Once more unto the breach, dear friends!

Some writers compare writing a story to raising a child.

You labour to bring into the world something that is in an intimate way a part of yourself. You work tirelessly to make the very best of it as you revise and edit. Finally the day arrives when you can nurture it no longer and you are obliged to send it out in to the world to make its own way.

The first time you submit for editorial consideration a story that was hard to write but of which you are particularly proud is terrifying. Will someone else recognise it for the remarkable piece of individuality that it is?  Will your carefully selected judge be prevented from ever seeing your masterpiece by slush readers who only feel safe passing upstairs a traditional formulaic offering that's pretty similar to what their editor has approved before?

If the editor actually gets to see it, will he possibly find faults that you never suspected? Might he even mistake your diamond for cubic zirconium?

In such a parlous state your correspondent currently finds himself, having finally sent off his latest piece just yesterday.  And I love it.

All the best, little one!

Falkirk Festival Writers Seminar 2015

This was my sixth attendance at the annual seminar run by Falkirk Writers Circle for authors from all over southern and central Scotland.  Each year usually sees competitions for short story, article and poem with a special additional category.  This time it was flash fiction.

One thing that writers must overcome is fear of speaking in public. If you do achieve success in being published, you are likely to be required to promote your own work. The chances are you will have to do book signings or readings in various locations and give talks to all sorts of audiences.

Of course being a good writer doesn't make you a good speaker, so it is very helpful to those who are inexperienced in the latter skill to have practice in reading to an audience of other writers who are going to understand.

To an audience it can be remarkably difficult to follow a story read out by an author who has not yet mastered the art of reading aloud, so it is also helpful that the judges are given time to explain their rankings and what they are looking for in the various competitions.

For some reason I specialise in submitting entries that would have suited last year's judges. All too often I find myself on a track with which this year's judges do not sympathise. I have however a fairly good idea of what I do well, so I have decided to do that every year regardless of who happens to be judging.

Last year that produced a surprising first place in the short story competition with a very experimental story.  This year my best result was a perhaps even more astonishing second place in the flash fiction competition judged by Silvie Taylor. I must confess I had thought the classical puns in this little story were far too outrageous for such a competition, so I was very pleased with the result.

Being your own editor

I read nineteenth century novels for fun. Well, either that or I'm a cheapskate and you can read nineteenth century novels for free. The problem is that when I've read one I have a dreadful habit of writing like its author when I return to my day job of story writing.

I was given a bit of a jolt recently by a slush reader's feedback - the sort of thing you get from some magazines when your story's not good enough for a personal rejection and not bad enough for the unsubtle hint that they'd just as soon you didn't send them any more. This reader criticised my slow pace. Then as an afterthought he wondered whether I was trying to write as though I were a nineteenth century novelist. That, he thought, might be clever but was never going to sell.

Now this particular story had started life at something approaching 11,000 words. Then with difficulty I edited it to 9,800 so as to meet another contest's 10,000 word limit. I had, as usual, very high expectations. I got straight rejections. I tried again until I got the above comment.

As it happened, I had received an encouraging personal rejection for another story of a similar genre at about this time, but from a market whose word limit was about half the length of the original version of this story. I had a bit of a think. What were the chances of cutting out so much? Well I had often read that it was good practice to try and reduce your story by a third, so I reckoned it must be even better practice to try and almost halve it. I set to work.

I stress that I really liked the original version of this story myself. Of course I'm the guy that likes nineteenth century novels too. As I got going I discovered lengthy lyrical writing about the setting of the story; so lengthy in fact that the story was sometimes put on hold for a page at a time whilst my Point-of-View character took a look around in all directions. And then moved a few yards and got a different view and did the same again.

Now writers are always warned against white room writing. This means not engaging your reader in the setting at all and ignoring all or most of the human senses in your enthusiasm for the story and nothing but the story. Whilst the writer can see the setting in his own mind, the reader cannot unless the writer paints the scenery and populates the landscape for him.

But perhaps at the other extreme we should also be warned against what I might call Art Gallery writing - if we might consider a gallery to be the opposite of an empty room. A lot of the pictures in an average gallery don't attract the average visitor's attention. Fortunately. If they did, I'm told, it would take ten years to walk around The Hermitage in St Petersburg (left).

Anyway, in very short order I had removed 1,000 words from the first eight pages of this story. The thing was I was really enjoying this process. I found myself developing an instinct for the difference between description that was vital to the story and description that was there for its own sake.

So I ended up with a story halved in length and zipping along, if not like a racing car at least like a  buggy drawn by a spirited horse. And I couldn't believe how much better I liked it. I read it again and again without even threatening to get tired of it the way I can easily do with some (though not of course all) of my longer stories.

Since then I think I may be more sparing with unnecessary description, but I still think it's a worthwhile exercise to be your own editor for a while.

Writing and its Rewards

I do not write in order to win awards. I don't actually know anyone who does, though I would not suppose it impossible for someone to so so. That does not mean of course that I should not like to win awards. I am no more immune to the natural human desire for recognition than anyone else.

Though any artist would like to produce art for its own sake, unless you are very self confident it is hard to go on producing work that you can't sell. You do begin to wonder; if you are the only person who can see merit in your work, then does it really possess the merit you suppose?

Writers even cherish that strange publishing phenomenon known as a personal rejection. Magazine editors and other publishers receive huge volumes of unsolicited submissions that they call 'slush'. Much of this they may not even read themselves; they delegate to 'slush readers' who are often other writers trying to gain experience. All of us wonder from time to time how many gems are missed in this sifting process.

If a slush reader refers a promising story up the line to a second reader or editor, the odds are still against it appearing in the magazine, but sometimes, if the editor sees promise in your work, he will write back and tell you why he's rejecting it. This gives you pointers as to what you should be looking to improve on in future submissions.

This 'personal' (as opposed to 'form') rejection offers the writer encouragement to continue. At least one editor thought your work was not total rubbish.

One stage better is the 'rewrite request'. This is when the editor tells you the story is good but has, in his or her view, faults which would have to be corrected for the story to be published. You are invited to try again with the same story if you wish. As a general rule, writers struggling for publication credits certainly do wish, though you could always stand on your dignity and insist that your work cannot be improved upon. I have already stated as a matter of public record that my story 'The Man on The Church Street Omnibus' was much better after the suggestions that I received from Alison Wilgus of The Sockdolager than it was as originally submitted to her.

Those of us who have stories published on line may also receive feedback from reader comments in the publication itself or in some other forum such as this blog. Every little helps, and positive criticism in the sense of suggesting how things could have been better is welcome. Not all of us are robust enough to take negative criticism, the usual answer to which is, of course, that if you don't like it you are not forced to read it.

If awards serve any useful purpose it is to praise artistic merit. There would be no point in an award that simply recognised the highest sales, since such authors already have their reward.

Sometimes awards are judged by a panel. Panellists have to be pretty robust because some of the time they are going to face hassle from those who cannot understand, appreciate or agree with their choices.

Some awards, like the Hugos, the prestigious awards in the science fiction genre, are voted for by the members of the institution which instigated them. In this case there is an intermediate 'nomination' stage to whittle down the qualifying writing to manageable numbers for voting.

The controversy over that process this year has been loud enough to reach the ears of dwellers in the wilderness such as myself. Whatever the rights and wrongs one can only be sorry for the outcome.

This is just not the reason we write.

Travelling like a writer

Rebecca Birch,  whose work I like, wrote in her blog earlier this year of how a writer  may approach travel with a different attitude to normal human beings.  We have a habit of storing up experiences that may come in useful in our work.

Personally I find that my camera helps. The great boon of digital photography is practically to eliminate the marginal cost of your pictures. No more worrying whether you can justify the use of film.

So when I am wandering around I take a picture of anything that looks interesting, even if I don't know what it is, together with numerous landscape shots that will help me remember the setting. Then when I get home I do my research and find out what I have photographed. Usually between reference books and the internet I can find out. I find this also helps me to remember the next time I see something like it.

Even on a guided tour it will often prove difficult to take in everything that you are told, but
photographs will help you recall it. The best tour guides throw in all sorts of local colour: history, myth, prejudice, manner of speaking. All of these have their potential uses.

Not everything can be photographed. It may be a sound that characterises a place, sometimes a smell, sometimes a taste or a texture. But at least if you have documented one sensory impression it may help you to recall others.

My two example photographs above are both from Taormina, Sicily.  The first is a detail of the second.