Sunday Reads: 29 July 2012

Kylie Quillinan Sunday Reads The Writing Life No Comments

It’s Sunday!  And that means we have 10 reads worth your time:

Jason Black discusses the important of the denouement in Cause of Death: Denouement.

Kristen Lamb has 5 Common Writing Blunders That Can Annoy or Bore Our Readers.

Over at Anne R Allen’s Blog, Ruth Harris lists 11 Reasons Writers Get Rejected – And Why Only 3 of them Matter.

At Writer Unboxed, Shari Stauch examines some unique blogs in Seven Out-of-the-Box Author Blogging Ideas.

Catherine Ryan Howard talks spam marketing in This is an Ethical Way to Sell Your E-Book? I Disagree.

Natania Barron discusses Five Ways Social Media Can Destroy Your Writing (And, Potentially, Your Career) and offers some solutions.

S James Nelson talks about How I Won David Farland’s Writing Contest by writing a specifically-targeted story.

Roni Loren has a warning about copyright in Bloggers Beware: You CAN Get Sued For Using Pics On Your Blog.

A class action lawsuit has been lodged against Harlequin, alleging under-payment of royalites.  See the details at Harlequin lawsuit.

Interested in writing for Writer Beware?  They have recently put out a Call for Guest Bloggers.

 

Missed any Fictorians articles this week?

Guest poster Jordan Ellinger – Flexing Your Writing Muscles with Help from the Writers of the Future Contest

Dylan Blacquiere – Writing Doctors

Colette Vernon – Can Goldfish Channel Muse?

Can Goldfish Channel Muse?

Author's Perspective Colette Black Making Progress as a Writer The Writing Life No Comments

I’ll tell you  now, if you didn’t figure it out from the title and the picture, this post is a bit silly. Which is kind of sad since we’ve just had two amazing, interesting, and informative posts. And no, it’s not about the band, though I do have “Uprising” as my ringtone.

The thing is, I had my son’s goldfish nearby for quite a while. First, in my study. Then, in his room next door. The water sloshed through the filter creating white noise, the little goldfish swam around as I came in and out of the room, and occasionally I  stopped to give them an extra snack while they kissed at the edge of the glass.

They died.

No, I didn’t overfeed them. My daughter brought home a couple of new fish she’d won at a school fair or something. We put them in with the others.  Buttercup survived her initiation, though she swam sideways for a while. The other wimps didn’t have her evasive abilities. They  failed their mount wannahockaloogie test, and  the rest of the fish ate them. Even Buttercup eventually succumbed. We should have cleaned the tank as soon as I found the first skeleton stuck to the filter’s intake. I was busy, my husband was busy, and my son thought it looked cool. It was like something out of a Fringe episode. Within hours the whole tank was black and all the fish had died.

I had trouble focusing on my writing after that. I liked writing when it was quiet, with no background noise, not even light music. But without the fish tank, it was too quiet. Even the trees waving outside my window didn’t dispel the eerie silence.

I needed my muse back. In the nick of time, summer came, and I discovered a tall floor fan makes great white noise.

But eventually summer will be over– though since I live in southern Arizona it may take a while–and I’ll have to turn the fan off.  Maybe it’s time I had my own pet, instead of the numerous ones my kids take care of.  Or maybe I’ll just set up the tank and forget the fish. Any suggestions?

Oh, and yes, after it went black I put on some gloves and cleaned the tank. My bio-hazard disaster will not be blamed for an upcoming apocalypse, nor will it be a source of a post-apocalyptic story. Although….

 

The Art of Writing Medicine – Writing Doctors

Craft & Skills Dylan Blacquiere The Writing Life No Comments

Irony of ironies, my series on the art of writing medicine has been unavoidably delayed these past couple of months by having to write my own board exams. I’ve passed, which makes me a fully qualified neurologist. It’s a tremendous thing to be able to say that, after four years of medical school and five years of residency; it also gives me some weight on what a credible physician character can be.

I have talked in past entries about how easy prey physicians are for cliché in fiction. To some extent, that isn’t surprising, as doctors and physicians are stock characters that show up regularly in genre work, often as a simple background fountain of exposition, sometimes as a noble, compassionate hero who starts her day reciting the Hippocratic Oath over her morning coffee. Sometimes the reverse happens, and the doctor is secretly an evil character who conducts unethical experiments or is involved in a vast conspiracy (often with a pharmaceutical company) for no other reason than the money. Take a look at any science fiction story or television show; odds are high that there will be an episode or a segment where the doctor struggles with healing the enemy, or where an unscrupulous physician is called out by a morally sound one on a violation of ethics. Money or research prestige is usually at stake, with justifications about it being for the good of science. It’s usually a surgeon, too, which makes my physician’s heart calcify with jealousy.

That isn’t to say that these tropes are always bad, but they can descend quickly into cliché. They’re easy to fall into as well, and it happens when the medicine takes over from the character.

So how to avoid the slide into cliché? The easiest answer is to write true characters who happen to be doctors, and many other posts have talked about how to write good characters in your story. Here are a few other pointers, though, which may help the next time you have a doctor among your cast.

1. Not every doctor is a bloody surgeon or emergency room specialist. Sorry, that may be my own pet peeve. But pity the poor internist, or family doctor, or geriatrician. It’s been a fond hope of mine to see a physician-hero who happens to be a radiologist someday. But in all seriousness, the practice of medicine is wide and varied, and not every doctor goes to the operating room or runs a trauma code.

2. Do some research into the training. For the most part, it takes at least six years of schooling after an undergraduate degree to become a doctor, yet it’s not uncommon to see preternaturally gifted doctors in fiction that went to medical training straight out of high school. That doesn’t happen, and it strains credulity to have your doctor too young.

3. Not every doctor does everything. The moment House lost its magic for me was when Alison Cameron, nominally an infectious diseases specialist, was the lead on a brain biopsy, which requires years of neurosurgical training. Some doctors are able to do many things in many different fields; these are generalists, like family doctors and general internists. Having your trauma surgeon show a sudden expertise in managing a heart attack or a stroke – that doesn’t happen. If you need your doctor to be able to do a specific thing, then plan that as you create your character – or have them acknowledge that they’re out of their depth if the situation calls for it.

4. There is life outside of the hospital. We do more than see patients; we teach and research, we shop for groceries and mow the lawn, we get flat tires and go to the bathroom. Keep in mind that doctors are human beings and that having sworn the Hippocratic Oath doesn’t take away from all of our other needs and secrets. Write your doctors as human beings, and make them more than just their profession.

5. The same tricks apply even if your physician is just a means for exposition. Having some hint of a back-story can help make the difference between a piece of furniture delivering dialogue and a good minor character that helps to flesh out the world that you’ve built.

6. As with any aspect of medicine that you write, read up on the medical science. If the doctor you write doesn’t know what he’s talking about, it’s going to show.

There actually aren’t many other tricks to writing physicians that don’t apply to writing people from other professions or occupations. The bottom line is that medicine is an occupation, not a character description, so you’re going to need more than that to flesh them out. Done poorly, doctors in fiction can stand out as tired clichés, but done well? Many of the greatest works of fiction have had physicians as strong characters. Maybe yours will be next.

Jordan Ellinger: Flexing Your Writing Muscles with Help from the Writers of the Future Contest

Guest Posts The Writing Life 8 Comments

Guest Post by Jordan Ellinger

The Writers of the Future Contest, more properly known as “L Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future”, is quite simply one of the largest, most well-respected short fiction writing contests in the world. By some accounts, it has the fifth largest purse of any contest, and is one of the only ones without an entry fee.

When Joshua Essoe, the managing editor for Fictorian guest posts, asked me to write an article about the Writers of the Future Contest, I started out with the title “How to Win the Writers of the Future Contest”. But that article has been written before, a couple of times, by previous winners of the contest. So I scrapped that idea, and instead decided to write about the experience of winning. But that article has also been written. Dozens of times. I used to even maintain a page linking to them.

So what could I cover that hasn’t already been discussed? Well, the contest has helped to shape my career almost from the moment I decided to write seriously, so I thought I’d write a little bit about what it has done to help me succeed professionally.

I discovered WotF back when I first started writing short fiction. I’d found a battered copy of Writers of the Future Volume 9 at a used bookstore, and the title intrigued me. “Writers of the Future”. It was an anthology for undiscovered talent. I was undiscovered and, hopefully, talented. I was excited.

It was encouraging that I recognized some of the writers within. Sean Williams was a #1 NYT Bestseller and Star Wars author and appeared in the table of contents alongside noted Baen author Eric Flint (1632). So that table of contents told me that some of the authors who won the contest went on to have great careers. I wanted in.

Unfortunately, the book was old. The spine was lined with cracks and calling the cover “dog-eared” was generous at best, so I Googled the contest and, impressively, it was still going. They’d just released volume 20. Longevity is a very good sign in short fiction, and twenty years impressed the hell out of me.

The first story I submitted was called the Autobomber, which was about a robotic suicide bomber. Looking back, I can see the story’s flaws and I eventually retired it to the trunk, but at the time it was the best I could manage. Encouragingly, it won an Honorable Mention.

Honorable Mentions are something I think the contest does right. Fully 10-15% of entries will receive HMs. Though the number of entries is kept a strict secret, internet gossip places it at around 1500 a quarter, which means that some 100-150 writers receive one. This is enormous encouragement. Often it’s the first bit of positive feedback an author has received at that point in their career.

While some writers win the contest on their first attempt, it took me seven, and I was able to mark my progress by the awards that I won. At first it was Honorable Mentions, then a Semi-Finalist, then another Semi-Finalist, and then eventually my Finalist story “After the Final Sunset, Again” won 1st place in Volume 25. Because there were so many tiers of prizes, I could actually see myself improving as a writer, and that was all the encouragement that I needed.

The prize for placing as a Semi-Finalist is a critique of your story by the contest administrator. In my case, that was the late K. D. Wentworth. I’d submitted a story called Mannequin Empire, about a hot shot engineer who figured out how to transfer the consciousness of a real dog into a robot body. Now, this guy was a bit of a jerk. Think Tony Stark without the redeeming qualities. When the critique came back K. D. explained that, though the writing was good, I had written an unsympathetic main character. Because she had no reason to like my protagonist, she had no reason to read further.

By the time I received K. D.’s critique I’d already submitted my next entry to the following quarter and it too placed as a Semi-Finalist. Guess what my critique said? Unsympathetic main character. Now, this contest is judged blind, so she had no idea that the same person had written both stories. What she’d done without realizing it was to identify a major weakness in my writing.

Armed with that knowledge, I set out to create the most sympathetic character I could. A mother who fights for the life of her unborn child. “After the Final Sunset, Again” was the result and it ended up winning first place.

I’m not going to talk about what the workshop or awards ceremony was like. Google “Writers of the Future Resources” and you can find dozens of workshop blogs, my own included, that cover the experience in more detail than the space allotted to me here. Instead, let’s talk about what happens immediately after you get home from the workshop week.

One of the best kept secrets of the contest is that Author Services Inc., the people who administer it, will keep in touch with you after you win, and continue to support you in any way they can, including getting you a spot on the 2nd most watched morning show in America. They have a vested interest in helping you to succeed. The better their contest winners do, the more the contest gets a reputation for picking winners. And they’ve picked some doozies. Patrick Rothfuss, Karen Joy Fowler, David Farland, Jeff Carlson, Stephen Baxter, David Zindell…the list seems endless.

I met several pro-writers at the workshop weekend, one of whom got me my first novel contract (coming out in November. No, I can’t talk about it yet. But it’s coming). Since then I’ve been developing a close network of friends who are neo-pros and we back each other up. We share opportunities with each other and recommend one another for writing assignments. Winning the Writers of the Future contest was my entry into the world of the genre writing, and for that alone I’m grateful.

Now, no article about the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest would be complete without a short paragraph on Scientology. Roy Hardin was asked about it on NBC Daytime, and I’m frequently asked about it at cons. I have no feelings about Scientology either way, or any religion for that matter. However, I do believe it’s wrong to discriminate based on one’s religious preferences–no matter what they are. “Nuff said.

The fact is that, to my knowledge, everyone at Author Services Inc. (the agency that administers the Contest) is a Scientologist. However none of the judges are (or have ever been), and no Scientologist has ever been included among the winners. There are rumours of a “firewall” between the contest and the religion L. Ron Hubbard founded, and in my experience it could very well exist.

No one ever mentioned Scientology when I was down there. No one. Not even the guests at the various events we were invited to. Whatever else he did, L. Ron Hubbard was a writer first and foremost and he enjoyed paying it forward. The folks at Author Services say that they recognize that and are paying it forward in his name, and I believe them.

So, to sum up, the contest has been the gift that keeps on giving. It encouraged me with Honorable Mentions when I was just starting out, rewarded me with a win when I’d reached a certain skill level, and has helped me develop a robust network of neo-pro and pro writers who’ve become my friends. It’s more than just a writing contest, and I encourage anyone who is reading this to enter. Hopefully it’ll help you to develop your writing muscles and launch your career the way it has mine!

Guest Writer Bio:Jordan Ellinger is a Writers of the Future winner and Clarion West graduate. His story “Kineater” recently made an appearance in Warhammer:The Gotrek & Felix Anthology and has work upcoming in Hammer&Bolter as well as World’s Collider, a new anthology from Nightscape Press. In his spare time, he helms Every Day Publishing, publisher of Every Day Fiction, Every Day Poets, Flash Fiction Chronicles, and Raygun Revival. To read more, visit his website www.jordanellinger.com or follow him on twitter @jordanellinger.