The Fine Line Between Acceptance and Rejection

Years ago, I  read the view of an editor from a major journal who estimated that the vast majority of submissions are terrible. My experience leads me to a different conclusion.

Most journals are inundated with submissions and can only publish a fraction of what they receive, maybe 1/100. Many journals publish primarily work by established writers solicited by the editors, so the fraction of work coming in via the slush pile is even smaller, maybe 1/500. So does that mean the other 499 are terrible? Or even bad? Many of those are probably pretty good, but the editors did not rank them to be the best out of the stack of 500 they were considering.

When I began submitting, all my work earned form rejections. Then, as my writing got better, I slowly started getting some acceptances. Now I'm at a point where I still get more rejections than acceptances, but about as often as not I get personal rejections that say things like "this made our short list" or "our editors spent significant time discussing this essay, but . . ." or there's the old classic: "please consider us in the future." I take those personalized rejections as a very good sign that I'm on the right track with my writing. It means what I'm doing is good, very good even, but just not the 1/100 or 1/500 they want to publish in the next issue.

I recently served as a guest editor for Driftwood Press, a journal in its second year. They published a story of mine earlier this year and asked me to help with editorial duties this summer, going through the slush pile and picking a few submissions for consideration.

I was assigned fifty short stories, which broke down roughly like this:
1 was great. I voted yes, it should be highly considered for publication.
5 - 10 were in the maybe pile, good but not quite right for the journal's aesthetics or maybe matching another editor's tastes more than mine, so definitely worth having someone else offer a second opinion.
1 or 2 stories were withdrawn by their authors.
2 or 3 didn't meet submission guidelines.
20 - 30 featured some good writing but had some problem or other: they needed additional editing or relied on clichéd plot turns that experienced writers recognize and beginning writers don't. Basically, these stories were promising and with more work and experience, these writers will produce very good material, but these stories just aren't there yet.
Only 5 - 10 were bad, like full-of-typos-bad.

So here's my takeaway from this experience on the other side of the slush pile: there is a lot of good work out there. Being the one standout in the pile is hard. It means being absolutely polished with more interesting characters and plot elements and more resonant metaphors and sophisticated language use than all the surrounding pieces. You  have to hit every note just right to be that one standout.

And even then, you never know. It could be the one story I selected will wind up rejected by the next editor who reads it. This journal gets hundreds of submissions but only publishes four to eight stories per issue (and again, some journals have worse odds than that). So it could happen that the next issue is published, and none of the fifty stories assigned to me are included. If that's the case, I hope the many good writers I read understand the rejection doesn't mean their stories were bad. A lot of them were good, but the odds are long. To them, I say, keep submitting. Keep writing. And please consider us again in the future!

Learning Where You Fall on the Continuum

When I first began submitting my writing for publication, I had no concept of how good I was (or wasn't). I figured I might as well send that short story to The New Yorker because, hey, maybe I'm brilliant and will be discovered at age twenty-three. Then on to a bestselling novel!

I'm sure you can imagine what happened. I did not publish those early stories in The New Yorker or The Paris Review or anywhere else. I did work to learn what could make me better, however. I went to grad school and wrote three novels and a handful of short stories over the next few years.

Most of the stories never got very good (I'm pretty sure at this point I'm just not much of a short story writer). The first novel was a great learning experience, but by the time I finished it as my MA thesis, I knew it was simply that: a learning experience rather than something worth publishing. The second novel I thought was better than the first, and I've gone back and forth on it over the past seven years. Sometimes I think it's worth publishing, sometimes not. I spend months revising it again and then abandon it for years. That's the novel I revisited this summer and have decided to finally submit to small press contests.

I know that novel is not going to take the publishing world by storm. I know it's not going to attract an agent and a six-figure book deal at a major New York press. But I still think it's pretty good. I think other people would enjoy reading it. I can imagine a small press putting it out into the world. So I've submitted it to one contest and intend to try a few others over the next year or so.

My third novel is a departure from what I did before. My first two were written in grad school and were "literary" in the sense that they are not high-stakes, plot-driven stories. They are small, focused on characters, and hopefully sensitive to language and artfully written (especially with my latest revision). The other one is a fantasy story for kids. It's the book I had in the back of my mind ever since I was a kid reading that kind of book. My goal with it is to create something that I would have loved when I was ten.

Like my second novel, I've gone back and forth with the third. After the first draft, I abandoned it for years, figuring I don't know enough about the market or whatever to break into the world of children's books. I continued to focus on literary journals (and shifted my focus to nonfiction), which felt safer and more familiar to me. During that time, I managed to get published. And that third novel has mostly sat on my computer, remaining a rough draft.

But last year, I revisited it in the summer. I revised about half before getting busy with my day job as a university instructor. But I want to finish that revision (and additional revisions after that). I want to try to get this book into the world.

Here's what I know about myself as a writer and where I fall on the continuum of writers: I am decent enough to get some work published in some respectable (if not absolute top tier) journals. I am not about to win the Pulitzer or have something in The New Yorker. But I'm a better writer today than I was fifteen years ago when just starting out. I'm a better writer today than eight years ago when completing my MFA. And while I have high hopes for my second novel and the small press route, I have higher hopes that my third novel (once it's revised and polished) could break into the mainstream world of publishing.

It's sometimes tough to be honest with yourself about how good you really are. We writers tend to have both inflated egos and low self esteem. We think we're brilliant and terrible at alternate moments. But honest assessment is important.

Book Contests

Last week, I saw a Tweet promoting the Brighthorse Books Prizes with a submission deadline of Sunday (yesterday). I was particularly interested in this contest for a few reasons:

1. The deadline worked out.
2. The small press is young.
3. The press has three contests: one for poetry, one for short fiction, and one for novels. 

1. The deadline. As mentioned in my last post, I had failed to meet the earlier summer deadline I'd set for myself with this revision. That happens to me often. Summer after summer, I set large writing goals and wind up falling behind my schedule. But having this new goal worked to motivate me. I completed the revision on Friday, went back through for a final proofread, and submitted my manuscript to the contest Sunday afternoon

2. A young press. I imagine fewer people submit to a contest that is not well known with a long history. A famous press with a long-established contest surely gets hundreds or even thousands of entries each year. But with a press only in its second year, some writers will not have heard or it or will be hesitant. Of course, there is good reason to be hesitant. You don't want to fall for a scam and throw away money on entry fees or to think you're getting your book published by a reputable place only to discover it's a vanity press. From what I can tell from some very limited research, this place seems above board. So while it is small and young, I still feel like I would be happy having my book published with them. Bottom line: better odds with fewer submissions.

3. Multiple contests. Finally, the three separate contests also may increase my odds of winning. Many such contests have a a prize for short stories but not for novels. Or they have a single fiction prize for any book-length works of fiction, including combinations of short stories, novellas, and novels. When those categories are divided up, there are likely fewer submissions in each one.

Also, my impression is that there are fewer contests for novels than for short stories. I think this may be because novels are still seen as the realm of big presses. Short story collections are tough to sell, so small presses have taken up the charge of helping to get those out into the world. Novels can still fight for themselves. But what about smaller, literary novels? Those that won't find a home at a big New York publishing house? Those still need the world of small presses. Certainly there are many small presses publishing those novels, but this type of contest is a great entry into the small press world and from what I've seen, such novel contests are still rarer than short story contests.

I feel good about having submitted my novel. I have no idea what the odds are of winning. What I do know, however, is that people do win such contests. I have friends in my age group who have won contests like this before. It really is a great way to get a book out into the world when it would be hard to find a match with a publisher through the slush pile or when the literary size and scope of the book would likely not be big enough to attract an agent. I still assume the odds are against me. Even if this contest has fewer submissions than some of the big ones, that may mean that they get a hundred submissions instead of a thousand, which would mean only one percent win.

But whatever happens next with this particular contest, I feel good about my book as it currently stands. And the next time I read about a contest or a small press looking for submissions, I'm ready to submit.

Representing Reality Versus Interesting Plot

I've been working on my novella for the past week, and I've made some decent progress (not quite up to my goal, but still I've got some new pages), but I'm struggling with how to motivate my characters' actions. I was reading a writing book recently that commented on how we can always figure out what a character would do in a situation by imagining ourselves in that situation, but I think that's not very good advice. Most of the time, what I would do in a situation would be the most reasonable thing, which is probably not at all interesting.

So I've been working on a scene where two characters are having an argument, and this is really giving me trouble because I don't really know how people have arguments in real life. If I try to imagine what I would do in the situation, I come up with my characters sitting down together and reasonably hashing out their differences so they understand where each other is coming from and see how they misunderstood one another, and then they make up. But that's not interesting for a story. There's no drama there, no tension. But I can't really see why anybody would yell and scream and throw things or whatever. That's ridiculous behavior. There's no way for that to come across as realistic, at least not to me. I don't think I've ever yelled at another person in real life.

But in order to move a story forward in an interesting way, in order to increase the tension, there needs to be conflict. But conflict seems to me to usually be unrealistic. Most of life is not made up of conflict. But most of life is also boring and not worth writing a story about. But if I increase the conflict, the whole thing starts to feel contrived or sentimental, like I'm stretching to come up with something because that thing is interesting rather than because it organically evolves from the situation and the characters. But if I play down the conflict to a more realistic level, the story feels boring or frigid. There must be a very fine balance, but I struggle to find it.

Ultimately, what I want to do with my fiction is to say something about the world, to represent how things actually are. But I also want to write something that's interesting to read. And sometimes those two goals seem to be mutually exclusive.

Goal

I finished up my semester last week, and I have two weeks until I have to specifically do anything. At some point in that time, I need to plan for my summer classes, but basically I'm on vacation time, which means I have ample opportunity to get some serious progress done on a writing project or projects. As it happens, the piece that is at the forefront of my mind (which I wrote about last time) seems like the ideal piece to devote about two weeks to.

I think I might actually have a novella on my hands rather than just a short story. I wrote a rough draft last year that was in the ten page range. Then as I reworked it, it expanded, and I didn't finish a second draft because I realized the whole structure and approach needed reworking. So I've been outlining and structuring the whole thing, and I think it's going to be much longer than the initial short story. So I'm close to ready to begin writing what could be considered the third draft of the story or the first draft of the novella.

I've never written a novella before, so I don't know exactly how long it might take, but when I have so much time available to write, I should be able to get a significant amount done each day. The fastest pace I ever achieved was a couple years ago when I wrote a rough draft of a kids book in about three weeks. That was about 60,000 words, which is in the range of a novel rather than a novella. I'm guessing that this novella I'm writing now will be maybe in the 20,000 word range. So if I could write 60,000 words in three weeks, I should be able to write 20,000 in two weeks. That's less than 2,000 words a day, and 2,000 words a day isn't a crazy ambitious goal; I've often kept up that pace. And if I have a solid outline where I know where I'm going and how I want to proceed from sequence to sequence, I think the writing should flow as easily as a rough draft ever tends to flow.

So we'll see how it goes. I feel good about it. I think I might actually manage to produce something solid by the time I go out of town in two weeks.

Structure

I've been working on a story recently and really wrestling with how to put the thing together. I wrote the rough draft nearly a year ago, and I've been playing with a revision for months, but I keep hitting a wall in my progress. The initial inspiration for the story was just a character and a situation, which I let play out in front of me. Then as I rewrote, I figured out more back story, and now I have a lot more material that I want to include, and I think the newer version will be much more interesting and complex than the rough draft where I was just figuring out basic elements of the story. But my current trouble is that I'm not sure how to put all the material into a new draft.

I started rewriting where I began at the same point as last time, just before the big event that sets the present story in action, but as I wrote and wrote, it became obvious that this structure results in a couple of paragraphs followed by pages of flashback before eventually returning to the present story, a structure that doesn't typically work well. Flashbacks are best kept to a minimum.

I could structure the story in the absolute most straightforward way, where I begin with the very first element and then play it out in order. But this would mean starting with the character as a child and then going through years of events until I reach the big scene that was the original inspiration for the story, which also feels like a mistake since it would take pages and pages before reaching the hook, the exciting event that really sets the action in progress.

Another approach would be to start with the hook and then insert mini-flashbacks throughout the whole story, interweaving memories into the present action. But this seems like a set up for a schizophrenic story that fails to ever be quite one thing or another.

Part of the problem is that any of these structures CAN work. Writers have done them well before and will continue to do them well in the future. But they all have drawbacks and weaknesses. And sometimes the pitfalls appear so large that there seems to be almost nowhere safe to step.

So I've been wracking my brain, trying to remember what I learned in grad school about how to find an appropriate structure for a work of fiction, and the sad truth is that I don't think this issue was covered very well. Part of the problem is that the teacher I had for the class that should have covered this material was simply not a good teacher. Instead of learning about structure in the fiction class, I learned about structure in the screenwriting class, and that's now what I'm falling back on.

One major structural point in the screenwriting class was the inciting incident, the action that sets the plot moving, which, in a screenplay with a standard three act structure, comes in the first act, typically fifteen to twenty minutes into the film, after the world of the film has been established. Before the inciting incident occurs, the audience needs to understand the world and who the major character is, so when the inciting incident occurs and the character makes a choice about what is going to happen, we understand what is at stake. I'm not sure a short story necessarily has the exact same structure as a screenplay and whether I can plot out my story in the same exact fashion, but I think this concept of the inciting incident is probably useful to keep in mind.

So the question I've been asking myself is whether the hook, the event I began with as the original idea for the story, is the inciting incident or something else. I tried something to help me sort through the material: I wrote down each separate event, which could be an entire scene or simply a memory that is represented in a single sentence, and I wrote down each one on a note card. Currently, I have forty-two cards. I looked at these events and tried to determine which one has the most potential to be an inciting incident, which one results in the character making a choice that affects his life and sends him down a new path. And I've tentatively concluded that the original spark for the story is actually more of a plot point later. It's a complication from the second act (if I'm thinking of a three act screenplay structure), and the inciting incident is something that occurs much earlier. So what I need to do is not necessarily begin at the very beginning, but begin shortly before the true inciting incident, the action that occurs that sets my protagonist on his path that leads him to where he is when the big event occurs, setting up the final action down the line.

Anyway, I'm still struggling with it. I'm also trying to figure out whether I have a short story on my hands or a novella, so I'll probably write another post here soon where I hash out my ideas on length as I keep working on this.

Living Life

I've been thinking again about the old issue of writers needing something to write about. A friend and fellow writer has touched on this issue recently in her blog and sparked my thinking. She thinks that it's important for writers to live full lives rather than hole up and live in front of the computer screen. This is certainly an issue I've thought about over the years, and it's one I struggle with. The reason I struggle with it is because I fear that if she is right, then I may be doomed to never be a great writer because I'm not a very good liver (I'm a better kidney, ba-dum-bum).

I have a mind that won't quit spinning. I think through various outcomes for situations. I plan out possibilities and analyze things to no end. I have a strong desire to understand the world around me, and my inclination is to believe that if I ponder things enough, I'll improve my understanding. This can, of course, be great for a writer since I can come up with various possibilities for how a story might unfold and what characters might do and what it all means. But this tendency certainly has a downside. I'm not good with a lot of basic interaction. Chitchat is something I struggle with because my mind runs through various possibilities or tries to interpret what somebody is REALLY saying so I can respond appropriately, and by the time I think of something to say, along the lines of "yes, you're right; it was hot today," the appropriate time for a response has passed and the person I'm chatting with has wandered away or the conversation among a group has moved on and I'm still standing quietly in the back. Another facet of my social skills is that I don't pick up on various social clues. I take things literally and misunderstand what somebody is asking or saying. Anyway, the end result is that I don't make friends easily, and most of my social life consists of either communicating via internet with friends I knew from years ago or with people who are related to me by blood or marriage.

When it comes down to what most people think of as "having a life," I don't have one. I go to work. I come home and work. It's not unusual for me to go days at a time without leaving the house because if I'm not going to work, I really have no place to go. I don't understand how or where people meet other people and make new friends. It was a tough thing to do back when I was in school and was among a group of people of similar ages and interests, but now that I'm out in the adult world, it strikes me as a nearly impossible task.

I was in another city this weekend for a job interview, and while I was there I managed to get together with one of my old college roommates, one of my best friends from my early twenties. We have managed to keep in touch a bit over the years, but we tried to figure out when we last saw each other in person and, as far as we could recall, it was seven years ago. So we asked about various issues like what had changed in our lives in that time. He asked me if there were any major developments he'd missed, and I had to tell him that there really weren't as far as my personal life went. Since I last saw him I earned two masters degrees and became a teacher. I put on a bunch of weight and lost it again. I wrote a lot. Much has changed, but when he asked about my social life, there was not much to report. He asked if I missed that, and I had to say that I didn't really miss it. I have had so little experience with that kind of thing that I don't know what I'm missing.

(Also, this weekend of going through an extensive interview process--including a teaching demonstration and interviews with a search committee as well as several campus deans, presidents, and vice presidents--was one of the most stressful things I've ever done. I felt sick with nerves for much of the past couple of weeks, and what it most reminded me of was my dating experience years ago. I've really only had one girlfriend. We dated for about two months right at the end of my senior year of college. And the major thing I remember about that experience was the constant anxiety I felt. I was stressed and nervous and sick to my stomach and just generally pretty miserable. When I think back on it today, I have trouble figuring out why I put up with it. There are some pleasant memories as well I have of that girl. We had some good times, I'm sure. But whatever good times we had are completely overshadowed by my memories of anxiety and stress. If I had it to do over again, I don't think I would repeat that experience. And when I sometimes envy my coupled friends and family, I remember how unpleasant my attempt at such a coupling was and recognize that a life like that just doesn't seem to be a fit for me.)

What I don't understand is what is at the heart of good stories. Stories are about conflict, about drama, about interactions between people, about relationships. And those are things I don't have a great understanding of. Sometimes I hope that will change in my life. I see people around me who are very social or who have close bonds with romantic partners, and I have some envy for those individuals. My siblings are all married, and those relationships seem to bring them a lot of happiness. But I don't foresee anything like that in my life. I think somehow when I was a kid or a teenager or whenever, I missed out on learning some of the basic things about life that most people just pick up on their own. Or maybe I lack some instinct that others have about how to interact with others. So if I lack that understanding, will I ever be able to write stories that people respond to? Or will my pieces always seem odd, the characters unnatural and robotic?

My hope is that through reading widely I can further my understanding of human life, that I will vicariously experience the world. I think that's one of the great joys of reading. But is that enough? Can one learn what one needs to know to be a writer solely through holing up with books? Or am I doomed to be somebody who understands words and sentences and paragraphs and structural elements, who can evaluate a story and write a nice facsimile of life, but, lacking that spark that others have that makes life life, will never be able to produce that spark in my own writing?

Writing Sample II

I sent off my fellowship application for the Wisconsin fellowship today. It's amazing how long it takes to put together a packet like that. I wanted to make sure my writing sample was as strong as possible, obviously, so I spent many hours over the past couple of weeks working on it. I got some feedback from trusted early readers to help me decide which sample to use. I was leaning toward the current beginning of my novel, which I feel is some of the strongest writing I've ever done, but I knew that I was way too close to it to evaluate it properly, so a couple of other people looked it over and, sure enough, agreed with me that the new beginning to the novel is in good shape. I got that feedback several days ago, but I still wanted to go over the material a couple more times. Plus, I wanted to include the second chapter as well, which still needed a bit of tweaking.

So I continued editing and polishing the sample. Yesterday I typed changes into the second chapter off of a marked up hard copy and then read over the entire thing today. Just this week I lectured my classes on the importance of polishing their work before turning it in, doing that final read through (preferably aloud and preferably off a hard copy instead of just on the computer) before declaring their work complete. So I did that today, and sure enough found a bunch more little things I wanted to tweak: a phrase here, a preposition there. I read the whole piece out loud, marked with my trusty red pen, typed up those final changes and then printed everything out. I've probably spent twenty-some hours on this writing sample in the past couple weeks. But I got it in the mail today, and I feel really good about it.

As I did the final read-through today, I couldn't help feeling that my work is at a great place. I've grown so much in the past few years that I think I'm either reaching or on the edge of reaching a new level. If I keep producing work at the quality that I'm currently producing, then I think it's really only a matter of time before I break into some significant journals with some stories and maybe even wind up finding a place (a small press or contest perhaps) for my novel in the next few years. Or if not this novel, then maybe the next one.

It's nice to be at a point where I feel genuinely positive about what I'm doing and confident that I am actually moving forward and not merely spinning my wheels or deluding myself.

Writing Sample

Lately, I've been working on multiple projects at the same time, or rather I'm going back and forth between projects. I've got a story I'm working on that I started last summer. I wrote the rough draft and then have been tossing it about in my head and jotting down notes on where I want to go with it for months. Now I'm writing the next draft of it. Then I'm also in the process of revising my MFA novel again. That's a similar situation. I wrote it years ago, of course. I defended it as my thesis, continued to revise for months afterward, thought I was done, did more revision, really thought I was done, started into the query process, thought maybe I wasn't done, and so on and so forth. I've been jotting down additional notes and planning out a revised structure for the novel for a while now and slowly sitting down to rewrite. I'm tackling the opening of the book first because that's where the most substantial changes are coming in. Some of the new beginning is coming from previous drafts and simply being shifted from later in the book to earlier, but some of it is brand new. So, anyway, I had been working on the novel for a while and then felt more like tackling the story, and I worked on that for several days, but then I felt obligated to work on the novel again.

Obligated is not the right word there. It's not that I feel like I should work on the novel and it's a hassle or something like that. I want to work on the novel. But at the moment I'm thinking about a fellowship I'm going to apply for. I have to get my application packet in this month, and, of course, a writing sample is the major component of the application. And I'm stuck on what to include as my writing sample. If I land the fellowship, this novel is the primary project I want to work on during the fellowship year, so I think it would make sense to include an excerpt from it as my writing sample. Yet which part should I excerpt? The obvious answer is the beginning, but that's the section of the book that is in the most disarray right now because I'm completely reworking it. But if I send a later section, that might indicate to those evaluating the applications that I don't feel confident in the beginning of my book. I've read several places that when querying agents and such and including sample pages, one should include the opening of the book rather than a section from the middle for that very reason. However, applying for a fellowship is not the same as querying an agent; the assumption here is that I have a project that I will continue to work on, not that I have a finished manuscript ready for publication.

Another option is to forget about including an excerpt from the novel as my writing sample and just use a short story (the application doesn't indicate that the writing sample has to be from the project I would be working on). That would show what my writing is like as well as be a complete piece. That might be to my advantage because it's often difficult to judge a part of something by itself. I used to bring in chapters of my novel to workshops in grad school, and a good deal of the time it seemed like my peers didn't know how to comment on it because they had no idea how this one section fit in with the larger story or really what that larger story was. Sometimes when I read the fiction published in the New Yorker I have that problem. They publish short stories, but they also publish excerpts from forthcoming novels, but they don't clearly identify which a given piece is, and sometimes I'll read it and then feel a bit baffled because it was well written but doesn't feel complete at all; then, later I discover that it was the first chapter that wasn't supposed to work on its own. So, for a fellowship application, would it be wise to try to entice them with a slice of something larger or to give them something complete so they can get a better sense of my ability to not just write a nice sequence but to write an entire story?

Anyway, what I've been doing the past few days is working on the beginning section. I figure that if that comes together really well and I feel confident in it, then that would be the best thing to send. But I only have a couple of weeks before I need to send the application off, which is not much time to get a new piece of writing into polished form. So in the likelihood that the opening isn't ready, I have to decide what else to send. I'm leaning toward an excerpt from the novel that works on its own as a story. But that leads to one more question. Do I refer to it as a novel excerpt or as a story? If sending a novel excerpt, I can include up to thirty pages, which would be about two chapters. If sending a story, I can only include one story. I think maybe I'd be better off sending one story by itself (again, that way there are no issues of trying to figure out how the excerpt works in terms of the larger piece), but that means I'd only be using half the amount of space available to represent myself. Would they look down on my application if they only get fifteen pages instead of thirty? Or do they really know after two pages whether they like the writing?

I'm probably over thinking this and would be better off just picking a piece I think is good and representative of my abilities and sending off the application already.

Saying Something

Once again, I'm contemplating the purpose of writing fiction. I think fiction should primarily entertain. I don't remember which book it was (Stein On Writing by Sol Stein or one of John Gardner's books?) that made the observation that reading a piece of fiction should provide an experience more interesting than not reading it. Or something like that. And I agree. I think there's nothing wrong with simply entertaining. In fact, if a book isn't entertaining, then no matter how much it plays with form or touches on important subjects, it fails. For me, one of the great examples of this problem is Toni Morrison. Of course she's a best-selling writer and a Nobel laureate, and Beloved was voted by a group of publishing professionals to be the greatest American novel of the end of the twentieth century/beginning of the twenty-first. I have read two or three Morrison novels, and although I can analyze them for a literature course or admire the innovative way she tells a story, I simply don't enjoy reading her work. It's an entirely intellectual exercise for me with no emotional connection; the work doesn't resonate and excite me the way reading Hemingway or Roth or Salinger or Carver or so many others does. Of course, this is where the largely subjective nature of the whole thing comes in, and I recognize that regarding Morrison, my opinion is in the minority.

Anyway. The first objective is to engage, to entertain, to provide a dream that is superior to sitting around not reading. But that isn't necessarily enough, unless one is writing genre fiction. Simply being entertaining is fine for a mystery or an adventure story, and even in those cases, I think the best works have some additional resonance, some thematic elements that raise them above merely being a diverting way to spend several hours in another world. For example, The Shining is about the effects of alcoholism and abuse on a family; The Silence of the Lambs is largely about feminist ideals. But if one is writing something that is realistic, that isn't driven by high conflict or enormous events, if one is dealing with the small, the mundane, then I think by necessity the work must offer more than the experience of reading; it must have a lasting impact, leave the reader contemplating ideas. Right?

Here's part of my thinking. I wrote a story years ago about a lonely man who encounters a girl in a coffee shop and the experience affects his life; I brought it in to a grad school workshop, and my professor was able to succinctly express why it wasn't a great story: "Salinger did it first and did it better." Within the past year or so I received a rejection from a literary journal for a story about a young man contemplating having an affair; the rejection itself was a personal note rather than a form rejection slip. The editors informed me that although they wouldn't be publishing the story, they liked my writing and would happily consider more work from me. The problem with the piece I submitted is that it didn't "contribute anything new to a familiar situation." And, like my professor, these editors were exactly right. My story was well written, but it's nothing unique.

I'm not especially interested in experimenting with form and doing anything wildly different. So how do I make my work significant? How do I add something worth paying attention to? If offered a choice between my story and Salinger's, I would recommend that a reader pass over mine in favor of the master's. I'm also not interested in writing plot-driven genre fiction. So, if my work isn't gripping because of the high tension and it isn't reinventing what a story does, why should a reader bother with it? I think the answer might lie in having something worth writing about, some observations about the world that make a reader feel like perhaps they've experienced what it's like to be somebody else or to reconsider experience from another perspective. I think I have to have some sort of intellectual angle or theme that elevates my fiction.

And that is the challenge.

I've recently been working on a short story that I began last summer. When I started it, I had no idea what it was "about." I just had an image of a character in my head and then something happened, and then something else happened; another character came into the scene, and eventually I had a rough draft. I've reconsidered and reevaluated and reconfigured the plot and characters, and I'm at the point now of rewriting the story so that it will likely have little resemblance to the initial version I wrote a few months ago. But the issue I'm struggling with is this: what the hell is the thing is about? I think I've got some interesting plot details and some reasonably engaging characters, but I'm still not sure that the story has anything to say. I have some rough themes that the story touches on--death, loneliness, attempting to make connections with others, the unceasing progress of life--but I'm not sure that I'm actually saying anything about anything. Touching on a theme is not the same as actually having a position. Is it? I remember Stephen King commenting in his On Writing that theme is overrated and tends to come on its own without the writer having to stress over it too much. I suspect he's right, but he also had the advantage of writing plot-driven high tension pieces where theme can elevate the piece but isn't necessarily required to give it its purpose.

So what I wonder, what I've been wondering about more and more for the past year or two, is whether I have anything worth saying to the world. Maybe the best I can hope for is that I'll write stories that others before me have written better. Maybe I'll have one decent story that's basically a Salinger ripoff and another that is a pale version of a Carver story. Is that enough? Can one ever truly hope to add anything new? Is that a completely unrealistic goal that is best abandoned sooner rather than later? I used to shake my head at fellow students who talked about being original because I long felt it was an unattainable objective. I also felt, and still do, that having the goal of making a difference, of changing the world or changing people's minds through one's art is ludicrous to the point of nearly being delusional. Yet somehow, despite knowing that for a long time, I'm still struck by the difficulty of facing that reality. If I truly accept that I can't contribute anything new, then what am I actually trying to do? Is it enough to do something old and do it well? I hope so, but I don't know.

Rejection

I got another rejection today. I know that rejections are an inevitable part of being an aspiring writer. There are many reasons a piece can be rejected, and it's a bit foolish to take them too personally. There's no way around them, and the old notion that those who succeed are those who don't give up is certainly true. However, that doesn't mean that it isn't frustrating when work is rejected.

I'm willing to admit that not everything I've written is amazing. In fact, most of what I've written is not that good. Part of the learning process is improving and being able to look back somewhat more objectively on past work and see where it is flawed. I think that despite writing seriously for the past several years, I have up to now produced only a small handful of work that is good and hundreds of pages of work that isn't especially good. But that small handful of good work is genuinely good. I swear it is. So it's frustrating when I continue to send it out into the world in the hopes that some editor out there will agree with me that it's good and have it keep boomeranging back.

Sure, it's nice to get the handwritten notes or personal e-mails telling me that, while my writing is good, this piece wasn't a match for that journal. Those notes buoy my spirits. But come on already, world. Please, please, please, with sugar on top, can I get one of my stories accepted?

Part of the struggle, I think, comes from the pure subjectivity of literary writing. Unlike genres, which have certain conventions, literary stories can be about pretty much anything and have almost anything happen or not. Characters might grow and change or they might not. Epiphanies may occur or they may not. One reader will say that a character has to change or else why bother reading the story. Another will say that it's a cliché to have a character change, and such a convention is outdated and unrealistic. Some editors will want work that has little plot but experiments wildly with form. Other editors will want traditional forms but plots that are unlike what has been seen before.

I've been reading literary stories for years, picking up journals and collections to see what is being published. Most of what I see I don't particularly care for. Much of it is simply boring because not much happens, or what does happen is so minimal that it's left mostly up to the individual reader to figure out why the events of the story have any significance. But I will admit that the stories are well written from a basic craft standpoint. The language is solid. The prose works effectively. Sentences and paragraphs construct a living dream. But beyond that, there are no real standards as far as I can tell. There doesn't have to be anything in particular that a story does. There doesn't have to be a catharsis or a moral lesson or a dramatic climax or a commentary on society or an interesting twist or a character that represents reality.

Actually, let me pause a bit on that last point. I think that one might be the real kicker. I think that the subjective nature of fiction lies largely in whether or not an individual reader connects with the characters and ideas, and creating a piece that connects with an individual reader or editor at any particular magazine seems to me to be largely up to chance. Experts advise new writers to read all the journals (and there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of them) to get a sense of what they publish. From what I've seen, there seems to be no consistent vision or style for individual journals beyond the subjective tastes of the editors who happen to be there at the time; so, honestly, I don't see that reading all the journals accomplishes much. At least I've never been able to detect any real standards that differentiate one journal from the next. And as far as creating characters that will resonate with an individual reader goes, again, I think it's pure luck. I remember having wildly divergent views from people in my workshop classes. For instance, one particular story once struck me as being uninteresting in part because a character seemed so unrealistic, so irrational, that I suspected that the character must be insane, and I didn't understand the appeal of reading about insane characters if they are presented as if they are ordinary; yet others in the class loved the story, feeling that it accurately depicted the world as they knew it. I can think of other similar situations where viewpoints on stories simply diverged. And these were well written stories as far as the basic issues of craft are concerned. The language was strong. The situations were explained and the plot moved from point to point and so forth. But if we can't agree on what a realistic person is like, we simply aren't going to agree on whether the story is appealing or not.

So if it is indeed the case, as I believe it is, that having a story accepted is largely a matter of chance, of sending it to the right place at the right time where the right person happens to somehow find the characters and situation relatable and interesting, then is there ever any end to the frustration? I think it comes down to perseverance, I guess. The old saws are true: one must stick with it; not give up; try, try again. Once a writer has a reputation, I think editors start to ignore the issue of whether or not they personally find the piece appealing because it has already been established that the writer is good. In fact, journals will seek out established writers to send them pieces, and I'm fairly certain that a journal won't solicit a story from a well known writer and then reject it because the editor doesn't care for it. But getting established, having those first few people acknowledge that one is good is a frustrating endeavor.

A final note: Maybe this rejection today is hitting me harder than many do simply because of when it arrived. I'm a bit stressed at the moment because I have stacks of papers to grade this weekend; I have to work at my retail job tomorrow, which eats into my grading time; and the final weeks of the semester are going to be incredibly busy. And when I get stressed, I tend to get a bit depressed. I feel a bit frustrated in general with my life at the moment. I'm in my thirties without a full time job. My plan B is to teach, and even that isn't fully working out since I can't actually land a full time position, and it's often frustrating because many of my students don't care or don't try or really should not be pursuing a college education in the first place. And the dream I've been pursuing for years continues to elude me. It might be easier if I had some of the other things in my life that make life enjoyable for many people, like fulfilling relationships, but I don't. Apart from my immediate family, my only real friendships are with people I see in person only every few years because they live thousands of miles away. I feel like my entire life, my identity, is wrapped up in my dream to become a writer, and the reality is that that dream may never come true. And there isn't anything else in my life that makes me want to keep going day to day. Each day I sustain the hope that maybe today will be the day that I get that big acceptance. I check my e-mail obsessively in case a journal has sent me a notice that they'd like to publish me. So it's tough when that dream keeps getting dashed.

When Are You Ready?

A piece of advice I've read several times in writing books and writing magazines is to wait before sending out one's work. I've read interviews with editors who complain that young writers in MFA programs don't ask them questions about craft or characters or style or plot, but instead ask about submission guidelines. These editors feel like the young writers they encounter really need to focus on honing their abilities before worrying about getting published.

This makes sense. Before feeling like I'm ready to put my work out into the world, I should really take a long time to work at it and get good. Absolutely. And yet, it's tough because so much hinges on getting published. If I had no other concerns, I think I'd be happy enough to spend the next few years simply honing my craft, working on applying all the lessons I learned in grad school, developing my skills more, and then sending out some amazing, polished work when I would be at a point of really being ready. But I do have other concerns, such as making a living. Right now I'm scraping by with two jobs. I'm busy all the time. I have stacks of freshman essays and developmental writing to grade. This leaves me little time to work on my own writing. But if I'm good enough to publish and can build up those credits, then I can land a better teaching job, where instead of teaching four classes at a part-time pay scale, I can teach maybe three at a time with a full time salary and benefits and the expectation that continuing to work on my own writing is part of the gig. So simply out of necessity, I feel like I have to send out my work in the hopes that some of it might be good enough already. Once I move up the career ladder, I can spend more time on my writing, but I have to spend the time on my writing first before I can move up the career ladder. It's a tough bind to be in.

So related to this point, I've been thinking about contests and submissions and so forth. I came across a fellowship the other day that is incredibly attractive and would be a life changing opportunity to land, the Stegner Fellowship through Stanford University. Numerous major writers were fellows there, so the prestige alone would be enough to make a CV more competitive. And the fellowship itself pays a stipend of $26,000 a year for two years with no teaching requirement or any coursework beyond a regular writing workshop and attending visiting writer events and such. The goal of the fellowship is really to provide a writer time to write and hone his or her craft. How perfect would it be to be selected for such a fellowship? But of course it's incredibly competitive. According to their website, they get about 1,400 applicants each year for the ten slots (five in fiction, five in poetry); that means fewer than one percent of the applicants land a fellowship. So my first thought is that there's no way I'm at the level where I'd stand a chance since I'm barely even published, and the $60 application fee is hefty enough that I don't want to simply throw that kind of money away on a dream. And yet . . .

I can't help thinking that maybe I could stand a chance at something like that. Who's to say that I wouldn't be one of the chosen few? I won a fiction contest before that was on a small scale but still against some strong fellow MFA student writers. I've received some handwritten notes complementing my fiction from some prestigious journals, including one that I rank in the absolute top tier. And my work is getting better all the time. If I take my two best, most polished pieces, my absolute highest quality work, and I do everything I can to make them as good as they can be, well, would I necessarily be in the rejected 1,390 applicants? Probably, but maybe not. There's always that chance that I would be one of the ten.

I think about one of my professors who won a prestigious contest for a story collection. How did he know he was at the level where he stood a chance of winning? He had published fairly widely by that point, but he was still a struggling writer, sending out his work and (I'm sure) still collecting rejections. Did he know that his stories were finally at the level where he would win? I'm sure he didn't. But he thought maybe he was there. Maybe that batch of stories would be selected that year. And he won.

So is it better to follow the advice to simply stop sending out work until I've improved even more and gotten that much better? Or should I aim high and try for dream fellowships and submit to dream journals? Each time I go over an old story, I see new ways to improve it, which means I'm getting better constantly, and the fiction I send out now is superior to what I sent out a few years ago, so probably if I wait longer, my work will be that much better next year or the year after. But maybe it's good enough now. But I won't know until I submit it and see what happens.

Will I risk $60 of the money I work two jobs to earn? Should I wait on something like that fellowship and apply next year when I've got one more year of experience under my belt and maybe a few more publication credits? I don't know. I haven't made my mind up about that one. My rational brain tells me not to waste the money. But if I always lived according to my rational brain's suggestions, I wouldn't be pursuing writing at all.

And Now For Something Completely Different

I'm getting another piece published, and this time it's something totally unlike what I normally write. I think of myself as a fiction writer, primarily as a novelist. I worked hard on one nonfiction piece that came together and is soon to be published. But I also wrote one poem that has recently been accepted for publicatoin. Apart from a handful of poems to fulfill a high school English class requirement, I don't think I've written any other poetry. But a couple of years ago, I had an idea for a poem and sat down and wrote it. It seemed halfway decent to me, but what do I know? I'm not a poet, and I don't read a lot of poetry, so I never bothered to submit it to journals or anything. Then this summer, I decided to pull it out and look at it again. I rewrote it and decided I might as well send it out. On the off chance that it got accepted somewhere, it would be nice to have an exra credit on my CV. Plus, unlike with my fiction, I didn't have much at stake in the submission process. If it got rejected, it wouldn't much hurt my feelings because I know I'm not a poet. So I sent it out, and it got accepted.

Of course, I'm thrilled to have one more thing published. This will be another credit on my CV, and publishing in multiple genres could help me get teaching jobs as it demonstrates that I am qualified to teach a mixed workshop course without completely alienating those writers interested in poetry. And when I looked over the poem again, I must admit that I think it's pretty good. The language is carefully chosen, there's a nice rhythm to it, and there's some alliteration that I think really helps the whole thing resonate. But having this piece of writing accepted while I'm still waiting for acceptances for my fiction, which I've worked much harder and longer on, leaves me wondering if I can draw any conclusions from this experience.

One thing that I've decided about this--one great, wonderful, positive thing--is that I do in fact have an ability to use language well. I've long felt that, as a writer, beautiful writing is not my specialty. I've read a number of stories in workshops over the years where I have greatly admired the writer's ability to put words together into beautiful sentences even when I didn't much care for the actual story the writer was telling. I've seen this same thing with published stories as well. Literary journals are full of beautifully written, boring stories (this is often what I think about when I hear criticism of MFA style writing). And while I admired my peers' abilities, I accepted that I wasn't so naturally gifted. But I've worked hard to hone my language skills. I try to pay attention to my diction and to the rhythm and flow of my writing, and I think my prose is much nicer now. So having a success in the world of poetry, which is so much more about one's ability to use language than it is to convey meaning or be clear, well, that tells me that I have been successful in developing my skills there. So, well done me.

But there's another conclusion I draw. I'm hesitant to bring this up because I fear it will seem derogatory and I don't intend it that way. I have admiration and respect for poets. I fully acknowledge that I am not one of them and apart from this one instance of dabbling in their field, I cannot do what they do. But the conclusion I draw is that it may actually be easier to get poetry published than to get fiction published. And what I mean by this is not that it's easier to write poetry or that the standards for poetry are less vigorous. I mean that purely from a numbers standpoint, there's more room for journals to publish poetry. I was glancing at a few journals the other day and counted up the different types of work. From my extremely limited survey I concluded that many journals publish in a typical issue perhaps four or five short stories, two or three essays, and twenty or so poems. This, of course, varies greatly. Some journals will publish dozens of stories. Others publish no nonfiction at all. But of those journals that publish both poetry and fiction, it is highly likely that while the number of pages dedicated to fiction in a given issue outnumber the pages of poetry, there are more actual poems than there are stories.

I also imagine (and again, this is pure speculation) that there are fewer poets out in the world submitting their work. Because it is something that many view as specialized and difficult and almost magical, many writers are reluctant to attempt poetry. But many of those same people assume they can write a story because it's the same kind of language they use everyday when writing e-mails. Any literate person knows how to write prose, so why not a piece of fiction? So I would guess that there are more aspiring fiction writers than aspiring poets in the world and more writers submit fiction than submit poetry. But even if I'm wrong there and the numbers are even, that still means that a journal could recieve a hundred poems and a hundred stories and find space in an issue to publish twenty percent of those poems and in the same number of pages only two or three percent of the stories. So while all of those poems may be wonderful, it's quite likely that some wonderful stories are rejected at the same time because there simply isn't enough space for all the good ones.

It's possible (or likely) that I have no idea what I'm talking about and this is all wild speculation, but I'd guess that on a whole it is statistically likelier to have a poem accepted than a story. Once again, let me emphasize that I don't intend to show disrespect for poets and what they do; however, when I finally get a story published, it will feel more significant to me than having this poem published.

What It's About

I've been thinking recently about the difference between craft--that is being able to convey things well and interestingly through good diction, style, structure, etc.--and actually having something to say. In particular I was reflecting on the benefits of studying writing in a formal program and what one learns there compared with what one doesn't learn there. I feel that my experience in graduate school was useful in developing my craft abilities as a writer. I have no doubts that I am a better writer today than I was five years ago. And, in a strange way, writing is harder for me today than it was then because I know of so many various factors to pay attention to now (when I'm rewriting, I can spend a couple of hours and only get through a paragraph). I've studied craft and, I think, become a decent craftsman.

However, one thing that isn't really addressed, and I don't know if it's possible to address, in an MFA program is content. It's great if one can write well, but if one has nothing to say, then what's the point? And I think that's one of the problems I'm encountering at the moment. I feel like I can write well (of course I've still got more to learn and more developing to do, but basically I write well), but I'm increasingly unconvinced that at age thirty I have anything worth writing about. When I start to develop the ideas I have, I usually become excited about a new prospect and start to think through the implications of the idea only to become discouraged because it's nothing very original or different. Now I don't think this is strictly a problem that I have. I think most writers probably have this basic problem. Great writers have been producing work for so long, how can we, now, add anything new to the discussions? That isn't necessarily a problem. Approaching something old from a new angle can work. Or even doing something old, but doing it well, can be solid. The problem for a young writer, though, is that sometimes the ideas that seem fresh are actually old. Or if I recognize that an idea is old, but I think I can still do it well, that might not be enough. Why would an editor want to publish some old idea from some young nobody? I recently received a very nice letter accompanying a rejection. The letter said that my story was well written, but essentially takes on an old idea and adds nothing new. And I couldn't disagree with their critique.

I read a blog today about a similar issue, and that is whether one gains better experience from the "real world" than from the academic world. In essence, that's part of my concern. I'm thirty years old. I spent my entire childhood up to age twenty-two in school. Then after only a short break, I returned to school for almost the entire remainder of my twenties. Now I'm out of school as a student but still in that world as a teacher. Most of my life experience is from that world. I like that world. It's a good world. But it does leave me feeling limited in my understanding of humanity. When I interact with my students, who are largely from very different socio-economic, cultural, and intellectual backgrounds than me, I feel perplexed by their attitudes and behaviors. Likewise, I feel that I might not be able to properly imagine other situations and lives. I've heard that a writer doesn't need any real experience because it's all about imagination, so the great writer has learned everything they need to know about humanity by age seven or so, and from then on it's a matter of making up stories. This contrasts with the other view, that a writer would be better off spending years on a failed marriage than on an MFA. My sensibilities lean toward the imagination camp, and yet I'm not sure if that actually works.

The difficulty for me is that I fear my own views of the world, or something about the way my mind works, might be different enough from the average that my work doesn't quite resonate with others. On more than one occasion I've written fiction where characters were created from my understanding of how people think and act, and the reaction of my readers was puzzlement as to why the character acts and thinks as he does. Or I've had the reverse experience as a reader, where I read a story and find the motivations of the characters completely baffling, but the others around me see those characters as everyman types that anyone can relate to and understand. Maybe it's a matter of life experience, that I simply haven't done enough to understand the world around me as much as I'd like to. Sometimes I think that the best plan of action would be to sort of set aside the immediate goals of publication and so on and to simply live life for a while longer to try to come up with something worth writing about. I could continue to work on my craft to keep my skills up, but maybe I simply won't have any stories worth sharing with the world for another ten or twenty years, if then. I don't know.

The downside of a plan like that is that, essentially, I've never felt that I was very good at living life. Many of the basic experiences that people have and that then produce the inspiration for good writing are beyond my experience or understanding. And I don't know that there's any way to have those experiences merely for the sake of having them. I don't think life works that way. When I was younger, I sort of attempted such a thing. I had never really dated before, and I suspected that it would not be a good idea to date this one particular girl who was interested in me. However, part of what convinced me to do it was that it would provide good life experience for me as a writer. The relationship ended as I always knew it would. I've long felt that the anxiety of the experience while it was happening followed by the depression when it was over was plenty of reason to avoid the experience to begin with and I should have followed my rational brain that told me not to do it. But at least I now had this life experience that is a rite of passage for most people. I had experienced a young romance and could now write about it. But it turns out, the way I experienced that was not similar to how most others experience such a thing. I wrote about it, and people felt like my character was an enigmatic freak.

I don't know that there's any way to overcome this obstacle. My inclination is to hope that continued living will somehow magically transform me into someone with greater understanding and more significant ideas to put into my writing, but I also suspect that there's a lot of truth to the notion that one learns the essentials by age seven, and somehow I just never quite learned them the way others do.

Reading Habits

As everybody knows, it's essential as a writer to read in order to gain a greater understanding of how language works, how novels are constructed, how characters are created, what works and what doesn't. Sometimes it's kind of annoying though. Not that reading is annoying. I love reading. But sometimes I wish I could completely submerge into a book and not analyze it at all. Not think like I'm a writer trying to deconstruct. Okay, so it would an exaggeration to imply that my mind is always working like that. Sometimes I do get sucked in and forget about analyzing craft at all. But usually, at some point in a book I have this commentary going on in my brain that is about how it's written rather than what's going to happen next in the story. But the advantage of that is obvious. I feel like I'm always gaining new appreciation for writing that I hope I can then apply to my own work.

When I was a kid I never understood how my dad could read more than one book at a time. He always had a handful of books with bookmarks sticking out of the top. They sat next to his bed in piles. He read often, but what was the point? How could he "get into" a book reading that way? And now I've become him. I haven't counted up the number of books I'm in the middle of right now, but it's probably in the double digits. Some of that is due to the variety of things I read. For instance, I've read some stories from a collection, marked how far I am, but then not returned for a bit. Does that count as being "in the middle" of a book? Or how about a collection of essays? Then there are science books about theories on the brain or addressing big questions of nature versus nurture. Dipping in and out of that over time isn't the same as setting down a novel in the middle, right?

But, alas, I also have several novels I'm in the middle of. Part of the issue is that I don't feel the same obligation to read a book to its conclusion that I felt when I was younger. For the first twenty years or so of my life, I almost never put a book down unfinished without returning to it. If it was boring, well, I had to plod through. If it was interesting but I wasn't quite in the mood for it, too bad. I had to finish that one before I could start another. Now, however, if a book fails to hold my attention, I feel little guilt about setting it down and picking up something else. The problem, however, is that I often am interested in a book, want to finish it, but it's not absolutely compelling me to read, so I set it down with every intention of picking it up only to start another book. So at the moment I'm probably in the middle of a few novels that I plan on finishing, but for whatever reason they weren't holding my interest every second.

So, back to the issue of learning from writing. I've been thinking that it's a good idea to read more widely than I've always done in the past few years. In grad school, they tell you to read widely, but then that's not really what they encourage you to read in classes and for the comps exams. You pretty much stick to "classics" and "literary" stuff. I like a lot of that, sure, but what about the majority of what people actually read. I work at a bookstore, and not only do we only carry a handful of the type of book I studied in grad school, but what we do have, we rarely sell. In fact, the store has probably sold more of that since I started working there than in the previous year because I keep recommending stuff to customers or buying stuff for myself. So when professors tell us to read widely, do they actually mean to read as widely as possible, or do they merely mean we should read both James Joyce and Italo Calvino?

One problem with only studying classics or literary stuff is that it's often difficult to get much from those as far as learning what those writers do. I was reading a Philip Roth book last fall, and rather than thinking, "Ah, here's how he puts this stuff together; I need to try that myself," I kept simply being stunned by how good it was, yet completely unsure why it was so good since he seemed to be breaking a whole slew of the craft rules I learned in workshops. I'm actually not sure how much can be gained by studying the masters. They might simply be so far above the rest of us that they're untouchable.

However, I think we can learn a lot from writers whose work actually sells to normal people. For one thing, there's the major question of why does this appeal to the average reader? That's an issue that is pretty much never addressed in grad school. All the discussion of craft and character and language, and we never really think about what the average paperback buyer is looking for when they choose something to read on the plane. And sometimes, I fully admit, it's easy to dismiss what is popular as "bad" writing. I've picked up a few bestsellers and read a few pages only to shake my head and wonder how anybody can get through this junk. And yet more people are interested in that, so there must be something there, right? I wish my grad school experience had devoted some time to looking carefully at popular genres to deconstruct what is so appealing to so many. About the only time a class touched on those issues was the screenwriting class, and I still feel that class may have been the most useful course I took in grad school. One of the main things we discussed was the need to not bore the audience, which didn't seem to be much of a concern in the workshop courses. Or there was the class on "Forms of Fiction." Rather than thinking of different genres as taking on different forms, our only concern was literary fiction, often classic stuff that (in my view anyway) bears little relevance to twenty-first century writing. I mean the techniques that were cool and innovative two hundred years ago are simply clichéd now, and you can't get away with that.

This post is probably going on too long, but I've got something specific I want to mention. I was working at the bookstore the other day, and it was slow, so I grabbed the nearest book off a display by the register and started reading. As you might guess, the prominently displayed book was a big bestseller, and in this case the cover featured an image from the movie that was just coming out based on the book. All right, I figured, I'll see what the big deal is with this book, why we sell so many, why they made a movie of it, why this writer is rich now. The book was Confessions of a Shopoholic by Sophie Kinsella. So while the store was nearly empty, I read the first few pages. And you know what? I wound up buying the book that day. It is hysterical. And there's a lot to be learned about craft from it. Not only does it present a clear lesson on the value of humor, how that can compel a reader to keep going (I laugh out loud probably every couple of pages and even more often I smile laugh on the inside), but it's also a fine example of irony. A writer studying the use of the deluded protagonist-narrator who doesn't see the world as it is and is constantly at odds with that world in an effort to protect herself from its challenges could do much worse than studying this book. I'm sure Confessions of a Shopoholic would be dismissed in a graduate "forms of fiction" course. In fact, I once spent a whole class listening to my professor try and fail to explain why Jane Austen is not chick lit because Austen is so great and wonderful while chick lit is stupid fluff (apparently Austen is funny and uses irony well to comment on society, which as I've now seen is exactly what Kinsella does, only more successfully in my opinion).

Anyway, I'd say I've gotten off track a bit, but I'm not sure I was ever on a track to begin with. So here's the thing: Not only am I fully engaged with Kinsella, but I also feel like I can learn something about how to write effectively, how to appeal to a reader. Roth, on the other hand, engages me, but also leaves me completely awed nearly to the point of paralysis because I can never do what he does, or if I can I haven't figured it out yet. Not to suggest that I'm on the level of Kinsella at this point, either, but she seems attainable.

I realize that some of my thoughts here seem to be in direct contradiction to my previous post about high concepts. After all, Kinsella's book is about a financial journalist who is completely out of control with her personal finances. It's utterly high concept. And that's the case with so many genre works. But maybe there's something valuable to learn from them still.

Advice On When To Move On

The topic of finishing, knowing when you're done, is something I've obviously been thinking about and wrote about last time. So to help me consider the issue, I've been reflecting on advice I've received from teachers over the years.

I've studied under some good writers who have given different types of instruction and advice. Perhaps my favorite writer I took a class with had a process very different from mine. He spent months thinking about his stories. He would jot down notes, but basically do draft after draft in his head until he had figured the whole thing out and even polished the language. Then he would write it down, and essentially the first written draft was the final draft. I could never work that way. I simply couldn't keep it all in my head. Also, this professor was a great short story writer and not a novelist. I doubt his process would work on a novel due to the larger scope and the difficulty of keeping so much in one's head. Basically the way he ran his workshop classes was to examine the pieces students submitted, to look at the structure, the techniques, and analyze them. We often got into abstract discussion of about how literature works and why, but often that came at the expense of specific critique of the pieces themselves. Although I feel I learned some things in that class, those things were larger theoretical concepts, and I'm not sure the stories I submitted benefited a whole lot. Probably my professor didn't have much to suggest for how to change a story because once his were written, they were done, so he wasn't much for changing them after that point.

Another professor I studied under was an accomplished novelist. She had published five or six novels and many short stories over the years. One of the specific pieces of advice I remember from her was directly in response to the question of knowing when you're done. She said that is, of course, one of the toughest questions to answer and her best take on that issue was to quit rewriting when she felt like she was starting to make the piece worse. It's been a few years since she mentioned that, and I still reflect back on it as I rewrite, and the tricky thing is that when I approach a piece I haven't looked at for a while, I usually spot things to improve. I have one story I've been working on for over four years, and I revised it again as recently as a month ago, and I think I was still improving it. So on the one hand I think I should continue to work on it since I haven't started completely messing it up yet, but on the other hand I think at some point I have to move on, retire it, and work on future pieces. I don't know that I've reached that point yet with this particular story. Most of the stories I've written over the years ultimately were nothing more than learning exercises, but I still feel this one is good and will be published eventually.

I asked another professor about his thoughts on the issue of when do you know you're done. I suggested that maybe you can tell you're finished when somebody finally publishes something. And he said that even then, it's not that clear. He was at that time editing a short story collection. The stories had previously been published in magazines, and the collection had been accepted for publication. Even so, as he went back through it, he found some stories he still wanted to rework beyond simple edits. I recently read an interview with Tobias Wolff about his new story collection, which includes revised versions of stories he published years ago. And he's certainly not the only writer to keep returning to the past and revising it. So I don't know. I guess the difficulty is to avoid winding up like the writer in Albert Camus's The Plague: he keeps rewriting the opening passage of his novel, trying to get it perfect, and since he never moves on from the beginning, he never completes anything.

I guess I'd rather move forward and accept that some of my past work isn't as good as it ultimately could be, but in the end produce more. If I wind up writing a great novel, but it's my seventh novel and the first six were learning experiences, I still think I'd be happier with that than if I spent twenty years to produce one novel that was ultimately great.

In part my desire to move forward comes from some other piece of advice whose source I don't remember. I think it's important to move on when the passion dies. This is a difficult continuum, however. There are writers who write a passion-fueled rough draft, can't stand to rewrite and so they quit there. That doesn't seem like a good way to go. But if I write, rewrite, revise, rewrite, revise, edit, polish, rewrite, edit, etc., etc. and I've gotten the piece far, but I've reached the point where, despite liking it as a story and feeling it's good, I'm getting sick of it, well I think that's the time to move on. If I'm at that stage with one piece and another piece is taking over my mind more and more, I think it's best to move on to that next piece. Now it's certainly possible that the earlier piece will force it's way back into the passion part of my brain and I'll return to it down the line, but still, it's not necessarily the most productive to rehash the same thing forever.

One final thought on this issue is closely related to that previous idea: as I improve as a writer, I think my ideas get better. I wrote my first novel between the ages of twenty-three and twenty-six. I have no regrets about writing it. I learned a lot from the experience of drafting, rewriting, submitting it to workshops and a writers' group, and ultimately defending it as my MA thesis. But the basic story was not necessarily the most interesting thing in the world. As with many first novels, it drew heavily on my own experiences, and it had the kind of plot that might simply be too minimal to ever be of much appeal to most readers. If I were to continue working on that novel until it reached the level of being a great novel, I suspect it would have to change so much that it would barely resemble the original. So if the final version is going to be so different, why not actually do something different? Rather than being burdened with that history, it's better to start fresh. My second novel moved further from my own experiences, but still has some limited scope. I think this book is good, and I hope to see it published, but I know the story is limited and will not appeal to many readers. But I have other ideas for future novels that have the kind of premises that I think have much more potential to bloom into something great. And I think it's because as I head into my thirties, my views of the world are larger and more interesting than they were when I was in my early and mid twenties. So that's one more reason to keep moving forward, to progress to the next piece instead of rehashing the old ones forever.

Finishing: Yeah Right

So I set a deadline for myself to have an additional revision done in time to enter a contest. I need to have my manuscript finished and in the mail by November first. I've been doing revisions on the computer, printing out the new pages and then going over them once more with a red pen in an effort to catch all the little issues. Last night I got all the way to the end of my book, and so I'm ready to print out the remaining pages and do the final read through and then input the additional edits. I still have a week before the contest deadline, and it definitely looks like I'll make it in time. And the timing couldn't be better.

Unfortunately, my life is squeezing me so I'll soon have even less time to work on my writing. I'm being promoted at the book store, which is great in that I'll make an extra twenty-five cents per hour (Hooray! My income this year might even hit five figures!) and will even soon be eligible for some minimal health care benefits, but I'll also be working more. Rather than being at the book store twenty to thirty hours, I'll be there thirty hours a week minimum. On weeks when I don't have student papers to grade, I'll still be working about fifty hours a week. When I do have papers to grade, it'll be sixty plus hours. This coming week I'm working seven days. And that means the little time I currently find to write will be even scarcer.

Anyway, the sound of violins behind me is distracting. Where was I going? Oh, yeah. Finishing yet another revision. I don't know if I'm actually done. Is it ever possible to be done? I'm sure there are improvements I could make. My newest draft is the tightest, and shortest, version of my book. The length concerns me a little bit. Although it's still a three hundred page novel, double the minimum length for what would be called a novel as opposed to a novella, it's still not a long book. And I have had a few of my early readers who felt like they wanted more, that they would like to spend additional time with the characters. That, of course, is one of the greatest compliments I could hope for, but it also makes me wonder if it should be longer. Basically I have three separate story lines following three major characters, so although the book is one cohesive piece, it's in a way three linked novellas. So I can understand that a reader might want more of each. I have a few ideas for additional chapters I could include, but I'm reluctant to keep writing more. For one thing, I've been working on this for years already and just want to move on. But, more importantly, I feel like the book is tight. Even though it's not a plot-driven book, the major plot points work together pretty succinctly without major digressions and insignificant details. I'd like to think I've got on my hands the type of novel somebody might pick up and feel compelled to keep reading and finish in a couple sittings.

But anyway, I think I might have begun writing this post with some sort of point in mind, though I'm not entirely sure what that point was. It might have had something to do with the old issue of having trouble finishing. I'm pretty sure it was something like that. And the final thought for the moment is this: although I'm sure I could keep working on this book, keep writing new bits and pieces, keep editing for the clearest, most engaging prose, reconsider and evaluate every decision I made along the way, I'm not going to. I'll enter this new version in that contest, look for other such contests, check into small presses who might be interested in a first literary novel, query agents who probably won't be interested in a first literary novel, and move forward with the next novel.

Many times over the years I've had students approach me asking if they could revise a paper an additional time after the final draft in order to improve their grade. For my own sake, I can't keep grading draft after draft; I obviously don't have the time for that. But for their sake as well, I recommend moving on. Instead of trying to juggle one more revision while also writing the first draft of their next paper, it's better to learn from the previous essay and apply those lessons to the next one. And that's what I need to do as well. It might be that my book still isn't where it needs to be, isn't tight enough or long enough or whatever enough to get published. But rather than spending another year on it, I'd rather move forward. I'm a better writer now than I was when I started this book, and the next thing I write should be better than this one. It's possible (although depressing to dwell on) that I'll have four or five novels written before one makes it out into the world. But that's how it is.

As Always: Revision

So It's been a busy few weeks for me that involved not much writing. I moved cross country, settled into my new home, succeeded in finding two part time jobs that provide more hours with less pay than full time work and no benefits. So I have not made a ton of progress toward getting my newly drafted YA fantasy into the next stage. However, I did manage to revise a short story for the nth time, making it that slight bit better where I hope it will now go from getting hand written notes on the rejection slips to actually getting acceptances. I also did my initial read through of the fantasy novel, and I feel although it is of course rough, it has a solid base to it. The skeleton of the story is working, and now I'm ready for the hard work of fleshing out the characters further, making the world pop, and doing all the other stuff that takes so much time and effort but can't be ignored. However, before I get to that, I have something else that I've moved to the front burner again.

I finished what I thought was the final revision of my previous novel several months ago. I'd been working on it pretty steadily for about two years when I defended it as my MFA thesis. From there I moved into working on an additional revision, then all the nitty gritty polishing stuff for three more months or so. I had it where I felt it was ready to put out into the world and even started querying agents. Then I had one of my trusted early readers take a look. She hadn't had the time to read a draft up until that point. And fortunately, or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, she had some great notes for me. For one thing, she found a number of small typo errors that I could have sworn I'd eliminated but somehow still survived. But also, she had some really good suggestions of some places to tighten, some scenes that were redundant, some questions that arose about certain characterizations and so on. Anytime I get good feedback I'm grateful to the person who provides it, but it can also be discouraging because it means my work isn't over. So after talking with her I knew I needed to attack my manuscript again, but I just couldn't seem to find the energy and force myself to sit down and do it. After all, I'd already spent years and reached the point where I was supposed to be done. But one of the differences between being a guy who enjoys fiddling with writing in my spare time and somebody who truly is a writer is in the ability to sit down again and again and find more things to improve.

So I knew I had work still in front of me, but I put it off. I knew I wasn't ready to send it out to more agents or anything until I addressed the new concerns, but I also lacked the heart to do the hard work. But finally I've kicked my butt into gear and said, "Self, you need to do this." But how to motivate myself. After all, it would be more fun to start in on rewrites of the new book. Plus, the old one is a challenging literary novel that even if I succeed in making it great has a limited chance of ever being published while the new one is more marketable and might be possible to actually become something other than a file on my computer or a stack of pages in my room. After some thought I decided I needed something specific and concrete to motivate me, some set deadline by which to finish the revision. It's easy enough to say I won't query any more agents until I fix these little problems and then simply never query any agents. So I decided the best motivating factor to provide a strict deadline for this (hopefully) final revision would be to find a nice contest to enter. And sure enough I found one. I'm planning on entering the novel in a contest for beginning writers who haven't previously published a book. The deadline is the beginning of November, so I have about a month to get it ready.

I don't really expect to win this contest. If I do, that would be great. Not only does the prize include a publishing contract, but the prestige would likely be enough to launch my academic career away from adjuncting and into full time work with a bit of security. But the important thing isn't to think about winning, but simply to think about making my book as good as it can be through one more draft. Then I can query more agents, send it out to small presses, and submit to more contests. And with a deadline hanging over my head, I think it should happen. I've spent many hours the past few days hacking through some problems in the book's opening, and now I've managed to address a number of issues in the first four chapters (including cutting out the false start that was the previous chapter one). I feel confident that even though I'm working twenty-some hours a week at a bookstore, have about forty student papers to grade and two classes to prepare for, I'll have a well-polished manuscript in the mail to that contest before the end of October.

Current project

So I ended last time without actually getting to what I'm working on now. As I wrote before I was floundering after finishing my previous novel and having trouble really sinking into something new. I bounced around a little bit, but for one reason or another, I wasn't ready to begin on a few of my other novel ideas. But I had one left. While most of my ideas are more in the realm of "literary" fiction (although I'm not necessarily a fan of that term and it's pretentious associations), I had one idea for a fantasy novel. This idea began building in my head a few years ago, and maybe a year or so ago I thought about the possibility of making the main character younger and thus, it could be a young adult fantasy instead of straight fantasy.

Now I have nothing against fantasy. I'm not one of those MFA types who looks down on genre fiction as less worthy or significant. It's all just entertainment, and whichever appeals more to you, that's just fine. As it happens, I simply prefer stuff in the "literary" mode, where it's about real characters in real world situations, where nobody's been murdered, and there's not a terrorist attack about to happen in a matter of hours if our hero can't prevent it. Even as I write that, I realize there's a bit of a snarky tone there, which I don't really want. I have gotten into some of those types of stories before (I've read everything Thomas Harris has published; I've stayed up late into the night to finish a James Patterson novel). The one genre that I have been most attracted to in my life is fantasy. Between the time I learned to read and the time I finished high school, probably the majority of my reading time was spent on fantasy novels. However, at some point in there, I'd say the change occurred in my late teens, I just sort of lost interest. My tastes changed. I didn't lose any respect for the art, but I didn't want to spend my time on it either.

So, that brings me to the point where I am in my late twenties contemplating writing a fantasy novel. A few things stand in my way. One: I'm not sure whether I'll have the excitement and interest in the project to work on it for the necessary length of time required to produce something good. After all, I spent years on my first two literary novels, and it's not fair (I guess I see it as disrespectful to the genre) to think I could just bang one out without putting in the same kind of hard work rewriting, revising, editing, etc. But would my passion be sufficient to keep me going through all those months of work on a genre that I am no longer in love with? Two: I haven't read a fantasy novel in years. Sure, I've seen the Lord of the Rings Movies and Harry Potter. I've even listened to the audiobooks of Harry Potter (read by the amazing Jim Dale), but it's been about a decade since I was actively part of that literary community, where I consumed many books and had a good understanding of its conventions and tropes. I'm afraid that if I tried my hand at this genre, I would unknowingly produce a story riddled with cliches that fans of the genre would abhore. I believe it's important to do one's research and to know about the kind of story one is writing. I'm sure if I tried to write a mystery, for example, I would produce something that didn't go beyond the conventions of the earliest type of mystery story. Sherlock Holmes would laugh at my pathetic clues, Sam Spade wouldn't even leave his desk to solve my case, and whoever the current champion detectives are would scratch their heads and wonder if I could possibly be serious with my offering. Because I don't know that genre. In the world of "literary" fiction, I feel comfortable with a story idea that even if it's a simple plot it hasn't been done quite the way I'm doing it, or there's enough room for another story along these lines because of the unique voice or character combinations I'll present. But I don't have that background any longer in fantasy, and I don't want to presume that because I've studied writing and have an MFA I could whip out something great because, "well, it's only fantasy, how hard can it be?"

After considering those reservations a few months ago, I pretty much set the project aside. I figured maybe at some point down the line I'd start tinkering with it, maybe do a chapter here and there and have a slowly expanding file on my computer, but I no longer thought it would be something that I would feel compelled to write. And then I reached the point I described earlier of lacking a project. So I'm in a situation where I need something to get caught up in, but I don't want to start my next literary novel because I know I'll be picking up and moving in a few weeks, so I don't want to disrupt that process. But I'm also not working, so I have plenty of time. It's possible I could pound through something fairly quickly and finish a draft before my life goes into upheaval. So, alas, my thoughts turn more and more to this fantasy idea. As a young adult book, it would likely be shorter than my previous novels (I'm thinking in the range of 60,000 words as opposed to the 90,000 range I've done before), and I have most of the story mapped out in my head and even written down in a set of notes I've compiled earlier. The final factor was simply that more and more this idea is what was occupying my brain. I wasn't thinking about the next literary novel, I was wondering how I could make the fantasy world work, what trials my hero might face and how he would overcome them. So I sat down and began.

More details next time on how it's coming along.