Posts Tagged ‘writing’

World creation and the source of objects

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

One of the things that bothers me sometimes when looking at world-building is the way people don’t think about where objects come from. What is the industry that fuels the region? Where does all that paper come from in Battlestar Galactica?

So this essay on the origins of a pencil tickles me no end, and not just because it’s written in first person. What I like about it is that it points out all the different jobs that you don’t even think about which are required to make a pencil.

Pick me up and look me over. What do you see? Not much meets the eye—there’s some wood, lacquer, the printed labeling, graphite lead, a bit of metal, and an eraser.

Just as you cannot trace your family tree back very far, so is it impossible for me to name and explain all my antecedents. But I would like to suggest enough of them to impress upon you the richness and complexity of my background.

So next time you’re doing world creation, think about where all those objects are coming from. Even if you don’t put that detail down on the page, it can add a richness to your fiction.

Tags: world building, writing
Posted in SFWA Blog, Writing Technique | 1 Comment »

Manuscript Preparation

Friday, November 7th, 2008

Written by Vonda N. McIntyre

“Manuscript Preparation,” a PDF, requires the Adobe Acrobat Reader. The software comes installed on many systems, and is available as a free download at the Adobe website.

Tags: manuscript, McIntyre, Vonda N. McIntyre, writing
Posted in Advice for New Writers, Information Center, Manuscript Formatting, The Craft of Writing | Comments Off

TANSTAAFL and the Novice Writer

Wednesday, January 4th, 2006

Written by Elizabeth Moon
From a note posted on SFF Net
(TANSTAAFL ¹)

When I was teaching short workshops, I found that some beginning writers want business information in the curriculum and others hate it. One critique sheet complained bitterly that I spent a couple of hours on the business end (out of eight) and was “too commercial”. Needless to say, the only people who have ended up published after these workshops have been the ones who weren’t afraid to be commercial.

Novice writers have to take some responsibility for their own careers. The good information is NOT that hard to find. The novices who don’t find it–and don’t find it repeatedly–are resisting the truth.

Example: at a Dragoncon, I heard Anne McCaffrey talk on a 2-hour panel aimed at new writers. She talked, she answered questions, she put out a lot of good information on Copyright issues, agents, editors, contracts, and so on. Patient, firm, clear, all the above.

On her way out of the room, a young man who had been in the audience ambushed her, and asked again, the very basic-stupid question he had asked the panel twice. He was convinced that she had said what she said only because she “had” to say that in public, but in private she could give him the Magic Button to Getting Published.

There is no Magic Button. There is no such thing as a free lunch (not even when it’s charged to the editor’s plastic.)

This kind of novice will claim, to his deathbed, that no one ever told him the real secret to getting published … because, of course, he never listened. No writers’ group, SFWA or any other, can be held responsible for this kind of novice. We are not their fairy godmother, and we have too many other claims on our time to spend much effort trying to break through their fantasy.

How do I know? I was once a hopeful hobby writer myself, who had a wistful vague dream that someday a shaft of light would beam down from above, trumpets would sound, little drifts of glittering gold would land on my shoulders, and I’d be anointed Real Writer. I would know it. My mother would know it. My friends and their friends would know it. And of course editors and publishers would know it instantly. Fame and fortune awaited me; I had only to wait until the right moment.

While in this hazy dream, I didn’t seek out any practical knowledge whatsoever. I didn’t go to the library and find writers’ magazines or books on how to write. I didn’t take courses. I didn’t join a writers’ group. No: if I had the talent, someday the light would come. I wrote bits of stories and sent them to a friend who was in a graduate English program; she trashed them and sent them back. Then I’d go into a decline (mentally wailing and worry about my talent) before before trying again. (The one thing I did right, was write. At least I was working on the salable skill, if not the skill to sell it.)

The turnaround for me came when something (I now forget what) shook me out of this idiotic daze and I realized that if I wanted to be anything other than a science fictional Emily Dickinson, I would have to know some practical stuff. The “getting published” side of writing was more like “getting a driver’s license” or “getting to Europe” than having a religious experience.

I had gone from “it sure would be nice to hike along mountain trails” to reading, researching, renting equipment for short hikes, buying equipment, and finally hiking along mountain trails pretty competently. I had gone from “it sure would be nice to be able to ride horses over fences” to reading, researching, taking lessons on the flat and over fences, leasing a horse, buying a horse, and riding my own horse over fences.

So … what was this silly nonsense about a spotlight from on high when it came to getting published?

From that revelation came an immediate burst of research–which did not take long to put me in touch with perfectly good sources of information. The information is out there. It is available. You can tell the good stuff from the scams just as easily as you can in any other field. All it takes is applying the same business attitude you would if buying a car, a house, a horse. While any writers’ organization (including SFWA) may provide general information on the business of writing and the realities of a writer’s life, you don’t have to find it here–it’s in every library.

Genre-specific info is another thing entirely. By the time I went to a half-day SF workshop, I already knew about manuscript preparation, why I shouldn’t be looking for an agent yet, which publishers handled SF, and so on. I had finished three books and quite a few stories; I had been submitting stories for over a year. But I had no idea what a science fiction convention was, or why anyone would go. I knew no writers (SF or other, except for reporters at the county newspaper), no editors, nothing.

The workshop presenter mentioned SFWA and handed around a copy of the Bulletin. I had read about SFWA (briefly) in Writer’s Market; the presenter, and the Bulletin, convinced me it was an organization with something to offer. In other words, I was ready to hear what SFWA had to say.

He also explained conventions (sort of … ) and I decided to get a one-day membership to the NASFiC in Austin that year. While I did not meet any science fiction writers then (I had two sales, but nothing out in print; I felt suspended between novice and neo-pro) I had the chance to see them, watch them, and start figuring out the tribal customs. The workshop also gave me an immediately useful bit of advice (”Send your stories to an editor whose choices you already like — he’s most likely to like yours”) which was responsible for my first hard-SF sale, about three months later.

But there were over thirty people at that workshop. Many were where I had been a few years before — drifting along day-dreaming of being writers by annointment. They had never finished a story; some had never started a story. They wanted to hear that they were talented — they wanted the beam of light to come down and mark them as Instant Real Writers. They couldn’t hear the practical advice being given, and they have never sold a thing, even if they kept writing. Another group were almost ready to hear it — close enough that they formed a support group, and most of those later achieved at least one professional sale.

I’m coming on strong here, because I just spent another half-hour writing back to a newbie with a fantasy novel who is desperate to find an agent, and has gotten a nibble from someone who wants a reading fee. I spent an hour yesterday combing my files and essentially re-writing several articles for him. He came back with a bunch of “yes, but … ” sorts of things. If he writes me again, still misty-eyed because someone is willing to read his work, I’ll give up. He’ll have proved himself determined to be fooled. I have mail waiting from someone who wants me to read her work and tell her she’s talented enough to keep going — although I’ve told her before to workshop her stories in her own area (which has writers’ groups.) I’ve spent hours and hours with promising beginners (some of them now thoroughly published) when I felt they were taking in the info I could give, but I do not have the time to waste on people who want the Magic Button or the Free Lunch or the Secret Decoder Ring to the Publishing Empire.

---

¹ TANSTAAFL: There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. (From Heinlein, “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”.)

Tags: Elizabeh Moon, Intermediate, Moon, writing
Posted in Advice for New Writers, Building a Career, Information Center, The Business of Writing, Tips for Beginners, Workshops and Critique Groups | Comments Off

The Obligatory Manuscript Format Article

Tuesday, January 4th, 2005

Manuscript Preparation. Don’t Skip It — You WILL Learn Something
Written by John Gregory Betancourt

Everyone starting out as a writer will, sooner or later, get hit over the head by an editor over manuscript format. In short, there is a single right way to do it.

For short stories:

• In a font called “Courier”
• At a standard, easily legible size (”12 points”)
• Double spaced (between LINES, not WORDS!)
• With a 1″ margin on every side
• On one side of the paper ONLY
• With a ragged right margin (NOT fully justified)
• With your address in the upper left-hand corner of page 1
• With the word-count in the upper right-hand corner of page 1
• With the title in ALL CAPS in the exact middle of page 1
• With your byline (”by John Q. Writer”) 2 lines underneath it.
• With the story commencing 4 lines beneath that
• With future pages containing the author’s last name, the story title, and the current page number in the upper right-hand corner (”Author/STORY/2″)

For novels:

• In a font called “Courier”
• At a standard, easily legible size (”12 points”)
• Double spaced (between LINES, not WORDS!)
• With a 1″ margin on every side
• On one side of the paper ONLY
• With your address in the upper left-hand corner of page 1
• With the word-count in the upper right-hand corner of page 1
• With the title in ALL CAPS in the exact middle of page 1
• With your byline (”by John Q. Writer”) 2 lines underneath it.
• With the story commencing on page 2 (or a later page if you have dedications/quotes/acknowledgments/etc. to go at the start)
• With all pages after the first page containing the author’s last name, the story title, and the current page number in the upper right-hand corner (”Author/STORY/2″)

BUT WHY?

No, these rigid format requirements are not designed to make the writer suffer under an oppressive editor’s insane rule. Believe it or not, every one of these format requirements exists for a legitimate, sensible reason. Once you understand the “why” of all these seemingly arbitrary rules, you will probably agree that they are necessary. Let’s look at them one by one.

1. In a font called “Courier”

Courier is a fixed-width font, which means every character takes up exactly the same space on a line. It is easy to read, and most importantly, easy to use to calculate your story’s word-count accurately. Word-count is important with short stories, since most short stories are bought by the word.

IMPORTANT: WORD COUNT IS *NOT* THE EXACT NUMBER OF WORDS IN A STORY! “Word count” is, more accurately, the amount of space a story will take up when typeset. Editors conside one word to be 6 characters (5 characters plus a space). Therefore, putting a computer-generated exact word count on a ms. is not entirely helpful (though it doesn’t hurt).

2. At a standard, easily legible size (”12 points”) [ed. note: that's 10 pitch, or pica, in typewriter terms]

Editors live by their eyes. If you make it too small, they will have trouble reading it. You want to make reading your work as painless as possible.

3. Double spaced (between LINES, not WORDS!)

Editors mark on manuscripts after they have purchased them for publication — edits, corrections, instructions to the typesetter, stuff like that. You must leave them enough room to write clearly and legibly.

And believe it or not, people have made the mistake of adding an extra space between every word, rather than between lines.

4. With a 1″ margin on every side

Again, you must leave the editor room to work.

5. On one side of the paper ONLY

The publishing industry is horribly wasteful, but everyone else only writes on the front of pages. If you write on the back, chances are good that no one will notice half your manuscript. Conform to the industry standard. If you feel guilty about those poor trees, use recycled paper.

6. With a ragged right margin (NOT fully justified)

This ties in with point #1, “Courier”. You need to leave the right marged ragged so the editor (or anyone else) can calculate the exact 6-character word count. Here is how it is done:

Pick a standard-looking page from the middle of the manuscript. Using a ruler, align it along the right edge of the text so that the ends of half the lines stick out and half are covered. Since most standard format pages contain 24 or 25 lines, you should have 12 or 13 sticking out beyond the ruler. Count characters backwards from the point where the ruler ends. Divide the total by 6. Multiply by lines on the page. (Example: 60 characters divided by 6 equals 10 words per line. Multiplied by 25 lines equals 250 words per page.) Then multiply by pages in the manuscript — adjusting for blank areas, like the half page missing on the first page. This will give you an accurate word count equivalent to what an editor will use.

7. With your address in the upper left-hand corner of page 1

You DO want the editor who wishes to purchase your story to be able to find you.

With the word-count in the upper right-hand corner of page 1

8. With the word-count in the upper right-hand corner of page 1

This is just a guide for the editor, who will perform (and pay using) his or her own word count. You can use a computer-generated true word count here, if you want.

9. With the title in ALL CAPS in the exact middle of page 1

You want the title to jump out at the reader; you don’t want him or her trying to figure out what it is.

10. With your byline (”by John Q. Writer”) 2 lines underneath it.

This is how you want your name to appear on the published story. If you use a pseudonym, put it here. Make sure your real name is on the address part; you want to be able to cash the check when it comes, and you may have trouble if it’s made out to a pseudonym.

11. With the story commencing 4 lines beneath the byline

Again, you must leave the editor enough room to work.

12. With future pages containing the author’s last name, the story title, and the current page number in the upper right-hand corner (”Author/STORY/2″)

You must identify each page of your story completely. Remember, an editor buys a lot of stories, and accidents do happen. If your story gets shuffled in with another story, dropped with a bunch of them, or otherwise mixed up, you want it to be an easy matter to sort it out.

Author name: what if someone else writes a story under the same title?

Story title: what if the editor buys 5 or 6 stories by you?

Page number: you want the story read and typeset in the proper page order!

13.  For novels/books:

With the main text commencing on page 2 (or a later page if you have dedications/quotes/acknowledgments/etc. to go at the front)

You start a new chapter on a new page in books. This gives the book’s designer room to write instructions on how to start a new chapter for the typesetter.

And that’s about it for format.

ADDITIONAL NOTES!

1. Don’t listen to a handful of old pros who tell you not to worry about format. I know several who deliberately don’t follow the above rules, creating headaches for editors/copyeditors/typesetters with bizarre fonts, right-justification, improper margins, etc. A word of advice: DON’T DO IT, TOO. These are established professionals; editors are willing to overlook formatting in their cases because their books sell a lot of copies. It’s simply easier to do things right. After all, when you’re starting out, you don’t want to look like a troublemaker or a rank amateur, do you?
2. Lawrence Watt-Evans commented, when I workshopped this article, that he got out of the habit of using all caps (even for story titles) when one of his editors expressed his displeasure at seeing anyone use all caps anywhere in a manuscript. If you have a paying editor who likes your work and has specific format instructions (as in LWE’s case), follow them. You’re here to make money, and you never argue with a man who buys your work for real money. If someone will pay you an acceptable rate and wants your work in green crayon on toilet paper, oblige that editor! You can always change the format before you sell reprint rights to anyone else.
3. Also in workshopping this article, Cecil Rose said: “I just wanted to comment about cashing checks made out to somebody else. I have refereed soccer and football in high schools and colleges, and the schools frequently get the names wrong on referee’s checks. The standard practice here is to just write “pay to the order of [your name]” on the back of the check and then sign the other guy’s name. As long as you’re depositing this check in your own account, the banks never question it. In twenty years, depositing 30-40 such checks per year, I’ve never had a problem. As long as you’re not doing it for a fraudulent purpose, I don’t think you’re breaking any law, and in practice it always works.”My reply: Some banks will question (or refuse to accept) 3rd party checks. You can probably get away with it for small amounts, but for the sake of simplicity, it’s easier to do it right in the first place!

“The Obligatory Manuscript Format Article” is Copyright © 1997 by John Gregory Betancourt. All rights reserved.

This document may be printed out and archived for personal use.

This document may be distributed free of charge by teachers or other educators for use in writing classes.

ALL OTHER USE IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED.

This article may not be reprinted, linked to, or otherwise redistributed (in its entirety or in part, via the Internet or any other means), without first obtaining the prior written consent of the author.

(No, he won’t withhold such permission unreasonably. It’s just polite to ask.)
If you wish to reprint this article in another format or medium, please email John Betancourt (wildside@wildsidepress.com) for rights availability.

Tags: Betancourt, John Gregory Betancourt, manuscript, writing
Posted in Information Center | Comments Off

Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Tuesday, January 4th, 2005

• The Apostrophe
• Phrase Matching
• Spelling
• Identifying Your Pronouns
• Being Consistent

The Apostrophe: When In Doubt, Leave It Out

The omitted apostrophe confuses meaning less often than the needless one does. If I write a note to tell you, “This is Janes dog,” you’ll likely know I mean to let you know the dog belongs to Jane. If I write instead, “Jane’s friend’s are writer’s,” and you know anything about the punctuation of English, you will be in some confusion as to what belongs to whom.

In general, the apostrophe means one of two things.

1. There is a missing letter where it is. For example, in “don’t” there is a missing “o”; in “it’s” there is a missing “i”: each of these is a one-word contraction commonly used to represent two words. “Don’t” means “do not,” and “it’s” means “it is.”
2. Something belongs to someone. For example, “Jane’s dog” means the dog belongs to Jane. “Fred’s house” means the house belongs to Fred (or at least that he lives in it). Apostrophe-S is used to indicate possession.

Unfortunately, number 2 above presents a problem when a thing belongs to a thing. If we want to say, “The box has its label now,” shouldn’t we use “it’s” to show possession? The answer is most emphatically no, we should not. “It’s” means “it is.” It never means “belonging to it.”

And here I present you with a writerly secret about apostrophes: if the reader sees none where there should be one, she will imagine you’ve dropped it by accident, and that the result is a typographical error (a “tyop”) rather than an indication of ignorance.

But if she sees an apostrophe where there should be none, she is unlikely to imagine that you added it by accident. Even if in this one case you really did hit that key without noticing, your reader is going to assume that you did it deliberately, in ignorance. It is a sad truth about readers. As a result, you’re much safer if you follow the apostrophe rule: when in doubt, leave it out.

Phrase-Matching

A participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject.

Luckily this rather daunting injunction is simpler than it sounds. An example from Strunk’s The Elements of Style:

Walking slowly down the road, he saw a woman accompanied by two children.

The word walking refers to the subject of the sentence, not to the woman. If the writer wishes to make it refer to the woman, he must recast the sentence.

He saw a woman, accompanied by two children, walking slowly down the road.

Strunk considers this example adequate, and perhaps it is. Even without an understanding of “participial phrases” and “grammatical subjects,” you should be able with moderate effort to extend this logic to other, similar sentences.

The next rule contains even more daunting terms:

Participial phrases preceded by a conjunction or by a preposition, nouns in apposition, adjectives, and adjective phrases come under the same rule if they begin the sentence.

If you don’t know what those terms mean, you should still be able to see by example what is meant.

Wrong: On arriving in Chicago, his friends met him at the station.
Better: On arriving in Chicago, he was met at the station by his friends.

Wrong: A writer of popular self-help books, they hired her to write their company manual.
Better: A writer of popular self-help books, she was hired to write the company manual.

Wrong: Inexperienced as he was, it sounded easy to write a book.
Better: Inexperienced as he was, he thought writing a book would be easy.

Sentences that violate these rules are often ludicrous:

Being weather-damaged and badly infested with termites, I was able to buy the house at quite a low price.

Wondering which way to turn, a bird soiled my hat.

As a writer of popular romances, his computer was quite fast.

Spelling

If your word processor has a spell-checker, use it. Be aware, however, that spell-checkers can only determine whether words are spelled correctly. They cannot determine whether the word in question is the one wanted. For example, had I written “they cannot determine weather the word … is the one wanted,” a spell-checker would not have flagged it because, although “weather” was quite the wrong word, it was spelled correctly.

It is therefore necessary not only to spell-check by hand, but also to know more than your computer does about which word you wanted. A hardcopy dictionary is essential. If you know there are other words that sound like the one you used, it’s a good idea to look them up, to make sure you selected the right one.

Did you say “they’re” or “there” when you meant “their”? What about two, too, and to–have you used the right one? Do you know how to decide which of “you’re” and “your” and “yore” you want? Depending on your regional accent, the words within these groups may sound identical. Have you really selected the correct one? Do you know how to tell?

A dictionary will help in every case. If you look up the word you selected and the meaning turns out to be quite different from what you intended, look up similar-sounding words until you find the one you wanted. You may be surprised how many words are commonly used incorrectly or mistaken for each other in speech.

Identifying Your Pronouns

Fred went to his brother’s house to get his hat.

Whose hat is that? Can you tell from that sentence? I can’t: the hat could belong to either Fred or his brother, or even to someone else entirely. All we know is that it belongs to someone male.

Sometimes it feels awkward to identify a pronoun. In the above example neither “Fred went to his brother’s house to get Fred’s hat” nor “Fred went to his brother’s house to get his brother’s hat” sounds quite as satisfactory as the original. Yet you do want your reader to know just whose hat it is; otherwise she may fuss about it so much she doesn’t enjoy the rest of your story. Readers are like that.

The solution is to recast the sentence:

Fred went to his brother’s house to get the hat he left there the previous day.

This is still mildly ambiguous, but will be understood in context. The probability that it is Fred’s hat is increased.

Or if the hat belongs to the brother, you could say,

Fred went to his brother’s house to borrow a hat for the party.

It could be that Fred’s brother keeps a houseful of hats belonging to persons we have not met, but very likely he does not, and the hat in question actually belongs to him.

This sort of thing is important to the reader. If she is left in doubt as to whose a hat is, she will all too often keep worrying the problem long after a more rational being might have gone on to something else. What’s worse, she’ll bring it up again and again at the most inopportune moments, reminding anyone who’ll listen that she was left in doubt in the middle of your book (she may make it sound as bad as having been left without water in the middle of a desert) as to the ownership of a hat.

Far better simply to tell her at the first mention of it that the hat is Fred’s, or you may never hear the end of it. Nobody wants to spend her entire literary career worrying about Fred’s hat.

Being Consistent

Now that we have settled this pesky matter of the hat I feel comfortable mentioning that although the reader often seems to have only the frailest grasp of what’s going on and therefore needs every clue possible to stay abreast of the fictional situation, it is unwise to assume that he or she will overlook the smallest discrepancy in your logic.

Perhaps you think that the person who could not tell that was Fred’s hat you were talking about will not notice that Fred lived on Elm Street at the beginning of your novel and yet goes home to Ellis Street at the end with never a change of address mentioned in between. Not so. Readers will notice the oddest things.

If your protagonist puts down her blaster on page one, walks away from it, and yet has it handy in her holster to shoot another villain on page three, your reader will be testy about it.

If your protagonist has blue eyes and yellow hair on page forty-two, but has become a brown-eyed brunette by page ninety-eight, your reader will very likely be vexed.

There are a great many hazards in the path of a beginning writer that I have not even mentioned, and seemingly endless skills you will need to acquire. And when you have mastered them all, you will be left alone with that shockingly dense and perversely astute creature called “the reader,” who cannot be trusted to divine the ownership of a hat but will relentlessly examine your every apostrophe for its purpose, meaning, and needfulness.

That creature is the one to whom you are telling your stories. That is your audience, and it can be appeased only with the greatest of care and attention to detail. It will notice when you change tenses in mid-sentence. It will snarl when you change points of view without warning or explanation. It will show its teeth when you confuse it, and it will be easily confused … except when you want it confused so it won’t notice prestidigitation. Then it will remain steadfastly alert and attentive despite your best efforts to bludgeon it into insensibility.

That is the nature of the beast. Fortunately it is willing, even eager, to be amused. If you have done your research, mastered the tools of your trade, exercised all the skill at your command, and been consistent in your choices, you may please it.

Tags: beginners, Melisa Michaels, writing
Posted in News | Comments Off

The Basics

Tuesday, January 4th, 2005

As a writter, these sentences look odd to me.
This essay will be of interest to many writer’s and literary type’s.
I use to think things like this were a waist of time if you just want to write fiction.
Now I know that writers half to know there basics.

If you cannot find at least two errors in each of the above lines, this article is for you.

Those lines should read:

As a writer, I find that these sentences look odd.
This article will be of interest to many writers and literary types.
I used to think things like this were a waste of time if you just want to write fiction.
Now I know that writers have to know their basics.

We aren’t concerned here with flowing prose, glowing phrases, or any stylistic questions; before you worry about those things you need to know how to spell the words you want, how to choose from among similar words with different meanings, how to punctuate, and how to put the parts of a sentence together in such a way that the result makes sense.

Without this basic knowledge, not only will you have difficulty communicating, but you may produce unintentionally hilarious results. There are reasons for all the seemingly arbitrary rules of grammar and punctuation. Some of them can be dismissed once you know what they are; others cannot. To communicate what you really mean, you must know which rules can be safely broken; and to know that, you must know the rules.

The easiest way to learn them is (this is the good part) by reading the sort of fiction you want to write. But you have to (this is the hard part) pay attention to what you read. For best results you need to read a wide range of works by a number of authors, carefully noticing their spelling, punctuation, and grammar. And you need some way of determining which one is right when you find two or more of them in opposition on a given usage.

A copy of Strunk’s The Elements of Style, read carefully and its lessons taken to heart, will help you avoid the most common errors. Between that and a few dozen of your favorite novels you’ll have the beginning of a good education in accepted usage. Later you may choose to disagree with Strunk on certain points: but until you understand what he instructs and why, any deviation from his rules stands a good chance of getting you in trouble.

There are, of course, other works on usage and style that you might choose instead of Strunk. I suggest this one because it is not only available free on the web, but very small and inexpensive in paperback form, relatively easy to find, and as uncontroversial as an authoritative work on a sometimes ambiguous topic can be.

As you may already know, even the experts don’t agree on some usages. This may sound as though it provides a ready excuse for any, er, let us say original usages you may introduce in your prose, but it does not. You will realize when you’ve learned the rules yourself that the astute reader can tell the difference between rules broken by choice and those broken in ignorance. The former sort may be innovative, imaginative, even brilliant, or only a careful rendition of some common oral tradition. The latter sort will seldom be anything but illiterate or amusing (or both).

Even to successfully render the careless speech of the streets into printed words that will “sound” to the eye the way the oral version would sound to the ear, the author must know precisely what rules are used and what rules are broken.

This is not to say that all this knowledge must be available on a conscious level, that you must memorize parts of speech and rules of usage and punctuation as children used to do in grade school. That might or might not be valuable. What is invaluable, possibly indispensible, is that you should pay attention to these matters, know what you’re doing, and deviate from the accepted norm only by intention.

If the only way you can be certain of that is by learning remedial English by rote, then do so. If you already have a sufficient understanding of the parts of speech (whether or not you know them by name) that you can grasp the purpose of the rules laid down in Strunk, then you probably have no need of remedial English.

In any case and no matter what you wish to achieve with your use of words, language is your only real tool as a writer. You would not expect to successfully construct a wooden house without first learning how to use hammers, nails, saws, screws, and other woodworking tools (and quite probably practicing with them on smaller projects before embarking on the house). You should not expect to successfully construct a work of fiction without first learning the written language that will be your tool.

Of course, we all speak at least one language, and it is perhaps not amazing that so many people imagine that qualifies them to write in their native tongue. After all, they’ve been speaking it since babyhood. They are surely intimate with it by now.

What this does not take into account is the many differences between a spoken and a written language. You have no need, for example, to understand spelling and the rules of punctuation in order to accomplish oral communication. When you say, “the bare bear threw the ball through the wall,” the person to whom you say it will very probably be surprised, but she should have no trouble understanding your meaning.

If you were to write, “the bear bare through the ball threw the wall,” however, your reader would have to do strong mental contortions to get any sense out of it at all. Perhaps you can see from this alone that intimacy with a spoken language is not sufficient for the writer.

Punctuation presents some of the same problems. In speech you know when to hesitate for a comma and when to come to a full stop for a period. You’ve no need to know when spoken words should contain an apostrophe and when not. The person to whom you’re speaking will determine your meaning from context.

If, however, you, don’t. Know where’ to put; punc’tuation, in your” writing: you’ll run into some serious difficulties right quickly; and while many’s the writer who can’t spell worth a darn, we almost all of us know that “spelling” is not spelled “speling” and that “writer” is not spelled “writter.” I am dismayed to have to tell you that a great many hopeful writers do not. Very likely they are able to pronounce these words correctly and so do not, in their everyday activities, reveal their illiteracy: but they are probably not competent to write marketable prose. They have not acquired even a cursory familiarity with their tools.

Written language is the tool of the trade. With skilled use of it you can work wonders, build universes, create gods if you like, and entertain thousands. Without sufficient understanding to enable skill, you will more likely amuse by accident than by design.

Melisa Michaels is the author of the science fiction novels Skirmish, First Battle, Last War, Pirate Prince, Floater Factor, and Far Harbor, the fantasy novel Cold Iron,and the mystery novel Through the Eyes of the Dead.

Tags: beginners, Melisa Michaels, writing
Posted in Advice for New Writers, Information Center, Tips for Beginners | Comments Off

How Do I Learn to Write?

Tuesday, January 4th, 2005

Sentence-by-sentence writing improvement:

• Line by Line: How to Edit Your Own Writing, Claire Kehrwald Cook,Houghton Mifflin
• A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, William Fowler, Oxford Univ. Press
• The Careful Writer, Theodore M. Bernstein, Atheneum
• The Practical Stylist, Sheridan Baker, Harper & Row
• The Transitive Vampire: A Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed, Karen Elizabeth Gordon, Times Books (also The Well-Tempered Sentence by her)
• The Elements of Style, Strunk & White

Writing better fiction:

• Beginnings, Middles, and Ends, Nancy Kress, Writer’s Digest Books
• Creating Short Fiction, Damon Knight, St. Martin’s
• On Becoming a Novelist, John Gardner, Harper & Row
• The Art of Creative Writing, Lajos Egri (may be OOP)
• Techniques of the Selling Writer, Dwight V. Swain
• Science Fiction Writers Workshop I: An Introduction to Fiction Mechanics, Barry B. Longyear
• How to Write a Damn Good Novel II,James N. Frey. St. Martins 1994, ISBN 0-312-10478-2
• Characters and Viewpoint, Orson Scott Card

Writing better speculative fiction:

• The Craft of Science Fiction, Reginald Bretnor
• Those Who Can, ed. Robin Scott Wilson (recently reprinted)
• Paragons, ed. Robin Scott Wilson
• How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, Orson Scott Card, Writer’s Digest Books
• Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy, editors of Analog and Asimov’s
• Aliens and Alien Societies, ed. Ben Bova, Writer’s Digest Books
• Creating the Heavens, Melissa Scott, Heinemann

Style manuals (cover grammar, punctuation, usage, treatment of names and terms, editing stages, book production):

• The Chicago Manual of Style, University of Chicago
• Words into Type, Prentice Hall
• A Manual of Style (U.S. Govt Printing Office), Gramercy
• The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage

Tags: bibliography, Terry McGarry, writer, writing
Posted in Advice for New Writers, Information Center | Comments Off

Perseverance, Publishing and the Urge to Write

Tuesday, January 4th, 2005

Written by James Van Pelt

Discouraging news about the publishing business has pummeled the writing community lately. Beside the frightening specter of Norman Spinrad’s misadventures with his publisher, and the ongoing fracas with Bantam over the Star Wars novel contracts, other high profile harbingers of trouble for veteran and novice writers lurk on the horizon.  Spider Robinson, for example, has posted an open letter about his thoughts on publishing, and none of his thoughts sound hopeful. An eleven-year SFWA veteran recently vented his frustrations with novel publishers in a resignation letter to the SFWA Forum. Paula Guran of Dark Echo also lately bemoaned the state of the publishing industry in her e-mail newsletter.

For many, particularly those who earn a living or hope to in this business, things have never looked bleaker, and appearance mirrors reality well in this case. More people it seems are writing science fiction, fantasy and horror than ever, and fewer places accept the work. The cutbacks in “mid-list” authors in the book publishing market, and the disappearance of major short story markets are well documented.

Because of these trends, numerous authors and want-to-be authors are despairing. Comments like, “You have to know someone to be published,” or “The editors only print their friends’ work,” are common. A former student called me last week, completely down in the mouth about her writing. She said, “I’ve been working for years and seen no success at all, just one rejection after another. I think I ought to quit.”

I told her that if publishing was the reason she was writing, then maybe she should quit, but if publishing was the main reason she was writing, then she’d probably never be published anyway. Publishing is the result of perseverance, luck and talent, and it should be almost totally removed from the urge to write.

It’s true that the odds against placing a manuscript have never been higher. Scott Edelman at Science Fiction Age reports that he reads 1,400 to 1,600 stories every two months to choose the six or seven stories for print. Numbers are higher at Asimov’s, Analog and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Unagented novels at the major publishing houses are also coming in record numbers. An acquiring editor at one of the major houses told a kaffeeklatsch group at this year’s WorldCon that to handle the crunch of manuscripts she once rejected 26 novels in 25 minutes. Literary agent Donald Maass reported that he, like many other agents, is receiving hundreds or queries and manuscripts. So from a numbers stand point, the odds look bad.

Fortunately, manuscripts are not chosen from a numbers stand point. They aren’t plucked randomly from the pile like some kind of literary lottery; they are evaluated (as hard as it is to believe that a novel could be evaluated in less than a minute).

Why this is good news is that rejecting 90% or more of the work is easy. Of the thousands of manuscripts, some significant percentage are by people who are sending in their first story or novel (or by people who don’t seek feedback on their writing, so that everything they write is essentially their first work). When they are rejected, they quit. Writing, after all, is a lonely sport that requires a certain mix of determination/vision/anti-social tendencies to continue. Not many people can sustain the effort in the face of rejection. My guess is that if someone kept a data base of all the authors who submitted stories, a surprising proportion would only appear on the data base once.

Then another significant percentage of manuscripts are obviously poorly written. They betray themselves in the first couple of sentences and require no more reading. I edited The California Quarterly, a literary magazine, for two years, and most manuscripts revealed their ineptitude on the first page. Writing skills don’t come easily to most, and even massive improvement won’t raise these writers to publishable standards.

Those two groups, the first-timers and the poor writers, make up the bulk of the slush pile. After that are the earnest middle-of-the-road writers whose skills are adequate (but not great), who don’t have interesting stories to tell, or they haven’t learned how to make the story interesting.

So, out of a thousand manuscripts, not many remain that are worth looking at. Certainly fewer than one-hundred.

More good news is that, for the serious writer with a modicum of talent, getting into the top 10% of the stories in the slush pile isn’t that difficult. All that is required is perseverance and the capacity to learn; two qualities that most people lack. The persevering writer doesn’t give up. He/she keeps producing new work and submitting the old. George Scithers once rejected a story of mine with this helpful advice: “I hope while you were waiting to hear from us on this story that you were working on your next.” Fortunately, I was.

Connie Willis says that at one point before she’d published her first story, she had eight manuscripts in the mail to different markets. One day she checked her post office box, and in it was a slip telling her to pick up her mail from the postmaster. Instead of a package or something pleasant, however, the postmaster handed her rejections on all eight stories. Crushed, she considered quitting, but because she’d made it a habit to address envelopes to the next market for each story, she decided to slip the rejected work into the new envelopes and send them off. Eventually, she says, all eight works found publishing homes.

I have never sold a story to the first market that saw it. However, last year I sold a story that had been bounced thirty-one times previously.

Writing publishable work also requires the capacity to learn and to improve writing skills. Too many unpublished writers take their old skills to a new story, figuring that their last rejection was the result of just telling the wrong story. What would serve them better, and move them closer to publication, would be to work on their skills. What ought to be different on their next writing project is not the topic but their ability to accomplish the task. Writers who are dedicated to improvement study successful writers, seek feedback on their own work, and look to make definite changes in their style.

Perseverance and growth will pull a writer into the top 10% quickly. As far as publishing goes, however, the real challenge and the hard pull is to get into the top one-half percent. But the slush pile is thinner than it looks.

I told my dejected student that if publishing was the main reason she was writing, than she’d probably never be published. Writing her stories and marketing her work should be separate hobbies. Getting one too entwined with the other will surely damage both. When she started writing it was because she felt she had stories to tell. Her hope was to bring her passion, vision and voice to the stuff of her imagination and the materials of the world so that she could explain herself to herself and others. If she is ever to have a chance of being a published writer, she needs to be a writer who writes even if there is no hope of every being published because the act of writing is more important than the fate of the writing.

As far as marketing the work afterwards, it’s a distinct and different activity. I talked to a writer from the south-west who told me that she’s on Greenberg’s short list for writers who are invited to submit work to his anthologies, and her stories have appeared in several of them. She got that connection through an older pro who was a friend of hers. She also told me, however, that she was envious of me because she’s never made an “over the transom” sale to a magazine. At the same time I was pumping her for information on anthologies, she was trying to discover if I had placed work in magazines through connections or some sort of secret backdoor. She told me that she had concluded (just to make herself feel better) that a previously unpublished writer had NO chance of getting into those magazines, since all the sales were to friends of the editors.

I had to tell her I had no connections. I just write them and mail them. The news made her look somber.

And I don’t have any connections, really. I have shaken hands with editors at conventions. I once stood in a small group that was talking to Gordon Van Gelder. I’m one of the faceless hundreds who shake hands and stand in groups.

So, I’m back to my starting position on these marketing matters, which I think philosophically, motivationally and artistically is the place to be. I write the best damn stuff I can, tell the stories I want to read, and if they never sell, stay happy with what I have done.

I heard an anecdote once attributed to Stephen King. Someone asked him what the secret to writing success was, and he said that it was easy. “You just need to be in the right place at the right time. Since none of us can know when the right time will be, our job is to get to the right place and stay there.”

I’ve always liked that quote.

Someone is getting published everyday. Even in the novel industry, there are hundreds of authors. When I walk through the genre section at Barnes and Nobel, it is forty feet long and six feet high. New titles rotate through constantly. If one disregards media tie-ins (and why would one?), there’s still an impressive number of new books.

The magazine market is somewhat analogous. Despite some magazines’ disappearance, there are still numerous markets. Chris Holliday’s on-line market list shows twenty professional and twenty-seven semi-professional magazines. Although the competition is fierce, editors must find new work. Someone will write the stories that the editors find.

Selling a work presents incredible challenges, but publishing or not publishing should have nothing to do with the impetus of the stories, at least for us who are not making a living at it. In fact because publishing is so unlikely, it gives me the freedom to write anything I please. I recently sold a story to Realms of Fantasy that was a writing experiment on my part. I didn’t think it was commercial at all, but I liked writing it.

I sent it out because I have this second hobby, submitting the work. Marketing feels exactly like fishing to me. Most of the time, nothing happens, and I begin to believe there are no fish in those enticing holes I’m tossing my lure into. Then, every great while, I get a strike. When I took education classes they called that occasional hit, “sporadic reinforcement.” Turns out that it’s the strongest motivator, and it sounds like fishing to me.

The odds don’t stop me from marketing. I like the hobby. I even think some of my stuff is good enough to find a market, so I keep trying. On the off chance that meeting someone at a convention might help, I go to those too. Maybe some day a tired editor will pick up one of my manuscripts and think, “Oh, yeah. Van Pelt. He’s that pleasant fellow I met in San Antonio,” and at least be in a charitable frame of mind as he reads my story.

But I’m not betting on it.

In the meantime, I have a story that’s been bugging me. I really want to explore it, play with it, discover what it has to teach me and what it has to say to others. I think I’ll go to work on that hummer right now and make it sing.

Copyright © 1998 James Van Pelt. Reproduction and distribution specifically prohibited. All rights reserved. First published at SF Central. Reprinted here with the author’s permission.

Tags: Intermediate, James Van Pelt, van pelt, writing
Posted in Information Center, Keeping At It, The Craft of Writing, Writing Technique | Comments Off

Manuscript Format

Tuesday, January 4th, 2005

Written by Chuck Rothman

Over the years, publishers have developed certain standards to make their jobs easier. Manuscript format is one of them, and something that often creates some heated discussion in various newsgroups. There are several points that you need to remember:

1. The standards are there for a reason. They are not arbitrary and are generally set up to make certain jobs easier.
2. It’s not your job to design the manuscript. You supply the words; the publisher supplies the format.
3. You don’t have to stick to the format except in the final version. If you prefer something else in your drafts, fine. It’s simple to change the font once you’re printing out the final version.
4. The wrong format or font won’t destroy your chances; it may not even hurt. It a question of whether you’re willing to take the chance that you’re writing is good enough to overcome the difficulties you’ll cause by not doing things properly.
5. As a personal aside, I’ve noticed the people who fight hardest against the standard format usually end up using Times Roman instead — which, on most computers, is the default font that comes up automatically. Hard to believe they’ve put much thought into their choice.

That stated, here are the rules for standard format:

• Manuscripts must be typed, double-spaced, on one side of the paper, with wide enough margins (min. 1-in.) for the editor to make notations.
• Fonts (and here’s where the fights occur): The preference is for monospaced fonts — fonts where all letters are the same width. The most commonly used monospaced font is Courier; the most commonly preferred size is 12 points (also called 10 pitch — 10 characters to the inch). This is a hangover from the days before computers, when most typewriters used what was known as “Pica” type — essentially 12 point Courier. It is also acceptable to use a 10-point monospaced font like Prestige Elite — again, a hangover from typewriter days, when you could buy “Elite” typewriters that used 10-point (12 pitch– I know, it’s confusing) Prestige. The actual font is less important (as long as it’s large and dark enough) as the fact that it must be monospaced; proportional fonts screw up word counts.
• No fancy formatting within the manuscript. Indent each paragraph five spaces (1/2 in.). Indicate italics by underlining (do not use italics; they are easily missed). Indicate boldface by drawing a wavy line beneath the text and writing “bf” in a circle in the margin. Do not hyphenate words (the typesetter will include the hyphen so the word might read “Schenec-tady”). Do not right justify the text (you may like it, but it’s harder to read — especially on long paragraphs — and it messes up word counts).
• Indicate a blank line by placing a # in the center of the line. The # indicates space to a typesetter.
• At the top of the first page, type your name (the one you want them to write the checks out to) and address at the upper left corner. Type the word count at the upper right corner Skip down to the middle of the page. Type the title of the story, centered (optionally: ALL CAPS). Go down a line. Type “by Your Name” (if you want to use a pen name, type it here; the check will be sent to the name at the upper left). Go down another line and begin the story.
• Don’t put on a Copyright notice. It’s unnecessary. You also don’t have to indicate the rights offered. Most magazines tell you what they’re buying; if you don’t like it, don’t submit to them. Don’t write “Approximately” by the word count. Editors know the word count is approximate.
• On each additional page, put your last name and the page number in the upper right corner: Name/2
  You can also include a keyword from the title of the story: Name/Keyword/2, but this is optional — it’s rare that you have two manuscripts in a position when they can be mixed up, and if at the last minute you decide to retitle your novel, you only have to change the title page instead of printing out the entire thing with the correct keyword.
• At the end of the story, center the word “end”.

Tags: Chuck Rothman, manuscript, Rothman, writing
Posted in Advice for New Writers, Information Center, Manuscript Formatting, The Craft of Writing | Comments Off

What Is a Word?

Tuesday, January 4th, 2005

Written by Chuck Rothman

When you submit a story, you’re expected to include a count of words.

Now, this sounds simple. Press the “Word Count” button on your word processor and there it is. Unfortunately, this count is likely to be wrong.

Why? It all depends on your definition of “word.”

To a computer, a word is anything with space around it. “To a tee” is three words. “Antidisestablishmentarianism” is one. Simple. Too simple.

Because, in publishing, you are most concerned with space: the space a story or article will take up when published. And the computer method is inaccurate. Some words are long, some words are short. So, years ago, publishers set up a standard definition: a word is six characters (including spaces).

Now the length of the word didn’t matter. You could determine the length of a story without worrying about the length of the words in it. “Antidisestablishmentarianism” is just short of five words. “To a tee” is two and a third. You get more accurate counts.

But there’s another factor. Consider this exchange of dialog:

"I'm pregnant," he said.
"What?"

A computer would call this five words. A magazine editor would count it as 25.

Why? Because the two-line exchange takes up as much vertical space as two full lines of text. An editor has to have some way to account for short paragraphs.

So, years ago, a standard method was developed to count words in a story:

1. Count the number of characters in an average, mid-paragraph line (BTW, this all assumes a monospaced font. If you’re using a proportional font, the number of characters can vary immensely, throwing off the numbers and word count).
2. Divide by six. This is the number of words per line.
3. Count the number of lines on a page. (This includes any # for blank lines.)
4. Multiply #2 by #3 to get the number of words per page.
5. Multiply by the number of full pages (plus any fractional pages), to get the total number of words.
6. Round the number to the nearest hundred. Authors tend to round up; editors round down. This is the number you put on the front page of the manuscript.

There’s a second reason to use this other than making it easier for editors: this method usually gives higher word counts (My count is generally about 20% higher than the computer’s). Higher word counts mean higher payments. It’s perfectly OK with the editors to use this method, so you might as well take advantage.

Tags: Chuck Rothman, manuscript, Rothman, word count, writing
Posted in Advice for New Writers, Information Center, Keeping At It, Manuscript Formatting, The Craft of Writing | Comments Off

• « Older Entries