Wordcraft – Stuff I learned while getting knocked silly

It’s official. I’m a WRiTE CLUB 2015 dropout, eliminated in my second bout at this year’s writing contest run by DL Hammons. Bruising as the combat has been and continues to be, ringside chatter about the one on one contests between writers shielded by anonymous pen names has been more instructive than most of the writing critique groups I’ve attended. Instruction I’m happy to share, now that my wounds have started to heal.

First, maybe you want to know what WRiTE CLUB is. It’s a contest Hammons started five years ago: 40 contestants (whittled down from a slush pile), each writer pitted randomly against another, until the 40 become 20, then 10, then, well, you get the picture. Maybe because it’s not the kind of thing my classier literary friends go in for, or maybe because I don’t always check my emails as frequently as I should, I escaped hearing about it until this spring, almost at the April 30 deadline for submissions. Maybe you, too, read about it for the first time in my April 28 post at this site, “Get a head start on summer writing contests.” (I mention this because, you know, some of those contests are still open. And because what you read here may help you there.)

Writers were allowed to anonymously submit up to three pieces, in any genre, of no more than 500 words each. No charge. I sent a couple of pieces in, from stuff I’d been working on already. Waited for the April 30 deadline to pass, and heard nothing. I haunted Hammons’ site, which was informative but didn’t even tell me whether I, or rather my anonymous alter ego, was still in the running, until. . . while skimming the stories as usual, I saw something that seemed familiar. Hey, I’d made it out of the slush pile of 170 entries to become one of the 40 contenders. And then, surprisingly, I won that first bout.

Another couple of weeks of nail biting followed while my opponent to be made her (or his) way through the first bout and we were paired for the first round of eliminations. At which point, after a week of voting, she (or he) pulled ahead by three votes. I’d voted for this person in the first round, before we were matched against each other. So in a way, I could be glad I’d shown such good taste while bewailing the rotten luck that pitted me against a writer with what has to be one of the all-time greatest main characters: a conjoined twin.

So what have I learned from all this, other than to check emails more promptly? And why tell it now, when you probably won’t remember all the way to next year’s WRiTE CLUB? Because 500 words is about two pages worth of writing, about as much as an agent would probably read before deciding whether to represent you. More than anyone picking up your book in a store, or skimming a sample online would read before making a decision to buy. So here goes:

First: don’t try to do too much. It’s only 500 words! There’s no room, in WRiTE CLUB or anywhere else for a story that relies on hopes of prior reader knowledge of anything.

Next: go for the now. Beautifully written back story is still back story. Readers who voted for any contender did so because the story touched them, at that moment, not a theoretical 1,000 words later.

And then: little things matter. Readers quibbled over some of my too-short sentences, as well as over my opponent’s too-long ones. Readers also disliked not knowing what’s going on,  not knowing who’s talking, not knowing what the setting is. Even the tiniest flaws in logic jumped out, and this was for pieces that had already made it out of the slush pile.

Finally, keep fighting, I mean, writing. WRiTE CLUB slush reader (and 2013 champion) Tex Thompson has noted that just being one of the 40 chosen out of more than four times that many submissions is an honor. It’s also an honor to those who tried but didn’t make the cut, because what you do takes guts.

Need more tips? Check out Tex's conversation with last year's winner, Dan Koboldt. And remember that reading and voting for WRiTE CLUB 2015 continue through late July, when the champion is announced at this year’s DFW Writers Conference. May the best writer win!

Wordcraft -- A new word in writing critiques

I drove to the Writer's Garret workshop Saturday in a drizzling rain wondering why, oh, why, I’d signed up for a writing critique. Because however necessary rain and critiques are, neither of them are usually spirit-lifting. Little did I know that I would emerge from the morning workshop feeling with a new attitude toward writing critiques.

It helped, of course, that the instructor taught us a new naughty word. In French.

Co-editor with the day’s second workshop leader, Robin Hemley, of Extreme Fiction, University of Alabaman professor Michael Martone opened with a brief lesson on the history of writing critiques. The classic University of Iowa creative writing critiques, he informed us, could ultimately be blamed on the GI bill, the post-World War II legislation that flooded American colleges with “twenty-two year old guys who’d just fought a war.” Twenty-two year old guys who devised writing critiques with the same methods they’d used successfully to fight Germans, post D-Day, through the hedgerows of Normandy.

“The workshop became tactical, to use a military term, instead of strategic,” Martone said, based on the belief that “everybody knew what a good story was and thinking the purpose was to make your bad story good.”

Considering it unlikely we’ll have to defend our stories from Nazi gunners, however, Martone prefers a method called the cross-sectional workshop, a method more like coaching than fighting. I’ll provide a synopsis of the first part of his -- and our -- discussion today, with more to follow.

In the first slice of the cross-section, Martone asked us to contemplate the physical appearance of our papers without regarding the words. They looked eerily similar -- black 12-point serif type on 8 x 11-inch white paper. Did it have to be that way?

“Crots,” he said.

Before we wondered whether we’d heard him correctly, he explains. It’s a term French printers used to describe the appearance of printing on a page, similar to the view of a print preview on a computer screen. “What printers were saying is, this is a white road and there are ‘plops’ on it left by the horses.”

(My high school French dictionary defined “crotte” as, among other things, an animal dropping.)

Then on to the cross-section of titles. Honestly, I can’t remember ever encountering a discussion of titles in a workshop. And I usually hate thinking up titles, wishing I could do the musical thing -- opus number so and so. But I’d be missing an opportunity, in Martone’s thinking.

“You want to suggest to the reader what kind of game you’re playing,” he said. “Any time you can use two words that are contradictory, there’s almost a fight between the two ideas, which is useful for drawing people in. If you’re a prose writer, this might be the only time you’re asked to think in a more poetic way -- a kind of poem that introduces a prose piece, or the prose is a commentary on the piece of poetry that the title is.”

A short poem for a title. Perhaps a poem with only two words? Only one. Or many? Martone teased us with a tale of a flash fiction piece whose title was longer than the story itself. Yes, maybe I can do that.

For more about the Writer's Garret, see www.writersgarret.org/.

(Next Monday -- more cross-sections, and a peek at Hemley’s writing prompts.)