Writing Progress and Thinking About Frame Stories

It’s March, and you can now get IF THIS GOES ON, the anthology of near future political science fiction that I edited. There are some amazing stories in it, and I’m so proud of how the book turned out. Please check it out, and if you enjoy it, spread the word with a review or mention!

The project was initially the idea of publisher Colin Coyle; it was a pleasure working with him along with an awesome team of slush readers. The book was a mix of solicited stories along with ones that came in through the slush pile, so there’s a nice mix of more established and newer voices.

Some of the authors are friends as well, including E. Lily Yu, who I first met working with Fantasy Magazine and whose lovely “Green Glass: A Love Story” leads off the collection in a way that is beautiful and disturbing. The stories are sad and funny, often biting. Sometimes the worlds they project are just a heartbeat away; other times they are surreal glimmers that show us the distortions in our own existence and interactions with the world.

All of them are political — some more subtle than others, certainly — but this project declares itself from page one to be about politics in this country and the world at large.

In related news, I’ve also curated another Storybundle for Women’s History month, the second Feminist Futures one. You can find it here: I’m very happy with this, which ended up being nicely diverse, plus let me put forth K.C. Ball’s collection, SNAPSHOTS FROM A BLACK HOLE AND OTHER STORIES. K.C. was a friend and I edited the collection. She also edited the flash magazine TEN FLASH, which published my flash piece, “Lost in Drowsy Dreams.”

Grab the bundle now – it’s only good for a few weeks, and it has some really terrific reads in it!

Several new classes have been added to the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers schedule, including this weekend’s live online class Mapping the Labyrinth: Plotting Your Novel So Things Happen. I’ve co-taught with Kay several times, and she is a savvy and elegant woman. I’m anticipating learning things from the class myself.

Other upcoming classes being taught for the first time are The Fashion of Worldbuilding: Clothes, Technology, and Taboos with Mary Robinette Kowal and Catherine Lundoff’s In Flagrante Delicto: Writing Effective Sex Scenes and So You Want to Put Together An Anthology?. You can find the full list of live online writing classes here; look for several more getting added this month.

In 2020, Meerkat Press launches Meerkat Shorts, a novelette and novella line, and my “Carpe Glitter” will be part of the initial line-up, along with “Into Bones Like Oil” by Kaaron Warren and “Wild Horse” by Kyle Richardson. “Carpe Glitter” is the story of a woman sorting through the masses of stuff accumulated by her grandmother, a retired stage magician, who runs across something very strange indeed.

Chez Rambo has moved! And one feature of the new place is a much quieter space for podcasting, where there’s not a fire engine whirling by or a recycling truck picking up an apartment building’s worth of trash or similar Very Noisy Events happening every half hour. Here’s two recent additions to the Youtube channel: How to Send Out Stories and How to Evaluate Markets. Got something you want explored in a future video? Drop me a line in the comments here.

I’ve confirmed I’ll be at the Bard’s Tower at Emerald City Comic Con this month. I’ll post a schedule of when I’ll be at the booth, but my plan is to spend most of my time there, since it’s so much fun hanging out with those awesome folks. If you’re going to be there, please stop by and say hi!

On March 14, I’m part of the People Eat and Give fundraising event for the excellent nonprofit the Bureau of Fearless Ideas, a nonprofit writing and communications program that provides after school tutoring, workshops, and other efforts to “prepare young people, ages 6 to 18, for a successful future by developing strong writing skills, championing diverse communication styles, and motivating young people to share their stories.” I’m part of the skit the kids have written and are putting on; we’ve got our first rehearsal this weekend!

There’s an event for Unfettered III: Tales by Masters of Fantasy, which has my story, “Merchants Have Maxims,” in it on Tuesday, March 19, at 7 PM. I’ll be there signing along with several of the other authors as well as its editor Shawn Speakman.

How do you learn to write? You learn by observing and doing, by reading good fiction and making attempts at your own. The truth is that writing is primarily self-taught, that the axiom that you must write a million words is on the mark, and that the first rule is this: To learn to write, you must be writing.

With my students who are writing and thinking about writing, I would have to actively give them bad advice like Play videogames rather than write. Don’t read anything. Only write when you’re in the mood. for them not to get better. That’s the plain and simple truth.

So Do Writing Classes Help?

Writing classes do help – or can, at any rate, depending on what you do with them. They can supply short-cuts, impetus, tricks and techniques. They can kick you in the butt and make you produce, by forcing you to give fellow students a piece to critique, or via homework or in-class timed writings. They can provide inspiration to keep going by giving you something new to try or a way to break a log-jam or dry spell. They can build connections and new friends for you, sometimes friendships that will last for years or even decades.

But with or without them, if you’re writing and think about writing, you will get better at word-smithing, and that is true no matter what stage of the game you’re at. I schedule classes with other people for the Rambo Academy because they’re classes I want to take, which means I’ve been very lucky in recent years, getting to hear people like Seanan McGuire talk about writing series or Ann Leckie discuss writing space opera. Those classes always inspire me, and the novel that I have coming out next year from Tor had its genesis in Leckie’s class. If I wasn’t willing to take classes, I wouldn’t have had that inspiration.

What Should You Learn to Become a Writer?

What should you learn? Learn grammar, so you don’t have to rely on Word’s red wiggly line to tell you when you’ve got a subject/verb agreement. But remember a good, innovative writer colors outside the lines sometimes — know the rules so you can break them with panache. A writer writing to get a high score on Grammarly is missing the chance to innovate and improvise, and aiming for mediocrity in the process.

Learn how to show instead of tell, weaving a dream to pull in your readers. Pay attention to your senses so you can replicate those sensations in your text. Work on supplying the details without ever drawing attention to yourself, so you never commit the cardinal sin and remind the reader that they are reading. Look at how other people do it, and find the techniques that work for you.

Learn how to revise what you write, so you can just write whatever you’re writing, knowing that you’ll make it perfect in the rewrite, and relax into that joyful flow of verbiage. That’s another thing you must be doing in order to learn the skill, but also a place where working with a group that lets you critique other people’s work as well as be critiqued will help you learn it faster.

Critiquing groups are a vast help but not in the way you think. You learn more from critiquing someone else’s work than you do from having your own critiqued, because the former forces you to articulate your ideas and understandings of fiction. You’ll be amazed at how often the problem you’re spotting in someone else’s work will turn up in your own.

What Should You Read to Become a Writer?

What should you read? Read everything — contemporary and classic — and when you love or hate a piece of writing, go back and figure out why. Look at what other authors are doing and imitate them. Steal like Picasso and make things your own.

Read stuff that wins awards so you know what the current trends are and who’s producing what. You can’t predict where the market will be going, but you can know what territory has been so well-visited that it probably won’t be returned to.

Read nonfiction because so much of the stuff of story resides there. Nonfiction will give you details that help makes your dream real for the reader, as well as insight and information that will help shape your stories.

Read poetry because it is beautiful and feeds your soul, and because it will teach you new things to do with words, while seeping into your writing and tinging it with new and beautiful colors.

What Should You Do to Become a Writer?

You must write. Every day if you have that luxury, even if it’s a quick 100 words squeezed in on your phone on the bus to work. You must figure out how to carve space and time for your writing, and you must defend that time from well-meaning friends and vile enemies alike. You must learn to step the hell away from social media and other distractions sometimes and just write. Use the things you love to coax yourself along — ten minutes on Twitter if you finish that page, an ice cream cone for hitting your weekly word count, that new fountain pen for completing that story. Find the things that make you productive — and do them.

You must — at some point — start sending stuff out. Don’t do the editor’s job for them by rejecting the work before they even see it. Send it out and write more while you’re waiting for it to come back.

Remember that writing is a professional activity, that if you’re putting yourself out into the public maybe you want to think about how you’re coming off in face to face and online interactions. It’s a small eco-system and you’ll find that the editorial intern you take out a frustration on today may well be the acquiring editor turning down your book somewhere down the line. Don’t assume you always have the right answer, and don’t be afraid to admit when you don’t. Be kind. Or at least, as per Connie Willis’ advice, don’t be a jackass.

The unexamined life is not worth living, Plato tells us, and I will add that it’s not one that makes you a better writer. If you want to understand the human heart, look to your own and all its petty mean behaviors as well as the nobility of which it is capable. Write what you know; write truth. All of this will help you become a writer.

But write. And write, and write some more. You cannot be a writer until you begin to write.*

*For an alternate viewpoint, consult Timothy the Cat.