Getting A Word In

     I, like most writers I know, have a couple of short stories lying around that I’m happy with but which aren’t ever going to grow into larger or longer pieces. Having read through a couple of them recently I decided I would try to get them published on one or several of the e-Bookstores that are around now. I have been singularly unsuccessful thus far.

                I’m using a particular site recommended by a friend for the service, pretty much because it is free. I’m trying to avoid paying for something I could do myself – as part of my belief it is far better to take the trouble to learn a skill rather than lose out by paying someone else to do it. I’ve got a little further than I have before through the process but have failed at the second hurdle. I’ll get there in the end, though, using the same drive and determination that allowed me to finish reading the Silmarillion and finish writing my university dissertation.

                Why am I telling you all that I’m slightly retarded when it comes to this self-publsihing process? To show that I am following my next BRILLIANT WRITING TIP of course! Which is to get yourself published, even if it is only on a small scale – or even if it’s just to get you more familiar with the process. Getting your name out there and having examples of your work, even if they are only short stories, can help a lot – especially if they’re well presented in a published format. Looking the part is not quite as important as playing the part but the former goes a long way to making people think you can do the latter. 

                So how should you publish your work? Well, I’m not a professional agent so can’t give you professional advice. The best I’ve got is anecdotal so I’ll pass that on. Firstly, having a printed, published and well turned out copy of your story/manuscript/work/piece/intellectual-love-child you can show or give to people immediately makes them think something along the lines of, “Hold the phone, this is actually real.” It provides substance to all the wild stories of how fantastic a writer you are – obviously if you’ve been published you’ve got to be pretty good, right? It also means you can show off to people as well and while this may seem a little self-indulgent you are trying to break into a media industry. This requires advertising and unless you have a substantial budget behind you, the best you’re likely to be able to manage is to do it yourself.

                I don’t necessarily mean you have to stand in the street handing out copies of your work for free (something I have considered) but asking your local bookstore to advertise it is a step in the right direction. Waterstones, Barnes&Noble and other large chains might take you up on it but since they are part of substantially vast corporations they usually have to get their advertising behaviours prescribed to them BUT smaller bookstores, charity bookstores, or libraries may be more open to putting a flier up somewhere – a flier you’ve designed yourself that is so amazing people won’t be able to resist going online to buy your work.

                Yes, I am very good at coming up with great-sounding results and not really describing the method. Again, I am not a professional agent. They cost money, and probably don’t write blogs online to advertise their services. Self-advertising is difficult because it requires time and sometimes money, so doing it is entirely up to you. For most people, it is an unrealistic goal. What you can do is get your work uploaded to e-stores or e-libraries, which is what I am trying to do at the moment. This gives you a massive potential audience and once you get a couple of pieces out there they work to advertise each other – if someone reads Piece A, they will look for others by you and will find Piece B, D and E, and will keep looking for C until they find it (if you can keep them interested). 

                I suggest short stories because they are quick to both write and edit. My current project of that type has got a little out of hand and I need to go back to basics. I’ve spent a lot of time scene-setting and character building, which would be great if I had more than four to five thousand words. Realistically, at about twelve hundred words in, I should be at a slightly more advanced stage. The pacing is too slow for the length of the piece and I have to re-evaluate where I want it to go. This is an example of comprise and structured editing; I know what the limits are and where I’ve made mistakes. As long as you keep your creative ambition under control you will be able to craft to story you want. Next week I’ll be writing in more detail about modelling/preparing short stories but for now – back to the subject.

                Getting published; this is the goal. Realistically, you’re not likely going to be the one that makes headlines, gets their book pasted across buses and billboards or be the next big thing. Depressing? Perhaps but I think it’s better to set achievable goals. I’m not saying you won’t be the next big thing; I’m just saying you’ll have to finish your story first and then get noticed somehow. Self-publishing can be free, it can be easy and it can be done from the comfort of your own home. So go for it, give it a try. See if you can beat me to it! Once you’ve got a couple of pieces in circulation it will be much easier to pitch a big project to a publisher. When they ask, “What else have you done?” it will sound much, much more impressive for you to be able to say, “I’ve got X, Y and J available here and here,” than the ever-expressive, “Um.”

A Short Secondment to Starting Stories

               Below is, as the post title suggests, a short piece I wrote on my lunch break at work (because I'm so cool and have loads to do at lunch time). I've tried to capture the idea of isolation and bleakness while also putting some effort into a couple of tricks to make the narrative a little interesting despite the heavy feeling I want it to carry. Importantly, it is untitled and I just sat down and wrote it without worrying where it was going - I did this to show it can be done, and that writing doesn't have to be a crystalline, perfect creation from concept through to closing the concluding cover. I don't know where this is going, or what the character names are, or even where it is set, but I wrote it and I feel it is definitely strong enough for me to build on at a later date for another project, or to modify so I can add it into another project.

Untitled.

            It was close to the middle of the day. The sun scorched the scorched the street and the man who stood in it, sheltering in what sparse shade escaped the heat. It was too hot to work at this time and most were inside, cowering in the hot boxes their houses had become. This one man chose not to cower, instead braving the midday glare of the sun to be outside. His skin was dry and rough, cracked across his hands like the ground further out from the town; he rarely chose to hide inside when the world might offer something. Today had only offered heat and silence until the figure had appeared on the horizon. The man in the street had watched him from the shade for nearly an hour now. The figure revealed itself to be a man in yellow clothing on a horse. It was not the yellow of sun and sand staining but a bold and bright colour, nearly golden in its richness. The man watched as the rider approached, head unbowed by the height of the sun's heat. It appeared today did have something to offer, the man in the street thought, as he stepped out of the shade's safety to greet the man in yellow.


           Bam! Two hundred ish words of pure creativity! Not quite creative genius, and certainly not up to what I like to think of my normal standard; I noticed at least a dozen improvements which could be made as I typed it up. I left it as it was though, as a true and fair representation of what I could manage in twenty minutes without time to edit or review.
     
           I've tried to make the two characters have similarities and differences, such that I could in a section as short as this. They are both meant to exude a certain amount of pride and/or determination, perhaps defiance even, in their description but I wanted to make the man in the street disdainful compared to the aura of mystery I wanted to enshroud the rider in yellow. This grew from the decision to write in two characters, which I made very early on; I thought I'd have a little more time, and swiftly after creating the first I realized my plan for him would make him pretty unlikable if I didn't have another to counterpoint the views I wanted him to have. As it was, I did not actually get to the stage in the narrative where dialogue could happen and so you, as the reader, have yet to appreciate this.

              I point it out now because I've always found that if there is only viewpoint in any piece it creates an immediate potential barrier between the text and the reader - if the reader doesn't agree with the viewpoint, no matter how justified you might think it is or have written it to be, then they won't get on with the character or story. Hence I try to have at least two characters, if not three, so that they can each exhibit strong personality traits which differ from one another. By doing this I hope that at least one of them will appeal to the reader and so spread my net wide as far as catching and retaining interest is concerned. In fact, taking the net analogy a little further, if you make one out of rope tied in just one way you won't catch much and often smaller prey (readers newer to your genre of choice or with less time/interest for/in reading) will escape. If you bind the sides of your net with a second you will retain far more, and a third set of knots give extra security to it. More rope than that becomes clutter and clumsy, making your net difficult to use.

          Yes, that's the best I can manage write now. I appreciate this is a short post but I wanted to get something up; it's a busy week and as I have tried to keep clear thus far in my writing some words are far better than no words.

Stylus at Dawn

                 I have been challenged! To write something, rather than an event as dramatic or enthralling as a duel, I should explain. I have been charged with writing a piece which is a scientifiction and demonstrates character growth or change within five thousand words. Some would argue that I could use five pictures, using a certain equation most are familiar with, but I have neither the talent nor the patience to hone it for that to be a viable choice. I am about six hundred words in, due to time constraints rather than lack of ideas (fortuitously) but I am not worried that the deadline of a week will pass to find me in failure.

                Now, I used a word in that paragraph that some people (and Microsoft Word) would say isn’t real, or perhaps that it is a misspelling. ‘Scientifiction’ is that word (I hope, or my editing skills need more work than I thought) and it is quite an old fashioned one. I suspect a large number of literacists (an actually made up word, a spoonerism of ‘literary artists’) might not be familiar with it. It is an interesting term that is used to describe a sub-section of the science-fiction genre. In my mind the great, bloated and vast genre encompasses a huge amount of writing and a similarly pronounced potential for the exploration of ideas in the future and because it is so big can sometimes lose meaning. To give an example; Alien, Man of Steel and The Time Machine are all science fiction but differ quite substantially in content. As with most works of fiction these fall into several categories, and as with most science fiction pieces that particular descriptor is unfortunately lacking in descriptive detail. This is why I use the term scientifiction.

                Scientifiction is another spoonerism, borrowed from a university lecturer in my first year of study, for ‘scientific fiction’. This is now a sub-genre of science-fiction, but was probably the original genre before fantasy and science fiction started overlapping to the stage of being close to indistinguishable in some areas. It describes a piece or story that is based around the idea of fictional science, and explores it. Sometimes very little else happens in the story – Flowers for Algernon is one of my favourite examples of this. It is a really touching story of the romance between two individuals, one of whom is a scientist and the other a (willing) test subject. I highly recommend it, and it is only a short story, and it is a good example of scientifiction. It explores the effects of a new (and entirely fictional) scientific discovery on the two main characters and how they react to it.

                How is this different from other science fiction – or indeed, other fiction in general? Firstly the story is about mostly character reaction to the discovery and their responses to each other’s reaction. Usually there is a more interactive element in stories that are so character driven, but the focus in Flowers is overwhelmingly how the discovery affects the characters. This is not to say there is no interactive elements – there definitely are – but the science is central to everything that happens. This focus drives the piece forward, which is a strength, but at the same time because there is an intensity to this central element stories tend to be shorter as it is harder to maintain that diamond-edged concentration on a single subject through an entire novel. I’m not saying it can’t be done, I’m just pointing out it is difficult. 

                Yes, other genres have a similar, concentrated focal point. Gothic horror is an example with many stories that keep the reader tightly bound on a single subject. One of my favourite stories of this genre is The Red Room by (author) which I read during my GCSEs (middle school finals). I remember reading it in class and feeling almost claustrophobic, like there was a pressure pulling on me as I lived through the narrator’s horror. It was my first foray into what a friend of mine calls entrapment-horror and for all the reasons he hates it, I love it; the feeling of inescapable, inevitable doom good Gothic and/or horror stories induce is a thrilling feeling for me, although I appreciate that in the same way not everybody enjoys skydiving this emotional state is not everybody’s idea of an enjoyable reading reaction.

                Returning to my point – I am aware that my writing (and my conversation) can be haunted by tangents – scientifiction looks at imaginary science. If you are familiar with the Star Trek series, you will know they have the ability to travel at ‘warp speeds’. The science behind this faster-than-light travel is often alluded to but as something everybody is familiar with, and it is never really explained in any detail. This is, obviously, partly due to the fact we don’t know how to travel faster than light so explaining such is pretty close to impossible. If the show had a scientifiction grounding, however, conversations about the process would be more common place. They would probably involve a lot of jargon or ideas that sound legitimate but are actually improbable at best as scientific theories. 

For example, a new element – Kirkium, for the sake of an example – could be invented (read: discovered on Jupiter) that reacted in a particular way with something like lead which is cheap, common and plentiful to create a clean form of energy that was easily convertible into electricity (as that is the most common and accepted form of energy we use currently) in vast amounts. Then, on one of Jupiter’s moons (probably Titan) another element is discovered which is super dense yet easily forms alloys with more common metals in small amounts, making a super-strong molecular compound that can resist every pressure it is put under and doesn’t become brittle at absolute zero temperature. This is how starships are powered and can be flung through the void at faster than light speeds without smooshing them into a small lump of variously composed mush.

The above scenario is possible, although improbable and very difficult to substantiate at the present time. However, because it is possible and potentially plausible people are more willing to accept it - or suspend their disbelief – because the result is both brilliant and believable as a theoretical concept: If we could produce enough electricity and if we had a sufficiently structurally-sound construction material then the result is possible. This is the conceit we are willing to accept, and science fiction expands slightly on what those ifs are. Scientifiction explores the discovery and application of those ifs, which is the difference.

Now, I appreciate that might not sound like the exciting, rip-roaring adrenaline ride that some people look for in literature and nor is it the emotionally moving epic other want, but for some the exploration of a theoretical concept is incredibly intriguing, and I am one of those. So the challenge that has been laid at my feet is one I face with relish, and the genre is one I am happy to discuss – and little known enough I thought some might find it interesting to learn about. It strays flirtatiously close to creative non-fiction in some cases and if you enjoy relaxing to an intellectual piece or the exploration of a concept (not necessarily scientific in nature) then it would be worth a look. 

BIG BAD WRITING TIP FOR THE WEEK:

Don’t procrastinate. I talked about making time last entry; don’t put off writing simply because you think you will have time later. Get some done, even a little, and sometimes it unleashes a torrent of creativity. Keep it dammed up and you may find your ideas dry out before you can bathe in their refreshing waters. I failed in that this week, writing blog entries and having a social life rather than writing under this misconception I would have some free time at work. I didn’t, so am behind on the above challenge. So if you’ve made time, use it!