Category: Smart Advice from Smart People

Some recommended reading for you, from other places on the interwebs. A narrative will attempt to move the reader from one state to another. There’s a question of acceleration with word length: a short story must take off very quickly and land with great precision, while a novel can take its time lifting off and setting down anywhere that looks interesting along the way to a leisurely destination. It’s the difference between travelling by plane or hot air balloon. Just as the novella is not a long short story or a short novel, a novella is not a jet fighter dragging a particoloured balloon twice its size. A novella is overland travel by foot, and the length of the journey will depend on the nature of the landscape and the unique qualities of the traveller. From Kill Your Novellas, by A.S. Patric, over on the Kill Your Darlings Website.

So, let me clear: if you are a fan of Warren Ellis work in any way, and you have not subscribed to his email newsletter, you should fucking remedy that right fucking now. If you are a fan of smart creators doing smart things with networking tools, you should also fucking remedy that right now. If you are…look, fuck it. The man is smart. He talks about things in a smart way. Go forth. It is a surprising thing when I actually look forward to making a cup of coffee and sitting down to read an email, but I do this every week and it’s always fucking rewarding. Case in point. This is the part of the job that doesn’t get talked about a lot, not least because it’s hard to talk about, but also because it doesn’t involve Productivity and Goals and The Magic Of Writering and The Grand Statement and all that good stuff in interviews. Sure, we

I’ve been reading my way through David Madden’s Revising Fiction, which is rapidly proving to be one of the best investments I’ve made in the last few years. I keep stumbling over things that explain the minutia of writing incredibly well. Case in point. Your reader expects to see, hear, touch, smell, taste. Bald statements do not necessarily stimulate the reader’s senses. “Coughing, the tall man wearing a wool suit, reeking of garlic, ran into the flower shop.” That sentence may or may not have stimulated one or more of your senses, despite my overt, rather strained effort to do so. A cluster of sensory experiences may not be as effective in a given context as focus on a single sense. “Fires on the dry mountain slopes surrounding the town had been smouldering for days.” We can see that, but we can also smell it, without including a phrase as “and I could smell the burning leaves throughout the village.” No

One of the nice things about being forced to spend time on Tumbr by the website outage is actually reading some of the tumblr’s I only visit intermittently under normal circumstances. Mostly, it’s the comic-book people. The best part was discovering this post from comics writer Matt Fratction about craft and intent and the decision making in Fargo, which is one of those things you should read if you’re a writer. Nothing with craft is an accident. It might not be good, or successful, or pleasant, or engaging; it may not have beendeliberated or considered. Or deliberated or considered well, even.  It may have been surprising or contrary to the creators’ intention, to the interpreter’s expectation, to the world’s conception of what a thing is or can be, but it is not accidental, haphazard, dashed off, or crapped out. Suggesting otherwise is a critical feint. A work may not deserve comment.  Life is short and there are beautiful things. Nothing

I spent yesterday working my way through the Every Frame a Painting series on youtube, courtesy of a recommendation from my friend Jess. If you’re interested in cinema, this is one of those things worth subscribing too – Tony Zhou pulls apart the technical aspects of film-making in terms of shot composition and editing, and it’s utterly fascinating to look at some of the minutia that separates a solid film from a great one. If you’re primary interest is making your writing better, rather than a general interest in film, then I’d recommend his F for Fake: How to Structure a Video Essay in particular. This pulls apart the craft of creating his videos, looking at three important principles for making your point effectively. Said principles are equally applicable for fiction writers structuring a plot. Or a scene. Or the growth of a character. It’s an incredible amount of value for four and a half minutes of your time.

This is a heads up for anyone who doesn’t ordinarily follow Galactic Suburbia: the November 23 episode is well worth making the time to listen to. Alisa Krasnostein’s explanation of her feelings about the recent World Fantasy Award changes are worth it on its own, but the section where she explains the things she’s learned from her PhD research into publishing should be required listening for any aspiring writer/publisher. You can find the episode here. Well and truly worth your time.

With a hat-tip to Jonathan Strahan,who shared this link on Facebook, the Nerds of a Feather blog series where they’re interviewing cyberpunk authors about the current state of SF is awesome, particularly the section where the interview Bruce Sterling: It’s true that the mid list has dwindled and more money and attention goes to fewer science-fiction creatives, but that’s also true of movies, nonfiction books, acting, pop music, all kinds of pursuits. Even heads of corporations have a one percent of ultra-wealthy moguls towering over them. I dunno why, but it’s clearly something broad and systemic, it’s not about some personal injustice done to some particular writer somewhere. I would also argue that popular writing kinda needs a lot of dross available. Popular writing needs room for badness. You don’t get great writing without a lot of just, writing. When I look at a bookstore rack and it’s all junk I feel a sense of relief: it’s like the swimming

Many years ago, I heard a renowned magazine editor Gardner Dozois remark, “I don’t want just a great story in my magazine, I want a great writer in my stable.” He was talking of course about why he didn’t pick up new writers on their very first stories. He had a policy: if a new writer sent him a great story, he’d wait and see if the author sent two more fine stories, and then he would start buying. His logic was simple. He wanted authors who wrote frequently and to the very highest quality. He didn’t want people who were just playing in the field, or trying to write one story and then use it as a vehicle to launch a career as a novelist, never to write him another story again. David Farland, Editors Fill their “Stables” with Stories, Not Authors I’ve been hitting Netflix pretty hard over the last month, which means I’ve blown through my broadband allowance

Odds are, if you’re interested in writing, you’re already reading Chuck Wendig’s blog regularly. If you’re not…well, fuck, I don’t know, start. In fact, start today, ’cause his most recent guest-post by Delilah S. Dawson is brilliant and includes a point that could be a personal mantra at the day-job and my writing life in general: DO NOT FEEL GUILTY FOR PURSUING YOUR PASSION. Now, that being said, you have to keep up your bargains with the world. You can’t just quit your day job and spend your family’s savings to rent a writer’s bungalow in Bali. You have to pay your bills and taxes, keep your kids healthy, and pay attention to that person you promised to love and cherish. As with all things, there’s a balance. But if you’re doing all the things you’re supposed to be doing, you have every right as a living creature to pursue your bliss in your spare time. Anyone who says otherwise is

Romance Rocks, the 2014 Romance Writers of Australia Conference, is taking place in Sydney this weekend. Under better circumstances I would be down there, but the new mortgage put a pin in that plan earlier this year. This makes me sad. Last year, the RWA conference was the best event I attended as a writer, and this includes a year that was capped off with a trip to World Fantasy. Which means, this weekend, I’ll be tuning in to the official twitter hashtage of #RWAus14 to see what I can pick up. See, the RWA conference is a pretty phenomenal experience, and of all the writer out there, they romance folks are generally the crew that has their shit together when it comes to talking about writing and publishing. I killed a note-book at last year’s conference, filling it with notes covering everything from aspects of craft through to some fairly detailed publishers and agents advice that went way beyond the 101 conversations you’d

Two hours of writing time this morning. In my head, this usually equates to about 1,000 words of writing. In practice, it resulted in 498 new words on Frost, which is not a rate that will get things done by the time they need to be done. Only 29,232 words left to write. # Weird day at the day-job today. One of the things you don’t expect about running a site like the Australian Writer’s Marketplace is the dead market factor. Sometimes it manifests in the form of irate users writing to complain about the fact that they’ve found a dead market in the database. More often, people write to complain that Market X isn’t included in the database, when Market X has been closed for a number of years. ‘Course, if I can’t remember said market closing, I’m obligated to go and see if it’s still around, just in case we do have a gap in the listings. Today I spend a