Category: Writing Page 1 of 3

Perseverance and Publishing Short Fiction

On September 15, 2023

In Marketing, Publishing, Short Stories, Writing

STORY SALE!

I offer this as a tale of perseverance.

Neil Clarke at Clarkesworld has accepted a story from me, which is my first original sale to them. They previously reprinted a piece that Gardner Dozois chose when he was working as their reprint editor (it was a story Gardner also included in his YEAR’S BEST anthology in 2010).

They have been using an online submission system since at least 2010 where I can view my submissions. I see that the story Neil is taking now is the 55th piece I’ve submitted to them. Many pieces made it to “round two” before being bounced.

I like to think of the submissions process as being a kind of pen pal arrangement. I’ve sent Neil 55 long, self-revelatory letters in the last 13 years. While his responses have been somewhat shorter, and a little repetitive , I have enjoyed our continued correspondence.

Almost all the other bounced stories found homes in other magazines. My submissions records at the major magazines who have taken pieces from me also contain WAY more “no” than “yes” replies.

That’s the case for most authors . . . except the late Mike Resnick who claimed during a panel at a WorldCon that he didn’t know what a rejection from ASIMOV’S looked like, so he couldn’t comment on its tone when asked.

This is my 190th short story sale since 1989.

Where Ideas Come From

By [email protected]

On April 27, 2022

In Books, Craft, Interview, Short Stories, Writing, Writing advice

Fairly frequently someone will ask where I get my ideas, and like most authors I am at a bit of a loss for a good answer. However, a couple days ago, an FB writer friend asked for reasons a teenager might be laid up for weeks but not cause long term damage.

Their question question made me think this at first:”Not totally related, but an anecdote about how medical research can be fraught. For story purposes, I wanted to know if a teenager with bone cancer might have to have both legs amputated. I called my doctor, and he immediately went into a diagnostic mode. “What symptoms do you have? When did you start experiencing discomfort? How long have you been ignoring this condition?” It took quite a bit of talking to convince him that I wasn’t sick myself. I’m pretty sure he worried about me for years after.”

Amazon - The Radio Magician and Other Stories: Van Pelt, James: 9780982073025: Books

I added, “I have written three stories with bed-ridden young people: “The Radio Magician,” about a boy with polio in the 30s, also the story about a boy who had his legs amputated because of bone cancer, “Roller Derby Dan'” and the piece I’m working on now with a boy in the 60s who has both legs in external fixators after surgery to correct severe bow leggedness. I think the antecedent to my interest in this trope is Ray Bradbury’s “The Emissary” from THE OCTOBER COUNTRY.”

The FB friend asked why that situation interested me, and I realized I had a partial answer to where I get ideas, at least this idea.”Besides the awesomeness of the Bradbury story, a friend of mine when I was 12 had both legs broken to correct for extreme pigeon toed alignment of his feet. His legs were casted from ankle to hip. He was miserable but suffered gamely. We pushed him in his wheelchair everywhere we went that summer. I’ve often thought since what his experience must have been like. Also, of interest in this situation, H.G. Wells broke his leg when he was eight. He was bedridden while it healed (they were much less into getting patients on their feet at that time). He spent his convalescence reading. He said that’s what made him H.G. Wells. He became devoted to books and writing.”

That’s where the idea came from.

Practice and Theory of Naming Characters

By [email protected]

On March 12, 2022

In Characterization, Craft, Short Stories, Writing, Writing advice

Most stories start small for me and then accrete, like a pearl in a clam. The story I’m working on now has grown to 8,000 words, and I’m still writing the last scene. My challenge is that it’s a teaching story with a large cast: the teacher, a student teacher, a janitor and twenty-four students. I’m working at portraying a class environment. As the story stands now, I’ve named ten of the twenty-four students (and a couple parents).That’s a lot of balls to keep in the air!

The problem is the impact of those names. At what point would readers toss up their hands and say, “I can’t keep the characters straight,” or would readers realize there are quite a few names, but only the characters who keep popping up rise to importance while the others settle into the background?Either reaction is possible. I believe any writing challenge can be overcome with the right collaboration between a careful writer and competent reader. That’s one of writing’s joys: anything is possible.

As I write the last scene, though, I’m deciding which characters to use. Not all of them will appear, and I realized over the course of the couple weeks I’ve been working on this piece that I’ve lost touch myself of everyone in the story, so I inventoried them. Here’s the list I created with the first page the character appears and then how many times total I mentioned the name:

Ms. Milspaugh pg.1—73 mentions

Andrew Tyndale pg. 1—53 mentions

Jed Rote pg.2—40 mentions

Dove Klein pg. 2—38 mentions

Dennis Cho pg. 12—6 mentions

Cassie-Lasila Arms pg. 13—8 mentions

Paisley Lopez-Sang pg. 14—7 mentions

Len and Amelia Tyndale pg. 14—1 mention

Lisa Fromme pg. 15—1 mention

Toby Gwinn pg. 17—1 mention

Harmony Dlamini pg. 19—5 mentions

Jim John pg. 22—3 mentions

Sharon Hann pg. 23—4 mentions

Ryan Bigelow pg. 24—3 mentions

Hot damn! That’s a big list.

A closer look at number of mentions reveals my cast centers on the top four characters: the teacher who is my protagonist, Ms. Milspaugh, her student teacher, Jed Rote, and two students, Andrew Tyndale and Dove Klein.The rest are supporting cast.

I tried to pick names that reflected different origins to show Ms. Milspaugh’s class, like many real-world classes, comes from diverse backgrounds (my default when I don’t think about it is almost always north-western European). I also didn’t want the names to be visually similar. Different first letters help with this, as do names with different shapes. At first glance, Dennis Cho doesn’t look like Ryan Bigelow, so the eye cues help to differentiate them. I notice I have two names that are hyphenated, which might make them hard to distinguish. I’ll give that more thought.

I did choose a few names from my life. “Milspaugh” was the name of one of my junior high teachers who was memorable. I knew a pair of sisters in high school named “Klein.” One of my sisters is a “Sharon.”“Jed Rote” was chosen because of the meaning of his last name in the same spirit as the naming of Han Solo, Truman Burbank, and Willy Loman.

List of Dickensian characters - Wikipedia

I love how Charles Dickens created characters. Part of his genius was in giving them cool names: Seth Pecksniff, Mrs. Jellyby, Samuel Pickwick, Uriah Heep and many others. I’m not doing cool naming the same way he did in my story, although I do like the names I’ve chosen. A classroom of characters all named the way Dickens named characters would be awesome, though. What I do want to borrow from him, is his really well-done pocket characterizations. He could create a character in just a sentence or two.

Mr. Ayresleigh (Pickwick Papers) “A middle aged man in a very old suit of black, who looked pale and haggard, and paced up and down the room incessantly: stopping now and then to look with great anxiety out of the window as if he expected somebody, and then resuming his walk.”

Miss Barbary (Bleak House) “She was a good, good woman! She went to church three times every Sunday, and to morning prayers on Wednesdays and Fridays, and to lectures whenever there were lectures; and never missed. She was handsome; and if she had ever smiled, would have been (I used to think) like an angel–but she never smiled. She was always grave and strict. She was so very good herself, I thought, that the badness of other people made her frown all her life.”

Ned Beadwood (David Copperfield) “It won’t do to be like long Ned Beadwood, when they took him to church “to marry him to somebody”, as he says, and left the bride behind. Ha! ha! ha! A wicked rascal, Ned, but droll!”

Here’s a quick dive into Dickens’ characterizations and also a revelation in how many characters he created.

At any rate, this longish post came from me pausing to create the list of characters in my current project and got me thinking about names and characters. I’m not looking for advice about this ill-advised story problem I’ve written myself into. Writing into story problems is half the fun of creating fiction.

Training Critique Partners

By [email protected]

On January 5, 2022

In Craft, Short Stories, Writers, Writing

I belonged to writing groups for many years when I started writing for real. Luckily, the groups contained a few skilled writers who were sensitive, insightful readers, who also wanted my work to succeed (they also contained folks who occasionally were helpful, and one or two who I learned weren’t useful in the least).

But I haven’t been in a group for years. I depend on willing friends who don’t have writing or workshop backgrounds. They want to help, but they might not know where to start or what I need to hear. I can get useful reactions to the story if I suggest these responses:

First, did the story work for you? I want to know if the reader liked the story. What did you like? This is a broad, global type of question. If the story doesn’t work for the reader for whatever reason, that will give me pause as a writer. It could mean I chose the wrong reader for the piece. I need more feedback.

Second, did the story provoke anything for you? Did it leave you thoughtful or change your mood? Did you feel moved by it and what did that?

Third, what did you like most? What caught your eye? Were there specific moments, scenes, lines, and/or wordings that tickled you?

Fourth, did you not understand anything or feel confused by it. Where were those specific moments, scenes, lines, and/or wordings that tripped you up?
Next, did the story drag in places?

Was there any place in the story that felt rushed or you really wanted to know more about?

What did you think about the characters?

Any other thoughts? This might be the place where an analytic reader might say what they thought the story was about, or what they thought they were supposed to get out of it. You never know what might come out of this question, but I listen carefully to those random observations.

Oh, and by the way, did you run across obvious typos or miswordings? I don’t expect my first readers to proofread for me, but if they see something, I appreciate hearing about it.

You might notice that I don’t ask my reader for suggestions on how to improve the story. I don’t know who it was that said, “Anything a reader notices is a flaw probably is right. Anyway, a reader suggests how to change it is probably wrong,” but in general that strikes me as true. A reader might see a problem with a paragraph, and then suggest a way to improve it, but you realize the fault actually was in how the paragraph was set up. You have to rewrite something pages earlier to make the “flawed” section work. Also, I’ve had readers go to town at length about something in a story and then go through gyrations to suggest how to fix it. All I did was delete it. Problem solved.

The point of all this is that a reader who just says, “I thought it was cool. Thanks for sharing,” might be affirming, but they’re not helpful. When I share a draft, I’m hoping for meaningful feedback that will give me an outsider perspective on the story. The longer I can get them to talk about the story, and the more different ways they approach the story, the better.

Here’s an example. My wife is not a writer, but she’s a reader and she’s been living with a writer for a long time. She read my latest piece and asked a basic question: Why did I have two policemen in the opening scene who I identified as the “man officer” and the “woman officer.” Later in the scene, I shortened it to “the man” and “the woman.” My wife said she stumbled when she read that. Why didn’t they have names?

I did the tiniest rewrite of the scene, giving them names, and it was way better.

A New Horror Story Anthology!

By [email protected]

On January 3, 2022

In Books, Publishing, Short Stories, Writing

A cool thing about writing is that I get to check off boxes for the stories I’ve always wanted to write (and I can write variations too–checking off the box doesn’t mean I’m done!).

My story in Alternative Deathiness is a haunted house story, but it’s also about the impulse to scare, the trail of trauma an effective horror writer leaves behind, and how the wheel goes round and round.

How to Improve as a Writer

By James Van Pelt

On June 1, 2017

In Craft, Writers, Writing, Writing advice

I finished my two-day class called “Creative Writing for Teachers who would Like to Write” yesterday. I think it went well. I sent them this letter to the teachers today to give them some suggestions for what they can do for themselves as writers on their own (besides reading, reading, reading and writing, writing, writing).

Hi, all,

We talked a little about outside resources for writers that can help you on your journey, so I thought I could send you some specifics.

The first is writing workshops or writing retreats and conferences. A workshop would be where you meet up with other writers to share and critique each others work. A retreat is sort of like a writer’s vacation where you go to write in the company of other writers. A conference is more educational in its nature where there will be presentations during the day related to writing and/or publishing, but, depending on the conference, there can be opportunities for a professional critique of your manuscript or a chance to pitch a project to an editor.

I go to the Rainforest Writers Retreat in Washington each year. It’s easily the best five days of writing I get. It sells out quickly, but there are many other writing retreats all over the country. I also attend two or three conferences a year. Because I write science fiction, fantasy and horror, I go to conferences that focus on those genres. In the last year, I attended the World Science Fiction Convention that was in Kansas City, and MileHiCon in Denver. I will go to the World Fantasy Convention in San Antonio in early November.

I don’t think I can encourage you to look into attending a retreat, workshop or conference more strongly. It would be something you are doing to both acknowledge and feed your commitment to yourself as a writer.

You might also consider looking for or forming your own writers’ critique group. You can see guidelines here: http://writersrelief.com/blog/2014/09/start-writers-group-set-success/

Retreats and Conferences:

A list of well-respected writing retreats around the world: https://thewritelife.com/writing-retreats/

Colorado writing retreats and conferences: http://writing.shawguides.com/Tag/colorado

Writing Organizations:

Another way you can help yourself is to join a writing organization. The Grand Junction area has two that I can recommend. The Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers (http://rmfw.org/) and the Western Colorado Writers Forum (http://westerncoloradowriters.org/index.html). Both organize events for writers, including presentations, contests, critique groups, etc.

There are also national writing organizations that might interest you (http://writersrelief.com/writers-associations-organizations/)

If you are interested in writing for publication and are looking for markets for your work, one of the best resources is at https://duotrope.com/. They describe themselves this way: “Duotrope is a subscription-based service for writers and artists that offers an extensive, searchable database of current fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and visual art markets, a calendar of upcoming deadlines, a personal submissions tracker, and useful statistics compiled from the millions of data points we’ve gathered on the publishers we list. We have been honored as one of Writer’s Digest 101 Best Websites for Writers. Also, Preditors & Editors selected us for their Truly Useful Site Award.”

I hope this helps. Have a good summer and may all your words flow easily.

Best,

Jim Van Pelt

First Person Narration

By James Van Pelt

On December 13, 2016

In Craft, Writing, Writing advice

LEARNING FROM THE MASTERS: THE USE OF “I” IN FIRST PERSON NARRATION: About every third story of mine is in first person. It’s good for voice pieces, and sometimes making the character the narrator feels like the best choice, but when revision comes around, my manuscripts are flooded with “I”s. Ton of them, which bothers me, so the first revision step is to cut them down. Really, five “I” uses in a single paragraph is amateurish. So, tonight, while preparing for tomorrow’s 9th grade class, I reread Truman Capote’s beautiful “A Christmas Memory,” which is 4,800 words long and written in first person. In all those words, the narrator only refers to himself with “I” about twenty-five times. He’s 163 words into the story before it appears the first time. Some student papers will have twenty-five “I”s in the first 250 words, and my own first drafts are hardly better.

The pronoun shows up more often than that in Capote’s piece, but the other uses are in dialogue from the character’s “friend,” his elderly cousin. It’s admirable restraint, and a true lesson in handling first person narration.

Writing a Biography

By James Van Pelt

On October 15, 2016

In Marketing, Publishing, Writing

fullsizeoutput_558 Most of the time when I sell a story, the magazine asks for a bio to go along with it. Writing a bio sucks, so I have a sort of harmless, generic bio that I’ve used a bunch of times. However, I’m doing a reading for the Colorado Mesa University Poet’s and Writer’s series next week, and the coordinator asked for a bio. I almost sent him the generic one, but a mood swept me and I sent this instead. I wish I could get into this kind of mood more often.

James Van Pelt grew up watching Sci Fi Flix and Creature Features Friday and Saturday nights. He gave literature a chance when he discovered Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” in the middle of the 4th grade literature textbook, a tome that was otherwise filled with the most forgettable prose ever contained between two covers. No wonder so many kids don’t like reading. He wrote poetry first because he heard Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill” read out loud. He took his love for language and the fantastic to the University of California at Davis where he earned a masters degree in Creative Writing. His mentor’s parting words to Jim were, “I don’t think you’ll have any luck in publishing. You’re too literary for the popular magazines and too genre for the literary ones.” Since then, Jim has sold 140 short stories to the literary and genre magazines and published four short story collections and two novels. He’s been a finalist for the Nebula Award and been nominated for Pushcart prizes. All Jim can conclude from this is that his university mentor didn’t understand the publishing world very well. He semi-retired from teaching high school English two years ago and has since devoted himself to really trying to get the hang of this writing thing.

Sunday Writing: Every “Rule” has Exceptions

By James Van Pelt

On July 23, 2016

In Craft, Short Stories, Writing, Writing advice

marquee One of the many fascinating aspects of English and writing is that anything that sounds like a rule has exceptions. The only real rule in writing is this: IT HAS TO WORK. If it works, it’s good. I’ve written stories in the past just to show that a “rule” can be broken. My latest story at Daily Science Fiction does exactly that. It’s called “Writing Advice.”

So, a lot of the standard wisdom writing teachers hand out is challengable, if you know what you are doing.

– Write what you know. This is intuitively wrong, or at least poorly stated. I prefer “Don’t write what you don’t know,” because that implies you can find out stuff (and should). Too vigorously applied, “write what you know,” produces a lot of belly button gazing. At the college that means I get a ton of dorm stories, filled with drinking and teen angst. Maybe an even better way to phrase this might be, “Write what you can imagine, and imagine with gusto (and detail).” At least for science fiction and fantasy writers.

– Don’t shift point of view. In general, this is good advice. A writer who slips around willy nilly with point of view just confuses the heck out of the reader. I responded to a story the other day that dipped into the cat’s point of view for a sentence, and then, catastrophically, into a house plant on the fireplace mantle for another sentence. The better advice, at least to stronger writers, is Control point of view. If you know what you are doing, a story that shifts point of view can be the only way to tell the story, if it works.

– Show, don’t tell. This rule is what I had in mind when I started this post because yesterday I said the weakest way to reveal character is by the narrator directly telling the readers what the character is. What I had in mind was the writer who puts something like this down on the page: “Leslie was witty and clever,” and then Leslie never does a single witty or clever thing. That’s telling without confirming showing. But some of the most memorable characters in fiction are revealed partly through the narrator directly telling the readers what the character is like.

For example, here is one of the most famous character introductions in all of English literature:

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dogdays; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.

External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn’t know where to have him. The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect. They often “came down” handsomely, and Scrooge never did.

I think that nice bit of telling works, don’t you? All right, it’s a bit of a cheat as an example, because there is some effective showing in there too, but the mode is mostly telling. Look at how much milage Dickens gets out of mixing showing and telling. Remember, too, that the very first time we see Scrooge in the story, his character is revealed through dialogue:

“A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!” cried a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge’s nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach.

“Bah!” said Scrooge, “Humbug!”

So, for me, the better advice is “Show, don’t tell, unless you earn the right to tell by doing a lot of showing.” It doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as easily as the first piece of advice, but it seems closer to the truth.

Sunday Writing: Creating Believable High School Characters

By James Van Pelt

On July 10, 2016

In Characterization, Craft, Writing, Writing advice

The FMHS class of 1986 held their 30th reunion this weekend. That’s my wife’s graduating class. We perused the photos and videos that the class posted on their FB website. The don’t look that old. I can still see the teenagers in them.

Almost ten years ago, I wrote this article about characterization using the high school classes I was teaching as my examples. Since I’ll be starting a new school year in another month, I think I’ll do the exercise again. Has anything changed that I can notice? How different are they from the class of ’86?

Creating characters must be hard because I read so many unconvincing, thin or cliched characters in fiction. How high school characters are portrayed often bothers me because so many people default to a handful of stereotypes. Since I teach high school and really, really, really respect high schoolers as people, it’s particularly upsetting to see them boiled down into predetermined niches.

We administered the ACT test to all of our juniors today. I proctored for two hours, which involved walking back and forth among the desks for the whole time, I took notes on what I saw.

If you’re interested, here’s raw data from Fruita Monument High School in western Colorado, a predominantly white student body that draws about 2/3 of the kids from upper-middle class suburban neighborhoods and 1/3 from rural ranches and farms. We have 1,200 students in three grades.

Twenty-one students took the test in the room I proctored, 17 girls and 4 boys, an imbalance caused by the randomness of assigning kids to rooms alphabetically.

–   14 carried cell phones (they couldn’t have cell phones on them during the test, so we had to collect them. Some of the kids remembered this and didn’t bring a cell phone–clearly I have to buy a cell phone for my 11th grade son!)
–   3 wore hats
–   1 wore a school sweatshirt
–   1 wore a university sweatshirt
–   1 wore a Tigger sweatshirt
–   9 sweatshirts total–none of them were dressed in a style we normally call “preppy”
–   2 Hispanic students, no Black or Asian ones
–   1 facial piercing (a small diamond stud on the side of a nose)
–   2 unnatural hair colors
–   2 wore glasses (lots of contacts?)
–   1 male with an earring
–   6 females with hair below their shoulder blades
–   4 in shorts. The rest in long pants, mostly jeans. It’s been a cold spring.

They were all cooperative, quiet and industrious. Once again, the luck of the draw. I taught a sophomore class here a couple of years ago that was phenomenally bad. I took three of the worst out to work on a paper with them alone while my student teacher tried to handle the rest. The three I had were supposed to be working on a paper about influential people in their lives. They all wanted to write about their probation officers.

The teacher who teaches in the room I was proctoring in today had the kids do an “I” poster for an assignment. The kids are supposed to make a collage of who they are. It reminded me a little of the writing assignment in The Breakfast Club, where the kids who were serving a Saturday detention were supposed to do an essay on who they thought they were. I broke the posters down into categories:

–   2 pictured guns, one in a hunting context, and the other in a redneck context (to use a stereotype; the poster was hunting rifles and pickups)
–   4 agriculturally centered (livestock, John Deere machinery, etc.)
–   6 sports
–   10 fashion
–   7 music
–   1 overtly religious
–   5 travel
–   6 hunting
–   3 environmental
–   1 sort of disturbing one, that included the phrase, “Every killer lives next door to someone”

So, where am I going with this? First, when a writer wants to write about high school, he/she has to decide first which high school. FMHS is like the proverbial elephant being described by a bunch of blind men. Who your character is determines the high school in the story. For some individuals, high school is scary. For others it is fun. For many, they don’t have much of an opinion about it one way or another.

Here’s something to think about: the very best high schools in America have some kids who are deeply disturbed, lost to drugs, victims (or dealers) of violence, potential psychopaths or profoundly unhappy. The very worst high schools in America have some kids who are academically excellent, love their classes, are kind to their friends, have good relationships with their parents, and are moving forward into fulfilling and happy lives.

I guess what I’m arguing against here is simplification and stereotypes. High school students are not simplified versions of adults. They are not driven by only a single motivation (any more than some adults are driven by a single motivation). They are complicated, contradictory, fully faceted human beings, capable of cruelty, tenderness, cowardice, bravery and every other emotion you can think of. They can be clear visioned or confused (sometimes several times in the same day, just like you or me). Their hurts and their passions are as deep and profound to them as they are to people in their thirties.

If you want to be honest in your portrayal of them, keep in mind that every individual is . . . well . . . individual.