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.

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

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.