Editors provide constructive feedback that can be instrumental in refining not only your current short story, but your approach to future creative projects. Editors can highlight structural issues or sentence-level problems. Alternatively, they can point out something as simple as a repeated misuse of an apostrophe. Sometimes changes will be made to your work prior to publication without checking with you in the case of punctuation and grammar , but this would be outlined as a common procedure in the submission guidelines.
Access to an editor is priceless. Continued exposure to the editorial process will further your ability to understand technical conversations, recognise repeat issues, self-edit your own work, and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of your writing with an open and critical mind.
Your confidence in dealing with industry professionals will increase, as will your understanding of publishing industry etiquette — all crucial when approaching a potential publisher with your novel. By regularly writing and submitting short stories to publications, your knowledge of genres and sub-genres will grow, as will your ability to pinpoint the most appropriate readership for your work.
Before submitting to any publication, a certain amount of research is undertaken by the writer. This is to ensure the work is submitted to a publication that is well-suited, which in turn will increase the likelihood it will get published. Submitting words of romance to a horror e-zine is a guaranteed gut-wrenching rejection unless your romance features shrieks of terror rather than love. Through the ongoing research and analysis that preludes each short story submission, your skill in identifying and categorising your own work, and the work of others, will increase.
Clarity when approaching narrative is only ever a good thing and will assist you later when considering which publishing house to pitch your novel to. An authorial persona is your professional brand. It is the idea that comes to people when they hear your name. An authorial persona is crafted by publications, your public personality and your online author presence. Short stories are a fantastic way to begin construction of your public author presence.
On the other hand, if being defined as a certain type of writer is exactly what you want, then you have the ability to build a persona entirely within one pocket of the market. Any positive authorial persona you create can aid you when seeking publication for your novel. Any author with an established public presence is a boon to publishing houses. Instead of having to start with nothing, you have provided them with an established professional platform and an already growing audience.
The novel and the short story: two opposing creative creatures that share more in common than most realise. Unfortunately, the short story is often disregarded by novelists as pointless, but instead it should be embraced, and regularly.
Narrative tools, skills, awareness, experiences and authorial identity are all transferable from short- to long-form fiction and can really maximise the potential of any novel. Short story writing provides novelists with a multitude of opportunities for creative and professional development, so why not try one today? Maggie Doonan is an emerging author of fiction and non-fiction. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts: Creative and Professional Writing with distinction and several publications online and in print.
For more on Maggie, check out her Facebook page here. Fantasy novels are well-known for including maps, more so It can be hard to sit down and start writing. Or maybe Also, I have a need for money. But that very rarely happens. With all that said, Mr. Orwell might have summed it up best. In his essay , he listed what he believed to be the four great motives for writing :.
Sheer egoism. To be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups in childhood, etc. Aesthetic enthusiasm. To take pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Historical impulse. The desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity. Political purposes. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.
While every author seemed to have a slightly different motive for writing, they all appear compelled to tell us stories, a burning desire to get something out and share it with the world.
Whether you are an avid reader or a writer Why We Write is an insightful work which allows you the chance to visit the minds of some of the most successful authors of our time.
Also check out our post on the extremely prolific writer Isaac Asimov and maybe improve your professional writing by taking the advice of Steven Pinker. Whether you choose to adapt or, as I like to say, "translate" your novel into a film, something I did a webinar on last weekend, or write a new story from scratch as a screenplay, you'll find very quickly that screenwriting teaches you to write the strongest story possible in a short amount of time.
This exercise then forces you to see what makes your story strong and then gives you a place where you can enhance those areas even further. In screenwriting, we use the phrase "get in late, get out early," which essentially asks all writers to enter a scene as late as possible and to end the scene as soon as possible. This forces screenwriters to maximize their time on screen and use it as efficiently as they can. While I a strict adherence to this rule can often feel robotic, even if you don't stick to writing perfect two to three-page scenes, screenwriting forces you to maximize your time in a scene so that you are only using the most powerful parts.
Novel writing often involves a lot of build up or exposition and while those traits and fine and often quite effective in novels, screenwriting calls the writer to only choose moments that move the plot forward or reveal information about character. The more you are forced to practice doing this — like in screenwriting — the better you'll be able to use these same tools in your novel writing, always considering whether or not the chapter you're writing serves a purpose or whether it's just there because you like the idea of it.
A problem I know I deal with all the time in my prose! So if you find that your scenes aren't memorable or that they leave readers feeling like something is missing, consider how writing a screenplay every now and then might sharpen up your scene writing tools.
Speaking of maximizing time, when you write a screenplay, you have to write sentences that at first may make the descriptive and flowery writer in you cry, but with a bit of practice, you'll see that screenwriting challenges you to convey a ton of information in the least amount of words possible. Think about characters, for example.
In a novel, you can spend pages and pages describing the backstory of your character, their internal struggles, and their various relationships. Of course, a lot of prose writers will dissuade novelists from doing this, saying it's "telling" instead of showing," but I am one of the few people who believe novels are all about telling and therefore love to read about backstories in a novel.
It's why I love fables and magical realism so much! But my opinions aside, whether you think explaining backstories is good or not in a novel, the possibility to do so is always there. However, in screenwriting, even if you wanted to, you can't really describe a character in ten pages.
Instead, you must describe them in one sentence, maybe two at most. Again, always being efficient can be boring, but if you're struggling with dawdling plot points in your novels, jumping over to screenwriting for a bit is going to force you to convey information in as a few words as possible. At first, this might feel very limiting, but over time you'll come to see that this constraint on the number of words you can dedicate to information makes you even more creative as a writer, not less, because you have to rethink every word and its value in a sentence.
If novels are about telling — say what you will, you have to use words to tell a story in a novel — then screenwriting is all about showing. While some exposition in the screenwriting world can be expressed via dialogue, it has to be done so in a subtle way that doesn't just explain things to the viewer. Though that might work in a novel, unless you're Ferris Bueller, if your characters begin to relate backstory and exposition all through dialogue it starts to feel like the story is spelling things out on screen for the audience and gets boring very quickly.
To novelists, that might seem hard. As you begin to write more and more scripts, you'll find you can convey a lot with the way someone gestures or what your character looks and when they do so. Plot matters, of course it matters, but it is always subservient to language.
Plot takes the backseat in a good story because what happens is never as interesting as how it happens. And how it happens occurs in the way language captures it and the way our imaginations transfer that language into action. So give me music then, young maestro, please.
Make it occur the way nobody ever made it occur before. Stop time. Celebrate it. Demolish it. Slow the clock down so that the tick of each and every second lasts an hour or more. Take leaps into the past. Put backspin on your memory. Be in two or three places at one time. Destroy speed and position. Make just about anything happen. Maybe in this day and age we are diseased by plot. So, unbloat your plot.
Listen for the quiet line. Anyone can tell a big story, yes, but not everyone can whisper something beautiful in your ear. In the world of film we need motivation leading to action, but in literature we need contradiction leading to action, yes, but also leading to inaction. Nothing better than a spectacular piece of inaction. Nothing more effective than your character momentarily paralysed by life. The greatest novel ever written has very little apparent plot. A cuckold walks around Dublin for 24 hours.
No shootouts, no cheap shots, no car crashes though there is a biscuit tin launched through the air. Instead it is a vast compendium of human experience. Punctuation matters. Full stops. They scaffold your words. Should a writer know her grammar? Yes, she should. Parentheses in fiction draw far too much attention to themselves. Never finish a sentence with an at.
Grammar changes down through the years: just ask Shakespeare or Beckett or the good folks at the New Yorker. The language of the street eventually becomes the language of the schoolhouse. So much depends, as William Carlos Williams might have said, upon the red wheelbarrow — especially if the barrow itself stands solitary at the end of the line. But then again, a sentence can be over-examined. Good grammar can slow a sentence — or indeed a wheelbarrow — down.
The perfect run-along of words can sound so stiff. Every now and then we have to disregard the serial comma, or leave our participles dangling, even in the rudest way.
Sometimes we make a mistake on purpose. And the question is: would you rather be the ornithologist or the bird? Writers feel the grammar rather than knowing it. This comes from good reading. If you read enough, the grammar will come. Research is the bedrock of nearly all good writing, even poetry. We have to know the world beyond our own known world. We have to be able to make a leap into a life or a time or a geography that is not immediately ours.
Often we will want to write out of gender, race, time. This requires deep research. Yes, Google helps, but the world is so much deeper than Google. So go down to the library. Check out the catalogues. Go to the map division. Unlock the boxes of photographs. If you want to know a life different from your own, you better try to meet it at least halfway. Get out in the street. Talk to people. Show interest. Learn how to listen. You must find the divine detail: and the more specific the detail, the better.
William Gass — the American author who says quite beautifully that a writer finds himself alone with all that might happen — once suggested, while invoking Maupassant, that we should never mention an ashtray unless we are swiftly able to make it the only one in the world. Please remember that mishandling your research is also your potential downfall. At times we can pollute our texts with too much of the obvious.
It is often a good thing to have space instead so that we can fill it out with imaginative muscle. Always ask yourself: how much research is enough? Texture is much more important than fact. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. Failure is good. Failure admits ambition. Reach beyond yourself. The true daring is the ability to go to the postbox knowing that it will contain yet another rejection letter. Use it as wallpaper instead. Preserve it and reread it every now and then.
Know that in the years to come this rejection letter will be a piece of nostalgia. It will yellow and curl and you will remember what it once felt like to throw your words against what everyone presumed would be your silence.
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