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.

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But, we also have the kind of dreams that plague us throughout the day; dreams that comfort us like a warm blanket when we go to sleep at night, and dreams that keep our minds racing while we drive to work, while we eat a sandwich, and pretty much while we do anything. These dreams are literally the stuff of legend. These dreams are the scenes, dramas, and epics that are begging to be written and to be told from start to finish.

What’s interesting here is that there is no magic fairy dust, no faith, no religion, no lucky roll of the dice that will, on its own, make our dreams come true. The only thing standing between us and the realization of our dreams is work. That’s it. Putting one foot in front of the other, tapping one key after another. Certainly we could all use a little luck to help us along, but if we’re still sitting at home in front of a blank screen and 700 pages of unwritten manuscript remain jammed inside our head, no amount of luck will get our story published. What will get our story published, what will pull our dreams from out of reach and into the palm of our hands is nothing more than raw, hard work. Persistence and patience don’t hurt either.

A couple of years ago, I remember saying to myself that I’d never be published. I kept telling myself that I wasn’t good enough to be a published author and that my stuff sucked. My dream of being a real writer remained just that, a dream. Then I changed my dream of being a writer into a goal. I worked and I wrote. I wrote some more. Then I wrote some more. I now have over 14 computer programming books published and I’ve got a short story published in a real, actual, on-paper anthology.

Dreams are things we have that will never happen. Goals are real, tangible things we can put effort toward.

Another dream I’ve had since the day I got my driver’s license was to own a fun, sporty car. In the past I’ve just never had enough money saved up or I’ve needed to drive practical cars or minivans or whatever. As long as I kept that dream as a dream and convinced myself it would never happen, it never happened.

A couple of weeks ago, I walked into a BMW dealership and I special ordered a green BMW 328i xDrive and it will be put on a ship leaving Germany sometime next week. The combination of handling, sporty feel, comfort, reliability and style are unmatched by any of the other cars I test drove.

BMW 328xi in Tasman Green

Instead of pining over what I didn’t have, I visualized what I wanted. I pictured myself sitting behind the wheel of the car I wanted most in the world (within reason… no amount of positive visualization is going to give me enough money to buy a Bugati Veyron ) and I worked toward that goal. It took a lot of scrimping, saving, penny-pinching and skipping on other big-ticket purchases I might’ve made, but I made it. My dream car arrives in a few weeks and I fully expect to be driving this vehicle when my first fantasy book is published. That’s not a dream, that’s my goal and it’s a goal that I work toward every day.

So, while I may not have advice that I can impart on the step-by-step process you need to follow in order to get published, I do know a little something about making stuff happen. Want to be a published writer? Take all that time you spending wishing and write. Take the rest of your spare time and write. Take the spare time you don’t have and make it spare and take writing classes and join a writing group. Get all the guides on how to get published and how to write query letters and hone your craft. Work. Put one foot in front of the other and tap one key after the other. Don’t sit around waiting for divine intervention because your own intervention is what’s going to set things in motion.

Nothing would please me more than to see a bunch of comments on the bottom of this blog post rattling off dream after dream that you folks made come true. Dreams aren’t mythical, intangible pink unicorns. They’re goals you can make happen.

While you’re at it, make sure your characters have dreams. At the very core of a good novel is a protagonist who has dreams and an antagonist that wants to thwart them. Use the feelings you have while trying to reach your goals to make your characters and their struggles to fulfill their dreams more realistic.

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I’m not apologizing, my absence actually has relevance and meaning to the life of a writer. My life as of late has been very chaotic. I’ve had ups, downs, big ups, and big downs, all within an extremely short period of time up to and including considering a potential job change, considering moving, beginning divorce proceedings, and much, much more. Even though my divorce probably ranks at the top of the worlds most amicable divorces ever, its still a huge source of stress, anxiety, and most of all – change.

As I floated around on the top of the waves, nearly drowning from having swallowed so much stress I got to thinking about how long it had been since I actually sat down and wrote anything. I don’t mean having written anything good, profound, or meaningful. I mean, how long it had been since I’d written anything. I hadn’t blogged, hadn’t written in a journal, and certainly hadn’t been working on my fantasy novel.

So, I slapped myself in the face and said to myself:

One thing that writers must do is write. Thinking, plotting, scheming, dreaming – all useful but mean nothing without actually sitting down and writing.

If I’m not writing, I’m not a writer. That’s the short and long of it right here. So, I sat down and started writing. Since then, I’ve finished a short story that I’ve sent out for consideration by a popular fantasy magazine (will know in about 6 weeks if they liked it) and I’m nearly done with another short story that I’m submitting to an anthology. Once done with those, I’m going to dive back into the fantasy novel.

The point I want to make here is I hit rock bottom. I was wallowing in self-pity and I was coming up with every excuse in the book to stop writing. Since I’ve started writing again, I’m a happier person. The moral of the story is if you want to be a writer – the one thing you must do above all else is write. Its about time I followed my own advice.

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I got up from my desk, and got about halfway to the kitchen when it hit me. It wasn’t the typical “I just got an idea for how I want to work the next scene” idea – those are fairly subtle and I file them away in Evernote on my iPhone so I don’t lose them. This idea, however, appeared before me and bashed me in the face with a Louisville Slugger.

To set the stage here, I’ve finished the outlining (word doc, index cards, and a table full of sticky notes) for my fantasy novel. I’ve written Act I, and am about 30,000 words into the book as a whole. When I’ve had a chance to write, I’ve typically been able to nail a 3k+ scene during that session. I have committed to this novel and I’m in no way feeling frustrated with it and have no desire to give it up.

The idea that hit me is truly unique. I spent several days googling and searching book store keywords for anything that resembled what I wanted to do – nothing. This new idea is not fantasy, but set in current times and will probably have a faster pace. It is also part of a genre for which more agents accept queries, that prints more books, that has a vastly higher readership.

So the dilemma : This story is now haunting me. During the day, the time my brain normally spends thinking about my fantasy novel is now mostly consumed by this new idea. This idea is far more character-driven and doesn’t in any way resemble the “epic fantasy” of my current project.

I have been told many times that dropping a WIP in the middle to pick up another one is one thing that separates published writers from “aspiring” writers. That said, this idea is haunting me and I’m not sure how to get that out of my head.

So, if you’ve ever had this problem – you get knee deep into a WIP you love and an idea hits you in the face and won’t leave you alone – what do you do? What techniques have you tried for calming the second idea so you can finish the first or have you actually dropped the first to finish the second?

I would love to hear how other writers handle this situation.

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One of my favorite places to get ideas for characters is Wal-Mart. Now, before you start throwing flames my way, let me say this: I am in no way demeaning that store or the people who frequent it. The reason that I like this particular store is because everyone shops there. If you go to a trendy mall, you’re only going to see a particular type of people at that mall. If you go to a salvation army store, the breadth of economic bracket of the typical consumer there is also going to be limited.

But, at Wal-Mart, you see everybody in one place – everyone from people on food stamps to a guy who drove up in a Benz. You’ll see mentally challenged people there with their case workers, struggling to maintain a hold on their independence and dignity in a world that shuns and degrades them. Single mothers (teenage or otherwise), bachelors, college students, parents with eight kids trying to save a buck here and there on the essentials, and of course, that guy who drove up in the Benz who wants to save a few bucks on the HDTV he’s putting in his 5th guest room.

If you want a reader to be able to sympathize and empathize with your characters, then you need to be able to do the same with actual, living, breathing human beings. People from different walks of life as you, people with problems you can’t possibly imagine, people with advantages you know you’ll never have.

What I’ve found really rewarding is going into a Wal-Mart and just watching, observing. Take a look around you, but not that cursory glance you normally give that is filtered with the blinders of your past experiences and your own preconceptions. Take the blinders off and look around you with fresh, objective eyes: the eyes of a reader waiting to be guided, thrilled, excited.

Take a look at the woman pushing the cart with her kid in it. What do you think her daily life is like? Is she happy? What do you think she daydreams about while she pushes that cart through the grocery aisles? What does she want out of life and what’s preventing her from getting it? Asking yourself these questions and filling them in with complete fiction is a great way to build your characters. If the fictional backstory you build for these people fits what you’re looking at, then it might also fit scenes you write for such characters.

Places like Wal-Mart (as well as thousands of other good places to people-watch) are endless fountains of ideas for characters. So, the next time you’re stuck looking for ideas for new characters or the ones you have lack dimension, then just get in the car and do some character shopping.

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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.

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Also when I was young, I was really into writing stories. I wrote stories on my mother’s old blue Smith Corona type writer until she couldn’t stand the sound of the hammers smashing anymore and had to confiscate the thing. I went to summer school just so I could take the creative writing classes. When I got to college, my first year there I took creative writing, introduction to science fiction, greek mythology, and philosophy. Doesn’t sound like the kind of stuff a computer science major would be taking, does it? Sure, I also took Physics and Calculus and Linear Algebra and Discrete Math and a bunch of computer programming classes. I even ended up as a TA/exam proctor for a lower level computer science class.

As far back as I can remember, everyone expected me to go into computers. They certainly had good reason, I can say without ego that I’m incredibly good at what I do, among the best. I have presented at programming conferences, user groups, and written and co-written 14+ books on computer programming, some of which have ended up as dog-eared bibles on the desks of developers. Over the past 10 years, I have made it my goal to be among the top computer programmers in the world. So what’s the problem then? Why blog about this? The problem is that I have never been truly satisfied at any “day job” that I have ever had. Sure, there have been really great jobs, but even then those began to seem unsatisfying. I used to think it was because the job was getting boring (and sometimes it was).  But now I realize that there was a deeper cause to my unhappiness at work.

I didn’t want to work in a cubicle building stuffy, boring computer software all day long. Especially when it felt like there wasn’t a single creative step in the process of building this software. I wanted-needed- to build, create, let my mind free and imagine worlds and people and events that stimulated my imagination. The most fun I’ve ever had programming was when I was building MUDs (Multi User Dungeons/Dimensions) – big, expansive, text-based worlds that let players roam around and solve puzzles, complete quests, and kill things in classic “infocom” style. I got to use the creative and analytical sides of my brain at the same time.

This past October, I decided that I’d had enough. I was done being a computer programmer. I made the mental switch to believe in the old adage that I am not my job. I forced myself to admit that I was a writer and that I was merely paying the bills with my job as a computer programmer. I was no longer a programmer, but instead a writer who knows how to write computer software. It was amazing what a difference that simple change in perspective made on my life. I have been “present” more in my life in the past few months than I have in the past few years. Not only that, but I’ve got a short story coming out in a published anthology soon, I’m writing a few more stories for other anthologies, and I’m finally moving forward on my fantasy novel with real, measurable progress. It’s amazing what a difference a little change in perspective and priority can make.

Part of me mourns the loss of my previous identity. Part of me feels guilty every time I choose to ignore some blog post about a new piece of software. Part of me feels the tug of stress and anxiety when a new development tool or platform comes out. The old me, the one obsessed with being one of the best coders on the planet, would rush off and absorb this new technology to the exclusion of all else – family, friends, responsibilities, hygiene. Now, I feel the tug and am aware of the call but I don’t answer it. I have decided that I don’t need to obsess about my career as a software architect. I have decided that because I just don’t obsess anymore. I will still bust my ass for my employer and give them 100%, I just won’t spend my nights and weekends obsessing about every new thing that comes along.

I now know what makes me happy. I know what I need. I know who I am.

I am a writer, for all the good and bad that entails.

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I was thinking about this and suddenly came to the conclusion that my college professor was an idiot. First of all, this same professor “taught” us that using said as a default attribution is a bad idea and taught us a whole bunch of other things that an editor recently told me were all wrong. I am now in the process of unlearning all the garbage I was taught by this particular professor.

When I was a kid I remember taking one of those aptitude tests, the ones designed to tell you, based on your scores, what sort of future career you to which you might be suited. This test told me that I should pursue a career in “sanitation”. That’s right, the aptitude test told me that I should be a garbage truck driver. The moral of the story: I’m done letting other people tell me what I can and cannot do.

I firmly believe that if you have that raw spark (neurosis?) within that makes you a writer, then you can hone your craft, learn your tools, and produce great fiction. I think it is foolish and the greatest form of hubris to think that one can be a writer and never once pick up a book on how to write.

Imagine a musical genius whose instrument of choice is the guitar. The man can hear songs in his head that are absolute gems, pure musical perfection. Now, ask that musical genius, who has never lifted a guitar, to go and play the songs in his head. With the exception of a few savant types, this musical genius is going to struggle to play “Happy Birthday” on the guitar, let alone the complex songs in his head. He needs to know how to use the tool, he needs to learn the chords.

Knowing that, in the heavy metal genre, an A chord with the distortion cranked up will make your audience want to punch stuff (a good thing) is essential if you plan to compose heavy metal songs. You wouldn’t know that, regardless of your level of creativity, if you didn’t know all of the chords, how they sound, and the emotions they produce.

The same is true for a writer. We can’t create a page turner without knowledge of plot and structure. We can’t make readers cry without knowledge of characters and character bonding. We can’t make readers so immersed by our fictional world that they ignore the pot of boiling water and the pets with full bladders begging to be let out unless we have a mastery of plot, structure, characters, description, setting, dialogue, and every other tool in the box.

So I picked up a bunch of books on how to write. I’ve already read a few, including those by Stephen King and David Morrell,  but these books were down and dirty technical manuals for how to convert raw inspiration into truly readable fiction. I must admit that I ate quite a bit of humble pie in reading those books. Rather than being upset about it, I ordered about 10 more books. Every speck, every tiny granule of knowledge that I pick up teaches me to better hone my stories. The end result is a work of fiction that is not only more fun to read, but much more likely to be published.

So, to summarize: You can’t create music on the guitar without knowing the chords. You can’t create good fiction without knowing the techniques available to writers. Learn your Chords and your readers will thank you for it.

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Are our bookshelves going the way of the CD case?

Regardless of the answer to that question, that’s still the wrong question to be asking. Lots of people are worried that printed books are going to disappear the way CDs have “disappeared” (I use quotes here because you can still buy CDs in stores, they are just losing popularity). What happens to writers if printed books go away? Are we all just going to go extinct like the dinosaurs? From talking to some people and listening to their fear, one would think that one day all writers on the planet are simply going to sink into a tar pit and disappear, to be replaced by the proverbial “thousand monkeys” sitting in a room typing out Shakespeare (eventually).

We’re not looking at an extinction here. Everything evolves, including the art of storytelling. Writers can either put themselves on or ahead of this evolutionary change or they can be left behind. There will never cease to be a market for storytelling, the only thing that changes is the medium through which the story is told. Primitive cultures that had no written language told stories, including oral histories, to each other. Once people figured out how to paint on cave walls, stories depicting great hunts were painted on those walls. When people figured out how to write on papyrus, great stories were told on papyrus. When man invented the printing press, great stories were told to larger numbers of people. When man invented the eReader, great stories were told to people riding buses, sitting on trains, or wiling away the hours on a beach.

Writers will always write, and people will always crave a great story. The medium through which people crave those stories is going to evolve as technology evolves and people’s lifestyles change. It is my opinion that writers need to embrace these new mediums and be part of the evolution of those mediums, helping bring about fantastic new ways to tell stories. Historically, artists who cling to the “old ways” and refuse to accept new mediums are left behind.

So, in conclusion, I don’t think that our books are all going to disappear. I don’t think that we’re going to lose the pleasure in visiting a library that smells like books or visiting a big book store and spending hours just browsing. We are, however, going to have more options available to us that are tailored to our specific needs and lifestyle and that represents great new opportunities for writers, not a death knell.

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What all of this means is that readers will put the book down if they don’t identify with, sympathize with, or want to be like, characters in the book. If the reader has no emotional investment in any of the people in the book, then they don’t give a crap about what happens to your protagonist. They won’t want to see the antagonist get his (or hers) in the end. They won’t care whether the love interest blossoms into a relationship. They simply won’t care – no matter how good the plot is. You can have a fantastic plot driven by flat, unbelievable, caricatures (not characters).

One of the things that I see a lot, especially when reading the fantasy genre is that an author will fail to make their character real enough by making them too perfect or sometimes even the reverse: too flawed. When characters reach an extreme like that they cease to be people with whom the reader can form a bond and become nothing more than an archetype. You could easily replace “Character A”‘s looks, personality, background, and name with an entirely new persona and the book would read the same way. This is because “Character A” is just that - generic and lifeless. They’re a placeholder, not a source of motivation or inspiration to the reader.

I’m not saying that this is a cardinal sin. No, if you look at the bookshelves of a Barnes & Noble on any given day, you’ll see countless popular books with archetype placeholders instead of living, breathing characters. Some readers can tolerate it.

If you think about your characters like real people then giving them a rich, full history filled with joys and sorrows, flaws and positive traits, becomes easy. Think about all of the things that motivate your character through the book – the history and life experience that pushes them to make the decisions they make. You could leave all of that stuff unsaid, or you could turn all of those motivations into chances to breathe real life into the character. What if your ultra-brave soldier protagonist suddenly has a burst of paralyzing fear because the sight of the enemy recalls some childhood horror? To me, that’s far more believable than a soldier who is brave and strong throughout the entire book. What if your main character has an addiction that they are constantly fighting and struggling with? Not only will millions of readers be able to identify with that problem on some level and immediately bond with that character, but it provides a wealth of opportunity for coming up with great struggles, climaxes, victories, failures, and plot twists.

The bottom line is this: think about all of your friends and family. Think about every single one of them. They all have flaws, dents, dings, cracks in the armor and skeletons in the closet. It could be an innocent skeleton like having a secret love of green frosting, or it could be the story of a childhood victim or someone who suffered through a terrible loss that effected them tremendously and changed who they are today. All you have to do is look around you and at the people you live with, talk to, love, and barely know and you will find a plethora of flaws, character traits, and histories that chisel your character into a real person instead of a bland, generic archetype.

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