Rex the Wonder Scribe
Earning a living as a writer. Yes, I'm serious.
Monday Muse: An Interview With Joe Lansdale
May 7th
Joe Lansdale’s new novel, Edge Of Dark Water, is getting so much good press it’s hard to keep up with. Joe’s been a writer for a long time. He’s published a lot of books and stories, and won awards for some. He even snagged a Horror Writers of America Lifetime Achievement award for 2012.
Kind of looks like he might know what he’s doing.
With a track record like that, I wanted to ask Joe about how he works. No two writers handle their storytelling job the same way, but I’ve gotten plenty of good ideas over the years by trying the things other writers do, to see if they work for me. Maybe something Joe does will work for you.
How did you learn how to write? Did you have formal instruction?
I learned to write by reading, primarily, and by writing and rewriting. There’s no other way.
Do you write to a schedule (same time every day)?
I write in the mornings, three hours usually. I keep this schedule five days a week, and sometimes I work on the weekends, and from time to time a little more. But, if I get the number of pages I want and feel good about it, I stop no matter if it took thirty minutes. If there’s still gas in the tank, I keep going.
Do you have a page count or word count to shoot for?
Three to five pages a day, but if I get more, that’s jim dandy.
Do you outline prior to writing a novel?
I don’t outline for anything. Though I make a note or two now and then as reminders. Making outlines bores me and I lose interest in the story. I need to be surprised as the reader is surprised. I have dreamed complete stories and novels a few times, lot of times in the case of short stories, so I felt as if I was mostly just dictating those; they were outlined in my head.
Is your writing process different for short stories?
It depends on the nature of the novel. I think most people read for plot. For me, character and style and echo of theme are the most important, and then plot. I like something flexible. Plot interests me the least of all the other components.
Do you write character sketches independent of the world of your novel, or develop them as you work on the story?
I do it all as I write.
Do you have a particular method for crafting convincing dialogue?
I just write the way I think people ought to talk, and sometimes do. I’ve always had a kind of knack for dialogue, if I say so myself.
Do you consciously craft things like theme and subtext, or do they emerge naturally as you write?
I do some of it consciously, and sometimes it’s the engine that drives the novel. But most of it, or at least a lot of it, is unconscious. Works best that way. I like to think nearly everything in a novel works best unconsciously.
How would you respond to the claim that genre fiction is formula?
I would say literary fiction is formula as well, more subtle, but formula. But I’m not in either camp exclusively. My work is heavily influenced by both popular and literary fiction, as I read a lot of both.
The best literary novels had plots, but they weren’t afraid to deviate and digress. Mark Twain comes to mind. Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove has plot, but it goes about its business without the plot ruling it, and it’s one of our great American novels, and a Pulitzer winner to boot. There are many other examples.
Most writers have a lot of work rejected before something is finally published. How much rejection did you go through before you were published, and how did you handle it?
I sold the first thing I wrote with my mother, under her name, O’Reta Lansdale, to Farm Journal, and then all the other things I wrote, which were all non-fiction. Some paid in copies, but they placed. And then I switched to my real love, fiction, and that took a couple of years I think. And then it all started selling regularly. I’ve been writing for 35 years, and have been full time since 1981. I never took rejection personally. It disappointed me, but I just moved on.
Was there a particular time in your life, or an influence, that made you realize that you wanted to be a professional writer?
Comic books originally inspired me, and then Edgar Rice Burroughs. These are the things that drove me to be a writer from a very early age.
How difficult was it to find an agent?
I sold all my own stuff for years, got a bad agent, and then got a few good ones. One died, one I fired because she had begun to lose steam, another retired on me, and now I have my current agent. I didn’t have a real hard time after I had credits that I established on my own. I’ve had and fired many film agents. I also had a book agent who dropped me after a week, and I fired a few book agents in between the ones I’m talking about, especially that first one. Man, she sucked.
Were any of your novels sold directly to publishers, without an agent?
Yes, I sold novels directly to publishers without an agent.
There’s a perception out there that you won’t sell a book without an agent. True or
false?
Not true, but it is hard these days, and harder all the time. So many novels, so few people to read them in the editorial department, so they like agents as buffers. It’s different than when I started, but, hey, it’s still about staying with it and not taking no for an answer.
Self-publishing and online publishing. What’s your take?
I prefer actual books, and I like there to be a quality buffer. New writers need to earn their chops. Some will start out good. Most won’t. But what I like and what I think is true are two different things. Online publishing offers opportunities, as well as all manner of junk. It allows old books to come back into print that publishers may not deal with.
I also think it is the new paperback, and I’m not against that. I just don’t like the change, which is partly fuddy-duddy, and partly because I see publishing, and music, going south, and for those of us who make a real living at it, selling a few books here and there in case someone finds you is tougher.
But, the way publishing compaines are going, it’s not so good there either. Change happens, but I don’t have to like it all, even if I don’t think we should work against it. We should look for the opportunities.
Visit Joe on Facebook, Twitter, or at http://www.joerlansdale.com/.
Lighting The Lamp
Apr 30th
As writers, we have more experience in pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps than most professions. We work alone, paid very little (or nothing), trying to stamp our impression of the world around us into the fabric of that world. Often there’s no one around to field ideas. There may be community, but it’s usually after the fact. You may take your laptop and meet a friend at the diner for a writing session, but when the waitress brings your coffee and the computers are warmed up, it’s just you and the page. It wouldn’t matter if there were fifteen people sitting across from you. When you write, you write alone.
All that solitude sometimes causes your good writing energy to spiral down into a very dark place. Depression. Isolation. Fear. Doubt. Things that eat away at good energy, your good health, confidence, well-being.
When that happens, you can cope with it by writing it out of your way with an exercise I call Lighting the Lamp. The term comes from a Hindu prayer, which translated means “I salute the One who is the lamplight, that brings auspiciousness, prosperity, good health, abundance of wealth, and the destruction of the intellect’s enemy.”
Kind of a mouthful, isn’t it? Which is why I call it Lighting the Lamp. It’s a great example of pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps.
If you’re in need of this exercise, it’s probably because you’re not writing well today (or not writing at all). If you are in mid-page, put aside the day’s writing work and take out a fresh sheet of paper. At the top of it, write the following:
I am a great writer. Through my words I share my wisdom.
You may feel dumb writing it. Embarrassed. Right now you don’t feel like a great anything–certainly not a great writer. Go ahead and write it down. What have you got to lose? Nobody’s going to see it but you.
Next, write Now, in this moment, I am grateful for ____ .
Write down five things you’re glad you have. It doesn’t matter what they are. Your health. Your kids. Your cat. A chocolate fudge brownie with whipped cream on top. A freshly sharpened #2 pencil. Whatever.
No matter how glum and hopeless you feel, you will think of five things. If you don’t, email me. I’ll help you think of five things.
Feeling dumb now? Thinking to yourself, “You’ve got to be kidding me–I thought you were a writing mentor, not some half-baked new age clown.”
Writing is living. Write it down. No one will see it but you.
Writing makes it real.
This may be more readily apparent to fiction writers, but I’m willing to bet a lot of full-time, eight-hour-a-day worldbuilders haven’t thought of it. Writers develop an odd tunnel vision when it comes to the act of writing, its potential in their lives, and its uses outside of storytelling.
We work with this idea daily, and never think twice about the truth of it. We turn the blank page into a spacecraft filled with exotic aliens, a stagecoach hurtling along a prairie track, a surreptitious meeting between our heroine and her doomed lover.
We create the scene of a murder and turn our reader into a detective, sweeping the crime scene for clues. We unleash a monster who exists in only two dimensions, and our dismayed, very three-dimensional reader sleeps with the lights on, half-convinced the monster will escape the page and stalk him in reality.
Your imagination has power. Writing transfers this power into reality. Try the exercise. If you’re having a bad week, do it every morning for the next week. It takes five minutes.
I am a great writer. Through my words I share my wisdom. It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe it at first. Written down, it becomes an affirmation–something that holds more truth the more you repeat it. If it doesn’t work the first day, do it again the second day. And again the third day.
The second part of the exercise is about perspective and a reminder that if you look at a glass of water, you decide if the glass is half empty or half full. If you have five things to be grateful for, today isn’t as bad as it seems.
There will be some writers out there who think this sounds like a bunch of silly, mystical, power-crystal-clutching hooey. Until very recently, I would have been in that group myself. Yet some of the world’s most respected philosophers have embraced it. Rene Descartes argued that nothing exists outside of your own experience, a rather more extreme version of imagining becoming real. As a philosophy student, I certainly thought that idea was ridiculous–even as I was proving its validity in my daily writing.
It came down to this: I had a bad week and I tried it. Two days later I felt better and got back to work. That’s the best recommendation I can give: I tried it, and it worked for me.
If it doesn’t work for you, nothing’s lost for the attempt. And I’m willing to bet it will work. It has worked for a lot of respected, highly creative people.
Monday Muse: Writing Freedom
Apr 23rd
Every once in awhile I run across somebody who remembers me from that brief period in the late 80′s and early 90′s, when I had what might be called a career as a fiction writer. I wrote a bunch of short stories, and I sold some, and I experienced that dreamy, weightless state of being that happens when everything you send out is accepted somewhere.
I had good work habits. I had lots of projects going. People were starting to know who I was. I had momentum.
And I killed it.
I didn’t do it on purpose, mind you. I have no death wish, no self-destructive streak that leads me to slam doors in the faces of agents and publishers (though now I choose not to deal with them, and more on that in later posts). I was selling short stories, and I knew damned well that the smart thing to do would be to write more short stories and sell those too.
But I got bored. After several years of writing nothing but short stories, I wanted to write something else. I had started working on a novel, and I was having fun with it. So I wrote that instead. After that was finished, I had an idea for another. And novel number three followed number two. So, for three years, I wrote novels. It was fun. I learned a lot.
None of them sold. The first two were passed on because they weren’t very good. I was still learning, and the books were too long for themselves. The third was better, but it was a horror novel. I’d sent all three novels to the Jay Garon-Brooke agency. When I sent the third one, they sent me a personalized response instead of a form rejection. I was amazed and honored.
The response was: “Horror market not good now. Try us with another novel when you have one ready.”
I finished a horror novel at the beginning of the early 90′s horror slump. Oops.
I can hear you unpublished writers out there, shouting, “Serves you right! You were getting published, dummy! Why wouldn’t you want to keep getting published?”
Of course I did want to keep getting published. But I discovered something else I wanted more: freedom.
I’ve always had a day job. So I never experienced the pressure of having to write to pay my rent. I was able to do what I wanted to do with my creative time. I worked on stories, but I wrote songs, too – for several different musical projects, with several different styles. I wrote novels and poetry and song lyrics and journal entries and all manner of unclassifiable crap. A very small percentage of it is professional and publishable.
The rest of it is just writing. Because this is what I do. And I need freedom to do it. I may write every day, but I may not work on the same thing every day. Song one day, story the next. After work on weekdays, first thing in the morning on weekends.
So. For me, it’s freedom first, publication later.
How about you?
New Stuff!
Mar 25th
The Hill, a short story featured in the upcoming Silvern Press anthology “Depth Of Reflection,” is now available to read free. There’s also a teaser for a new pulp horror novel called “The Deep Dark.” You’ll be able to read several chapters here before the e-book comes out in October.
Click the Stories tab to check out the new content. And feel free to comment.
Creative Careers
May 30th
ArenaNet Art Director Daniel Dociu
Daniel Dociu is Art Director for a software company called ArenaNet. ArenaNet makes computer games — in particular, a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game (hereafter known as MMORPG) called Guild Wars.
An MMORPG is a computer game that features a persistent online world combining computer-controlled creatures and quests with real players from all over the world. Players log in to the game universe, create an avatar that represents them in the game world, and use that character to have adventures in a fantasy realm. The popularity of this style of game took off with a game called Everquest, and continues today with games like Everquest 2, Eve Online, World of Warcraft, and Guild Wars.
A complex, ever-changing game like Guild Wars requires continuity, flexibility, ingenuity … and tons of artwork. Everything you see or interact with in the game — every landscape, every structure, every creature you square off against — is an artistic creation. You create your own character in the game, but you do so using tools created by the design team. Those tools rely on art assets, which are produced by a team of over 50 artists under the direction of Daniel Dociu.
Get A Real Job
“I’ve been in the industry since 1993,” Daniel says. “I worked with Squaresoft as an art director, Electronic Arts for a couple of years, a startup called Zipper Interactive for four years, back to EA under a different title, freelanced for a few months, got tired of that, decided I wanted a full-time gig, and that’s when I joined Arena.”
When I asked Daniel why he decided to forego freelance in favor of a gig with a software company, his answer surprised me. “It’s very easy to get greedy, and work yourself to death,” Daniel says. “ The money can be really good, and it’s easy to start neglecting your life, health and family.”
That doesn’t exactly sound like the kind of problem a starving artist would experience, does it? “I began to think of every minute as money earned or money lost. You never know where your next job will come from, so you tend to take on a lot at once.” Daniel found that the more stable and balanced lifestyle of regular employment was a better fit.
For him, regular employment does not mean sacrifice — stable money doesn’t mean less of it. We didn’t talk specific numbers, but Daniel lives very comfortably. In fact, he has never fit the “starving artist” stereotype. Formal education and constant self-improvement helped him build success. “I got my degree in Industrial Design and worked as a product designer for years, “Daniel says. “After I came to the U.S., I got into the toy design business for a couple of years. It was purely by accident that I ran into a young artist — a guy who later became a well-known art director — who mentioned video games. He had recently been exposed to this emerging industry, and he told me there was money to be made.”
At Squaresoft, Daniel developed his professional and artistic reputation, landing subsequent jobs based on networking that reputation. “It was purely me chasing the money,” Daniel says.
“Artist” Does Not Mean “Starving”
I hope you’re picking up on the recurring theme here. I’m beating you over the head with it quite intentionally. During our fifty minutes on the phone together, Daniel never once mentioned being broke, struggling, looking for work without finding it, or even feeling like he wasn’t going to make it. He remained flexible, kept his own definition of success loose and fluid, and went where his creativity took him. And he always found work.
Daniel is very much an artist, with a solid creative philosophy playing compliment to his take-no-prisoners business acumen. Lots of artists are uncomfortable with the whole idea of commerce, but Daniel sees possibility in the marriage. “I believe there are plenty of opportunities to express yourself and feel good about yourself in the context of commercial art,” he says. “There is compromise, but there is compromise in any art form. It’s up to each artist to decide when your integrity is taking a hit. It’s always up to you to decide where that line is that you don’t want to cross. It’s not a hard line. You set it for yourself, and sometimes decide to move back and forth.”
Daniel emphasized that it’s very important to dig deep and do the necessary soul-searching before you start getting a paycheck. Being centered — understanding who you are as a person — will both protect you from making a decision you later regret and help you define your style.
“I think it’s dangerous to deliberately search for style, “Daniel says. “I’ve been there, done that. It didn’t take me anywhere. Eventually, I decided to give it up, not worry about it. It’s not deliberate effort.”
That said, artists often enter the fray unaware that they’re voluntarily agreeing to live out the archetypal bad dream of going to school naked. “Being yourself is a scary thing. It’s really paralyzing for young artists to expose themselves as they are — their strengths and weaknesses alike, their doubts and insecurities,” Daniel says. “But this is what makes you who you are. You shouldn’t try to hide it. It’s what gives your art credibility and makes it genuine.”
Daniel told me he meets far too many artists who only care about tools and technique. “You need to figure out who you are, what you’re about, and be open to exposing that, and finding the means of expression that allows you to communicate that. That’s your technique. It’s not something you borrow or learn,” he says.
The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades
If you’ve worried about making a living as an artist, I hope Daniel’s example has helped allay those fears. It is not only possible to make money; it is possible to make a living — a very comfortable living — as an artist.
The outlook is good. The gaming industry is a brave new world. “Even if we think we’ve outgrown infancy, the industry is still in the puberty phase, which is not any prettier,” Daniel says. It may not be pretty, but the explosion of growth means opportunity. With the development of new game consoles rivaling the power of current PC processors, the entire industry has taken a giant technological and creative step forward. It’s exciting stuff, and a lot of new companies are going to be looking to be part of that growth. Existing companies will expand as the demand for new games strengthens.
Game developers are always looking for new talent. The possibilities for finding work are more varied, more numerous and better paying than ever.
So how’s your resume looking?
The Secret Formula
Mar 14th
“Thank you, Dave, so much for your very thorough, in-depth, and thoughtful critique. You’ve given me so many valuable things to think about. I’m excited to start implementing them. Just your way of writing itself, in your comments and suggestions, was inspirational. And thanks also for your encouragement–that means a lot, as you know, especially to someone starting out.”
- Pam
I’ve been checking out other writing websites this week. I was amazed by the number of websites for writers out there – many good resources, filled with helpful, well-organized information. A Google search will turn up hundreds of sites.
The same search will also turn up a lot of junk. I found a good dozen websites – just very long one-page sales letters, really – that used variations on this particular theme:
“Learn how I wrote and published over 200 stories in 244 days using this secret formula!”
The sales copy went on to explain how, once in possession of this secret formula, you could crank out story after story after story, and then sell them all. Never get rejected again.
Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?
The problem is, it doesn’t exist. If you see websites that claim to offer the “secret formula” to writing anything in a downloadable “best selling” e-book, click away from the page as quickly as possible.
If there is a secret formula for how to write great short stories, it’s inside your own head. You don’t have to pay somebody $39.95 to download it to your computer.
You only need to do three things to write publishable fiction. They’re simple, and any of the several dozen writers I know would happily pass them on to you free of charge.
Everybody loves “simple,” right? We all love “easy.” These rules illustrate the simplest, easiest process for writing publishable short stories.
1. Read. A lot. We absorb tons of technique through reading. If you want to write short stories, that’s what you need to read.
Look for paperback anthologies. The Best American Short Stories is your source for literary fiction. The 2010 edition is available now in your favorite bookstore. There are “year’s best” anthologies for every genre – mystery, fantasy, detective, horror, SF. Seek them out. Read the stories. Then read them again. Study them. Take notes. Which were your favorites? What did you love about them? How did the writer achieve the effects you loved the most?
The anthologies are your masterclass. It’s inexpensive education. Invest in it.
I’ve worked with clients who wanted to write but claimed they “didn’t have time to read.” If you don’t have time to read, you’re not a writer. And that’s fine. There are a lot of careers out there, and most of them actually earn money.
2. Write. Here’s the big one. Some of you are now saying, “well, duh,” while others are trying to figure out a way to make a writing career happen without writing. Sound crazy? If it weren’t true, there would be no professional ghostwriters. There are. I interviewed a bunch of them for one of my Love of the Craft articles at Creativity Portal.
If you want to be a writer, you write. You might write a lot of stuff that isn’t fit to publish. You might work for years without selling a single story. You might have to put up with a less-than-desirable day job and slave over your creations in the wee hours of the morning, sacrificing weekends, football games, concerts, vacations, anything resembling normal life.
This is it, folks. The truth. De-glamorized, unornamented, secret formulas and promises of easy income stripped away. Funny thing is, this applies to anything in your life – anything in life itself: if you want something, you must be willing to pay the price to get it. In order to have the energy required to pay that price, you have to want it more than anything else. Need it. Burn for it.
Yes, you could be watching TV. Spending time with your significant other. Playing video games. Surfing the web. But you’re a writer. So you write. What reading doesn’t teach you, writing will.
Third and final rule:
3. Develop objectivity. The only way to do this is through experience. Read countless books of short stories. Write a bunch of stories yourself. The more you write, the better you get at judging your own work against others. Objectivity is the only way you will escape your ego. It’s the only way you will give yourself the time to move away from “writer’s high,” which makes you think everything you write is genius, and into the more critical mindset necessary to revise and reshape. It takes more than just inspiration to create a professionally written story. It takes distance to be able to see that the story is a very different thing two weeks later.
See? Those are easy rules. It’s a simplified version of the system (which is not a formula, and not a secret) I use in my mentorships and manuscript critiques.
The system is very straightforward. Every single writer reading this can follow it – and write publishable stories.
Have a great writing week!
Filling The Empty Cup
Oct 20th
“I signed up for Dave’s Basic Critique. Don’t let the name fool you. He provided a three-page single-spaced critique for a 12-page story. It contained plenty of meat, and was well worth the money. If you need help whipping your story into publishable shape, give Dave a try!”
- Mark
The cool thing about writing is a flexible schedule. You don’t have to write at a particular time each day (although I encourage it), and you don’t have to write every day (although I strongly encourage it). I’m always shouting “write, write, write,” and “anything that is not writing is bad.”
But sometimes you have to stop. Take a step back. Recharge. Do other things for a day or two (or three, as I have been doing since my last post) and come back to the page refreshed, ready to start again.
All of my novels started with an idea, followed by a 25-page burst of inspiration, followed by about three weeks of scribbling, a page or two here, more notes, another page there, before starting the actual scheduled write-every-day routine I get into when working on a long project.
My schedule changes from book to book. The page count, while fairly consistent, does have a wide margin of variation; my personal best for a day’s writing is 13,000 words, while my worst is 200. I usually land right around 1500.
But there are those days where I sit down, stare at yesterday’s work, and think, “this is not happening today.” And I go do something else. Read, watch a movie, play my guitar, go for a walk, play computer games. Anything but write.
Last night I sat down to work, read through some email, took a look at the website stats for the day, and then set to writing a post. Nothing happened. After about five minutes I realized nothing was going to happen. I dug through my old movies and watched Poltergeist. I hadn’t seen the film in years, and this was the first time I’d watched it since my daughter was born. It took on a whole new life for me. I got out my notebook and started sketching out ideas for a new story about a man whose daughter disappears. Very generic stuff for now, but the seed is planted. It may germinate.
That’s filling the empty cup. The whole time you’re doing other things, you’re still writing. My head is working through whatever problem I grappled with when I decided it was not time to put words on paper. Time is often all that’s needed.
Skipping a session is not the end of the world, the kiss of death, a criminal act or a cardinal sin. But you have to trust yourself. You have to know yourself well enough to know when it’s really time to recharge and when you’re just being lazy. That’s tough. It takes discipline to plow through the bull, shut up that whiny voice that just wants to do crossword puzzles in bed all day and get back to it. Discipline and honesty.
Funnily enough, both of those qualities are also requirements for writing decent prose.
Take breaks to fill the empty cup. But when the cup is full again, get off your butt and get back to work.
Cultivating A Professional Attitude
Jul 15th
“Thank you so much for your insightful critique of my two stories. It is such a treasure to discover people like you.”
- Lester
I’ll get straight to the point: if you’re serious about writing, you’re going to have to treat it like a job.
Not a very sexy intro, is it? It doesn’t exactly scream “million dollar success!” It doesn’t promise instant gratification. It doesn’t offer to make you rich overnight, or show you how to write a bestseller in ten days.
If it did claim to do any of those things, would you believe them?
Thought not.
The public perception of writers is often skewed by extremes: the eccentric, alcoholic egotist with a basketful of neuroses and abandonment issues. But this is the truth, and the sooner you embrace it, the better. Doesn’t matter how young or old you are. If you’re fifteen, you get more practice being professional. If you’re fifty, you’ll pick it up more quickly.
Like many creative careers, you will spend far less of your time dealing with the activity that inspires you – in our case, writing – than you will dealing with the associated peripheral activities that other professions call “career building.”
If you’re a professional musician, you spend fourteen hours a day on a bus driving from point A to point B, doing press interviews and record store signings and assorted other things that may or may not be fun – all for that hour and a half when you’re on stage. 90 minutes out of 1440. Ouch.
Another home truth: most people, most professions, that’s the ratio.
Unfair? I think not. Happiness is up to you.
As a professional writer, you’ll do some press interviews. You’ll do some book signings. You’ll do some other things that might not be fun – contract negotiations, promotion, social events. Professionalism means being grateful when you’re having fun and graceful when you’re not.
Do you dream of being a bestselling author? Don’t even answer that. Of course you do. We all do. If we didn’t, why would we subject ourselves to the rejections, long hours of work with no pay, and maddening anonymity?
Here’s the trick: no matter how long it takes to get there – wherever “there” is – start being professional now. Success will come faster if you do.
So how can you become professional now?
1. Stop complaining about “the state of the publishing industry.” Only one person controls your writing career. That person is you. You can’t change the industry by complaining, or feeling victimized. How can you use the industry to your advantage, and win a six-figure advance or a million-dollar book contract?
In his book Writing the Breakout Novel, agent Donald Maas answers succinctly: write a novel that warrants it.
What will change the industry?
You. You, plus a bestselling book, plus professional influence, plus a great idea. If you have a great idea for change and you want someone to hear it, this is the best way to be heard.
Present the idea professionally – with the purest inspiration and finest attention to craft you can muster.
2. Accept publishing industry standards and adhere to them. I, too, hate getting generic “dear writer” rejection letters from magazine editors who insist on being queried by name. Fact: if your query letter’s salutation reads “dear editor,” that query letter will be discarded unread. Also fact: the same editor might send out twenty “dear writer” rejection letters in the space of one hour.
Annoying self-congratulatory sidebar: As a webzine editor, I didn’t do that. I always addressed rejections to the writer, and included the title of the story. I believe that you should extend courtesy if you expect to receive it. My view is, of course, influenced by the fact that I had submitted and published stories prior to becoming an editor.
Most editors do not share that view, sorry to say.
If you’re an amateur, you say: That’s not fair! Why should I maintain a different standard than they do? If they don’t call me by name, I’m not going to call them by name.
If you’re professional, your approach is to raise the bar rather than lower yourself to like behavior. So, repeat after me:
I will always address my queries to an editor by name – one I know is looking for the kind of story I have written. I don’t care if I get a “dear writer” letter in return. I will always be professional. If I am always professional, I will never be wrong.
It’s a simple rule, but profoundly effective. In a roomful of unprofessional people – at a writing conference, for example – be the only professional person in the room. You will be remembered.
3. Cultivate personal integrity. Only one person can raise the bar for you. Three guesses who that is.
I define personal integrity as doing the right thing even when no one is looking. What does this mean for you as a professional writer? Honesty, for one. If the editor does not accept multiple submissions, don’t send your story to Alfred Hitchcock’s when Mystery Reader already has it. It’s dishonest, and it wastes everybody’s time.
Honesty also pertains to your work. Let’s say you’re given editorial suggestions. Making the changes will mean a professional sale, but you feel the requested revisions weaken the book.
If you ignore your intuition and go after the paycheck, I guarantee you a negative learning experience – one of those “gee, I really wish I hadn’t done that” moments.
Keep those moments to a minimum with a professional attitude. Keep all your dealings professional and you will build a career. It might take longer than you wished, but it will happen. Professionals enjoy dealing with other professionals.
You will earn respect. That’s the best calling card you could hope for.
Believe
May 17th
“I was completely blown away by your critique. It meant so much to me!”
- Linda
When I was a kid, I believed in everything. It was like the scene in Ghostbusters where Janine Melnitz interviews Winston Zeddmore for a job helping out the seriously overworked trio of Dr. Venkman, Dr. Stanz, and Egon.
She asks him, “Do you believe in UFOs, astral projections, mental telepathy, ESP, clairvoyance, spirit photography, telekinetic movement, full transmediums, the Loch Ness Monster and the theory of Atlantis?”
Winston replies, “If there’s a steady paycheck in it, I’ll believe anything you say.”
There was no paycheck in it for me, but I would have gleefully added Bigfoot; the Yeti; Nostradamus; the Rosicrucians and Illuminati and any of another half dozen secret societies; the mystery of the Easter Island statues; and all that stuff about extraterrestrials helping the Incas build their pyramids.
I accepted it all with equal enthusiasm. I ate that stuff up. I read Frank Edwards and Erich von Daniken and Robert Blum. Nobody was wrong. All of it was true.
If pressed, I would have also told you that Jim Morrison was alive and well and running guns in North Africa, living the kind of life that Joseph Conrad would have been pleased to write about. And bumping into Elvis from time to time.
I would have also shared with you a little known secret concerning the Kennedy assassination: it was a conspiracy, all right. An intergalactic conspiracy. You see, medical professionals extracted some of Lee Harvey Oswald’s blood following his arrest, and they found certain … anomalies. Inexplicable anomalies. The kind that later propelled entire story arcs of The X-Files.
As a Philosophy minor in college (longer ago than I care to reveal, thank you very much), I continued to live experimentally. I explored with the kind of enthusiasm and fervor only undergraduate students can summon. I took every subject I studied and I lived it.
For one semester.
From September through December, I was an existentialist. From January through May, I was a classical realist. When the summer session rolled around, I spent ten weeks leaping and frolicking in the fields of the shaman.
From one year to the next, I cycled through two or three belief systems, completely embracing each one until the term was over, then moving on. My emphasis was comparative religion, which made an excellent excuse for diving into the waters of Zen, Tao, Islam, Cherokee, Druidic practice, and Teilhardian Catholic mysticism (if you don’t know who Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is and want a fun, readable primer, check out William Peter Blatty’s novel Legion, the sequel to his classic The Exorcist. The novel has absolutely nothing to do with the execrable film sequel, Exorcist II: The Heretic).
After graduation, life started becoming more and more about a steady paycheck. Over a period of two or three years – my first years in the Air Force – I became Winston Zeddmore.
It wasn’t the environment, as you might think. I ran into plenty of military people inclined to believe in the paranormal, extraterrestrials, or psychic abilities. I heard at least a dozen ghost stories for each new assignment. I lived in England for 12 years. The country is crisscrossed by ley lines, dotted with standing stone sites and Norman churches built on old pagan holy grounds. How did the Normans “acquire” those sites, you ask? By slaughtering the pagans, of course, and stealing the land.
With that kind of long, bloody history, England really was spook central. But by this time, I was a skeptic. I lived in High Wycombe, only a few miles from the West Wycombe caves, a purported haunt of the legendary Hellfire Club, one of the aforementioned secret societies proud to call Ben Franklin a member.
I took a photograph in those caves I still can’t explain. A white, oblong shape, resembling fog, appeared where I had definitely not seen any such thing while taking the picture. Ghost? Not if you asked me. At that time, if you questioned me about paranormal phenomena, I would say, “I believe in the possibility.”
Which was pretty much the same as saying no.
Not only was I saying no, I was proud of it. I had finally grown up, grown out of that silly fantasy about flying saucers and ghosties and goblins and things that go bump in the night.
Except that every short story I sold over the next ten years had one of those creepy crawlies as its subject. My first professional sale, a story called Five Past Four, was one of only a handful that did not contain a supernatural element. The rest? Haunted boys; demons popping out of mirrors; ex-girlfriends returning from the grave; homicidal, dimension-hopping creatures; a man chased by the apocalypse, ever in his rear view mirror.
And on. And on.
My subconscious, calling me a liar. Oh, there was a good excuse for that one, too. “For a guy who doesn’t believe in that stuff, Dave, you sure write a lot about it.”
I explained that fantasy fiction gives writers a rich and diverse metaphoric environment to work in. Those monsters are really symbols, see. Our daily fears, lack of control, cultural paranoia and various other repressed issues, all dressed up in vampire regalia. It’s still not really about the creepy-crawlies.
Except that it was, and I was a liar, and I here confess. There are some things in fiction it’s okay to lie about. You can change a name here or there, a hair color, an eye color. You can make your male college roomie a girl in your story and no one will say boo about it (except maybe the roomie).
But in many ways, you must tell a much more naked truth in fiction than you would if you were writing a biography. All those symbols catch you out. They tell a deeper tale than the one you think you’re telling when you begin. They speak of things you may not even have realized you believed yourself, because they speak from the subconscious.
As you become aware of these truths in your conscious, work with them. Use them. Liberate them. Free them to run in your conscious mind. They are tools for your use.
Fortunately, my subconscious refused to be repressed. My stories told truths I never told aloud. And so they sold. Many years, later, I read them again and realized what I had been trying to tell myself. Better late than never, I suppose.
Discover what you really believe. Then be true to it.
If you don’t, you really are a liar. People read fiction, but nobody reads liars.