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[vegkitkat]

Hey, well this thread is about books too, so I thought I'd put this up here. Any of the many qc forumers writers? Have any of you been published? If so, how? What do you write? etc.

I'm curious. I'm not much of a writer. I've only been published once, in highschool, but I do want to at least make a go at getting something of mine published.

Tips? Stories?

[Inlander]

I had a collection of short stories published last year by an small independent publisher, Ginninderra Press.  Independent publishers are a good bet if you're starting out: they often publish things that larger publishers are reluctant to publish (for instance, my collection, though it has 10 stories, is only about 60 pages long), and they're much more likely than major publishers to accept unsolicited manuscripts.  Sadly, these days publishing has become an industry much like any other: in order to be picked up by a major publisher it's currently necessary to have a literary agent, and to have a literary agent you need to have an impressive C.V. of previously published writing, prizes, etc.  Same goes for if you want to get a government grant.  Also, don't expect to make any money from writing.

Another option to get your writing out there is to go online.  My website is my major writing project at the moment, and will probably be so for quite some time yet.

[Shale]

I'm a newspaper reporter, so I...guess that counts. I don't write books, and I doubt I ever will, but I do get a good 3,000 words a week published.

[Nettle]

I attempt to write.

[Micolithe]

I start writing a bunch of stories that I generally never finish. If I do finish them they tend to be really short.

[cuchlann]

I write, though I haven't been published yet (well, a poem in high school, but that's hardly what I'm going for).  I'm starting to get encouraging notes from editors, so that's probably a good sign.  I'm working on a Master's in creative writing, too (I got the B.A. last year).  

Tips?  Uh...  Well, submit things.  That sounds obvious, but do it.  And do it again.  An article put it very well, and I'll have to paraphrase it - you should think of submitting like you think of shopping.  You do it, you get a rejection, and you send to someone else.  

You started the thread, Veg - what do you write?

[Kai]

I'm writing a play. It's pretty fancy. I've also written a few articles that were published in the newspaper like, twice, but that's about it. Still, pretty awesome.

[Oli]

I'm starting to write a black comedy script about an independant funeral directors.

It's going kinda slowly though, because I'm still trying to mull each of the characters over to make them seem more 3D

I also occasionally write intorductions to stories that I never finish. Mostly just as something to do when I'm bored.

[vegkitkat]

I mainly write poetry. Sometimes short stories, but very rarely. I tend to get a good idea for a story, but I can't ever really get it to form on paper. Nothing I write ever ends up being very long, and I don't think I've ever really been happy with anything I've written. Even if others think that it's good. 'Tis strange.

[Kai]

All my stuff is very short too; I can't imagine writing a novel. I can't stick to one topic for a very long time when I'm writing. I do write alot of short stories though.

[LeeZion]

I write for a small newspaper in Harrisonburg, Va. Except that is about to change. On Feb. 23, I will leave this job to go work at an equally small newspaper in Morgantown, W.Va. Except at this paper, I will become a copy editor/layout editor. In this capacity, I will cease to be a writer and instead work on honing the writing of other people.

I have also written four novels — the most recent of which I have completed in November. None of these are published yet. But now that I have four novels under my belt, I am going back through all four and giving THEM some serious copy-editing. Actually, by this stage it's more like minor tweaking, since all four of them have already gone through the serious copy-editing. Now all that's left is some final polishing.

Once all four are polished, I will shop them around. In fact, I made several New Year's resolutions, and one of them was to complete the copy-editing and start shopping them around.

Anyone who has ever written for a living will tell you that there is no great writing, only great RE-writing. I completed my first novel in August, 1999, and when I did I thought I was really hot. But now when I look at what I had done back then and I'm embarrassed. That one was very much a rough draft compared to what it is now.

I have spent a lot of time copy-editing OTHER people's work, and copy-editing MY OWN work. One thing I've learned is that polishing one's own manuscipt takes a THOROUGH reading, AND re-reading a few months after that, AND re-re-reading a few months after that. Your eyes will fail to see the hideous mistakes lurking in your own manuscript, because your brain knows what you meant to say. As a matter fact, I had one sentence in my first novel which had a glaring error in it that I never once saw, over a period of months, no matter how much I looked at it: "He had already found out about it already."

So copy-edit, let it rest, then come back to it again.

I have a few other tricks I've learned over the years. One hint: Your writing will get stronger if you find a way to say the same thing with fewer words. When I finished my fourth novel, it absolute raw form it was 57,856. After several months of putting it through the wringer, I got it down to 50,437. And yet even though I got rid of one out of every eight words, the story still says the same thing. That makes the writing much more "tight" and "punchy."

[Kai]

Yeah guys; we don't need another Faulkner (as much as I love the guy, those sentences get really long and tend to be a bitch to follow if you don't have your complete attention on it). The above is great advice.

[vegkitkat]

My last english teacher was all about the pith, and the concrete images. He was a cool dude, and gave good writing advice.

[Inlander]

LeeZion's comment about having written four novels reminded me of another piece of advice I'd like to give: write a lot.  Write a hell of a lot.  Writing is like any other skill: you learn how to do it from experience and from practice.  Don't expect to write a publishable novel on your very first attempt - and don't try to.  Apart from anything else it takes a while to figure out how to write something that long, and on your first attempt you probably just won't be able to.  I have any number of unpublished, neglected novellas and short stories sitting on various computers and disks - and I have no intention of ever publishing them.  They weren't for publication: they were my learning curve.

Also, if like me you read a lot of Kerouac it's very easy to be seduced by that very romantic notion of getting a story right the first time, and making no further changes to that.  Well it might have worked for On the Road, but unless that's the kind of writing style you want to emulate you're going to have to revise your manuscript, maybe over and over again.  But you know what?  Spending days figuring out exactly how to end a scene, or what word to use to perfect the simile and best explain what you're trying to get across, that the real intellectual puzzle of writing.  Increasingly it's that which is the most enjoyable part of writing for me: sitting down and nutting this thing out.

[cuchlann]

While writing - a lot - is a great idea, and anyone that wants to write should be doing it, the other part is to get a good, critical second opinion.  If you never get any outside advice (hopefully from someone that knows something about writing) you may just repeat the same mistakes.  Hence my habitual lack of strong, thematic connection of beginning and end until I had a teacher or two work with me on that.

[LeeZion]

Here's some additional advice: Let your first draft suck.

No, I'm serious. One thing I've found, four novels in, is that if I took the time to hone everything I wrote while I was writing it, I would never get past Chapter 1. Instead, I concentrate on getting it out. That means taking the ideas and emotions tumbling around inchoate in my head and transferring them onto paper, in a form where other people can see them. The transferring is hard enough — my first two novels took a year each.

Only after I had a mediocre first draft — something that, in the very least, other people could see — could I go back and fix things.

It's a powerful experience getting all those thoughts out on a paper. When I was writing the last chapter of my fourth novel, in November of 2005, I was putting on the page words that had been floating around in my mind since February of 2003. What elation it was to finally get those words out!

Writing is an intrisically right-brain activity. Once it's done, the left-brain work of copy-editing takes over. That's when I start looking for sentences longer than 30 words and cutting. (Which is one of my rules, honed after years in the news biz: Be very wary of any sentence longer than 30 words.) That's when I turn on the word search feature in Microsoft word and start eliminating participles and adverbs.

The result: Four completed novels. And you can see some of the other results. When I'm in a hurry, I write the way I feel. Which is why, in my previous post, I have two sentences in a row that start with the word "Except." The copy editor in me looks at that and says, "Yuck." No doubt there are a few weak spots in this post, as well.

And before anyone starts getting snarky about "to finally get," three paragraphs up, yes, I know about split infinitives. I have strong feelings about when split infinitives are acceptable and are not acceptable. This use of a split infinitive is perfectly OK.

[vegkitkat]

I tend to write on the bus, or on the way to the bus stop. I have a poem sitting in my pencil case that is almost illegible it was written so fast. The idea is good; it just needs refining. That's where I die. I guess I don't have the confidence to look at old work and see how badly it's written.

[cuchlann]

Well, if you want to think about where split infinitives come from, there's no problem at all.  They're an addition by post-enlightenment grammarians that wanted the English language to act like Latin - you can't split an infinitive on that language, so why English?  Of course, the infinitive in Latin is one word, and two in English, so you can't split it in Latin because you *can't* split it, and you "can't" split it in English because people tell us not to.  Most grammar books never bother mentioning it anymore, for that reason, as well as an acceptance of language as a shifting form of communication.  

And no one can tell I love philology, right?  O_o

[LeeZion]

My rule on split infinitives is simple. Go ahead and split the infinitive, UNLESS:

1) The word doing the splitting is "not" or "never"
2) The sentence really sounds better with the adverb somewhere else.
3) The sentence is better served by not having the adverb at all.

Otherwise, split to your heart's content. I always think of William Shatner's exhortation TO BOLDLY GO WHERE NO MAN HAS GONE BEFORE! Any attempt to "fix" the split infinitive blunts the impact.

Another rule that should never have been created — and in fact was created for the same reason that the "don't split infinitives" rule was created — was the rule about never ending a sentence with a preposition. My rules on this are simple:

1) If ending a sentence with a preposition is good enough for Shakespeare, it's good enough for me.
2) Remember what Winston Churchill said. He described this fake rule as the sort of nonsense "up with which I shall not put!"

And I don't want to hijack this thread any longer. I won't talk about Grammar Rules From The Land Of Moron any more, unless someone really, really wants me to.