Letters to a Young [Aspiring] Writer
There are, perhaps, too many sites, readers, and blogs out in the ether that offer advice to aspiring writers. Let's add to the mess-after all, it's a conspiracy to keep you confused.
Every time you read a block of advice about writing or how to be published, you should read it skeptically. Including this one. These blocks of advice are particular to . . . well, particular writers, editors, venues, etc. Ideally, one will collate the "best" (based on personal reading opinion and perceived usefulness) blocks of advice into a sort of gestalt whole.
I edit a small zine that focuses primarily on interstitial, bizarre, or (even) experimental work. Specifically, I edit the fiction that appears in this zine. I do not pay large sums of money. My zine is not funded by a grant; is not supported by an established, profitable press; and is not for sale. It's free, which means that the costs of operation come out of mine and my co-editors' pockets. Editing this zine requires, in a quiet month, about ten hours a week of my time. In a busy month, it requires more like twenty or thirty.
There you go: a decent foregrounding of how to receive this advice, based on who it's coming from.
Let's start at the "top."
Presentation of Self
When you send a submission to a venue (like mine) that receives them exclusively via email, the first thing the editor is going to see (before your name, even) is your email address. If your email address reflects the nickname you were given as a five-year-old, or indicates your raging interest in some obscure hobby, or reveals your talented capability to down jager-bombs, do not use that email address to send your submission. In the end, will I reject your story outright because it comes from "l33tman2000@awesome.com" or "snugglebumpsy@cute.com"? No, of course not. However, you're kidding yourself if you don't think that the first thing I do, the very first reaction I have to your submission, is to roll my eyes and sigh. Look, your submission is, in most cases, one of dozens, or hundreds, or thousands. If you offer an editor a reason to be pre-disposed against your work, there's a real likelihood that he or she will be.
Instead, sign up for a new email account-Gmail seems to be the industry standard these days, and it's free. Do not make the address cryptic or overly personal. This is your writer's inbox-your super-cool, super-mod, hipster friends do not have to even know you have such a lame email address. Use your first name and your last name. Like this: bob.bobson@gmail.com (No similarity to any actual Bob Bobsons intended) or this: bobette.bobson@gmail.com. Even simple initials are acceptable (b.bobson@gmail.com).
Now, is your email address less "visible" in my inbox? Yes, it blends right in. Contrary to what you may think, this is a good thing.
Moving on.
With your spankin' new, professional email address, you draft your cover letter. Some venues don't like them, or don't allow them. You know what? If that's the case, but you really want to write one, too damn bad. Violating the editor's preferences just irritates him or her. Most will discard your submission outright.
But, let's say that cover letters are allowed, or required, as they are at my zine. Great, now you get the chance to pull at my heart strings, or demonstrate how bad-ass you are in your local writer's group, or that you've found an ingenious way to get your new gmail account to accept wingdings as a valid font.
No, you don't.
First, you take the two minutes it requires to browse the venue-in-question and find out who the hell you're sending this story to. Is this a big thing? No, in fact, not doing it won't really count against you at all. However, taking these 120 seconds to look up the name of the editor helps predispose him or her to at least receiving your submission with a bit more warmth. After all, editors are no more cogs in a machine than you are. They have names, and they're usually fond of them. They might like that you give (or offer the appearance of giving) two small shits about their zine-enough that you looked up such a small detail.
Next, you let the editor know, in very direct language, that you're offering up your short story for his or her consideration. Like this: "Attached, please find "[story title]" (approx. X,XXX words) for your consideration." If it's a simultaneous submission (you've taken the time to find out if these are allowed), add a line to the above: "This is a simultaneous submission." Just like that. Easy as crap.
Next you summarize your story in a few lines, right?
No. At best, it's going to be forgettable and grossly under-representative of the whole of the work. At worst, you're going to reveal, before the editor even gets to the first line, that this story is not what the editor likes. He or she will doubtlessly still read it, but again, we're talking about subconscious pre-disposition here.
What you do get to do is take a line or two or three and identify yourself. Let the editor know if you have any relevant degrees, are an active part of a writing group, have attended some workshop, or if you have been published elsewhere. Do not list all twenty of your awesome publications. Yes, they're awesome, but the editor doesn't want your life history. Pick your favorite three, list those, and then add "and others."
If you don't have any relevant information like this to share, no problem. Just skip that step. It won't really make as big a difference as you think it will.
Then, be polite. Say "thanks" or "looking forward to hearing from you" or "sincerely" or whatever you like. Type your name at the bottom of the submission. I'm serious. Not doing so is lazy and dismissive. I don't care if your name appears in quotation marks alongside your email address in the "from" section of the email. That up there, that's code, data, email-servers communicating with email-servers stuff. Down here, in the cover letter, that's "person" stuff. Be a person.
Think I'm kidding about this stuff? You think you're a special snowflake and you're going to engender my sympathy by telling me something like you worked in food transportation for thirty years, retired, and decided to try your hand at writing? You think I'm going to take it easy because this is your first submission evar?
No.
You have to assume that I'm an asshole. I may not be, and I actually might take it easy on you, but are you willing to take that chance? Most editors have been a part of the field for years, have trained as writers themselves-some, like me, may owe a bazillion dollars in student loans from earning degrees in literary studies. Don't prance into the field wearing your best tiara and say by implication that you don't give a rat's ass about the incredible devotion, discipline, and practice it takes to be successful in writing (or anything). True, you may be one of the lucky few who tripped and fell into writing as an untrained-but-brilliant genius. In that case, none of what I'm telling you is going to matter, but statistically speaking, that's not likely. In fact, it's closer to impossible.
Picking a Venue
This is the time-consuming part. Look, I know how it is. When I first began submitting short stories, I used the bird-shot technique. I'd skip on over to Duotrope or Ralan's or Writer's Market, and I'd do some category searches for which venues accepted which genres. I was on fire; I needed to get things moving. That was enough research for me. So I'd bundle up my subs (I even took the time to do everything I listed above), and I'd fire them off, one-after-the-other, to the zines my assiduous research had revealed.
And you know what? They were uniformly rejected. It could be that they were just bad stories (although some later found homes when I stopped submitting this way), but what's more likely is that they weren't suited to the zine I was sending them to. Instead of gaining time by not reading the zines, I lost it by submitting to places that never would have accepted the work in the first place, had I taken the time to read their material. See, just because a market listing says that a venue accepts "magical realism" or "fantasy" or "horror," that doesn't necessarily mean what you think it means. Sometimes, the editors-in-question don't write those market listings, meaning those categories may not even represent what they like to publish. But let's say the editor did submit that information. You have to keep in mind, genre labels are massive, inaccurate, amoeba-like categories. You need to take the time to see how that zine interprets "magical realism" or "fantasy."
Sound time-consuming? It is, and it should be. By doing this, you stop shooting blindly into the dark and start targeting your submissions with surgical precision.
What's worse, you need to be sure to read recent material. Editors' tastes can change over time. So, while you may find a story similar to your own, that was published by the editor-in-question three years ago, that's not enough. You need to see what he or she has been buying for the last two or three issues. The field changes rapidly (particularly if you're writing under the "speculative fiction" umbrella). Keep up.
Presentation of Work
Right, those requirements up above might be a pain in the ass, but they're not un-doable. In fact, once you start doing things this way, you'll see how much time they save.
Great. You're on the right track. The submission has been appropriately matched to the venue, you present yourself professionally, and the cover letter is nice and clean.
You can still screw it up. The actual format of the story is the easiest way to do this. Often, venues specify how they want material formatted. In my case, I require that you format your story like this. (As an aside, most editors require this format, particularly in the spec. fic. field, so you might as well get used to it.)
But you don't like that format, or you don't want to take the time to "OMG?? RE-format the whole story?!?" Too damn bad. Those formatting requirements are there for a reason, and usually it has to do with readability. Editors and their assistants are reading a lot of material, and they like it to suit their viewing tastes. Is that selfish and unfair? You bet your ass it is. If there are minor violations of the format I prefer in a submission, I'll sometimes overlook them, but they irritate me, which is not what you want to do. If there are gross violations, I reject the story without reading it, and since I rarely send personal rejections, you won't even know why your story got bounced.
Do not dress up the text. Putting drop shadows on the title is stupid. Enlarging the text of the title, or rendering it in bold-that's stupid, too. Is your title so weak that it needs help? Yes? Go re-do it, then, and come back to me with a little respect for said title. Give it a chance.
You know what else? I'm not going to steal your ideas, so don't tell me they're protected by copyright-above all, don't put that damn copyright symbol anywhere on the draft. First, you're telling me ab initio that you're such a bad-ass that your ideas are at risk of being stolen. Secondly, you're telling me that you think I'm shady (possibly). Finally, you're telling me that you don't realize the damn thing is already protected. Don't believe me? Look it up. Don't trust your 1986 edition of some Writer's Digest guide to formatting.
(In the spirit of full disclosure, this is one of my biggest editorial pet peeves, so I may be approaching it with more vitriol than is needed.)
As for which rights are available, you can tell me that if you really want to, but most venues will tell you which rights they are looking to acquire. If those specific rights are not available, don't submit the piece. When I open up a submission, I assume the writer has looked to see which rights I'm after. This, in and of itself, isn't a big deal, but the less meta-text you can put up there in the heading of your story, the better.
Now, in my inbox anyway, your story gets the fairest shake possible. Maybe the text is killer, and you'll be the next one on the T.O.C. Maybe it's not-remember, if a venue rejects your material, it doesn't mean it's "bad." Each venue has carved out a specific piece of the "good writing" pie, and that's all it wants. I reject good stories all the time-because they're not representative of the aesthetics my specific zine tries to corner.
(As an aside, if you get rejected, never respond to the rejection. No matter how much you want to. No matter how mean I am to you. Know why? Because editors talk. We really, really do. Publishing circles are smaller than you think. Already think they're small? Well, they're smaller even than that. If you respond to a rejection, it will almost never come across the way you intend-which can fully be the editor's fault, and not yours. Next, your name and the story of your rejection-response will be passed around. Unfarily and one-sidedly. You can be blacklisted and not even know it.
If you need to bitch about a rejection, that's what drinking-buddies are for.
No one said any of this was fair, so don't try to make it so. Be smart instead.)
There are, of course, issues of craft that we could talk about-the most common mistakes that will sabotage the telling of a story-but that's a topic for another time.
Remember, that while these practices seem to make your submission "invisible," that's a good thing. You want the business part of your writing and presentation-of-self to be as transparent as possible. The only alternative is to be "visible" somehow, and that never works out the way you want-it's a negative thing, not positive.
Originally published at Darin Bradley.
Every time you read a block of advice about writing or how to be published, you should read it skeptically. Including this one. These blocks of advice are particular to . . . well, particular writers, editors, venues, etc. Ideally, one will collate the "best" (based on personal reading opinion and perceived usefulness) blocks of advice into a sort of gestalt whole.
I edit a small zine that focuses primarily on interstitial, bizarre, or (even) experimental work. Specifically, I edit the fiction that appears in this zine. I do not pay large sums of money. My zine is not funded by a grant; is not supported by an established, profitable press; and is not for sale. It's free, which means that the costs of operation come out of mine and my co-editors' pockets. Editing this zine requires, in a quiet month, about ten hours a week of my time. In a busy month, it requires more like twenty or thirty.
There you go: a decent foregrounding of how to receive this advice, based on who it's coming from.
Let's start at the "top."
Presentation of Self
When you send a submission to a venue (like mine) that receives them exclusively via email, the first thing the editor is going to see (before your name, even) is your email address. If your email address reflects the nickname you were given as a five-year-old, or indicates your raging interest in some obscure hobby, or reveals your talented capability to down jager-bombs, do not use that email address to send your submission. In the end, will I reject your story outright because it comes from "l33tman2000@awesome.com" or "snugglebumpsy@cute.com"? No, of course not. However, you're kidding yourself if you don't think that the first thing I do, the very first reaction I have to your submission, is to roll my eyes and sigh. Look, your submission is, in most cases, one of dozens, or hundreds, or thousands. If you offer an editor a reason to be pre-disposed against your work, there's a real likelihood that he or she will be.
Instead, sign up for a new email account-Gmail seems to be the industry standard these days, and it's free. Do not make the address cryptic or overly personal. This is your writer's inbox-your super-cool, super-mod, hipster friends do not have to even know you have such a lame email address. Use your first name and your last name. Like this: bob.bobson@gmail.com (No similarity to any actual Bob Bobsons intended) or this: bobette.bobson@gmail.com. Even simple initials are acceptable (b.bobson@gmail.com).
Now, is your email address less "visible" in my inbox? Yes, it blends right in. Contrary to what you may think, this is a good thing.
Moving on.
With your spankin' new, professional email address, you draft your cover letter. Some venues don't like them, or don't allow them. You know what? If that's the case, but you really want to write one, too damn bad. Violating the editor's preferences just irritates him or her. Most will discard your submission outright.
But, let's say that cover letters are allowed, or required, as they are at my zine. Great, now you get the chance to pull at my heart strings, or demonstrate how bad-ass you are in your local writer's group, or that you've found an ingenious way to get your new gmail account to accept wingdings as a valid font.
No, you don't.
First, you take the two minutes it requires to browse the venue-in-question and find out who the hell you're sending this story to. Is this a big thing? No, in fact, not doing it won't really count against you at all. However, taking these 120 seconds to look up the name of the editor helps predispose him or her to at least receiving your submission with a bit more warmth. After all, editors are no more cogs in a machine than you are. They have names, and they're usually fond of them. They might like that you give (or offer the appearance of giving) two small shits about their zine-enough that you looked up such a small detail.
Next, you let the editor know, in very direct language, that you're offering up your short story for his or her consideration. Like this: "Attached, please find "[story title]" (approx. X,XXX words) for your consideration." If it's a simultaneous submission (you've taken the time to find out if these are allowed), add a line to the above: "This is a simultaneous submission." Just like that. Easy as crap.
Next you summarize your story in a few lines, right?
No. At best, it's going to be forgettable and grossly under-representative of the whole of the work. At worst, you're going to reveal, before the editor even gets to the first line, that this story is not what the editor likes. He or she will doubtlessly still read it, but again, we're talking about subconscious pre-disposition here.
What you do get to do is take a line or two or three and identify yourself. Let the editor know if you have any relevant degrees, are an active part of a writing group, have attended some workshop, or if you have been published elsewhere. Do not list all twenty of your awesome publications. Yes, they're awesome, but the editor doesn't want your life history. Pick your favorite three, list those, and then add "and others."
If you don't have any relevant information like this to share, no problem. Just skip that step. It won't really make as big a difference as you think it will.
Then, be polite. Say "thanks" or "looking forward to hearing from you" or "sincerely" or whatever you like. Type your name at the bottom of the submission. I'm serious. Not doing so is lazy and dismissive. I don't care if your name appears in quotation marks alongside your email address in the "from" section of the email. That up there, that's code, data, email-servers communicating with email-servers stuff. Down here, in the cover letter, that's "person" stuff. Be a person.
Think I'm kidding about this stuff? You think you're a special snowflake and you're going to engender my sympathy by telling me something like you worked in food transportation for thirty years, retired, and decided to try your hand at writing? You think I'm going to take it easy because this is your first submission evar?
No.
You have to assume that I'm an asshole. I may not be, and I actually might take it easy on you, but are you willing to take that chance? Most editors have been a part of the field for years, have trained as writers themselves-some, like me, may owe a bazillion dollars in student loans from earning degrees in literary studies. Don't prance into the field wearing your best tiara and say by implication that you don't give a rat's ass about the incredible devotion, discipline, and practice it takes to be successful in writing (or anything). True, you may be one of the lucky few who tripped and fell into writing as an untrained-but-brilliant genius. In that case, none of what I'm telling you is going to matter, but statistically speaking, that's not likely. In fact, it's closer to impossible.
Picking a Venue
This is the time-consuming part. Look, I know how it is. When I first began submitting short stories, I used the bird-shot technique. I'd skip on over to Duotrope or Ralan's or Writer's Market, and I'd do some category searches for which venues accepted which genres. I was on fire; I needed to get things moving. That was enough research for me. So I'd bundle up my subs (I even took the time to do everything I listed above), and I'd fire them off, one-after-the-other, to the zines my assiduous research had revealed.
And you know what? They were uniformly rejected. It could be that they were just bad stories (although some later found homes when I stopped submitting this way), but what's more likely is that they weren't suited to the zine I was sending them to. Instead of gaining time by not reading the zines, I lost it by submitting to places that never would have accepted the work in the first place, had I taken the time to read their material. See, just because a market listing says that a venue accepts "magical realism" or "fantasy" or "horror," that doesn't necessarily mean what you think it means. Sometimes, the editors-in-question don't write those market listings, meaning those categories may not even represent what they like to publish. But let's say the editor did submit that information. You have to keep in mind, genre labels are massive, inaccurate, amoeba-like categories. You need to take the time to see how that zine interprets "magical realism" or "fantasy."
Sound time-consuming? It is, and it should be. By doing this, you stop shooting blindly into the dark and start targeting your submissions with surgical precision.
What's worse, you need to be sure to read recent material. Editors' tastes can change over time. So, while you may find a story similar to your own, that was published by the editor-in-question three years ago, that's not enough. You need to see what he or she has been buying for the last two or three issues. The field changes rapidly (particularly if you're writing under the "speculative fiction" umbrella). Keep up.
Presentation of Work
Right, those requirements up above might be a pain in the ass, but they're not un-doable. In fact, once you start doing things this way, you'll see how much time they save.
Great. You're on the right track. The submission has been appropriately matched to the venue, you present yourself professionally, and the cover letter is nice and clean.
You can still screw it up. The actual format of the story is the easiest way to do this. Often, venues specify how they want material formatted. In my case, I require that you format your story like this. (As an aside, most editors require this format, particularly in the spec. fic. field, so you might as well get used to it.)
But you don't like that format, or you don't want to take the time to "OMG?? RE-format the whole story?!?" Too damn bad. Those formatting requirements are there for a reason, and usually it has to do with readability. Editors and their assistants are reading a lot of material, and they like it to suit their viewing tastes. Is that selfish and unfair? You bet your ass it is. If there are minor violations of the format I prefer in a submission, I'll sometimes overlook them, but they irritate me, which is not what you want to do. If there are gross violations, I reject the story without reading it, and since I rarely send personal rejections, you won't even know why your story got bounced.
Do not dress up the text. Putting drop shadows on the title is stupid. Enlarging the text of the title, or rendering it in bold-that's stupid, too. Is your title so weak that it needs help? Yes? Go re-do it, then, and come back to me with a little respect for said title. Give it a chance.
You know what else? I'm not going to steal your ideas, so don't tell me they're protected by copyright-above all, don't put that damn copyright symbol anywhere on the draft. First, you're telling me ab initio that you're such a bad-ass that your ideas are at risk of being stolen. Secondly, you're telling me that you think I'm shady (possibly). Finally, you're telling me that you don't realize the damn thing is already protected. Don't believe me? Look it up. Don't trust your 1986 edition of some Writer's Digest guide to formatting.
(In the spirit of full disclosure, this is one of my biggest editorial pet peeves, so I may be approaching it with more vitriol than is needed.)
As for which rights are available, you can tell me that if you really want to, but most venues will tell you which rights they are looking to acquire. If those specific rights are not available, don't submit the piece. When I open up a submission, I assume the writer has looked to see which rights I'm after. This, in and of itself, isn't a big deal, but the less meta-text you can put up there in the heading of your story, the better.
Now, in my inbox anyway, your story gets the fairest shake possible. Maybe the text is killer, and you'll be the next one on the T.O.C. Maybe it's not-remember, if a venue rejects your material, it doesn't mean it's "bad." Each venue has carved out a specific piece of the "good writing" pie, and that's all it wants. I reject good stories all the time-because they're not representative of the aesthetics my specific zine tries to corner.
(As an aside, if you get rejected, never respond to the rejection. No matter how much you want to. No matter how mean I am to you. Know why? Because editors talk. We really, really do. Publishing circles are smaller than you think. Already think they're small? Well, they're smaller even than that. If you respond to a rejection, it will almost never come across the way you intend-which can fully be the editor's fault, and not yours. Next, your name and the story of your rejection-response will be passed around. Unfarily and one-sidedly. You can be blacklisted and not even know it.
If you need to bitch about a rejection, that's what drinking-buddies are for.
No one said any of this was fair, so don't try to make it so. Be smart instead.)
There are, of course, issues of craft that we could talk about-the most common mistakes that will sabotage the telling of a story-but that's a topic for another time.
Remember, that while these practices seem to make your submission "invisible," that's a good thing. You want the business part of your writing and presentation-of-self to be as transparent as possible. The only alternative is to be "visible" somehow, and that never works out the way you want-it's a negative thing, not positive.
Originally published at Darin Bradley.