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

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.

We, as fans of fantasy and science fiction, were completely willing to accept these weaknesses within the vampire because the capacity for feats of raw awesome far outweighed their weaknesses. Do people complain that Superman is vulnerable to kryptonite? Of course not – the man of steel would simply be too powerful without some kind of built-in “off switch”. Vampires would quickly subdue the entire planet without some form of weakness that prevented them from doing so.

Their physical weaknesses have also led to the mystery and appeal that surrounds the vampire. They must live in the shadows to survive. This wraps them in a cloak of mystery and gothic suspense that true vampire fans crave. That darkness, that aspect of never truly walking in the daylight to reveal all of their secrets, that is part of the romance and true appeal of vampires.

I have always seen vampires as these dark, troubled creatures. Their immortality ends up being more of a curse than a blessing. They are extremely complex characters that are difficult to write without making them cliché. The reader never truly knows if there isn’t some hidden motive for their actions. Their thoughts and motivations are as shrouded in shadows as the vampires themselves.

Now, of course, this has begun to change. Vampires have become weak, angst-ridden, predominantly teenage whiners obsessed with finding true love and forsaking the bloodsucking life of the vampire to use their powers for good and high box office gross. Everyone who is part of an elite club mourns the loss of “elitism” when everyone joins the club and makes it popular rather than elite. What’s happening to the vampire is more than this; more than just the simple loss of the elitism that used to be inherent in the club of vampire fans.

Don’t get me wrong – a main character vampire needs to have enough humanity so that the reader can identify with them. That doesn’t mean they should be weakened to the point where they need regular visits to the psychiatrist and the support of a vapid, archetypal love interest in order to survive.

Putting vampires in your story or, heaven forbid, having a vampire main character has become taboo. Publishers have even started telling people to not even bother submitting vampire stories. Unless you plan on going completely mainstream and writing a “Twilight killer” or, you are the current author of the Twilight series, submitting a vampire story will trigger an endless barrage of derisive laughter from whoever hears your ridiculous idea. No one even cares if your vampire is by far the most amazing ever written. All they care about is that vampires are now a joke.

The definition of vampire has been diluted. No longer is vampirism the need to survive on human blood, which endows the sufferer (yes, I said sufferer) with superhuman strength and abilities. Now, vampires can do things that allow them to walk in the daylight, drink non-human blood, levitate, fly, move at nearly the speed of light, and deliver campy dialogue in a setting that might as well have been an episode of the original “90210”.

Variations on vampire powers have existed since the first vampire story, but never before have they all existed in the same characters. Authors know (well, we’re supposed to know) that you cannot make your main characters too powerful because they become their own cliché. This has apparently not stopped the modern vampire author. If you are a modern vampire author and are making hojillions of dollars doing it then kudos to you but I mourn the loss of the classic vampire.

Popularization of things that used to be “cult” is not a new phenomenon. However, with the Tolkien stories, Peter Jackson did it without completely watering down the original concepts of the author. The movie characters had better senses of humor and probably looked a lot better than Tolkien ever envisioned, but we are not standing around the coffeepot mourning the loss of the original concept of a Dwarf nor are authors being told that they shouldn’t bother submitting stories with Elves in them.

So you folks who enjoy the “nouveau vamp” – you can keep on enjoying, I won’t begrudge you that. However, I will stay comfortably in the shadows, clinging desperately to childhood memories of reading about vampires who hung the skulls of their victims on pikes along the bloodstained road to their isolated fortress to let all who passed know that they were on the road to encountering pure, raw, unfiltered badass.