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.

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.

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.

I could sit here, comfortably shielded behind the walls of my blog, and rant and rave about the injustice of it all – how dare they reject my story? What’s wrong with those people? Don’t they know good fiction when they see it? I could do all of those things, but I won’t. I deserved the rejection.

The rejection letter from these folks was nice enough to tell me that my story was both interesting and well-written, but because of the overwhelming response to the call for stories, I just didn’t make the cut. Cue the scene with high-school-me standing on the edge of the soccer field while teams are called, all sad and dejected as I get picked last. So, if my story was both interesting and well-written, then what did I do wrong?

It all comes down to the word interesting. I thought about it and read through my story last night and the reason for the rejection was clear as a bell. I actually told my wife that it probably only made the short list on the merit of the writing, because the plot was absolutely terrible.

Sure, I opened the story with a bang, leaping right into the action. I had very little exposition, only sprinkled into the action in the cleverest of places. The story read quite quickly and, as the letter said, was actually written pretty well. The problem was with the plot. The story is about this woman who, after losing her mentor in an accident, suddenly defies the city leadership to go off and save a group of people she’s never met. She even uses her powers to fight her people just to save the strangers. While there is motivation in the story that makes her actions (mostly) believable and justified, there’s something missing. Can you spot it? Can you say antagonist? I just knew you could…

I went through the story again. The cave-in at the beginning that kills her mentor was random chance, so we can’t blame that on an antagonist. The city leadership is partially there as an antagonist, but they never directly oppose her actions, the protagonist just kind of cuts them off in traffic, as it were. The antagonist(s) would have gone from point A to point B with or without the presence of the protagonist. As we say in the software business, that had a bad smell. The result is a bit of conflict, some (well-written?) action, but again, there’s none of that obvious, crucial opposition that should be there.

It gets worse. I know, I couldn’t believe it either when I read it. I kept asking myself, “What the hell was I thinking?” The confrontation, the climax that is supposed to take the reader out of the middle of the story and throw them, gripping the story with newsprint-covered thumbs, into the ending, was nonexistent. The protagonist runs away from the admittedly deflated antagonists. She gets rescued, and then flees her rescuers when she finds out they want to put her in a lab somewhere. Even here, when given the chance to turn these people into truly confrontational antagonists, I left them flaccid and ineffectual as true sources of opposition.

So my story may have been well-written, but in terms of plot and structure, it was a complete failure. It might have been interesting to follow the protagonist through her various adventures, but it wasn’t compelling. People reading the story didn’t care, they didn’t have an uncontrollable desire to keep turning the pages; that need to see what’s lurking behind the next page because the opposition is doing it’s job – hurling obstacle after obstacle in front of a protagonist about whom the reader truly cares.

Had I to do it all over again (and I will), I would have made the cave-in at the beginning caused by the city leadership, through their own reckless endeavors. When she confronts them about it, she discovers all kinds of horrible things the city’s leaders have been planning to do, including possibly destroying the city itself to satisfy their own greed. She threatens to tell the citizens of the city about what they’re doing, and they throw her in jail. She then escapes and, … you get the idea.

By making it damned obvious, as obvious as a hammer to the face, who the antagonists are, the conflict is easy to spot. By amping up the level of conflict, increasing the danger, the stakes, and the consequences, the reader cares more about the outcome. With all this conflict around the protagonist, I can weave in exposition and character development in how she deals with the obstacles to further draw the reader in, make them care about her and sympathize with her. Had I written the story this way the first time, I still may have been rejected, but the response from the editors might have been that the story was compelling or better but they still didn’t have room.

To me, a rejection isn’t a reason to quit or a reason to wallow in self-pity (though I did that for a couple hours). It’s a reason to look back at the work I produced with a different, more objective eye. I can look at it and see all of its shortcomings as if someone had circled them in yellow highlighter. The next time I write a short story, I will make sure the obstacles are far more hard-hitting, the antagonists are far more antagonistic (har har), and rather than settling for interesting, will strive for can’t put it down.

To finish this up, I’ll quote Thomas Edison:

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work

Think of each rejection not as a rejection, but a little reminder that you can learn from the experience and use it to make your next submission better.

So I’ve received my first rejection letter. Note that I said “first” and not “a” or “the”. This is an important distinction. Throughout the career of any writer, the reception of rejection letters is going to be commonplace, with a few notable exceptions for people who are lucky and talented enough to strike a hit with their first book.

Even though I knew it was going to happen and I knew it was coming, it still hurt. I’ve written or contributed to 14 different books that were all published and sitting on shelves in Barnes & Noble, Borders, etc. They were all technical books but they were published books nonetheless. As a result, I’m not particularly accustomed to people telling me they don’t want to publish my work.

This is where the courage part comes in. As soon as you open (either the physical envelope or the email) a letter containing a rejection, your brain starts doing all kinds of horrible things to you.  It tells you that your story sucks, it tells you that you can’t write and that you have the writing skill of a four year old. Your brain will tell you that you should’ve given up before you started, why should you even bother if your stuff sucks and nobody wants to read it? Then, when your brain has thoroughly beaten you and you are on the ground bleeding and positive you don’t want to get back up, your brain then asks you the most dangerous question of all. Be careful – it’s a trick question:

Why do you want to be a writer?

This is where you will get tripped up. If you answer this question, then you might as well give up now and seriously not bother trying to write any longer. This is a trick question because you don’t want to be a writer, you are a writer. Whether your writing is good, whether you can get published, whether the only person who ever reads your writing is your dog – you are a writer and there is nothing you can do about it. It is in your DNA and your soul as surely as any other immutable part of your anatomy and who you are.

This is the suffering that all writers go through. A writer doesn’t come up with stories, he or she is plagued by them. The stories and scenes and characters and ideas come unbidden at random points throughout the day and they quite literally cannot function properly until they have vented those ideas; given them release and physical form on paper or computer. Whether a person ever writes a single word for publication is irrelevant to whether or not they are a writer.

And so, with my self esteem in the gutter, I open a new blank word processor document and start anew, knowing that I will continue to be rejected and knowing that there is nothing I can do about it. I don’t want to write, I must write. It is essential to my sanity and the completion of a story is a therapy that I can buy from no clinic. This is my curse and my gift: my brain is full of stories and these stories are screaming to be given form and it is my job, my responsibility to do just that.