I remember being in middle school and how easy it was to for me to keep my writing organized. I had this blue and white composition notebook which I wrote in every night. Middle school me filled that whole notebook with a story that eventually would evolve into a book I started writing in the beginning of high school.
The more ideas I had made organizing my writing more difficult than it already was. Of course I had journals, but I’d end up only writing a couple pages and forget about the journal and let it collect dust in my drawer. I’d write during passing time in school on sheets of paper which would either end up staying up in my school notebooks or in my pencil case. I could be turning to a new page in my calculus notebook and  then suddenly stumble upon a future chapter of my story. Or, I could be digging around in my backpack for a pencil and instead of my led pencil, I find three folded up pieces of paper of chapter ideas.
I can’t quite say if this disorganization is because I’m forgetful or if this is just one of the perks of being a young writing. If I really wanted to put my disorganization to blame, I could pin the blame on juggling school and writing. The most organized with my writing I have ever been was when I put my ideas in piles of which story they belonged to. My disorganization hasn’t always been an annoyance. The first book that I wrote and self-published was written completely in random notes I’ve written in between classes. But, when you’re working on a chapter for a novel and can’t remember where you placed your notes, that becomes a problem.
The thing is, every writer has their own process. Mine involves writing chapter ideas on loose leaf paper and then losing the paper in my backpack only finding them randomly. Some may use notebooks or journals, binders, folders or even keep ideas written on their phones. I can’t say that there is an ideal way to organize for writers. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I can’t stand in the snack aisle at the store and preach about how Nacho Cheese Doritos are the superior Doritos. It’s the same thing with writing. I can’t march into someone’s office and demand that they write a certain way because it’s the superior way to write.
In school, we were taught what the teachers would call the right way to write. We had to do the writing process in their way and not our own. You feel connected to your writing when you create your own writing process. I certainly do. In the end, it doesn’t so much matter how you organize your writing or what process you have.
I could send email blasts and direct messages in all caps to all my favorite authors saying: “HOW DO YOU DO IT?!” If I did do that however, my writing process wouldn’t necessarily be my process. It would be whoever’s process I used. Not everyone else writes the same either. So, yes, I’m disorganized. But, I somehow, out of some random act of God, create something I am proud of. Maybe disorganization does help after all. But, who am I to say. I don’t stand in aisle at the store preaching about what Doritos to buy.
This was a guest blog post. Interested in blogging here?
Assembling an itinerary for a blog tour? Promoting a book, game, or other creative effort that’s related to fantasy, horror, or science fiction and want to write a guest post for me?
Alas, I cannot pay, but if that does not dissuade you, here’s the guidelines.
Guest posts are publicized on Twitter, several Facebook pages and groups, my newsletter, and in my weekly link round-ups; you are welcome to link to your site, social media, and other related material.
Send a 2-3 sentence description of the proposed piece along with relevant dates (if, for example, you want to time things with a book release) to cat AT kittywumpus.net. If it sounds good, I’ll let you know.
I prefer essays fall into one of the following areas but I’m open to interesting pitches:
Interesting and not much explored areas of writing
Writers or other individuals you have been inspired by
Your favorite kitchen and a recipe to cook in it
A recipe or description of a meal from your upcoming book
Women, PoC, LGBT, or otherwise disadvantaged creators in the history of speculative fiction, ranging from very early figures such as Margaret Cavendish and Mary Wollstonecraft up to the present day.
Women, PoC, LGBT, or other wise disadvantaged creators in the history of gaming, ranging from very early times up to the present day.
F&SF volunteer efforts you work with
Length is 500 words on up, but if you’ve got something stretching beyond 1500 words, you might consider splitting it up into a series.
When submitting the approved piece, please paste the text of the piece into the email. Please include 1-3 images, including a headshot or other representation of you, that can be used with the piece and a 100-150 word bio that includes a pointer to your website and social media presences. (You’re welcome to include other related links.)
Or, if video is more your thing, let me know if you’d like to do a 10-15 minute videochat for my YouTube channel. I’m happy to handle filming and adding subtitles, so if you want a video without that hassle, this is a reasonable way to get one created. ???? Send 2-3 possible topics along with information about what you’re promoting and its timeline.
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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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Guest Post: We Are Not Entertained by Aigner Loren Wilson
There’s this common misconception that the world of editing (in the sense of submitting your story to a magazine or contest) is an absolute puzzle constantly being shifted around by angry and jaded editors. In classes, writing groups, and even among non-writers, I hear it repeated that you have to have this unknowable combination of luck and talent to land a spot in a magazine, and it isn’t worth trying or learning. You got it or you don’t.
But that type of thinking leaves most people without it.
I want to say that in my years as a reader, judge, and developmental editor none of that is true. Especially about editors. We’re not shadowed goblins lying in wait to crush every writers’ dream. The reason we got into this line of work is because we want to hear a good story, a new story. We want to be entertained.
But unfortunately, most of the time, we are not. We are left wondering where’s the story.
And after a few years, I realized that most stories don’t make it because of the same reasons. Time and time again, I open a submission (always reading without knowing the info of the author) and come across the same mistakes or faults in stories that keep a cool or fun idea from making it from a submission to an acceptance. Dear writer, I’m going to tell you these faults so that you can identify them in your own stories and make it out of the slush pile.
Because I do really want to see your stories out there. Even if I never read them, someone will, and they will love them.
One of the common issues I come across are dark openings. A dark opening is when a writer aims to be mysterious but doesn’t give the reader anything to hold on to. Often, the story opens with two characters exchanging a few lines of dialogue while doing some mundane task that is an overarching metaphor for the story. That in itself isn’t bad and can be found in a lot of great stories, but where the stories fail is in how they do this.
In dark openings, characters, along with their dialogue, are usually nondescript to the point where you can’t really tell who is saying what because everyone sounds the same, and they aren’t really having a conversation but are merely stating the story in a heavy-handed way. The correct way in doing these mysterious dialogue driven openings is to use metaphor less like metaphor and more like subtext so that the point comes in without feeling like it’s being fed to the reader. And, of course, all dialogue should be distinctive to the characters, but this is even more so important in an opening.
Not only does it show the reader the characters, but it shows them that you’re an author who knows your story and characters. It builds that very necessary and crucial bridge of trust between the writer and the reader.
Another thing that holds writers back is telling their story to the reader instead of showing their story to the reader. Commonly known as telling vs showing. Based on the stories I’ve read, my theory behind this bit of advice not sinking into writers is that they misunderstand what it means to show and to tell. Writers tend to do a lot of in your face telling masking as showing. For instance, during a fight scene, the reader will get a blow by blow of flailing arms and legs.
But that is not showing.
Showing does more than just show. Showing makes the reader feel. It calls forth the image of the scene or character to the reader’s mind. There are many ways to do this, but the top way is by using descriptive language and sentence structure to control reader emotion and story. Instead of giving a blow by blow of action, give a blow by blow of evocative internal workings. How does your character feel when slicing into their foe or friend or lover? Use the right words in the right order to create magic.
The final issue that many stories have, though there are many more, is that they start too late. For a story of any length, the editor looks for whether or not the writer has introduced world, theme, problem, and character within the first paragraph. But a lot of writers, choose to open their stories with something that they think will grab the attention of the reader or will paint a picture of the setting. But what will tell an editor of place or grab their attention won’t actually cue them in on what is important to this story and to the character.
Openings should introduce world, character, and problem at least on the first page. When it is not introduced, the editor is left wondering where the story is going, instead of wrapped up in its progression.
As you will have noticed, most of these issues happen in a story’s opening. That’s the only space you really have to win a reader or an editor over. And editors can feel or sense whether or not the story they dive into is written by a writer that knows what they are doing or by a writer who is just phoning it in because they don’t think they have to try.
If you take issue with this article and feel as though I am lying to you, then I leave you with this: it is my firm belief that every writer should become a slush reader, so that they may see the wide array of mistakes laden in stories. It will not only help you realize your own faults, but it will also show you that I am right.
BIO: Aigner Loren Wilson is a SFWA, HWA, and Codex writer whose stories and articles have appeared in Terraform, Rue Morgue, Arsenika, and more. She writes or edits for Strange Horizons, Nightlight: A Horror Podcast, NYC Midnight, and other outlets. To keep up to date on where she is publishing and other news, sign up for her newsletter, follow her on Instagram, or follow her blog.
Guest Post from Luna Linsdsey: Putting the Mind Sciences in Science Fiction
Google’s predictive powers cause this question to answer itself.Hard science fiction tells stories based on the hardest of hard sciences, particularly on the engineering and technological application of these sciences. If a story doesn’t have space ships, terraforming, anti-grav, robots, or semi-accurate descriptions of planetary orbits and atmospheres, it cannot join the elite ranks of hard SF.
Any story which dips overly much into issues of society, culture, or what it means to be human, is often tagged as soft science fiction. Even cyberpunk, a high-tech genre, is usually considered soft, because of its thematic commentary on the fallen state of mankind.
The implication is that hard SF is somehow “better”, just as the hard sciences are “better”. Physics is a hard science. Psychology is not. Psychology is assumed to be flimsy, weak, inaccurate, and easy. “Soft.” Therefore, SF that deals with it is equally easy.
This division seems a little unfair, because to me the “soft” sciences are arguably far more complex than hard sciences. Physics and chemistry picked up the low-hanging fruit of empirical discovery, those aspects of our universe that could easily be discovered by looking through a microscope, telescope, or mass spectrometer. But understanding the interplay of synaptic pathways? That takes advanced tools like fMRIs and scanning electron microscopes, which have only recently been invented.
Your brain is looking very, very closely at a brain.]
All Freud and Jung had in 1900 was instinct and anecdote. So their research consisted of conjecture. Conjecture which has been built upon and advanced greatly since their time.
Access to technology is now blurring the line between soft and hard sciences. Soft SF concepts that used to require a certain amount of hand-waving can now be written about with a foundation in actual research.
It should follow that the line between soft and hard SF should also blur. And in many ways, this process has already occurred.
I remember reading my father’s shelf of classic authors, like Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke (but also soft science-fictionist Bradbury). My young mind didn’t care that all the characters were cardboard cutouts, barely-human actors there only to convey the ideas. Because for me, the ideas were most important.
But mere ideas, as cool as they are, flicker over the surface of our minds, the frontal lobe of the neocortex. They fail to reach into the occluded recesses of emotion and subconscious. They fail to spark our deeper neurological wiring.
Some golden era stories did dabble in psychology, but they did so at a clinical distance. For example, the classic novel Foundation depicted a science called “psychohistory” ““ only at arm’s length. Psychohistory dispassionately crunched numbers to predict how people in masses move inevitably towards some end. But these stories weren’t really about the people themselves.
As I grew up, and as SF grew up, readers began to demand real characters. They wanted to see how the technology affected human beings. There was a realization that without people, science was meaningless, and the outer space we sought to explore would simply be an empty, darkened void.
Mainstream fiction has always focused on an exploration of humanity. The golden age of SF set itself apart as a genre by instead exploring ideas about the future. Since then, it has come back around to become a reflection of ourselves via an exploration of the future. The future has become ancillary to the purpose of SF.
A story that doesn’t mean something beyond the idea is not likely to be published. It’s not enough anymore to fire off dopamine in a reader’s neocortex. A story that doesn’t also evoke some emotion or spark some unknown “thing” in the hidden depths of our hearts is unlikely to be noticed.
Psychology and neuroscience has grown up, too. But we’ve never needed it to. Psychology is often discounted as “squishy,” but that’s because the mind itself is squishy. Many of Carl Jung’s insights 100 years ago still apply today. Modern science is simply discovering how the underlying cells and chemicals work to create the behaviors and mental dynamics he and his contemporaries observed.
And we’re discovering more parts of the mind than even Jung’s two-part consciousness vs. unconsciousness model suggested. An engineer or astrophysicist might prefer the simple, predictable mechanics of a one-brain, one-mind model, (hard science!), but to accept that would be in denial of the facts.
Many may be tempted to laugh at the hand-wavy woo of Jung’s “collective unconscious.” But is it really so silly now that we’re learning about how culture spreads and how about “memes” may be thought of as living creatures that reside in our minds and self-replicate to everyone who comes into contact with them?
Getting a bit meta here (because a mind exploring the mind is intrinsically meta), science fiction has always unconsciously acknowledged psychological principles. By way of example, dreams are a common fictional vehicle to represent thematic elements of a character’s past. This is classic Jungian psychology, and as authors and artists, we know the power of symbolic metaphor firsthand.
Yet how often do we address these ideas head-on, with self-awareness, making the reader aware of the processes of her own brain as she’s reading? Wouldn’t such stories act fully in the spirit of science fiction, which has always asked the reader to ponder her place in the universe, to ponder her own relationship to the ideas of the story?
It’s time to consciously embrace the mind sciences in science fiction. It’s our responsibility, because as a society, we will soon begin to feel the impact in our own lives. Science fiction needs to step up and fill its predictive role, both warning us and giving us hope. Warning us of the dangers of advancement, while simultaneously inspiring future engineers in how to apply the discoveries we’re making right now.
Because what could be more disruptive (both constructively and destructively) than a comprehensive understanding of the human mind? I’m not just talking about obvious technologies, like neural implants, but also developments in how we practice the art of existing in fully understood self-awareness. How might we structure society to account for a better understanding of what nature has already given us?
Moreover, in past-SF, we’ve treated the obvious tech (like neural implants) like toaster oven technology (nifty conveniences) ignoring the probable fact that these technologies will change us at our innermost core. Just as social media has transformed how we relate to one another, “upgrading” ourselves will transform what it means to be human.
And though these scenarios are difficult to imagine (because how else can we relate to our fiction except through our current understanding of humanity?), it’s our responsibility to close our eyes and imagine it. We need to grapple with these disruptions via fiction before the changes come.
Here are just a few questions we ought to explore:
As we discover more neurotypes and cease to pathologize them, how will society change?
What if we could all see a live map (fMRI-style) of our minds on our smartphones?
Forget flying cars ““ how would the world be different if we could end the cycle of abuse, both in homes and in our public institutions? And how can we end those cycles of abuse? (Yes, this is science fiction!)
How can we explore newly discovered aspects of the human brain by telling stories of alien beings that take those aspects to extremes?
As we gain a better understanding of psycho-social manipulation, can we develop technologies (in the form of memes perhaps) that counter it?
Discoveries now tell us that the digestive tract literally is a mind of its own, and that the nerves throughout our bodies may play a much larger role in memory and thinking processes than previously thought. My words in this post may have triggered neurons in your left elbow. This point alone is worth a hundred science fiction stories.
And if that’s not hard SF, I’m not sure what really is.
Bio: Luna Lindsey lives in Bellevue, WA. Her first story (about a hippopotamus) crawled out of her head at age 4. After running out of things to say about hippopotami, she switched to sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. She also became an accidental expert on mind control, autism, computers, and faeries. Her stories have appeared in The Journal of Unlikely Entomology, Penumbra eMag, and Crossed Genres. She tweets like a bird @lunalindsey, intermittently blogs at www.lunalindsey.com, and publishes entire novels and nonfiction tomes at http://amazon.com/author/lunalindsey. Her novel, Emerald City Dreamer, is about faeries in Seattle and the women who hunt them.
#sfwapro
I remember being in middle school and how easy it was to for me to keep my writing organized. I had this blue and white composition notebook which I wrote in every night. Middle school me filled that whole notebook with a story that eventually would evolve into a book I started writing in the beginning of high school.
![Your brain is looking very, very closely at a brain.]](http://www.kittywumpus.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/neuron-300x188.jpg)