Writers and Writing!

leaning out the tabs and email after having a bad few days of being a little ill and working on a new novel. I hope these might be of help.

Anna North on the Genre You Didn’t Know You Needed: Bogcore (Literary Hub)

Do You Need to Be Surprised? (Reactor) raises an interesting issue.

I don’t think of myself as a person who has strong feelings about surprise in general. I don’t hate or love surprise parties; I try to be adaptable when a day goes not as planned and surprises me, for better or worse. The only kind of surprise I actively avoid is the jumpscare, but that’s because I hate being scared. I’ve never been a reader who focuses on seeking out the new, the “original,” the thing I’ve never seen before, though I’m always pleased when I stumble across it. I tried to think of the most surprising book I’ve ever read, but it was harder than expected. I just don’t think about books that way. Does that mean the twistiest? The most shocking? The book with the most gasp-inducing moments? (I can do that: That scene in Code Name Verity, or the moment in The Saint of Bright Doors where something is understood about the narrator. I gasped, and turned back, and read both those scenes at least twice.) 

I tend to think instead about whether a story showed me something cool, or looked at a familiar situation in a different way, or was structured intriguingly, or had characters that I wanted to understand. Did the writing sing? Did I want to crawl into the world and never come out? 

Is newness surprise? If a book shows you something new, is that inherently surprising? Am I splitting hairs? Possible. Merriam-Webster’s third definition of surprise is “the feeling caused by something unexpected or unusual.” Perhaps my sense that “new thing” and “surprising thing” are not necessarily the same thing is not borne out by the dictionary. 

But even more important since I think it can apply far beyond the practice of writing:

This is the thing about Davies’ remarks: I don’t think he’s really talking about fans. It’s too generous a word for people who have learned a detail from a leak and decided that they know how it’s all going to go and they can’t be wrong about it. I don’t prioritize surprise in the narratives I find interesting, but I do prioritize a capacity for surprise in myself. A capacity for surprise is a willingness to be wrong. A willingness to be wrong is, one one level, a willingness to find joy and delight and meaning where you didn’t expect it. On another level, it’s the only way I see to move through this world: to learn, and change, and keep doing both.

Yeah, think about that.

 And back to technical issues, have a look at How to format a book manuscript (Nathan Bransford | Writing, Book Editing, Publishing).

Literary agents and the various professionals you will work with throughout the process will absolutely view your manuscript as a proxy for your overall digital fluency. Being bad with computers is not necessarily a total dealbreaker, but there are more demands on authors than ever, and it could hurt your chances.

There isn’t an ironclad industry standard format for manuscripts that’s as exacting as, say, a Chicago Manual of Style. Instead, there are a mix of “must haves” and “some people do these things.”

What I’ll cover in this post:

• Why you shouldn’t mimic the formatting of a finished book
• Manuscript formatting must-haves
• Optional manuscript formatting
• A sample manuscript with proper formatting

Talent Isn’t Everything (Writing Forward)

Plenty of things can hold talented writers back from success:

• Some people only write when they feel like it.
• Some can’t accept criticism or stick it out through revisions and tedious or unpleasant phases of a project.
• Some refuse to learn new skills and practice the craft.
• Some give up too easily or drop projects to chase after newer ideas that seem more exciting.
• Some lack discipline, which encompasses just about everything else on this list.

Notice a theme? Discipline, not talent, is a more reliable path to success.

 On Seeking Validation...and Something More

During our session, Katie did something unexpected: she shared her screen with me and opened a spreadsheet she started 25 years ago to track her submissions. She scrolled through quickly to show me every line that says “Rejected.” She laughs that her relationship with literary rejections is one of her longest-standing relationships.

For every prestigious acceptance she’s earned over the years, there are countless rejections that came before those. She shared a story about how she and her fiction-writer husband used to keep a “Rejections Jar” in grad school where they put a one-dollar bill in for every rejection they received. When the jar filled up, they took themselves out to dinner.

The 5 Ingredients You Need to Write Subtext in Fiction (Helping Writers Become Authors )

Since the whole idea of story subtext is that you’re not supposed to look at it in the direct light of day, writers often get the feeling they’re supposed to tiptoe around their own stories’ subtext, never looking at it.

This is exactly what you shouldn’t do.

It’s true you’re not going to give your readers a direct look at your subtext, but you absolutely must be thoroughly familiar with it. The subtext must exist—the iceberg must be under the water—if the story on top is going to have any chance of floating.

Create your story’s subtext deliberately. This requires an absolute understanding of your characters’ backstories, motivations, and goals, as well as a firm grip on the world around your characters. This doesn’t mean you have t0 know all of this right away; it may be something you discover as you uncover the shape of the story for yourself.

 

Terms Publishing Assumes You Know (by Kristen Weber)

Practice makes some new content--Dey (FreedomFiction.com on Patreon)

Processing: How Adam Wilson Wrote Fail Sons (Counter Craft), an interview on writing process and ideas.

Yes - 

Point being, I’m a firm believer that people’s experiences of art—films, books, music, etc.—are as formative as any other experiences, and it’s precious and dishonest to pretend otherwise. In Fail Sons, specifically, Scott is a former magazine editor, and his midlife crisis is connected to his newfound feelings of obsolescence. It’s not just that he’s out of a career, but that he’s spent his adult life building a cultural knowledge base that seems to have been rendered worthless by things like recommendation algorithms. In the book, his constant cultural references tend to fall on indifferent ears, and I think that among many other things, Fail Sons contains a comic but earnest lament for a social language that’s quickly going extinct.  

A rejection that came in on 10/14:

Thank you for sharing your work with us. We often have to turn down well-crafted writing, and while "The Unintended Consequences of Art" isn't quite right for our current needs, we appreciate the time and effort which goes into every submission we consider. Thank you for sending your work.

Sincerely,

Sequestrum

 

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