“Style is the visible trace of a workman solving her problems. Good style is the trace of a workman solving her problems with economy and grace, leaving her individual mark…. You will put your individual imprint on everything you do, whether you want to or not. What you need to learn is not individuality but skill.”
– Damon Knight, Creating Short Fiction
#shortfiction
“Reading a story, even a tragic story, ought to be a succession of sweet pleasures, like beads on a string–vivid images, excitements, anticipations, surprises…. One almost universal fault of beginners’ fiction is that it lacks contrast.”
– Damon Knight, Creating Short Fiction
#shortfiction
If young women in STEM is a topic relevant to your interests, and you enjoy generally well-written stories in SF settings, I recommend taking a look at this.
Friday (my next writing day) is clearly going to be a short story day. Four of my stories have come back to me and need a going-over before I send them out again. And one or two of my story ideas are ripening towards the point where I can pick them.
Someday I will get an acceptance from Urban Fantasy magazine.
But this is not that day.
In case anyone missed it: The Well-Presented Manuscript is available for preorder, and will publish on the 14th of July. The link below takes you to the blog where I drafted it, so you can get a taster if you need it. There are links from there to the preorder page.
Here’s the blurb:
Do you want to be taken seriously by editors, readers or reviewers?
Do you make errors in your fiction writing?
This book is for you.
Mike Reeves-McMillan is a fiction author, reviewer, and former copy editor and technical writer. He’s analysed the errors he’s found in almost 250 books, both indie and traditionally published, and written a simple, clear guide to avoiding the most common issues.
Learn:
– Why editors reject 90% of what’s submitted to them—and how to increase your chances.
– How to get punctuation right every time.
– The special conventions of dialog.
– The most common word confusions, typos, and research errors—and how to check for and eliminate them.
The Well-Presented Manuscript: Just What You Need to Know to Make Your Fiction Look Professional is available for preorder on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B010RJOAYA. Launch day is 14 July (US Pacific time).
I set out to write a gentle, accessible guide to avoiding or correcting the most common errors that fiction writers make. How do I know which ones those are? I read nearly 250 books–indie and trad-pub–and marked the errors in my Kindle, then analysed them. And who am I, anyway? I’m a fiction author, a former professional editor and technical writer, and a book reviewer.
I cover punctuation (including breaking down sentence structure and parts of speech, so you understand where the commas should go); the special rules of punctuating dialog; commonly confused words; spotting and removing typos; and even a few research problems. I also talk about submitting to short-fiction and trad-pub editors, who reject 90% or more of what they receive, and how you can increase your chances with them.
Even good writers make many of the mistakes I cover, and I mark the commonest ones for special attention.
If you’d like to improve your fiction manuscript, but find other guides confusing or too technical, give this one a try. With hundreds of examples, many drawn from real books, it’s focused on practical use, not theory.
You can see an early draft in blog form here: http://csidemedia.com/wellpresentedms (but I’ve substantially revised and expanded it for the book, and added several new chapters).
I’m not very good at villains, so this is useful. It’s helped me think about a different approach to the second book in my Auckland Allies urban fantasy series.
The draft of The Well-Presented Manuscript is now complete, at 34,250 words.
Now I need a cover.
Plotting faults and solutions:
1. Story wanders aimlessly.
Solution: give the character a stronger motivation and more adversity. Rewrite without reference to the original.
2. Story has too much going on.
Solution: Cut down the number of characters to three or four, find one plot, rewrite.
3. Plot structure appears complete, but story seems pointless.
Solution: this is a character problem, not a plot problem. We must care about the characters, and it must matter what happens to them.
4. Ending is disappointing. Too obvious, or not planned and so feels arbitrary and tacked on.
Solution: Go back to the opening situation and replot.
#shortfiction Damon Knight