to read the essay, here's a preview:

Racist Like Me

by J. David Bell

Years ago, when my wife and I had just settled into our first house and our now pre-teen daughter was little more than a month old, I got held up by a black guy. I’d walked over to our former apartment to check the mail, which didn’t seem to be arriving at our new home. It was nighttime, and snowing, probably a stupid time to take a stroll. The guy was ahead of me, and when he doubled back alarms should have gone off but didn’t. He was far away, I couldn’t see him distinctly, my mind was on other things, fatherhood and home ownership and missing messages and the start of the spring semester, a week off. It wasn’t until the gun was in my face that I realized anything peculiar was going on.

The mugger didn’t get anything from me--I wasn’t even wearing a watch--but he did make me lie face down in the snow while he frisked me. “I swear to you,” I kept saying to him. At one point I foolishly reached for my pocket to prove I had nothing; I’m lucky, I guess, he didn’t shoot me then. When he left I stayed down a good five minutes, the tips of my fingers wet in the snow, my body not registering the chill. Walking back unnaturally fast, feeling as if my feet weren’t touching the ground, I managed to stay calm, only my breathing a bit off tempo. But when my wife met me at the door with our bundled daughter and asked what had taken so long, my voice choked and I started to cry.

The cop who came wanted a description. I couldn’t give him one. “You were looking at the gun, right?” he said. That was true--it seemed to blot out everything, even the hand holding it--but that wasn’t the real reason. I’d seen the man’s face. But once he pulled the gun it disappeared, never to return. In a perverse parody of racial profiling, I robbed the robber of a face when, having fulfilled the stereotype of AAA (Armed African-American), he no longer needed one.

As a professor whose work centers on the representation of race in American literature and culture, I wish I could say this incident is what corrupted me, turned me from an angel into the sort of bigot my teaching and scholarship have sought to expose. It would be truer, however, to see my teaching and scholarship as acts of expiation, or even exorcism, for the racism I’ve long recognized to be my own. I’ve feared black men most of my life, an unreasoning, visceral fear manifested by the clench in my chest when one (except, oddly, this one) nears me at night. But there are other symptoms, less obvious, masked as bravado or disdain: safely ensconced in my own vehicle, I scoff when one pulls up beside me, the bass thump of some rap anthem rattling his SUV. Or when another peels around me, I think not “reckless driver” but “black guy,” “ghetto,” or even “gang-banger.” When a dark, dour face flashes on the eleven o’clock news, as it always does, associated with some drive-by or rape or other crime against humanity, all my reading and knowledge of economic inequality and judicial bias and selective reporting go out the window and I see what they want me to see: a black beast loose in my neighborhood. When a black teenager from the school where my wife works showed up on the news one night, accused of butchering a baby in a hail of indiscriminate bullets, I didn’t mourn, as she did, the waste of two young lives. I thought, “there goes another one.” I was almost glad, in the sick way racists are, to see my prejudices confirmed.

The story we tell about racism in this country has two threads, one individual and the other social. The individual says that racism comes from education: you learn it, you can unlearn it too. The social says that, thanks to the integration of our schools two generations ago, the nation as a whole is gradually outgrowing racism, or never learning it to begin with. But my own experience suggests that neither of these stories is accurate--or at least, that the latter offers no real answer to the former. A child of enlightened parents and integrated schools, I received no proper training in racism. On the contrary, I received lesson upon lesson dedicated to withering it in the bud. Yet a lifetime of such schooling has proved inadequate to touch attitudes far more basic, beliefs bred in some abyss I can’t quite identify. At most, my formal education has enabled me to intellectualize my racism, to name it for what it is, to recognize its voice when it croons to me like a demon lover. To own it--in part by distancing myself from it--but not to root it out or will it away.

"Frogsong" (Officially!)

My sci-fi story "Frogsong" is now officially available in the anthology Farspace 2. It's an interstellar environmentalist love story of sorts, with a dash of Heart of Darkness thrown in for kicks. Ya gotta love it!

So check it out, buy lots of copies for Christmas, and let me know what you think!

"The Burning of Sarah Post" Hits the Stands (for Real)

I received my copy of "The Burning of Sarah Post" in the mail today; apparently, the printer was running a bit behind schedule, but it's available for purchase now. If I do say so myself, it looks great! There's one part of the story (you'll know which part I mean when you see it) that I had some concerns about, typographically, but the printer did a great job with it. I'm looking forward to reading all the other great stuff in the collection too!

The publisher, Sam's Dot Publishing, also alerted me to their online newsletter, which contains information about their publications, plus some excerpts therefrom. If you're into fantasy, sci-fi, and horror, it's worth checking out!