Quote #1 – You miss 100% of the shots you never take.

“You miss 100% of the shots you never take.”

– Wayne Gretsky

My interpretation for writing:

If you find an opportunity to submit a piece of work (short story, novel, article etc) the only way that you might find success is by taking the shot and submitting it.

There is a legitimate time and place for making another draft / edit (for example, after it’s been critiqued) or researching the right market.

But to not submit it, to not try – to not take the shot – out of a fear of failure / ridicule / rejection, I think is just an excuse.

I also think that as artists we have a responsibility to bring our chosen art to the world – for all of those people who don’t have the freedom to do so.

So if you’re someone who has a piece that is ready to submit for publication, but you haven’t taken the shot yet, just think about the reason why you haven’t and if it’s a legitimate one.

Consider the quote again – “You miss 100% of the shots you never take.”

Remember this: if you take the shot, you have a chance to win.

But if you’re still not convinced…go and watch the Braveheart speech on YouTude. 🙂

Blog improvements

On this bright bank holiday Monday morning, I thought I’d share with everyone the improvements that I’ve made to this blog.

Blog improvements:

– added comments to all past and future posts (I had previously thought if I did this the blog would get inudated with spam, but after seeing a few other writing blogs with spam free comments I thought I’d give it a go!)

– created 5 more categories and correctly categorised all posts

– added a widget to search posts via category

– added a widget for inputting email address to follow this blog

– added a widget that listed the past 10 blog entries (for easier navigation than endless vertical scrolling)

– removed the side-bar containing quotes (as it didn’t really work how I wanted it to)

Work in the pipeline:

– I’ll be starting a series of posts concerning the editing of stories, with each post being copied into a new page “Editing Checklist”

– I’ll be starting a series of posts concerning the various research and reference materials that I’ve come across on a new page “Research and reference”

– I’ll be starting a series of posts about how famous / not so famous quotes relate to the world of writing, with each post being copied into a new page “Quote Advice”

Why a writer writes…

I was talking with a mate recently, and he mentioned that someone who works in his company has the idea of quitting by the time they’re 40 so that they could write full-time. However, my mate couldn’t understand why the person had to wait that long.

I went on to explain that at a guess, roughly 95% of all writers have at least a part-time job, if not a full-time job and can only write in their spare time. The reason for this I said was that in the majority of cases there simply isn’t the money in the industry to allow more writers to work full-time.

This reminded me of when I was at university studying fitness, at the end of my first year and wasn’t sure if I wanted to continue the course (due to various reasons, including getting interested / motivated in my writing) and so I went to speak with the head of the creative writing department. The lady I spoke with assured me all of the writing lecturers were writers themselves, but had to have a full-time position to pay the bills.

I therefore explained to my mate that writers write because we feel that we have something to say, or that there’s some experience that we want to pass on to other people so that they can learn from the writer’s life. Or simply that the writer wants to create something that sparks a reaction in the reader, whether that be, happiness, sadness, joy, fear, trepidation, elation, etc)

So basically I think it’s important to keep the intention of a piece in mind when writing it, because it can assist in steering the piece in the right direction. Although oddly enough, there’s been many times when I’ve had ideas for stories where I’m left thinking what’s the point in this story, but then later as I continue to work on it, meaning is revealed to me. From this point the direction of the story changes and the writing becomes more focused.

Progress update on short story ‘Shaving’

For the past two weeks I’ve been re-editing the 9th draft – no, I’m not joking, I’ve written nine drafts over nine years for a short story that for the purposes of this blog I’ll title, Shaving.

I decided to re-edit this draft after creating an email submission to an online science fiction magazine, and realised that I needed to ensure that the formatting had carried over correctly from my Word document and that it maintained the requirements that the magazine wanted. I submitted this draft to two magazines earlier in the year and I thought that I might as well try to tighten the story at the same time as submitting the story again.

Whilst proofing the formatting in the email I once again began to notice certain things. I found that there were still a few instances where it was possible to make the prose tighter by reducing word count through saying something with fewer words and getting the same meaning. Also, this was the first time that I noticed that there were two instances where the point of view (POV) switched from my main character (MC) to the supporting character (SC). I honestly have no idea how I didn’t realise this before, but it woke me up to yet another item to be added to my editing check list. I needed to keep the POV on the MC as he and his thoughts are the focus of the story, not the SC’s.

Each draft of this story has been different than the one before. My experience and abilites have increased year-on-year so that when I come back to the story I’ve been able to find solutions to problems that had dogged earlier drafts.

I submitted the 3rd, 5th and 8th drafts to the online writing group that I’ve been a member of for over 10 years on-and-off. This writing group is called “Critters” at this address – http://critters.org/ and I can’t rate it high enough. The feedback I received each time inspired me to create an altogether different story for the next draft.

The 6th draft was submitted to five magazines with no success. However, it was not fruitless. One editor gave two sentences of feedback that made me re-think some important aspects of the story, notably being too dialogue driven and a lack of connection with the reader. I took this feedback, this constructive criticism and embraced the message. I re-read the story with new eyes and saw what the editor saw.

I suppose what I’m trying to say, is that although I’ve being working on this story for a very long time, it’s gotten better with each draft and that feedback is very important in the development and progression of a story and should be actively sought whenever possible.

Journal entry from 2009 about the province of the fiction writer

I found this in my journal from 2009. I think I better place a copyright warning here as I can’t be totally sure that I wrote it myself or obtained it from a source unknown.

“It is not the province of the fiction writer to extol the virtues or lambaste the vices of a particular culture or society, but rather to allow the story to speak to the reader unbridled, giving them the opportunity to make up their own minds. In short: it is to ask questions, not answer them.”

My letter published in April 2013 issue of ‘Writing Magazine’

The increase in self-publishing fiction in recent years has me feeling rather unsettled. For me, as an aspiring science fiction writer, as much as I’d like for other people to read my work I feel that it’s more important for it to go through the traditional route of quality control through magazine editors and publishers. This route would mean that my peers, who would be well versed and experienced within the industry, have judged my work and found my stories to be of a good quality and add something to the field and society. By negating this quality checking I might not realise for example, that my story was actually a re-hash of one told better 20 years ago. I’ve personally had a rejection letter with constructive criticism that caused me to re-draft the short story and the overall quality has been vastly improved as it lead me to explore different avenues and question the message I was trying construct and way in which I did it. I wonder if in the years to come, the credibility of authors will become suspect due to an over abundance of poor quality work where the authors weren’t helped by editors and readers might not have the ability to filter truly unique writing from copy-cat stories.

http://www.writers-online.co.uk

Aims of my writing

Whilst on the Arvon Foundation short-story writing course in 2009, one of the tasks we completed was to write down the aims of our writing, or what we would like someone to think of our writing. The below is what I came up with at the time:

I’d like my writing to have:-

> the humour of Robert A. Heinlein
> the bizarreness of Philip K. Dick
> the drama of David Weber
> the prophecy of Arthur C. Clarke
> the inventivenes of Isaac Asimov
> the scope of Frank Herbert
> the realism of Joe Haldeman

I suppose that part of this task was to help us find our own voice, perhaps even our style. But overall, I think it was to get us to think about what type of writer / the kind of writing we wanted to do. I think that knowing any amount of this will help to provide focus, motivation and confidence in one’s writing endeavours.

Looking at this list now, I think I would adjust it a little bit. But overall, I still think that it sums up at least partially, how I want my writing to aim towards.

Thoughts on “The Left Hand of Darkness” by Ursula K. Leguin

I recently read ‘The left hand of darkness’ by Ursula K. Leguin, and this story I think is a great example of one of the core purposes of science fiction: social commentary. This story to me spoke about how we as humans identify ourselves through our gender. The male / female dualism of the species in the story highlights how we interact with each other and where those interactions come from. Identity, I think, forms a large part of person’s life journey: discovering who you are and what you want, are two of the most important and difficult questions anyone can ask of themselves. This story clearly showed an alternate lifestyle, way of life, motivations and relationships – all derived from a different mixture of intersex relations. I felt that this had the power to make a reader re-evaluate their lifestyle, way of life, relationships and motivations that root themselves in the separation and distinction of the two sexes.

“And so it begins…” – Kosh, Babylon 5

This is the first of what I hope to be many posts about my writing endeavours. I currently intend for this blog not be a running commentary of my life in general, but rather, those aspects that relate to the writing.

I confess to being a noob, when it comes to blog sites, and it took me some time to make some decisions: should I have a blog, which site should host it, what will I write about, et cetera.

Now that I’ve begun a blog it’s going to take me some time to get to grips with the format and mechanisms of this site. So like a pilot episode to a main series episode – this blog will change quite a bit in the short-term until I find my way and a stable format.