Learning to (Re)Write

I've taken a long hiatus from this blog, in part because things have been so busy, but also in part because I was thinking long and hard about what I wanted to do with this space.

Do I want to write about writing regularly?

I could, but that would be hard, since I don't write full-time. I have a day job, and in fact love the balance I have between working 8-5 and coming home and writing fiction if I feel like it. The blog, consequently, was going to be part-time as well.

Do I want to write about writing at all?

Of course! And not just to share when I've made sales, but I really want this blog to be a part-time space where I get people thinking about the act of creating.

So Janet, what's new since you last posted?

Let's make this the topic of this post!

The exciting news is I now have two published sales. The first sale, "Chance Encounters" to On Spec, can be purchased as an ebook through their website. The second sale was to EDGE Publishing Tesseract's series, for Tesseracts 18: Wrestling with Gods. My story, "A Cut and a Prayer", is near the beginning of a very fantastic book of fiction about faith, doubt, science fiction, and fantasy. You can find it in bookstores, on Amazon, etc. (The links to both stories are in the tab of my Published Works above.)

I've had a few very tantalizing nibbles since then, but nothing has panned out to an actual sale. The Story-That-Everyone-Likes-But-No-One-Buys received glowing feedback on its last submission, of a kind I would be floored to receive in an actual review, but so far still no dice. A few more professional markets are temporarily open right now, and I'm frantically trying to send it off one at a time in hopes an editor will eventually snag it.

Mostly, I've noticed my stories are away on submission longer than they used to be. So far this year I have had 3 submissions go over 170 days, one of which I just mentioned above. The other two are still out, and market related. Still, even the submissions that came back sooner are seemingly making the next round of cuts; instead of returning after 3-5 days, they stay out for more than 20.

As a measure of progress, I'll take it. I don't plan on doing this full-time, so for the part-time work I put into it, having improved success with my writing over the year thus far is encouraging.

Goals for 2015

Improving my writing really is my long-term goal for 2015. In addition to my stories staying out longer, I am starting to receive consistent feedback on a few annoying things I do wrong in stories. Which is not to say it happens in all of them. But when I mess up, it tends to be because of extensive exposition.

I'm a technical writer by trade my day job. My job is to take the shortest amount of time to sit someone down in text, and explain something to them so they understand it. This habit tends to bleed into my fiction writing, particularly when I'm building a complicated world. In short fiction, you don't have time for exposition. It's a nuisance that breaks the narrative flow of the story. I'm trying to learn, now, to blend exposition into dialogue (minimally), into the very structure of the plot itself, so the story naturally teaches as it goes.

It's not how you would write a briefing email, obviously. There's no story in a briefing note. It's the details, the hard facts, ma'am. But fiction isn't a briefing note. It's a story, and even the hard facts have to blend into that.

About that novel ...

The biggest impact this style revision has had is on my novel-in-progress learning experience. I had sent it off a year ago for some editorial feedback, and it was the first time anyone flagged the exposition issue in any of my stories. I had planned on just going through and fixing up the narrative, then working with the story as it was. He had also, however, pointed out a few plot things, which really started me thinking.

In a longer work, exposition works at the structural level the same way it does in a short story. Just because you have more time and more words, doesn't mean you need to write any less concise.

I made a crazy decision. I did some brainstorming with a couple people who have read the story and liked it. I pulled out the essential nuggets of what made the story: characters, setting, motivations. And I started over. Not just a re-writing of style, but a completely different story.

Because part of what I realized when I did the brainstorming, and part of what I had been thinking about for months, was that although the story was good, I had the writing skills now to make it even better. Why settle for mediocre when you are a perfectionist, and you have been told ways to improve something?

A few people have told me the act of completely re-writing from scratch would terrify them, or it would be too daunting, but truthfully I'm excited. I started life as a fanfiction writer, and one of the joys of fanfiction is taking a story and expanding on it, building in someone's universe, to tell amazing stories. I have the joy of doing the same with my own world. I can take the characters and the story, remove the lame bits, and paint it so it's bright and colourful and every word is full of awesome.

The novel as it was, was a trunk novel. It was good, but it wouldn't sell. As a first attempt writing a novel, I'm also proud I did as good as I did. This new version, I want to be proud because it won't make amateur mistakes. It's going to do things right, and then if I send it and it gets rejected, it'll be on its content and preference, rather than because I had so much more to learn.

I don't really have a timeline for when I want this re-write to happen. Like most of my writing, my brain goes through periods where I want to read, and periods where I want to write. The output period isn't happening yet, and I know better than to rush it. But I've been making draft notes, outlines, etc. When I'm ready to put words to paper, it'll all be there waiting for me.

How is everyone else's writing going lately?