The Mathematics of Rejection

 
 

My last blog post Old Year / New Year included headline statistics on the number of stories I’d had accepted/rejected during the previous year. My last blog post was also rather a long time ago, because life doesn’t half get in the way sometimes.

However, to my great delight the post accrued a comment!

“How many unique stories did you submit in 2021? Would love to hear a bit more about e.g. how many rejections an accepted story had on average.”
— Bill

For reference, the total number of submissions made last year was 109, and the results stacked up like this:

 
 

The table is actually slightly different from the original, because a few of the submissions that were pending at new year have now un-pended. The acceptance rate is still inflated by having three pieces accepted for the same drabble anthology.


To answer the first question: the 109 submissions were to 77 distinct markets, and involved 42 unique pieces of writing. I don’t keep detailed records, but from eyeballing the list I think only 14 of the 42 stories/poems/drabbles/self-indulgent creative-non-fiction ramblings were actually written during 2021.

To answer the second, I figured I was going to have to learn a little more about Excel pivot tables.

And then there was a lot of swearing. And then I wondered why on earth I was faffing around with Excel when I am (in my day-job) a computer programmer who can trivially churn out code to do this sort of number-crunching. And then there was a lot less swearing and a lot more progress.

I’ll be honest, the outcome here surprised me:

StoryRejections before Acceptance
Change 0
Christmas Elf 0
Glass / Desire Lines 0
Henderson 1
Jeremy Sleeps 1
Reveal 2
The Failed 1
The Fight 0
Time For Tea 0
Time To Move 0
Time To Think 0

My perception is that most stories go through multiple rounds of rejection before they’re accepted. However, we have several things affecting the data.

The Time… drabbles, Change, and The Fight, were written for very specific fiction calls or markets. Had they been rejected, they would likely not have been suitable for anything else, and would probably now be languishing in the place were stories go to moulder.

2021 is also not the entire picture. The story referred to here by its working title of Henderson was published as The Lady of Time by The Colored Lens in last Autumn. However, it was written some years ago, and had already been rejected 6 times before we even reached 2021. (Unrelated: the editorial staff at the Colored Lens are an absolute joy to work with. They also tend to offer pretty rapid response times, and constructive feedback. I highly recommend both sending them stories, and buying their magazine!)

The final problem with my results is the very obvious one: it’s a tiny sample size! Averages and so on can be really good tools for getting a handle on giant piles of data, but I do not, sadly, have a giant pile of acceptances upon which to commit acts of data science. Anyone trying to generalise from 11 stories may well not learn anything useful.

Extending it to all the stories I’ve ever had accepted (24 to date; not all have actually been published yet), then the average number of rejections is 2.8. However, I don’t think that’s a terribly helpful measure - stats fans may be interested to know that the median is 1. To put it more usefully: 10 of those published stories were accepted on their first try, but the most-travelled story was rejected 20 times before it was accepted. Among the stories that were not accepted first go, the average number of rejections is closer to 5. Note to self: acceptance on first submission is actually considerably more common than you think it is.

If I look at just the un-accepted stories, the picture gets a little strange. The average number of (all time) rejections for each unsold story is currently almost exactly the same, just below 5*. But the stories at the top of the rejections league are, by and large, the stories I think are my best. Why would my best stories accrue so many rejections?

Well… it’s my fault. Kinda. When I feel a story is particularly strong, I tend to send it to higher-profile markets. By that, I mean markets whose publications have a large circulation, or which are more highly thought-of, and which often (though by no means always) pay at professional rates. Sadly, everyone else does the same, meaning that these markets have a constant, high-volume slush pile of great stories and they can afford to be extremely choosy. Their acceptance rates are often below 1%** - and presumably even lower than that for unsolicited submissions - meaning that the rejections can rack up pretty quickly.

When I wrote my submissions-round-up-post for 2020, I closed it by noting that a piece I was very proud of had collected 10 rejections and just gone out for the 11th time. It remains one of my favourite things I have ever written, but it is kind of odd, and hard to categorise, and probably not for everyone. It was first submitted in August 2018 and, despite editors often saying nice things about it, it kept on coming back. It is, in fact, the piece noted above with a record-winning 20 rejections - and it finally found a home in early January (to be published later in the year). Sometimes it really is just a long slog to find a publication which wants the particular thing you have written.

* Actually now very slightly higher, due to a rejection having come in while I was drafting this!

** Most markets don’t publish these stats, but aggregators like The Submissions Grinder provide estimates.

Drabble-Writing for Fun

 
 

This week, inspired by the Drabble Harvest contest, I have been writing drabbles. This isn’t something I’ve tried to do before.

What’s a Drabble?

If you’ve not heard of a drabble, it’s defined as a story of exactly one hundred words. According to Wikipedia, the form originated with Birmingham University’s SF society in the 80s, and takes its name from Monty Python. It does not, as I’d previously assumed, appear to have anything to do with Margaret Drabble.

Some definitions also restrict the title to no more than fifteen words. I suspect this is because people were trying to hide extra story in the title!

(Completely irrelevantly: yes, I do often phrase my sub-headings in blog posts as questions, purely because I enjoy the deranged way this font renders question marks. Thank you for asking.)

How NOT TO Write a Drabble

A someone who has only just begun to experiment with the form, I’m clearly no expert. However, initial attempts have led me towards a very definite conclusion:

The trick is not to try to write a one-hundred-word story.

One hundred words is absolutely nothing - this blog post was well over the word-count before it even reached the end of its third paragraph. If you plan to fit a story into such a tiny space, then you will end up with… well, basically no story. You might get a vignette, or a very basic outline, but it’s likely to end up the fiction equivalent of the one-liner.

If I aim small, I find myself at 90 words, wondering where I can shoe-horn in extra adjectives to make up the numbers. And a drabble can’t really afford to waste its time on flabby descriptives. A few well-chosen details can really help set the scene, and avoid the “rushed” feeling you get from including only the bones. But if I’m looking to pad my work out to the required length, then I’m really not making the most of the space available.

Instead, the method that’s been working best for me is to settle down and write a story. A short one, sure, but without paying too much attention to the word-count. Once I’m happy with the story, I start removing pieces. How many sentences, or even paragraphs, can I actually take out without the whole thing collapsing? It’s not unlike a sort of literary KerPlunk.

I wrote some time ago about exposition, in particular about writing as much of it as seemed to want to be written, then removing most of it later. All those extra words really do help build the frame for the story, and once you can see the whole structure you can work out which bits are not actually load-bearing after all. It’s often surprising how many parts that originally seemed essential can, actually, be chopped without any lasting damage.

Let the Reader Do The Work

There’s very little room for world-building in drabbles - because there’s very little room for anything. I’ve always assumed that realism would be best, because you don’t have to waste words setting up your environment.

Actually, sci-fi and fantasy settings work very well. No one is expecting a fully-realised world in a hundred words. It’s fair to expect the reader to do a little work, and less really is more; mention an airlock and a space-suit, and they’ll figure out where the action is taking place.

The drabbles I’ve most enjoyed reading have at their heart something a little more universal, something independent of setting or genre. Take, for example, What’s a Commander Have to Do to Get a Decent Cup of Coffee Around Here? We’re clear from the first sentences that we’re on a space-ship, and the story hinges on that setting. But the bones of the story - to me - lie in the emotional tone that we can all recognise.

I always enjoy a reveal at the end of a story, even a story this short, and Checkout Page delivers in a beautifully understated way. As a reader, you’re given all of the pieces, but the drabble stops short of spelling it out.

This feels like one of the reasons you can remove so many blocks from the Jenga-tower of your dravbble. Give the reader the skeleton, and they’ll be willing to fill in all the gaps for you.

Give it a Try?

More than anything, writing drabbles is fun and feels productive. Got a spare half-hour? Bash one out. It probably won’t be perfect, but it’ll be a start. After a few half-hours, you’ll have a few to choose from - and at least one of them will be worth the effort of polishing up.

If you fancy giving drabble-writing a whirl, then I refer you to the contest linked above. Their theme for the current round (open until the end of September) is “time travel gone wrong”.

Endings: Are We Nearly There Yet?

 
 

Endings have been on my mind recently. Last week, I noted down some ideas for a story about a monster under the bed. I could feel the shape of the story, the build up, the conflict between the two main characters… and then a bunch of loose, flapping half-ideas where the story’s end ought to be. I knew how the conflict was resolved, but it didn’t quite feel like a conclusion.

I tried to approach the problem logically: what does this character want? what is this story really about? how do we leave the narrator in a situation where she is able to actually tell this story? After a lot of muttering, and some swearing, I came up with something I thought would work.

I wrote the story, typed it up, edited it and took it along to my Writers’ Circle. (Technically speaking, it’s a Writers’ Triangle and right now - due to vacations and other commitments - it has been temporarily reduced to a Writers’ Line). The main feedback from the other end of the Line? This story ends in the wrong place.

Endings are really, really difficult. Worse, they don’t feel like they should be difficult. Once you’ve set up your world, your characters, and their situations and conflicts, you’ve done the hard part and you just need to write the story. Right? Sadly, that is not how it works - or at least, not for me.

Some years ago, I heard an interview with Lee Child in which he described how he writes each new Jack Reacher novel. He sits down with no ideas, works out the plot as he goes, writes until it is finished, then sends the whole thing to his editor. When his editor suggests that changing details, or switching events around, would make a better story, he says that yes, perhaps it would - but “that’s not how it happened”. (I suspect that this is the sort of nonsense editors will only let you get away with when you have well north of 100 million sales worldwide.)

To me, that is the cartoon idea of how a book gets written. One just sits down and writes it, no? Every author I’ve ever spoken to, heard speak, or read about, talks of writing, re-writing, editing, taking notes, despairing, re-re-writing, and slowly hammering their work into shape. Editing doesn’t just mean fixing the spelling and making sure all the apostrophes are in the correct places: it can involve huge structural change, adding and removing subplots, or reworking the whole direction. (It’s worth noting that Child was being interviewed by Karin Slaughter - whose novels also shift by the million - and she listened to his description of his writing process while shaking her head in disbelief.

When reading a novel, I am often willing to relax and enjoy the journey. If travelling through the book with the characters is a really fun experience, then I don’t actually mind too much about the final destination. The Starless Sea was still a delight to read; I loved hanging out with Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London even though I didn’t enjoy the way the plot concluded. But I don’t think a short story can get away with that; there simply isn’t enough of it. The reader expects - and deserves - a neat conclusion or a payoff at the end. There doesn’t have to be a twist (although a good twist is great) but there should be something that feels like a resolution.

A couple of months ago, a publisher sent me a rewrite request (if you’re not familiar with the term: they rejected my story, but said that they would consider it again if substantial changes were made. It is an invitation only, there is no implicit assumption that they will accept it if I make the changes.) They sent quite detailed feedback, but the headline news was we really like the story, but aren't happy with the ending. Would I consider writing a different ending?

The request threw me. The story I’d sent them was one where I had always been confident I knew how it ended. I had not been terribly sure how it was going to get there - which is why it had ended up almost novella-length. But the story had been written with the end clearly in mind, and every piece of the plot had been working towards that end. I simply couldn’t imagine how I could change it.

However, the feedback raised valid points and closely matched some earlier feedback I’d had, but chosen to ignore. The story as it stood had also received multiple rejections., so I got started. There was - predictably - a lot more swearing and muttering, and a couple of weeks later I had a new ending. It wasn’t a radical new direction, but there were substantial changes to events, and to characters’ motivations. Once I’d accepted the possibility of an alternative, it wasn’t actually as hard as I’d expected. Lesson learned: stories are more mutable than you think.

Sadly, even once I’d decided what was going to happen, I still had the problem of the literal end. The last line. Opening lines are important, because they grab a reader’s attention. Closing lines affect people’s perception of the story, and stay with them much longer than that really good bit in the middle. Once you’ve revealed the murderer, you still need the equivalent of “and they all lived happily ever after” to signal The End. Even if the outline is brilliant, the story will feel flat if the final sentences just, sort of, you know. Peter out a bit.

Halfway through writing this, working through my podcast backlog, I coincidentally reached the Start With This episode But How Does It End? It’s well worth a listen for a discussion of what makes for a good or bad ending, though sadly they concluded that there are few concrete rules - it requires a writer to identify the bit that just feels like the end. I shall be taking their advice and examining other people’s endings more critically - not to analyse the plot, but to see if I can learn more about what makes the final few sentences feel like a proper, satisfactory conclusion.

And will the novella with the re-written ending be accepted this time? I’ll let you know…

You Say Clickbait Like It's a Bad Thing

 
 

I’ve been thinking recently about titles. Specifically, the titles that writers give short stories.

I’m embarrassed to admit that for a long time I didn’t give that much thought to titles for the stories I write. Sometimes a title springs fully-formed into mind before a story is even written - but equally often a half-written story ends up saved in a file named after a character (or an object!) in the story, and eventually that accidentally becomes the title. I mean, titles aren’t that important, right? It’s the story that counts.

Now, if you are - say - Neil Gaiman, with a vast and enthusiastic following who will leap on a new story with delight regardless of title, you can probably get away with calling your latest work any old bollocks (or, of course, Any Old Bollocks). Spoilers: I am not Neil Gaiman. My enthusiastic following is largely limited to my parents and a couple of friends. (Also, arguably, even Neil Gaiman didn’t get where he is today by publishing stories with crap titles.)

If you publish a novel then you’ve got a title, a nice illustrated jacket, and probably a cover blurb to lure people in. If you’re very lucky, bookshops will pile your novel temptingly on tables, include it in multi-buy offers or (bless every last shop that does this) post up little handwritten notes from the staff explaining why it is awesome. A short story is much more likely to appear on a website, where casual browsers have nothing but a list of titles to choose from. So the title had better get its paw in the air and yell “pick me!”

My story Granny’s Cooking was turned down a number of times before I began to wonder whether, perhaps, its title was a bit boring. It eventually appeared in print as Cook Me A Storm. Would the magazine have taken it, regardless? I’ll likely never know, but I like to think the title-change gave it a hand up.

The most intriguing title I’ve seen recently was in an an issue of Cossmass Infinities. Browsing down the contents page, I immediately clicked on Murder or a Duck by Beth Goder. What situation could possibly result in that particular choice? I wanted to know. Then I became suspicious.

Calling your story Murder or a Duck makes an implicit promise: there is going to be some sort of dilemma, dichotomy or question of identity revolving around murder (or a duck). Your fiction had better make good on that promise. Coming up with an intriguing title is easy; coming up with an intriguing title which suits the actual story and does not leave the reader feeling cheated is quite another.

(Murder or a Duck, by the way, was delightfully silly and delivered handsomely on the promise. I recommend it.)

Intrigue isn’t the only option. I’m also strangely fond of titles which tell you (in a sense) exactly what you’re getting - for example Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island or The Tale of the Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters, and the Prince Who Was Made of Meat. And of titles that appear to ramble on long after they ought to have stopped, like Once More Unto the Breach (But Don’t Worry, the Inflatable Swords Are Latex-Free). And titles that include fun pop culture references, like Open House on Haunted Hill…

It’s fair to say that titles are capricious beasts, and that there’s no smart formula for coming up with them. They are, however, something that I’m going to give a lot more thought to in the future.

Next time you see me advertising a story on Twitter, let me know if I got it right!

Where (and When) Should I Submit Christmas Stories?

 
Scratch image of heavily over-decorated Christmas tree.
 

 It is May; the sun is shining. I can hear birds twittering in the trees and the patch of wildflowers is just beginning to show its purples and oranges. Naturally, my thoughts are turning to Christmas.

I love a good Christmas - or wintry - story. During the dark months of the year, one of my favourite pastimes is curling up somewhere warm and cosy with a Christmassy horror story. I enjoy writing Christmas fiction and there are - ignoring the occasional Krampus anthology - remarkably few open submission calls.

Winter holiday-themed magazines or collections are not that common, and festive tales almost never crop up in the genre magazines that I read regularly. I wanted to know whether magazines who don't publish themed issues were open to festive fiction submissions. And, if so, what time of year is right to start submitting?

I wrote to a variety of magazine editors to find out whether "regular" magazines would consider festive stories. I'm writing here about Christmas, but the theory would apply to any other holiday, or special event.

I'm grateful to all the editors who replied, with especial thanks to Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, Hexagon, and The Colored Lens for taking the time to send detailed answers.

So, Would They Consider Christmas Stories?

Happily the answer is "yes"! It seems magazines are willing to consider Christmas stories, even if they don't publish themed issues.

Here are a few things to bear in mind.

The Story Has To Meet The Magazine's Guidelines

This should go without saying for any submission. Markets publish submission guidelines, and you should read them. And follow them.

Your story must meet any requirements for length, genre, or theme, and must fit with what the market usually publishes. It’s as simple as that, however awesome your story is. A tale of the jolly adventure Santa had with the Space Pirates is not going to cut it with any magazine that wouldn't want jolly tales involving Space Pirates the rest of the year.

I've never yet seen a market that explicitly says "do not send us holiday-themed stories" - but if they do, don't.

The Story Has To Stand On Merit Alone

If a magazine has no themed issue, then they have no special requirement for wintry stories. You're going to need to blow the rest of their slush pile out of the water in order to be considered - just as you would submitting any other piece.

This is something that almost all the editors who responded stressed: they'll read the story, and if they like it they'll accept it. Its Christmassiness is basically irrelevant.

Consider The Publishing Schedule

Pay attention to when the magazine is published. If it comes out annually, in June, then the chances of them wanting a Christmas story are lower. Dawn Lloyd, who edits The Colored Lens, pointed out that, although TCL publishes quarterly, their issues fall in October and January - neither of which is especially well-suited to Christmassy tales. Not having a December issue doesn’t necessarily mean a market wouldn’t accept festive pieces, but snowballs and sleighbells are likely a much harder sell at the height of summer.

If you have a particular magazine in mind, identify whether there is an issue that feels like it might be a good seasonal target, and shoot for that one.

Consider The Response Time

In order to aim correctly for your chosen issue, you need to know how the magazine organises its reading schedule. Does it having rolling submissions, or a strict window for each issue? If they read your amazing splatterpunk Christmas flash on Dec 24th, are they willing to hold it for a year, or have you missed the boat? (And if they offer to hold it for a year, are you willing to wait for publication?) Some markets advertise their process pretty clearly, or lay out their estimated timelines - but you'll already know that, since it will be in the submission guidelines. Which you've read, right?

For markets that do not do that, you'll need one of the handy sites which aggregates statistics about response times. I use the Submission Grinder (which I highly recommend - it's easy to use, and free) to see statistics about how long a market takes, on average, to accept or reject a story. If you're looking at one of the super-fast publications that typically responds within a week, you've got a lot more leeway than if you're submitting somewhere with an average response time of 6 months or more. Keeping an eye on the little graphs on the Grinder will also give you a good idea of whether a market clears its slush pile completely before each issue, or allows pieces to roll over for future dates.

As the editor of Hexagon Magazine put it: "...for an issue releasing December 1st, I am selecting my stories between July 15th and October 15th. This means that I am already selecting winter stories in summer/fall." Which is why, as spring sunshine finally starts to unfurl in the UK, I'm thinking about this problem. If you send an editor a story that aligns with the issue they're currently planning, you give your story the best chance it can have.

Should you query? Should you mention Christmas in your cover letter?

One of the questions I put to editors was whether they'd prefer people to query before submitting a Christmas story. On balance, most said "no". Again, the extent to which a market would prefer queries over "just submit it and we'll decide" is something that varies, and is frequently mentioned (you guessed it!) in the submission guidelines.

The general tone from almost all the editors' responses was that they would treat Christmas stories exactly as any other submission, and didn't require any special provisions. So no query, no reference in the cover letter.

However, Neil Clarke, of Clarkesworld, did raise an interesting point. He referred to his advice for cover letters, which suggests authors mention "if there’s a particular aspect to this story that pulls from your... personal experience (cultural, regional, temporal, etc.)", and clarified that "knowing whether or not the author of a holiday story has actually celebrated the holiday has some value to us, particularly when it's a holiday we haven't personally experienced ourselves."

TL;DR

In summary: No-one is categorically opposed to festive stories. Do your homework. Figure out which issue you're aiming for, and when the magazine might be reading for that issue. Make sure your story is fabulous. Send it.

And if you are actually an elf, slogging your guts out on Santa's shop floor? Probably mention that in your cover letter.

The Failed: An Unexpected Success

Headline news: I have a new story published! The Failed appears in the second issue of the Interstellar Literary Review.

The Failed is a story I thought would probably never be published. Although I was very proud of it, even I had to admit that it was on the quirky side, and that its subject matter would make it a pretty hard sell in most markets.

Then I saw a tweet from Interstellar, which linked to a “submissions wishlist”. Most magazines will give you a broad brush outline of what they want - or occasionally a very narrow definition of what they accept - and suggest you read previous issues to form your own ideas.

Although Interstellar also publish conventional guidelines, this wishlist was different. Multiple people from their masthead had jotted down what they, personally would like to see - covering tone, sub-genre, setting, and a few super-specific details. In itself, the list was a great source of ideas. Bit more importantly, one person wanted something that sounded, to me, like The Failed.

As a side note, the experience of working with Interstellar as been lovely. They mailed me to tell me that they would like to publish my story (which obviously disposed me well towards them!) but also sent detailed feedback from a couple of their readers, should I wish to act on it. The feedback was actually very useful and constructive - when I replied with my updated draft, I asked the Editor to pass on my thanks to one reader in particular for their comments.

It turned out to be the person whose wishes I had been deliberately aiming for :-)

There is always a home for every story. Finding it, however, can be a huge challenge. I’d love it if more magazines published wishlists!

Why I Love Twitter Writing Prompts

 
 

When I first set up my Twitter account and began questing around for other writers to talk to, I found a lot of bewildering hashtags. #vss365, #WeirdVSS, #SatSplat, #AchtenWrite… they popped up over and over again, and I had (broadly speaking) no idea what was happening. What does VSS even stand for?

Over time, I figured it out. These are all writing prompts - some weekly, some daily - that provide a word and invite you to respond with a tweet-sized piece of writing inspired by or including the word. Some prompts are more specific in their goal - like #PoetryIn13, #HaikuChallenge or #HangTenStories - challenging the writer to respond with a particular form, in a set number of words. The VSS, by the way, stands for “very short story”.

Most writing prompts have a host, whose role is to post the prompt word - some prompts rotate among different hosts, some are always organised by the same person. Searching Twitter for the hashtag, and clicking on the “People” tab, will usually get you reasonably quickly to the current host. Some prompts, like #vss365 (via @vss365official), publish rules, and a charter; others are much more informal affairs.

My favourite prompt is #whistpr, which aims “to spark your creativity in words, art, music, gifs, thoughts”. It is organised by the very lovely @whistberry, who posts a daily word with an original artwork to match. (And how she finds time for that is a mystery to me; I live in vague but constant fear that she will realise what a lot of work it is and stop.) There is a small, friendly, community of #whistpr writers who comment on and promote each other’s tweets, and - compared to the general dumpster fire of Twitter-at-large - it’s all genuinely lovely.

I aim to write a story for #whistpr every day, although I don’t always manage it. I enjoy the challenge of trying to come up with something for each word, and find it a useful exercise to have to nail down an idea every day. Each day I post to the hashtag is a day I have written something, even if it was only 240 characters long. And some of the ideas I tuck away for future reference - my most recently-published story, Smiles, grew from a #whistpr tweet in response to the prompt-word “grin”.

Fitting a story into such a small space is also an interesting discipline. I often write something which spills over to 260, 280, 300 characters… and then prune it. It’s amazing how many words can be removed, how much can be packed into a sentence. Is that adjective essential? Does that adverb bring anything to the party (spoilers: it probably doesn’t). Do you really need to say “I used to lie awake at night”? If you’re lying awake, it’s implicitly at night unless otherwise specified. Not every piece of writing needs to be so compact, but tersity is a great weapon to practise wielding.

It’s also a surprising indicator of what people like to read. Some of my favourite stories have gone fairly unnoticed, while tweets I felt were rushed out before the end-of-day deadline proved unexpectedly popular. Some of that is the luck of Twitter: did someone happen to notice it and retweet? Maybe it just got lost in the noise. But the days when a few people comment that they liked something are instructive: this might be an idea worth keeping.

There should be a Twitter widget just below showing my most recent #whistpr tweets - if you’re on Twitter, why not come and join in the fun?

"I've been shouting of you": authenticity in dialogue

 
Outline map of Northern England, showing the coverage of the Landranger OS map series. Map 93 (Middlesbrough and Darlington) is highlitedin pink.
 

“Come get it, Sean, or I’m tossing the lot.”

That’s a line of dialogue which an editor recently suggested inserting into a story of mine. It made my teeth curl.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with it - I understood it perfectly, and the editor’s suggestion that I add something to that effect was entirely correct. But the character speaking was (like me) British, and would never have said that.

“Come and get it, Sean, or I’m chucking it all out.”

There we go.

It’s often the tiniest differences that stand out, to me. Did you have a couple of beers or a couple beers? Did you do it by accident or on accident, while you visited your friend or visited with them? Never mind the sidewalks and the faucets and the constant bewilderment of pants, it’s the structure of a phrase that can instantly puncture the authenticity of dialogue. It’s the written equivalent of the power of saying it right.

Recently, I sent a story out for beta-reading. Several people picked up on the same line of dialogue:

“I’ve been shouting of you for ages.”

This doesn’t seem right, said one. Shouted for? after? at? to? queried another.

My characters often (like me) have the speech patterns of someone who grew up in the north-east of England. I lost most of my accent years ago (though the astute will pick it up when I say “bath” or “hook” or “cherry”) - but I retain numerous quirks, oddities and dialect words.

“I’ve been shouting of you” was not a typo, it was exactly what I meant. None of the others felt right. Shouting for was too polite, shouting at too overtly aggressive. The more I thought about it, the more I built up the difference in my head: the character, angry and controlling, standing in one room of the flat shouting of his girlfriend. I could hear it - I have heard it. It’s the way countless people in my world would say it.

At the same time, if the vast majority of readers would simply trip over the phrase and think it an error, what was the point of keeping it?

I’ve often read stories - set in India, or South Africa, or among Black Americans - where a lot of the dialogue has been alien to me. Unfamiliar words slide into the sentences, phrases don’t mean quite what I think they mean. I keep reading, go with the flow, trusting that I’ll be able to pick up the thread where it matters.

Perhaps the key, here, is that a string of unexpected words indicates a cultural difference; an isolated one looks like a mistake. Perhaps if my character had been hollering of wor lass nobody would have batted an eyelid. If you want to represent a particular spoken idiom, you have to go all in - or make sure you present it in a way that will lead your readers to trust you.

I hadn’t considered any of these things: “I was shouting of you” is something initially I wrote without realising it would sound odd to non-northerners. And this is why we have beta readers. Read your own dialogue out loud, imagine it in the local accent of your choosing - but be sure to get an outside perspective as well. You don’t have to make sure your reader understands every last word - variety is everything, flavour is important - just make sure everyone knows it’s deliberate.

Exposition Is Not The Enemy

 
Pages numbered 6-9, covered in pencil scribbling.
 

I'm currently writing a story. I don't quite know where it's going, yet, but I know the basic premise of what happens in it.

However, before we can get to that part, we need a little set up. I need to introduce the characters, show (not tell!) that the main character is in a somewhat dysfunctional relationship, establish the mechanisms that enable her to slip between worlds... Today, I got to the place where the story actually starts.

I'm nine pages in.

Usually, at this point, I would be gripped by vague panic. This story is becoming a monster! It aspires to be a novel! It is going to mushroom into a thing that will take over my entire life, and never be done! Even if I get it finished, no one wants to wade through nine pages of character study before their story begins!

However, last year I was listening to an episode of the excellent Start With This podcast - an episode titled "Exposition". It opened with a description of exactly this problem.

“a lot of what you start writing is sort of throat-clearing, it’s you figuring out your way in”
— Jeffrey Cranor, Start With This

This, to me, was a bit of a revelation. I have to work through these details to write the story - but the reader doesn’t need all of them to enjoy it. Armed with this new idea, I mercilessly pruned the introductory section of a piece I’d just finished, keeping in only the fragments that were essential to the plot.

And then an editor said “would you consider dropping the preamble?”

“But it’s important we know the box contains a plastic Millennium Falcon, because it places us in time!”

Fine, she said, put the Falcon in a box later. The reader doesn’t need to know absolutely everything up front.

The preamble went.

So, today, I am trying not to be concerned about the excessive exposition at the front of my current work in progress. It’s all important and completely necessary… at the moment. I’m getting to know my characters, and learning about the dynamic between them. The words I’ve written will probably be cut, but their former existence will inform the story. Perhaps some sections will survive past the first draft, perhaps all of them will have outlived their usefulness.

I’ll let you know how it goes!

Write The Things

 
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A while ago, I had a brilliant idea for a piece of creative non-fiction.

As a teenager, I sang in a church choir - weekly rehearsals, two services every Sunday, plus occasional concerts and a whole slew of extra bits and bobs around Christmas and Easter. It was a good, though not exceptional, parish church choir. It was a lot of fun, a lot of hard work, and it took up loads of time. It also taught me an incredibly valuable life skill.

Perhaps (depending on your beliefs, and the prevailing Covid regulations wherever you live) you’ll go to a choral Christmas church service or carol concert in the next few weeks. The choir will appear to be perfectly rehearsed, calm and serene. Spoilers: they are likely none of those things.

“And it goes like this: sing Once in Royal David’s City in four-part harmony on autopilot, get to the choirstalls, make sure the trebles don’t set anyone on fire. Snuff out the candles properly, and put them somewhere safe without spilling melted wax while saying the prayer of preparation with half a mind.”
— My journal, Christmas 2003

To be in a choir is to develop the art of appearing calm at all times, despite how very much things are not going to plan. It is to sing from memory while sorting out some problem that has arisen. It is to hold entire conversations across an aisle while using no more than an eyebrow. It is to switch seamlessly to an unrehearsed anthem for some unforeseen reason.

Anyway. My brilliant idea was to write about this, and about the firm foundation it gives you for coping with (apparent) serenity despite what life throws at you: maintain the appearance of calm, swear inaudibly, re-plan for the current situation and never, ever look surprised. I would write about this as a genuine life lesson, but also make it atmospheric, and funny, and even Christmassy.

In short, it was going to be amazing.

I thought about it every now and again, and eventually I wrote it. I revisited the various journal posts I wrote when I was still in the choir, and which I remembered as hilarious. I rewrote it.

I rewrote it again.

And it just… didn’t work. Beyond the basic premise that it teaches you to remain calm in adversity, there wasn’t a lot to say. The examples needed so much explanation that they became laboured. A lot of the chaos I remembered stemmed from me being roped in to swell Christmas numbers long after I’d officially left the choir - it was my own under-preparedness, rather than a general state of being.

There is nothing so disappointing as the gap between a piece of writing in conception, and the writing as it exists on the page. Nailing down the words often falls far short; emotional passages become stiff, wooden things that fail to capture the atmosphere that seemed so vivid.

I’ve often found myself putting off writing a story because I’m worried that I won’t do it justice. “I won’t write it now,” I think, “I’ll save it”.

This is, broadly speaking, a terrible idea. The thing, when written, might be a disappointment. But unwritten, it has no chance to be anything at all. Writing it once doesn’t preclude writing it a second time (or third, or fourth), and perhaps it will get better with each iteration. Perhaps you will learn, as I did this time, that it is never going to match your hopes. But perhaps you will slowly inch towards it being the story it was in your head.

Do not leave the things unwritten. Given them a chance in the world: write them at least once. Possibly many times. And accept that you will lose some along the way.






Aphantasia: Or Why I Can't Draw Dragons

 
Rather inexpert pencil drawing of a cartoonish dragon, with a spiny red autumnal leaf glued in place as the flames from his mouth.
 

Yesterday, on Twitter, I learned the word “aphantasia”. Wikipedia (where would we be without Wikipedia) defines aphantasia as “a mental condition characterized by an inability to voluntarily visualize mental imagery”.

I wouldn’t describe myself as having no ability to visualise mental imagery, but my abilities are certainly very limited. Mental images are difficult to summon, low on detail, and extremely fleeting. Oddly, recalling a photo of someone’s face is easier than recalling their face; having someone else do the work of collapsing a three-dimensional human to a two-dimensional image helps a lot. People whom I saw last week on video calls are easier to visualise than the person who has just left the room.

Visual imagination, however? Creating new images from scratch, from my mind? From nothing? Forget it.

If you say “don’t think of a purple horse”, I won’t.

From Wikipedia, I followed a link to Blake Ross’ article describing his aphantasia (the article is on Facebook, always a minefield if you are not signed in). It seems his visualisation skills are considerably worse than mine, but many things still struck a chord: the poor memory for experiences, despite an otherwise-good memory for detail; the terrible sense of direction; the complete inability to explain to someone how you can easily recognise, but not visualise, a face; a lack of emotional attachment to past events.

The scientist who coined the term aphantasia is keen to point out that this is not a disorder, it’s a normal way of being for around 2% of the world. I’ve never felt my lack of visual imagery to be a problem - more that images are just not something I’m especially interested in.

I can imagine things by concept. A drawing of a dragon, with a red autumn leaf for the flames it breathes, is a nice idea. I know that. I can pick up a suitable leaf. I cannot, however, draw the dragon. I can find a picture of dragon, and copy it. I can’t adjust the arms. I can see that they don’t look right; I can’t imagine how to fix them.

When I read a novel, I have no idea what the characters look like. Or the location. Or the layout of the house in which the action takes place (and thank you to everyone who has ever included a map or building plan when plot points hinged on the details). I don’t skip the descriptions. I might even enjoy them, if the words are nicely arranged, or if they evoke an emotion. But I won’t remember - or notice - what colour the hero’s hair is. I won’t understand the route he took. Descriptions of battles - explaining terrain, whose army is where, how the mass of bodies moves in attack and counter-attack - are particularly difficult. I frequently get lost, re-read, get lost again, give up, and move on.

Any mental model I have, either when reading or writing, is entirely derivative. If I need a building, I will use a house I have lived in, or a school I went to. If your description doesn’t match that house I lived in, I probably won’t notice. Recently, some twenty chapters’ into a friend’s first-draft of a novel, I tripped over a few details. A few moments’ consideration revealed that I had mentally (and unconsciously) mapped the race of beings who peopled her pages onto…. Wombles. Had she described her creatures as furry? No. Long, pointy noses? No. Nifty way with litter? Absolutely no. Yet, for some reason, my brain had cheerfully assigned them Womble and ignored any contradictory evidence.

One of the things most commonly said to me by people kind enough to beta-read my stories is: you haven’t described the physical appearance of the characters. Apparently, readers like to be told these things. (Why? You are the ones with the imaginations! You decide what these people look like!) Sometimes I make up a few details at random, shoehorn them into the prose somewhere, and hope that they will pass muster. It feels pointless. More often, now, I agree that I haven’t described them.

There is room for everyone in the writing world. If people would like vivid, imaginative descriptions in their prose then my stories are probably not for them. But who knows? Perhaps 2% of readers can relax with my stories, safe in the knowledge that they don’t need to worry about those details that are, for some of us, irrelevant.

Redcar: The Power of Saying It Right

Once upon a time, in a pub in Berkshire, I nearly made a man cry by saying “Redcar”.

I was in Newbury, talking to a table of strangers. “Oh,” said one, “you’re from the north-east? Our mate’s from the north-east. He grew up in Redcar.”

The mate looked sheepish, but he carried on. “It’s a seaside town, it’s in Yorkshire.”

I know. I grew up not far away. When I was twelve or so, my best friend and I used to catch the train, bold with the excitement of travelling by ourselves. We would go to either Redcar or Saltburn for the day - both were on the same line. Redcar had three railway stations (Redcar East, Redcar Central, and Redcar British Steel); Saltburn was the terminus. Shortly before I triumphantly dropped geography as a school subject I spent a dull day surveying shoppers and passers-by as part of a field trip and “enquiry” into the central business district of Redcar. I know that it hasn’t actually, technically, been in Yorkshire since before I was born.

I didn’t say all of that out loud. Instead, I just said that I knew it. “We used to go to the beach at Redcar.”

The man who grew up there suddenly joined in. “See? See? She says Redcar properly. None of you say it right”.

It’s a tiny difference. It’s whether you say it as written - Red Car - or lean all your weight on the first syllable and practically chuck the second one away. Even in a country as small as England, it’s very easy to travel far enough away from your home town that no one will pronounce it correctly. And when you meet someone who does, it is a tiny bond, a tiny shared moment that both creates and cures disproportionate homesickness.

Homesickness seems too strong a term. Perhaps is it more akin to nostalgia, a rose-tinted fondness for places distant.

In recent months another town near where I grew up has been in the news: Barnard Castle. It is, incidentally, a lovely place that deserves better than to be the butt of jokes about a politician making ill-advised choices. You should go there some time. Visit the Bowes Museum. However, every time Barnard Castle has been mentioned by friends, by colleagues, by news readers I have noticed that (like the man said) none of them say it right. And I am reminded that I am not at home.

I’ve never lived in a different country. I imagine that anyone living thousands of miles from their home, possibly somewhere they rarely speak their native language, must feel a little leap of joy when they encounter a familiar accent. The stranger feels like a friend and ally. Surely even someone who cheerfully left their home behind might feel that tug of shared experience.

But someone who was already lonely, or missing their home? I think they’d be much more likely to trust this unknown person, to turn towards them for company and kinship. Or, at the very least, buy them a drink and sit in the pub and chat for an hour.

Next time you need a character to make an unwise choice, remember the power of letting them meet someone who says it right.

Two New Stories

 
Sunrise over Oxfordshire fields
 

Today is June 20th, and I’m very excited. It’s the summer solstice and the lovely people at English Heritage are going to live-stream the sunset from Stonehenge. (And also stream tomorrow’s sunrise, but let’s be realistic: I will not be awake for that.)

On top of that, I have two - not one but two - new stories published today.

All Worlds Wayfarer is a beautiful literary speculative fiction magazine, published at each solstice and equinox. The night I discovered it, I stayed up way too late reading my way through the latest issue - and their masthead involves a windrose. I do love a windrose. Their issues are usually packed with good stuff, and I’m over the moon that they’re including The Fear Inventory in Issue V. You can buy the latest issue (or any past issues) for an extremely reasonable price on Kindle; you can also read Issue V free on AWW’s website until the autumnal equinox.

The Gray Sisters is a brand new literary magazine of modern myth and folklore. In their inaugural issue, which is free to read on their website, they include my modern fairy-tale, Rosa. I’m very much looking forward to making the acquaintance of the other stories.

The Gray Sisters are also producing a podcast, which will include audio versions of the stories and interviews with the authors. I had an absolute blast on Skype with Retta Bodhaine for my interview - she was immense fun to talk to, but also provided me with a completely unshakable reason for constructing a blanket fort very late night at night. (Absolutely to improve the audio quality, absolutely not because I like building dens.)

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a lot of running around in over-excited little circles to do before sunset.

(Many thanks to Katie for the sunrise photo.)

Submissions and Rejections

 
Pile of stories printed on A4, annotated in red pen.
 

In 2018, I sent eleven stories out into the world to seek their fortunes. Two of the stories I dispatched twice, and the net result was that I received thirteen rejections.

At the beginning of 2019 I was wondering whether I should send any of them out again for another try. Was dogged determination the right approach? Or should I accept that editors had decided these pieces of fiction weren’t publishable, and move on? I’d seen writers advocating sending the same story out ten, twenty, a hundred times - and writers arguing that rejection is a clear sign that you need to rewrite. So I went looking for advice.

I found Why You Should Aim for 100 Rejections a Year, Kim Lao’s essay on embracing - with enthusiasm - rejections. Shortly after that I came across another piece (which I now can’t locate) which likened submitting stories to buying lottery tickets: the more you do it, the more chance you have.

Right, then, I thought. That’s what I’ll do.

And I started throwing stories at the world. When one got rejected, I turned it round and send it straight back out the door. I wrote new things. I polished up older things, and sent them off, too. I tried to match stories to publications, which means I’ve also read a lot of stories in a lot of magazines and journals this year, and I tried not to get dispirited when yet another editor emailed to tell me that my work was “not a good fit”.

But hey, none of them said “your fiction is awful, please desist”!

Some of them were lovely. Some editors took the time to send me feedback with their rejection (and I am so grateful to everyone who was able to do that). One story that I was particularly proud of came back time and again until I was beginning to lose faith… then an editor rejected it with a friendly and apologetic note telling me all the things they liked about it.

I kept a count of the submissions and rejections (which is, by the way, really very easy to do if you use The Submissions Grinder). Chatting to a friend, who is a proper, published and extremely successful author, I mentioned that I was trying to get up to a hundred.

“But that’s a submission every three and a bit days!” she wailed, “that’s madness!”

Well, yes. When you put it like that, it does sound a bit excessive. And unachievable. Fortunately, I didn’t put it like that.

I also didn’t quite manage it. During 2019, I made 80 submissions. I received 64 rejections… and four acceptances. The acceptances, needless to say, caused me to run round in little circles like an over-excited Labrador pup.

Of the rejections, six were personal and some included helpful and thoughtful feedback. At least two stories have been extensively rewritten as a result, and three more are on hiatus while I wonder how to address them. Many of the form rejections were on the encouraging side, saying that they had enjoyed the story, inviting me to send them further work or wishing me luck placing the story elsewhere. A few were not encouraging at all.

Kim Lao was right: embracing - and shooting for - rejection is a surprisingly freeing experience. It’s educational, and fun, and it really is just part of the process. When an editor says that they liked a piece but it didn’t quite fit their requirements, I choose to believe them. This year, I’ll be aiming once again for a hundred rejections.

And that story, the one that I was proud of, but that kept getting rejected? It was my first submission of 2020: it went out again on January 2nd, for the eleventh time. I’ll let you know ;)

How's the November Challenge Going?

 
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This November, I’m attempting to write a minimum of 200 words per day. I stole this idea from Carly Racklin and have been tweeting relentlessly about it under the patently-made-up #IShoWriMoMo hashtag.

200 words doesn’t sound like very much, does it? That was the point, really. To me, the big hump to get over isn’t the actual words, but finding the time in the day to sit down and begin the writing. Once I’ve actually started, words do tend to come out - not necessarily good words, but words-comma-existent. My theory has always been that once a thing exists, it can be improved. If there are words, they can be edited and/or threatened until they turn into something decent.

One evening this week - arriving back home at around half-past eleven at night - I was tempted to skip a day. After all, this is a challenge I have set myself. Missing sleep for an arbitrary set of rules is silly; I can give myself permission to go to bed instead. Right?

I didn’t.

Partly, this is because I am the sort of person who invents silly sets of arbitrary rules and sticks to them. Ask me about January 2018, when each day I had to try a new drink, and (other than that) was only allowed to drink things from previous days. But mostly it was because I am hoping to use this month to blast through a first draft of my work-in-progress.

My WIP started as a short story, but is rapidly turning into a thing that I must reluctantly concede is a novel. I have previously lost impetus on long works, and I want to kick start myself into seeing it through to a conclusion. If I only add to it when I have the time, then that’s not a challenge. That’s just normal life.

The daily writing is providing results. My draft has grown considerably since November 1st, so I think the plan is working.

Which does, of course, raise a question: why am I writing this blog post instead of getting on with it?

Experiments in editing

 
crayons
 

Some time ago, I came across this post on Tumblr: Writing advice you’re not going to like. I recommend reading the whole thing, but the executive summary is: do not attempt to edit your writing, instead re-write it from the ground up using the previous draft as a reference.

As predicted in the article, I didn’t particularly like the advice. But here was someone of considerable writing experience assuring me that it was a revolutionary approach. In addition, I had a story that needed some fairly drastic action if it was ever going to make it in the world. Trying the re-write-from-scratch advice seemed like a worthwhile venture.

I took my printed copy of my story, which was much scribbled on in red and green ink. I found a purple pen and did some more scribbling. Then I opened up a nice new text document on my laptop and started typing.

At this point I would like to report that the text came together in a new way, I managed radical change, the rewritten story was immediately snapped up by an important and influential journal, and will shortly be published to massive acclaim. Sadly, none of those things is true, so much as I would like to report them, I shan’t.

As a strategy, rewriting really didn’t work for me at all. I’m a decent copy-typist, so at any point in time the path of least resistance was typing what was already on the existing page. Obviously, this is equivalent to letting a paragraph stand in edit, but because you’re furiously typing it feels like you’re making huge progress. I did rewrite some sections altogether, but far more often I typed in something close to the original, then edited until there was nothing left. In short, what I did was regular editing with extra busywork.

This is, obviously, not what the original poster had in mind. The process may be sound, but my first attempt to implement it certainly failed miserably.

What struck me (hilariously after the fact) is that to some extent I’ve always done this anyway. My first draft is usually, time permitting, written in long-hand with a pen. Once the first draft is finished, I type it up and frequently do fairly drastic revising as I go. This is a completely normal part of my writing, which I had inexplicably failed to equate with someone telling me to do exactly that.

For writing anything - fiction, essays, CVs - I’ve always regarded it as a two-stage process:
1. Make it be
2. Make it be good
To be honest, doing (1) feels like the hard part. Editing something to improve it is always easier than creating something out of nothing. (That’s not to say that I don’t get stuck with editing; a story I’m very fond of has been stranded in limbo for months since I realised the ending hinged on a series of ghastly puns, and I set it down until I could come up with something better.)

I’ll certainly try the re-writing again in the future. Sadly, however, it isn’t a magic bullet.

Of course it isn’t :-)

Violent Silence is loose in the world!

Luna Station Quarterly…

…which is a speculative fiction magazine…

…with a beautiful print edition…

…has published my story, Violent Silence.

And I couldn't be more delighted!

You can grab a copy of the magazine from Amazon, or from Weightless Books. You can also read it free online.

This is my first publication, the first time a piece of fiction I've written has gone through the whole process of submission, and selection, and been made into a typeset page which I can turn.

(I can't turn it yet, because the paper copy is still winging its way to me through the postal system. But I will! And there will be pictures, oh yes, there will be pictures.)

It makes me very happy that the publication will be Luna Station Quarterly, too. I've loved LSQ since I opened issue 29 and read How Lady Nightmare Stole Captain Alpha’s Girlfriend by Kristen Brand, and realised that here was a magazine that would print funny superhero stories, alongisde whimsical sci-fi, and gritty fantasy. And still manage a consistent feel for each issue. I subscribed on the spot, and I still love the variety of voices and viewpoints they publish.

I’m grateful to LSQ’s editorial staff for making it all happen, and for being so quick to answer newbie questions. I’m honoured to be appearing on their pages with all their amazing authors. I’m revelling in the idea that this might just mean I am a Real Writer.

But mostly I’m excited.