Pacing is like cooking, in a way. The preparation and presentation of food affect the experience of the diner just like text informs the reader. Pace is the heart of performance.

If you’re preparing an amuse-bouche to serve your guests, you want to create a flavor that will unravel on the palate, tell a story, and leave them satisfied. A big idea within a small body of work. Flash fiction in a nutshell. One self-contained bite.

Scene breaks signal the end of service, a place for the reader to pause while we refill their wine and set the table for the next course. I was using them like I might in short fiction but instead the reader was forced to stop and spit out a bone from their salmon tartare.

In hindsight, it doesn’t surprise me that the judge who pointed out the pacing problem also works in theatre. I don’t usually think of writing as a performance art. We don’t write in front of a live audience, but the end result is still being performed in front of one.

Rules themselves aren’t necessarily bad. Some people are contrarians and make a point to avoid them but the truth is, rules are rules for a reason. These are things that have been done so poorly over time that someone arrived at a simple conclusion to fix a widespread problem and the publishing community said, “Yes, that.” As generalities go, they can be useful for filtering out a lot of noise.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say that “You have to know the rules before you can break them.” What’s that mean, exactly? Well, it’s part of the internalization process but that’s still vague.

I think about that in terms of the old lawn mower engine I used to tinker with when I was a teen. At first, I knew nothing about it other than where to put the gas. When it wouldn’t start, my dad explained the carburetor, about ignition, combustion, and airflow. He handed me a screwdriver and showed me how to wedge open the choke and get the engine started. I understood a rule; I could tell you why restricted airflow would prevent the lawn mower from starting and I could follow the rule and make it run it but I was far from being able to build my own engine.

Rules try to quantify problematic story traits into simplistic, cautionary terms. What they don’t always do is give us the context behind them. That’s left up to us to figure out. I know I’ve internalized something when I can tell it to someone else without stumbling over the explanation. I put together a shiny little flowchart that kind of breaks down my process:

I try to take each piece of advice as if I’m chewing on a piece of salt the size of a jawbreaker, even if it comes from my childhood hero or my best friends. No one is trying to mislead me, but everyone approaches these problems from their own experiences. Rules that work for everyone, like absolute, are suspect at best.

The most famous (and infuriatingly vague) rule might be “Show, don’t tell.” What that really means, to me, is choosing which details you reveal to the reader, and how, carefully. I don’t need to spend a paragraph emphasizing the ticking of a clock, for example, if it doesn’t have any relevance to the story other than, perhaps, to set mood. It’s a balancing of importance.

“Write what you know” is another one that has always bothered me. I’ve never been an airship pirate, nor have I been a 1920’s superhero but that hasn’t stopped me from writing about them. So what does that really mean? What I do know — life experience. I’ve known anguish and heartbreak. I’ve seen people self-destruct through inaction and apathy, or rise to new heights through personal revelation. What I know is the life I’ve lived and ultimately story comes down to the people who populate it.

Every writer has leeway to interpret the rules their own way. How we write defines our voice. That variety is what makes literature exciting and worth reading. Can you imagine the horrible boringness if every writers voice were the same — if someone like Catherynne Valente (whose written voice is amazing) were indistinguishable from any other writer? That would be a fucking criminal and should emphasis the importance of making these bits of wisdom your own.

Finding your voice is your internalization of the so-called rules. And when you’re done, motherfucking own those rules and write.

Skip forward a few years. I’d been following a discussions on story revision, submission management and tracking on Codex and elsewhere. I’d gone through several iterations of my own submission spreadsheet, trying to find a process that worked for me. Then I remembered that past conversation with Jay. I still had that snapshot into his early short fiction career, circa 2000-2009, so I reconnected with him to see if he would be interested in discussing his early career in more detail.

I think most people have some goal for publication — pay rate, prestige, SFWA qualification, etc. What was your strategy for choosing where to send a story and how has that changed over the years?

When I first started publishing I was keenly interested in SFWA qualification, yet at the same time (ca. 2001/2002) the independent press was exploding. Print on Demand books had become financially and logistically practical, while Web based markets were first being taken seriously. So, frankly, I went for exposure in casting my net widely. I was submitting to top pay and prestige markets from the very beginning, but I was also producing sufficient inventory to keep stories out at various independent and one-time markets.

In the years since, I’ve shifted my primary writing focus to novels. At the same time, my cancer experiences of the past four years have robbed me of a considerable amount of writing time. Taking these two trends combined has significantly reduced the attention I’ve been able to pay to short fiction. My strategy these days is to respond to requests from markets I’m interested in supporting, while still also aiming for those top pay and prestige markets. Reduced inventory had caused me to pull in net, so to speak, but I’m still an enthusiastic supporter of independent presses.

Fundamentally, I’d like to be read. Whatever path it might be that gets me there.

Your submission history speaks to persistence. In one case, a story had been rejected twenty-two times before selling to Weird Tales. At what point do you give up trying to sell a story?

Usually I trunk a story when it has hit all the markets I think it was likely to be of interest to. Obviously this is a very subjective judgment on part. And I do have a pretty big trunk, so to speak. Every once in a great while I’ll pull out a retired story, rework it, and put it back on the market. So even those trunk stories aren’t necessarily in permanent retirement.

It doesn’t look like you often edit to a story once it’s gone into submission. What will prompt you to make revisions before sending something to the next market?

I usually try to read through a story before it goes out, just for a typo patrol. Every now and then I’m moved to pull a finished story and edit more heavily. In general, though, I’d almost always rather write a new one. Since writing isn’t a difficult exercise for me (other than the time issues mentioned above), this seems to work out fairly well.

As your career and writing progressed — pro sales, invitations to closed markets, award nominations and wins, etc. — do you have any qualms about submitting older stories that are not representative of your current work?

Not really. If I pull an old story out of the trunk and rework it, well, then hopefully I’m functioning within my present knowledge and mastery of the craft. I’ve always had pretty good ideas and a neat turn of phrase. The problems in those older stories are more along the lines of characterization, ending and so forth. That’s stuff I can fix if I want to take the time to do so. My voice is always evolving — if it ever stops doing so, that will be because something has gone wrong — but I’m proud of my earlier work as well.

Jay Lake lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works on numerous writing and editing projects. His 2012 books are Kalimpura from Tor Books, and Love in the Time of Metal and Flesh from Prime Books. His short fiction appears regularly in literary and genre markets worldwide. Jay is a past winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and a multiple nominee for the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards. Jay can be reached through his blog at jlake.com.

I did what needed to be done, promptly sending a withdrawal and apology to the editor. My next step was figuring out how I made the mistake in the first place, which led to writing this post.

I’m a pretty avid supporter and user of Duotrope. It’s the first place I go to look for markets and where I primarily track my submissions but, as it turns out, with some omissions. On top of that, I was using a mix of spreadsheets but those were entirely current, either.

Numbers (or Excel) worked well as an offline solution, but was getting cluttered. I decided to switch to Google Docs and create multiple spreadsheets — one per story — to track submissions. It was an interesting experiment, but only added to the confusion (not to mention a duplication of effort).

Disheartened, I started re-examining the problem. The spreadsheet(s) I had only tracked the most basic information: title, market, dates submitted and responded, status and comments. That’s not enough, though. I also keep a list of stories written and their status and was duplicating information between the two lists. There’s also tracking what rights were sold for acceptances, which I wasn’t tracking. Ugh.

With only a half dozen stories sold, reprints aren’t something I’m worrying about yet but I’ll need to be. I also need to know which rights I’ve sold — print vs. Electronic vs. Audio. A story sold once is a story that can be sold twice.

Databases, which I’m all too familiar with, seem like overkill. Any solution needs to be simple or I’m just going to get frustrated building it or using it. I know some people are happy using a simple document ala Word or a notebook (one page per story) but that lacks the ability to quickly search for specific information. Back to a spreadsheet I went.

Using one document to track them all, containing three spreadsheets:

• Index
• History
• Rights

The index is just that, a list of relevant details (title, log line, genre, themes, status, and notes) of each story I’ve written. I’ve color coded the status so I can quickly see if it’s in need of revision, rewriting, ready for submission, etc.

History is where I’m tracking the lifecycle of a story, from draft to submission. In one glance, I can see where a story has been and where it’s at. If I decide to trunk a story, or bring on a collaborator, I know exactly when that took place.

Another benefit I’m finding is that an occasional comment from an editor might have been filed away and forgotten, with months between rejections. Seeing them together on one page with other responses, patterns start to emerge that might have seen me make revisions to one or two stories before sending them back out.

In Rights, I’m recording the title, market, and which rights I’ve sold, along with the effective dates, how much I’ve been paid, when I was paid, and when rights revert back. If, at some point in the future, an editor asks me if I have any reprints to sell them, it’s a simple matter of filtering by date. Also, when it comes time to do taxes and I’m wondering how much money I’ve made from writing, I have that recorded, too.

A sample spreadsheet, with totally fake data (although I kind of want to write  The Bromantics, now) is available here.

There is no perfect solution to this problem, I think, because it’s different for every person. Reading Jennifer Brozek’s guest post about managing her freelance schedule, for example, gave me the idea to use color coding. It’s an adaptation of process, find what works and abandoning what doesn’t.

The more you write, the longer your inventory becomes and managing that isn’t going to become easier. I wish I’d done a better job of record keeping at the start, not just so I wasn’t spending hours trying to fix the mess I have now but so I had more accurate notes, like when I finished drafts or made revisions.

I’m curious what you’re using to track their submissions (non-fiction, short fiction, or novels), and how happy you are with that process. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

The regulars on a tech forum I frequented ran a secret santa gift exchange. Maggie, the then-wife of the person who received my name, was also interested in writing, and sent me “Storyteller: Writing Lessons and More from 27 Years of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop” by Kate Wilhelm. My interest in the workshop was rekindled; I applied in 2007 and again in 2010, when I was accepted.

Clarion is not without controversy. Ask a room full of writers if you should go to six-week workshop and you’re bound to get mixed opinions: go, don’t go, it’s the best experience in the world, it will ruin your life and you’ll never be able to write again. Sorting out who’s wrong and who’s right is complicated, especially when they’re all right.

I’m a bad traditional student. I don’t do well being lectured to and being assigned tedious homework. I floundered in high school and dropped out of college during my first semester. I taught myself most of what I know about software engineering. I read dozens of books about writing and, more importantly, written hundreds of thousands of words in practice. I studied the history and format of the workshop, and read both sides of the debate of its value. If I was going to apply, it was going to be a well-informed action.

There’s no question that going to Clarion is hard. Six weeks away from home cascades into questions of finance, career, and family.

I’d been in the process of preparing my paperwork for immigration to Canada when I was accepted to Clarion. Shortly after that, I was kicked out of Canada after a work trip to Detroit and separated from my wife. The six weeks at Clarion overlapped with that, which was a blessing and a curse. It was time I would probably still have been barred from home but I felt doubly guilty for the separation.

The workshop fee stopped me from applying more than once, but it’s a problem to be solved after you’re accepted (no rejecting yourself). I didn’t have that kind of savings, especially while paying alimony and being underwater on a house I couldn’t sell. I received some scholarship money and I am eternally grateful to the donors who sponsor them. I lucked out with my taxes that year. Because of the alimony I’d been paying post-taxes, I received a larger than expected tax return.

Time away from work was the issue I was most scared of. I’m a bit of a workaholic. I’d skipped vacations for three years prior to my acceptance but my job at the time balked at giving the time to me, despite several months notice. I’d counted on the paid time off but ended up with a partial sabbatical and advance to cover the extra time off. I didn’t get final approval until the day before I left for the workshop. Because of the alimony obligation, I would have had to back out of Clarion and forfeit my workshop fee without that approval.

For all of that stress, the anxiety of separation and uncertainty over money and job, it was worth it for me. Clarion is an intense experience. It’s not just the hard work or spending six weeks with people who you’ve just met. You’re pushing yourself each and every day, being inspired by your classmates, making new friends, and discovering new things about yourself.

Clarion isn’t for everyone. You get from it what you give to it. You’ll work hard and you’ll play hard (I might hold the record for the only student to get a concussion). I think of it as tearing you apart to find your weaknesses and putting you back together again. You’re still you, but the way you look at the world has changed.

Did Clarion worked for me? Yes, because I made it work for me. I would have had the same successes without attending, but it would have taken me longer. A lot longer, maybe. Clarion was the leap of faith I need to take in myself and for that it was worth everything.

Clarion isn’t just a workshop; it’s a community within a community. Seventeen classmates, friends who shared the journey applying. And Maggie, who so thoughtfully sent me the book that restarted my journey towards Clarion? She herself attended Clarion West in 2008. Thank you.

Acts of theft aside, the loss of work is so nearly avoidable in this age. I was an early adopter of online file storage, dating back to the early 2000’s and a brief stint writing that kind of software for a company that no longer exists. I still lament the loss of one particular story, lost to the fickle platters of an angry electronic god and I don’t want to go through that again. That’s where Dropbox came into my life.

What is Dropbox? It’s not the most clear from their webpage without watching their video. Dropbox is, in a nutshell, a system for backing up and synchronizing files between your devices (PC, Mac, Linux, or Mobile) and the Cloud. The Cloud, in this instance, being Amazon’s S3 file storage service.

How it works

Every computer you install the desktop software in will place a “Dropbox” folder in your home directory. Inside that directory, I’ve organized all of the documents and files I want to keep backed up and synchronized. It looks a little bit like this:

• Clients
• Contracts
• Proposals
• Documents
• Taxes
• Receipts
• Public
• Writing
• Contracts
• Copyedited
• Cover Letters
• Critiques
• Essays
• Fiction – Short
• Fiction – Long
• For Critique
• For Submission

That probably looks somewhat familiar. It should. The point is, the Dropbox folder shouldn’t look any different what you already have, except for its name. It took me a while to come up with a file structure that suited me and to remember to save things to it but that’s all. As long as you’re connected to the internet, you’re done. Dropbox will backup any new file you move or create under its folder, and synchronize any changes that you make.

Privacy and Security

As with any service that transfers and stores your data online, there are privacy and security concerns to consider. Dropbox got themselves into a middle of a fuss some months back thanks to some unclear changes to their Privacy Policy, which have since been revised for clarification.

The short, non-technical version is that they use same kind of security that your web browser uses to keep your secure when you’re checking bank balances or shopping online. Once in the Cloud, your files are not encrypted unless you encrypted them first, but they are three ways your files can be accessed by others. Two are if you’ve chosen to share them, either by putting the file in your Public folder *and* linked them to it or specifically invited them to share files. The third is by an employee of Dropbox, when they are legally required to do so.

There’s a privacy debate about whether or not Dropbox should encrypt by default and, indeed, there are competitors such as SpiderOak that do, but their client software was not nearly as well-integrated the last I checked and, for that reason, not suitable for my needs. It comes down to a personal choice; I’m choosing convenience in this case.

There was a debacle in June 2011, where a programming change introduced a bug that left accounts accessible by any password for four hours. An embarrassing mistake, unlikely to happen, and not enough by itself to find an alternative.

Disaster Recover

I primarily work from a Macbook Pro, but I have an older Mac Mini in my office that I primarily use for music. I installed Dropbox on that and linked it to my account. If I’m on the road and make changes, they are automatically synchronized at home. Dropbox already provides a way to restore files, through the desktop application and their website but this gives me an extra layer of redundancy.

Whether you use Scrivener like I do, Word, Open Office, yWriter, or whatever, things occasionally get bolloxed up. You can train yourself to hit save early and often or setup auto-save but no matter how many times do, sometimes the last save is the only one it takes to corrupt a document and make it unreadable.

Dropbox to the rescue. Every time you save, it records the changes. Viewing the previous versions will show you the history of that file and let you download the previous copy until you find one that worked.

Other uses for Dropbox

I haven’t used Dropbox to share files between users much, but I’d love to hear comments from anyone who has, and how its worked. I have used it with the iPhone and iPad client, in conjunction with the Plaintext application, to make quick changes or even revise (with an external keyboard).

Getting Dropbox

Dropbox has a free tier with 2GB of storage, which should be more than sufficient if you’re using it to store documents or small files, with increases in 250MB increments if you refer people to signup with them. A paid plan of course, is available, if you need more. I’ve been using the free tier for more than three years without having to consider upgrading. Download, install, and forget about it.

Get Dropbox (using my referral link, so we both get 250MB bonus storage)
Get Dropbox (no referral link, but no bonus storage)

Writing, and more specifically, writing for publication, means cultivating a discipline that borders on obsession. Setting goals, reaching goals, and yes, failing, is part of that process. Think of it like minding a garden — too much attention and you’ll kill your crop but so will neglect. This harvest, though, isn’t something you can read about in the Farmers Almanac. You’re tending you — your motivations and productivity, compensating for whatever life is throwing in front of you at that given moment, in order to blossom.

The setting of goals is individual. Its what you hope to achieve, but should be something that you have direct control over, i.e., revising a story for submission versus a story being accepted for publication.

A lot of the advice you’ve heard repeated ad nauseam is sound: read, write, revise, submit. These should pretty much be mantra.

There’s also the voluntary bits, such as: slushing, proofreading, attending workshops and conventions, social networking, etc. These can improve your abilities as a writer, give you new insights into publishing, open up new career paths, such as editing or proofreading or publishing, and introduce you to many wonderful people.

These extracurricular activities come at a cost, both in terms of money and time. You should evaluate each according to how it applies to your goals. Voluntary work is an additive, like fertilizer. It should enhance your work or life in some way, not choke the life out of it.

Semi-related side note: I was listening to the podcast Writing Excuses 6.17: Writing Assistants last week and they mentioned Kevin J. Anderson, who probably needs no introduction. On his desk, he has a piece of paper with the word “no” written in large letters where he can see it whenever he looks up as a reminder not to take on too many projects. I think that’s a good reminder for all of us. The demands on our time get worse, not better, with success.

Set a goal and try. Accept that failure will happen and figure out why when it does. Sometimes a transitory event will kills the crop — the equivalent of a freak hailstorm. It’s okay. Repeat methods that fail due to outside influence but if it doesn’t feel right or isn’t working for you, try something else.

I’ve tried more than a few things that didn’t work for me. Points systems that lead to rewards. Withholding simple pleasures. None of them worked for long. I found lists to be effective but they needed to be short, specific, and updated frequently.

I put a cork board up over my desk a few months ago. Along with a few personal keepsakes, I keep a few things pinned up as reminder of what I’m working towards. First there’s the Norse Crisis Flowchart, because it’s always good to remember to blame Loki. I have a list of goals for the current month. A growing collection of index cards with inspirational quotes. Finally, I have a spreadsheet of SFWA markets with response times and notes about what they’re looking for and my experiences submitting to them, that I refer to when I build my submission plan for new stories.

My 15 year old self didn’t know what he was doing, but that’s the thing about goals; if they’re want them bad enough, you don’t give up on them. You keep chipping away, for years or decades, if necessary.

What are your techniques for goaltending? What has, or hasn’t, worked for you?

My process is basically this: I spend a fair amount of time thinking about a story. I’m usually preoccupied with formal elements: should I write this in first person, past tense, have two storylines running at the same time, tell it all in flashback, etc.? When I figure out something formally interesting, I then come up with a first sentence. When I have that, I sit down and write the story. I keep the Internet on for research purposes, which I perform on an as-needed basis. If I need to know something, I look it up on the spot. It’s impossible for me to leave something for later. Usually, I hit the “ending” and realize that there is more story to go, then finish it up with a final page or so. Then I look at who is still awake and on GChat and beg someone for a proofread. Not a critique. A proofread.

Then it’s done. I spend almost zero time revising, make no outlines, and don’t put a story aside for a few weeks to return to it later. That’s it. I generally finish a story in one sitting, though some more difficult stories take up a few evenings. Length is only a secondary factor—I’ve written novelettes in a day, but one 1800-word short story took me a week. For novels, I treat individual chapters as short stories. Sometimes, I might add a sentence or three after the fact, and indeed, often after a sale but before publication.

I don’t recommend this process for anyone, not even me. It’s not appropriate for the writing of lengthy novels, which many people wish to write. It’s a pretty exhausting process as well. Ever pull an all-nighter in college? It’s like that. After about a decade of practice, I’ve managed to make it work fairly efficiently. Occasionally, I’ll have a run of doing a story a week for three, or four, or six weeks. This year so far I’ve managed to produce stories, mostly on solicitation, for the anthologies Demons, Long Island Noir, Future Lovecraft, Black Wings II, Shotguns vs Cthulhu, West Coast Crime Wave, The Mammoth Book of Steampunk (a novelette), and something for a tie-in book the name of which I cannot yet reveal. I’ve also produced a number of essays. But I still don’t write very much. When I have lunch with a writer friend, he often says something like, “I have twenty-two stories out on submission.” I don’t think I’ve ever had more than three or four out at a time after I got past the days of universal rejection.

I developed my process for mercenary reasons. For a long time I supported myself by writing non-fiction—journalism, copywriting, and even term papers for college students with more money than brains. The price was right. Even small political journals will apologize for paying as little as twenty-five cents a word; in the world of short genre fiction that’s top-dollar. I often had multiple daily deadlines, so short stories had to be squeezed in. The sprawling novels beloved of the publishing industry were a scheduling impossibility. I also discounted the future by writing work I could sell relatively quickly, instead of spending years on a novel first. My stories still tend to be on the short side—2500 words is a sweet spot for me.

The secret for me is figuring out the structure first, then filling the frame with the information the story should actually contain. Back when I was editing Clarkesworld, the plurality of the stories I rejected had informational problems—elementary lapses of point of view, false suspense, tedious exposition, and the like. The formalist method not only precludes such errors, it lets the story tell itself. After all, there is an infinite amount of information that could be disseminated about any individual or circumstance, as the endless volumes on the life of Christ, or the influence of the French Revolution, or those ol’ debbils the carbohydrates demonstrate. Form is like a cookie-cutter of any shape you like, used to slice a consumable bit of informational dough out from an infinite plane of the same.

Ultimately, the process is occult. Where do ideas come from? How do I know that the form I selected was correct? Honestly, I spend almost no time thinking about any of this. Hell, I’ve only recently realized that I write stories form-first. I’ve done it just eighty times or so in the last decade. (Essays are written differently. Novels are a variation just different enough to exclude.) Not too often, really. Writing fiction is like folding socks in that we all have our own way of doing it. Writing fiction is also like folding socks in that changing one’s method will not likely lead to cuter, or warmer, feet.

Nick Mamatas is the author of three and a half novels, over seventy short stories, and hundreds of feature articles, and is also an editor and anthologist. His fiction has been nominated for the Bram Stoker and International Horror Guild awards and translated into German, Italian, and Greek; his editorial work with Clarkesworld earned the magazine World Fantasy and Hugo award nominations. Nick’s reportage, short stories, and essays have appeared in venues such as Razor, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Silicon Alley Reporter, theVillage Voice, The Smart Set, The Writer, Poets & Writers and anthologies including Supernatural Noir and Lovecraft Unbound. He teaches at Western Connecticut State University in the MFA program in Creative and Professional Writing, was a visiting writer at Lake Forest College and the University of California, Riverside’s Palm Desert Campus, and runs writing classes in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Cute — adorable, even, but limited.

It reminded me of an early story I wrote that suffered from generic setting syndrome. Any background details that did existed were thrown there haphazardly and not in any real sense of historical place. I didn’t see a problem with it at the time — after all, it was the characters that mattered, right? Kind of.

Just shy of two years ago I attended a weekend photography workshop in Toronto. Prior to that, I’d been snapping pictures but not putting much thought into it. Point, zoom, and shoot. Much like that early story, the subject of my photographs filled almost the entire frame, leaving little else for the imagination.

Somewhere along the line, we discussed telling a story through a photograph along with concepts such as the rule of thirds and depth of field. Something clicked in my writer brain; the little gears whirred away in the background and churned away until it could put it in terms I could understand.

One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned is that there’s a difference between telling a story and telling a story dramatically, and that tenet isn’t exclusive to writing. The words we choose to use to communicate direct how the reader sees our stories. It works the same way for artists and photographers.

Animated image built from color and black & white with grid source images, demonstrating the rule of thirds.

Think of the field of view as you tell a story. What details to include? Which should you leave out? Well, the rule of thirds suggests dividing your work into nine equal parts by vertical and horizontal lines. Align your subject along the intersections to create more more dramatic image.

The thing that’s important to your story is in the foreground but the background — the things you include but leave slightly out of focus, contribute to a much broader experience. Below the cut are a few more photographs that may help illustrate the idea.

This photograph is zoomed in solely on it’s subject but still tells a story. It’s a building, obviously, but one with a story. It’s an urban storefront, possibly tied to a church — one with a lot of problems (4 shizzle).

The man wearing the purple hat looks a little bit like Pop-Eye. In the background we see a wall with some vegetation clinging to the side and a few people who are dressed differently than our focal point. He’s an entertainer at the Bristol Renaissance Faire, explaining to the audience that they have been divid into two cities — Sparta and Trojan — and he is their champion. They must cheer the loudest to prove that they are the best, or else he will have to save their honor by eating…mud. Long live the mud show.

Aha! Here we have Guido of the Swordsman (bold and stupid men, at your service). He’s on stage, caught in the act (but of what?) by his nemesis, Dirk.

Just like a photograph, our words shouldn’t be focused solely on the subject of the story. Zoom out a little bit and give the reader a wider context — setting, side characters, motivations, etc. It’s through the noise in the background that a story emerges, and we see and interpret the world around us.

Presumably, you know how to brush your teeth, comb your hair, and tie your shoes but you don’t really think about the acts themselves. You learn, you internalize, and then you do without conscious effort. The basics of writing are much the same way, from the act of forming a complete sentence to submitting a finished manuscript. The following advice is purposely simple, a primer for those just getting ready to submit.

Goals

People usually dive right into the research and flail like a swimmer at high tide. It’s an approach I’ve used on more occasions than I’d like to admit but there is  better way. The first thing you should do is ask yourself a very important question: what is your goal?

We all write for different reasons; understanding yours will save you a lot of frustration later. Assuming you want other people to read your work, I look at three factors primarily.

What kind of exposure does the market have? If I can get more readership posting to my blog than if they published a story, they’re probably not the right kind of market for me. Figuring out what the readership numbers are is a dark art. There are ways to see gritty, probably inaccurate numbers on some website, but look at the website itself. Is it easy to read? If you google their name, do they show up? Do they have a Wikipedia page? Are other people talking about them? All fairly easy things to find within a minute.

Money flows towards the writer — Yog’s Law

Secondly, what is their pay rate? This can be a sticky subject for some, and is very subjective based on your goals. Publishing is often a for-the-love effort by the editors and some markets only offer token payments, if that. If, however, they are a for-profit venture, have a shiny, professionally-developed website and are selling subscriptions, I would expect a semi-pro rate. Writers create content, and if that content is sold, writers deserved to be paid for their effort.

Some of the very best markets don’t pay at all, and that’s okay, too. You come to know who they are. Electric Velocipede. Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Sybil’s Garage. They pay little to nothing but are highly respected for the quality of their work and as such are read by fan and editor alike.

Breaking into a prestigious market is a perfectly valid goal. Take a look at the award-nominated and winning magazines and you’ll find a who’s who of markets that are high quality and well-respected. Selling a story to any one of them is a point of pride.

Market research

Now that you have an idea of what you’d like to achieve, the real work begins: finding your markets. In days of old, you would have lugged out the doorstop known as the Writer’s Marketplace. Thankfully, we’ve come a long way, kid. Your search begins and ends at Duotrope. (Ralan.com, I should note, is genre specific and has good listings but doesn’t have any search functionality so I generally leave it for secondary research.)

With Duotrope, you can search for print or electronic markets, by pay rate, by genre, etc. Once you’ve narrowed down the results to fit your goal, I urge you to pay close attention to the details. You’ll find detailed response time reports so you can see what other Duotrope users are experiencing from their submissions. You can also see the average acceptance/rejection rate based on those numbers. The statistics are only so accurate, but when I see a market with a 65%+ acceptance rate, I know that they’re probably taking every legible submission not written in crayon and that’s doesn’t fit with my goals.

Even though I know my markets, I re-check their Duotrope listing and website from time to time, to see what’s changed. Editors move on, formats change, and markets close. You’ll also hear praise and damnation from fellow writers based on person experience. I keep a spreadsheet of markets that I’ve submitted to, make a note if I or someone I know has had a bad experience with them, and make a priority list, by story, of where I want to submit.

Submitting

You’ve written your story, you’ve found your target markets, and now it’s time to submit. Follow the guidelines, ask questions if they aren’t clear (because sometimes they aren’t), and learn to love Standard Manuscript Format. William Shunn has written the definitive guide to Standard Manuscript Format. My friend Kaolin, a geek of the highest order, also wrote a nifty tool to automatically generate your final document.

Rejectomancy

Everyone will tell you that this way lies madness but it’s a case of do as I say, not as I do. That said, there are plenty of ways to scry your stories fate. Duotrope lists the expected and actual reported response times for any given market. What’s even better, if you sign up and track your submissions, they offer an RSS feed listing the recent responses of markets you have a pending submission at. This can be a useful reminder. You might find that your story has been waiting three times the current average response time. It might be too soon to query but it is a good reminder for checking your spam folder.

Most markets will list how long you should wait before querying. Even if others are receiving responses before you, resist the urge to query early unless something has obviously gone missing (your submission disappearing from the market’s status page, for example).

Plays nice with others

The more you submit, the more likely it is that you’re going to interact with an editor. You’ll rack up a stack of rejections both form and personal, rewrite requests, and hopefully more than a few sales. You’ll develop a working relationship and reputation with these editors. Be professional. Communicate clearly. Above all, don’t be an asshole.

Handling rejection

When your rejections wing their way home again, be prepared to resubmit. I allow for, at most, a 24 hour cooling off period before sending a submission back out on its way.

Log your rejections in your spreadsheet, in Duotrope’s submission tracker (because good statistics help us all), and/or in the Rejection/Acceptance log. Make a witty comment on Twitter or Facebook or behind the closed doors of your writer’s group. Keep the message positive. Don’t assail the market for rejecting you — editors will see and remember your name in a bad way.