It’s the time of year when people are contemplating submissions to workshops like Clarion, Clarion West, Odyssey, Taos Toolbox, and a myriad of others. Here’s seven tips to help with yours.
Don’t put it off till the last minute. I used to do this sort of thing too, in school, because it was always so satisfactory to manage to pull a good grade out of your butt. But one thing I’ve learned is that time spent planning pays off, even if it’s just taking the time to get a little bit done or outlined each day.
Read it aloud before you send it off. I can’t begin to say how helpful this is when catching typos and other glitches that make your submission seem less than professional.
Color between the lines this time. Follow the directions and don’t send a piece that’s longer than the guidelines say.
Get someone else to read it. If only for your own piece of mind. Have them read the copy you’re sending – that way if you’re sending hard copy, they’ll catch that missing page that somehow didn’t get collated.
Pick something interesting. A piece that shows you at your most adventurous and best, a piece that shows you’re willing to take risks.
Play to your strengths. If you do killer dialogue, choose a piece that shows that.
Pay attention to the statement of purpose and say who YOU are, not what you think the readers want to hear.
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
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Class Excerpt: On Story Basics and Ways into Stories
Freytag’s pyramidI’m finishing up the Moving from Idea to Draft class, or rather finishing up the writing phase and still need to shoot a couple dozen little videos, ugh. But I wanted to share this from the introduction to the class because I thought it might be useful for some people plus maybe tantalize a few into trying one of my on-demand or live classes.
I begin with some basics of story mechanics. Quite probably much of it will be familiar — feel free to skim if you feel like you’ve heard all of this before.
A basic part of a story is its arc. The arc, graphed out, is a roughly slanted triangle, with the slope on the lefthand side usually significantly longer. I’ve provided a diagram of it, also called Freytag’s pyramid, or sometimes his triangle.
The X axis of that diagram is story tension; the Y axis is the story over time. As the storyline progresses, while there may be momentary lulls or dips in tension, the movement is upward. Tension is increased by things like complications, reversals, and raising the stakes.
But more than that, something in the story must change. The problem must be resolved in some fashion, even if it’s only to show that there is no resolution. The change provides the resolution; without it, we have only a scene or static moment, which is generally an unsatisfying thing for a reader. Often (I might go so far as to say usually) there are two changes, an internal one inside the protagonist and the external one taking place around the protagonist.
The change can, in some circumstances, take place outside the story by occurring in the reader’s understanding of the story. What seems innocent (or vile) at the outset turns out to be the opposite. This sort of subtle change can be beautiful when it works. If you look at Rachel Swirsky’s “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love“ for example, you can see this sort of shift at work as we learn more about the circumstances behind the story and move from light-hearted to deeply sad in a story whose emotional core is — for me at least — the power of fantasy as a temporary escape, but only a temporary one. This sort of change, taken as far as it can go, is a twist ending and is best suited to flash fiction, but it can and does work at greater length, as with Ian Banks’ The Wasp Factory (I don’t want to spoil the ending, but urge you to find the book and read it if you haven’t.)
Do you need to understand what will change before you begin to write the story? No. But some story origins will have signs and clues leading to the change, while others will require you step back and consider it in various ways before moving on.
There are multiple forms in which an idea for a story can present itself to a writer. What I’ve done is try to present each, along with examples drawn from my own and other authors’ writings, with some tips and tricks for expanding them into a complete story.
Ways into a story are separated into structures, fragments, and directives. I’ve split them into these groups for the purpose of talking about them more easily, but each group has similarities of approach and possible issues that may make it useful to, after finishing an overall group, spend some time thinking about the material and trying to apply it to one or more stories before moving on.
Structures include plot, technique, stealing from other writers, culturally determined structure, and conceits/devices. These are the paint-by-numbers kits of the writing world, or at least they are ways to start a story that give you a great deal to work with.
Fragments may yield considerably less information. They include characters, dialogue, setting, scene, beginning, ending, title, images, or objects.
Directives give you little information but are more about the form in which you will shape the story: its flavor or flair, if you will. They include narrators, point of view, historical moments, concepts/issues, emotion, imitation or tribute, theme anthology, research, genre, and collaboration.
No matter what your starting point, at some point in the process of writing, you will need to think about the emotional core of your story, its heart. You can think of this as the “message” of the story overall, what it (not you) is trying to say about the art of being a self-aware, autonomous creature. That can vary, but examples are:
Life is complicated
You can’t always get what you want (but if you try real hard you can get what you need.)
It’s important not to lie (or insert the ethic of your choice).
Economics affects circumstances.
Karma is a bitch.
Etc.
You may not know this core going into the story, you may not know it in the middle of the writing or even at the very end. But before the story can be called finished, you need to figure it out.
The point at which you figure it out will affect your writing process. You may even use it as your starting point. I can only think of one time I’ve done this, which was the story “Elsewhere, Within, Elsewhen”, which I wrote for the anthology Beyond the Sun. I had been thinking about the idea that people accumulated grudges and slights and that sometimes those got in the way of communication and even healthy living. I took that idea and literalized the metaphor by creating creatures who consisted of such layers and turned out to have entirely different entities at their heart.
The point at which you realize the emotional core is the point at which it will begin helping you organize the story. It often happens to me that I do not reach the stage at which I think about this until after the first draft is done. In that case, this is part of the rewrite process, and involves my going back and reading the story in order to try to figure this out.
These are often the stories that are the most self-revelatory, because the moment we as author understand the message of a story, we begin constructing plausible deniability. Stories that are raw and full of emotion are rarely understood until after the fact of their construction, in my experience, unless you are deliberately sitting down to write about a painful experience in order to process and/or explore it.
Once you know the heart of a story, though, you know what to remove or add, because you can tell what’s getting in the way of the heart of things, and where it is not getting communicated sufficiently clearly.
A crucial point about this is that sometimes it can take time, and it’s very hard to force it. Usually you should let it steep a while. It’s my belief that your unconscious mind takes some time to turn it around and consider it from a few angles before delivering up something worthwhile. You can force it through focused timed writings, sitting down and just writing within constraints, but you will do a lot of thrashing around creating superfluous verbiage that you cannot use in the final version of the story.
Cat in the San Juan Islands. Photo by Wayne Rambo.In 2009, Genevieve Valentine did this interview for the press kit included with my collection. I’ve posted it here for posterity.
Genevieve Valentine: Though your stories take place in different worlds and range from the comic to the tragic, a common theme is the intrusion of the fantastic into the everyday (for certain values of “everyday”); do you find it more satisfying, as a reader, when there is conflict between worlds, or cooperation?
Cat Rambo: Well – story inevitably comes about as a result of conflict. Where there is only cooperation, as nice as it sounds, stories become a lot subtler and dreamier and sometimes easy to miss.
To me one of the inevitable things about the intrusion of the fantastic is that it makes us rethink the everyday in a way that may provoke a similar conflict in our souls. The very best stories sock us in the gut and leave us gasping with realization that we almost missed a cathartic moment.
GV: The workshopping process seems close to your heart; in what ways do you feel it’s shaped you as a writer and as a reader? What is your advice for writers who want to find, our found, a writers’ group?
CR: Curiously, I’ve found myself listening less and less to the line by line comments and more to the broad-scale, big-picture level stuff. If I can infuriate my friend Derek Zumsteg, I know I’ve gone far.
It’s possible to get too carried away with workshopping, to end up pulled in too many directions by too many voices. As far as founding a group goes – make sure everyone is at a comparable level, that people communicate with trust and respect, and that you establish the ground rules early on.
GV: Your stories are steeped in folklore, but your retellings seem built on the barest bones of the original tale. What advice would you give for writers who want to make an old fairy tale new again?
CR: When I was a kid, I was working with a somewhat limited library. I ran out of fiction to read, in fact, and they wouldn’t let kids 13 or below check out books from the adult stacks. So I spent a few months one summer working my way through the fairy tale and folklore section, which is where all the bones of fairytales that come glimmering through in my stories, such as “Heart in a Box” or “A Key Decides Its Destiny”, grow from.
It’s hard to do anything new with fairytales anymore because the top layer has been mined so thoroughly. If I’d seen the wealth of mermaid stories that I’ve seen since taking on reading for Fantasy Magazine, I don’t know that I would have been arrogant enough to try a new take on the Little Mermaid or Dick Wellington’s Cat (The Dead Girl’s Wedding March).
GV: What was the particular fact or piece of trivia that determined your course in writing “The Towering Monarch of His Race”?
CR: I was writing an encyclopedia entry on the acquisition of Jumbo the elephant by P.T. Barnum and the story’s details were too good not to go into a story. They are, for the most part, true — Jumbo did die as a result of a collision with a train and it’s true that when Barnum was told that Jumbo had laid down and refused to board the ship to America, he said every day the elephant spent lying down was priceless in terms of publicity. The elephant did refuse to go aboard until his keeper coaxed him onto it, and all of England mourned the elephant’s departure.
GV: Animals make frequent appearances in your stories; what are the challenges of writing around (and sometimes, writing as) an animal?
CR: Well, I have never found this quite as radical an act as some readers seem to have thought it. I know I caught some flak about writing from an elephant’s pov part of the time in The Towering Monarch of His Race, but I didn’t think it too over the top. I researched it and I spent time thinking about what an elephant would notice.
GV: So, what’s your beef with eagles?
CR: I like eagles! I see both golden and bald eagles almost every morning when I go to get my coffee – we have a tree down near the water that they’re nesting in.
GV: What’s something you feel people overlook in your writing?
CR: The muscular nature of my sentences, which I try to pare down as much as possible.
GV: What about your writing makes you roll your eyes sometimes?
CR: Often I get carried away with the intense beauty of my prose.
GV: As an [Overlord for Armageddon, you came to the table well aware of the potential and the peril of an online identity. What online platforms have been of most benefit to you as a writer? What should new writers avoid?
CR: I was, and still am, an Overlord for Armageddon, which is a game I’ve worked with for almost two decades now. I have been a public figure in the game for most of that time, and find being a writer/editor not much different. People are generally kind and patient if you are patient and kind with them, but you should also not be a pushover.
Computers are TERRIBLE TIME SUCKS but sort of unavoidable. Avoid committing too much of your time to an online presence – it does you no good if you don’t have some actual writing to sell.
GV: You’re doing a DIY promotional tour for Eyes Like”¦. In an age where publishing is getting scaled back, writers are becoming their own best publicists. What have you discovered about self-promotion while preparing for this tour? What are you looking forward to? What’s the number one mistake you’re afraid of making?
CR: That it’s incredibly hard, tedious work. I’ve been going through my mail compiling a list of reviewers and bloggers, for example, that I want to make sure get an ARC (advance reading copy of the book). I’m preparing for a 31 day virtual blog tour, as well as a month on the road where I’ll be reading at the KGB bar in NYC as well as venues in Philadelphia, Indiana, Kansas, Colorado, Salt Lake City, and Seattle.
In this I’ve been happy to have my retired mother compiling a lot of the info as well as my incredibly talented friend Kris doing a lot of the graphic work.
I am worried about pushing too hard with this book and alienating people, but at the same time, I’m learning that unless you ask, you can’t find out, sometimes.
GV: The most frustrating part of the writing process is _________.
CR: The slowness. I can’t stand markets that take 6+ months to reply. I think that’s RIDICULOUS. At Fantasy we turn stuff around within a week tops, and that’s processing 400-500 fiction pieces a month. :p
GV: This can be solved by _________ and liberal applications of _________.
