I’ve been cleaning up some relatively-new stories to submit to journals lately. I tend to overwrite on my first drafts, so this process of “cleaning up” usually consists mostly of cutting and condensing—sometimes removing entire characters and scenes that I realize I don’t need, other places removing words and sentences to give the voice the right rhythm and keep the story’s momentum pushing forward.
The ending is one place I consistently overwrite, especially when I’m writing a story that’s driven more by emotion or relationships than narrative. Even when it’s a plot-driven story, though, it’s not always obvious exactly where it should end, and just getting to the narrative conclusion doesn’t necessarily give it that satisfying sense of resolution that great short stories have.
Dialogue is a powerful tool. It gives your readers a chance to hear the characters speaking, efficiently revealing aspects of their personality and inter-personal relationships that are difficult to show in narrative.
Something you quickly learn if you read and write fiction, though: realistic dialogue isn’t easy to write, and even great writers sometimes get it wrong. If you’re looking for ways to enhance your dialogue, here are some tips that can help.
In the simplest terms, point of view can be defined as the perspective through which a story is being told. A story’s POV identifies three things:
Who is telling the story
The relationship between the narrator and main character
The distance between the characters and readers
Those things are all critical to how a story comes across to the reader, and shifting the POV—even if it’s just from one 3rd-person close narrator to a different one—can have a huge impact on how the reader interprets the story (and how much they enjoy reading it).
I love a good writing prompt. Or even a not so good writing prompt. Honestly, anything that gets my creative mind going and takes it into a new place is a winner in my book. And starting from something that’s inherently entertaining, like a board game, can be especially valuable, in my opinion. It shifts your mind out of work-brain and into fun-brain, taking away some of the pressure of producing words and helping to silent the inner critic so you can just enjoy the process.
Because that’s what writing should be, even if you’re writing about a serious topic, even if you’re a capital-A Author who does it for a living: joyful. If you’re not engaged by your own writing, no reader is going to be, either. When the writer takes joy in the creation process, that comes through on the page.
I’m a sucker for a mailing list. Anytime I research new journals and presses to submit to, or go to a conference or bookfair, I end up subscribing to a plethora of new lists.
Of course, doing this, I’ve signed up for a bunch of newsletters that were…less than helpful. Inevitably, I’ll come to realize my inbox is getting inundated and embark on a purge. But there are newsletters I’m always excited to see pop up in my inbox, and a few I’ve come to anticipate, to the point I’ll go searching through my spam folder to double-check if I don’t see them.
There are times ideas spring into your brain faster than you can get them on paper, but even the most prolific writer sometimes feels the frustration of staring at a blank page waiting for words that don’t want to come.
I’ve read several short story advice books that give the mildly infurating solution to “just start writing,” which is kind of like telling a lost traveler how great the subway is but not how to find the station. If I knew how to just start writing, I would already be doing it.
To be fair, I get what these writers are saying. Once you start putting words down, they build on each other sentence after sentence until you find that flow that carries you through to the end. The question is how to unlock those crucial first words to open the door for the story you want to tell.
“Hero” is one of those words that packs a lot of punch (no pun intended). Everyone understands it to mean the same basic thing: someone who’s admired for their qualities or achievements. But different people can have very different ideas about what actions or people they’d consider heroic, and just what promotes a figure to hero status within a society tells you as much about that culture’s values and perspective as it does about the hero themselves.
Hero also has multiple meanings in a literary sense. It can mean, among other things:
A character, often in mythology or folklore, who has superhuman qualities or a semidivine origin, and whose exploits or adventures are the subject of legends, epics, or myths.
The primary male character in a narrative, typically one who is identified with good qualities in a good vs. evil conflict.
The primary character in a narrative with whom the reader is intended to sympathize; synonymous with protagonist.
Writing great stories is all well and good, but for most writers that’s just the first step. What we really want is to have other people read them, and if you’d like that audience to go beyond your friends and family, odds are that will mean sending work to journals.
The process of submitting can be intimidating and confusing when you’re first starting to send work out, but it’s not actually complicated or difficult. If you’ve never submitted work before, this step-by-step guide will tell you everything you need to know. I’ve also included some links to resources that can be helpful for newbies and experienced submitters alike.
I wrote a post a couple of weeks back about the skills you need to freelance, and honing those will certainly help you to succeed when you start a freelance career. Writing that post got me thinking about some other things that either helped me when I was starting out, or that I learned along the way and wish I’d known from the beginning.
Just for some context, I started freelancing mid-way through 2015. I’ve been doing it full-time ever since and it’s currently my only gig (though that hasn’t been the case the entire time). In those 7-ish years I’ve definitely made my share of mistakes and taken on some clients who were walking red flags in hindsight. Some of those missteps I think are an unavoidable part of venturing out as linguistic mercenary into the wild world of words for pay, but hopefully these tips can help other new freelancers make the transition a bit more smoothly.
Language and culture are inextricably linked. Using other languages in your fiction can help to create a three-dimensional, fully-realized world for the reader, but it can also pull them out of your story and leave them bored, confused, or frustrated if you overdo it.
Like many aspects of fiction (and life), it comes down to finding the right balance. This tends to be especially difficult for those who write their own languages—and understandably so. It takes a lot of work to write a language and you want to show it off. The best way to do that, though, is to integrate it smoothly into your overall storytelling.