The Depths and Shallows of Short Fiction
Last night I finished writing a short story that is, without a doubt, the “deepest” story I’ve written. Before I talk about that, I want to talk about some of the “shallow” (and I say this not in a derogatory way) work I’ve done. To date, the only short story that I’ve managed to get published is a piece that belongs to a relatively new sub-genre: zombie fiction.
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
To Quit Or Not To Quit (writing) – That Is The Question
Those of you who have read some of my previous blog posts (assuming anybody reads this blog anymore) know that I’ve addressed the issue of rejection before. My feelings on rejection have stayed fundamentally the same: rejection is part of the game. If you plan on being a writer, you need to plan on getting rejected. Over. and over. and over. Unfortunately most of the rejection letters we get aren’t really all that helpful, so sometimes we will continue making the same mistakes in our writing over and over and getting rejection letters over and over. This is why we need to continually try and hone our craft – go to classes, find different people to read our stuff, and join writing groups.
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.
A Writer’s New Years Resolutions
It is now officially 2011. I won’t get into how disappointed I am that we don’t have flying cars, hoverboards, the ability to “jack in” to the net via cables embedded in the backs of our necks, or the fact that we can’t yet even handle simple things like teleportation or cheap space travel.
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…
The Decay of a Nation
Up until this point I have tried to keep this blog just about writing and those things that are related to writing and the publishing industry (hence my posts about the Kindle and eBooks and the iPad, etc). However, on my way to the office this morning I was listening to an anchor from CNN talk to the Florida minister who runs the church planning the 9/11 Qur’an burning.
I can’t in good conscience sit here behind my WordPress console and let this issue go by without at least posting my opinion of it.
Something has started to decay in this country. There is a festering rot here that is slowly and inexorably creeping toward something more terrible than most people can imagine. Our culture of complacency is breeding attitudes that are eerily similar to those of the pre-Nazi-Germany attitudes toward Jews. It is becoming culturally and publicly acceptable to exhibit what can only be described as rampant bigotry, hatred, and prejudice fed by fear and ignorance.
First we have the huge debate over whether or not a Mosque can be built near ground zero. The media has, as usual, been doing their part to fan the flames of drama and conflict here. However, this doesn’t mean that the public at large isn’t partly to blame. My issue isn’t with the people who shout at the top of their lungs that terrorists shouldn’t be allowed to build on ground zero. Those people are ignorant, and we (should) all know that. The people I take issue with are those who sit back and do nothing. Dammit people, there is an injustice being done to an entire culture-a thriving religion- and nobody is doing a damn thing. Everyone who lets a co-worker bemoan the “terrorists” who are building “on ground zero” (the location is actually a few blocks away) should be ashamed of themselves. Whenever someone standing near you makes some offhand remark that takes the entirety of the world’s people who practice any form of Islam and lumps them together as a stereotype and treats them as something at which a finger can be pointed – you should be ashamed of yourself for allowing that remark to go unchallenged.
The general public in Nazi Germany didn’t just wake up one morning and decide that they were going to hate Jews, and those who did align themselves against the Jews – many didn’t even realize that what they were doing was hate. A slow, steady, relentless campaign of propaganda, fear-mongering, and public manipulation over the course of years slowly but surely changed the public’s attitudes toward the Jews. Lies, deceit, and the equivalent of media blitzes gradually turned normal, everyday housewives into people who feared that exposure to a Jew could contaminate their drinking water or put their children at risk. Why did all of this work? Because not enough people did anything, not enough people complained. I’m not saying it could have been avoided, my point is that complacency breeds this kind of horror.
This country, despite the praise people love to sing about it, has had its own dark past involving hatred, bigotry, racism, and worse. This country enslaved Africans. This country gathered up every Japanese person they could find, regardless of whether or not they were a US Citizen, and threw them in camps during the war.
And now, this country is actually debating whether or not it’s own citizens should be allowed to exercise their freedom of religion. Religious freedom is one of the founding tenets of this country. It is what has made this country appeal to generations of immigrants. It is one of the freedoms our soldiers fight for.
In the news today, complacency is everywhere. People who damn well should know better are staying quiet for fear of the backlash of having said something that might be construed as politically incorrect. People who know better are not putting their feet down and telling the ignorant bigots where to stick their hatred. Worse, for fear of public outcry, the people in a position to renew firm stances against these kinds of prejudices do nothing or even consider repealing parts of the constitution in order to revoke basic freedoms (the right of a baby born in this country to automatically be born a citizen…)
The main purpose of studying history is to learn from it. We study history so that we can become a better people, so that we can be more enlightened and learn from our mistakes. What we’re in the midst of doing now is repeating some of the worst mistakes in history. Our complacency is allowing hate groups to influence the public, allowing prejudice to influence law, allowing fear to drive policy.
If we, as a nation, let the minister in Florida and his congregation of bigots burn Qur’ans on September 11th, then we are allowing them to be no better than the people who flew planes into the World Trade Center on that same day. Flame me all you want, but the same kind of religious zealotry and hatred and xenophobia that drove those men to hijack those planes is absolutely no different than the kind of religious zealotry that can drive a congregation to publicly burn the holy book of another religion. If we, as a nation, let them do that without letting the world know we don’t agree, then the radical Islamic terrorists will just be able to point and say “Look, look at what the infidels do to our religion!” Just as an aside here – you know who else had public book burnings, right? Yeah, Hitler.
So. Who do you want to be? Do you want to be disliked because of what you believe in, or do you want to be liked because of the group you mindlessly follow? Do you want to be proud of who you are and taking a stand against hate, or will you be weak and just let fear, ignorance, hatred, and bigotry run rampant through this country, through your workplace, through your home?
Are you a complacent citizen or a real American?
How NOT to write a short story
For the one or two of you who read this blog, you may remember that I’ve written a few posts on dealing with rejection. The general tone of those posts has all been about the mental attitude necessary to pull yourself up after being slapped in the face by rejection and keep plodding on. I still wholeheartedly agree with those posts and ideas, but…
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.