writing

A “Submission Century”

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I heard writer Wendy Wimmer speak at a Barrelhouse Conversations and Connections conference in April 2024 in Washington DC. Wendy is nurturing of writers, with a “you can do this” sensibility in how she talks to them.

I had lots of takeaways from her session, which are now part of my thinking and my daily writing. For those alone, I’m grateful to Wendy.

A distinct idea from Wendy is the “Submission Century”. A submission century is making 100 submissions of your writing to publishers in 100 days.

When she mentioned this, I thought it was insane. Then I almost immediately laid plans to do one.

I write a lot of flash fiction and short stories, and seek only readers, not fame or fortune. There are hundreds of online literary journals that seek writing like mine and make it available, often for free, to readers. So submitting–getting my work out there–should be routine, not sporadic and neglected, as it has been for me.

This May, as I looked out over my life in about a 100-day span, I didn’t see a fit for a 100-day sprint, so I planned a submission blitz of 100 submissions in 20 days, with a 5 submissions per day quota. I worked with 13 of my flash fiction and short stories.

I just completed my “century” yesterday. I submitted 101 times total. So far, I have found homes for 2 stories, so I consider this effort a complete success. I’ve gotten plenty of rejections, but expected that. As of today, I still have 72 submissions out for decision.

The stories that found a home were some of my older ones, veterans of past unsuccessful submissions. This is teaching me to not give up on a story I believe in.

Stats on my effort, results so far
Day 1  — May 22, 2024 through Day 20 —  June 10, 2024
Submissions:                      101
Acceptances so far:                2
Rejections so far:                 19
Withdrawals by me:               8 (of stories accepted elsewhere)
Still out for decision:           72

Key takeaways

Submitting is its own thing, and it is different from the work of writing. It is administrative or clerical in flavor, detail-focused, and may not be a given writer’s preferred kind of work. It is work that has to be done, however.

It was essential to have a set of stories (I had 13) fully ready; revised, proofed, etc. All were either flash (up to 1,000 words), or short stories, 1,000 to several thousand.

Publishers can be persnickety. You have to closely study their guidelines and get the details right. Word counts are routinely stated and enforced.

You get better at the flow and process of submitting as you go.

I can also imagine, with just one story in hand, doing a blitz for just it, submitting perhaps 10 or 20 times, with a careful targeting of publishers.

Or, with just one story to focus on, I might prioritize and target places I’d like that story to end up, and do one at a time, waiting for a response before submitting elsewhere. But nevertheless treating it as a submission campaign.

A lot of publishers accept multiple pieces at the same time. Often it’s up to 3, so having sets of three stories in single documents ready is useful. Submitting multiples is helpful to the cause of reaching 100 submissions in a short time.

Duotrope is a service for writers that tracks publishers and publishing opportunities. I’ve found it valuable for both finding publishers and keeping track of my submissions. It costs $50 per year.

Duotrope tracks, via user data, acceptance rates for publishers, if they have enough data to calculate a rate. I favored publishers with enough data on Duotrope that they had a calculated acceptance rate.

In my submitting, I targeted journals with low, but not ‘impossible’ acceptance rates, so I tended to reach for opportunities in the 3% to 10% range.

I sought publishers who put stories online, favoring those with free and open and linkable content, so I could share my stories to family and friends and on social media. While it’s thrilling to be in a printed anthology (I’ve had this experience once), my goal is to get more readers.

About a quarter of publishers I submitted to charge a nominal fee, usually $2 or $3, to defray expenses. I am OK with that, and did not discriminate against them. If they had a much higher fee of, e.g. $25, I did not submit to them.

I avoided most contests, which quite often have an entry fee, theme requirements, and other hurdles for the submitter. With (often) cash prizes, I suspect they also may get flooded with submissions, and I wanted to avoid my pieces getting limited attention.

I did not explicitly favor publishers who pay writers. The payments out there are generally nominal anyway, and if I am leaving those for others more needing than me, I feel good about that.

Having dozens of stories out for review means getting, sometimes, multiple rejections a day, which takes some getting used to. On the other hand, the stakes are not as high as if you were waiting for just one beloved story to be reviewed by a publisher.

It’s easy to loosen one’s standards by doing a blitz of submitting, taking less careful a measure of where you are offering your story. I tried and mostly succeeded at being discerning.

Tracking submissions and publishers for the process is critical, and makes the effort more efficient. I used Duotrope for reporting and tracking submissions, but also kept a spreadsheet where I could log, assess, prioritize, and choose publishers to submit to, and a log of my stories, and their word counts

I tended to favor certain stories and submitted them more than others. This is about having darlings, and may or may not reflect quality and readiness. I tried, partway through, to balance my submitting so more stories got an equalized chance.

I found value in this process and will do it again.

Thanks Wendy!

NaFFWriMo–A flash fiction story, every day of November

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“Write a short story every week. It’s not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.” —Ray Bradbury

I read Ray Bradbury’s advice on writing, and remembered it wrong, but I got the spirit, if not the letter of it, right. I took the wisdom as, write a short story every day. It’s likely I was remembering his advice to read a short story every day.

For three previous years November has meant my participation in the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) program. This year, I decided to give the same sort of effort, but instead writing short fiction.

I committed to myself to write one flash fiction story each day for the month of November. You might call it, “NaFFWriMo.” Flash stories are as short as a few hundred and up to 1000 words. That means a piece of flash fiction is shorter than the daily average words needed to complete NaNoWriMo, 1,667. Four or eight hundred words is enough for my “NaFFWriMo” effort.

I have now reached 11 days–11 stories, despite a day when I felt horribly sick, and a day when I felt angry and sad and wholly distracted because of the U.S. election.

What have I learned so far?

I expected and it has been true that most of the stories, for which I can only give about 40 good pre-dawn minutes, are rough, raw, and may not pan out. Some have a premise and a start, but don’t arrive somewhere. Some are wooden and uninteresting, even to me. But two or three show great promise, and several others may pan out with more work.

Thirty or 40 minutes is not much time for writing, but with a bit of inspiration, it’s enough for a burst of creative work, and a good raw start.

I had built and banked and continue to tinker with a list of 100 ideas for stories, which I rated on a 0, 1, 2, 3 scale of most to least appealing to me to write, generally based on the degree to which I know what the point of the story would be.

That list has proved useful, but, in fact, the stories still seem most often to just arrive at the tips of my fingers as I sit down to write. That bit of magic that happens is a mystery to me. But I think the act of list building is part of the juice that goes into it, even if I don’t always pluck a theme from the list and set to writing the list.

Is it good for my writing to do this?

Yes! Like NaNoWriMo, the “get it written” pace means you just create, you don’t fuss, double back, edit, tinker, slave over structure, etc. This, like NaNoWriMo, prevents my worst habits as a writer from being allowed: researching junkets, restructuring while writing, losing the spark in some side journey in the process.

What will happen to all this work?

I will develop the stories that appeal to me, and work on them along with others I have written prior. I’ll find critical eyes to share them with, and I hope to learn how to submit them for publication.

And I will report further here about the effort. The next test is Thanksgiving, which has its own distractions and delights. But the family doesn’t get up as early as I do.

Here is the update: “30 days, 30 flash stories — how it turned out“

Every word crystalline: My favorite writers

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My most admired English language novels, in no particular order:

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
William Golding, Lord of the Flies
Phillip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint
Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop
J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
Jack London, The Call of the Wild
Jack London, White Fang
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes are Watching God
Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt
Salmon Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
Annie Proulx, Close Range: Wyoming Stories
Edward P. Jones, The Known World

And must read writers (for their style), in parens some great short story examples:

Hemingway (The Snows of Kilimanjaro or The Old Man and the Sea)
Annie Proulx (any story)
Salinger (Franny and Zooey, any story)
London (To Build a Fire)
Fitzgerald (The Diamond as Big as the Ritz)
Mark Twain (The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County)
Raymond Carver (Cathedral)
Eudora Welty (Powerhouse)
Edward P. Jones, (many, if not all)
Raymond Chandler
John Steinbeck
Kurt Vonnegut
Ray Bradbury
John Kennedy Toole
Dave Eggers

Anachronisms

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In 10th grade, my English teacher, Mr. Simmons, put anachronism on our vocabulary test, and gave us the definition to memorize: “Something out of place or time”. Anachronisms are at issue in my professional work as a futurist and in my fiction writing. My futures work involves remembering that the future isn’t mostly the same as today, with a few changes (e.g. using only brainwaves to drive an internal combustion engine, gasoline-powered, four-door sedan).

My fiction writing has to involve intent focus on what would and would not be present in my stories, and since I’ve focused mainly on writing fiction set in the past, the potential for anachronisms is high.

Mr. Simmons used a broader definition of anachronism than most people do, most often, people use it to mean something in the present from the past, which no longer belongs. That’s the least of my worries. A story set in 2013 could have a butter churn standing in the corner, since such things can still exist as antiques (though the thing ought to be explained) but a story set in 1916 cannot have a mobile phone or a woman fighter pilot in it.

The arts of fiction and foresight involve thinking intently about these things. Everything matters. All the details count, and wrong details count multiply, and do only harm. It’s probably harder in futures, because we really don’t know what will change and how much. But in historical fiction, we can at least rule a lot of things out.

The biggest problem is not in material things, but in values and attitudes. It’s too easy to shine a current-day light on the past or the future which supposes that people back then or in that future will have the same values as today. They won’t or didn’t. I’ve learned to be humble about all this, it’s hard to get it right and you need to keep a watchful eye on yourself, and work at it.

Image: Mike Licht, via Flickr, creative commons attribution license

Six things studying the future has taught me about fiction writing

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On my foresight blog, I posted the reverse of this: “Six things fiction writing taught me about foresight” [LINK] 

Since the late 1980s, I’ve worked in the field of futures studies, also known as foresight. I am a consultant to any organization that will hire me to explore how the world is changing and where they might see challenges and find opportunities in that change. That work prepared me in certain ways for writing fiction. In fact, a big part of the work of a futurist is like writing fiction. Nothing is wholly known or provable about the future, so, in essence, you make it up. But like a novelist, you make up something based on logic, truth, and facts. My fiction work is based in history, and I stick to contextual setting truths about history, even as I have my way with my human characters within that reality.

Here are some key things I’ve carried from my work as a futurist to my efforts as a novelist:

1. Technology changes, but it’s the human changes that spring from that which matter most. I don’t write science fiction, but even Sci-Fi, in my limited experience with it, is really about the human things that technology does.

2. Placement in time of a story is a critical step and in that setting you have to get the conjecture right; avoiding anachronisms  and being as true as anyone can be to the times you are writing about. Whether a story is set in the future or the past, it’s important work to avoid putting too much of today’s values into the minds of people of another time. This is unavoidable, but we still have to try.

3. The world is a complex of systems connected to systems. Nothing is simple, and nothing has just one cause.

4. Conjecture is essential, and I’ve had the chance to build a habit of, and comfort with conjecture over years of working to suppose things about the future.

5. Storytelling has proven essential to getting across ideas about change in my work as a futurist. The stories meet what’s already in people’s heads, what George Lakoff calls “frames”. In fiction, your story doesn’t have much success unless it does that. So though we strive for originality, our characters may fit archetypes and other known qualities that the reader brings.

6. Exaggeration, or sharp contrasts, may make the difference in storytelling, as they do in getting ideas about the future across to people. So, even if we don’t think it will ever happen, we may spend time talking or writing as futurists about “what ifs” such as “zero waste” or “free energy.” In fiction, the lives of our characters cannot just be ordinary lives, at least not without something big happening too. We exaggerate, you could say, or at least draw sharp contrasts.

Image: rahego, via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution License

Six things fiction writing taught me about foresight

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAI have posted at johnmahaffie.com, the inverse of this theme: Six things studying the future has taught me about fiction writing

I’ve spent a couple of years deep in the ranks of amateur novelists, working on a couple of novels, which I will confess, though I am a futurist, are set in the past, one in 1916, and one in the 1970s. I am still learning the basics by writing fiction every day, but doing it has already paid off for my work as a futurist. How? Several ways.

1. The parts of the story not told
In building a body of work for a futures project, I learn a lot, and think a lot, and develop a lot of ideas. I collect lots of information. I begin to know the “whole” future that my client faces, or at least have a large body of conjecture about it. But like the readers of a novel, my clients don’t want to know everything about the future, just the part that matters and that they can act on. So, overall, what I discovered in writing my novels is, don’t put something in just because you thought of it and researched it, and went some trouble to create it. That’s not your reader’s, or your client’s problem.

2. Things are complicated
Reinforcing the lesson of foresight, and one that I can benefit from learning, relearning, and building upon, is that human systems are complex: there’s never just one cause for a change, the swirl of forces large and small shape and reshape the destiny of people, families, towns, cities, societies, humankind. In building stories about people, you get a stronger sense of that, it’s the combination of forces that create change.

3. Point of view matters
Writers have to work out the point of view, and the voice they use to get across their stories. In foresight, getting the story told, or the forecast communicated, or the call to action made, means understanding who you are exploring the future for, what’s in their heads, and what needs to be in their heads. We spend a lot of time working out what future to focus on, how to frame ideas about change, and whose interests we have in mind in doing so. The first acts of a foresight initiative involve answering the question, “What future?

4. What’s worth exploring is change
There’s not much for the futurist to do in exploring the present, other folks are far more expert at that. Our value is in looking at change and the intersections of different kinds of change. In fiction, it’s also change that matters. If a character doesn’t change, if there are no points of no return, if nothing really happens, you’ve set a scene but not told a story. In foresight, if you get caught up in the discovery of what’s going on now, you may end up a little smarter, but it’s much more valuable to get at vital changes, what they mean, and how things could turn out.

5. Show don’t tell
Good futures work is about conveying insights and wisdom, but also about explaining, supporting, and giving examples. So like the writer admonished to “show, don’t tell,” in communicating about the future, examples and specifics and the concrete do better work than generalities. Concepts and new framings are powerful, but without the support of a “such as,” or “for example” the listener or reader may not get or accept what you are talking about.

6. Story telling is the thing
Futures work includes telling stories, often those are scenarios–narratives of the future. And the more they work as stories, the better a job they do in getting ideas about the future across to people. The scenarios I’ve worked on lately are better stories, with greater attention to real human lives, ideas, and reactions. Too much of my work in the past played out technologies for technologies’ sake, at the expense of true, deep insights on people. It’s not that I didn’t know the importance of people in futures stories, it’s just that I’ve gained strength in know how to focus on that side.

Image: rahego, via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution License

It’s the heat under the simple words that counts

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Willa Cather in 1912

A new book is coming out with the letters of Willa Cather, an author whose work and whose prose I like very much. I look forward to reading her letters, which have never been published before, only quoted in paraphrase. The book is The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, edited by Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout. [Amazon link]

A review [link] of the book quoted one letter where she reflected on writing. She said:

“…it’s the heat under the simple words that counts. I early learned that if you loved your theme enough you could be as mild as a May morning and still make other people care. … It’s the one thing, that simple really caring for an old Margie, an old cat, an old anything.”

If I was set just one goal for my writing it would be to kindle that heat under the simple words. That’s all that truly matters, and it’s hard to do well.

The nature of creative work: art, fiction, and futures

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Georgia O'Keeffe

Artists, writers, musicians, and other creative people muse over what it is that they do. We can learn a lot from their exploration of what their crafts mean, and what they are for. So I try to pay attention to what they have to say.

I recently explored the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, which displays quotes from her among the paintings. I liked these thoughts on her work:

Nothing is less real than realism … Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things. –1922

If I could put down accurately the thing that I saw and enjoyed, it would not give the observer the kind of feeling it gave me. I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at – not copy it.–1976

Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or a tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or a tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they say something. For me that is the very basis of painting. The abstraction is the most definite form for the tangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint.–1977

It may surprise some people that I say it, but a futurist’s work to describe the future is just like the painter’s effort to make an idea or an experience, visual. Foresight is not about reproducing something objective for others to see. It’s about changing how and what they see as they look at the future.

The work of writing scenarios, or any analysis called “the future of…” is rooted in what we try to know about the future, but it’s a game of selection, elimination, and emphasis, as O’Keeffe saw her task as a painter.

In fact, when I write a scenario, I work knowing that the world of 2030 or some other future date has much that is the same as our world today, but with plenty of changes showing everywhere. My task is to help people understand those changes, not item by item, but as a part of a whole system. Things need to seem different from today in my scenarios. The important changes need to stand out, but be part of something whole, and partway familiar. Like O’Keeffe, I have to try to put the lines and colors of this future together so that they say something.

When writing fiction, I follow the same goals. I need to know a lot about the story’s background, but what I share with the reader is a selection. The details that matter to what the story is trying to convey. It’s a process of selecting, eliminating, and emphasis.

 

Image: Library of Congress

Scrivener: A great writing tool

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Scrivener authoring programFor a few months now, I’ve used the authoring software, Scrivener [available for Mac and Windows. I use the $40 Windows version] for writing fiction and non-fiction, whenever my task requires more than a short piece. The program has proven to be a terrific authoring tool. Let me tell you why.

Though the program came highly recommended by writers whose blog posts I read, at first, I was skeptical about it. Early advice as I began to learn to write fiction was, essentially, just get to the writing, don’t chase all sorts of tools for the work, just do it.

I tried it anyway. I started with a trial version, and quickly saw its advantages.

I started using it for fiction writing I was doing for a class. I was writing a short story with about five scenes in it. The program allowed me to build the story and its scenes as I cared to, dropping in and out of different parts while maintaining the ability to view and work on the whole story, if I liked. Some writers focus on word count, and I could keep close track of that, too.

Realizing Scrivener’s power and convenience, I then tried the program for building a transcribed collection of letters from 1906 and 07, and compiling the associated research and annotations for that work. Scrivener was terrific for that, allowing me to take each old letter from its an archive box and transcribe it, edit it, and chase down some of the details in the letter through research, and even collect images to publish with the letters. Putting the letters into their chronological order was a since.

For now, that collection of letters is part of a digital archive for my family, whose forebear wrote the letters. I am well set up, however, to turn the collection into a book manuscript.

I also used the program for client work for my business, setting up a complex and long report based on big forces of change shaping global society. Scrivener let me add and arrange sections at will, and work on ones I was ready to develop, as I saw fit.

Now I am also using Scrivener to write a novel, and the program’s ability to let me develop scenes and chapters, and to work on the ones I am ready to, when I am ready to, and to add detail, annotation, etc. to any and all parts, is a powerful and convenient feature.

Finally, in all these examples, the program has a great benefit to someone like me. I tend to want to perfect, refine, and decorate my written work, choosing fonts, aligning text, settign margins and line spacing, etc. before I’ve actually gotten the thing written. I can make MS Word jump through hoops–I am quite good at manipulating format in Word, but that’s a total distraction from the actual work of writing.

Scrivener strips away that distraction. It’s about the simple task of writing a body of prose–you fix it up visually, later. Getting things written with the bare bones font on screen is superb discipline for me. MS Word too easily lets me design a document before I’ve really written it.

I’ve not tested all the features of the program, and truth be told, I’ve not yet compiled a draft work for anyone other than a small group of writing colleagues in a class, or a draft report for my client project. I’ve yet to truly put a written peice of any large size to bed as a compiled work. But when I do, I’ve seen, I can choose the format for the given purpose: manuscript, magazine subscription, and so on. Those templates are part of the program. I look forward to taking things to the next step.

 

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