Dealing With Advice

Welcome to the recesses of my twisted mind. I am not saying this is how to absorb advice. It is how I do it. Neuroses may vary.

10 Things I Need Every Writer to Know (Inside An Editor's Brain)

1. Readers, Agents, Editors and Publishers do not owe you anything. Your job is to give them a story they cannot put down.

2. Start the story sooner. Too many writers spend chapters preparing to tell the story instead of actually telling it. Make sure the plot is invited in…fast.

3. Pretty writing is not enough. A gorgeous sentence cannot save a manuscript without stakes, movement, and emotional payoff.

4. Your first manuscript may simply be your apprenticeship. Sometimes Book One only exists to teach you how to write the book that finally changes everything.

5. Revision is not failure. Your finished draft still needs work because every real book becomes itself through rewriting.

6. Readers only see the page. They do not know your intentions or the version in your head. Clarity matters.

7. Stop tiptoeing around your own story. Go deeper emotionally. Let characters make mistakes. Let things become uncomfortable and human.

8. Publishing is subjective, but craft still matters. You cannot control timing or trends, but you can keep becoming better on the page.

9. Protect your joy. The writers who survive this business are usually the ones who refuse to let publishing destroy their love of storytelling.

10. Do not decide your story has failed before you even try. People finish books every day. People get agents every day. People build writing careers every day. There is no reason you cannot become one of them.

I had “Scenes From A Small Indiana Factory Town” when I read this; I did some work on it today. These are the ones that jumped out at me.

Pretty writing is not enough. A gorgeous sentence cannot save a manuscript without stakes, movement, and emotional payoff. 

Last night, I sent this to KH with the subject line “critiquing myself”.

 Reading https://eastoverpress.com/book/we-couldve-been-happy-here-by-keith-pilapil-lesmeister/ made me think that I did not do enough with personal relationships in my stories. Not all, maybe not even in the best of them. But that was not the idea. What I wanted to do the personal and what I will call the economic. Probably read too much Dreiser. Who is a chore to read. He is not sentimental in a sickly way. Mostly, this email goes back to what we have been talking about all along - that what we grew up with is no longer fashionable. We might be the tail end of the Industrial Age. We have not retreated from the world into emotional navel-gazing. Perhaps I could turn up the emotional stakes, but I can neither see how nor do I want to revise further. The novella might actually do better at the emotional stakes in the Daria stories and in the Kate Harvey parts. The Mike Devlin divorce story was already emotional enough - even if it had to do with Mike trying to play hero. I was joking about camels, but there is little I see in some published stories that concern political/social issues. Also, not fashionable? Science fiction - some of it, anyway - does not shy away from these kinds of issues. I do think I did get how these people live and love in their environment. After all, we did. We were just trying to figure out how to have a life in a world of economic and social uncertainty, and we did not have the luxury of navel-gazing. A bit more thoughtfulness might have helped us, but there is the humanity, isn't it?

Yeah, I have been worrying over whether I have been investing enough emotion in the story. Some of the story (now a novella) involves business decisions that change the titular city. One family member decides to turn loose the family's control of the city because she has felt herself too long under the control of a husband and her brother. There is another involving an abortion driving a girl towards her girlfriend and the effect of pregnancy on a former lover. There is the girl who is likened to the princess of the prominent family who wants only to be free, to be herself, and is the catalyst for the deaths of two boys. There are the feelings of fathers for a son and sons for fathers. I know no other way but for the payoff to be low key, perhaps even elliptical. But is that enough? When the rejections come in, I will have to assume it was not enough.

Then there is:

Revision is not failure. Your finished draft still needs work because every real book becomes itself through rewriting. 

Anyone reading my posts under the topic of “On Writing” knows that I keep doing this. Listening today to an old interview of E.L. Doctorow, he mentions a story that Thomas Hardy made revisions even after they were published. I made revisions this afternoon.

 This is a little trickier because so many of the stories in “Scenes” are about people screwing up, and even those where characters do not blatantly screw up, they are not saints.

Stop tiptoeing around your own story. Go deeper emotionally. Let characters make mistakes. Let things become uncomfortable and human. 

 So, trying, trying, trying.

Also, working on this one:

Start the story sooner. Too many writers spend chapters preparing to tell the story instead of actually telling it. Make sure the plot is invited in…fast. 

The odd thing with "Scenes" versus its earlier incarnations as a collection of short stories is that I added two sections starting long before the earlier incarnations. They also introduce two characters that will persist throughout the novella. I guess it really does kick in the story of the town's rise and the stakes posed to the people of the loss of its industrial base.

I like trying to write plays, even if it has not been something done lately.  Bertolt Brecht has ideas about making an audience think that I have gotten attached to, but with a caveat. If there are no emotional stakes, there is no attachment to the characters, and no one will pay attention to the ideas. 

Why then with my fiction do I get too caught up with the action rather than the characters?

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