Gideon turned away from the scene as the blue planet’s atmosphere shredded like paper. The swelling star would soon absorb the remains of the world and the species known as man. There was no last, frantic attempt to leave Earth despite their knowledge and abilities. The whole experiment was lost. Mankind once possessed such promise.
Category Archives: Authorial Trust
55 WPM
The Story:
55 wpm
Khalid I love you that’s the most important thing whatever happens remember I LOVE YOU. Not much time, I don’t know who the hijackers are or what they want…Khalid I would rather tell you you’d be proud of me for my typing test today. I can type 55 words per minute with no errors at
The Article:
I think my experience as a short story writer is probably a common one in that over time, stories tend to sort themselves into three categories.
You’ve got your Bulls-Eyes. You see a call for submissions, you have a great idea, you write it and it works, you send it in, and the editors love it and snap it up. One and done. This was the case with my flash fiction “The Long Haul,” which got published in the Dark Bits anthology.
You’ve got your Wanderers. Sometimes these stories get written because you want to tell them, and not in response to a particular call. Other times, you write them for a specific call and they don’t get accepted. Either way, you’ve now found yourself with a “homeless” story that needs to find a place to belong. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and you’ll stumble across a call for submissions that suits what you’ve got. Or maybe this story will find a home in a magazine or anthology that accepts stories on a wide variety of subject matter and themes. You’ll rework and rewrite and send it out again. Sometimes you’ll have the delightful experience of watching a story that’s been rejected several times finally find a home…sometimes even in a market that pays double, or triple, that of the markets that rejected it. The time I invested in revising that story definitely paid off.
And you’ve got your One-Winged Birds. These stories have flaws that keep causing them to be sent back to you time and time again. I’ve got a few of these now which are starting to feel like time sinks, and I think that I’m better served writing something new than spending any more time rewriting old material. There’s always a balance to be struck between rewrites to make something better, and accepting that a certain concept is just not working, and eating up time better spent creating something new.
One of my one-winged birds is a political story which, I’ve been told, is too much of the characters discussing/debating/arguing and not enough action. I think the debate is exciting, but I’m apparently the only one.
55 wpm is another.
I’ve sent out several versions of “WPM” (word number varying depending on story length…) and gotten some very mixed feedback. I think this is the only story where I’ve ever been told that the stakes are “too high” and I should “write smaller”–from a reader who found the hijacking scenario too over-the-top to be able to suspend disbelief. (A vast majority of critiques suggest that authors make the stakes higher!) Other feedback suggested that the stakes were great –tense, urgent, exciting–but the main character’s responses too banal, surely? All I could think in response to that was my own responses to emergency situations–including an in-flight emergency as pilot in command–were, after the fact, hilariously banal. This might be the reason for the markets who told me they found the story unintentionally humorous and rejected it on those grounds.
So, with some of my critique suggesting that I choose a less urgent scenario, and other critique advising me to make the main character’s response more “serious”, I’ve decided to call endex on any more revisions for this story. In a less urgent scenario, I couldn’t write the main character’s stream-of-consciousness reply, transcribing her thoughts as she thinks them, no matter how banal–because in a less urgent scenario, the main character would have time to consider her words and edit her typing. And a more “serious” response is completely at odds with the kind of things that crossed my mind in actual emergencies when I’d already done all I could do and was waiting to see if it would be enough.
The lessons I’ve taken away from this one are:
- I don’t think I want to write another hijacking story (except possibly as part of a longer thriller in which the hijacking would be a plot point and not the entire focus of the story). This tight focus on the hijacking event seems to be a very hard sell, partly because there’s a tricky line at which extreme emotion becomes over-the-top.
- I find this story frustrating because the stream-of-consciousness (banality and all) was inspired by my own mental response to an emergency situation. I wondered whether some of the people giving critique had ever been in a life-or-death emergency situation. But…they’re the editors and I’m not, so I can’t exactly argue with them that they’re wrong (Don’t argue with editors. It makes you look very unprofessional, and you won’t convince them to change their minds and accept your story. But it can definitely be galling.)
- This story’s based on a conceit: the protagonist’s typing speed precisely limits how many words she’s able to send to her partner before impact. Being “cute and clever” can backfire. Character and voice are far more important than showing off how clever you are; and there are some readers (and editors) who don’t like “clever twists”, no matter how well you do character and voice. I still like the story’s conceit, but I also like puns and stuff 😉 Going forward, I plan to focus on character and voice rather than thinking up new “sly twists” to base stories on.
About Mary:
Mary Pletsch is a glider pilot, toy collector and graduate of the University of Huron College, the Royal Military College of Canada and Dalhousie University. She is the author of several previously published short stories in a variety of genres, including science fiction, steampunk, fantasy and horror. She currently lives in New Brunswick with Dylan Blacquiere and their four cats.
Descriptive Genre Novels
Back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, novels were suddenly available to the general public at greatly reduced cost. The paper wasn’t always the best quality and plagiarism was rampant between different countries — sometimes even between regions or states. People didn’t travel much and there was no Internet to bring rich, colorful multimedia presentations to someone’s eye at a whim.
Literature was their window to the world and beyond. The descriptions and eloquent language had to give the reader an understanding of places they’d never been to and most likely would never actually see. In a way, the genre novels were a combination of travel books combined with a fascinating tale.
Take, for example, the best-selling author Marie Corelli. She was read by the masses more than HG Wells, Edgar Allen Poe, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — combined. In her book, Vendetta, she introduces the Italian landscape with intricate detail and flowing prose. Everything is richly described that let the readers “see” through the text. Colors, sounds, smells — all were documented to bring the landscape to life.
This method of novel-writing remained active and at the top of the best-sellers list until the 1980s. James Michener’s doorstopper novels included when the Earth was forming from dust up until the actual story took off. This detailed understanding of the environment was just as important to his novels because the landscape was an important character. Alaska, one of his last novels, explained volumes of how life was like in the frozen, snowy wastelands. Without that understanding, the story would be missing something important for the reader to incorporate in their thinking.
Post-1980’s, the writing landscape changed. People had less time to spend on reading and publishers pushed for stories that started when the action began. Michener and James Clavell would have a tough time getting published these days without their extensive bookselling record.
One of the reasons for this sea change can be blamed on the Internet. Instead of having an author interpret and describe an exotic location, people can fire up their favorite search engine and watch travel videos and see pictures of daily life in far-off lands. We no longer need the words. For some genres, this is a sad thing.
With the hustle-and-bustle of daily living, coupled with the constant barrage of time-absorbing activities as far away as the cell phone in your pocket, nobody has the time for a beautifully written novel. They want to jump in, read the good parts, and jump out. The older readers are the ones who miss the prose the most.
Probably the one spot where this is less apparent is the speculative fiction markets. Science fiction and fantasy are based in places beyond our experience, so the author still has to do some worldbuilding. The details, alas, are typically lacking because the publishers want the action and not the description. Sometimes it is a good thing to take a break after a wild chase and a fierce battle to rest — both the characters and the reader — by delving into some more history or landscape description. At least, it’s something I miss these days.
About the Author:
Guy Anthony De Marco is a disabled US Navy veteran speculative fiction author; a Graphic Novel Bram Stoker Award® nominee; winner of the HWA Silver Hammer Award; a prolific short story and flash fiction crafter; a novelist; an invisible man with superhero powers; a game writer (Sojourner Tales modules, Interface Zero 2.0 core team, third-party D&D modules); and a coffee addict. One of these is false.
A writer since 1977, Guy is a member of the following organizations: SFWA, WWA, SFPA, IAMTW, ASCAP, RMFW, NCW, HWA. He hopes to collect the rest of the letters of the alphabet one day. Additional information can be found at Wikipedia and GuyAnthonyDeMarco.com.
Two Great Genres That Read Great Together
Science Fiction and Horror – Two Great Genres That Read Great Together
If you’re of a certain age, you’ll get this.
Imagine a kid, tousled hair and freckles staring in horror at a book in his hand walking down the aisle of a library. From the other directions another kid, this one a girl with thick dark curls held up in two ponytails, as they peruse the aisles of their local library. They comically run into each other. The first boy recoils. “You got your science fiction in my horror!”
The girl looks equally aghast. “You got your horror in my science fiction!”
As an aspiring writer, I tried to write what I thought was purely science fiction while I wrote my first short stories. I knew that the novels developing in my head were more military science fiction and I was completely comfortable with that subject matter. I wanted to keep my learning curve within the bounds of “traditional” science fiction. In hindsight, I’m very glad for the opportunity to have had my mind changed for me.
In 2012, I joined the Colorado Springs Fiction Writers Group and became a regular member. While submitting short fiction for critique, analysis, and help, we had a contest to write a flash fiction story combining two dissimilar genres. To this day, I’m glad I did not draw Lovecraftian horror and “chick-lit.” Instead, I drew science fiction…and horror.
Horror was something I never expected to write. I’ve never been a huge fan of horror movies, and I very rarely watch them. Walking Dead? Nope. It’s just not my thing. So, faced with writing a 1,000-word story I panicked and wrote nothing until the weekend before it was due. I was hung up on two things. First, to paraphrase Ray Bradbury’s definition of science fiction – it is the art of the possible. Horror, to me, seemed like the art of the impossible. Granted, I’ve experienced a few crazy, unexplained things in my life, but horror seemed to be all about fear. How could fear and (at least to me) optimistic visions of the future be related?
The second thing standing in my way was failing to understand why we read horror. I am a dedicated Stephen King fan and I realized while I was trying to get past the blinking cursor of doom that I was not connecting the science fiction scenery to the emotional response from the reader. When that finally happened, I wrote the story in one sitting while waiting for a flight at the Salt Lake City airport. I submitted the story “Poultry” for critique and was told I should find a place for it. Eventually, I did find a magazine for it, but without pay. In the last six months, I sold it again to Digital Science Fiction, where it recently appeared in their Quickfic Anthology.
Writing a miniature space opera with a horror element (and admittedly, a dark humor, too) was easier than I thought because I realized I wanted to elicit a response from the audience. I wanted there to be a moment of revulsion and a head-shaking chuckle at the end of the story. I’m hopeful I achieved that because that was the lesson I learned while writing the story.
We tend to think of prose as painting a picture for the reader. That’s part of the equation. We need to visualize the reader’s response. Can we do that for every reader? No. But, if we have that “target” in mind, we can deliver an emotional punch to the reader’s gut. That’s what makes stories memorable.
And, for the record, science fiction and horror are two great genres that work great together. (Insert head-shaking chuckle here)