Best writing advice you'll ever get: stay in chair till you finish

 I’m sitting in a room in Cross Plains, Texas, with half a dozen other writers of various genres at the inaugural REH Emerging Writers Workshop editor/authors Adrian Simmons (Heroic Fantasy Quarterly), Jason M. Waltz  and Mark Finn (of basically everything else Robert E. Howard related), straining to hear advice.

They have a lot to say, from Finn’s: “Most writing advice sucks!” To Simmons more straight forward: “Keep backstory under control. Move most of it out of the first 10 pages!”

But possibly the best? Waltz’s: “1) Put your butt in a chair. 2) Finish!”

(OK, now close your browser, sit, and write to the end. Just kidding – for now! There’s more words of wisdom waiting to be revealed.)

Why would Mark Finn, for instance, disparage giving advice about writing?

“Because it’s really focusing on the wrong thing. Everybody’s different. Instead of ‘write what you know,’ write what you care the most about. . . Write about what nobody but you can. Your passions, what you find endlessly fascinating,” which works for nonfiction as well as fiction.

Waltz inserted – “If you write about what you’re interested in, passionate about you are writing about what you know.”

Finn returned with a suggestion: make a list of three thing you care deeply about, three things you know a lot about, and three genre categories. Mix, match, see what happens.

“When you care about your subject, you will write more often. This is where your ‘voice’ comes out.”

Simmons got more specific in his advice, especially drawing on his experience as magazine editor. “You might need to have it in your head – not on the page. Focus on the first pages (of a manuscript). It’s incredibly important real estate.”

 Other caveats:

·       Despite their origins in the sword and sorcery genre, “wandering barbarian swordsmen are a hard sell now.”

·       The pointless action scene (give a fight some stakes)

·       Clever thief scenes are overdone, as are “up and coming assassin” scenes

·       Witty banter is not, usually (“you can have humor and witty dialogue – but be careful”)

Robert E. Howard & his dog Patch

Also, for writers aiming for acceptance in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly – it doesn’t like S&S parodies.

 Simmons’ focus seems to be mainly on magazine-length stories (see HFQ’s submission guidelines for word counts)

Waltz had more caveats for novel-length stories. Perhaps surprisingly, one was to write short stories before attempting a novel – “there’s a difference between the opening of the two. In a novel, you have the first page to keep an editor’s attention. With short stories, you don’t have a first page – you have (only) the first line and first paragraph.”

And, addressing the common advice to open with action, “action is forcing a decision to act. It doesn’t always have to be a fight.”

 What about character development? “Have somebody a reader can identify with, show what he loves. And know your characters. When the rainstorm hits, when the car blind sides you need to know how they react.”

Then, stay in your chair until you finish.

***

 Want more about the REH Emerging Writers Workshop? Keep an eye on the Robert E. Howard fan site and pester them until they agree to hold a repeat! 

The Lemon Tree

People ask whether I paper my walls with rejection slips.  Sometimes I explain that in the twenty-first century most story rejections come by e-mail.  Sometimes I just smile.  But even though they’re not on paper, those rejections live on – in my submissions results folder.  You could think of it as a lemon folder but I think it of as folder full of seeds, with the potential to grow.

My advice last week was to know your markets.  Today’s advice – never diss an editor.  My editors, especially of e-zines, have often provided helpful comments that kept hope alive and pointed the way to making a story saleable.  I’ll share a couple of examples from my folder to show how an editor’s comments helped turn a story from a reject to a winner.

I had the pleasure last fall of talking to Adrian Simmons, an editor at one of my favorite on-line magazines, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly.  Adrian and I were workshop participants at FenCon in Dallas and I thanked him for his critique of “Shaman,” my previous short story submission to HFQ.  His response to the submission had been – “I like the setting and the characters but. . . try us with something a little less convoluted.”  By taking his comment to heart, I was able to eliminate the overly complex passages and sell it to Short-Story.me.  You can still see there.  Take a look.  With enough looks, it may get into their next anthology and earn some more money.  And, yeah, I’ve submitted another story to HFQ.  Will it sell?  At least I can hope for quality feedback.

“The Gates of Shaizar,” like “Shaman,” suffered from the handicap of being based on characters and incidents from a still unsold novel.  The fictional equivalent of the plea “but it really happened that way” is “but I really wrote it that way.”  Just because you wrote a novel a particular way doesn’t mean it’s going to translate into a short story in the same way.  In the initial response to “Gates,” Rob Santa of Ricasso Press wrote, “What bothered me, I suspect, about this piece is the non-linear way the story was told.”  When I looked at the story in light of that comment, I saw that I had been too fixated on a historically accurate way of dating its flashback scene.  After all, I’d spent a lot of time researching dates.  But changing from an A.D. date to the simple statement “Two months earlier” before the flashback scene resulted in a sale to the Pulp Empire Volume Two anthology.  You can buy the Pulp Empire volume at Amazon and see what I mean.  Please do -- I get a percentage of the royalties.  A little fertilizer for the lemon tree.

(I found all the markets mentioned in this article through www.duotrope.com/  Next week, why I subscribe to market listings besides Duotrope.)