Hello Lit Reactor.
I've written six articles so far here at LR for my Storyville column:
1. Finding Your Voice
2. Cover Letters
3. The Journey of "Rudy Jenkins Buries His Fears"
4. Duotrope.com and submitting short stories
5. Where to Find Ideas
6. Landing an Agent (upcoming)
What would you like to see in future columns? More craft stuff, more process, a general column of just questions and answers (or is that too much like what Erin does?).
Just post up whatever sounds interesting. Maybe I'll do that for column number seven.
Thanks,
Richard
Maybe an article on the four elements of craft represented on this site. I'd also like to see one on plotting.
I'd like to see more articles on craft, personally. Specifically, editing and revising stories.
#1. Plotting - structure, free-form, and combinations.
#2. Revising and editing stories.
#3. Q & A sounds good - there is only one Q & A column, another occasional Q & A is not too much.
Outlining, pros and cons.
#1. Plotting - structure, free-form, and combinations. Yes
#3. Q & A sounds good - there is only one Q & A column, another occasional Q & A is not too much. Yes
Actually everything Boone said.
Novel length manuscripts.
Promoting your work after you're published.
Writing habits.
I think "how to reveal character by showing, not telling" would be very helpful to most everyone. I was just having this conversation with another member.
Richard, some of the people I've been talking to lately and I have been talking about reducing our reliance on pronouns to convey setting and action (including, but not limited to, "I").
I would love to see your thoughts on this.
And I think Avery's suggestion is sorta locked in with mine like a binary star. They orbit one another.
I'm with Jack.
showing, not telling"
You and Averydoll talking behind my back? LOL
Different ideas for a creative environment.
Query letter formatting.
I'd like to see something like dissecting a certain story line-by-line, showing why it needs to be there for story structure, detailing your own usages voice/style/imagery, adding a little commentary to the writing process of a particular piece.
Can't think of much else.
i had been thinking of writing one on how to reveal character by showing, not telling. or one on how to create layered settings.
I like both of those ideas.
Yeah I read it, but if you got your list, then you got it. Look forward to reading it.
Def man! I was always told to make it look like movie trailer on paper. It was always a huge pain in the ass though if you ask me. Send it my way sir!
Something I've thought of now and again- Balancing your personal life with your writing life. I think we can all relate to the problem of having to push people away when the laptop is calling. But at what point do we put writing down to maintain relationships, stay healthy, etc. I'm very lucky that I have a partner that is supportive of what I do, but I've had relationships fall apart due to me wanting to be a writer and not letting go of that. My last relationship in particular ended specifically over me not giving any kind of clear deadline over when I would give up writing and bartending and get a normal 9 to 5 job instead.
-bill
I hear you Bill. Plenty of people hold down a relationship and still manage to do it - some of the best ever - but it's very difficult and I've gone down the "live like a monk" route to get to where I want to get to.
If I can throw my two pennies in I'd love to read something about conflict and plotting. I'm sick of reaching 50,000 words and the whole thing falls like a cheap tent. I've lost count of the amount of times it's happened to me. I think conflict is the key. I find characters fairly easy to write but conflict seems beyond me. Maybe it's because I'm such a laid back affable fellow but there you go.
I also realise it's almost impossible to ask you to explain plotting in an article but maybe even a little on conflict would be great.
As an aside, I read the Palahnuik essay on Diary (think it was Diary - I haven't read a lot of his books) and he talked us through the original plot, about a big house that consumes people, and then he trashed it because it wasn't good enough. To me the plot sounded amazing. The bastard, to be able to trash a plot like that :)
Cheers
Andy
showing not telling, there it is again, you sure you aren't talking to Averydoll behind my back? Haha, I drop ya an email.
I agree with the promotion column idea.
After thinking about writing a horror story for a while for the Shock and Appall anthology project, I have to admit that I don't know what really defines horror. Scary, shocking, or surprising happens in every story, so what makes it 'horror' (besides ghosts and serial killers).
I'd love a column that disects each genre. Aliensoul77 did a great job of summing them up in the Litreactor Needs thread. I can also look them up on Wikipedia. Neither of those cover the techniques of writing specific genres, though (see the horror fiction entry).
So, again, I'm asking for a definition (and now a guide) to writing some of the genres we can use to lable our stories.
Not that we need all 23, but it would be an interesting ongoing project that you pick up whenever you are between good ideas and something that I would be interested in possibly buying as a book (shit, now I'm thinking of a short story example of each type by one of the litreactors).
Thomas Ligotti wrote a really great piece on horror that's featured in the introduction to one of his short story collections (I think its in The Nightmare Factory).
Horror puts a person in a situation that, in reality, would come close to destroying them. People that love horror do so because its a means to surviving a thing we're afraid of. This can differ from person to person. That was the basic gist of the Ligotti article.
And there are many different genres to horror and levels as well. Horror can make you laugh and cry and scream and everything else in between. It can be over the top or just really brooding. It can be bloody or not a single injury can be inflicted. It can be sublime or it can be your neighbor's tendency for violence.
One thing I have a hard time with, Richard is I like writing horror but it always involves sexuality or cussing or violence in some way and a lot of so-called horror publications say they don't want that. I don't get it. I mean I don't think I use it to excess but I would like your opinion. I'm not just saying this to get reads but on the story I did for the thunderdome contest with Panda, it's called Remnants, that is a straight up horror story. I just want to know, if you have the time to read it, what you think? Is that too graphic for a typical horror market? Are they looking for more subtle? I would like to try sending out stuff again but I get so frustrated because I find a lot of horror markets are very conservative with subject matter. I don't think horror has to be all blood and guts and profanity and rape but I do like to add some grotesque aspects when I write it. I also wrote another story that is sort of horror in the workshop called, "Alternate Universes and Acceptance Letters" and it's written all in the form of query letters by a psychotic writer to a publisher. Now that was very experimental and I'm wondering if a publisher might find that format too weird. I mean what magazines have you found that really take chances on experimental horror pieces or stuff that is really graphic? and that actually pay would be nice.
Meh, I wouldn't limit it to just horror. I think Kitts is looking for anything transgressive as long as it's over-the-top without going for pure shock value. Okay, so Jack Ketchum is classified as horror (most of his books) but he's also thinking stories like "Guts" which I don't think is classifed as horror.
When you write graphic horror you're writing to a very niche market. So out of the top horror markets that you're aiming at you've cut that down to the handful of trusted magazines that run stuff that dark or graphic, and then the few no-pay rags on the internet that are a step above delegating a story to the trash bin. That's pretty much how it's gonna be, unless you write wider appealing stuff or get lucky with a few of the big markets or good anthologies. Get comfortable with that handful of places to keep submitting to, maybe you build up a relationship with them. I've felt like there's only 4 or 5 places that pay that would except the kind of bloody crime stories I been writing.
Well said Renny.
If we have as many big names attached to it as Psychosis, I don't think we will have to go the self-publishing route. Knock on wood.
I'd tend to agree- there's a ton of different markets out there for horror. A lot of places will say if they want "soft horror" or "quiet horror" and you probably won't be able to submit anything too hardcore to them.
Its also not a bad prompt to try and write something without a lot of violence, but still make it scary. I think that's harder in some ways. Some of the best horror films have very little violence in them, in my opinion. Sometimes violence can become cartoonish and you risk overwhelming a reader's senses with something that does little more than make them think of an image, rather that a feeling. Which is like... the difference between any Jason movie vs The Descent (violent, sure, but the worst scenes are the ones that make you feel claustrophobic).
Hey Richard,
Personally I enjoy reading articles about people's most beloved writing resources or perhaps books that caused leaps in a writer's story telling abilities.
As well, a discussion on rewriting specifically with regards to dissecting/accepting/rejecting criticism would also be helpful to many writers as well as maybe a discussion on the theory behind what a story really is as this pertains dirrectly to rewriting and criticism. You see, if you believe that a story is something you excavate or build then what you are really doing is tearing down the parts that don't work and polishing the parts that do, much like sculpting. But I think many writers let their fiction push them around and treat their fiction as a precious dream that cannot be tampered with- which is fine, although rather constraining and can hinder a writer's growth. Anyhow, an article on the relationship between the writer and their writing and how that affects the writing process and product good and bad I'm sure would be an interesting read and helpful column for other writers.
Cheers,
Nikki
Dialogue; what works, what doesn't work, including how to tag. Nothing takes me out of a story faster than reading dialogue that doesn't work, or is tagged improperly.
Tense; picking the right one, maintaining it throughout.
If I think of more, I'll let you know, but there are some I will keep for future WriterDrome columns.
I like Bob's idea regarding tense.
Hey Richard, I really like Nikki's idea. Could you clarify what you mean here?
interesting thoughts, nikki. i'm not a huge fan of revision
Do you mean you don't revise your stories much, but rather just have them workshopped for editing purposes? I find the workshop very helpful, but if I were to revise with every comment considered, I think my voice would become buried.
do keep your own voice. but also be open to suggestions. sometimes one phrase can radically alter a story, make it so much better. maybe it's the opening line, maybe it's the ending line, or maybe you open with a different scene. but keep your language, your voice.
I feel this a lot. It's great to have you here, Richard.
I think a column on what Nikki wrote would be good. I totally agree with her actually. I feel like stories are unearthed and sometimes you drag a lot of stuff out of the ground that doesn't really below with the skeleton of your story. I think stories are found things, and we're just editors when all is said and done.
My process, for what its worth, is to do a first draft and change it as I like as I write it. And usually when I'm about 2/3 through or finished, I'll open up a whole new word file and retype the whole thing and let the story diverge where it feels appropriate. Which is to say, I'm using my instincts as an editor for my own work and its a lot easier to make drastic changes when the page is blank as opposed to having it all in front of you. In other words- its harder to press the delete button than it is to just write new stuff altogether.
I think everyone's process is different. Richard, for all his success, has a process that would NEVER work for me. In fact, beyond the basic idea of a story, I never think about it until I'm sitting down and writing. Which isn't to say that what I'm doing is wrong or what he's doing is right. Everyone has to find what works for them. And my process fits me pretty good. The first story I ever sold (and hopefully more to come), was a story I had written numerous drafts of, all significantly different, until finally settling on something that I felt worked. Its very easy for me to let a story go where it shouldn't for fair amount of pages. And that it shouldn't is only clearly seen when I've let it sit for a day or two and start fresh, rewriting the whole thing. That's usually when I feel deep in my gut that I've made a mistake with my work. And that's also when I know, instinctively, what direction I should take it, because knowing what doesn't work also feeds into my intuition of what will work.
Hey guys, glad to be here. Thx for the nice welcome. Just spitballing. Had a couple more ideas about things I rarely see discussed in depth but for which I found extremely helpful to consider so maybe others might.
An interesting article would be about how to use language to evoke things, use of subtext, negative space, seductive language, lyical flow etc ... techniques used to make the readers mind fill in things so the writer doesn't have to and to create a richer experience for the reader.
Also, the psychology and relationship between the writer and reader isn't discussed much other than the basics like making the reader "trust" you etc which is fine but seduction is so much yummier than trust and I think we are all more than willing to suspend our disbelief as readers if there is a glimmer of seduction.
And I can't speak for everyone but I know that my best writing comes when I'm really jerking the reader's chain, trying to provoke a certain response in a scene so I can build on that and do it again and again so they are utterly at my mercy and incapable of any level of scrutiny capable of taking them out of the story.
Cheers,
Nikki