I’ve really enjoyed this month’s Fictorians’ posts on new beginnings. As I am typing this, I am sitting in my newly finished basement, in the new house we built in 2016, and am about to head to the Superstars Writing Seminars. I’m also starting a new novel and looking forward to a new year.

Some of the posts I found the most interesting and helpful were those where the author embarked on a new direction after deciding a previous effort was not working out. Taking motivation from rejection, using a new start to rekindle a love of writing, taking a leap into a new genre… All of them were helpful and entertaining.

I hope our readers found them helpful. It was my deliberate desire to provide new writers, or writers who were dealing with difficulties and lack of motivation some encouragement and ideas.

I’d like to thank all of the Fictorians who posted, and would like to especially thank this month’s guest posters. As far as I’m concerned, you all hit it out of the park.

Now, on to Superstars!

Cleansing With Fire

January 28, 2017

Frog Jones

Craft & Skills Frog Jones Rewriting The Writing Process No Comments

I hear from other authors or prospective authors that nothing is quite as intimidating as a blank page.

I won’t speak for everyone, but this simply isn’t the case for me. I love a blank page. A blank page represents the infinitely possible. A blank page represents freedom. When I have a blank page, I can fill the thing with whatever I want. It’s hope, it’s potential beauty, it’s raw creative space. I love a blank page.

For me, there’s nothing quite as intimidating as a page filled with a terrible story that I have written.

You see, sitting down and drafting is easy. It’s the thing we all love to do. It’s the funnest part of writing a thing. It’s what makes NaNoWriMo so popular (and so problematic for some) Throwing down raw, fat word counts is, without a doubt, simply a joy.

Fixing a broken story? That’s hard.

So, let me take you back to the fall of 2015. I’m writing this story for a little anthology called Horseshoes, Hand Grenades, and Magic. I’m not going to lie–the call for this thing was weird. My task was to write a story wherein “close is good enough.” That’s a really esoteric theme, and I know I’m not the only author that struggled with it.

See, I got this idea in my head. A thief breaks into a vault and then has to use the enchanted items therein to get back out, only he has no clue what those items do. Sounds like a fun little story, right?

Nope. Nightmare.

I ended up with about four thousand words of me repeating the same joke over and over again as told from the persepective of a main character that, by virtue of this joke, had almost no agency. It. Was. Terrible. I haven’t drafted a story this bad since high school. I gave it a day, read the thing, and cringed.

My wife, who usually takes the second pass on our stories, tried to calm me down. She’s a lovely woman, and her initial reaction was “Frog, you say everything is terrible when you write it.” And she’s right, but I tried to impress on her how much I really meant it, this time. Still, she insisted that she should read it and take the second pass, as is our normal wont.

I don’t actually think she finished that first read. Very, very quickly she returned, and this time with a different attitude.

“Okay, this time you’re right,” she said. “It sucks.”

Now, we’re all going to have off days. We’re all going to muff it a time or two. Nobody hits a home run every time they step up the the plate. Insert failure platitude of choice here.

But I want you to learn from my mistake. Screwing up the initial draft was bad, but not unforgivable. It’s what I did next that really sets this baby apart in the annals of Frog’s terrible mistakes. It’s my response to writing this malformed chunk of text that marks this experience as being just slightly worse than trying to shave my beard with a cheese grater.

I tried to fix it.

I spent a month. An entire month’s worth of writing time. An entire month during which I could have been working on a novel, or churning out four other short stories. No, I threw good time after bad, and I tried to polish this turd until it shone. I tweaked the language, I moved paragraphs about, I tried everything I could think of to make the story readable, but nothing I tried worked. You know why? Because it was a bad story. It wasn’t bad writing, it wasn’t bad grammar or bad structure. It was a bad story. No matter how I told it, it was going to suck. But I latched onto the thing like a weight and let it drag all of my writing goals down with me for a month.

It was my wife that saved me. After a month went by, you know what she did? She handed me a blank page. She sat me down and told me to stop thinking about the way I had written the story, and to start completely over from my original concept.

Two days later, the story was written, revised, and sent to the editor. It’s still got the same core concept as the original version, but this time it also has a story. You know, a whole plot arc, with dialogue and motivations and all that jazz that we put into stories that make them not suck. This second version is good; I’m actually pretty proud of it.

But mostly, when I did a reading of it at the last convention I appeared at, it made me think of that full month of pain in the fall of 2015 where I refused to cleanse a bad story with fire. Learn from my mistake, oh ye reader of writing blogs. Learn that sometimes, when you just can’t find a way to fix what you’ve done, the best thing to do is burn it to the ground and get yourself one of those blank pages everyone keeps talking about.

Reset

January 26, 2017

fictorians

Guest Posts The Writing Life Your Writing Environment No Comments

Guest Post by Connie Schultz

This past year was a rough one for me; full of changes and growth and not nearly as much writing as I would’ve liked, I can sit here and tell you until I’m blue in the face that I did the best I could with what I had. But now I can show you. I can stick my money where my mouth is, and show you how worth it all of the challenges of 2016 were to me.

Behold the New Year’s mindset.

It’s got a sort of magic all its own, doesn’t it?

As I sit here writing this, the second day of 2017, bookstore attendants running around me (I can’t write at home—one of many things I discovered about myself last year), I can’t help but be excited by the idea of a new slate. And I certainly hope that this isn’t just me. Because this is more than just a time for me to prove that I can measure up to my goals and expectations for this year.

It’s your time to prove this to yourself as well.

As we step further into January, here are some ways to go about taking this new chance, and owning this fresh clean canvas we’ve all been given.

Be Kind to Yourself

I’m still learning this one myself, to be honest with you. It’s hard, and more often than not I feel slightly dumb when I think about this, and then think about all the people pushing themselves to new heights, but this is a pivotal point to wrap your head around. It’s not easy doing new things, and growth takes time. How much harder will it be if you’re criticizing yourself every time you make a mistake?

Set Aside Time Periodically to Make It a Habit

This is something you’ve probably heard several times, especially in regards to writing. J.K. Rowling once said to “be ruthless about protecting writing days,” and even if it’s just thirty minutes a day, or an hour on Sundays, I agree heavily that that is essential. Even if you have non-writing goals, be ruthless about protecting them. Write down what you want to complete over and over again as many times as it takes until you think about it so much that you’re dreaming about it at night. And then go do it.

Never Give Up

Sometimes this is easier said than done. To keep going with a project idea when you just aren’t getting anything is hard. I’ve been there several times. It’s hard to not look down on yourself because you feel like you aren’t getting anywhere. But sometimes the only way to get around something, is to walk straight through it. Don’t let yourself give up just because you run into what feels like a brick wall. Grab your climbing gear and start pulling yourself up, because sometimes that’s the only way to continue moving forward.

Don’t Forget to Have Fun

Writing is meant to be an enjoyable act. It’s taking the weird in your brain and making it tangible for all the world to see. It’s giving the inner child in you as much candy as you dare, and letting them run. As much as it can feel like work at times, and as much as part of it is work, don’t forget why you love this. Because at the end of the day, that’s why all of us stick around. Enjoy yourself. Love what you’re doing.

As much as some this probably feels like a rehash of the same old advice you’ve read a thousand times before, I think it’s important to hear all of this again. Because we’re human, and humans tend to have difficulty remembering things from time to time. Especially the things that can sometimes be vital to our sanity. So I hope that as you continue this month, typing or biking or sweating or whatever-else-you-plan-on-doing away, you come back to this. And maybe you smile, or maybe you sniff and click out of the window. But you’re here for a reason, and I admire you for remembering that.

Happy writing. And Happy New Year.

An interesting thing I’ve noticed as of late, is that there’s a distinct difference between waking up one morning to the realization that you’re just one day closer to the end of the month, and waking up to realize you’ve lasted another full rotation around the sun. Part of it, I think, is the hype we silly humans place on it—New Year’s and New Year’s Eve parties are the next big focus after Christmas, and boy do they come fast. The part that gets to me the most, though, is that this is another chance to make things how I want them to be. And even more personally, to become the writer and author I so strongly want to be.

My name is Connie Schultz, I’m 18, and currently attending community college to attain my bachelor’s in journalism. I love fantasy and science fiction, but if the blurb on the back catches my attention, I will read just about anything. Eventually I would like to write novels full-time, but if I happen to write articles for science magazines/anything else involving science, I wouldn’t mind that either.

Some of my favorite things: J.K. Rowling, Brandon Sanderson, Star Trek, Veritasium, Philip K. Dick, Neil Gaiman, Stranger Things, and also dogs, chocolate, and orange juice.

New Beginnings from Old Endings

January 26, 2017

fictorians

Craft & Skills Networking Starting a Career Steve Ruskin The Writing Life The Writing Process Your Writing Career No Comments

Whenever I begin a new writing project, I know I’m building on what I’ve learned from previous projects. Having written non-fiction for over two decades, and fiction for a few years now, I’ve come to recognize certain patterns in my writing habits that have been formed—both consciously and unconsciously—by my previous efforts. All my new beginnings follow a long chain of old endings.

In simple terms, it’s the learning process. My articles and book chapters, my short stories and novellas, all contained both successes and failures: things that worked, things that didn’t. Yet each one taught me something that I could take into the next project. The failures, if I’m honest, are the better teachers. That’s where the real learning is done. And the failures don’t need to be epic. Simple mistakes, recognized for what they are, show me what to do differently next time.

For example, my first professional fiction sale (a short story to an anthology), contained a fairly subtle yet significant example of floating viewpoint: “head hopping,” as it’s better known (where the point of view suddenly switches from one character to another without any cue to the reader that it’s happening). In my case, I was too inexperienced at the time to recognize what I had done, and it was subtle enough that the editor himself didn’t notice it until his second or third pass. (It was a scene in a séance, wherein I jumped blithely between the main character, a man trying to contact the dead, to the old woman who was leading him though the ritual.)

When the editor caught it and pointed it out to me, I was sufficiently mortified (another classic newbie move—overreaction!). But I also learned why head hopping was a problem, how it can disrupt the flow and pull the reader out of the story. I have been careful not to make the same mistake again. (Don’t misunderstand: many very good authors head hop through their characters all the time, and do it well. But not me, not then.)

The point: it was a learning experience. One that I wouldn’t have made had I not given that project my very best efforts, and made a sale to a good editor who then helped me improve the story. Because even my best at any given time will have shortcomings. Only by pushing myself will I make mistakes I can really learn from them. These are the good mistakes. The “new mistakes,” I now call them, stealing a line from the Shakira Zootopia song “Try Everything.”

Speaking of stealing, the best illustration I know of the process of making these “new mistakes” comes from one of my favorite books, Steal Like an Artist, by Austin Kleon. I think it speaks for itself:

(Image source: tumblr.austinkleon.com/post/102479069106. Note that Kleon himself stole this from Maureen McHugh!)

It’s a great illustration from a great book. Notice, however, that implicit in the “life of a project” is that we must complete our projects. For fiction writers, this is the equivalent of Heinlein’s second rule of writing: finish what you start. That’s the best way to learn. Even the epic fails, the stillborn ones destined for the scrap heap, teach us something … even if it’s just the extent of our current shortcomings.

But finish. Learn what you can. Then start something new.

Starting a new year is a lot like starting a new story. We can look back on the successes and failures of the ones we’ve finished, figure out what we’ve learned, and then begin a new one with a little more confidence.

Here’s to 2017—may it be full of new beginnings built on old endings.

Steve Ruskin has been a university professor, a mountain bike guide, and a number of things in between. In addition to fiction (most recently the sci-fi novella A Deal with the Devil’s Broker) he has written for academic and popular audiences in publications ranging from the American Journal of Physics to the Rocky Mountain News. Visit steveruskin.com.