I am not this kind of writer.

My handwriting is terrible and within minutes of any form of steady writing my hands ache. Minutes after that the carpal tunnel from the years spent writing computer software makes my wrists ache. The idea of using a pen or pencil to produce a 100,000 word novel is to me as herculean a task as building the pyramids without the aid of diesel-powered construction equipment and laser-accurate measuring devices.

Ever since the iPad first came out I have wanted so badly to be able to use it as a writing device. Not as my main editing platform but more as the device that is virtually always with me whenever a great line of dialogue or an intriguing scene strikes me and begs to be given form. Up until recently, this has been impossible because writing using the on-screen keyboard is nearly as much of a pain in the butt due to typos as using a pencil.

Now I have an iPad2. In addition, I have a “Book book” iPad case. I love this thing on so many levels, but my favorite part is that my iPad case looks like an old book, an icon for which I hold a tremendous amount of reverence. The other thing I have is a fairly small wireless keyboard.

For the past few days I have noticed that when I feel the urge the write, the typical counter-urge to stay on my ass and do nothing is not as strong because it takes so little effort to just pull out the iPad, turn on the wireless keyboard, and start typing.

The software I use on the iPad for writing is iA Writer. I use this software specifically for something that it calls focus mode, where everything but the current paragraph is grayed out and there is nothing on the screen but my words. Nothing. No distractions, no blips from IMs or e-mails and most importantly for me, no temptation to fire up a code editor and start doing something technical.

This software also has iCloud support so that when I’m done spewing stream-of-consciousness raw prose into the iPad, I can take it over to my Mac, put it in my desktop writing application, and refine it later when I am in that mode. One thing that I’ve noticed is that I have very different needs and desires in terms of the way software looks and behaves when I’m creating something new versus when I’m editing and revising.

If you’ve been resisting the idea of writing on your iPad, then you might want to try again with this combination of software and hardware as I’ve found it very comfortable and easy to use. If you have your own favorite software/hardware for using the iPad as a writing tool, I’d love to hear about it.

In this format, we actually had to read our query letters and our opening pages out loud to the agents and fellow writers. I don’t know about many other writers, but the idea that other people are reading my story is nerve-wracking enough, but reading it aloud in front of other people, many of whom are far more talented than I, is worthy of a stomach-wrenching nervous breakdown.

First, let me just say that the agents were amazing. I learned so much from the short period of time I got to spend listening to their feedback. At times the feedback may have seemed harsh but writers need to know how to take constructive criticism and I learned a bunch of things that I hadn’t thought about before and had some of my techniques validated. I also met a bunch of great authors and we all have plans to use each other as critique buddies in the future.

Second, I want to say that reading your work out loud is quite possibly one of the best things you can do during the editing process. The human brain is an incredibly forgiving organ and its number one specialty is pattern recognition and compensation. In other words, while you are reading your own work in your head, your mind tends to fill in gaps, smooth over awkward speed-bump phrasing, and forgives much. When you read your work out loud, you’ll find that you come to a dead stop on awkward sentences, places where words don’t belong, and even on things like misplaced or dangling modifiers. Since I got home from the conference, I’ve been reading aloud each new chapter or scene that I write before I start the usual editing process and I am finding a ton of stuff that might have otherwise slipped through the cracks and only been caught by an editing partner.

I am an autodidact – always have been and always will be. Throughout my life and my career as a writer and computer programmer, there have been these key moments where I am suddenly aware of how much more I don’t know than I used to. At some point, I become fairly confident in knowing what I don’t know and the limits of my own advancement become finite. Then, something happens. I read an amazing book, meet a certified genius, or attend a conference, and everything changes. My horizons recede and I return to this amazing place where I have no idea how much I don’t know. The possibilities become endless again and I get filled with this childlike giddiness as I am confronted with nearly infinite learning possibilities.

This is what happened to me at Backspace. My horizons receded, the possibilities again became endless, and I have an amazing new perspective on writing. The conference re-invigorated me, inspired me, and more importantly, showed me how much more I have yet to learn. I highly recommend this conference for any writer who has finished a book and thinks they’re ready to take the next step toward publication.

I knew why it was happening. On the lowest and easiest to comprehend level, I knew that I’d had a coffee after dinner. This was my right and fit punishment for such a decision. But, just underneath the surface, a refracted, rippling and less obvious source of my insomnia was visible. Yesterday morning, at 11:30am, my uncle died. Cancer raised the battle cry against him, cancer fought the war, and cancer and its innumerable side effects defeated him.

Rather than sit in a corner, blubbering and jiggling as would a shaken bowl of still-cooling Jell-O, oozing a bevy of sobs and tears, my mind retreated. Rather than confront the truth and reality of my uncle’s death, the mortality of his departure and, let’s be honest, my own inevitable mortality, my mind turned and ran, its tail between its legs. It threw at me every possible shiny object, red herring, and interesting thought it could muster, anything it could put in my path to keep me from staring death in the face.

This was no ordinary collection of obstacles. My subconscious knows my conscious better than I do (I also realize the recursively flawed nature of that statement), and it knows what I like to chew on. I got up out of bed and in 10 minutes flat wrote the entire suite of sample code for “Hour 13″ of my upcoming Mac OS X Lion programming book. That failed to sate my desire for … whatever it was that I desired.

So then I started writing. Not prose, but something closer to stream-of-consciousness brainstorming, a free, unfettered and unfiltered flow of raw inspiration through my fingers and into outbound e-mails to my sounding board, friend, and editor of brutal ferocity. I’ve been working on storyboarding my novel and something just hasn’t been clicking into place lately. I’ve haven’t been able to nail down the rules of the world in which my book takes place. In addition, I haven’t found good behavioral and archetypal models for my characters. Further, I haven’t found a title for this book or its sequels.

Tonight, between fretful tosses and disgruntled turns, I picked up my smartphone and double-thumbed out e-mails containing my novel’s rules concerning the level, degree, and nature of magic in its world. I detailed the behavioral and archetypal models for the protagonist and many of the supporting characters and, though I didn’t send out the e-mail, I also jotted down pages of information on my antagonist and his cronies. This was all after 1am, mind you, when any sane person (who worked during the day) would be sleeping.

I put the phone down and again sought unconscious respite from the day’s news, events, and my ever-reddening bloodshot eyes. After another 30 minutes of sleeplessness, I was hit by the names for all 3 novels I had planned, including the name of the series to which they belong. These names might not stick, but they’re at the very least a straw man with which to elicit better, more powerful and evocative book titles.

And now, at 3:45 in the morning, in the patch dark with nothing but the glow of my monitor and even dimmer glow of the backlit keyboard lighting the room around me, here I sit writing this blog entry. I don’t do so because I think anyone’s reading my blog (in fact I have compelling evidence to the contrary) nor do I do so out of desire to increase my readership. No, I do this out of pure compulsion, not the kind of compulsion that makes a sleepwalker fix themselves a pastrami on rye before heading back to bed, but the kind of compulsion where you know you will find no peace until you satisfy that compulsion.

And so, finally, to the point of the title of my post: a terrible, sleepless, epiphanous, wonderful night. It started with the terrible news of my uncle’s death and continued with the maddening sleeplessness brought on by my mind’s defense mechanism, its poor attempt to shield me from the harsh reality only making the situation worse by depriving me of much-needed sleep and ability to focus. The night was epiphanous (I actually had to check to make sure that word was in the dictionary – it is). In the span of just a few hours I felt the pain and sadness of the lowest of the lows and the unbridled joy when your mind is filled with an open fire hose of ideas.

For the first time in my life, I know that I am a writer. I’m not just pretending to be one, nor am I an aspiring writer. Being a writer has nothing to do with being published. Being a writer has everything to do with being physically unable to sleep until you have given form to thought, given venue and escape to the ideas and concepts burned into your mind’s eye. I’ve experienced being literally tortured by the onslaught of ideas, information, and words that begged to be put to pen and would not rest until I had done so, including this blog post that puts form to my own struggle to both confront and avoid the death of my uncle.

Now that I’ve managed to empty my mind of the things my subconscious thought could keep me from my confrontation with death, I can now feel the pain and sadness approaching. Thankfully, I can also feel exhaustion and sleep approaching just as rapidly.

Sometimes, the writing was bad. By writing, I mean the craft itself was bad. I had poor sentences or awkward paragraphs and in many places I had beats in the wrong places and the story just flowed wrong.

Other times, as mentioned in a few other blog posts, I submitted a scene or even a loosely collected series of narrative events. In these instances what I submitted was not what most people would consider a short story.

The piece I submitted this morning, a 5,100 word urban fantasy short story, is by far the single best short story I’ve ever written. After finishing the first draft nearly two months ago, I have been re-writing it, editing it, and subjecting myself to brutal criticism from an amazing editor (if she had a blog or a mugshot, I would provide a link here).

Several dozen revisions later, I feel like it is a great short story. It isn’t a scene that is being squished into the short story format, it is an actual short story with a clear beginning, middle, and end. It has a hook. I think the writing is some of the best I’ve ever done, the beats are in the right place, the story flows fast when it should be fast, slow when it should be slow. All of the myriad of tiny little details that readers take for granted, I obsessed over for months trying to get this story right.

Now that I’ve submitted this story and I can see what it looked like when I started versus what it looked like when I finished and it really is night and day. I didn’t add a mountain of words and in many cases removed some, but the painstaking attention to every detail in every paragraph as well as to the story as a whole really paid off.

This led me to re-evaluate my concept of the editing process. I used to think of writing as a process that consisted of two big steps: you write, then you edit. To me, editing was something that was done after you produced whatever it is you wanted to label your initial draft. This placed far too much emphasis on the initial output and not enough on editing.

What I’ve learned is that writing isn’t what you do before editing. Writing is editing. The initial output is just that, it’s the starting point on a (often very long) journey. What you do to your initial output isn’t a grammar check or a check for punctuation, it’s a check for the thousands of subtle things that writers do at the micro and macro level: hunt down adverbs and replace them with stronger verbs, find passive voice and passive phrases and strengthen them where appropriate, make sure that as you build compound sentences you lead the reader’s mind’s eye from the right start to the right finish every time and at the right pace.

There’s still a million other things to do that I’ve been habitually bad at doing like consistency checking (making sure that if a character is on the ground in one paragraph, they’re still there in the next), object tracking (making sure that the reader’s mental image of a scene is stable and not disrupted by inconsistencies), dialogue consistency (making sure that people talk the way they should be talking given their backgrounds and current situation), beats and pacing check, exposition versus dialog (“say it don’t tell it” etc) checking, and when that’s done there’s a million more things.

I’m not saying these things to scare potential writers. I’m saying these things because I used to look at a draft and say, “this is good enough” and stop 20-40 revisions too soon. Good enough isn’t good enough. It’s very hard for writers to put themselves in the minds of a reader who has never read the story before – it’s been bouncing around in the writer’s head for weeks, months, maybe even years. It takes disciplined attention to detail and the aid of unbiased, objective, and hopefully brutal reviewers and editors to pull out the core nugget of greatness from the surrounding pile of mediocre writing and turn a good story into one worth publishing.

I am hoping that with this new-found respect for the editing process, my future pieces will be better for it. Even if I never get any of my future stories published, I now know how to make them far better than they ever would have been before.

Certainly I fear rejection. I think you are given this fear as an initiation present, a “welcome to the author’s club” trophy that you carry with you as a combination point of pride and burden for the rest of your life. I don’t think fear of rejection ever goes away, we just get better at suppressing it.

What I think I realized this weekend, however, is that underneath the fear of rejection is an even more deep-seated fear, a fear that is often so traumatizing that we can’t even bear to confront it or even admit that we have it. Some writers reading this now probably know what I’m talking about already. The real fear, the paralyzing fear that simmers underneath the frying pan of the fear of rejection and the other things that contribute to writer’s block is this:  the fear that we aren’t actually good at writing.

When I was a kid I took an aptitude test. This test told me that I should consider a career in the sanitation field or perhaps janitorial. At the time I had very few lofty goals outside of augmenting my collection of He-Man and G.I. Joe figures, so this didn’t hurt me much.

What if, as an adult, someone reviewed my writing and said, “you know what, you should stick to your day job.” Nobody (with the exception of a few strange people) wants to be that guy on American Idol who thinks he can sing but ends up in the “embarrassingly bad” clip montage. No writer wants to be that guy that devotes a year or two or twenty of his life to writing, to pouring his soul out onto disk, only to be shown the door and told that his stuff sucks and is beyond help.

I think this is the real cause for so much of a writer’s anxiety. They aren’t necessarily afraid of rejection, though it certainly stings. Everybody knows that even great writers have been rejected – if the story isn’t what they want to publish at the time, or if the editor was in a crabby mood that morning, the story is thrown in the round file. What none of us want is to get all the way to the end of the road and we wind up on the “embarrassingly bad”  writer’s list. We can tolerate being called “unpublished writers”, but, can we tolerate someone telling us we shouldn’t be writing?

As I was standing on the launching platform for the zipline I looked down about 25 feet and saw metal fences, hard rock, and people, none of which I was particularly interested in landing on. 25 feet below them I saw water. I’d always had trouble with heights so it came as no surprise to me that I had trouble breathing and every fiber of my being told me to turn the hell around, go back on solid ground, and give up. Let someone else take the risk.

That’s when I reminded myself about this one pervasive fact: the only difference between me and the other people on the zipline was what was going on inside my head. If my brain wasn’t telling me that I was going to die, then I could easily get up on the zipline and jump off the platform.

This same conversation goes on in a writer’s head when they sit down to write. Somewhere deep inside, there might be a voice telling this writer that they aren’t good enough, that they aren’t really a writer, and that they shouldn’t bother, that they should let someone else take the risk.

I decided at that moment that I was going to take the risk, that the journey was worth it even if the ending wasn’t the one I’d dreamed of. And so the point of this blog post is that, if anybody is reading this and thinking about spending a year or more writing a novel, they should do it. Don’t let someone else take that risk, because they’ll end up with a novel and you’ll end up with regret. The only difference between the writers writing and the writers pacing is what’s going on inside their head, and thankfully, we have complete control over that. So write. Fear can’t stop you unless you let it.

I will close out this blog post with some inspiring words from Frank Herbert’s Dune about fear:

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Writer, go and write. Everything else is secondary.

In this genre, the end of the story isn’t determined by the protagonist’s emergence from a long and drawn-out battle with his inner demons, a struggle that involves the protagonist’s growth and self-discovery and ultimate confrontation and victory over the antagonist. No, in zombie fiction, the end of the story is often determined by the protagonist’s emergence from a pile of spent ammunition and exploded body parts. And that’s a good thing.

Personally I find novel writing immensely less difficult than writing short fiction. The main reason for this is that I think in terms of novels. I think in scenes and I relish the challenge of interweaving character development with multiple concurrent plotlines and the up and down pacing of a good thriller or fantasy or sci-fi novel.

I have a lot of difficulty with short fiction. Obviously it depends on the venue to which you are submitting, but in many cases people are looking for meaning, for purpose and direction. A scene plucked from a 500-page novel and padded is not a short story – it’s still just a scene. I have been guilty of submitting scenes to short story venues in the past and my lack of publication is the punishment for that.

I tried writing what I thought would be a decent short story but it also ended up being a scene. Sure, it had some element of short story quality where the main character had a sort of hoisted by his own petard moment and there was a little bit of a surprising twist at the end but that still didn’t qualify as a short story.

Finding the right mixture between cinematic action, character development, and the progression of a true short story is very difficult. For zombie fiction, it wasn’t too hard because many readers of zombie short stories expect scenes with little character development. That genre is typified by action often enhanced at the expense of things like character development, narrative over inner turmoil, a description of the senses affected by the dropping of spent ammunition and bodies rather than emotional journeys.

So the other night I got to writing this story. It’s been a point, some bit of truth that I felt I needed to tell and I wanted to tell it in a science fiction narrative. As I started writing I realized that there were little bits of symbolism and even a bit of irony in the naming of the main character. The story starts with the character confronting his mentor, then there’s a flashback to the childhood memory that set the protagonist on his quest for advancement (or, quite literally, ascension). It all sounds good but I keep asking myself whether it’s too deep? Will it seem contrived? Will someone think the symbolism is just crap that gets in the way? I honestly don’t know… I intend to submit this story in a few days after I’ve had some more time to polish the drafts, we’ll see if the venue thinks I’m full of crap or a good writer

I guess the point of me writing this post is this: if you write shallow and the venue expects deep, literary fiction don’t expect to get published. Likewise, if you spend all your time in a zombie story dealing with a character’s inner conflict and not much time blowing stuff up, don’t expect to get published. Sometimes, no matter how good your writing is, it may just not be a good match for what the publisher wants. You owe it to yourself to spend as much time matching your story to the target venue as you do worrying about the craft that went into each paragraph.

Hopefully I’ll have good news to post if my story gets accepted. If not, then I will have yet another “how I’m handling rejection” post

As if mustering the willpower necessary to keep going in the face of repeated, heart-stopping rejection wasn’t enough, we have to deal with the brutal reality of the need to pay bills, feed ourselves and our families, and possibly even put gas in our cars. Most writers have to deal with the daily choice between spending time doing things that earn money and spending time doing things that are fulfilling (like writing).

I have a demanding day job that often requires that I work from home, work after hours, and even the occasional weekend. In addition to this, I also write technical books on all kinds of computer programming topics, including iPhone, Mac, and Windows Phone 7 programming. When I am not spending time working on those projects, I enjoy spending time with my family – the simple pleasures like watching TV with my girlfriend, going to the movies, getting out of the house on weekends, etc.

So when I step back and look at the potential to spend enough time working on my writing to get good enough at it to get published, the prospects look grim. Any writer will tell you that the secret to being a great writer is to write. You need to write, and you need to do it every day. Just like a guitar player needs to do a few scales every day just to keep the fingers nimble, a writer needs to write a few paragraphs every day just to keep that part of his brain working. Writing is not like riding a bike – the longer your brain spends not writing, the less your brain likes writing.

The question then is, given a busy (albeit rich and fulfilling) life, do you attempt to continue writing even though you know you just don’t have the time to do it justice… or you do throw in the towel and give it up? You hear stories about writers who were able to walk away from their day jobs and become successful, published authors on their first try like Brent Weeks but we also know that most of us can’t afford to take that risk. We can’t walk away from our day jobs and live on Top Ramen for a year while we write our novel only to have it never published. Nearly every published writer tells us that we should never plan on using money from writing to pay the bills because that just doesn’t happen to the average Joe.

For me, the answer is never quit. Writing fiction makes me happy and so I am going to try harder to re-arrange my schedule so that I have more time to do it. Even if I only get to write one paragraph a week, that will have to do. Even if I get 100 more rejection letters this year, that’s going to have to do because of this one important fact:

What I love is writing, getting published is an optional side-effect.

At the beginning of a new year, we often find ourselves facing a clean slate. We figure it’s a new year, so it’s time to start fresh. Time to make promises to do the things this year that we didn’t do last year. Time to make amends for the crappy year we had last year and make this new year one to remember – everything we want it to be!

Unfortunately, this is also a time of denial. A time to kid ourselves and try and sweep the crap from prior years under the rug, look at the shiny new rug, and promise ourselves that the same stuff won’t happen this year. This time of year we fill ourselves with empty promises (we call them “resolutions”) to do more, be better, and achieve everything we’ve always wanted to achieve. Just like there are those who sin all week and then duck into a church every Sunday in search of absolution, there are those of us who use January 1st and “resolutions” as a form of absolution. We tell ourselves that we’ll be better this year.

The trick here isn’t to avoid resolutions all together, the trick is to treat them as goals and make them achievable. We have to pick things we want to accomplish, things that will stretch us and challenge us and make us grow as people or as professionals or as both. Pick something that’s just out of your current reach so you have to take that extra step in the new year to get it… but don’t pick something that’s so far out of reach you’re just going to give up before the end of February.

I’ve got a pile of resolutions that I plan on for this year but I also plan on achieving all of them. Oh I’ve got the usual “lose weight” one, but I’ve been hitting the gym 4+ times per week so I think I may actually accomplish that one if I stick to it long enough. Weight loss is a long, drawn out war of attrition (literally). It’s your willpower versus your gut, and your willpower has to win every day, all day and it sucks the life out of you (well, at least me anyway).

I also have a couple of writing resolutions. This year, I am going to pick one of the open books that I’ve been writing and I’m going to choose just that book and I’m going to finish it. I’m not going to stop and obsess over every chapter I am simply going to grind through the entire book from start to finish and I will end that book. Finishing the book is the hard part. The months of editing afterward are (relatively) easy. I have heard many times that the difference between published authors and aspiring authors is that published authors actually finish their books, aspiring authors just keep starting new books over and over again.

So, one way or another, for better or for worse, I’m going to finish a book this year. In addition, I’m also going to write and submit at least 3 short stories, regardless of my rejection history with short stories. This is because I need to prove to myself that I can continue to love the act of writing in the face of rejection, despair, self-loathing, and all of the other horrible things writers do to themselves when they get rejection letters.

So that’s that. I’ve aired my resolutions publicly and I hope to be accountable to them. Lose some weight, finish a novel, and submit for publication at least three short stories. I wonder what kind of resolutions other authors (published or otherwise) have? Do they fall into the trap of “new year absolution” and just come up with a pile of unattainable goals, or are they pragmatic about it and set fixed, measurable goals that they know they can work toward? I’m always curious about that. I wonder what Stephen King or Neil Gaiman set for their resolutions…

What if the story is actually bad?

What do you do then? The first thing that I must admit is that I am a novel writer. When I get stories in my mind they are huge, sprawling stories that can span generations or at the very least, multiple books in a series. This brings me to rule #1 for writing a bad short story:

Rule #1 : Make it Epic.

If you want to absolutely, positively ruin your chances of having your short story published, then go right ahead and make it epic. Without a doubt, this is the rule that I violate most. I violate it before I even sit down to type. The short story in my mind is a scene or a chapter from some epic confrontation or vast story with hundreds of tendrils of plot and intrigue. I’m not ashamed to admit this – this is how I think as a novel writer. The problem with thinking like a novel writer is you’re going to come up with crappy short story ideas. My solution to this is to take the epic topic I’m thinking about and run it through the following filter: “What would Edgar Allan Poe do with this?” If the answer is chuck it, then heed that advice.

Rule #2 : Don’t Have A Point

This one is also particularly nasty for any budding, hopeful short story writer. If you want your story to fall flat (and there’s a reason I use the word flat), then make sure it doesn’t have a point. Leave your reader saying, “Great narrative, but, what’s the point? Why did I just read that?” The thing that drives a truly tight, crisp, powerful short story is a clear sense of purpose. Even if you don’t want you reader to know your purpose, you must have one. Your purpose can be as simple as “I want them to get to the last page and gasp when they see my surprise ending!” or as complex as wanting them to feel compelled to do something to save the environment once they’ve finished your story. Bottom line is that any editor, whether they can express this to you or not, will reject a short story that is not driven by singular purpose. Oh yeah, I’m guilty of this one.

Try out this little self-help test: If your short story started out with you saying (aloud or to your mind) to yourself, “Wow, this would make for a fantastic scene!” Then you could be in trouble. Short stories are not scenes and should never be thought of as such. Yes, I’m guilty of that as well.

Rule #3: Don’t Care About Exposition

This one is actually really important and can often take the most time and effort to get right for a given story. If you don’t particularly care about exposition or spend any effort thinking about the pacing, order, and amount of exposition in your story, then feel free to wallow in the rejection letters. (This may be getting tiresome, but yes, I’m guilty of this as well).

If you front-load your story with exposition and spend the first two pages with narrative explanation about what’s going on and identifying your non-epic purpose, you may have satisfied rules 1 and 2, but you’ve ignored rule 3. People who pick up a novel typically have a pre-conceived notion that it could take them as long as 50 to 100 pages (depending on the length of the novel) to become truly engrossed. With a short story you do not have that luxury. The reader will only give you a few paragraphs to hook their attention, not pages.

Likewise, if you spend no time at all on exposition and leave the reader absolutely clueless until the very end, they will have no concept of your purpose. They won’t know why you brought them along on this journey through your story and will be left feeling very unsatisfied… no matter what the ending, it will be anti-climactic because a confused reader is incapable of experiencing suspenseful build-up to a conclusion.

The hard part, of course, is to make sure you put just enough exposition to let the reader know enough about what’s going on to give them context so that as more information is revealed and action occurs, they’re following you on your trip through the story, eager to reach the end… rather than being pulled along clueless on a leash just to get to the end.

Rule #4: Don’t Revise

In your quest to build the world’s worst short story, you have decided to follow rule #4 and skip the revision process altogether. Sure, you might have edited a few paragraphs here and there, possibly cleaned up some awkward wording, but otherwise once you’d spewed your first draft, you were just polishing the edges.

This is one of the worst things you can do. The information that comes out of your head on the first draft is raw, unrefined, stream of consciousness. In this form, you haven’t considered that characters are talking about things they might not yet have encountered, you haven’t made sure that each character has a unique, appropriate voice, and you certainly haven’t made sure that the pacing of the story speeds up when it should and slows down when it should.

To do this kind of revision, I will gather feedback on the stream of consciousness draft (to which I often refer as “plot vomit”) from others and myself. I will get all the notes on all the issues people have had with it and print this draft out. Then, I will read this over so that I can remember most, if not all, of the editorial comments. Then, and this is important, I delete the first draft. Every word. Gone. I then start typing it over from scratch. I keep in mind all the comments I had, but at the same time, I’m keeping a thought toward refining the stuff I originally spewed.

After this new revision, I’ll repeat the process until I really like the way the story feels and flows. Then I will go back and line-by-line, word-by-word, edit the craft of the story – revise sentence structure, change word usage, find synonyms, remove cliches, etc.

So, if you take these four rules and apply them to your own short story writing, you might produce great narratives, but you will not produce great short stories. I’d been going along producing halfway decent narratives that often made the short list, but after having a good friend of mine take a critical eye to my most recent story, I have a new appreciation for the amount of effort that goes into writing a truly good story. Not only that, but the story with which I am nearly finished is easily one of the best I’ve ever written precisely because I avoided the pitfalls outlined in this post.

Certainly there are thousands of other pieces of advice that writers can give about making better short stories, but avoiding the pitfalls in this post helped me write some of my best short stories ever.

Yesterday I found out that a short story that I’d submitted to a fantasy magazine had been rejected. As with virtually all rejections, there was no associated list of reasons why the piece had been rejected.  There are a couple things that writers typically feel when they get these letters that I want to write about:

First, don’t blame the publication. I know we’ve all heard stories about how ridiculously famous authors have had their books rejected and most of us have heard the stories about how, to see what would happen, people submitted a NY times bestseller to a publishing firm and it got rejected. Say what you will about the system or the man or whatever, but they’re just doing their jobs. The system isn’t there to coddle you, stroke your ego, or put you down humanely. It’s there to make money. Bottom line: if they don’t think your story/book/poetry/whatever will sell money, you get rejected. Writer self-help step #1: Accept this fact. It will never change.

Second: the Kick in the Face. If you have read this blog before, you may have seen this post I wrote previously about handling rejection like a true writer. I’m going to say something that a lot of the writing self-help books don’t say. When you get that rejection, you’re going to be pissed off. You’re going to be mad and you absolutely, positively will feel like giving up. Writers, when we get these rejection letters, will say and feel all kinds of  crazy stuff ranging from “my writing sucks” to “nobody’s ever going to publish my stories” to the absolute worst of them all:

Why do I even bother writing if nobody’s going to publish my work?

This is where the kick to the face comes in. It’s perfectly fine to feel these things and you should feel them – let yourself go through the range of anger, sadness, and dejection that comes with that rejection letter. Then kick yourself in the face. Slap yourself out if it. Realize that all of that crap is just that, crap. You write because you’re a writer and if you do it long enough and hone your craft enough, you will eventually find some success. You may not get on the NY times bestseller list, but there will be small victories.

If you can’t slap yourself out of it, then get a friend to kick you in the face. Last night I was babbling on about how I was going to give up writing and I quit and life sucks and why should I bother yadda yadda yadda. A friend of mine slapped me in the face and told me to knock it off (you know who you are…thank you!). What I intend to do is write tonight… write until I can’t take it anymore.

What I failed to remember, and what we may need friends to kick into our thick heads (hard!), is that we write because that’s who we are. We write because we tell stories, and we gain some satisfaction from telling and honing a story. Publication is secondary to writing, and every writer gets rejected.

So I’m taking my own advice: sucking it up, getting back on the horse, and moving on from yet another rejection and realizing that friends who can slap you around a little bit after a rejection are probably more valuable than friends who can proofread your stuff before the rejection.