These are the afterwords/author’s notes I wrote for the stories in my second collection, Worshipping Small Gods. They didn’t appear in the actual book for two reasons. 1) There wasn’t room and 2) They hadn’t been written yet. I think the second reason is probably the one that matters. Some readers are interested in this kind of thing, some aren’t. If you fall in the “aren’t” category, you can bail now. Fair warning. Continue reading
Sparing Your Darlings
“Murdering Your Darlings.” Yesterday the subject came up in the context of cutting good material that nevertheless no longer belonged in the story you’re working on. That is, the case of a paragraph or page of chapter which is well-written, interesting in its own right, perhaps even particularly fine, but neither advances the plot nor reveals character. In other words, it’s just not pulling its weight, therefore it’s adding weight and slowing your story down. It has to go. That’s often the sense in which that phrase is used today, but it occurs to me that, originally, the phrase meant something a little different.
“Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly— and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings. ” — Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
“Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.” — Samuel Johnson
The rationale hasn’t really changed; the premise is that the material just doesn’t belong. Yet the subtext is that the material doesn’t belong in your story for the sole reason that it is especially fine. That is, the passage calls attention to itself rather than serving the story, and at that point it no longer belongs. There’s truth in that. For a story to work the voice and tone need to be consistent, or at least in some sort of harmony. A passage that is so clearly out of place can jolt the reader out of the story, remind them that they’re reading and not really experiencing, and the risk is that the whole structure then collapses like the construct of shadows and mist and mirrors that it actually is.
So you murder your darlings. It’s good, tried and true advice…so far as it goes. I’m going to be a teensy bit contrarian here, and suggest that, like all advice–good or otherwise–sometimes it’s just full of crap. Continue reading
How is a Meme Like a Mime?
Other than the more affected pronounciation? Beats me. Memes are only sometimes silent and not always annoying, whereas….
Ahem.
In honor of and surrender to all the memeage floating around from now to Doomsday, I will reluctantly answer five questions that nobody asked:
1) Never
2) Once, but I was still at the “hormones with feet” stage (college). And I’d been drinking.
3) Poetry.
4) A raven.
5) Parke Godwin, Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Ursula LeGuin, Peter Beagle and Andre Norton.
There. Done now.
Zen and the Art of Beating Your Head Against the Wall Revisited
“Everything’s been said. But no one was listening, so we have to keep saying it.” — Anonymous.
I’ve said this before, I know. Look away if you want. I won’t mind. Some of this applies across the board, but this is mostly for the short story people out there.
Ok, tough guys of all genders, do you really think you’re ready for this? Of course you do, and why shouldn’t you? You’ve endured the long hours with nothing but you and a blank screen. You’ve endured the rejections. You’ve endured the shoestring operations that either lose your submissions or close up shop before they publish that story they bought from you, the one that was going to make your reputation overnight. Your grin may have been more grimace for a bit, but you got through it. Now you sneer at editorial indifference, you scoff at bad reviews. You’ve been assayed, weighed in the balance, proven. You’re starting to break through; the venues are getting better, the checks are getting larger. This is no small accomplishment. You’re in. You’ve done it. You’ve passed all the tests.
Not all. There’s still one test left. And while we’re at it, how good are you at being ignored?
Have a Little Faith, Will Ya?
Feeling dogmatic this morning, so avoid if you ain’t in the mood. Time again I hear two classic questions about writing and submitting stories, most recently on another board– how do you know when something is good enough to send to markets? How do you know when it’s time to take a story out of circulation and trunk it?
Considering how self-evident those answers are, I should be amazed that people keep asking them, and yet I can understand the frustration. The true answers may be obvious, but they’re next to impossible for a beginner to apply, by definition. It makes sense that they keep looking for easier, more relevant to their current state of development answers. Unfortunately, I don’t think there are any. Continue reading
