Tag: writing fiction

Swap

My writing buddy Cheryl sent me back her read of Hurricane Baby: Stories, and her read was much more favorable that I thought it might be. She noted a very few places in the manuscript where she lost track/got tripped up in the narrative, and she thought I could actually cut some places where I was describing actions that didn’t necessarily move the plot forwards–she urged me to focus on the action throughout, which was a nice surprise. She said she really, really loved it, and her favorite character was Tommy Hebert, the one I turned from a peripheral character to a major one –she said his character arc really held her attention.

So now I think I know what to do with it in the next stage of revision, which I am probably going to take up next year (if it doesn’t get picked up by someone before that) after I draft my new project I want to work on. I am going to make each story as individually strong as I can and start sending them out to see if I can publish them in high-profile places and get them some attention. We will see what happens.

Some of the items she mentioned I can fix now before it goes out to anyone else this year–they’ll be quick. And I need to finish reading and reacting to her manuscript before the end of the month. So i am gong to look for some time to finish that before May 30.

i am very glad I did this new swap. I feel more confident about the manuscript’ strengths and know where to fix the weaknesses. So good. Onward and upward!

Genius Move

Just got off Facebook with a solid plan to write this late summer and fall.

A writer buddy of mine and I were talking about writing, and I said I was going to start on my next short story collection in mid-August once my kid goes off to college and need something to distract me from the empty nest.

I remembered how a lot of people talked since the pandemic about doing writing “sprints” where you and others meet over Zoom and write for a while together then compare notes when you finish the sprints. So she and I agreed to start meeting on Facebook at 6:30 p.m. three times a week, and each write for an hour, then compare notes.

So I feel good about what I’m going to do. I’m going to only write an hour a day, three times a week, and write a very rough draft.

I’m now aware that I’ve got to give up the notion of I’m putting down something magical right as it flows from the pen. I need to just get the story out. I have a good outline, a throughline, and lots and lots of details to squeeze in. I’m looking forward to it. Really. 🙂

Accountability is really good for me. How do you feel about writing partners, workshop partners, accountability, and deadlnes?

Numbers Update

So it’s been a few months, and i thought I would update my query numbers.

Presses queried–53

Rejections–33

Submissions still outstanding–20

Presses left to send to–8

I am still hopeful. But I have a few backup plans in place now, so we will see what happens. I went ahead and sent it off to my workshop mate Cheryl to see what she will say about it. And I will spend time reading her work and see how I may be able to help her improve her new novel project.

We will see what happens. Some really nice places still have the manuscript, so I will see what develops. I will send to a few places tomorrow that open on May 1. So that is the next step. Wish me well! Happy writing!

Ready to Swap Again

I’m on the verge of doing another swap of Hurricane Baby with another writer, this time Cheryl Pappas, who I met through the workshop I attended last summer. She is writing her first novel even as we speak, so I will be beta reading that for her, and she will be reading Hurricane Baby.

I’m not sure what I can actually accomplish by having it read again and revising it again. I may can make it better so it gets accepted at one the eight places left on my list where I haven’t yet sent it. Which is a heck of a tiny margin of error or success, depending on how you look at it.

Or I may can make it better and send it around again in 2030.

That looks like a damn desperate concept when I say it that way.

Or her feedback may convince me to shelve it altogether and start over with my new story idea and just work on that for a while.

Or I may can take the feedback, make each story the best it can be, and try to sell the individual stories around to see if I can get one or three picked up by journals to have a better chance once I start sending it around again.

That sounds more hopeful than giving up. Or simply waiting around after revising.

I guess the moral is: Keep fighting for your work. Even if it means a strategic retreat from time to time. The fight IS the work in that case. So that’s what I’m doing: Fighting.

Honesty in Writing Fiction

Is honesty a concern in writing fiction?

Most people would probably say no. It’s supposed to all be made up. Out of your head. Figments of imagination. If it’s not, then it’s not fiction–it’s nonfiction.

Beginning writers often write about real events that happened to them–and defend themselves when told it’s not plausible by saying, “But that really happened to me!”

So what do we mean when we say we want honesty in fiction?

Well, often what has happened is that the writer has set up a character to be a certain sort of person–honest, villainous, seductive, dogmatic, whatever their defining trait is–and then the writer has those characters do something that readers literally describe as “out of character”. The honest person may lie. The villainous character may rescue a homeless kitten. The seductive character may get to the edge with a seductee and upon finding out she’s married, turn virtuous and say no to sleeping with her.

Often when the reader gets taken out of the story by someone acting “out of character”, it’s because they writer didn’t draw the character as a fully rounded complex individual. I like to write characters where a reader may have no idea what the character might do next–they’re interesting, but often dangerous, just as an unpredictable person might be in “real life”.

Flat characters are actually hard to write about in an interesting way. They may have only one defining trait, and therefore their path is fixed. The honest character will always tell the truth no matter what the consequences. The villainous character would always lie even when there’s no clear benefit to doing so.

Whatever world you create–whether your characters live in the middle of Mississippi or on the edges of the galaxy–readers often want writers to follow the rules the writers create. If a writer builds a world where the atmosphere is unbreathable–until the main character steps foot on it and needs to survive without his spacesuit, which the writer had fail upon atmospheric entry to heighten the dramatic tension–the writer better have a good explanation why that character stays alive that makes sense in the world the writer has created–beyond simply that the writer wants him to survive.

One of the most effective techniques to create dramatic tension around what a character may or may not do is foreshadowing–dropping small hints about how the honest guy is only honest about one aspect of his life but not about another. Another is immediate flashbacking following the character’s uncharacteristic action–where the reader sees what the character did when it was a kid faced with the same type of choice–what did the character do then? Is that character going to make the same choice, or a different one? Why?

Robertson Davies, one of Canada’s leading authors of the twentieth century, once said, “Imagination is a good horse to carry you over the ground, not a flying carpet to set you free from probability.” If a writer’s world follows certain rules, the writer must be honest with the reader as to why the roles are there–and why they get broken. If a character is rounded, complex and human–those rules can be bent a bit– if and only if the writer is sure to point out how said bend serves the story and is not as “out of character” as the reader suspects.

Professional Jealousy

I had kind of a bad week the week before last as far as how I felt about my writing. One author in a writers’ group I am in posted the story behind her book deal. I am trying to be charitable and think that she was just posting encouragement. She talked about how long she had been writing in her spare time and how she’d always wanted to write a book, and she got laid off at her job. She decided to take the plunge and try to do a book on a volunteer passion project of hers.

She consulted with another person in this writers’ group, and together they crafted a nonfiction book proposal. Within a month, she had a literary agent. Within six months, she sold the book at auction for a six-figure advance to a Big Five publisher. She hasn’t even written the book yet; she asked for encouragement going forward.

I am trying so hard to be joyful for her and not think of myself.

But it’s so hard to.

I have been kicking Hurricane Baby around for almost twenty years. I got an agent fairly rapidly, and I tried the big New York presses first. No dice. Now I have refined it several times over and am trying to work with the small presses. So far the query letter got some hits, but I’ve collected polite rejections after that. I still have about twenty possibilities for it, but I’m starting to think that maybe it’s just not going to happen for me–a feeling that reading this story intensified.

But as Anne Lamott says, I am comparing my insides to someone else’s outsides. It probably wasn’t as easy as it seems for this person. On social media, you only see the end result. In this blog, I’m trying to counter the myth of the “overnight success” by being transparent about what this process is like. I believe in telling all like it is. And right now, it’s uncomfortable to sit with the idea that Hurricane Baby might never be all I want it to be.

But all I can do for myself is press forward. And press forward I will. It was hard to pick myself back up and send the book off to yet another press this week. But I did it. And I will wait and see what happens with it. Wish me well. And I will take heart in the fact that I have my own tribe cheering me on, here and elsewhere.

Persist. That the word of the month for me. I hope it can be yours as well.

Watch Out!

I already addressed in a couple of posts about how writers can get victimized monetarily by publishing companies that charge fees for any number of services they offer their authors–and my one exception to paying presses was the fee that presses may ask for when they run contests for manuscripts once or twice a year.

But new reporting has come out that some presses are charging ALL submitters with fees, and that these certain publishers are owned by known bad actors in the indie publishing world. Read the full article here:

Showcase Magazine, Ephemera, C & R Press, Steel Toe Books, Fjords Review, PANK Magazine, American Poetry Journal…oh my? (substack.com)

I’m transparent enough to admit that I sent Hurricane Baby to two of these publishers. I’m out about $50 to people who may not have even been interested in publishing anyone, much less me. One publisher on this list I withdrew from very early in my querying process after reading a Writers Beware post from Victoria Strauss, an invaluable member of the literary community who researches and collates publishing scams and the scammers that run them.

The other I withdrew my book from after reading this article.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I looked at reputable organizations to find these publishers–various literary magazines maintain databases of small presses. and these trusted publications never had anything indicating that these presses were in any way suspicious. We’re on our own, folks.

Just goes to show that some people will do anything to make a buck. And others will be silent about these bad actors and are therefore complicit in their schemes.

The takeaway? Research, research, research. Make sure you know something about who you are sending your work to. Check them in Google. Scan for their names on Twitter and other social media. Give their website a detailed look–one way I weed out publishers is if I have never heard of any of their authors. If a place gives you bad vibes for any reason, don’t submit there.

The only way we can choke out these people is to decline to be a part of their income stream in order to make our point–that it’s wrong to take advantage of people.

Playing with ChatGPT

So I decided to be one with the cool kids and see how well ChatGPT worked. I had it do several blog posts “in the style of Julie Liddell Whitehead”.

I was not expecting much, and that’s what I got.

It produces clean copy. But it’s very airy copy. No substance, all glitz. i asked it to write a blog post “about the book Hurricane Baby”. It gave it a glowing review that–oddly enough–sounded a lot like reviews handed out for books on Amazon. No specifics, no details, just airy copy how what a wonderful book it was! (I also got a lot of discussion about all the places that had interviewed me about the book and all the accolades it had won) Pretty good for a book that hasn’t been published yet. 🙂

Apparently it’s been trained to sound authoritative by using a lot of words. I tried getting paragraphs in the style of some other authors (like John Grisham and Anne Lamott) and got much the same results. It would not be hard to imagine it being written by a real person, as long as that person’s last writing class had been Business Communication in college. As far as imitating other authors, it didn’t have much of a range beyond a few big names.

I think what will always distinguish great writing from just good writing is specificity: details. quirky characters who sound like actual people, a sense of place. If you want boilerplate language, I think ChatGPT may can deliver that error-free. But the sense that an actual person is behind the writing? That’s up to us, the writers, to keep our writing fresh and exciting–and real.

Read-Thru

So I didn’t post last night, because I was doing something kind of nerve-wracking.

I sat down and read Hurricane Baby again, all the way through, from start to finish.

It was so gratifying. because the stories held up to scrutiny.

I had wondered if when I read it again, I would discover lots of problems. Continuity problems, poor story construction, tone-deaf dialogue–I was prepared for the worst: that I would see that it really wasn’t in my best interest to publish it.

That’s not what I saw reading it.

Are there places that could be better? Probably. One place in particular I thought I might need to add a scene that is referenced early on but not played out.

Typos? Yep. But not nearly as many as I was afraid of.

But the stories still felt true. I’m sure if someone picks it up, it will need to undergo some revisions. But the stories are there: meaningful, impactful, and oh so human.

That was a good feeling. I wish i could bottle it for when I find myself doubting my skills and talent. Hurricane Baby might not be Great Literature, with capital G and capital L.

But it’s good. And right know, that knowledge is enough.