Actually, that’s not true. If you’re doing this thing for a living, every day is a day for writing, no matter how bad the world gets.
But some days, current events don’t leave much room for chitchat and casual banter.
Stay safe, people, wherever you are.
One of the hardest things to do with first-person narration (apart from the problem of how to tell the reader about important things that happen where the POV character can’t see them) is describing the narrator’s appearance. With third person, it’s relatively easy — you can slip in a detail here and a detail there as the opportunity arises, or you can say the heck with subtlety and provide a couple of descriptive sentences about the character shortly after he or she is introduced. But with first person, you’re not just following the character around and eavesdropping on their thoughts when it’s convenient. You’re inside their head all the time . . . and most people, unless they’re either really vain or really insecure, don’t spend that much time thinking about the fact that they have, say, brown hair and hazel eyes and a nose that’s just slightly crooked because they broke it falling off a seesaw back in second grade.
So what can you do?
Well, you can always not bother with physical description of your first person narrator. It’s surprising, really, how irrelevant brown hair and hazel eyes are to a lot of story lines. (For the story lines where they are relevant, the narrator will tell you about them — in fact, if he or she thinks that the crooked nose and the unexceptional hair and eye color are why they are still tragically without a date for the senior prom, they are probably not going to shut up about it.)
But what you don’t do (and don’t do it with third person narrators, either) is have your first-person narrator look at themselves in a mirror and describe what they’re seeing. And for “mirror” read also lake, pond, mud puddle, silver bowl, shop window, the eyes of the beloved, or any other reflective surface. Because that has been done.
Doesn’t anybody know how to use the past perfect any more?
(I’m reading slush these days, along with everything else. All aspiring writers should do some slush reading if they get the chance. It’s an enlightening experience, and far more entertaining than, say, grading freshman essays, which I’ve also done in my time. Even the worst slush in the world was written by somebody who actively wanted to be putting words on paper, or pixels on screen; even the very best freshman essays, on the other hand, have a certain forced, gun-to-the-temple quality about them. Also, when you’re reading slush, once you get to the point where you’re convinced that a piece is hopeless, you can stop. With freshman essays, there’s no such release.)
Any writer who’s ever tried to put together a proposal package for an editor or an agent knows the unpleasant truth: Writing a proposal sucks. You have to make up a summary version of something that you’re telling at novel length because you haven’t got any way to say it that’s shorter; and you have to put the prose equivalent of false eyelashes and fishnet stockings onto something that is — you devoutly hope — subtle and understated, or at least is naturally flashy and dazzling and not some tasteless imitation of the real thing.
Take heart. And consider the example of Herman Melville, who in 1850 wrote to his English publisher:
“In the latter part of the coming autumn I shall have ready a new work; and I write you now to propose its publication in England. The book is a romance of adventure, founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries, and illustrated by the author’s own personal experience, of two years & more, as a harpooneer. Should you be inclined to undertake the book, I think that it will be worth to you 200 pounds.. Could you be positively put in possession of the copyright, it might be worth to you a larger sum — considering its great novelty; for I do not know that the subject treated of has ever been worked up by a romancer; or, indeed, by any writer, in any adequate manner.”
This is an effective proposal — the publisher in question bought the book. Consider what it does: It lets the publisher know when the projected work is going to be finished; it describes the nature of the book in terms of how it would appeal to the reading public (it’s a “romance of adventure” in an exotic setting — “the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries”); it lets the publisher know of the author’s special qualification through personal experience “of two years & more”; it demonstrates that the author can think of the project in commercial terms and is willing to negotiate.
Wisely, the proposal doesn’t say, as Melville later did when he wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne:
This is the book’s motto (the secret one), Ego non baptizo te in nomine – but make out the rest yourself.†
Melville didn’t enjoy the commercial side of writing (“Dollars damn me,” he wrote — to Nathaniel Hawthorne, again; the long-suffering Hawthorne deserves a gold star) but he could make himself do it when he had to. And if he could, so can we.
†Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli — “I do not baptize you in the name of the father, but in the name of the devil.” It’s one of Captain Ahab’s memorable lines from Moby-Dick.
If you’ve got a character speaking a line of dialogue and also performing an action, don’t get into the habit of always putting the action into a participial phrase tacked on after the dialogue tag:
“This is an important announcement,” she said, taking her place at the podium and opening her notebook.
No. It needs to be either:
“This is an important announcement.” She took her place at the podium and opened her notebook.
or
She took her place at the podium and opened her notebook. “This is an important announcement.”
Save the participial phrases for occasions when the dialogue and the action are truly simultaneous:
“Listen up, people!” she snapped, slamming the notebook down on the podium.
or when the action’s mostly a bit of stage business, there for characterization or setting-establishment or pacing:
“Listen up, people,” she said, shooing away a moth that was trying to fly into the Coleman lantern.
(Who gets to decide what’s important and what’s stage-dressing? You do. It’s your story. Just remember to keep on listening to what it’s telling you. And remember, audiences like variation.)
We roasted a leg of lamb for Easter dinner. It would have been a half-leg of lamb — which is more in line with the number of people in the house these days — but the grocery store didn’t have any half-legs left by the time we did our shopping, so a whole leg of lamb it was. We stabbed it with a knife and put in slivers of garlic, then laid rosemary sprigs on top of it and cooked it at 325F for 25 minutes per pound, and served it up with mint sauce and roasted potatoes and asparagus in hollandaise.
The potatoes and the asparagus are gone, along with the hollandaise, but we’ve still got half the lamb in the refrigerator, and now I’m thinking about leftovers. Lamb sandwiches, probably, and maybe a shepherd’s pie.
It isn’t just cooking that has me thinking about leftovers. Writing jobs have leftovers, too — the paths the story tried to take that turned out to be dead ends; the bits of other as-yet-unwritten stories that cropped up in the current project by mistake; the occasional perfectly good, yes-it-really-happened scene that nevertheless had to be excised from the finished text because it slowed things down at a point when they needed to be moving fast, or because it threw unwanted emphasis on something that needed to be kept in the background, or because the book had a firm word count requirement and was already threatening to run long.
But the dead-end paths and the outcroppings of other narratives can often be reworked into fully realized stories in their own right. In fact, their appearance in a story where they don’t fit can often mean that your subconscious muse is telling you something about what your next project ought to be. As for those snippets that were removed in the service of the greater good — it used to be, there wasn’t much a writer could do with them except put the pages away in a desk drawer with a sigh of regret, but the internet has helped us with that as it has helped us with so many other things. Those snippets can now be posted on a novel’s web page as extra treats for faithful readers, or turned into Kickstarter rewards, or compiled into a self-published chapbook and put up for sale by the author.
So don’t throw out those leftovers, any more than you’d throw out a perfectly good half-eaten leg of lamb.
Sometimes I fantasize about having the ideal desk. It’s nice and solid, in oak or cherry or some other polished hardwood, and it puts my monitor at just the right height, and it’s got three or four proper-sized drawers that I can put things away in . . . something rather like this one, in fact, which I would buy in a heartbeat if I had all the money in the world.
Since I don’t have all the money in the world, I’m still using the same particle-board desk my husband/co-author and I bought as one of a pair in a 2-for-1 sale at K-Mart the year we took up this freelance writing gig. It’s not even a little bit ergonomic — the computer magazines were only just starting to take up that idea — and it’s ugly as a mud fence plastered with tapoles (to use an idiom of my youth), and so far it has proven damn-near indestructible.
Taking a sledgehammer to it would be cheating.
I tell myself that with a new desk, a proper desk, I would experience a sudden efflorescence of creative enthusiasm. I know better than that, alas. The quality of the desk has little or nothing to do with the quality of the writing. I did a lot of very good work during the five-year span where I had my computer and printer set up on a table in the kitchen where I could keep an eye on the front door — that being the time period when the two younger children had learned how to work the latch on the front door but had not yet attained the discretion necessary to not go out and play in traffic.
Nevertheless, a writer can dream.
Anybody who writes for money is going to become, perforce, an expert in the types and levels of rejection.
There’s the generic form rejection, which usually reads something on the order of “Your manuscript does not meet our needs at the present time” — which may on rare occasions mean “Your story was so bad it made our eyeballs bleed” but which usually means nothing more than what it says. Your manuscript didn’t meet their current needs, whatever those needs may have been. Maybe they bought a story similar to yours just last week; maybe your story was an awkward length and they already have enough stories of that length in inventory to keep them supplied for a year; maybe you happened by chance to write upon a subject that gives the editor hives. Or maybe your perfectly competent story just didn’t quite push the editor’s “Buy This One!” button.
(That last is a dreadful stage to be at in one’s writing career, by the way. It’s like perpetually getting B-plusses and never quite getting an A; it’s like watching everybody else in your high-school class get asked out on dates while you’re spending your Saturday nights at home with a good book. A lot of aspiring writers give up at this point. A lot of others turn bitter and morose, and are left unable to enjoy themselves when they finally do make that first sale. The only consolation to be had is that everybody who’s eventually sold their writing has gone through this stage first.)
Then there’s the personalized and encouraging rejection, wherein the editor takes a minute or so from a busy schedule to add something like “Keep on writing!” or “Try us again with your next.” These notes are good and flattering things. The wise aspirant doesn’t take them as an invitation to initiate a personal correspondence,† but files them away in the “Attaboy!” (or “Attagirl!,” as appropriate) folder to take out and contemplate on those grey and rainy afternoons of the soul that writers are so often prone to.
Then there’s the rejection letter with specific suggestions: “Shorten this by 500 words and I’ll give it another look” or “This isn’t really our sort of thing, but you might consider sending it to Anne Editor over at Marketable Magic Realism.” In those cases — for heaven’s sake, don’t be dense. Shorten the story and resubmit, or send it over to Marketable Magic Realism post haste with a note in the cover letter to the effect of “Joe Editor over at Rivetty SF suggested I send this to you.”
Maybe you don’t think your story was magic realism; maybe you think it was hard sf. (You’d read Rivetty‘s submission guidelines, after all; that much of a newbie you aren’t.) And maybe you’re right. But editors make their reputations by knowing how readers are going to see these things, and Marketable Magic Realism‘s checks clear just as well as those from Rivetty SF Stories. Take the money and run.
†Really, don’t. The last thing you want to do is inadvertently consign yourself to some editor’s Creepy Stalker file.
Found while looking through my bookmarks the other day, a blog post from back in 2010 talking about something even earlier:
A (personalized and encouraging) rejection letter from William Dean Howells, in 1900.
I don’t know if Howells also had a stack of pre-printed “your manuscript does not meet our needs at the present time” letters, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find out that he did.
As of this week, we’re roughly halfway through the application season for the Viable Paradise workshop.
If you’re planning to apply, now is a good time to do it; there’s always a big rush of applications at the very end.
(In the interest of full disclosure, I’m one of the eight instructors at Viable Paradise; this year’s full set also includes James D. Macdonald, Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Elizabeth Bear, Sherwood Smith, Steve Gould, and Steven Brust.)
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