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Tips For Writers: Examining Your Own Writing Process

We had the first session of the advanced workshop last night. I’m delighted by the mix, and expecting wonderful things from the class. Some are published already, some are just breaking in.

Unlike the Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction Stories class, we are not focusing on one of the basics each week, like characters, plot, or world building. Instead, I am trying to let the class drive itself where it can. My hope is that everyone, by the end of class, has not just been critiqued a couple of times, but has a better sense of their writerly process and how to make it more efficient, more confidence in finishing stuff and getting it sent out, and new ways of moving story from idea to finished draft.

So here is the assignment I gave them, in the hope that it will prove useful for other writers trying to figure out their process:

  • I asked them each to make an account at the Submissions Grinder, even if they already were tracking their stories in another way. I said I would like them to send out at least one submission and track it in the grinder, but if they couldn’t manage that, then I wanted them to identify at least one market that they wanted to send something to. We spent some time looking at my old submissions spreadsheet, since the question came up, after how many rejections do you trunk story? My answer is that you don’t trunk a story unless you would find it embarrassing to be published. I have some stories that were out over a dozen places before finally finding a home.
  • We did an in class writing exercise to make them think about their writing process. I want to them to try varying their process three times over the course of the next week. They can vary their process spatially, by changing the location where they write: outside under a tree or in a coffee shop or at the library or in their closet. Or they can vary it temporally by writing at a different time than they usually do. Or they can vary it according to process: using pen and paper instead of the keyboard, for one, or by writing with outline if they don’t usually use one. Or they can even look at their work and see if there is a pattern they want to vary, such as always writing in past tense.
  • Finally, they were assigned to read this and come in prepared to talk about how the writer creates emotion in the reader. That’s a piece that I personally cannot read without crying, so I think it will prove an interesting discussion, and hopefully provide some guidance for creating depth of emotion in their own work.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

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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Seven Tips To Make Your Workshop Submission Better

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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. Color between the lines this time. Follow the directions and don’t send a piece that’s longer than the guidelines say.
  4. 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.
  5. Pick something interesting. A piece that shows you at your most adventurous and best, a piece that shows you’re willing to take risks.
  6. Play to your strengths. If you do killer dialogue, choose a piece that shows that.
  7. Pay attention to the statement of purpose and say who YOU are, not what you think the readers want to hear.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

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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Writing And Courage

Gray and white linoleum print of a fantasy creature resembling a sea horse
Linoleum print I did in 2008 (?). Meant to use it on Christmas cards, then never got around to it.
To talk about this, I need to talk about the scariest thing that ever happened to me. Bear with me.

In 1999, I was driving on the New Jersey Turnpike. The car behind me tapped my bumper, sending me fishtailing across several lanes, and under a trailer truck, which sheared the roof off the car. I got out of the emergency room with a lot of stitches in my scalp, but otherwise unharmed, and then had to get home to Brooklyn, which was an adventure in and of itself.

Honestly, I don’t remember a lot of it. I recall thinking this was it, and wondering how much dying would hurt, in what seems in retrospect a surprisingly calm moment.

Since then, I’ve had trouble driving. I have panic attacks on the highway and even as a passenger, trucks pulling up alongside send my heart rate up. It took me a long time to realize this was affecting my life. It took me even longer to admit to myself I had PTSD and needed to work on it. It was very weird for me to realize that I couldn’t just think my way out of a panic attack.

So this summer I’ve been driving in when volunteering in the Clarion West classroom. It’s not a bad drive, but it takes me on a highway, and across the 520 bridge, which was way outside my comfort zone at the summer’s beginning. Now it’s a lot more endurable, but still scary, and I don’t know that I’ll ever get to a point where I feel comfortable on the terrifying part of I-5. It wasn’t pleasant when I started, and it’s still not pleasant. But I pushed myself, because I didn’t want fear to make my life smaller.

By the same token, we need to not let fear circumscribe our writing. We need to write about things that obsess and confuse and frighten us to the point of nausea. We need to tell stories about the things that scare us, and what we do when we’re scared. Because this is how we confront and transform the abysmal moments in our lives. We are the laboratories in which our stories brew and bubble, and the ones distilled from our pain will be better than the ones imported from outside sources.

You can write anything in fiction. Go for it. No one knows where your life ends and the fictioneering begins, so use the material life gives you freely, gleefully, fully. Face the themes that terrify you and write your fears out without worrying about who will read them. It may not solve them, it may not make them any less scary, but at least you’re using them. And your stories will be so much the better for it.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

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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