Writing Excuses Season Two Episode 25: The Seven Deadly Sins of Slush Stories
Writing Excuses Season Two Episode 25: The Seven Deadly Sins of Slush Stories
From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/03/29/writing-excuses-season-2-episode-25-the-seven-deadly-sins-of-slush-stories/
Key Points: use standard manuscript formats. Not technicolor, not fancy fonts, not multiple sizes. Follow the writer's guidelines for your market. Avoid Star Trek and other fanfic, obvious grammar errors, run-on sentences.
The seven deadly sins are:
1. Infodumping (a.k.a. a story is not a lecture)
2. Staff Meetings (a.k.a. infodumping in dialogue is still infodumping)
3. Incomprehensible actions (a.k.a. lack of setup)
4. Navel contemplation (a.k.a. non sequitur infodumping and no action)
5. White room syndrome (a.k.a. lack of setting)
6. Dystopias (a.k.a. the all-disgusting background)
7. Dark and gritty (a.k.a. all the disgusting little details)
Recommended: Revise, revise, revise. And write your passion.
[Howard] 15 minutes long because you're in a hurry.
[Nancy] And we are not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Nancy] And I'm Nancy.
[Brandon] Nancy. Our guest star is Nancy Fulda. Introduce yourself to the crowd.
[Nancy] Well, I'm Nancy Fulda. I'm the assistant editor at Jim Baen's Universe, which is, to the best of my knowledge, the highest paying market for speculative fiction in the short form. [Jim Baen's Universe is at http://www.baensuniverse.com/]
[Brandon] And it's an electronic publication only, right?
[Nancy] It's an electronic-only publication, with pictures, with graphics, with all the works.
[Brandon] It has a very good reputation.
[Howard] I did a cover for them once.
[Brandon] All right. We're going to talk with Nancy as an acquisitions editor, you do a lot of... essentially, what you are is, you're the first gate people have to get through before being passed on to the senior editor. Is that correct? Is that how this is working?
[Nancy] That's about how that works. Eric Flint and Mike Resnick are doing the main editing. We have a team of slush readers that I kind of head. They all give their input on the stories and I decide if you get rejected or not. And I sometimes take their input and I sometimes ignore it a little bit.
[Brandon] Okay. So you get to be head of the slush puppies, essentially.
[Howard] Slush puppies? Is that an industry term? That should be an industry term.
[Brandon] All right. The first thing I want to ask you... what gets you rejected? Are there ways you can get rejected before even you read line one? Can someone... how can someone get rejected without you even reading the first thing?
[Nancy] Well, if you write your manuscript in technicolor -- and I have seen this -- I really don't bother to read it. We got a manuscript once that was in blue and green and red with apparently no pattern to the different color allocations.
[Howard] This was electronically submitted?
[Nancy] This was an electronic submission with multiple colored fonts and multiple sizes.
[Howard] So even though you could have block copied someplace and stripped the formatting, why bother?
[Nancy] Yeah.
[Brandon] If someone... I've heard this from lots of editors before, if someone looks that much like an amateur, then you're just going to assume that their writing is going to be amateurish as well.
[Nancy] Pretty much. I may have read the first line or something, but I wasn't disappointed in my expectations.
[Howard] You weren't reading the first line in order to read the first line, you were reading the first line in order to say, "Oh, my gosh, is this really green and blue and red? Oh, my gosh, this hurts my eyes. This is still hurting my eyes."
[Brandon] I've heard stories about this before, and it gets... different figures get bandied about. But you're different because you only accept electronic submissions. Is that correct?
[Nancy] That is correct.
[Brandon] But a lot of the print magazines, they'll say, when they open up an envelope, and a manuscript inside has not followed their writers' guidelines, they just immediately toss it. Because they figure if someone is not willing to look up the writers' guidelines for the magazine -- this was actually one of the editors over at F&SF that was saying this -- if they're not willing to pay that much attention, then they are not going to be writing on a professional level.
[Nancy] We actually give people a little more leeway than that. Although I can't think of a single time a story has been improperly formatted, that we have then taken it. So that validates those statistics pretty well.
[Brandon] What are your writers' guides in 5 seconds? I guess more than that -- 15 seconds?
[Howard] 15 seconds long because you're in a hurry.
[Nancy] So wait... so writers' guides as in what is our policy?
[Unsure] Submission guidelines for Baen's Universe.
[Nancy] Submission guidelines for Baen's Universe. Standard manuscript format as an e-mail attachment. This is for web submissions. There is a complete separate submission process which is Baen's Bar. I don't know if you guys are familiar with that. Web submissions, standard manuscript format. There's a submissions upload page. So you go to our webpage, you find the guidelines, you upload the story, you type your name. We actually give you a tracking number and you can check back every day -- five times a day if you want -- to find out whether your submission has been listed or not. [JBU Submissions Page is at http://www.baensuniverse.com/subguide.html ]
[Brandon] Wow, that's cool. That's better than having to send five postcards a day. That's what I always did.
[Howard] You do realize that those all showed up at once?
[Brandon] Yeah, but... it was pretty often.
[Brandon] Getting beyond those mistakes, what do people do that gets them rejected in sentence one?
[Nancy] If you mention Klingons, Vulcans, teleporters, or... I got this once, Heisenberg coils. I think the person was very very much trying not to write a Star Trek episode, but...
[Howard] Let me interrupt here real quick. I bet that some of the people who submitted that stuff actually listen to this podcast. And I need to step in on Nancy's behalf here and say, "Nancy, be as specific as you need to be to make us laugh and to make us understand the gravity of these mistakes because while there is somebody out there who's going to be anonymously embarrassed, we need them to know that they are helping lots of other writers." Sometimes it may be that your purpose in life is just to be an example to others.
[Nancy] And we can also assume that this was probably a year or so ago, and by now, you don't make those mistakes anymore.
[Brandon] That's right. You've learned. You've been listening.
[Howard] Perfect. Perfect. That's true, they've been listening to Writing Excuses, they're past that.
[Brandon] They know. Don't send your submissions written in crayon.
[Howard] My orcs do not carry Heisenberg coils.
[Brandon] Obviously. It's the Klingons that carry those.
[Howard] What else? What else?
[Brandon] Anything else in line one?
[Nancy] Obvious grammar errors, run-on sentences, utter boredom.
[Brandon] Utter boredom in line one? You have to work really hard to get that.
[Nancy] I think it has happened once or twice. I can't recall the exact sentence, but I do recall that...
[Brandon] 17 layers of passive voice and you're not sure who's doing what and whose was's are was'ing whose was's... was a bear?
[Brandon] Okay. What gets you rejected on page one? You've got a little note card with your seven deadly sins of something that's hard to pronounce. Why don't you go over those for us?
[Nancy] Sure. The seven deadly sins -- and I should emphasize these are somewhat personal for me and for Baen's Universe because every editor's a little bit different although I expect most editors will match these pretty closely.
[Brandon] I've heard editors mention that before. Sometimes submitting is like a crapshoot because everyone has their own pet peeves. What one editor will say, "You absolutely never want to do this," another one will say, "Eh." I remember one editor when I was going to cons saying, "Never submitted Times New Roman, the writers' guidelines say Courier." Another one said, "That's stupid. Times New Roman is way easier to read. Submit it in Times."
[Nancy] Yeah, what's an editor to do.
[Howard] So let's have the seven.
[Nancy] Okay, the seven. First one is infodumping. Most people won't know what that is, but I'll reiterate real quick.
[Howard] No, no, no. I think our readers have infodumping down.
[Nancy] Okay. Infodumping bad. If you're going to do it, slip it in later after I care about the story.
[Brandon] Don't infodump on page one if you have to infodump.
[Nancy] Yes, if you must infodump, do it later.
[Nancy] Number two. The Staff Meeting. The Staff Meeting is an infodump that's trying to disguise itself as a conversation between some sort of [garbled]
[Brandon] Maid and Butler.
[Howard] Maid and butler dialogue. It's the Star Trek boardroom.
[Nancy] Exactly.
[Brandon] That's a better thing to call it than Maid and Butler, because Maid and Butler is like so 19th century.
[Nancy] It was really surprising to me when I started working for Baen how extremely common this approach is cause everybody knows, don't info dump, everybody knows infodumping is not a good idea. So they just say I'll just have people talking. If it's dialogue, it's not infodumping. It's not true.
[Brandon] Okay. No boardrooms.
[Nancy] Three. Incomprehensible action. Everybody hears, all the time, start your story in the middle of the action, start where something interesting is happening. People take this advice, they try their very best, and I end up with a gunfight and a shootout and I don't even know which guy is the good guy and which guy is the bad guy. Bullets flying.
[Howard] You say good guy and bad guy. That's so relative these days. You don't know which character you're supposed to care about.
[Nancy] Exactly.
[Brandon] And I think we've talked about this in a podcast. Action is very difficult to pull off unless you have rooting interest for someone in a book. I always say start with motion. It doesn't have to be an action scene.
[Howard] In late, out early is a great set of principles. But if it's incomprehensible, you came in too late.
[Nancy] Some of the best advice I've heard is you start the story where something changes. Not in the middle of a gunfight because that's the climax, really, right? And if you start there, aside from the fact that I don't know what's going on, there's also not very many places you can build to, to make the story more exciting. It's an intro, it's a hook, it's not a climax.
[Brandon] This is going to be harder though, also, with short stories which you are reading because you don't have a chapter to establish character. It's one of the things that I've always found harder with short stories, is getting that hook to start in the right place because you don't have a lot of lead time, but if you go too far, then it's confusing.
[Nancy] Hooks are really tricky. Because I've seen them all, I've seen all the versions. And they're really hard to get right. If you hook too hard, your hook is so interesting that the rest of the story is a complete letdown. So you actually have to be careful about that too.
[We interrupt this episode for an advertisement]
[Howard] This episode of Writing Excuses is brought to you by Schlock Mercenary: Scrapyard of Insufferable Arrogance, the new Schlock Mercenary book available at store.schlockmercenary.com We're taking pre-orders right now. The books are $15, but if you want a sketch edition, you can spend 25 and I will personally draw a picture in the back of your book just for you. But that's not all, we've also got a slipcase out now for the first five Schlock Mercenary books. You can buy the slipcase all by itself for five dollars, or you can buy the whole set -- volume one through five -- and the slipcase for an even 100 bucks. And we will throw in the little hyper-node fiddly bit activator thingy absolutely free.
[Dan] And if you call in the next two minutes, you get a free set of steak knives.
[Howard] You're providing those, right? Mr. I Am Not a Serial Killer.
[Brandon] They're used steak knives, stolen from Jordan's cupboard over there.
[We now return to our exciting episode of Writing Excuses]
[Nancy] Number four. We call it... in the Baen's crowd, we call it navel contemplation. I don't know if that's familiar to you guys or not. We got this one story once, and I was... I was almost bored to tears. Because the entire world was about to be destroyed and the main character was sitting at a cafe wondering about the meaning of life and then she was sitting at the cafe wondering whether anything would change after today. See, I can see you guys are already bored to tears and all I've done is summarize. People will ask why this is not an infodump...
[Howard] There were a couple of pages of the Watchman that were like that.
[Brandon] Did you finish it?
[Howard] Yes.
[Nancy] You're going to want to ask what is the difference between navel contemplation and infodumping, and the difference is, navel contemplation is completely irrelevant. You could cut it all out and the story would still make sense. Infodumping is at least somewhat useful in some vague sense.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Nancy] Number five. White Room Syndrome. That ought to be a familiar phrase. Talking heads...
[Brandon] People walk in, don't give any setting, it's like they are talking in a white room.
[Howard] Oh, that. Yes.
[Brandon] I think we have mentioned it.
[Howard] We have mentioned it. I just didn't... remember...
[Brandon] You were still bored from the previous number, so bored that...
[Howard] [snore] Huh. Oh, Nancy's talking again.
[Brandon] We need a joke, Howard. Think of one. All right, go ahead.
[Nancy] Number six. Dystopias. This is somewhat of a personal one, cause I know lots of people like them. But I am dead sick of seeing books being regulated, love being forbidden, children raised by machines, everyone gets a disfiguring disease when they are 13, whatever you can do to make the world be fundamentally wrong -- I have probably seen it before, and I don't really want to see it again. Again, that's very editor specific and this comes back to the concept of every editor has their own thing.
[Howard] There are probably some editors out there who really like the dystopias.
[Nancy] I know that there are a lot who do. That's why I said...
[Howard] But that's not going to get them... that's not going to get us... a good dystopia isn't going to get the story past you and into Eric's hands.
[Nancy] No. Especially not Baen's Universe. We specialize in upbeat. That's our thing.
[Howard] That's good to know.
[Nancy] Yeah. Baen's Universe is all about action, upbeat, happy. There's one concept that beginning authors really need to get their heads around, and that's there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all story. It does not exist. One person's self-indulgent rambling is someone else's literary masterpiece.
[Howard] Is there a one-size-doesn't-fit-anybody story?
[Nancy] No. There are 3 million of them.
[Howard] Okay. Good. Just making sure.
[Nancy] All right. And the seventh of the seven deadly sins of slush stories -- again, this one's a bit personal -- it's dark-and-gritty. Some people would call this realistic, I call it dark-and-gritty. Prison scenes, torture, drugs... everything very depressing. Those stories don't work at all for me or for anyone else on the Baen [garble]
[Howard] And that's different from dystopia because the one is a societal backdrop and the other is a... boy, we're gonna get right here...
[Nancy] Into the middle.
[Howard] To the tip of the needle as it's injected into the eyeball... Oh, wait, we're family-friendly. I forgot. I'm sorry.
[Nancy] And again, there are editors who look specifically for that. These last two in particular, the dystopic and the dark-and-gritty, that's pretty much specific to our magazine.
[Brandon] Okay. So if someone wants to get rejected by you really fast, they should write the dark-and-gritty story about a man who contemplates his white boardroom in a dystopian world where everyone eats eggs all the time while being tortured during incomprehensible gunfights?
[Jordan?] And it's in technicolor.
[Howard] And submit it in 5 point font.
[Nancy] One thing I should clarify. None of these things are mortal wounds. If a story excels in other areas and it's necessary for some reason, of course, you can get past me with any one of these. But by and large, if I see that on the first page of the story, it's not gonna get past.
[Howard] And if you hit three of them on page one, it's gone.
[Nancy] It's out.
[Howard] So now I gotta ask, is there a way to actually get into Jim Baen's Universe? Cause we've heard a lot of ways to not get in.
[Brandon] Yeah, what do...
[Howard] What's the secret password?
[Brandon] In a minute and a half, tell them how to get published.
[Nancy] Yeah. Okay. The first thing you have got to do -- you hear it all the time -- is revise, revise, revise. And I feel that people have three major areas of a story where they make mistakes when they are revising. And that's the beginning, the middle, and the end.
[Laughter]
[Howard] So revise the whole dang thing, cause it sucks. Great. Let's hear the next. That's awesome.
[Nancy] So, the other thing I really have to say to authors, especially beginning authors. You hear a lot of don'ts, you hear a lot of don't do this, don't do that, here's all the rules. When you're just getting started as an author and you're just sort of feeling your way into the field, I really say you should follow your passions. Write the story that you love, write the story you adore, and ignore the fact that it happens to be dystopic or it happens to start with a staff meeting or whatever and write that story the best you can, because that's your best bet.
[Brandon] Yes. I'm going to go and write my dystopian egg gunfighter torture story.
[Howard] Then, someone's going to help you revise it so it's not quite so dystopic, and so the gunfight is more comprehensible. You can keep the egg, cause you like the egg.
[Nancy] If the egg is what you are passionate about, write the egg. Really. The stories that get through are the ones where I feel the author caring about it. Now there are a lot of stories the author cares about that don't get through, but if you don't care, it really doesn't have a chance.
[Brandon] Thank you very much, Nancy. This has been good information. This has been Writing Excuses. Do you have a Writing Prompt, Howard?
[Howard] Write something...
[Nancy] That you're passionate about.
[Howard] About an egg.
[Brandon] A passionate egg!
[Howard] Oh, no. No. Those... oh, dear.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses. Thanks for listening.
From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/03/29/writing-excuses-season-2-episode-25-the-seven-deadly-sins-of-slush-stories/
Key Points: use standard manuscript formats. Not technicolor, not fancy fonts, not multiple sizes. Follow the writer's guidelines for your market. Avoid Star Trek and other fanfic, obvious grammar errors, run-on sentences.
The seven deadly sins are:
1. Infodumping (a.k.a. a story is not a lecture)
2. Staff Meetings (a.k.a. infodumping in dialogue is still infodumping)
3. Incomprehensible actions (a.k.a. lack of setup)
4. Navel contemplation (a.k.a. non sequitur infodumping and no action)
5. White room syndrome (a.k.a. lack of setting)
6. Dystopias (a.k.a. the all-disgusting background)
7. Dark and gritty (a.k.a. all the disgusting little details)
Recommended: Revise, revise, revise. And write your passion.
[Howard] 15 minutes long because you're in a hurry.
[Nancy] And we are not that smart.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Nancy] And I'm Nancy.
[Brandon] Nancy. Our guest star is Nancy Fulda. Introduce yourself to the crowd.
[Nancy] Well, I'm Nancy Fulda. I'm the assistant editor at Jim Baen's Universe, which is, to the best of my knowledge, the highest paying market for speculative fiction in the short form. [Jim Baen's Universe is at http://www.baensuniverse.com/]
[Brandon] And it's an electronic publication only, right?
[Nancy] It's an electronic-only publication, with pictures, with graphics, with all the works.
[Brandon] It has a very good reputation.
[Howard] I did a cover for them once.
[Brandon] All right. We're going to talk with Nancy as an acquisitions editor, you do a lot of... essentially, what you are is, you're the first gate people have to get through before being passed on to the senior editor. Is that correct? Is that how this is working?
[Nancy] That's about how that works. Eric Flint and Mike Resnick are doing the main editing. We have a team of slush readers that I kind of head. They all give their input on the stories and I decide if you get rejected or not. And I sometimes take their input and I sometimes ignore it a little bit.
[Brandon] Okay. So you get to be head of the slush puppies, essentially.
[Howard] Slush puppies? Is that an industry term? That should be an industry term.
[Brandon] All right. The first thing I want to ask you... what gets you rejected? Are there ways you can get rejected before even you read line one? Can someone... how can someone get rejected without you even reading the first thing?
[Nancy] Well, if you write your manuscript in technicolor -- and I have seen this -- I really don't bother to read it. We got a manuscript once that was in blue and green and red with apparently no pattern to the different color allocations.
[Howard] This was electronically submitted?
[Nancy] This was an electronic submission with multiple colored fonts and multiple sizes.
[Howard] So even though you could have block copied someplace and stripped the formatting, why bother?
[Nancy] Yeah.
[Brandon] If someone... I've heard this from lots of editors before, if someone looks that much like an amateur, then you're just going to assume that their writing is going to be amateurish as well.
[Nancy] Pretty much. I may have read the first line or something, but I wasn't disappointed in my expectations.
[Howard] You weren't reading the first line in order to read the first line, you were reading the first line in order to say, "Oh, my gosh, is this really green and blue and red? Oh, my gosh, this hurts my eyes. This is still hurting my eyes."
[Brandon] I've heard stories about this before, and it gets... different figures get bandied about. But you're different because you only accept electronic submissions. Is that correct?
[Nancy] That is correct.
[Brandon] But a lot of the print magazines, they'll say, when they open up an envelope, and a manuscript inside has not followed their writers' guidelines, they just immediately toss it. Because they figure if someone is not willing to look up the writers' guidelines for the magazine -- this was actually one of the editors over at F&SF that was saying this -- if they're not willing to pay that much attention, then they are not going to be writing on a professional level.
[Nancy] We actually give people a little more leeway than that. Although I can't think of a single time a story has been improperly formatted, that we have then taken it. So that validates those statistics pretty well.
[Brandon] What are your writers' guides in 5 seconds? I guess more than that -- 15 seconds?
[Howard] 15 seconds long because you're in a hurry.
[Nancy] So wait... so writers' guides as in what is our policy?
[Unsure] Submission guidelines for Baen's Universe.
[Nancy] Submission guidelines for Baen's Universe. Standard manuscript format as an e-mail attachment. This is for web submissions. There is a complete separate submission process which is Baen's Bar. I don't know if you guys are familiar with that. Web submissions, standard manuscript format. There's a submissions upload page. So you go to our webpage, you find the guidelines, you upload the story, you type your name. We actually give you a tracking number and you can check back every day -- five times a day if you want -- to find out whether your submission has been listed or not. [JBU Submissions Page is at http://www.baensuniverse.com/subguide.html ]
[Brandon] Wow, that's cool. That's better than having to send five postcards a day. That's what I always did.
[Howard] You do realize that those all showed up at once?
[Brandon] Yeah, but... it was pretty often.
[Brandon] Getting beyond those mistakes, what do people do that gets them rejected in sentence one?
[Nancy] If you mention Klingons, Vulcans, teleporters, or... I got this once, Heisenberg coils. I think the person was very very much trying not to write a Star Trek episode, but...
[Howard] Let me interrupt here real quick. I bet that some of the people who submitted that stuff actually listen to this podcast. And I need to step in on Nancy's behalf here and say, "Nancy, be as specific as you need to be to make us laugh and to make us understand the gravity of these mistakes because while there is somebody out there who's going to be anonymously embarrassed, we need them to know that they are helping lots of other writers." Sometimes it may be that your purpose in life is just to be an example to others.
[Nancy] And we can also assume that this was probably a year or so ago, and by now, you don't make those mistakes anymore.
[Brandon] That's right. You've learned. You've been listening.
[Howard] Perfect. Perfect. That's true, they've been listening to Writing Excuses, they're past that.
[Brandon] They know. Don't send your submissions written in crayon.
[Howard] My orcs do not carry Heisenberg coils.
[Brandon] Obviously. It's the Klingons that carry those.
[Howard] What else? What else?
[Brandon] Anything else in line one?
[Nancy] Obvious grammar errors, run-on sentences, utter boredom.
[Brandon] Utter boredom in line one? You have to work really hard to get that.
[Nancy] I think it has happened once or twice. I can't recall the exact sentence, but I do recall that...
[Brandon] 17 layers of passive voice and you're not sure who's doing what and whose was's are was'ing whose was's... was a bear?
[Brandon] Okay. What gets you rejected on page one? You've got a little note card with your seven deadly sins of something that's hard to pronounce. Why don't you go over those for us?
[Nancy] Sure. The seven deadly sins -- and I should emphasize these are somewhat personal for me and for Baen's Universe because every editor's a little bit different although I expect most editors will match these pretty closely.
[Brandon] I've heard editors mention that before. Sometimes submitting is like a crapshoot because everyone has their own pet peeves. What one editor will say, "You absolutely never want to do this," another one will say, "Eh." I remember one editor when I was going to cons saying, "Never submitted Times New Roman, the writers' guidelines say Courier." Another one said, "That's stupid. Times New Roman is way easier to read. Submit it in Times."
[Nancy] Yeah, what's an editor to do.
[Howard] So let's have the seven.
[Nancy] Okay, the seven. First one is infodumping. Most people won't know what that is, but I'll reiterate real quick.
[Howard] No, no, no. I think our readers have infodumping down.
[Nancy] Okay. Infodumping bad. If you're going to do it, slip it in later after I care about the story.
[Brandon] Don't infodump on page one if you have to infodump.
[Nancy] Yes, if you must infodump, do it later.
[Nancy] Number two. The Staff Meeting. The Staff Meeting is an infodump that's trying to disguise itself as a conversation between some sort of [garbled]
[Brandon] Maid and Butler.
[Howard] Maid and butler dialogue. It's the Star Trek boardroom.
[Nancy] Exactly.
[Brandon] That's a better thing to call it than Maid and Butler, because Maid and Butler is like so 19th century.
[Nancy] It was really surprising to me when I started working for Baen how extremely common this approach is cause everybody knows, don't info dump, everybody knows infodumping is not a good idea. So they just say I'll just have people talking. If it's dialogue, it's not infodumping. It's not true.
[Brandon] Okay. No boardrooms.
[Nancy] Three. Incomprehensible action. Everybody hears, all the time, start your story in the middle of the action, start where something interesting is happening. People take this advice, they try their very best, and I end up with a gunfight and a shootout and I don't even know which guy is the good guy and which guy is the bad guy. Bullets flying.
[Howard] You say good guy and bad guy. That's so relative these days. You don't know which character you're supposed to care about.
[Nancy] Exactly.
[Brandon] And I think we've talked about this in a podcast. Action is very difficult to pull off unless you have rooting interest for someone in a book. I always say start with motion. It doesn't have to be an action scene.
[Howard] In late, out early is a great set of principles. But if it's incomprehensible, you came in too late.
[Nancy] Some of the best advice I've heard is you start the story where something changes. Not in the middle of a gunfight because that's the climax, really, right? And if you start there, aside from the fact that I don't know what's going on, there's also not very many places you can build to, to make the story more exciting. It's an intro, it's a hook, it's not a climax.
[Brandon] This is going to be harder though, also, with short stories which you are reading because you don't have a chapter to establish character. It's one of the things that I've always found harder with short stories, is getting that hook to start in the right place because you don't have a lot of lead time, but if you go too far, then it's confusing.
[Nancy] Hooks are really tricky. Because I've seen them all, I've seen all the versions. And they're really hard to get right. If you hook too hard, your hook is so interesting that the rest of the story is a complete letdown. So you actually have to be careful about that too.
[We interrupt this episode for an advertisement]
[Howard] This episode of Writing Excuses is brought to you by Schlock Mercenary: Scrapyard of Insufferable Arrogance, the new Schlock Mercenary book available at store.schlockmercenary.com We're taking pre-orders right now. The books are $15, but if you want a sketch edition, you can spend 25 and I will personally draw a picture in the back of your book just for you. But that's not all, we've also got a slipcase out now for the first five Schlock Mercenary books. You can buy the slipcase all by itself for five dollars, or you can buy the whole set -- volume one through five -- and the slipcase for an even 100 bucks. And we will throw in the little hyper-node fiddly bit activator thingy absolutely free.
[Dan] And if you call in the next two minutes, you get a free set of steak knives.
[Howard] You're providing those, right? Mr. I Am Not a Serial Killer.
[Brandon] They're used steak knives, stolen from Jordan's cupboard over there.
[We now return to our exciting episode of Writing Excuses]
[Nancy] Number four. We call it... in the Baen's crowd, we call it navel contemplation. I don't know if that's familiar to you guys or not. We got this one story once, and I was... I was almost bored to tears. Because the entire world was about to be destroyed and the main character was sitting at a cafe wondering about the meaning of life and then she was sitting at the cafe wondering whether anything would change after today. See, I can see you guys are already bored to tears and all I've done is summarize. People will ask why this is not an infodump...
[Howard] There were a couple of pages of the Watchman that were like that.
[Brandon] Did you finish it?
[Howard] Yes.
[Nancy] You're going to want to ask what is the difference between navel contemplation and infodumping, and the difference is, navel contemplation is completely irrelevant. You could cut it all out and the story would still make sense. Infodumping is at least somewhat useful in some vague sense.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Nancy] Number five. White Room Syndrome. That ought to be a familiar phrase. Talking heads...
[Brandon] People walk in, don't give any setting, it's like they are talking in a white room.
[Howard] Oh, that. Yes.
[Brandon] I think we have mentioned it.
[Howard] We have mentioned it. I just didn't... remember...
[Brandon] You were still bored from the previous number, so bored that...
[Howard] [snore] Huh. Oh, Nancy's talking again.
[Brandon] We need a joke, Howard. Think of one. All right, go ahead.
[Nancy] Number six. Dystopias. This is somewhat of a personal one, cause I know lots of people like them. But I am dead sick of seeing books being regulated, love being forbidden, children raised by machines, everyone gets a disfiguring disease when they are 13, whatever you can do to make the world be fundamentally wrong -- I have probably seen it before, and I don't really want to see it again. Again, that's very editor specific and this comes back to the concept of every editor has their own thing.
[Howard] There are probably some editors out there who really like the dystopias.
[Nancy] I know that there are a lot who do. That's why I said...
[Howard] But that's not going to get them... that's not going to get us... a good dystopia isn't going to get the story past you and into Eric's hands.
[Nancy] No. Especially not Baen's Universe. We specialize in upbeat. That's our thing.
[Howard] That's good to know.
[Nancy] Yeah. Baen's Universe is all about action, upbeat, happy. There's one concept that beginning authors really need to get their heads around, and that's there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all story. It does not exist. One person's self-indulgent rambling is someone else's literary masterpiece.
[Howard] Is there a one-size-doesn't-fit-anybody story?
[Nancy] No. There are 3 million of them.
[Howard] Okay. Good. Just making sure.
[Nancy] All right. And the seventh of the seven deadly sins of slush stories -- again, this one's a bit personal -- it's dark-and-gritty. Some people would call this realistic, I call it dark-and-gritty. Prison scenes, torture, drugs... everything very depressing. Those stories don't work at all for me or for anyone else on the Baen [garble]
[Howard] And that's different from dystopia because the one is a societal backdrop and the other is a... boy, we're gonna get right here...
[Nancy] Into the middle.
[Howard] To the tip of the needle as it's injected into the eyeball... Oh, wait, we're family-friendly. I forgot. I'm sorry.
[Nancy] And again, there are editors who look specifically for that. These last two in particular, the dystopic and the dark-and-gritty, that's pretty much specific to our magazine.
[Brandon] Okay. So if someone wants to get rejected by you really fast, they should write the dark-and-gritty story about a man who contemplates his white boardroom in a dystopian world where everyone eats eggs all the time while being tortured during incomprehensible gunfights?
[Jordan?] And it's in technicolor.
[Howard] And submit it in 5 point font.
[Nancy] One thing I should clarify. None of these things are mortal wounds. If a story excels in other areas and it's necessary for some reason, of course, you can get past me with any one of these. But by and large, if I see that on the first page of the story, it's not gonna get past.
[Howard] And if you hit three of them on page one, it's gone.
[Nancy] It's out.
[Howard] So now I gotta ask, is there a way to actually get into Jim Baen's Universe? Cause we've heard a lot of ways to not get in.
[Brandon] Yeah, what do...
[Howard] What's the secret password?
[Brandon] In a minute and a half, tell them how to get published.
[Nancy] Yeah. Okay. The first thing you have got to do -- you hear it all the time -- is revise, revise, revise. And I feel that people have three major areas of a story where they make mistakes when they are revising. And that's the beginning, the middle, and the end.
[Laughter]
[Howard] So revise the whole dang thing, cause it sucks. Great. Let's hear the next. That's awesome.
[Nancy] So, the other thing I really have to say to authors, especially beginning authors. You hear a lot of don'ts, you hear a lot of don't do this, don't do that, here's all the rules. When you're just getting started as an author and you're just sort of feeling your way into the field, I really say you should follow your passions. Write the story that you love, write the story you adore, and ignore the fact that it happens to be dystopic or it happens to start with a staff meeting or whatever and write that story the best you can, because that's your best bet.
[Brandon] Yes. I'm going to go and write my dystopian egg gunfighter torture story.
[Howard] Then, someone's going to help you revise it so it's not quite so dystopic, and so the gunfight is more comprehensible. You can keep the egg, cause you like the egg.
[Nancy] If the egg is what you are passionate about, write the egg. Really. The stories that get through are the ones where I feel the author caring about it. Now there are a lot of stories the author cares about that don't get through, but if you don't care, it really doesn't have a chance.
[Brandon] Thank you very much, Nancy. This has been good information. This has been Writing Excuses. Do you have a Writing Prompt, Howard?
[Howard] Write something...
[Nancy] That you're passionate about.
[Howard] About an egg.
[Brandon] A passionate egg!
[Howard] Oh, no. No. Those... oh, dear.
[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses. Thanks for listening.