Bev Vincent

I once put a Nobel Laureate to sleep.

I grew up in a rural part of a sparsely populated province in eastern Canada. I only knew of famous people through books and television. I never thought I would get to rub arms with a celebrity or talk to someone famous. Even after I moved to Halifax to attend university, I felt like I was at the edge of the universe. We thought we hit the big times when Supertramp or Chris de Burgh came to town. Someone like Elton John would never venture so far off the beaten track.

My first encounter with celebrity took place when I was working for the town newspaper in northern New Brunswick for a summer job. The mill wasn’t hiring students any more (it has since closed). I was a cub reporter, in effect. Taking notes at town council meetings and snapping pictures during the summer festival. Sitting in on court sessions. Then came the Royal Visit: Prince Charles and Princess Diana came to town, of all places. It was a fleeting visit, but everyone in town turned out. A couple of my fellow reporters got press credentials, but I didn’t. I was in the crowd with everyone else, and I got to shake Diana’s hand. (Turns out, the reporters with press credentials were cordoned off in a different area and didn’t even get close. My lucky day!) It was one of those heart-pounding moments when time seems to stand still. It was over twenty years ago, and I remember it like it was yesterday.

When I went to graduate school, my thesis adviser arranged a visit by his former adviser, who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1964. She was well into her seventies when she came to our university. Still sharp, but in a wheel chair some of the time. My adviser put me in his little closet of an office with her for an hour so I could tell her all about my research. It was a warm summer day. The room grew stifling. She nodded off. I was a nervous wreck, prattling on about alkylammonium  hexachlorostannates. I was convinced she didn’t hear more than a few words of what I said, but she later told my adviser she thought I was “sharp.”

Being in science, you tend to meet up with famous people at conventions (I met Linus Pauling at one), and as you work your way up the academic ladder, but it’s still always a little strange.

Shortly after I came to Texas in 1987, I heard that Stephen King was going to be signing in Houston. I took a Greyhound bus 120 miles each way to attend the event. Only chance I’ll ever get, I thought at the time. My wife got me tickets to see Ray Bradbury when he was in town a bunch of years ago. One of my all-time favorite writers. Never in a zillion years growing up in eastern Canada did I ever expect I’d get to shake his hand and have my picture taken with him.

Since I started writing and publishing in 1999, I’ve gotten to meet and become friends with a number of authors and other celebrities. It always seems surreal. My nerves still get the better of me.

As I write this, I’m battling nerves yet again. For my current project, I’ve had to interview quite a few people. You’d probably recognize some of the names. Today as I write this (the day before this post goes live), if all goes according to plan, I’ll be interviewing an Academy Award winning screenwriter. It’s a daunting proposition. To top things off, our home phone decided to act up this morning, adding to my stress level. Tomorrow, again if everything goes according to plan—these are very busy people and schedules can get changed on a moment’s notice—I will be interviewing an actor-turned-director whose name you would undoubtedly recognize.

OK, this doesn’t have very much to do with writing—except that many of these opportunities came my way because of writing projects or writing conferences. With an April 1 deadline for my next book, and all these interviews to conduct and transcribe and incorporate into the book, I don’t have much spare time to write an essay for Storytellers Unplugged this month.

Except, as I see, I sort of accidentally did.

– By Bev Vincent

There’s a legend that Stephen King’s mother, acknowledging his need to please people, told him that if he were a girl, he’d always be pregnant.

I can relate.

After struggling to get noticed as a writer for a number of years, people have started asking me to contribute to projects that I would never have heard of once upon a time. I get invitations to write stories for closed anthologies, or to write essays for fun projects like the Book of the Month Club calendar I contributed to last year. I almost always say yes.

Generally those projects don’t happen all at once, so it’s not a problem. Every now and then, though, all the chickens come home to roost at the same time. My project calendar starts to get crowded, with different projects competing for the same precious few hours each week.

I’m in the midst of one of those times right now. Every time I think I see the light at the end of the tunnel, I take stock of what I still have left to do and realize that the crisis is not yet over.

I’m not complaining—that would be silly. I got myself into this fix, after all, and I’ll get myself out of it. It’s partly about prioritizing—but it’s also about living up to commitments. If I have to stay up all night, I’ll hit all my deadlines, and not only turn something in, but turn in the best work I possibly can. That’s just the way I roll. It would bother me to no end to do otherwise.

The main cause of my current situation is a big project that I’ve been working on for most of 2009. The one that I talked about last month, for a book packager. January and February were taken up with principal writing, and the manuscript arrived back on my doorstep about 10 days ago with editorial changes and a short deadline. At the time, I was trying to write a short story for the next Mystery Writers of America anthology, which had a March 15th deadline. I haven’t been writing much fiction lately, so getting back into the groove of producing a short story worthy of such a fine publication would be a challenge at the best of times. Losing out on several working days added to the problem.

In this case, prioritization was easy. The big project had a contract attached to it and a decent payday. The MWA story was on spec and wasn’t something I’d committed to (other than to myself, and I’m an understanding guy). It stands a very good chance of not being accepted. So guess which squeaky wheel got the grease?

As it turns out, something lucky happened—my deadline for the MWA anthology got extended by several days, which gave me enough time to finish my story and get it in the mail. But if push came to shove, I was willing to purse my lips and concede that there simply weren’t enough hours in the day to get it done.

But that’s all in the past now. This essay is being written in a hotel room 200 miles from home two days before it’s due. I like to get these essays done at least a few days early so I can prune them down, but not this month. There may be warts in this one. Sorry. Because of day-job work commitments I’ve had to do a lot of work in hotel rooms lately.

What next? I have another essay and a short story due at the end of the month, two book reviews due in mid-April and three other essays due not long after that, along with another short story. All of these are things that I’ve promised, so they’re going to happen, come hell or high water. There’s a very real chance that I’ll get another set of editorial notes from the downstream editor on the book packager project, however, so I have to be flexible.

More than anything else, though, for the time being, if you ask me to do something that would be due before the end of May, there’s every chance that I’ll have to do the unthinkable: say no.

The word doesn’t come easily to me, though, so if you catch me in a moment of weakness, there’s a very good possibility that I’ll say yes, of course I will.

– Bev Vincent

(With apologies to Lawrence Block for co-opting and modifying the title of his most excellent book about writing fiction)

Much of what we write about at Storytellers Unplugged has to do with the world of fiction: short stories, novels, screenplays, video games, etc. Today I’d like to spend a little time discussing how everything you know about marketing fiction is the exact opposite of the way things are usually done in the non-fiction world.

Can you imagine the response you’d get if you sent a query letter to an editor that said, in effect: I have a great idea for a short story that I’d like to sell to you. Here  is what the story will be about. Would you buy this idea so I can start writing the story?

If you received any response at all to this query, it probably wouldn’t be very encouraging—and perhaps not printable in this blog. With fiction you write, then you sell. For non-fiction, you sell, then you write.

Non-fiction projects are typically sold via a proposal. Before I started shopping around my idea for The Road to the Dark Tower, I researched the process. At the back of Jeff Herman’s Guide to Book Publishers, Editors, & Literary Agents, I found a valuable resource:  a section titled “The Knockout Non-fiction Book Proposal.”

Armed with his advice and the template from his book, I created my own 50-page proposal, which consisted of the following. Except where noted, each item was approximately one to three pages long, double spaced.

• Title page. There was every chance that the proposed title wouldn’t survive the editorial/marketing process, but I gave the title a lot of thought just the same.
• Project overview. The overall concept, with snippets of the rest of the proposal distilled into a punchy pitch letter.
• Author bio. This wasn’t simply a CV or a list of previous publications. It was where I explained (in third person) why I was the ideal person to write this book, as opposed to someone else. What relevant resources and connections I had, along with other work that pertained to the subject matter at hand. Though I listed fiction publications at the end, the focus was on my non-fiction experience. (In response to this section, I was susequently asked to submit recent copies of my Cemetery Dance column.)
• Market analysis. Why did the book need to exist? Who was the target audience and how could I tap into it? I used the demographics and sales figures for King books to bolster my argument, for example. In general, this is also a place to list other books that covered the topic and why the proposed book was different or better, but in my case my book was going to be the first on the subject, so I emphasized that fact.
• Promotion: This section allowed me to outline any connections I had to the target audience that could be used to help promote the book. This was also where I demonstrated my enthusiasm for the project by stating clearly that I would be available for interviews, appearances or any other duty the publisher might request. In addition, I named people who had already told me they would be willing to consider providing a blurb for the book, along with other likely candidates.
• Approach: My plan for the book – for example, writing style, source of material, the use of direct quotes, interviews, sidebars, etc.
• Table of contents: Even though I hadn’t written the book yet, I provided my outline of what I thought the book would look like, including chapter titles and appendices.
• Chapter by chapter expanded outline: My outline ran fifteen pages, with approximately a page devoted to each chapter. It didn’t summarize the chapters—it couldn’t, as I hadn’t written them yet—but it detailed the purpose of each chapter.
• Sample chapter: I included the full text of the first chapter of the book, which was the only part of the project I had written at this point. Approximately 25 pages.

I started with a query, as I might for a novel, and then followed up with the proposal. Once a publisher expressed interest, I was able to acquire representation from an agent and the negotiation went on from there.

Once we had a deal in place, all that remained was to write the darned thing.

Though the above pertains to a book-length work, the same concept is relevant to shorter works such as essays, book reviews and interviews. Pitch and sell the idea, then do the work. Otherwise you could spend a lot of time working on spec projectst that never get sold. The same is true, of course, in fiction–though some writers achieve enough success to be able to sell future works on proposals–but that’s just not the way the system works at present.

– Bev Vincent

I received a surprising e-mail a few weeks ago from a grade eleven student at a magnet school in Nashville. As part of an English class on critical thinking, their teacher had assigned them my short story “One of Those Weeks” from the anthology From the Borderlands (originally Borderlands 5).

This isn’t the first time one of my stories has been read in an English class, but it’s the first time where I have absolutely no association with the teacher, the students, or the school. A couple of years ago, I was invited to speak to the Creative Writing class at the local high school. My daughter graduated from that school, so I knew the teacher. There was a connection that led to that speaking gig. In that case, the class read “Harming Obsession,” and I enjoyed the opportunity to speak with them about the story and answer their questions. In this recent situation, however, I have no idea whatsoever what led the teacher to pick my story.

Here’s the part of the essay where I digress from my message and harp on something we repeat over and over, often without feeling like we’ve conveyed the message. From the Borderlands was a Time Warner paperback. I don’t know its sales figures, but it spent one glorious week on the USA Today Top 150 Books list, coming in at #82. I used to see the book in airports all the time, and even found it on the shelf at our local grocery store. In brief, it got serious distribution. I’d be willing to bet that more people saw this story than saw all of my other stories at that point combined. Though none of us got rich off that project, this was an instance of real exposure. An editor called me up to ask whether I had a novel.

And a class several states away studied my story in their class. The students were asked to come up with theories about the meaning of its ending. They presented numerous interpretations of the story, some of them intriguing to me because they certainly weren’t in my conscious mind when I wrote it—but whose to say that I wasn’t thinking that way at some level?

The student who volunteered to contact me believed it was possible that I had written the story primarily to create the type of discussion and thinking they were undertaking. That gave me a lot more credit than I was due—though I didn’t tell them that.

I was more than happy to take some time to respond to the e-mail and subsequent letter to discuss the story with the class. However, in formulating my answer, I discovered that the story meant something different to me now than it did at the time I wrote it. I identified a subtext that seemed obvious, but one that I’d never considered before.

My daughter is an English/Creative Writing major at university so, over the past few years, I’ve had the chance to read her essays on the subject of interpretation, and on the various intents of works. There is the author’s intent, and the interpretation that each reader assigns to the text, all equally valid, and finally there is the abstract notion of the story’s intent, as if it had a consciousness of its own. Until recently, I dismissed that concept as effete intellectualism, the realm of lit. crit. researchers looking for high-minded concepts to make themselves seem important.

By revisiting “One of Those Weeks” several years after it was written, edited, revised and published, I discovered that the story might indeed have its own intent as an entity separate from me, the author. One of the best encapsulations of the story I read came from a reviewer, who was able to summarize its essence in a cleverly crafted and insightful sentence. I liked that analysis so much that I’ve often used it when discussing the story.

However, in 2008, five years after the story first appeared, I see in it something completely different. Things that I’ve experienced in the interim opened my eyes to new interpretations of something I wrote before having those experiences. It still all sounds a little artsy-fartsy to me, but I’m more of a believer in the story as an abstract entity than before.

Try rereading some of your older works, even if you think you’re completely familiar with them. You might discover that your past self can send a message through time to your present self. It’s surprising and delightful when that happens.

 

 

– Bev Vincent

I have published something on the order of fifty short stories since I began writing seriously at the beginning of the millennium. Some of the early stories appeared in what are disparagingly referred to as “for the love” (or “4theLuv”) markets. A few were published in “royalty only” anthologies (which are but a smidgen better than 4theLuv markets in that in rare cases some of them have delivered a pittance in revenue—my current record is about $18). Most of the recent ones have appeared in professional markets, some with distribution to tens or hundreds of thousands of readers.

Every now and then, someone asks me when I’m going to release a collection. Choosing from among those fifty stories (plus the twenty or so that are currently seeking homes), I could probably put together a decent volume of my short fiction. Over the past few years, I’ve been approached by reputable small press publishers to do just that.

A couple of years ago, when I was in New York on vacation with my family, I had lunch with my literary agent. Among the topics on our agenda to discuss was a then-recent proposal to do a collection. When I broached the subject, he asked me what I thought it would do to grow my readership. In other words, who would buy this collection beyond people who already knew of my work, either by direct exposure or by reputation?

As much as I would love to see a handsome volume, artfully designed by a specialty press, with an eye-catching cover illustration and a signature page for my John Hancock, I got his point. He was looking at the big picture of a career in publishing, versus the quick and easy gratification of a limited edition.

Single-author collections are a hard sell, especially for an unknown author like me. No mainstream publisher is going to release a collection of my stories, and few people are going to splurge on a $30-$50 small press edition from someone they’ve never read before—assuming they hear about the book in the first place. The total print run would logically be something on the order of 250 copies, enough to satisfy the people already familiar with my writing and maybe a handful of others. As my agent asked, how would that expand my readership? The book might satisfy readers looking for more of my work, but what would it do for me?

Instead of rushing into faster but lower-reaching deals to get a novel or a story collection in print, I’ve decided to be patient. I’m not young—but I’m not exactly old, either, so I have time to improve my skills and come up with something that New York wants to publish. Maybe it will be the novel my agent is currently reviewing, or maybe it won’t be until three or four more manuscripts down the line. Maybe ten—who knows?

Perhaps I have delusions of grandeur, or think more highly of my writing than reality might suggest, but I have decided, for better or for worse, to aim as high as possible for my books. Perhaps I have the luxury of doing this because I’ve already had my ego fulfilled by publishing one book through a mainstream publisher. If I never succeed at that level with my fiction, at least there’s that.

If I were to achieve some success with novels, then it might be time to think about a story collection, when it could actually appeal to a wider group of people who’ve heard my name, perhaps read things about my work, and want to test out my writing in smaller doses than committing to a novel. That could actually benefit my career. All in a best-case universe, of course. There are many hurdles to leap before that joyous day. I accept the possibility that some of these hurdles may be insurmountable.

This essay was inspired in part by a recent discussion about authors who may have published too early—writers who appear content to only publish in the small press, or who seem too impatient to try to break out at a higher level. I’ve given the subject a lot of thought over the past few years. Robert McCammon ultimately withdrew his first four books because he felt he had been published too soon, when he was still learning his craft. I’m not sure I agree with his assessment of his early novels, but I respect the high standards he has decided to set for himself.

As I said, maybe I’m deluding myself about the potential for my writing. My agent doesn’t think so, which is encouraging. Everyone in this business has different goals, different reasons for doing what they do. Different needs they want to have met. I already have a shelf full of anthologies that prove to my ego that I can be published. My goal at this point (subject to change without notice) is to continue to be published well.

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When I started writing in 1999 after a long hiatus, I didn’t plunge straight into a novel. That probably sounds logical, but some writers skip the short story and cut their teeth on books. John Grisham hasn’t written many short stories, for example. Some successful novelists claim they have trouble with the short form.

For me, it was a no-brainer. I had written short stories in college, and I felt the need to exercise my writing muscles. I took many twenty- and thirty-mile bike rides before I embarked on my first century (100-mile) challenge. That was the analogy I used for writing, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. I have no regrets.

I had another motivation, though. If a person writes a bunch of short stories, he stands a better chance at getting published a bunch of times, provided he is at least a proficient storyteller and can string together words into proper sentences. It’s the old “get your name out there” theory. Success breeds success. Earning a reputation with short stories would boost my chances at having an editor pay attention to my eventual novel submissions.

That notion isn’t entirely without merit. My short story in Borderlands 5 attracted the attention of the editor who handled the paperback edition. She called me out of the blue one Friday evening to tell me how much she liked the story and to ask the magic question: Do you have a novel I could look at? Unfortunately, at the time I didn’t, so it was a missed opportunity.

I’ve now published over fifty short stories, some of them in the sorts of places that look good on a cover letter. I also have a backlist of another twenty currently seeking good homes. However, unless I happen to get published in The New Yorker or Playboy, it’s hard to imagine much that would enhance my resume significantly. I’ve demonstrated to myself and to some others that I can write. Now I have to finish novels and get them in front of editors.

So, why do I still write short stories? Why do I spend weeks on something that will bring in, at best, a few hundred dollars in income, when I could be writing novels?

I am writing novels. I finished the first draft of my fifth novel a few weeks ago, and am about to embark on the first round of revisions prior to sending it to my agent. He thought one of the earlier manuscripts was good enough to shop around, but editors didn’t snap it up.

But I’m still writing short stories, too. Why?

Because I love writing them. When I’ve finished drafting and revising one, I feel like I’ve accomplished something special. I’m much better at it than when I started nearly a decade ago. Not only has my writing improved, my editing has as well. Writing and revising short stories continues to make me a better writer. Working on novels develops different skills: Plotting and sub-plotting, characterization on a grand scale, pacing over the long haul. However, I seldom feel like I have improved as a wordsmith after working on a novel. Books are about big things, like sections and chapters. Short stories are about smaller things, like paragraphs and sentences. With a short story, I can (and do) agonize over every word, moving sentences around in paragraphs for maximum effect. If I spent as much time (proportionately) revising a novel as I do for a short story, I don’t think I’d ever finish one. That might change once I spend more time with novels, but at present short stories are where I am continuing to learn to write better.

When I’m working on a novel, I can seldom divert my attention from the story to do anything else, although I did knock out one 5000-word story during the course of writing this latest book. If novels become my daily routine, there might come a time when I have to put short stories on the back burner.

I can only hope that I end up in a situation where I have to make that choice.

Why do you still write short stories?

By Bev Vincent

I’m a big fan of crime novels and TV shows. I like the procedural details and the forensics, the minutiae of the day-to-day workings of the average detective who plods along, chasing down leads and stumbling upon the big breaks that solve crimes.

One aspect of criminal investigations that completely befuddles me, though, is the work done by police sketch artists. These are the people who sit with witnesses and come up with a drawing of a suspect that is then handed out to police officers or sent to the media. These sketches stand in for photographs or frames from surveillance video when these are not available.

Originally, sketch artists worked like park caricaturists, using pencil, paper and eraser, adding details and changing features based on feedback from the witness. Nowadays, the work is done primarily on computers with programs that have palettes of hair, eyes, noses, chins and ears, in much the same way that traditional graphics programs have palettes of colors and textures.

A sketch artist would grow frustrated with me pretty quickly. I have a poor grasp of the types of information he needs to do his job. I would be hard pressed to describe me accurately enough for an artist to produce a passing likeness, let alone a stranger who I saw for only a fleeting moment. I might be able to close my eyes and imagine what someone looks like, but I’m not sure I could explain what I see well enough to be of any use.

If you stood me in front of a house or an office building, I would have no difficulty describing it. I might even be able to draw a passable imitation on a sheet of paper. It might look like it came from the hand of a six year old, but it would be recognizable. I couldn’t draw a human being that resembled a specific person to save my life.

What does all this have to do with writing? Only everything. Our books and stories are populated with people we see in our mind’s eye.

My natural tendency is to be a minimalist when it comes to describing characters. I often don’t have a clear vision of what they look like. I’ve tended to follow Elmore Leonard’s advice about leaving the character description up to the reader. “You can essentially stop the action if you describe too much about a character. You might be messing with the reader’s idea of the character, and that’s not a good idea,” he told Rick Newman in a Q&A for US News and World Report. Another writer said he didn’t describe his protagonist because he was constantly looking at his fictional world through that character’s eyes and not at the character himself.

My lack of character description was one of my agent’s biggest complaints about the first novel I showed him. At first, I resisted his requests for more. I could quote Leonard until I was blue in the face, but that didn’t get around the fact that a lot of readers want writers to at least sketch out what a character looks like. Tall or short. Fair or dark. Long hair or buzz cut. We don’t have to outline every scar and blemish, or report the number of hairs on their heads, but we are world builders. We describe scenes so readers can imagine them—and people are very much part of the scene.

For another book I wrote a few years ago, I introduced a character who caught the protagonist’s eye. Because she was going to be important to the story, and given my agent’s advice, I decided to envision what she looked like and how she dressed in detail. She was a Hispanic American, pretty but not glamorous. A girl-next-door type. Problem was, I couldn’t conjure up a consistent vision of this woman.

Google is my friend. In this case, the “image search” feature. I can’t recall the exact combinations of search terms I used, but I went on a quest to find my female character. Though I had only a general idea of what she should look like, I certainly knew when I hadn’t found her. I must have poured over five dozen possible candidates. The moment I saw her, it was like I had been shown a police sketch and then a photograph of the person it was supposed to represent.

Though she is a famous television presenter in Spain, the model for my character is essentially unknown to most of the world. Given her regional fame, I was able to find photographs of her in many different poses and wearing different outfits. Since my protagonist encounters her many times over the course of the novel, I needed to describe her in apparel appropriate to the various scenes.

Was I cheating? Perhaps. At least I wasn’t taking one of the common shortcuts sometimes found in amateur fiction—comparing a character to somebody famous. “She looked just like Lindsey Lohan.” Not only is that lazy writing, it also dates your material. Readers ten years from now may have no clue who that is, and even if they do the visual is attached to a 2008 version of the person and not to the 2018 version.

I haven’t repeated the Google Images experiment, but I found it useful at the time. It allowed me to consider character attributes I might not have come up with otherwise. The aquiline nose with a gentle bump on the bridge. Eyebrows plucked to an intriguing shape nature never intended. The crooked smile, or the way she looks when taken off guard as compared to when she knows she’s being observed. How her various hairstyles make her almost look like a different person to someone who doesn’t know her well. The outfits and combinations she chooses to wear that would defy this colorblind and fashion-impaired writer’s imagination.

The net result of my experiment, though, is that I’m more aware of what my characters look like, and of a reader’s interest in knowing what they look like. Not all of us come to the page with the same imagination, and the more completely we can paint the scene, the more accessible our work becomes—or so I have come to believe.

 I still couldn’t describe a living human being to a sketch artist and have him come up with a representation of that person that would be recognizable to anyone else. However, I am now more likely to make up descriptions of people I see in my head. Whether a reader sees the person the same way I do isn’t important. By providing some specific details, I am helping them envision the action that is playing out on the page in front of them a little better.

A few weeks ago, I read the submission guidelines for a small press anthology. I’d never heard of the publisher, but a superficial search told me they’d been in business for a couple of years and had published some books, including one by an author whose name I vaguely recognized.

It wasn’t a pro-paying gig, but they offered moderate compensation in advance, and the premise intrigued me enough that I started adapting an old, uncirculated story to suit their guidelines.

Then I did a little more research. I visited the publisher’s website and was dismayed at what I saw. The introductory sentence was a disaster, both structurally and grammatically. The pages were riddled with poor grammar, misspelled words and amateurish writing.

Worse, the layout of some pages was horrendous. In one place, there was a narrow column of fully justified text down the middle of a page, leaving abnormal gaps between words.

If their web content was this poorly edited, what type of editorial oversight would stories in their anthology receive—let alone simple proofreading? And what would one of their books look like if this was someone’s idea of an attractive design? Not having seen any of their books, I can’t say. Maybe the web site was an anomaly. However, I wasn’t encouraged.

I dug deeper to see what others were saying about the press. I stumbled across some unflattering information that made me decide I didn’t want to be associated with that publisher. Was I being overly judgmental? Perhaps. I just knew that I had this queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach, and when that happens I pay attention. It’s like the situation I found myself in several years ago when I received an acceptance letter from one of those agents we all learn through experience or lore to avoid. Tempting as the offer was, my instincts told me something was rotten in Denmark.

A few months ago, I learned that the publisher of an anthology containing one of my stories had agreed to publish works that I considered of dubious merit and questionable taste. I was displeased at the thought that our anthology might be lumped together with this other work simply because they came from the same publisher. Guilt by association. In that situation, there wasn’t much we could do to distance ourselves from the publisher. We were already part of the stable. We could only commiserate, and request that the publisher not use our names to promote his business.

A character in a novel I read recently had four rules for success. The final one was: “Never go into business with someone you wouldn’t want to wrestle naked in bed.” That’s a little extreme—and easy for him to say since he was working with his wife—but pithy sayings like this often reveal an underlying truth. Though a short story sale is essentially a financial transaction between two people who know absolutely nothing about each other, does or should personality or character enter into it? Should an editor refuse a story from an author who says atrocious things on a message board, for example? Are there publishers you wouldn’t want to be associated with because an employee has a questionable past or because they’ve purchased stories from someone with a dubious reputation?

I have a reputation. We all do—and we probably each have different reputations with different groups of people. We don’t always actively seek to create these reputations—they’re a consequence of our actions and statements—though some people do go out of the way to generate a certain reputation, especially people who like to be thought of as edgy or controversial.

As a writer, I try to always meet deadlines, respond to editorial requests promptly, return galleys corrections on time and be generally easy to work with. I never want to be the reason something falls behind schedule. I want to cultivate a reputation as someone easy to work with so that editors will be favorably inclined to work with me again in the future.

Online, I try to avoid getting involved in messy fights and flame wars. I have opinions about a lot of things—I just don’t feel compelled to share them very often. I couldn’t count the number of times I’ve been tempted to respond to something, have actually gone so far as to compose a response, and then canceled out of the editor.

That probably makes me a little invisible and unmemorable on message boards, but that suits me just fine. Better that than to stand out because of something lame, annoying, thoughtless or volatile I’ve said. That might turn me into the kind of person other writers would feel uncomfortable appearing with in a table of contents.

— Bev Vincent

[Note: An audio version of this entry is available at Podango and via iTunes.]

What’s one of the most common pieces of advice given to young writers? Write what you know. Many authors more accomplished than I am have weighed in on the myriad possible interpretations of “what you know.” If it were taken literally, there would be fewer murder mysteries, precious few books about vampires and none at all about space travel. More often than not, writers make stuff up out of whole cloth.

Even so, readers are perennially curious to find out how autobiographical a work is. What bits are “true” and what parts are made up? Invariably, elements from our lives creep into what we write, either consciously or subconsciously. We recreate situations we overhear and witness. Conversations we’re part of or privy to. Successes and failures we experience. Memories from the past—recent or distant.

Injecting these experiences adds a level of credibility to our fiction. As Michael Westin—the defrocked spy on Burn Notice—says, when you have to make up a cover story, keep the lies to an absolute minimum and use as much of the truth as possible. It’s easier to remember that way.

Sometimes we do more than simply integrate experiences into our stories. We mine deeper. Part of our lives speaks so loudly that we have to process it, and fiction is the way we writers deal with things. As the saying goes, it’s cheaper than therapy. That’s a nice, pithy quote, but the truth of the statement is inescapable.

According to Michael Westin’s philosophy, a story with a predominantly factual basis should be easier to write than a complete fabrication. In reality, when we decide to embark on a personal exploration, we risk exposing ourselves to others. We also risk exposing ourselves to ourselves.

I recently finished a short story that is by far the most autobiographical I’ve ever written. It takes a frank look at the community where I grew up, and how my nostalgia for it hasn’t kept up with the times. The town has moved on in the decades since I moved away. It’s not the same place I knew, and I would probably be regarded as a stranger there if I moved back.

It took me longer to write the 5000-word first draft than usual. I knew where the story was going, but the journey was difficult. I could close my eyes and picture the setting better than for anything I’ve ever written, I understood the protagonist’s dilemma, and yet I had trouble making forward progress. I got bogged down in editing what I’d already written, and it took nearly two weeks to complete the first draft.

When I was finished, I did something I rarely do. I sent the unproofed draft to the editor who had solicited the story. I’ll call him Mike, because that’s his name. I had a sinking dread it was fourteen pages of self-absorbed navel gazing. I wasn’t even sure it was a story.

Fortunately, Mike loved what I’d done. Not without reservation, though. He had several suggestions, but he also said something that made me think. He said it seemed like I was holding back. I had to admit he was right. I wasn’t conducting an architectural dig; I was barely scratching the surface.

During every revision—and they’ve been legion—I ventured a little deeper. I pulled out things I’d been previously reticent to explore.

When I received the next set of copy edits back from Mike, I was chagrined to see that he had slashed entire paragraphs that contained real details from the memories that inspired the story. I bristled. I balked. I drafted response letters in my head that defended my glowing, shining prose. It really happened that way, I wanted to write.

But then I discovered something. The “facts,” such as they were, became somewhat disposable or interchangeable. I was free to change things around to improve the impact of the story.

In retrospect, I believe that I found it easier to write details than generate genuine emotional response. I gave myself a couple of day’s distance from the story (I spent a weekend getting caught up on submissions and revising another story) and tackled the copy edit report with fresh eyes. I wasn’t ready to give in yet. I found good reasons to keep some of the text. However, these reasons had legitimacy in the context of the story. The passages I decided to keep revealed something about the theme or the character’s transformation. The things that were easiest to cut were simply window dressing. I even lopped out a “real” character because she was inconvenient and, ultimately, immaterial to the story.

Eventually, I accepted about 2/3 of Mike’s cuts, and even made a few extra of my own. As of this writing, I’m still not entirely sure what final shape the story will take, but it’s a much more honest story than the one I submitted nearly a month ago. I don’t think I’ve ever worked harder on a short story. I’ve lost track of the number of revisions it’s been through, and according to the statistics generated by Word, I’ve spent over twenty solid hours on the most recent draft alone.

The story isn’t perfect, that’s for sure. There are elements of what I wanted to convey I’m not sure I captured. Maybe I’m my own worst critic about this story. Mike keeps telling me I nailed it, and my first reader told me that “everything just flowed like a stream.” That put to rest my fears that the story was self-indulgent, at least. Imperfect, perhaps, but not a catastrophe.

Telling the truth, laying a little sliver of my soul bare, proved to be among the hardest writing I’ve ever done. However, it shows me a doorway into future works. That doesn’t mean I intend to do personal history post-mortems from here on out, but when I chose to do so again maybe it won’t be as much of a struggle.

Nah—it will be. Who am I trying to kid? It’s harder to tell the truth than to make things up.

– Bev Vincent

(Audio podcast version available here)

Writers sometimes debate the value of being part of a critique group or attending writers’ guild meetings. I won’t generalize. What works for one person may not for another. I can only relate my own experiences and hope that within this stream of words you’ll find something that applies to your situation.¹

Over the past decade, I’ve belonged to two different critique groups—one live and one virtual. I joined the local writers guild in 1999. My first contact with the guild was sometime in the late 90s through one of their annual conferences. Joe R. Lansdale was a guest of honor. I wasn’t writing at the time, but I loved Lansdale’s books—especially his Hap and Leonard novels—so I attended the day-long conference.

There were other writer guests—Sean Stewart (who wrote Galveston) and a professor from the University of Houston who was the son of some famous science fiction writer whose name escapes me—and probably some agents and editors, but Lansdale stole the show with his casual and disarming style. When I started writing a few years later, I remembered the guild and decided to give them a try.

The group meets on the first and third Tuesday of the month. At 6:30 there’s a business meeting that lasts about half an hour. As the final item on the agenda, members announce any recent acceptances or rejections. Both are met with the same applause, because they’re equal indications that writers are submitting their work, hoping to be accepted but exposing themselves to the possibility of rejection.

Once every month or two, a guest speaker talks about some aspect of writing or publishing. Afterward, the attendees, usually 15-30 in number, break up into groups of six-to-eight people for the critique session. Anyone wanting criticism brings several copies of up to eight pages of a work, distributes them to the members of their group and reads while the others follow along. Occasionally the author alerts the group to look for something specific— characterization, pacing, dialog—about which he or she would like feedback, but not always. After each reading, live reactions are provided, ranging from grammatical corrections to more general contextual criticism.

I had to check my ego at the door to keep from getting defensive when someone didn’t like what I’d written, but I also had to keep from blindly accepting all the feedback I received. I learned early on that the criticisms I received weren’t always valid. Each group member interpreted my work through the filter of his or her own creativity. I listened for common themes in the feedback. Places where readers were confused or dissatisfied. Obvious continuity errors or inconsistencies. In the final analysis, the work was mine and the decision about how to present it was mine, too.

We were never successful in getting a take-home critique program running, partly because of the relative infrequency of the meetings, but also because we didn’t have fixed groups from one meeting to the next, creating a lack of continuity. I might find myself with a poet, an essayist, a spiritual writer (usually Christian, but not always) and a science fiction author. The next week some of the same people might be in my group or the composition might be completely different.

I stuck with the guild for a long time—I was even president for a term—but as the years went by, my participation dwindled until at the end I was only going for the business meeting and leaving before the critique session. Why? Because I wasn’t getting the kind of feedback I needed. Live critique doesn’t give the other participants much time to consider the work, so the advice I was getting was mostly grammatical—and I do a decent job of that myself. Not perfect (I’m sure an astute reader will find any number of errors in this essay), but it’s not rocket science. What I needed was structural feedback, big picture stuff, and I wasn’t getting it. Other than having my work proofread, the only benefit I received was some ego boosting when people liked what I wrote—which isn’t to be dismissed. One reason we perform public readings at conventions is to get the same immediate gratification stage actors thrive on and writers seldom receive because of the distance between us and our audience.

Also—and I hope this doesn’t come off sounding too pompous—many of the Guild members were perpetual aspiring writers, whereas at some point I stopped aspiring and became a writer. I outgrew the group. A few others were published, mostly in small press or through POD deals, but anyone who achieved a certain measure of success—one former member, a school teacher, has published at least a half dozen historical romance novels—stopped coming after a while.

I kept going to the business meetings for a while as a show of support for the other writers, and for the social aspect—it was good to commiserate about the shared experience of laboring at a common craft—but eventually I realized the time I was spending at these meetings was better spent writing.

At around the same time as I joined the writer guild I also became a member of a message board with a small group of people who shared a common interest. A few of us happened to be writers, so we started e-mailing works in progress to each other. We’d then post our feedback on the message board. The non-writing members of the board participated with the critiques, too.

The online critique process was far more productive. By posting our thoughts on the message board instead of e-mailing them directly to the author, we turned the critique into a dialog. Other readers of the same story would chime in with their thoughts, sometimes offering a dissenting opinion to that of the original commentary. Through this process, I received a lot of valuable and constructive criticism when I was just starting out. Several stories that we circulated back then have seen publication—a few of them mine. Monica J. O’Rourke, a name some of you will recognize, was also a member of that group.

We stuck together for quite a while, but eventually drifted apart. I haven’t been part of an organized critique group since.

What’s the take-home message? I think that writing and critique groups may be of value to writers starting out. We’re like toddlers, testing our footing, sometimes losing our balance. We’re trying to express ourselves while craving and needing encouragement for what we’re doing. When we stumble, we’re in a supportive environment, where someone can hold out a hand to us. Once we reach a certain point, though—and those of us who are really determined will—we gain a surer footing. We find our voice, and some measure of confidence.

That’s not to say we still don’t need help—but what we need is more sophisticated and can’t be provided by toddlers. We find a mentor or a first reader who becomes our one-person focus group—the person who reins us in when we go too far or who spots the gaping holes in continuity or logic that we miss because we’re too close to the work.

Once we start publishing, the editors who shepherd our works from screen to page become our ultimate critique group. I’m working with a very hands-on editor at the moment, and it is a delight. He knows what he wants, but he also discerns what he thinks I want from the story and is helping me get there.

Another way of looking at this: We attend kindergarten, grade school, high school and perhaps university. At each stage, we require different levels of support, from spoon-feeding to tutorials and independent study.

If I still belonged to a critique group, I might have showed them this essay before I posted it here for all the world to see. I wonder what sort of feedba
ck they would have provided.

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¹ The presence of anything that might be construed as advice within this essay is not guaranteed