|
While we’re on rejection letter chat, I figured I’d share mine from late last year: Late in the year I queried eight agents. Got five radio-silences, one “liked it but no thanks,” one form rejection, and one “like it but not taking new clients” who kindly referred me to another agency, who became the form rejection. I also sent two manuscripts to publishers as an unagented individual and got one request for rewrite with a lot of feedback and one “we are kicking this up the chain” which I’m still waiting back on. The nerves continue to fray. Meanwhile, I finally got off my rear end and started a Patreon for the serialized novel I’ve been writing for the last 8 months. My goal in 2019 is to finish my commercial thriller and get it sent off to a whole new crop of agents. It’s a different beast to writing contemporary romance (which I have published both traditionally and self) and fantasy (my primary short story dabbling ground) but creepy page-turners about messed up individuals is such a fertile stomping ground. I haven’t swung by this thread in a while, but I got nostalgic and remembered posting in the old Fiction Farm thread about my first ever magazine sale back in like 2012-13.  Good to see we’re all still failing along together.
|
#
¿
Jan 20, 2019 00:57
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 21, 2024 05:27 |
|
|
“The words of Peter’s sister” and “Peter’s sister’s words” are needlessly cumbersome phrases unless there’s some story-related reason why you’re avoiding naming her.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 22, 2019 22:36
|
|
|
Dolash posted:Yeah, I was just trying to keep the set dressing as short as possible This is a great discussion to have especially in regards to flash fiction because flash is a medium where you have to tread a careful line. Revealing too much bogs down short pieces; revealing too little leads to confusion and head-scratching. When considering stuff like whether to name a character or just describe them or their relation to the protag, I err on the side of “how would the character themselves think about this person?” If you’re writing in close third or in first, chances are your protag would just think of his sister by name. If you’re able to slip a name or two confidently into the narrative, rather than coming across as excess set dressing, it hints at a broader world beyond the scope of the scene your reader is actually reading.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 22, 2019 23:11
|
|
|
I’ve been staying in a few different cities this week where my phone straight up didn’t work in my accommodation and I was informed to walk down to the local corner store if I wanted cell reception. It’s definitely still a thing in New Zealand as well as my hometown in the US. But at the same time everyone’s also gotten rid of their landlines, so if anything it feels more isolated. There’s also power outages and dead batteries. A property of the ghosts/supernatural poo poo could be draining batteries, as touched upon upthread. It’s something people are totally willing to roll with and can be used to introduce extra fear and anxiety to your protag.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 4, 2019 23:11
|
|
|
Burkion posted:It would be nice to know what they wanted, what was wrong and what you could try to change Until you get two full rejects with extremely helpful bullet-point notes about what they liked/disliked and they contradict each other utterly. 
|
|
#
¿
Feb 18, 2019 09:36
|
|
|
Agent355 posted:So I”m looking for advice on a specific thing. I hate to post what feels like a cop-out answer but the best advice I’ve ever followed when wondering this is read a lot. Read stuff you like, then go back and read it again and pay attention to what the author focuses on. Try move beyond thinking “wow this works, it’s great” into trying to piece together why it works. If you’re worried about scene length, find a bunch of scenes that you really like and (if you’re reading an ebook) copy them into a document and see how long they are. If you’re writing a heist story, read heist stories that you enjoy and get a feel for those authors’ rhythms.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 10, 2019 07:42
|
|
|
Nae! posted:I no joke went through this whole door opening song-and-dance last night when trying to describe a guy sneaking through a partially opened door. I had like three or four sentences describing the movements of his fingers and his feet, then ended up whittling it down to: “Without daring to breathe, he gently peeled the door away from the frame and slipped into the office.” Yeah, this is how I do it. I have stuff I’m not thrilled with and action that doesn’t flow as smooth as I’d like it, but I just keep a dunning doc of stuff to fix in next draft. I’ll deal with it then. That way it helps give direction and consistency for the second draft anyhow. I tend to get lost up my own rear end if I let me go fix things in the midst of a project.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 13, 2019 05:17
|
|
|
One thing that helps me is to remember that my first draft is for me and me alone. It doesn’t have to be perfect because absolutely nobody other than maybe a tiny handful of close friends will ever see that poo poo.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 20, 2019 01:03
|
|
|
Daric posted:This whole thing is very weird. I’ve self-published quite a few books and worked with a few different editors at various levels (structural, line, proofing, etc). Feel free to shoot me a PM once you’ve got a draft ready and I can put you in touch with some folks who have good turnaround times and reasonable rates. It’ll be different depending on how much editing your work needs and, like Exmond said, what type of editing you’re having done. If this is your first book I’d recommend a full line edit unless you’re an extremely competent self-editor, which few people are early on in their writing careers.
|
|
#
¿
May 9, 2019 23:38
|
|
|
sebmojo posted:We squat athwart the page and strain until the word poops come Whalley posted:You type like real hard and make sure you’re sweating bullets the whole time This explains why I keep ruining so many keyboards. Actual writing update: Slugged myself past the 44k mark on current novel. I always have a motivation crap-out at 40,000 words or so, so it’s good to be past that. Only problem is I think my second act needs some reworking and isn’t exciting enough–buuuut for now I’m forcing myself to stick to the outline with the mantra of We’ll Fix It In Post.
|
|
#
¿
May 11, 2019 03:18
|
|
|
Fruity20 posted:I’m paranoid as stated before…And i feel like many stories i write or develop largely have young protags (11-21). I can’t pull off a believable adult without them becoming a manchild at best to feeling like a child’s view on a grown up at worst… It’s really tough for us to give advice on stuff like this without seeing what you’re writing. Are you simply worried that your adults will seem juvenile? Or have people told you this? If it’s all worry for something that you haven’t even written yet, then you’re just making yourself anxious over something that has yet to happen and not much advice we give beyond “try to write” will help you, because we don’t know what the problems are if you can’t show us any writing yet. Remember that writing is just like visual art, which you say you are experienced with: it’s okay to draw more than one draft of stuff. It’s okay to “sketch” before you try to write a polished draft. It’s okay to practice and then just throw it away. You don’t have to work yourself up into a frenzy over whether your writing will be great on the first attempt because it’s totally fine if it’s poo poo. You can just do it over however many times you need to make it good.
|
|
#
¿
May 14, 2019 01:57
|
|
|
Any of y’all short fiction publishing goons submitting anywhere interesting these days? I think I’m itching for a new target magazine. I’ve got stories on sub to BCS and a couple themed anthologies right now but am unsure what to try next.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 6, 2019 07:13
|
|
|
One bit of advice re action scenes that I haven’t seen posted yet: keep them shorter than you think they need to be. I’ve done slush reading for a few places and freelance editing for a bunch of novels, and one of the big stumbling blocks a lot of people seem to have with action scenes is writing fights that go on forever. Action loses its sense of momentum and immediacy when it drags on too long, even if your prose isn’t bad. I had to read a cowboy book once in which a barfight occurred that was over two pages long. But over the course of those two pages, there wasn’t much escalation or changes in stakes/characters/momentum. It was just two pages of dudes punching each other and throwing the occasional chair. The prose on a sentence level was perfectly competent, but after about four paragraphs my eyes were glazing over because all the extra punches and thrown elbows added nothing to the scene that wouldn’t have been solved by “the brawl continued, bodies flying every which way, until Sheriff Parker fired a shot in the air.” If you can see it in your mind’s eye and you have an active, action-packed imagination, the temptation to show your readers everything you imagine is real. But think back to movies and TV shows that you’ve actually watched–even in visual mediums, action scenes don’t tend to last for minutes at a time unless you’re watching a genre specifically designed to show off fight choreography. Obviously this isn’t a hard and fast rule for all kinds of action and conflict. Chase sequences and war sequences, big epic stuff, climactic battles, etc can all certainly run longer. But they’ll feel less epic and make less of an impact if your build-up throughout the rest of the book includes six other two-page fight scenes.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 11, 2019 00:20
|
|
|
Stabbey_the_Clown posted:I’m writing a novel with two main characters. However, I have a bunch of key story elements I need to put in place before the protagonist and deuteragonist meet, and I don’t want to go too long without introducing the deuteragonist. I’ve inserted a chapter which introduces the deuteragonist, but it doesn’t seem to have much conflict in it, other than they have to go on a trip for a couple of weeks which they don’t really want to. (If you ask “why don’t they want to go on the trip”, I don’t even have a good answer.) This is one of those things where it’s really hard to give specific advice without knowing specifics, since you appear to have a lot of setup (good!) but you describe it vaguely enough that I can’t offer any concrete help (less good). Why do the deuteragonist’s personal stakes only appear later? What would be so bad about establishing them earlier? Some ideas, though I don’t know how applicable they are since I don’t know many details of your story: 1. What if something minor goes wrong on the trip and gives us a glimpse into how the character deals with crises or changes in plans. It could be a good way to show whether they’re a cool cucumber under pressure or a hilarious overreacter or whether they panic. 2. You need to have a reason why this person doesn’t want to go on the trip. Even if it’s something as simple as “will take me away from stuff that matters at home.” This is important because you can’t write engaging characters without understanding their motivations. What matters to your character? Do they just not like the disruption of travel? Do they dislike the destination? Are they travelling with people they dislike? Pick a reason like this and use it to develop a chapter-level conflict from there. 3. Think about each chapter as having a beginning and an end point. At the end of this chapter, where does your character need to be? What do we need to have learned about them? What elements of the plot need to be moved forward? If you know where the chapter needs to end in order to set up the rest of the story, you can work backward from there and help fill in the gaps.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 13, 2019 02:50
|
|
|
I feel like “kill your darlings” is great advice for beginning writers who think they know more than they do, but the better you get at the craft aspect of writing the less helpful it is. Learning how to self-edit and accepting that it’s okay to cut things are VITAL in the early stages of learning how to write. But in my time editing for more journeyman and up writers, I have found I have to kill comparatively few darlings because they have learned to rein themselves in and they realise that you don’t have to be maximum clever every sentence. I liken it to a comedy movie script–you know those bad, bad comedies where the writers think there just has to be a gag in every single shot and there simply must be a one-liner every other line of dialogue? “Kill your darlings” to me is teaching yourself that you don’t have to do that even if the individual jokes all sound funny and good. It’s about learning that sometimes paring your piece down and not trying too hard works best because the more jokes you cram into a piece of writing, the more it becomes necessary to land every single one lest a few bad ones muddle the momentum of the entire piece.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 26, 2019 01:56
|
|
|
Eyyyy I sold a story to a 10c/word market and just signed the contract! I remember posting in the earlier iteration of this thread when I sold my very first story back in 2014. Thanks for sticking with me for many years of writing for fun and profit, Fiction
|
|
#
¿
Aug 21, 2019 10:04
|
|
|
This is a film essay but we’ve had a lot of chats in this thread about how to write better action. I love how this guy breaks down action sequences as a series of obstacles for the protagonist to overcome. http://www.davidbordwell.net/essays/anatomy.php
|
|
#
¿
Sep 11, 2019 00:50
|
|
|
All the suggestions posted above mine are excellent. Rather than offering another one, I’d just like to give you a bit of encouragement: as long as your explanation is feasible in the world that you have created then readers will buy it. Readers want to suspend their disbelief if you’ve already hooked them with an interesting premise and fun characters. As long as you make your book entertaining and good and consistent to its own internal logic, readers will be willing to accept a lot of contrivances. Think about how many movies have an “everyday person gets caught up in something crazy” plot, especially action movies. People who are committed to going along for the ride are willing to believe that a bus driver, palaeontologist, schoolteacher, Regular Dad, or whoever is capable of being roped into and keeping up with an action movie environment because they want to. Books work exactly the same way, you just have to be sure that you’ve grounded your book in enough Reality Truthiness that people will go “yeah sure this is feasible.” They won’t sweat that level of detail if you establish your world well enough.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 16, 2019 00:01
|
|
|
I won’t bother repeating what others have said about your cover Burk (all good advice!) but one really important thing if you’re gonna self-publish: you will need a much, much bigger title. Check out the size of thumbnails on Amazon and Kobo books on the storefront. Your title and author name have to be 100% legible at that size.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 24, 2019 11:18
|
|
|
Agreed re the cover fonts. If you absolutely must use two separate fonts, make the subtitle font a very clean boring sans serif. At the moment your spine/subtitle font has too much going on to not look jarring alongside the main title font. Nix the fence. Agreed re the blurb chat. I do think you nailed the vibe you were going for with the cover imagery (being more familiar with your subject matter than some) but I do worry that your colour and text treatment choices are not conveying the retro sci-fi/comic book type vibe well. Fonts are a big part of genre signifying. You don’t want people to look at your book and say hmm, that monster doesn’t look menacing, you want them to see your text treatments and colour scheme and other graphical elements and go oh, this isn’t trying to be a menacing monster book!
|
|
#
¿
Jan 24, 2020 10:07
|
|
|
If you have a short story you're shopping around and want the chance to win a full critique from an extremely accomplished, widely-published, award-winning writer and editor, come see my post in the Thunderdome thread, where you could win it for a $10 donation.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 5, 2020 01:45
|
|
|
I agree re ditching the 1000 word limit. In theory it was good for workshopping specific stuff but in practice it meant everyone posting a thousand words of fiction was starting their post with 600 words of preface explaining the setup.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 28, 2020 20:47
|
|
|
BigRed0427 posted:Novel writing month idea. A book about a non verbal boy and their GF/BF, presented as a notebook the two of them write in to talk to one another. They aren't nonverbal but the Griffin and Sabine books are a good example of how to do a modern epistolary and handles its themes of mental illness very well.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 8, 2020 03:14
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 21, 2024 05:27 |
|
|
I completely forgot to advertise it bc depression ate my calendar and I woke up and it was February, but I am teaching a class at Clarion West Online about how to pack some feelings into your fiction using lessons learned from romance novels! It’ll be fun. You might learn something. Unfortunately it’s this upcoming weekend, sorry for the lack of notice! 
|
|
#
¿
Feb 8, 2021 01:33
|
|