Flash Fiction Chronicles

Stories sometimes fall out of our heads and onto the computer screen, surprising us, filling us with an elation that comes mighty close to other kinds of elations.  The temptation is to get it out there into some editors hands immediately.  Usually we zip it straight to the editor we want most to love our work, an editor who’ll email us with praise, no edits, and a Pushcart nomination.  We are hot and bothered, and to use a phrase from my junior high years –STOKED–because we realize we’re beginning to get it. Writing is getting easier…

Beware the flush of love…I mean, the flush of drafts that are effortless.  Sometimes they really are good.  Sometimes they just FEEL good.  The most important thing to remember is WAIT.  Sleep on it.  Don’t lose your heart on a one night stand.  At least not yet. 

After you’ve cooled down, taken a hot shower, and rested, you may discover that what you’ve written is almost ready to go, but it needs proof-reading, a little polish, it needs to be more than it is.  On the occasion when the Muse has guided you, maybe a proof-read is enough.  But most of the time–I’d say 99% of the time–if it’s that good, it can still be better. 

Taking a piece of writing one more level up can mean the difference to finding a home for a story and not finding a home.

It could be as simple as doublechecking to see if your opening is sharp, seductive, and just as important, prescient.  Does it set up your ending.  If the first sentence, the first paragraph is a scene where siblings fight, then what you have communicated to the reader is that the relationship between this brother and this sister is important enough to start off your story.  I’m basically talking about short stories here, especially flash because the word count is such that nothing can be put into the story because because the author likes it or because that how it started in the head of the writer.  Not good enough. 

That opening paragraph must signal in some way, and yes it can be subtle, what it is this story is about. It should suggest both the main characters “journey and epiphany” without giving away the ending.  It can be done in clear straight forward way or it can be subtle, even metaphorical, but it does need to give the reader a hint to the main conflict, what this story is about on a “plot level” and on a “thematic level.” And yes, good genre writing has a theme just like “lit.”

 Creating the link between the beginning of the story and the end will bring complexity to a story.

Word count is a tool.  It sets up boundaries and when there are boundaries we are pushed to know about them, accomodate them, and break away from them.  Word count forces us to look at our stories under a microscope and to needle away anything that doesn’t do service to the story.There are almost always words and phrases that can be cut or sentences reworded by finding more exact and vivid language.

We all put words and phrases in stories when we are writing drafts and some of them eventually become invisible to us. But many of them become obsolete or unnecessary as we work with the material zeroing in on just what the story is about. 

I am trying to teach myself patience.  Trying to set aside work I think is strong in that first rush to the page, just for a day or two, before deciding if this is the best I can do.  And it never is because when I reread the attachment to the submission I’ve sent off in the afterglow of a good write (and I can never resist), there’s always a flaw in the first paragraph, a misused word, an awkwardness, and I want to haul it back from the ether and have it at least one more time.

Gay Degani has published in journals and anthologies including The Best of Every Day Fiction 2008 and The Best of Every Day Fiction  TWO (2009).  Her stories online can be read at Smokelong Quarterly, The Battered Suitcase, Night Train, Every Day Fiction as well as other publications.  Pomegranate Stories is a collection of eight stories by Gay. She is the editor of EDF’s Flash Fiction Chronicles and blogs at Words in Place.

I’ve read a lot of online discussion lately that suggests flash fiction stories are quick, easy pieces that you can dash off in a morning. That’s not my experience at all. The only reason I can afford to write flash is that I have a day job.

As an example, I thought I’d describe the process I used to write “Home to Perfect,” a flash piece published in the Best of Every Day Fiction Two anthology. This story took me a solid 15 hours to write. I’ll try to break down how those hours were spent. (The description below assumes you’ve read the story).

I got the idea for the story when I was poking around the Internet one day and found a clip on YouTube of a kid playing “Through the Fire and Flames” perfectly in expert mode on the video game Guitar Hero. At the end of the clip, the kid is visibly trembling, cursing in disbelief, and totally overwhelmed. I found myself thinking over the next several days about the kid’s awe and how he shared it with an audience on YouTube. I wondered if his parents had any idea what that moment meant to him.

I spent about 3 hours over the next several days developing the idea. I asked myself who Vic (my main character) was, why he cared about playing through the song perfectly, and what else was going on in his life. I wrote extensive notes on him, his mom, his dad, and his brother Kurt. This was the point at which I realized that I was writing about domestic violence. I could tell you a lot of details about all of these characters that never made it into the story. I believe a story should be an iceberg–what’s visible should be only a small amount of the material that’s in the author’s possession.

In a flash piece, I look for the iceberg effect even more. In very few words, I have to make the reader aware of significant emotions and history that bear on the scene I chose to show.

At that point, I wrote my first draft, spending about 2 hours on it. (My first draft rate for longer pieces is much faster, but my speed of writing seems to be inversely related to the length of the piece).

I put my first draft down for about a week. When I picked it up again, something was wrong with it, and I couldn’t figure out what. After much rereading and consideration (which I’m not counting towards the total time spent on the work), I figured out that “Through the Fire and Flames” was the problem. I had no emotional connection to the song, and I hadn’t spent much time playing Guitar Hero. I had, on the other hand, pulled many all-nighters playing Rock Band. There’s a song on Rock Band called “Green Grass and High Tides” that I love deeply and find wickedly difficult. I changed the story so that Vic is playing Rock Band, and spent about 5 hours writing a new draft. While I wrote this draft, I listened repeatedly to “Green Grass and High Tides” and periodically took breaks to watch videos on YouTube of people playing this song on Rock Band.

At that point, I thought I’d finished the story, so I let my husband read it. As always happens, he made me realize that I had a lot of work left to do, pointing out several problems with how it was structured. I spent about 3 hours restructuring and fixing those problems. Then, I spent 2 hours doing a final polish and preparing the story for submission. For me, this consists of reading the whole thing out loud several times, fixing anything that trips me up, and fiddling with things until I’m sure I really want to send the story out into the world. I run spellcheck. I obsessively study the guidelines for the market to which I’m sending the story.

And that’s a wrap. I’ve wished that I could write faster, but I’m proud of the piece and am glad I took my time.

The original version of this post appeared as Best of Every Day Fiction on Words, Words, Words.

Erica Naone writes by day about topics related to the Internet and computer software. Her fiction has appeared in On The Premises, Storyglossia, Every Day Fiction and Flashquake. She recently received an honourable mention in the 32nd annual International 3-Day Novel Contest. She lives with her husband in Allston, MA. You can read her blog or follow her on Twitter.

On January 26th, I sat down and wrote 1,000 words for the first time in something like two months. (There has been a staggering lack of writing at my house lately.) It was a first person narrative that began with:

“I’m no hero, all right? Let’s get that straight up front.”

As of today, 15 days later, I have an entirely outlined and characterized novel plan. This is how I did it.

_____________

The initial narrative took several days to get out of my system, so I went with it, following the narrator right into the middle of his current situation. I would revise the beginning to reflect things I was learning as I wrote the continuation. I shoved “show don’t tell” under my chair and let him tell me about each of his companions, until I felt like I knew them all. (I did all of the preliminary writing in a simple text-edit program so I could easily bounce back and forth between Bianca (my main computer) and Cheese (my baby hackbook).) I took the file with me everywhere for a few days, and worked on it in all of my spare time.

For several days after that, I characterized. (Maker bless the StoryMill for giving me one place to keep track of everything) I made an entry for each character, then jotted ideas and asked questions and bounced from one character to the others as I learned how they all interacted with each other, and why. The characters told me their stories, and I took notes.

Then came the outline, which was a relatively simple matter of piecing together all the quilt-square-stories my characters had told me into one ‘big picture’ of a story. The only challenge this time was puzzling out the right order in which to tell four separate stories until they could unite into one.

With the piecing came more learning, and some of the stories shifted or grew or became less important. I made notes along the way in each of the character’s records … going so far as to use strikethrough text for older ideas instead of deleting them outright, so I could see what I had scrapped in case I needed it again. I determined how many key events occurred during the scope of the tale.

At this point came the numbers – I need the numbers, they act as a boundaries to keep me from going on and on and on like some reincarnation of a famously verbose author (who shall remain nameless even though the fact that he is still being published after his demise is something of an annoyance to me, being that one printing run of his book could theoretically wipe out an entire rainforest in Bolivia.)

Anyway. I picked 65,000 as a starting point for my first draft (not too short, but with room to grow later when things require more explanation and detail.) I determined that the story could best be told in 10 chapters. Behold, each chapter now has a temporary goal of 6,500 words.

I created the 10 chapters, and named them to give myself a reminder of what happens in each one. From the chapter overviews, I determined the scenes – what events occur in what order to convey the story of the bigger picture? Sometimes there were two scenes, sometimes there were four. I entered them into the program as well, giving them names that helped me remember what happens within them, and assigning them to the appropriate chapter. I applied the numbers again, to give myself a framework for how many words each scene in each chapter should have.

At this point, I took an afternoon and made scene notes … one scene at a time, I made the notation: “In which …” and described the action that would be taking place in that scene when I wrote it. This is my map, the road marker I look back on when I am tempted to tangent in a wonderfully written side-story which is completely irrelevant and that I would only have to cut later.

Yesterday I was back to characterizing, since a few of them had come forward while I was making scene notes and requested some changes, or suggested some motivational aids. That was when I got to the nitty-gritty – the physical appearance, the life goal/motivation, the internal agendas, etc.

I also started the list of the things I need — as I encounter something in my descriptions that is incomplete, I make a note of it and keep going, so as not to slow myself down on the details that don’t really matter and can be dealt with later. Currently this list is begging for a world map, names for towns and countries and Inns, and a real name for a guy I am referring to as “Nameless Guy” in every section of notes – before “Nameless Guy” sticks and I have to name him that – keep an eye out for a guy named Inconnu or some form thereof. It’s french for “nameless”. (Thank you Babel Fish!)

I should be starting the actual writing today or tomorrow.

And that’s how it happened.

The problem I am having, however, is the guilt. I have this terrible feeling that working on a long piece, a novel-length work, is nothing but selfish indulgence. Only short pieces are going to make it out into the world and keep my name in the pond … so how can I justify taking the time to write something no one will ever read because the publishing world is a dank, scary place and I don’t have a map or a sherpa? *sigh*

(previously published at Blogging in the Dark)

BY NIK PERRING

reprinted with permission from Nik’s Blog, January 26, 2010

I am not an expert on short stories. I’m not an expert on anything to be honest. But I am a short story writer, one who’s been published in some fairly spiffing places, and one who teaches writing every so often.

It occurred to me earlier that I don’t really give any advice here, so this post should change that. It’s not comprehensive. Lots will disagree with me, I’m sure. But this is what I think. I hope it helps. And if anyone’s got any of their own I’d love to see them – so do leave a comment.

Here are my tips for anyone wanting to write a good short story or piece of flash fiction.

Start where the story starts, not before. If I was telling you about a fantastic hotel room I’d stayed in I wouldn’t start by telling you about booking the tickets to get there (unless the story was about booking the tickets and ended in the room).

Take out everything, every word, every sentence, every character that isn’t absolutely necessary.

Similarly, only use the right words. Sometimes people do just ’sit’. Or ‘run’.

Make sure your characters are believable. What they do, or the situations they find themselves in, may be unlikely and fantastical but the way they react to them has to be something that readers will believe.

Be suspicious of anything you think is clever. The story comes first, the story’s what people should notice, not the writer.

Write for you, but spare a thought for the reader too.

Don’t overdo it. Big words are fine if they’re the right ones. Same with descriptions.

Say what you want to say in the simplest, and most effective, way possible. In other words: get to the point.

Aim to be brilliant.

Don’t expect it to be easy. Or quick. Be prepared to work hard.

Don’t be afraid of rewriting. In fact, embrace it; it will make your stories better.

Don’t expect to get it right the first time. You have total control of what can be changed. (I often find also that if a story wants or needs to be changed, then it’ll let you know.)

Trust your instincts. If you suspect something’s not working then it probably isn’t.

Don’t be afraid of putting a story away for a while. Sometimes stories, and your head, need space.

Don’t be afraid of failure. Nothing’s wasted. It’s better to try something new and fail (and perhaps learn something) than to play safe all the time.

Most importantly: BE BRAVE. You have an imagination, use it. Write the story you want to write, write what you think’s good and interesting, even if that means not sticking with the norm. Different, if done well, can be brilliant.

And read the greats. See how they do things. See why they’re the greats.

Nik Perring is a writer and workshop leader from the UK. His short stories have been published widely, in places including Smokelong Quarterly, 3: AM Magazine, Ballista, Word Riot and Metazen. His debut collection of short, short stories will be published by Roast Books in the summer. He’s also the author of a children’s book and occasional non-fiction. Nik blogs here . 

It has happened to many of us at one time or another: The words are flowing, the story is unfolding on the page and then … the words just stop.

(a) Work on something else and hope that, in the interim, the block will resolve itself.

(b) Try to force your way through the block.

 (c) Read back through the story until you reach the last point where you were excited about what would happen next, and delete everything that came after.

Different writers have different solutions. I know plenty of people who manage to fight through blocks quite successfully. I’m not one of those people.

I generally choose option C.

I believe that writer’s block is my subconscious mind’s way of telling me that my story has derailed, that what I am writing now is not as good as what came before, that I am no longer telling the story I should be telling. Sometimes, the block occurs only a few sentences after the point where the story derailed. Sometimes, five or 10 pages or more go by before I realize something isn’t right. However big the off-track section is, I get rid of it all. Why? Because the only other viable choice – fighting through the block – keeps me going in the same wrong direction that caused the block in the first place.

So next time you hit a block you can’t write your way out of, you might try this:

Cut-and-paste the offending material into a separate document. Don’t delete it outright because something in there might be worth salvaging later. Spend as much time as you need to figure out what went wrong and what is the right direction for your story. Then put your butt back in your chair and write.

Chances are, the words will start flowing again.

Jennifer Campbell Hick’s work recently appeared in Science Fiction Trails. She lives in Arvada, Colorado where she tries to find time to write between two full-time jobs as a journalist and a mother of three.

Any “how-to” list about writing seems bound to be subjective, with the advice—”Write as I do!”—coming as no surprise. My entry here about flash is no exception.

First, here’s my bare bones narrative structure for the short story: Something happens (precipitating incident) to create a desire, and that desire creates a need for action that is thwarted by this and that and this and that until, finally, there’s resolution. Vonnegut’s oft-quoted advice to begin as close to the conclusion as possible works well for flash. Guided by that suggestion, a flash writer might begin with “Finally, there’s resolution.” The writer might find a way to imply the rest—that inciting incident, that series of actions. Or maybe a writer might want it all, the all of the short story structure, and write a compressed version with all the parts in place.

Flash narrative, in my world, doesn’t want to be a diminished version of the short story; it doesn’t desire what already exists. Flash fiction possesses a restlessness, an unsettled nature. If something’s been done, flash wants something else; no part of it wants to be a diminutive form of the short story. How a writer rises to meet the challenge of compressed narrative determines (for me) the success of a flash narrative. As a flash writer, I’m constantly looking for ways to take advantage of the opportunities presented by compression, and once one strategy seems to work, I’m off to find the next. By looking at what’s behind the traditional narrative—what it is that each section delivers for the reader—flash writers might be able to discover their own ways to make (very) short narrative pieces flash.

Perhaps the key to compressed narrative is “the inciting incident”; in short, it is the something that happens at the outset of a story. The inciting incident answers, for the reader,  the question, “Why now?” If one thinks of a character’s life as a timeline, then the story, especially a flash story, becomes the tiniest moments upon that line. Why, of all the moments, is this the one that makes the moment story worthy? The inciting incident answers that question as such: “Because something happened.” Okay. But characters experience a bunch of things each day, so there’s things writers might add to increase that “story-worthy” quotient of a moment. Having something happen may not be be enough to give a story a sense of purposeful existence. That “something that happens” might need other qualities. These include the following:

The something that happens is different for the character. It isn’t something that happens every day. If it is something that happens regularly, then there’s at least something different about this time.

The something that happens is odd, not only for the character, but for the reader.

The something that happens is the very thing that the character needs to figure out. For example, Eliot in E.T. could’ve been given anything, but he gets the very thing he needs to guide him on his quest. At the movie’s beginning, Eliot’s brother yells at him about his insensitivity toward others, asking Eliot when he’s going to think about what others feel. Thus, Eliot gets E.T., whose supernatural ability allows Eliot to feel what E.T. feels, the very thing Eliot needs.  Thus, the more meaningful the “something that happens” is to a character—the more it arises as the guide toward solving the character’s inner & outer problems—the less “so what?” feeling a story might have.

The something that happens gives the character a specific goal. Antigone begins with Creon’s edict that no one, not even Antigone, may bury her brother. This “something that happens” gives Antigone her goal: bury the brother. In Joyce’s “Araby,” the boy’s encounter with Mangan’s sister and the arrival of Araby into town gives him a goal (even though Mangan’s sister seems unaware of it): Bring her back something from Araby. That singular, concrete goal created by the initial “happening” gives the story the same thing it gives the character: a sense of purpose.

There’s a gain and commensurate loss attached to that initial incident (referred to in the fiction world as stakes). Stakes in movies often get artificially raised, so that finishing fifth grade has attached to it huge wealth (and usually, eventually, love), and enemies that arrive (be they aliens, terrorists, viruses) often put the very existence of the world at stake. There’s not much place, perhaps, for life and death stakes in flash, so the stakes often are attached to the character’s desire. The more a character wants something, the more to be gained and loss; the more important to the character’s life that goal becomes, the more to be gained and loss. So, I guess, in short, make the goal something the character really wants, make it so that something concrete will be gained and something equally concrete/important might be lost, and see how close you can get to having a character go all in to get it. That’s when the game gets interesting, methinks. That also helps with that idea of purpose. Why now? This is the moment when the character was forced to go all in to get his or her desire.

Of course there’s more to it than this, much more, but it’s a start. So the question becomes, what’s a flash writer to do, given the demands of compression and the desire to be something other than a short short story, to make the flash matter to a reader? One of my former teachers, Xu Xi, called this aspect of story “the dramatic imperative,” the reason for a story’s existence, the why of its being, of this moment’s being chosen over all the others.

A story I’ve been working on forever has this as the story. A son who has a life-threatening allergy to milk has gotten sick twice before when he’s with his father. The father swears he hasn’t given him milk and/or checked the ingredients of everything his son has eaten. After the third time, after the rush to the hospital and his wife’s giving him some kind of ultimatum, he decides to recreate the situation of his son’s having an anaphylactic reaction by hiding in the closet. From that vantage point, he sees his son go the refrigerator to get milk. At that point, the father comes out and confronts the son, who is maybe six to eight years old. And so on.

The problem with me, among other things, is that I don’t know what’s going to happen until I write the story. In other words, it’s in writing the story that I discover what the father will discover, the why of his son’s purposefully drinking milk. I think it has something to do with the son’s wanting to see that urgent love in his father, a love that only the milk brings out. But I’m not sure if that’s it. But if that’s it, if that’s the thing the father must confront, his son’s need for a father’s love made visible, then story gets transformed into plot and narrative by thinking of those aforementioned questions centering around making the moment feel like a plotted narrative, rather than as something else, something that might lead a reader to say “So what?”

Boy, that was convoluted, yes? In short, I need to make the reader think there’s a reason for this narrative to exist. And, if it’s flash, I need to figure out how to meet the demands of compression so that the story doesn’t feel like a shortened form of the short story, so that it feels like something else, like a flash. So here’s a quick, drafty look at my first draft opening, with comments.

Got It

Through the crack of the pantry, Jake watched Samuel eating the turkey sandwich at the kitchen table, the green island of countertop and burners between them, keeping Jake hidden from Samuel’s sight. Samuel twisted in circles, looked for Jake, then back to the milk glass Jake had left next to Samuel, around again for Jake, back to the glass as Jake’s weight shifted forward.

Three times, Jake had to blare through stop signs—Ben’s mouth in the rearview mirror, like a beached carp. This last time, Jake had read the ingredients for the water ice twice, had asked three times if they ever had used the ice cream scoop for the water ice. And still milk had found its way to Ben’s blood, puffing him up, taking breaths, only this time Jake had overheard the doctor’s crummy accusations about what he’d been doing to his seven-year-old. Here’s a common thing that happens in my flashes, something I’ve been working to eliminate: the interrupting exposition that comes after the in medias res opening. I’ve noticed it more & more in flashes, and for me at least, it’s a result of the desire to begin in the middle of things but get the needed information to the reader also.

“Maybe the father wants him sick. That’s the only explanation. Four times, now. All with him and no one else.” Part of that interrupting exposition. One solution might be to find a way either to parcel it in throughout in smaller chunks or find a way to imply all of it through a title. Imagine that.

But the truth that Jake now suspected—what else could it be?—might be even more terrible. And then Samuel did it—reached for the milk, held it in both hands, and raised it toward his mouth, his lips cracking open, wider and willing. Jake sprang into the kitchen, cracked his hip on the corner of the granite island.

“F*ck!”

The glass and milk slipped out of Samuel’s hand, hit the edge of the table, bounced harmlessly away to shatter on the ground.

Samuel grinned. “Dad. You’re here.” I kind of like the son’s reaction here. It feels a bit understated, a bit unexpected. Maybe it’s a keeper. It forces upon the dad further questioning, further action. It’s not an answer yet. It’s more of that Matrix-like splinter in the mind.

“That’s it? Dad, you’re here.”

“That’s it. Let’s throw the baseball, okay?” Samuel walked gingerly around the puddle of milk, toward the front door and outside. Somewhere, Jake thought, Samuel had learned that milk brought Daddy and that desperate love rush toward him. Daddy’s love, for Samuel, became worth the sacrifice of breath. Samuel wanted to be suffocated with it. Only Daddy didn’t have that kind of love. No one did. I’m not sure if this is a keeper, these thoughts of the Dad. Really, they’re my figuring out what the story’s about, but they might be okay to keep. I like these moments of “figuring out,” for it reminds me of the story’s purpose, of desire for an answer (finally) put into some kind of action.

I’ll stop here, by showing the revised version of the title & first paragraph, the second draft, still quite drafty, but maybe a bit more helpful in showing what I’m trying to say here about compressed flash narrative.

Only This Time

This title feels stronger, implying an inciting incident, the “different” thing that enters the character’s life to give him a story. It also feels as if it makes good  use of compression and creates that flash-sense of the story bursting into existence, right from the outset.

Jake had overheard the doctor’s crummy accusations about what he’d been doing to his seven-year-old: “Maybe the father wants him sick. That’s the only explanation. Four times, now. All with him and no one else.” So now, through the crack of the pantry, Jake watched Samuel eating the turkey sandwich at the kitchen table, the green island of countertop and burners between them, keeping Jake hidden from Samuel’s sight. Samuel twisted in circles, looked for Jake, then back to the milk glass Jake had left next to Samuel, around again for Jake, back to the glass as Jake’s weight shifted forward.  This opening maybe creates a bit more tension, a bit more urgency without that interrupting exposition. In terms of compressed narrative, the character arrives into the flash already in the midst of the action created by the inciting incident; he’s already committed himself to finding answers, and the answer seems to have something at stake, something important to him, something that will matter should he discover its truth.

And so on. With each revision, I find more opportunities to compress, more chaff, get closer to the essential thing that this flash might be about. That singular focus is something I love about flash, that way it goes for it, like a Saints coach at the beginning of a second half, as if it were the only chance one got in life. Flash says, to me, “This is it! Don’t blink. Don’t breathe. This is the moment and you won’t have to wait for it.” It begins with the title. It’s action created by the desire to know no matter what the consequence. This flash, the one about the father and son and the milk, isn’t there yet. But one day it might be. One day it might flash, filling the tiniest of spaces with something brilliant. Boom. Pow. Shazam.

Randall Brown teaches at and directs Rosemont College’s MFA in Creative Writing and Graduate English programs. He is the author of the award-winning (very) short fiction collection Mad To Live and his essay appears in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction. He recently served as the Lead Editor of SmokeLong Quarterly. His work has been published widely, both on line and in print. He can be reached at http://randalldouglasbrown.blogspot.com/.

BY SUE ANN JAFFARIAN

reprinted with permission from InkSpot, January 27, 2010

Every time someone asks me what it takes to be a published author, I give the same answer: Commitment.

Commitment to plant your butt in a chair day after day, week after week, month after month. Commitment to the process of submitting your work to agents and publishers. Commitment to publicity and marketing. You can’t just go through the motions. It will show.

With the Winter Olympics coming up in about two weeks, we will be hearing a lot about commitment as the personal stories of the athletes unfold between the televised events. I love hearing the stories of these dedicated men and women who have sacrificed so much, juggling family and jobs to pursue their particular discipline and dream. It makes watching the events much more dramatic and personal.

As writers, we’re participating in our own Olympics. I’m not talking about competing with each other for prizes, but competing with ourselves for each book to be better than the last. The Olympians, while vying for medals, do that. With each luge run, slalom or triple jump, they are competing with themselves to better their last performance. Only commitment will bring improvement.

Then something occurred to me. Being committed is also the term used when someone is placed in an institution for mental problems. In that instance, being committed is equated with being crazy or at least unbalanced. That led me to that old saying: The definition of insanity is doing something over and over and expecting different results.

Hmmm, does that mean the Olympians are insane? Or that we’re crazy for pounding out book after book and expecting each one to be better than the last?

I’ve been called insane for the schedule I keep, and crazy for the number of books I’ve agreed to write each year. In a few days I will deliver Murder In Vein to my publisher. It’s the first book in my new vampire mystery series and I wrote it in just over two months. My manager thinks it’s the best book I’ve written to date. I’m not sure about that yet. To me, it’s still a blur, like the faces of a crowd standing in the snow watching me race downhill towards the finish line.

I made a commitment and will deliver on it. In the meantime, I feel like I’ll be ready for a straight jacket when it’s over.

VIVA LE NUTS!
 

Like the character Odelia Grey, Sue Ann Jaffarian is a full-time, middle-aged, paralegal. She lives in Los Angeles.

Sue Ann heard the siren call of writing early in her life, but did not make the commitment to become a novelist until about 1995. After completing two novels (still unpublished), she turned her attention to the mystery genre, and fell in love. She continues to write both mysteries and general fiction, as well as short stories, and belongs to two very supportive writers’ associations: Sisters In Crime, and Mystery Writers of America. 
Sue Ann Jaffarian
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A woman who recently started to tread water in fiction writing asked me the other day what she should write to an editor regarding a piece that had been shortlisted in a contest but hadn’t won anything. The shortlisted pieces were available in a public domain and anyone could read them.  I told her that in that case her piece was as good as published and she should look at the reprint markets. However, if the editor was open to reprints, she could send it on. And also that she should always state the submitted piece’s status upfront in her cover letter. Integrity is something that is appreciated by all, and editors are no exception.

Writers often make the mistake of running headlong into a submission process without knowing what the publisher/editor needs. You would do better selling candy to a bunch of diabetics!

 The best and easiest way to know what your editor wants is to do something so obvious that many writers bypass this crucial step in their submission process. READ THE MAGAZINE’S/PUBLISHER’S SUBMISSION GUIDELINES! And read a few issues of the magazine as well. In the case of book publishers, take a long hard look at what books they are currently publishing.

No matter how many guidelines you have read already, and no matter how many times you have submitted to that particular editor before, glance at the submissions page just that one more time before you even begin to write your cover letter. Editorial policies change as do editors. Publishing houses may change their policies too.

You may have heard of the old adage “first impression is the last impression.” Well, your cover letter’s job is to create that all important first impression.  So please read and re-read, and go through the process all over again in your cover letter and of course your submission as well.

The cover letter is the part that introduces you to the editor and you wouldn’t want to spoil your chances at this stage. With more and more editors preferring the paperless  (read email) submission process over traditional methods (as editors like to put it in their guidelines page “paperless submissions kill less trees and are therefore more environment friendly), markets for writers never seemed closer. But herein lie the all the near invisible pitfalls.

In their impatience to be published many writers shoot off letters without hitting the spell check button. It’s the simplest of spellings that have all the devilry up their sleeve. So spell check, spell check and spell check.

I was careless once and just at the nick of time caught the gaffe which I put up in in the headline of this piece. Yes that’s right, I spelt editor wrong! Luckily for me I had to go down to answer the door or something and clicked “save” and five minutes later when I returned, my mind being refreshed somewhat, I spotted the error straightaway! Imagine calling your editor an “edioter!” That nonsense word has such terrible connotations that had I hit the send button I would have closed that particular editorial door forever!

Rumjhum Biswas’s fiction and poetry have been published in all the five continents, in print as well as online journals and anthologies. She has won prizes for poetrry in India and was long listed in the Bridport Poetry Prize in 2006. She blogs at htt://rumjhumkbiswas.wordpress.com