posted
In high school, I felt that although I was good at many things (art, piano, flute, singing, science, writing, etc.), there was nothing that I really shone at. I'm good enough that people notice and say, "Wow, that's pretty good." But there's no way that I'd ever be able to make a career out of any of my "talents."
Once I got to college, I started noticing that I was getting really good at writing. I had told my high school English teacher to grade me harder on my writing assignments, simply because I really wanted to learn how to write more than I wanted good grades. Since coming to college, I have basically mastered the research paper. My professors have repeatedly commented on my writing ability and told me I should do something with it.
I love to write. I think I am more proud of my ability to say things clearly and in an interesting, logical way, than I am of any of my other abilities. For years, I practiced and practiced. I've written hundreds and hundreds of pages of short stories, poetry, creative essays, novels, novellas, and just thoughts. I feel confident in my ability to put words on a page.
But I haven't written more than two dozen pages for fun since last spring. It's complete writer's block, and I hate it. I want it gone. Now.
I think I may have pinpointed the problem: I've lost my nerve. I finally wrote a story that satisfied me, and it still satisfies me now, a year and a half after I wrote it. I like where my novel is going, too. I mustered up the courage to submit the story to a small sf/fantasy magazine and got rejected. Okay, that happens. But the comments from the editors confused me. They say my writing is good and the characters were interesting, but essentially the story is boring. And frankly, by science fiction and fantasy standards, it is. They wanted to see the main character going off and doing great things after she becomes a fairy—but that's not my story.
To try to polish it before submitting it elsewhere, I requested a few reads on Hatrack and in real life. Everyone who read it had the same reaction, pretty much. Irami, someone I trust to be honest, said I sounded like a girl. I am a girl, though. What's wrong with sounding like one? Does it just sound timid? Or am I totally aiming at the wrong audience?
See, my impression is that people who pick up a science fiction or fantasy story want action. They want to gasp in pleasure at the cool factor, and they enjoy swordfights and huge scope. My stories read more like the stuff you have to read in school—you know, Hemingway and Bronte and Wharton. The stories are small and quiet (like me) and hopefully thought-provoking. But they're not really all that much fun. I think I may be aiming at the wrong audience.
So lately I've been contemplating trying to go mainstream. That audience seems to be one that might like my sort of story. But try as I might, the only stories that I can come up with are set in science fiction and fantasy settings. I'm stuck.
Anyway, I'm frustrated. I need the wisdom of Hatrack. I don't know what I need. I just needed to rant. Thanks for listening.
quote: See, my impression is that people who pick up a science fiction or fantasy story want action.
I think you're wrong. Fantasy is about well, fantasy! It's about having your breath catch in your throat from awe at a beautiful world.
Yes, of course there has to be enough action to keep the reader reading!
quote: So lately I've been contemplating trying to go mainstream. That audience seems to be one that might like my sort of story. But try as I might, the only stories that I can come up with are set in science fiction and fantasy settings. I'm stuck.
Brinestone.
Please. Trust yourself. God, I've read some of your stuff. It's good. If someone's only complaint with a story is that it's girly, then think what that means.
Maybe he thought there wasn't enough conflict? Maybe its something entirely else?
Don't do this to yourself, Brinestone. You can be your worst enemy or your best friend. Realize what you want to achieve in your writing.
posted
I also haven't read your story. Maybe it's just not right for a short story but would fit better into a novel. If you have more of a literary style, maybe you can go for something more surreal.
I got inspired to write last week when my brother stayed up all night reading a novel that he described as "Goosebumps for grownups". I mean, there is some real crap that gets published. I'm not much of a finisher, though. I could also accept a draft at my listed email if you want.
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
Write whatever you want. If you like it, chances are somebody else is going to like it. Just be reading your rant makes me interested in your writing and is making me think, "Hm, must be pretty interesting, a social fantasy, don't see many of them."
If you're writing something that not many other people write, you've hit a gap in the market. I love fantasy and science fiction, but I have to pick and choose so carefully to find decent characters and thoughtful occurances, which sounds like what you're writing.
Publish soon, so I can read!
(And Brinestone, your list of things you were good at in high school matches mine right now (in high school), except replace science with history. I'm honoured to be a tinsy bit like you. )
Posts: 8473 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
What they said! First of all - you only submitted your story to one place! Even famous authors will tell you that's not a formula for success. Perhaps that just wasn't the right audience for your type of writing; every magazine looks for different things. Checking out a copy of "Writers Market" may help you pick mags that your story will fit better with. As far as writer's block goes, every writer struggles with it from time to time. The best thing you can do is just keep writing and have fun with it.
Posts: 11 | Registered: Apr 2004
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posted
Maybe you should try a different market within the genre. Different editors want different things.
Generally, we write what we like to read. Women who write scifi or fantasy write different scifi or fantasy than men do, generally. There is an emerging market for scifi and fantasy that spends more time on characterization and relationships.
My point is that one rejection may just mean that wasn't the place for your story, not that your story doesn't have a place. You might try smaller, semi-pro markets. Cast around and you will find a place that has your type of stuff. I promise. Posts: 1664 | Registered: Apr 2004
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posted
You could also consider literary magazines instead of mass-market magazines. They do not pay well, if at all, but publish stuff a little more like how you're describing your writing... and after you've been successfully published a few times, you'll have a proven body of work to show to an agent, who can help you perhaps publish a book of short stories, or get some larger work published.
Also, the confidence of being published will help, a lot.
posted
No, I'm not phanto, but I do appreciate his decisiveness. I read a story to get in the mind of thoughtful decisive people. The doers of deeds. The deed doesn't have to be saving the world. It doesn't have to be rescuing someone from tremendous peril. It could be a simple action done to maintain the quiet spectacle of living, breathing, and working in this world. It doesn't even have to be the "right" choice, as long as I know why they are choosing. The problem I had with your story wasn't that it involved fairies and a country bar, it's that the crux of the story involved a decision that was a no-brainer.
The girl would have chosen to be a fairy at the beginning, and there isn't anything that is learned in the story that convinces the reader that she experienced a change of heart.
______
You want to know what I remember about Hart's Hope? First and foremost, Rainer Carpenter choosing to take the kid's punishment. Then in no particular order, the Queen killing her baby, and the kid the rejecting the job as a servant. that's it. Sure, I remember some other nuances, like the kid who choose to dance with snakes and also almost choose to the push the other kid into his death. Do you want to know what I remember about Alvin Maker? Measure taking the town punishment, and the dignity of Verily Cooper, but I think that his dignity was a mark of the choices he made and the reasons he made them. The last few Ender end books, Miro deciding to become a good father. I'm not saying that I agree with all of the decisions made by these characters, but they were sufficiently compelling to stay in my memory.
Your story was clearly penned and centered around a choice, but it wasn't gripping because I couldn't think of a compelling reason not to choose to become a fairy. There is not a desperate force pulling the other way. It was nice, cogent, and a little ho-hum. For my money, you have to develop and sell the individual virtues of mortality before you show her choosing to make the jump to immortality. And the more nuanced your depiction of the virtues of mortality, the more intriguing I'm going to find her choice to become a fairy. __________
I think that the presentation of these choices constitutions the backbone of the story. Dr. Zhivago had Pasha running to the Army in order to impress a woman, and the tragedy is that there is nothing he could have done that could have impressed her sufficiently to fall in love with him. That Pasha choose to turn from an academic into a calloused military murdered all for the unrequited love of Lara is a terribly pathetic story. And Pasternak pulls it off with nuance and honesty. *thinks* My girlfriend's reading Bee Season and she has gotten to the part where Aaron is becoming a Hari Khrishna, and it's all done so cleverly as to make a compelling case for how a 16 year-old nearly well-schooled Jewish boy can thoughtfully change religions and maintain his spiritual integrity.
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There are other examples. Hero comes to mind. I movie that starts as yet another revenge film, but slowily evolves as the protagonist grows emotionally and is asked to choose between a very complicated revenge and a very complicated martydom, and there is no clear answer at the end of his choice, but he is forced to make it anyway. I like this story because the character had to take a leap, and I think that's how life is for most people-- at least most doers of deeds. There is a critical level of information one attains and then POOF, a decision, and the morally complex and astute that decision, the better.
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I read a blurb from a story of Mac's a while ago about a kid who throw his brother's baseball glove into the fire. He was jealous, and of all of ways the jealousy could have manifested with this seemingly nice kid, there he goes, throwing his brother's baseball glove into a fire. The same could be said about Ender killing Stilson. That first murder was the hook. The subsequent slayings (Bonzo and the Buggers)seem to derive from a more legitimate motive, but Stilson was the one that sticks because I found myself saying, at the same time, "I know why this kid is killing the other one," and "I can't believe this kid is killing the other one."
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Les Miserables spent the first fifty pages setting up the priest's decision to let Jean Valjean go. And after all of that build up, it still came as a surprise. Ahh. I think that's where the magic is. A little shuffle, a little mis-direction, all of which are entertaining in their own right, but then to have a writer tie it all into the plot and the morality of the character and the reader. Poof
___________
John Irving is another one. He has Jenny the Nurse arrested for stabbing the a patron at a movie theatre for having the temerity to make a pass at her. (If I recall correctly) Sure, I think it was a particularly mean series of comments, but that Jenny was arrested as the assailant somehow opens up the possibility that this nurse, with her thoughtful love of humanity, choose to jab him with a hyperdermic needle not because she felt in immediate danger, but that because she didn't like him. This nurse, who you would think believes that you ought not stab people just because you don't like them, stabs a man because she doesn't like him. ___________________
The cell-block tango in Chicago worked as a kind of freakshow because it put all of these murders--- all devastating attractive by other standards-- as choosing to commit brutal murders. The energy displayed was intoxicating. Then society decides on jails to punish then, and a jury decided to throw the Russian by mistake.
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I think that's why these Law and Order shows do so well. Admittedly, I haven't seen too many of them, but I think it's because of the disturbing choices seemingly normal people make and the doers of deeds(the lawmen) who are forced to decided what the hell we do with them. It doesn't help that the people who decide are only marginally more competent than we are to distinguish right and wrong, lawful and unlawful, permissible and impermissable.
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I think violence is the bottom of the barrel, though. I think a more pressing story will put the reader the position not of seeing why a regular person will commiit a violent act, but rather why regular people choose decent, selfless acts. Jesus, the Priest in Les Mis, Rainer Carpenter. etc... and then the effects of those acts in the world.
The more nuanced these portrayals, the more thought, the more muddled and real the situation, the faster the decision has to get made, the better.
posted
Writing is art. It's personal for the artist and done to please them. If it resonates with others, fine. If not, fine. You create art for your reasons.
Try again. Perhaps another, better, story is waiting inside you for the right time to come out. I know how you feel. I feel like I've been in a funk for the last 3 years. No real progression. That doesn't mean that something better or, just what you were looking for isn't right around the corner.
You don't have to create a masterpiece yet. You have your whole life ahead of you to work on it.
There is a time to every purpose... Perhaps you've needed this time to adjust or work on other things and gain experiences that you will use to write that perfect thing.
posted
Ruth, I've had a hard time writing creatively since I got married. I think some of my angst vanished, and my muse got jealous. The last story that I was really pleased with I wrote in 1999, before I was even engaged. I've been trying to get back into it, but it just doesn't seem like the high priority that it used to. Plus, I write all day at work, and the last thing I feel like doing in the evenings is write some more.
I think the most creative writing I've done in a long time has been for the various threads here at Hatrack.
I've long since given up on writing science fiction, because I like hard sf but I'm just not the scientist, mathematician, or researcher to really get the details right. So I turned to fantasy, which still takes plenty of work, but you can be an English major and still get your facts right. But I just can't think of any good stories that aren't just take-offs of LOTR.
So I've tried "mainstream" fiction and I think that's where my strengths work the best. I feel like a traitor to my beloved speculative fiction, but if I'm going to keep exercising my writing chops I have to be writing something.
Posts: 144 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
The only person who can keep you from writing is yourself.
If you feel the story is good, then the story is good. The only thing other people can tell you is where it can be improved, where it doesn’t work as well as it could. But if the story is exactly what you want it to be, and you like it, then you don’t need any other validation. Putting your vision on paper the way you feel it should be said is it. Nothing more.
You need to toughen up to rejection if you ever want to submit stories for publication, because you will get a lot of them. The worst one I got was from the late Marion Zimmer Bradley, who said that she didn’t care if my characters won or lost or were swallowed by the earth in an earthquake. That hurt. Fortunately, the sting wasn’t too bad, since she had all ready bought a story from me.
The story I wrote with my wife that won the first Phobos contest was first rejected by all the major SF magazines. I had shelved it for over a year before submitting it to Phobos.
Any story that you feel is worth the time, energy and emotion to write is worthwhile. Being rejected just means the story didn’t click with that particular editor. Maybe the editor doesn’t like your kind of stories. That’s OK. Nobody likes every kind of story. But you like it. And that means someone else out there will like it, too.
The Good Book says that it is by faith that we are saved, not by works. You’ve got to do the work, but if you don’t have the faith, you can’t do anything with that work. Have faith in yourself, and your stories. Not every one of them will sing. Some will work better than others. Some you will look back at and wonder what possessed you to write that junk at the time. But you’ll never know which ones are which until you send them out.
The only person who can keep you from writing is yourself. Give yourself permission to fail, to write crappy stories that no one else may like. Because, if you put in the time, love, work and caring that a stories deserves, it is practically guaranteed that someone else will like it. And sooner or later (and you never know which one it will be), that someone will be an editor.
Posts: 2473 | Registered: Jan 2000
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I got caught on a tangent and ended up writing entirely too much off topic. ____________________________ Hellboy and Minority Report were so so to awful movies because the big moral hook was the existence of choice. Maybe some people need that, but I think that most adult Americans believe in the existence of choice. The mere existence of choice isn't compelling enough anymore. (Except when it comes to Iraq because it's obvious that we only had one responsible choice, there. ) The movie Hero transcended the question of the existence of choice, taking it for granted, and got down to the manifold possible reasons for and consequences of any one of the choices, appealing to more noble and murky levels of morality.
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Finally, to your question:
quote:
Irami, someone I trust to be honest, said I sounded like a girl. I am a girl, though. What's wrong with sounding like one? Does it just sound timid? Or am I totally aiming at the wrong audience?
I meant it as a pejorative. Not the most apt or polite pejorative, but as a means of saying that you need to go into your story and figure out what needs to happen in the story to make me feel that she lost something, or the possibility of something, by choosing to become a fairy. From what I remember, she was losing her father anyway and going to marry someone she didn't care for. It's a clear win/loose. Muddy the water a little bit, then wrestle in it.
For example:
If her father had always had his heart set on having a big beautiful family with lots of love and presents crowded around the house. Then went through eight or nine miscarriages, one of which killed the mother, leaving him with two children, the protagonist and a developmentally disabled sybling. If you draw the relationship so that the protagonist both cares for the sybling and is her father's--whom she loves dearly-- only hope of having the big beautiful family of grandchildren, then everything becomes more murky.
She is losing something, something important, when she chooses to be a fairy. You can switch the genders or do whatever is necessary to make the story less about fathers and daughters, but I think you get the point. It's still a story about a young woman's independence and why she would choose to become a fairy, we've just upped and made more nuanced the cost.
posted
Irami, you're exactly right. Now I can't wait to go home and write the thing the way it deserves to be written.
Posts: 1903 | Registered: Sep 2003
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) The movie Hero transcended the question of the existence of choice, taking it for granted, and got down to the manifold possible reasons for and consequences of any one of the choices, appealing to more noble and murky levels of morality.
