Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America

Archive for June, 2009

Another view of the Google Book Settlement

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

The Google settlement has been one of the big topics for authors and publishers these days. ARS Technica reports on the position that Oxford Univeristy Press is taking. While this isn’t SFWA’s position, we thought it was interesting to see how another organization approached it.

The settlement between Google and book copyright holders has been examined by everyone from librarians to the US Department of Justice. Most of the issues identified by outside parties have focused on two issues: the market power it cedes to Google, and the ability of the public to access the knowledge that is contained in out-of-print works. The latest organization to weigh on the settlement is Oxford University Press, which occupies an interesting position, as it’s both a publisher of copyrighted works and has a mission of disseminating knowledge. As such, the position taken by the head of its US division is quite nuanced: the deal is flawed, but may be essential for maintaining the public’s access to knowledge.

Tags: Google Book Settlement
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2009 winners Campbell and Sturgeon awards

Monday, June 29th, 2009

We are especially pleased to see that SFWA member Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother has just been awarded 2009 John W. Campbell Award for the best science fiction novel of the year. His novel tied with Ian MacLeod’s Song of Time which is only the third time in the history of the award that the jurors have ended in a tie.

Cory also holds another important first. He is the first person to win both the Campbell Award for Best New Writer and the Campbell Award for Best science fiction novel.

The Campbell award is shared by Cory Doctorow’s “Little Brother” (Tor Books) and Ian MacLeod’s “Song of Time” (PS Publishing). James Alan Gardner’s “The Ray Gun: A Love Story” won the Sturgeon award. The authors will accept their awards July 10 at KU and will be featured at the Campbell Conference on Saturday, July 11, and Sunday, July 12.

This is only the third time in the history of the Campbell award that the balloting of the jurors has resulted in a tie. In 1974, Arthur C. Clarke’s “Rendezvous with Rama” and Robert Merle’s “Malevil” tied. In 2002, Jack Williamson’s “Terraforming Earth” and Robert Charles Wilson’s “The Chronoliths” tied.

via KU News.

Tags: Campbell Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, Cory Doctorow
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How do I pay my dues?

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

1. In the left menu, click “Manage Profile”

2. It will ask you for your email. Use the one SFWA has on file for you. Send an email to secretary@sfwa.org to get your temporary password or use the “Forgot my password” option.

(The first time you log in the website will ask you to accept terms of condition. This is a one time thing.)

3. In your membership profile, you’ll see a button which says, “Renew until…”

From there, I believe that it is fairly self-explanatory, but please let me know if you have any questions.

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Writing SF For Kids

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

by Justin Stanchfield

Is writing science fiction or fantasy for younger markets really different?

Well …

Yes and No.

It’s true that children’s lit, especially for early readers, can follow a simpler format than mainstream fiction.

But …

Everything you know about writing, all the rules, guidelines and advice you’ve been given before still applies. You have to establish a convincing background, filled with characters the reader cares about, facing difficult challenges, and rising to the occasion to resolve the plot.

And you have to do it all in less than two thousand words!

That’s seven or eight pages, if you’re dealing with middle grade or YA magazines. Write for a market younger than this and expect word-counts lower than 1000 words. Some even demand the story be complete in 300 words.

On the plus side of the equation, once you have the story firmly in your mind, you can easily turn out a finished story in one or two writing sessions. And the kids’ magazines pay very well, generally more per word than comparable adult markets. Selling to a major children’s magazine can bring the author between $150 to $300, and some pay far in excess of that. So, if you think you have what it takes to write for kids, here are a few pointers.

• You may be writing for kids, but you’re selling to adults.
  Kids’ editors are every bit as savvy and professional as the editors of any other major publication. They suffer the same strains and time constraints as anyone else who has ever donned an editor’s hat.
• Write older.
  What does this mean? For one thing, if you are targeting ten year old boys, your protagonist better be at least twelve. Kids won’t read about somebody younger than themselves. It also means that you should never talk down to your audience. Don’t intentionally simplify your style. Younger readers need to be challenged just as much as older ones. More than once I’ve written stories with teenagers in mind, only to have them printed in magazines for middle graders. The point is, kids are a lot smarter than we sometimes realize.
• Know your market
  There are hundreds of children’s magazines out there, but only a few that will be interested in any particular story. Know the niche you are writing for. Read the guidelines. Better yet, read the magazines. Go to the Children’s Library. (Or next time you’re in a doctor’s office, go through the stacks of kids mags scattered about.) Ignore the strange glances. You’re a writer. People already suspect you’re insane.
• Write what you know.
  All right, we’ve all heard this one before. But with children’s lit it takes on a new perspective. Reach back into your childhood. Try to remember how it felt to be a kid at five years old, at eleven, and again as a teenager. Pick out specific times and instances that stand the most clear in your memory, and try to put those same emotions into your characters.
• Kids have to solve their own problems.
  Just as an adult protagonist has to overcome, or be defeated by, their own actions, so does the hero of your middle-grade adventure story. You can still have adult characters in the piece, but your protagonist needs to win or lose on her own merit. Period.
• Don’t preach.
  If there is a moral to the story, hide it! Kids don’t like being hit over the head with the point of your story. Neither do editors. If you do have a point to make, be certain it fits the story, helps resolve the crises, and is woven into the character’s words and deeds. If ever there is a place for “Show, don’t tell,” it’s in kid’s lit.
• Write tight.
  If you have only fifteen hundred words to play with, every word has to pull its own weight. Cut wasted dialog and unneeded descriptions. Use strong action verbs in short, punchy sentences. (Think Hemingway, not Dick and Jane.) Another hint: Don’t waste a lot of time describing your viewpoint character. The reader should place himself squarely in the POV’s shoes if you’ve done your job properly. Keep physical descriptions of them to a minimum.
• If you are writing science fiction, check your science.
  You are writing for an impressionable audience, one that trusts what they see in print. Be careful not to misinform. Besides, editors do check the numbers.
• Can kids enjoy hard SF?
  Of course they can, as long as you can hold their interest. If the science in our fiction loses our crowd, it’s our fault as writers, not theirs as readers. Same holds true for fantasy: they can enjoy it if it holds their interest, and it’s the writer’s job to make sure the work holds the reader’s interest.
• Things to avoid:
  • Dead grandmother stories.
  • Talking animals.
  • Scary witches who turn out to be kindly old ladies.

  Editors have seen them all. Try to be original.

• Above all else, remember who you are writing for.
  Think back to the stories and books, even the movies, that shaped your life. Now think about the lives you may be shaping. Give kids your very best. They deserve it.

Some Helpful Writer’s Sites

Children’s Writing Resources
Critters Workshop
The Children’s Literature Web Guide

Tags: business, justin stanchfield, kids
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7 Reasons Fiction Writers Should Sell Nonfiction

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

by Carol Ottolenghi

This article first appeared in Speculations. Copyright © 1997 by Carol Ottolenghi. All rights reserved.

Most of us, unless we’re independently wealthy, wring our writing time from those moments between job, family, and basic living obligations. So, if it’s fiction you yearn to produce, why waste any of that precious time writing nonfiction?

Because writing nonfiction–whether it’s straight news, opinion pieces, business reporting, feature stories or service articles–can boost your fiction-writing career.

I’m not suggesting that establishing a name in nonfiction ensures that your fiction will wing from your word processor to the printed page with editors genuflecting as it passes. It won’t. But writing and selling nonfiction CAN increase your fiction sales for reasons ranging from the psychological to the professional.

1. Selling nonfiction beats back the “Who am I kidding?” monster.

   Even with multiple sales, most writers descend into what Frederik Pohl described as “periods of wondering what the hell ever made me think I had a chance of making it as a writer.” Without sales, it takes a staggering blend of self-confidence, need and bull-headedness to keep plugging away, struggling to convince spouses, roommates, parents, and ourselves that we are writers. Nonfiction sales help quiet those nagging doubts.

   Because significantly more nonfiction is published than fiction, nonfiction is easier to sell. Often the quickest route into print is your local weekly paper. Many small papers are desperate for writers who can string words together without violating major tenets of grammar or sense. Whether you write feature articles or report on City Council, those stories will bag you clips, comments from your neighbors and, best of all, checks.

   Those checks are tangible evidence that you can produce writing that someone will pay for. That discovery is very freeing. Rejection slips stop being personal judgments on your worth as a writer and become business decisions on the suitability of one particular story for one particular market. By reducing rejection’s trauma-factor, nonfiction sales encourage us to continue–or begin–submitting our fiction.

2. Selling nonfiction reinforces regular writing habits.

   Writing professionally is a business, as well as a craft. Stories are our products. And this is where some writers stall out: They don’t finish making the product.

   Meeting nonfiction deadlines means that you write whether your muse is crooning in your ear or has departed for exotic ports and left no forwarding address. After you’ve sold to an editor a few times, it’s assumed that you’ll follow through on an assignment. Never mind that your daughter forgot her piano book, the dog threw up on the carpet and a really crabby customer decided to unload on you right before you got off work. There’s a blank page waiting for your article. Get it written, or you may never write for that editor again.

   Because deadlines underline the necessity of writing whether it’s convenient or not, you can use them to establish a writing routine. Then, once you complete your initial assignment, set personal deadlines and continue writing–fiction or nonfiction–at the established time.

3. Writing nonfiction stretches your mastery of the craft.

   It’s a truism, but writing is like anything else: The more you do it, the better you get.

   Nonfiction has many of the same requirements as fiction: Opening hooks baited to entice readers; personalities and settings developed appropriately; background material presented without dumping; consistent internal logic. In fact, nonfiction’s familiar traits–who, what, where, when, why and how–translate easily into character, problem, setting, setting, motivation and problem-solving action. Presuming that you don’t blow an assignment off as “just a piece for the local throwaway,” writing nonfiction gives you both practice in meeting these requirements and regular feedback on how you’re doing at it. There’s nothing like a rough edit–an edit you usually won’t get to see until it hits print–to tighten your writing on the next assignment.

   Sometimes an editor will suggest a subject so boring it’s painful. Accept these challenges occasionally. Then seize your reader’s attention through grace of style, humor and quirky facts. If you can make “Grandma Mae’s Ceramic Chicken Collection” fascinating, think what you can do with that truly inspiring fiction idea clamoring for your attention.

4. Writing nonfiction forces interaction with a multitude of people, ideas, information and opinions.

   Rudyard Kipling wrote “the motto of all the mongoose family is, ‘run and find out’.” It’s a pretty good motto for writers, too. The more we discover outside of ourselves, the deeper and more varied our stories.

   Writing fiction is a solitary pursuit. If we don’t periodically venture into the outside world to replenish our store of ideas, our work can become self-referential and shallow.

   Gathering material for nonfiction articles forces us to venture outside to meet people and places we might never have encountered otherwise. You may meet some unsavory opinions along the way, but they may be just what’s needed to jump-start a piece of passionately-felt fiction.

5. Writing nonfiction clears the mind.

   Sometimes running and finding out results in a surfeit of good stuff. You know there’s something for your fiction in the mountain of information you’ve discovered, but which nugget is gold?

   Organizing information into nonfiction articles helps you mine an abundance of material. It defines the slag, eliminates the clutter.

   It also provides a home for information that doesn’t belong in your fiction, but is “too good to not share.” I’ve used Ohio’s canal era as the setting for a series of original tall tales, a piece of historical adventure, and an adult mystery novel currently under development. The short stories are written and sold now (the tall tales to Cricket and the historical adventure to Spider), but they wouldn’t gel for a long time. The action plodded, dragged down by my zealous inclusion of all the cool facts.

   I couldn’t trim my canal-based fiction until I’d completed a nonfiction series on the canals (sold to Ohio Magazine and West Central Business Magazine). Then, having shared the information, I didn’t strain to include anything in the stories that wasn’t pivotal to their plots.

   Yes, it’s mind game. But it works.

6. Writing nonfiction sharpens research skills.

   During a panel discussion at an American Library Association conference, T.A. Barron said, “You have to know your subject cold to win your reader’s belief.”

   That seems obvious–every one of us has been yanked forcibly from a story by phony physics or shoddy history–but many writers are shocked to discover that research is a vital part of writing fiction.

   On the other hand, research and fact-checking are accepted elements of writing nonfiction. Burrowing after material for articles provides experience in defining the type of information needed, how much, where to find it, and how to find it fast. Fact-checking also cultivates the routine of automatically selecting a few, very focused details that lend verisimilitude to the whole piece. These habits can be applied to writing fiction as well as nonfiction.

   So can copious note-taking. A slim “Reporter’s Notebook” fits into most purses or pockets, and is handy for jotting down bits of overheard conversation, descriptions, personality sketches–whatever snippets of life might add flavor to your stories.

7. Selling nonfiction pays better.

   The large number of nonfiction markets–local weeklies, trade journals, literary slicks, and everything in between–plus frequent publication plus high word/article rates equals significant dollars.

   Frequent reprint sales add to the available pot. Since many nonfiction markets are regional, you can sell second serial rights to the same article many times. I self-syndicate service articles to more than 50 parenting papers and a similar number of dailies across the U.S. The papers only pay between $15 and $300 per article, depending on the publication’s size, but each article sells at least 10 times.

   The better pay allows you to write and still put groceries on the table. But there’s a catch. It’s too easy to park a piece of fiction you’re doing on speculation while you finish nonfiction assignments that you know are sold. Just for a month, you promise yourself. Maybe two. Three at most …

If you enjoy writing nonfiction, as I do, there are times when it’s right to concentrate on it. There are also times to run away. It’s a matter of balance, of recognizing whether writing nonfiction is stretching or hindering your growth as a writer.

Tags: business, carol ottolenghi, nonfiction
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Saturday, June 27th, 2009

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A Writer’s Guide to Understanding the Copyeditor

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

by Terry McGarry

Originally appeared in the Bulletin of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Spring 1995. Copyright © 1995 Terry McGarry. Reprinted with permission.

Many copyeditors prefer to spell the word “copyeditor.” I laughed when I got page proofs of a short story I had written about a copyeditor: the anthology’s copyeditor had changed my character into a two-word protagonist. As author, I could have stetted my spelling, but I deferred to house style.

After you have delivered a finished manuscript, and usually after your editor has gone over it, your publisher’s managing editor assigns it to a copyeditor.

The copyeditor prepares the manuscript for the typesetter, proofreading for typos and keying design elements. She also styles the manuscript, making sure that its spelling, punctuation, usage, and fonts are internally consistent and follow the publisher’s house style. She checks for faulty grammar. Depending on the latitude afforded by the publisher (and whether the editor requested a light or medium copyedit–fiction never gets a heavy copyedit), she will either recast grammatically incorrect sentences, shuffling the words into syntactic order without changing them, or she will suggest possible fixes in a query. And she keeps an eye out for errors of logic and continuity, querying things that seem physically impossible or that violate the internal logic of the book’s universe.

The copyedited manuscript is usually reviewed by people at the publishing house–the editor, the managing editor’s staff, or both. Often the author gets to see it as well. The copy editor’s queries are answered (called “deflagging” if queries have been written on Post-it Notes stuck to the pages), and if she has made changes the author or editor objects to, those changes are changed back. The manuscript then goes to a type house, where typesetters generate galleys or page proofs; these are read against the copyedited manuscript by one of the publisher’s freelance proofreaders.

Your copyeditor should not be rewriting your sentences for political correctness or because she thinks it sounds better her way, or rewriting ungrammatical sentences that are complex enough to require a phrasing decision. (One of prose’s beauties is its infinite malleability, the myriad ways in which a thought can be expressed, and even the most basic grammatical error can have several potential solutions.)

The freelance copyeditor gets two or three weeks to prepare a manuscript. She works at home or in a private office rather than in the publisher’s offices. She sits down with the edited original (or sometimes a photocopy of it); a sharp colored pencil (everyone who works on a manuscript uses a different color, so that marks can be identified); a copy of the publisher’s house style sheet, if one is provided (these can run from two to twenty pages); and the publisher’s preferred dictionaries and style manuals (usually Web 10, Web 3, and The Chicago Manual of Style). She has no idea, aside from genre, what kind of book this will be; unless the book is one of a series or written by an author whose work she’s familiar with, she comes to the writing style and the imagined scenario completely cold.

Her library usually includes a hodgepodge of reference materials–medical dictionaries, foreign-language dictionaries, dictionaries of quotations, encyclopedias, other style manuals, books on sports and fashion and the military and science, atlases, city street maps. The cardinal rule of copyediting is Look Everything Up. The copyeditor must know where to look things up, and how to find out where when she doesn’t know. She’s not far from a phone, so she can make fact-checking calls as the need arises. She looks up every compound word, every brand name, every geographical and biographical name. If the book describes routes through existing cities, she makes sure the streets are contiguous; if the routes are through imaginary places, she’ll sketch a little map. She will check quotations, foreign words and phrases, even such things as whether a constellation is visible from a certain point on Earth at a certain time of year.

She keeps several lists: one of design elements (front-matter heads, epigraphs, part and chapter heads, section heads, extracts, footnotes, tabular material, artwork, line-for-line settings), one of words (preferred spellings, invented words, foreign or alien words, specially capitalized words), one of proper names (characters, places, organizations, starships, pets and horses, alien races), and one of usage (which numbers are spelled out, whether the serial comma is used, how possessives are handled, whether a full sentence after a colon is capped). Every entry on these lists notes the page of first occurrence in the manuscript–and in the copyeditor’s working list, usually several pages of occurrence, in case the author later starts treating an element differently and she has to go back. When she is finished, she will alphabetize and type these lists and submit them with the finished job.

She usually also keeps several miscellaneous lists for her own reference, to keep track of what people look like, which starships are in which fleets, the complexities of tribal relationships–any of a thousand things that might pose problems.

She keys the manuscript as she goes, marking the design elements for the compositor, as well as qualifying dashes–em-dashes, en-dashes, end-of-line hyphens–and insuring that italics and small caps are correctly applied and clearly marked. She makes sure that quotation marks aren’t missing, that words or blocks of text haven’t been dropped or repeated.

She watches for typos, misspellings, and incorrect punctuation, as well as grammatical problems such as dangling participles, noun-verb disagreement, faulty parallelism, unclear antecedents. She also watches for unintentional puns, double entendres, or embarrassing mixed metaphors, and queries them; and she’ll query if a word or phrase is constantly repeated, on a page or throughout the whole book, listing all the occurrences.

Lastly, she reads for sense, continuity, and logical consistency, and queries anything that doesn’t seem to add up. She visualizes what’s going on, and applies common sense to everything as she reads.

Copyeditors must follow the publisher’s rules without compromising the author’s work–and without letting any mistakes get through. They are classic middlepeople. They have to please a publisher who wants an error-free book that conforms to house style, and an author who wants nothing changed but the mistakes (and assumes that the copyeditor will be able to tell a mistake from something intentional).

A copyeditor familiarizing herself with an author’s style is a little like a detective reconstructing motivations from a limited number of physical clues. From the printed elements in the manuscript, the copyeditor identifies the rhythms of the author’s prose, the way he uses modifiers, his punctuation preferences. She can thus avoid breaking the author’s style in imposing house style. Every page entails a dozen judgment calls, as the copyeditor weighs various style precedents against the book’s prevailing usage. While she may sometimes make the wrong decision, she is keenly aware of her responsibility to the author’s intent.

There are as many ways to fail as a copyeditor as there are to fail as a writer. Because copyeditors are trained for consistency, some become inflexible and allow the writer insufficient leeway for personal style and poetic license. Some copyeditors are too passionate about their political agendas and impose them on the author’s work. Some lack confidence and overquery; some could phrase their queries with more tact. But most copyeditors are careful people who got into their line of work because they love words and want to see a clean book.

Fiction copyediting requires a light touch, a fine sense of when to leave things alone, and an ear for style. Many journalistic copyeditors are extremely uncomfortable working on fiction; they’re afraid to change anything and they’re afraid that if they don’t correct what they perceive as errors they will have failed to do their job.

Speculative fiction is particularly challenging to copyedit. On the most basic level, it’s full of made-up words and unusual names. Most speculative fiction reflects the evolution of language: it will include new words, slang, and acronyms, words spelled in a new way, or even an entirely futuristic narrative voice. High fantasy will include archaic words and syntax and variants thereof. Alternate history and hard SF, because they manipulate established facts, require specialized fact checking.

On a higher level, SF is demanding on the copyeditor in the same way it is demanding on the reader and the author: each new novel presents its own custom-made universe, which takes time to understand thoroughly. The copyeditor must learn the details and limitations of that universe in order to be sure that the scenario’s own rules have not been accidentally broken. Think of how much work you put into world building–perhaps years of research and backgrounding. The copyeditor has at most three weeks to learn your world inside out, so she can double-check that it’s functioning just the way you want it to.

For these reasons, many copyeditors refuse to work on SF–and the ones who choose to work on it, because they care about the genre and their craft, are truly more inclined to be an author’s ally than her enemy.

Here are some things you can do to aid the copyediting process (not necessarily to make the copyeditor’s life easier and her work better, but to avoid misunderstandings that will aggravate you):

Keep your own lists of character and place names, invented or archaic words, and preferred spellings; print them out and submit them along with the manuscript. Proofread them carefully so that the copyeditor won’t wonder whether you decided to change a name when you wrote the list but didn’t mark it in the manuscript. By default, the copyeditor will choose the spelling that predominates in the manuscript, which may not be the one you really prefer, or will just stick with the way the first occurrence was spelled.

Submit a list of slang, jargon, acronyms, etc., and what they mean. For the reader, a gradual, unexpository introduction to the details of your world is part of the enjoyment, but it would help the copyeditor immeasurably to understand the details right off the bat.

Write a general note to the copyeditor. Try to describe your idiosyncrasies of style. Are comma splices an integral part of the rhythm of your prose? Point that out. If you have strong preferences regarding usage, state them, and she’ll incorporate them into the book’s style sheet. Let her know if you’re following a dictionary other than Webster’s–say, Random House or American Heritage.

Be aware of the rules of grammar and punctuation, and when you break these rules for a reason, put three dots under the occurrence, to indicate to the copyeditor, typesetter, and proofreader that you meant to do it this way and it should be stetted. New comment: Don’t put dots under every line of the entire manuscript. That won’t work. If you really feel that absolutely nothing should be changed–and be aware that that would include inadvertencies–discuss it with your editor; if she agrees, they’ll include a note in the copyeditor’s instructions.

When you’ve finished writing, go back to the beginning of your book. See if you took to capping or hyphenating or italicizing things later on when you didn’t start out doing so. (Do your characters wear grav boots in Chapter One, grav-boots by Chapter Eight, and gravboots by Chapter Twenty?) Writers often establish their distinctive style and treatment of words during the process of writing, and the preferred style dominates only toward the end, when the writer has settled into the work and made final–and possibly unconscious–style decisions. Some examples of decisions it’s helpful if you make early and stick by:

• Are you setting subjective, first-person thoughts in roman or ital?
• Are you capping the word “Human” as you do the names of your extraterrestrial or magical races, or would you prefer to keep “human” lowercase but uppercase “Terran” as the analogue of “Xerxian”?
• Are you using the serial comma or not? Do you prefer “gray” or “grey”? (House style may force the copyeditor to insert the serial comma or spell it “gray,” but in case you sell to a house that follows author preference in such matters, make your preference clear.)
• Do you want to set all non-English, non-Standard, non-Terran words in ital (which is what the copyeditor will do if you don’t specify), or do you want, say, just the first occurrence of such words to be italicized, but the words to appear in roman thereafter, to reduce their “alien” feel?
• If you are still using a nine-pin dot-matrix printer, and can possibly afford to upgrade, do so. It’s tough to tell an “e” from an “a” in nine-pin printouts, especially photocopies; and reading such printouts is taxing to the eyes, which means that the copyeditor, typesetter, and proofreader will miss things. Turn hyphenation off, so that if the copyeditor sees an end-of-line hyphen she will know that you meant it to stay in the word.
• Try not to succumb to the fun of fancy fonts or the elegance of paper-saving small fonts. Straightforward Courier 10 (Courier or Courier New, 12-point size) is the easiest to read, and leaves room enough for inserting marks. In smaller fonts like Times Roman, the correspondingly tiny punctuation is likely to be missed or misread (and is often overprinted entirely by underlining). Underline for emphasis rather than using an italic font; the copy editor will just have to underline all the ital text anyway, and in some fonts ital is tough to distinguish from roman, particularly for short words like “I.” Avoid sans-serif and condensed fonts, where some characters are indistinguishable (I and l and 1) or run together to look like something else (r + n = m). Turn right-justification off.

New note: Please go into Preferences in your word-processing software and turn off smart quotes, smart ellipses, smart em-dashes, and any other automatic format changes your software commits by default. Smart quotes aren’t; faux-typeset ellipses come out too jammed together to mark clearly for the typesetter; a typeset em-dash will come out looking more like a hyphen in Courier.

If, for some reason (e.g., a revised chapter that came out shorter), the manuscript’s pagination is not strictly sequential, make a note at the bottom of the page before the break: “p. 251 follows,” say, on page 234. Usually it’s apparent whether such gaps represent missing pages, but a note will save the managing editor a lot of scrambling after the copyeditor calls to ask for pages she hasn’t got.

Don’t go ballistic over stupid queries. It’s better to be safe than sorry, and it’s a brave copyeditor who risks exposing her own ignorance so a potential error doesn’t slip through.

Here are some mistakes often found in manuscripts:

• Commonly misspelled words misspelled. (There are lists of these in many reference books, but here are a few: accommodate, supersede, embarrass, harass, feisty, inadvertent, ophthalmologist, occurrence, camaraderie, desiccated, forgo [abstain from], millennia, liquefy, rarefied, fluorescent, inoculate, stratagem.)
• “Lay” used as a transitive verb in the simple past: “Yesterday he lay the book on the table.” He lay on the bed yesterday, but he laid the book on the table.
• “Lay” used as an intransitive verb in the present or progressive: “He lays down on the bed”; “He was laying on the bed.” He lies down on the bed now, he is lying on the bed; he lay down on it and was lying on it yesterday.
• Characters’ names, physical characteristics, or gender changing in midstory (not by marriage or witness-protection program or hairdresser or plastic surgeon or sex-change clinic); dead characters reappearing (not by cloning or reanimation or coroner’s error); unrelated secondary characters having the same first or last name.
• Incorrect subjunctives. The restrictive “that” and nonrestrictive “which” reversed. “Less” and “fewer” used incorrectly. Dangling participles and unclear antecedents. “Smile” or “frown” as a verb of utterance.
• Number of items or people changing for no reason (two horses plus five horses becoming a group of eight on the next page). Continuity errors (empty drinking vessels being picked up and drained).
• Third-person-narrative paraphrasing of thoughts underlined or italicized (with no emphasis intended).
• “He thought to himself,” “opening gambit,” and similar redundancies. (That telepathy might make it necessary to specify whether a character is thinking to himself or to someone else is a small example of how SF copyediting is different from general- fiction copyediting.)

There are, of course, more of these. But that’s why there are copyeditors. The more problems a writer can identify and fix before the copyedit, the better; but writers have other things to worry about.

Do copyeditors and writers have an intrinsically antagonistic relationship? From the stories that circulate at conventions and on-line, it may seem that way; but in fact they need not have. The copyeditor fulfills a support function–backing up the author. She’s on your side.

A writer, at least while writing, is concerned with plotting, characterization, phrasing. And the writer will always have blind spots about her own work. After I write, I do a second pass in “copyediting mode,” and I still miss things. Your workshop group or friendly second reader will also miss things, and so will your editor. Copyeditors read specifically for the nuts-and-bolts mistakes that are potentially the most embarrassing. And copyeditors, too, are backed up–by the publisher’s in-house editorial staff, by the typesetters, by the proofreaders.

A lot of people pull together with the aim of making your book perfect; yes, that’s our job, what we’re expected to do in return for a paycheck, but it should make you feel pretty good anyway.

Related sites:

The Slot: A Spot for Copy Editors
Copy Editor (link no longer valid)
The Editorial Eye (link no longer valid)
The Word Detective
Windhaven

Tags: copyediting, copyeditors, Publishing, Terry McGarry
Posted in Editors and Publishing Houses, Information Center, The Business of Writing, The Craft of Writing, Writing Technique | Comments Off

Murder Your Darlings

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009



photo by Beth Gwinn

by James Patrick Kelly

© 1995 by James Patrick Kelly, First published in Writer’s Digest, July 1995

What follows is not for the squeamish.

It’s the nature of writers to fall in love with words, particularly their own. Clever turns of phrase excite us; we beam like proud parents when our protagonists take on lives of their own; a shapely plot twist can turn our heads. There is nothing wrong with indulging in the occasional fling-as long as it stops in draft. When time comes to make that final revision, however, you must harden your heart, sharpen the ax and murder your darlings.

Well, maybe not all of them. Just the shiftless ones, those precious freeloaders who are too busy looking good to do any work. Once you learn how to spot them, you’ll see them everywhere, in unpublishable manuscripts and in award-winning stories, in my work and hers and yours. There are no exceptions; even Shakespeare can be profitably trimmed.

Some writers like to fix problems by addition rather than subtraction. First they layer in just a little more complexity to develop a rounder Aunt Penelope. And then they expand the garage scene, so it will foreshadow the car chase. Last they have Biff’s lawyer explain the rules of evidence to his secretary after the trial so that slow readers will get the end. If these writers worry about wordiness at all, they might tighten a few lines here and there. Drop a “he said,” on page two. Major surgery is for beginners, right?

What they don’t realize is that muscular prose alone can’t lift a narrative. Any sentence, no matter how powerful, that serves no story purpose is just so many wasted words. Obviously, adjective pileups and unnecessary clauses and clunky diction must go. However, effective cutting involves more than line editing. You can also strike whole paragraphs — pages, even! For example, toss out that extra twist and the plot might come clear. Too much costume jewelry weighs characters down so they can hardly move. Rather than reconstruct the pyramids in five paragraphs (despite that week you spent cruising the Nile last summer), pick the two best and invite readers to supply some of their own building materials.

Although I can offer some specific suggestions for what to excise, please don’t memorize my list. These skills are most useful when stored in intuition, not consciousness. The best way to prevent verbosity is to develop an instinct for cutting, which means you should practice every day. I know enough writers to realize there’s no universal technique for getting words on paper. But here’s the routine that works for me.

I write at the computer, the greatest advance in literary technology since the eraser. I spend the first hour or so paring and revising the previous day’s work. This not only promotes the proper mindset but it also helps me re-enter the world of the story. I’m rarely stuck because I always begin with these editorial warm-ups — much easier than first draft, in my opinion. In the middle part of the day I try to compose as carefully as I can. Later on, however, I may let standards slip in order to fill out the daily complement of screens. This admittedly sloppier work will either be cleaned up or pruned first thing the next morning, as the process begins again.

Although I edit daily, I rarely attempt major cuts until I finish a working draft. I like to split production of a finished manuscript into two stages, revision and deletion. In the revision stage I make sure I’ve given my readers enough of everything: plot, character, setting, theme. I search for logic flaws and continuity breaks; I run my spell checker. Revision ends once I’m satisfied that the manuscript is complete and as coherent as I can make it. Only then do I go through it one last time with an itchy finger on the delete key.

How much to trim at this point? Based on extensive reading, I estimate that the current rate of literary inflation is about 10%. I try to do my best to fight it; so should you. Thus, if the revision draft is twenty pages, the submission should be eighteen.

Two pages! How can you carve two pages of living prose from a story without killing it? Here are some things to look for.

Adjectival and adverbial leeches. Start at the sentence level, hunting for the unnecessary modifiers which drain the life out of prose. Strong verbs are the key to taut writing. Rather than, “The ungainly triceratops walked slowly away,” try “The triceratops lumbered away.”

Clumsy entrances and exits. Don’t waste time moving people around; too many doors open and close in fiction. If you want the UPS man to deliver a mysterious parcel, he doesn’t need to knock, come in, and ask Reggie to sign for it. When Janet screams at Bob that she’s sick of his catting around and wants a divorce, why must she also stalk from the house to her car and peel out of the driveway? Some writers try to punctuate emotional scenes with histrionic exits. If the scene isn’t angry enough, fix it. Don’t slam the door.

Unnecessary scene or time switches. Aristotle was wrong about physics but he was right to recommend unity of time and place. Before you board a cruise ship or skip ahead three weeks, always ask: is this trip necessary? When you change venues or let time fly, you take on an extra narrative burden. You must describe the new setting, explain what happened in the interim. Compressing these story elements can save words while shifting the focus back onto character and action.

Overpopulation. In the attempt to recreate the sweep and richness of life, some writers keep cramming characters into a story until it resembles the Marx Brothers’ stateroom in A Night At The Opera. The people you want readers to care about will be lost in a mob scene, so keep the cast to a minimum. Name as few characters as you can, describe even fewer. If you can combine two characters into one, you probably ought to.

Overdramatization. “Show, don’t tell,” can be a dangerous policy. Prolix writers think they must dramatize everything. But a story isn’t a game of charades; you’re allowed to come right out and tell the reader what’s what. Do you really need a rhapsodic paragraph about Amanda’s aquiline nose and alabaster skin and piercing blue eyes and tawny mane when all you wanted to say was that George was attracted to her? When necessary tell, don’t show.

Arriving early; staying late. Not all stories start on page one — only the good ones. If you’re the first at the party, there’s usually nothing to do until the other guests arrive except to stand around and admire the furniture. Writers who start their stories too early have the same problem. They waste time describing the china on the breakfast table, the daisies nodding in the garden. Or else they deliver a weather report. Yet the same people who chuckle at the classic howler, “It was a dark and stormy night,” don’t hesitate to play meteorologist in opening paragraphs of their own fiction. Similarly, when the story is over, stop writing. There’s no need to explain exactly what became of everyone and how they all felt and what it all meant. Memorable fiction rarely ends with the last line. By leaving some things unwritten, you empower the reader to imagine what happens next.

It is one skill to recognize potential cuts, another to make the right ones. A strategy I’ve developed is to read my work aloud in draft; it forces a fresh approach. Try it sometime and listen carefully to the expression in your voice. You may actually hear your interest level peaking and dipping.

For those who just can’t bring themselves to operate on their own fiction, I offer this advice: get a second opinion. Almost anyone can help, even your mom. In fact, if you’re dissatisfied with the criticism she’s been giving you lately, don’t ask for it next time. Instead, just hand her the manuscript and a blue pencil and tell her to prune 10%. While Mom may not have been an English major, she’ll know when she’s bored. Easier for her to remove the slow bits than to critique your subtext.

Unfortunately, the craft of cutting is undervalued in a world where writers are paid by the word. And it shows; you don’t have to look very hard to find padded work in print. Yet clearly it is precision which separates the journeyman from the master. Perhaps the way to grow as a writer is to shrink your manuscripts. Or, as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch so memorably put it, “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it — whole-heartedly — and delete it before sending your manuscripts to press. Murder your darlings.“

Tags: james patrick kelly, revising, revision
Posted in Information Center, The Craft of Writing, Tips for Beginners, Writing Technique | Comments Off

A Tale of Two Art Forms

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

by Alexandra Elizabeth Honigsberg

It’s often said that nothing learned goes to waste. Certainly we as writers find this is true. Everything is grist for the story mill. I’ve also noticed that, as I read the bios of my fellow authors, we have chequered pasts and still tend to wear several hats. I am no exception. From those who only know me as a writer, I find that they react to the discovery that I am also a professional musician (concert violist/conductor/soprano) as if I live in some fantasy-scape and wave a magic wand in mysterious ways. In some sense, they’re right. Ask any conductor if she doesn’t think she’s God and her baton magic, at least some of the time.

So, if I can play God, why write? Good question. Any one of us can also play God as we create worlds and people and guide them as we will, hopefully, as story and characterization dictate and not merely for our own jollies. This all reminded me, not for the first time, that there’s a lot of overlap between the two art forms.

Of course, if you’re going to write in a certain world, you have to do your research. So it’s easier to write what you know, especially if a lot of people either don’t know it or fantasize about it. So many of my stories are set in places that are legend to some and a workplace for me – Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center, and the like. But I know of few people who, especially with the advent of cable TV, CDs and VCRs, haven’t seen at least a bit of one concert or don’t even listen to the car radio. So music is all around us and these places are at least somewhat familiar to us. Not so much research after all, really, even for non-musicians.

These are great places for Urban Fantasy. You have ready-made heroes and heroines, all larger than life, all wading waist-high through archetypes and dramas. It’s a full-sensory world including sound, the smell of sawdust backstage, the play of the colored stagelights, the feel of the velvet curtains and brocade costumes. It’s all right there for the asking. And characters – just read a bio of Toscanini, Horowitz, Verdi, Berlioz, or a myriad of others, and you’ll find no shortage of knights and knaves. Everything’s as close as your local PBS station, stereo, library, or video/CD store. Album notes are an endless source of tasty little tidbits on the pieces and their composers, by the way, often things the music history books would pass over. Check magazines like Opera News, too. That’s full of fun stuff. Some of the pictures are entire stories in and of themselves.

Any time you get into stories that have been staged in some way, you have opportunities for the play-within-a-play scenario that Shakespeare had such fun with in his time. And the venues have a timelessness all their own. Tchaikovsky conducted at the opening of Carnegie Hall, after all, which is more than 100 years old, as is the tradition of the Metropolitan Opera, not to mention several hundreds of years of tradition in overseas ensembles.

With language and music so inextricably linked since the dawn of humans, my musician’s ears treat the written word in much the same manner as musical notes. After all, we could make all sorts of sounds before we had a formal language. Mel Brooks’ routine in The 2000-Year-Old-Man about the first music being for communication (he called it rock music, literally), especially to warn of danger, was funny because it’s not far from the truth. And though music and stories are entertainment and life-enriching, we are, after all, trying to communicate, aren’t we?

So consider the texture and ring of certain words, the rhythm of paragraphs and the phrasing of sentences. If you can’t read/sing a sentence out loud, it probably won’t play in the reader’s head, either. As a singer will mark breath points or a string player bow changes, or a pianist strikes the keys in varying manners to articulate notes differently – smooth, rough, short, long – so we as writers need to pay attention to our ears and feed them the infinite variety that makes them happy. You might find that you have better ears then you thought you did and your prose will flow more and more be more interesting.

As for writing while listening to music, that’s very personal. For myself, when in the act of raw creation, I need silence because there’s already music playing in my head. I write, literally, with a full soundtrack playing along with the story line. I wish I were a better composer and had more time because I’ve written a lot of music along with my stories that may never get heard. But it seems to live in the prose, so I don’t feel too badly about that. Once I get to the editing/revision stage, I can listen to pieces without words or in languages I am totally ignorant of (words tend to get in the way because they’ll contradict what I’m writing and I want to sing them – I can multi-task, but that’s a bit schizophrenic, even for me). They don’t have to have the same tone as what I’m working on, as long as words don’t get in the way.

I’ve written stories inspired by songs or pieces that are very dear to me. This is tricky. If you try to remain too literal, you write yourself into a corner. But if there’s an idea you have that seems to need a bit of jump-starting or has gaps in the plot, the right music can be just the tonic it needs. A story of mine, “Duet,” had been a concept barely percolating in my head for a year or more, but one I’d really wanted to write. Within one week I played/heard concerts of Carmina Burana, Verdi’s Requiem, and some Mahler symphonies. Bingo! I had my story line and characters.

Think of what a movie or TV show would be without a soundtrack and you might get an idea of what it would be like to try to write without a hint of sound to propel things along. Sound is grounded in the real world and all sound can be music. So music/sound can give your story a more three-dimensional feel, even if you’re not a musician and it never makes it anywhere into the story descriptions. You know it’s there and the reader will feel it in the pacing of the work. The horror writers seem to have picked up on this, especially in the punk/grunge/heavy metal rock cultures that seem to lend themselves to that edge. But considering how much of opera and symphonic music is based upon folk tales and various fantasies, I’m curious that we don’t take advantage of the overlap and return the favor. And then there are all those martial and abstract soundtracks for those hard sf movies (or not-so-hard, but just as much fun – consider the Trek or Star Wars movies, Alien, 2001, or Bladerunner, just to name a few).

So go forth and enjoy those CDs and hear the music in your work. Your readers will notice and you’ll have more fun, too.

Alexandra is a professional musician and religious scholar, and has had stories and poems published in numerous anthologies, among them Dante’s Disciples, Pawn of Chaos, Angels of Darkness, New Altars, and Blood Muse.

Tags: alexandra elizabeth honigsberg, music, world building
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Doyle’s YA SF Rant

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

by Dr. Debra Doyle

This rant first appeared in the book review section of hwæt!, my zine for Apanage, a children’s literature apa. Later on, I posted it in the Doyle&Macdonald topic on GEnie’s Science Fiction RoundTable. And after that, it seems to have taken on a life of its own.

The Giver (the 1994 Newbery Award winner) is a good example, in my opinion, of the reason why YA hardcover sf has been dying for the past fifteen or twenty years – and why it hasn’t been bringing new readers into the field.

Once, at a science fiction convention, I was part of a panel discussion of YA science fiction, where I heard a librarian explain what it was that teachers and librarians (and, apparently, a lot of hardcover YA editors) look for in YA sf. They want lots of subtext and character development and Growth. They’re big on Growth. Those of us on the panel who actually wrote YA sf for a living, and who remembered clearly what we read when we were that age, sort of exchanged glances and shook our heads. When we were kids, we didn’t want subtext and character development and Growth. We wanted Adventure. Good authors, of course, managed to sneak all those literary vitamins and minerals in there along with the fun stuff, but it was a real smuggling act. (Still is, too.)

These days, most hardcover YA sf reads like a dinner made out of tofu and supplement capsules – and regardless of its virtues, it doesn’t give its readers whatever it is that most readers come to sf for in the first place. And then librarians and children’s lit teachers complain because the kids ignore all the Worthwhile hardcovers in favor of reading Mercedes Lackey in paperback.

Personal taste aside, The Giver fails the sf Plausibility Test for me. I don’t see how a society like the one depicted could be attained/sustained in anything other than a metaphorical world. And even considered as fantasy, rather than sf, the book is too damned obvious. Things are the way they are because The Author is Making A Point; things work out the way they do because The Author’s Point Requires It. And like I said before, this book is so damned full of Meaning and Theme and Subtext that it would choke a whale. At least Herman Melville gave us one hell of a Nantucket sleighride along with the philosophy and allegory and metaphor and all.

A few notes on jargon and provenance: “YA” is short for “young adult”, which is publisher-speak for what most of us would call “teen-age”. The Newbery is the premier children’s book award. And “sf” (for completeness’s sake, though I doubt anybody who’s read this far needs the definition) is “science fiction”.

Tags: debra doyle, genre, SF, ya
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