It’s the time of year when people are contemplating submissions to workshops like Clarion, Clarion West, Odyssey, Taos Toolbox, and a myriad of others. Here’s seven tips to help with yours.
Don’t put it off till the last minute. I used to do this sort of thing too, in school, because it was always so satisfactory to manage to pull a good grade out of your butt. But one thing I’ve learned is that time spent planning pays off, even if it’s just taking the time to get a little bit done or outlined each day.
Read it aloud before you send it off. I can’t begin to say how helpful this is when catching typos and other glitches that make your submission seem less than professional.
Color between the lines this time. Follow the directions and don’t send a piece that’s longer than the guidelines say.
Get someone else to read it. If only for your own piece of mind. Have them read the copy you’re sending – that way if you’re sending hard copy, they’ll catch that missing page that somehow didn’t get collated.
Pick something interesting. A piece that shows you at your most adventurous and best, a piece that shows you’re willing to take risks.
Play to your strengths. If you do killer dialogue, choose a piece that shows that.
Pay attention to the statement of purpose and say who YOU are, not what you think the readers want to hear.
Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
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Retreat, Day 7
Today’s wordcount:5006
Current Hearts of Tabat wordcount: 99942
Total word count for the week: 10014
Total word count for this retreat: 27091
Worked on Hearts of Tabat, story “Days of Sweetness, Days of Want”
Time spent on SFWA email, discussion boards, other stuff: 30 minutes
According to Fitbit, 11646 steps, 85 flights of stairs, 5.26 miles
From Hearts of Tabat:
The journey upward was full of splinters and soot, but both girls made it. They wandered through the rooms here, which were lower-ceilinged but just as once richly appointed as the downstairs had been. Here too, though, looters had stripped away most of the valuable things other than the built in furniture and even there, the shelves that had once held drawers gaped openly. Bales of paper, blackened on the outside, fell aside at the touch to reveal white internals, blank and ready for words that would never come.
There were two separate suites, both facing out over Printers Row, and in one, rather than looting, someone had smashed: a mass of crockery, and a number of terra-cotta house dolls, every Trade God in the house, it seemed. Revelation picked through the fragments, taking out the faces where she could find them, accumulating them into a little heap of smiles and eyes and pointed noses.
“What are you doing?” Grace said irritably. “Those aren’t worth anything.”
Revelation bit her lip and kept down on her knees, sorting through the fragments. She thought to herself, they have value because I want them, even if someone else might think they’re worthless. Anger smoldered in her like a damp match.
“Do you think they’ll have some power, because they’re Trade Gods?” Grace persisted. “That’s foolish. Only the moons are real.”
“I know that,” Revelation said. “I’m not a heretic.”
“Then why are you sorting those out? Do you think you can put one back together?”
Revelation shook her head. Grace pulled at her shoulder. Reluctantly, she swept the faces she had found, two handfuls worth, into her pockets and let Grace move her along.
The fire’s touch had manifested in every room, charring walls, blackening fabrics. It smelled overwhelmingly of burned things, which was not a smell that Revelation had considered unpleasant before this day, but now pressed at her nose until she found herself dipping her face into her shoulder, trying to breathe through the fabric of her cloak. Grace seemed unaffected by the smell, moving quickly to anything she thought might yield some value, and forcing her gleanings on Revelation, whose load grew heavier and heavier as they sorted through the rooms: a brass lantern; half a picture frame, the edges gilded; a small glass jar full of an unknown white paste; a handful of yellowy-gold feathers, so bright that she thought they must be painted at first.
They both froze when they heard the noise from below.
Submerging, And Other Random Thoughts about Novelspinning
Found in a Seattle alley. They smelled like grandmothers and summer.One of the questions I’ve been asked several times and never known how to answer before is “How is writing a novel different than writing a short story?” The smart-ass answer is, of course, a novel is longer, but it’s more than that, more a question of the complexity that a greater length affords you, an ability to move in four dimensions rather than just three.
A short story is smaller, flatter, closer to two-dimensional, while a novel has at least four dimensions and probably much more than that. Things interconnect in a short story, but in a novel those interconnections become even more important, indeed are their own kind of building block. In a novel, things reflect, are doubled, made more complicated, imbued with meaning. So what’s the difference beyond that? For me, it’s what’s required in the writing, in getting enough of the book in my head to be able to figure out where it’s going next.
How does one achieve that? The answer that’s emerged for me is submersion. There needs to be — at least for me — a period where I’m focused on the writing to the exclusion of anything and everything else. To go to sleep with my words echoing in my head, to wake with dreams lingering in which pieces of the story have been predicted or deciphered. To not be watching television or playing videogames, which fills up my head with pop culture crap (I do not decry it in its place, simply claim that for a writer, too much can be detrimental.)
To work at novel length — at any length, really, though — is a willingness to let your unconscious wander and then capitalize in the rewrite on the wonderful things that process has revealed. You can’t hold a novel in your head the way you can contain a story, seeing it as a complete entity. Instead you exist within it, seeing outward, creating a hollow space in which the reader can live while experiencing the funhouse ride you have constructed.
I start with a roadmap that tells me the basic arc, but every few chapters I have to recalculate and check that map, and make sure no necessary sidetrips have presented themselves (or need to be dropped from the itinerary). I know by now, having completed five of these things, that I can reach the end. I just don’t know exactly how much gas it’ll take or what the terrain will present me with. That’s half the joy and most of the terror of this enterprise.
I don’t want to discount writers with a more straightforward plotting process — mileage will always, inevitably, vary and anyone who claims to have found the One True Way for anyone other than themself is full of hooey. Here’s a truth: all that matters is that you write. That you produce words of fiction rather than words about the art of fiction writing or the state of the world or the publishing industry or any of the ways in which the world has wronged you (a fascinating topic to you, but few others). This is not to say that critique and revision are not important as well, but simply that for either to take place, the act of creation must have preceded it.
I’m counting down the days till July because I’m taking a month and a half for submerging myself, heading off to housesit for a friend in another state. It’s what both my waking and unconscious mind are telling me to do in order to finish up this book and get a running start on the next, Exiles of Tabat. To dive deep into the roots of the story and blunder around, colliding with those hidden pillars, overgrown with metaphor and symbology, so semiotically-shagged that you must reach out for them with something like a special bat-sense, akin to sonar, because otherwise you’re just a blind man, holding onto an elephant’s tail and gravely expounding on how like a snake an elephant truly is.
Those pillars inform everything because they hold it all up. A story is just a story, a spaceship just a spaceship… but that’s not true at all, is it? In a novel, a spaceship’s cargo hold is packed tight with meaning: exploration, escape, the forces of technology, even fripperies like references to other fictional spaceships or science.
Things in books are more than just things, because even when we’re reading “just for entertainment,” there’s a level on which they show us what is and isn’t okay for humans to do. Everything is political in that it works to normalize (or mark as abnormal) what’s presented in it. A book with a protagonist preaching libertarian values or fondling her gun is just as political as any other viewpoint and to pretend such stories are not political is disingenuous or ignorant at best and outright dishonest at its worst.
But I digress, because I don’t want to talk about opinions of art, but rather what I can say about its creation. I’ll have wireless, so I’ll be teaching some classes, and there’s a few other things to do, but mainly I’m just going to write and write and see what I can get done. The book for sure, and a handful of stories that I’ve promised people, and at least an outline for Exiles. I am extremely lucky to have a spouse who doesn’t mind my heading off to hole up, as well as the economic circumstances to do this, and I am going to make the most of it, particularly in the post-Nebulas lull, because I’m itching to get the second book out there and see what people think, because it’s a weird structure, and man, the people who didn’t like the cliffhanger in the last are not going to be happy with this one.
Life’s been contentious lately, at least in the overall climate. If you want to feel happier, go do something nice for someone else. Give someone a kind word or a smile. And wish me luck, because today’s got a series of downers in it – but they are all quite survivable and July is coming soon.
