OK, so I’ve been pretty bloody busy since well before the new year began, and I’ve fallen massively behind with my compiling of writing advice links.

Or rather, I haven’t. I’ve been steadily compiling them in Google Notebook (which is a great tool, especially when used with the Firefox plugin), but the emphasis is on the “piling” … there’s about twenty of the buggers sat in there, taunting me from their position of safety-in-numbers, saying “hah - no time to post us, no time to write, you suck!”

Well, I’m not having that. So let’s offload - call ‘em out by author and/or website, sergeant!

Jim “Justice” Van Pelt

[ Long-time readers will know well my admiration and respect for Uncle Jim; no one tops him for quality friendly writing advice. Most of these are from his LJ feed, but the top one is from the column he does for The Fix.]

• “Sometimes the best bump I can give my writing is to get out of the house. A retreat is great, of course, but packing up my laptop and heading to the bagel shop or library is effective too.”
• “Is there such a thing as a “great” title, or do titles begin to look great because they’re married to “great” stories?  After a while, we can’t imagine the story being titled anything else.  Which comes first?”
• “While we walked, I was reminded again of the challenge and importance of writing with the landscape where a story takes place in mind.”
• “Writing the conclusion to a story can be hard!  First off, the whole story has been leading to this last page, so the sense of responsibility to the story and to the reader is huge.”
• “At any rate, I have a bunch of mini-units to talk about aspects of short story writing.  One that we covered last night was mood or atmosphere.”
• “I become insanely sensitive to repetitiveness in my sentence patterns, and I’m convinced that every reader will see it too.  I sometimes stare at my prose in despair. So, I go to the literature I love best to wash out my ears and to let me hear the rhythms again.”
• “My stance on all writing rules, from the nuts and bolts of grammar to the other much discussed rules of fiction writing (like staying attached to only one point of view, or “show, don’t tell, which I discussed earlier in Every “Rule” Has Exceptions), is that the only rule that matters to the writer is “Does it work?”"
• “Fortunately, your body which needs the oxygen doesn’t know if the breath that produced it was made while not thinking, or if it was the result of conscious effort. Your readers won’t be able to tell the difference. You can write crap consciously or unconsciously, just as you can write effective stuff both ways.”

Luc Reid

• “Don’t Worry: The Characters Don’t Believe It Either”
• “So here’s my advice to you: if you’re serious about writing and you currently only write  every once in a while, perhaps because you really, honestly don’t have the time (or just because you like to relax), try instead–just for a month or two–writing every day.”
• “Writer’s Block: Nothing to Fear But Fear Itself”

Jay Lake

• “Having just hammered 30,000 words out of the manuscript, I can say yet again that killing your darlings is hard sport.”
• “Developmental Anatomy of a Book“

Jeff VanderMeer

• Evil Monkey’s Guide to Creative Writing: Tips for Beginners - “(1) An early sense of entitlement is deadly to development. Don’t posture and preen well before you have any right to do so. (In fact, don’t ever.) Them that do rarely develop as writers, although some of them may become widely published over time. They just never recognize they suck.”

Paolo Bacigalupi

• “After today, what I really think is that I’m a dogged writer. If I polish the turd long enough, eventually something shines. It’s really my specialty. Going after a story again and again until finally I figure out how to spin crap into gold.”
• How to write a short story - by throwing away a short story - “I wrote a novelette last week. The interesting thing about it was that I literally had no idea what I was doing.”

Neil Beynon

• “As has been alluded to a few times recently, I have been experiencing more than my fair share of writer’s block, that all pervading paralysing fear that the ideas will dry up and not a single interesting sentence will be transmitted to the page.”

Write To Done blog

[ Some of these are more focused on non-fiction, but still useful. ]

• “How to Disagree“
• “How to Write Conversationally“
• “Research Sources for Writers: A Guide to Backing up Your Words“
• “Clean Up Your Narration: Four Tips For Fiction Writers“
• “31 Ways to Find Inspiration for Your Writing“
• “Short Stories: The Art of the Start” - “While revision is important for the entire short story — you should rip it apart and massage it and mold it until you have it right — I recommend paying special attention to the first paragraph or three.”

io9

[ OMG!!!1-post-not-about-Heroes-or-Torchwood shocker! ]

• Steal This Pitch: 8 Unstoppable Rules For Writing Killer Short Stories - “Short fiction is the “garage band” of science fiction, claims Tor Books editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden, so it’s time to step on that fuzzbox and thrash as hard as you can without knocking over your mom’s weed-trimmer.”

PickTheBrain.com:

• George Orwell’s Five Rules For Effective Writing - “If you want to be understood, if you want your ideas to spread, using effective language must be your top priority. In the modern world of business and politics this is hardly ever the case.”

WordWise:

• Verb Your Enthusiasm - “… a brain-imaging study conducted at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, England, showed that the brain’s motor cortex responds to merely reading action words like active verbs. Verbs, in other words, stimulate readers, kickstart their imagination, draw them in, compel them to think.”

Yes, some of these are hideously old. Doesn’t mean they’re any less useful, though.

Now, I’m off down the road to talk to an H P Lovecraft-inspired band called The Sword. Enjoy!

Yes.

Yes, I can.

I have been spending money I don’t have on things that make loud noises.

You may tell me this is unwise. You may tell me this will not endear me to my neighbours. You will be ignored on both counts, oh yes.

Writing about music:

Work continues apace at The Dreaded Press; this week’s recommended listen is I Am The Golden Gate Bridge by Creature With The Atom Brain.

Scuzzy whacked-out junkie rock’n'roll with a big helping of weird - think Butthole Surfers on a bong-binge.

Writing about books:

Still ploughing through the Book of the New Sun, meaning I’m falling behind on the Great Baroque Cycle Reading Project (not to mention other titles to be reviewed).

Some sort of concerted binge effort may have to occur this weekend; I’ve already had to concede that if I continue analysing the book as I read it, it’ll be well after Eastercon before I finish.

There’s just too much symbolism, and I’m getting hung up on trying to decode it all. Time to treat it like a normal* reader, I think.

Writing about other stuff:

In addition to today’s Friday Flash piece, I sent another one (a New Southsea story, as it happens) off to a magazine called Pseudonym.

It’s not a paying market, nor a science fiction market, but it’s one of those labour-of-love arty/designy type of magazines run by a friend of a friend, and they asked really nicely for something, and they said I could send fiction rather than non-fiction, so … I figured why not.

I quite like the resulting story, and will probably post it here in weeks to come.

Futurismic:

I’ve been really chuffed with the responses to “Uxo, Bomb Dog”, and with the resulting traffic at Futurismic.

I’m also pleased to have discovered Project Wonderful, an ad network that lives up to its name and which will be discussed in greater detail here some time soon.

Books and magazines seen:

Just the one this week: Murky Depths #3 has arrived, like some spectre of guilt intent on reminding me that (surprise surprise) I still haven’t read the first two.

Still, things should settle down at the end of the month**, so I can get some backlog-clearing done on the reading front.

Coda:

This week has been mercifully relaxed by comparison to the last. While the above may not seem a catalogue of triumph on the achievements front, I’m quietly happy with the fact that I’ve done everything that needed doing.

I’ve also succeeded in getting up early every day - which really does wonders for the old productivity, with the side effect of making you almost physically incapable of typing by 10pm.

The universe giveth, the universe taketh away … still, I feel like I’m making progress with things, and that’s good enough for me, thank you very much.

There’s been no gig-going this past week, but I’m off to Brighton tomorrow night to see the superb stoner-bluesmen Dead Meadow supported by local wig-out psych-rockers You’re Smiling Now But We’ll All Turn Into Demons, which promises to be a great night out … provided there are no embarrassing invisible guestlist incidents, of course, so fingers crossed.

But those are bridges to be crossed when arrived at; the current span stands between my empty stomach and The Friday Curry Of Self-congratulation And Righteousness, and so I shall step forth on the path to culinary adventure!

Have a great weekend, folks. Hasta luego.

[ * For 'normal', substitute 'sensible'. ]

[ ** How many times have we heard this one before? ]

OK, ladies and gents; the cat is out of the bag.

Yours truly is now publisher and editor-in-chief of Futurismic.

This is a very big deal for me, and also more than a trifle scary. But I’ve been talking the talk about web publishing for a long time - so when the opportunity arose to take the wheel at Futurismic I figured it was high time I walked the walk as well.

I hope those of you who’ve been following Futurismic for a while will stay on-board - we’re going to start publishing fiction again next month, and non-fiction columns will follow shortly after that.

Those of you who don’t already follow Futurismic, I hope you’ll subscribe and come along for the ride.

Thanks for reading, folks.

Stoddard’s Two Cents

Here’s an intentionally provocative post from Jason Stoddard*, who suggests that we might get some interesting ideas about improving genre short fiction by saying what we hate about it:

“Back in my audio days, we used to ask our dealers and our customers a simple question: “What do you hate most about your gear?” And, based on the answers to this question, we’d frequently create products that drove stunning business growth.

Because it really isn’t important what they’re thrilled with. What matters is what they hate. Hate is a red-hot emotion that drives change.”

An interesting idea - there are already some stimulating comments on Jason’s post that are well worth a read, if only as a demonstration of how various the range of attitudes really is.

My Two Cents

I’m not going to go overboard here, because I’m a comparative newcomer to short fiction, and I don’t feel I have the same degree of emotional connection to (or experience with) it that a lot of longer-standing fans do. But here’s a few little nuggets:

• Heinlein’s Capable Men - they may have made sense in Heinlein’s era, but these stories just rub me up wrong when done by modern writers.
• The PKD rewrites - great stories in their day. Leave them be and write your own.
• The Hollywood screenplay - I know it’s a short story, but a soupcon of description and depth wouldn’t go amiss. My imagination loves a workout, but it needs calories before it can exercise.

Your Two Cents

What do you hate about the short fiction you read? Or is it all just fine, thankyouverymuch?

[* I'm late out of the gate with this one, I know; I have a mass of things to post about that other commitments have held me back from covering, and this is me beginning to catch up on the backlog.]

Hey, look - writing advice from people who know what they’re on about! I need all I can get, that’s for sure - if you do too, read on.

Two top-tens from Jim Van Pelt

A double-whammy of top-ten lists from Jim Van Pelt. First of all, the Top Ten Rookie Writer’s mistakes (a rough draft). I’m terrible for this one:

"3 - Point of view character is passive or pluckless."

Then he revisits the list idea, after realising that there are at least ten top rookie writer mistakes that are behavioural as opposed to literary. This time he nails me with the first point:

"1 - Starting projects but not finishing them."

Ah. Right. Yeah, but, y’know, I’ve been busy, and … [exit, stage left, muttering]

Sharp thoughts from Uncle Nick*

The ever-succinct Nick Mamatas also has two posts of note. Firstly, two bad tendencies he notices in the slushpile:

"1. Being boring, on purpose. It really doesn’t work. One should not attempt to reflect the boredom everyday life by boring the reader with, say, a 700 word description of the process of consuming cereal…especially not within a 1400 word story. Bite. Chew. Swallow."

I’ll admit my writing’s often boring, but I’ve never tried to make it that way.

And secondly, reflecting on a story he had accepted by Nature magazine, a reversal of an established aphorism:

"You know that old saying "Murder your darlings"? One time, try the opposite: keep the darling, murder everything else, and write a new story around that jewel."

I think the important thing to note is his use of the words "one time". I know my poetry has benefited immensely from me learning to cut out the bits I think are really awesome. That’s because my assessment of them is usually very wrong.

Paolo Bacigalupi has a sex change

After someone made some trenchant observations about his characterisations of women, Paolo Bacigalupi decided to word-replace a character from a novel-in-progress from being a guy to being a girl, and discovered something interesting in the process:

"As I read the part of the story where my newly minted female character first appears on stage, I was struck with an almost overwhelming urge to describe her physically. Nowhere in the previous version of the story did I physically describe her male incarnation - no height, no weight, no haircut, no musculature, no eyes, no lips, no nothing — and yet now that her sex had changed, I felt intensely compelled to add markers of physical description. The role of this newly minted female character was to be the same as the earlier male’s role, her function in the story and the scene exactly the same (in the scene where she first shows up, she’s counting money - pretty gender neutral behavior) and yet now I had this intense urge to describe her black bobbed hair. Interesting, no?"

An insight into the actions we undertake when writing without being consciously aware of them.

The endings justify the meanings

Last but by no means least: David Louis Edelman, wearing his DeepGenre hat, discusses endings - more specifically the why and how thereof as opposed to the what - using the Batman Begins movie as a template:

"… we don’t tell stories from a naturalistic perspective. We might try to simulate nature’s point of view or use it as a tool in our own story-telling, but by and large we construct an artificial framework on which to hang our stories. We have a point of view. The protagonist’s experiences are filtered through a set of moral questions or psychological dilemmas. We focus on Batman’s efforts to stop the Joker from poisoning Gotham’s water supply rather than the audit of his 2003 taxes because it’s a convenient metaphor. Can Batman overcome his feelings of despair and hopelessness to face a challenge? Will Batman press ahead against overwhelming odds when it’s very likely he’s going to fail anyway? Does Batman believe that he’s fulfilling his mission to act as an instrument of justice? And so on.

When does the story end? It ends when the moral or ethical or psychological question is answered, whether in the affirmative or in the negative or some combination of both. Bruce Wayne finds the strength to put on the mask one more time. Bruce Wayne chooses to follow his convictions, even though they clash with society’s. Bruce Wayne perseveres when a lesser man would have given up. Whether he actually succeeds in capturing the Joker or not is of secondary concern."

Plenty of food for thought there. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to try and avoid breaking Jim Van Pelt’s first rule …

[* I have no idea whether Nick Mamatas would object to me finding his brutally honest writing advice to be avuncular ... but having seen how he tears a new one for people who piss him off, I'm sure I'll find out eventually. It's meant with the greatest of respect, Mr M.]

What with one thing and another, it’s been a donkey’s age since I last did a writing advice round-up. I had a few morsels lying about in the old RSS reader, so I thought I’d take a moment to pitch them out.

Twenty mistakes to avoid

This is the first of two posts from E. E. Knight, a man who manages to educate and entertain at the same time. It’s a list of twenty fiction-writing blunders made by beginning (and not-so-beginning) writers. My personal favourite:

11 - So that’s why you wrote this: I’ve read stories where the most precise language and evocative imagery is saved for the all-important pudenda-shaving scene as the heroine gets ready to go to the library. I’m not knocking your kink, I’m just wondering why so much word-weight is put into a personal hygiene choice in a story about tracking down Shoggoths.

Zing!

Showing not telling - avoiding infodump

Back-story is probably more essential in genre fiction than any other form … but that doesn’t make it any more palatable when served in huge expository lumps. So here’s a snippet of E. E. Knight’s comprehensively lengthy advice on sneaking the back-story under the radar:

You’re doing a disservice to your readers when you present them with the information they need to know to understand your world (or the backgrounds for your characters, or whatever) in a couple of ways when you do this, though. For one thing, it’s absolutely static and therefore boring. For another, the authorial hand is visible, cold on the reader’s throat like a doctor checking your glands.

Indeed. Concludes with plenty of examples, also. If you’re a beginning writer, and you’re not subscribed to his RSS feed, you’re missing out.

Collaboration 101

Another writer whose advice I increasingly find indispensable (and another one by whose actual fiction, to my shame, I’ve never read*) is Luc Reid. While not so much of a didactic piece as Knight’s material above, this post lays out a procedural framework for collaborating on short stories:

6. When we have a completed first draft, one of us does the first round of editing. If one person did more of the original writing, the other should be the one to do the first round of editing. During editing, we discuss any major changes before making them, but other than that we’re ruthless and edit the stories almost as though they were our own. We don’t hesitate to strike out a beautiful phrase or change a character or what have you even if the other person has done the original work. However, we do this using Word’s “track changes” feature, which is very easy to use, so that if something needs to be restored it can be.

Hmmm. I’m thinking you’ll have to be pretty good friends with anyone you do that sort of work with! Good food for thought, though.

Clomping foot redux

It’s a mark of his great talent (and the great esteem in which he is held) that M. John Harrison can set the genre blogosphere alight with a few short paragraphs about the sort of fantasy he is tired of seeing:

Go away & write me a fantasy like that. Wait twenty years before you start. Write it out of some emotion of yours you never understood, or some decision you made you�re not sure if you regret; but never once name that emotion or let me see the decision. I want what�s underneath. Make it short. Remember the world never had a plot, & that there�s no difference between a �myth� & commuting to work, they�re just two really excellent ways of narrating the life out of life.

Tear this one up, & start again with that very good sentence from p50, �I didn�t know what was happening.�

Much like the original “clomping foot” post, I think people will be talking about this one for some time to come.

In fact, it reminds me of some of the things the Mundanistas have been saying, though there are fundamental differences. But that’s a post for another day …

[*Actually, that's not strictly true - I have read some of Luc Reid's super-short pieces over at The Daily Cabal, which is kind of like Friday Flash Fiction every single day, and another fine addition to your web-based diet.]

There seem to be a lot of posts containing advice for writers in my RSS reader at the moment, so I thought it would be nice to share them with everyone. Let’s see …

First up we have Jeff Vandermeer reposting the start of his “Evil Monkey Guide to Creative Writing” at his recently-relocated blog.

My Futurismic co-blogger and rising science fiction novelist Tobias Buckell has links to some extensive notes on plotting that were taken at the Taos Toolbox writer’s workshop.

Finally, Jetse de Vries is e-submissions fiction editor for Interzone, but he’s a writer in his own right, too. He shares with us the lessons he’s learned from reading the slush pile, and discusses the value of “trunking” stories that you just can’t seem to sell.

[Cross-posted to Futurismic]

Futurismic is currently in redevelopment, having a new engine fitted … two evenings without posting to it, and I feel a peculiar absence. Blogging definitely has addictive properties.

So, in the interim, I’ll round up a batch of good stuff for sf heads to read on the web and post them here instead.

Kim Stanley Robinson on climate change

The man behind the much lauded Mars Trilogy (which I’ve still never read), Kim Robinson talks about climate change issues at Wired, in the context of his latest novel, Sixty Days and Counting.

Watts, MacLeod, McAuley and Slonczewski on science fiction and the biosciences

Thanks to Peter Watts, we can read [warning - PDF] a group discussion interview from Nature magazine where he, Ken MacLeod, Paul McAuley and Joan Slonczewski talk about their writing, the biological sciences, and the connections between the two.

There is apparently a longer and unexpurgated online version to come, reached by the URL at the end of the piece, but it doesn’t appear to be live yet.

(Special bonus material! Ken MacLeod is not too worried about doctors who think they can be terrorists. It’s the engineers we should be looking out for.)

Lewis Shiner gives it away

A little late to the pixel-stained revolution, but very welcome nonetheless, is Lewis Shiner’s decision to release all of his short fiction online under a Creative Commons licence. Yes, all of it, along with a manifesto about the importance of short fiction for developing one’s writing - and for cultivating readers, too.

I must confess to not having read any Shiner before, but his is a name I’ve had recommended to me countless times. Now I have no excuse, except the old ‘lack of time’ saw. Thanks to the omniprescient BoingBoing for the tip-off.

Happy reading!

I didn’t notice until I clicked through to it from my RSS reader that this lengthy ‘blog post from the future’ on Wired is by none other than my favourite cyberpunk author and all-round hand-waving Texan genius, Bruce Sterling.

I should have noticed, of course; in hindsight, it’s very much in his style. Although it doesn’t work exceptionally well on literary terms (it’s one big infodump with a framing concept), I doubt it is supposed to - and it’s well worth a read anyway. Here’s a snippet of news from 2017 as an example:

“Meanwhile, gray-haired representatives are wigging out over the hordes of Americans who blithely abandon their passports to travel the world with European mobiles. The Europeans let you do that. They understand that their hopelessly crufty nationware only impedes the flow of ever-stronger euros. Nobody wants to deal with nationware, not even in an emergency. It’s not granular enough, fast enough, close enough to the ground. If you lose everything you own in a flood or hurricane, who are you going to call � the federal bureaucracy?! Amazon.com, Google, Ikea, and Wal-Mart can deliver anything, anywhere, while the Feds are still stenciling their crates of surplus cheese.

It’s not about who salutes, folks. It’s about who delivers. Remember that. I said it first. You can link to me.”

Apparently there’s more to come, which promises to be fun. As well as being an interesting format with which to deliver futurist ideas (or ‘foresight consulting’, as I believe we’re supposed to call it now), I like the meta-ness of blogging a fictional blog from the future. It also highlights the potential for serialised short fiction to make a resurgence, if the authors can find the right hooks. Hmmm …

I’ve been a bit lax on posting up useful bits of fiction writing advice - largely due to being busy as all hell trying to scrape up some paid work writing non-fiction, as it happens - but a couple of doozies were sat in the feed reader that I thought were worth sharing.

First off, Luc Reid (who certainly seems to know his writerly onions) has a post on writing believeable fiction:

“Of course, if the reader just wants a good story and isn’t in a critical mood, you can get a lot more by that reader with less work. Unfortunately, this is in the individual reader’s hands rather than the writer’s, so it’s best to write for the skeptical and unwilling reader, since the willing reader won’t be overly bothered by the detail.

However, there is one element of willingness over which you have control, which is how compelling your story is. If you introduce your pond scum creature in the midst of a tense scene in which it immediately becomes clear that the pond scum creature may be able to give your main character the name of his birth mother, the reader may care so much about the story that they will accept whatever they need to in order to continue seeing it unfold.”

That advice has to be useful to anyone writing any sort of genre fiction.

Elsewhere, the Slushmaster approaches a thorny issue in a humourous way, by making a metaphor between the writing life and Darwinian ’survival of the fittest*’:

“Let’s use cavemen to illustrate some points, because cavemen are funny.  “Man next door has fire.  Me no need fire.  Me know what me doing.”  Translation: “I don’t need to read the submission guidelines.  I know what I’m doing.”  These are the writers who fail to put their stories in the proper fonts, fail to enclose their SAE, or stamps, or IRCs, send fantasy stories to science fiction markets, send poetry to markets that publish strictly fiction, etc.  If there are better methods of hunting/gathering you can easily learn, use them.”

Zing!

[* Yeah, I know, 'Darwinism' and 'survival of the fittest' aren't really the same thing ... but we both got the point he was making, right?]