It was good. Kind of weird to be at a mostly-professional convention. Aside from the autograph session, there were no fans in site. Most everyone was pretty much my colleague. And it did, to some extent, do what it said on the label: I talked with people about agent stuff and book deal stuff and all kinds of stuff that’s a little bit beyond “What are editors looking for” and “How can I make my story jump out of the slush pile.” It was also much less awkward than I normally feel at a convention. Still a little awkward, but, you know. I imagine that once I’ve gone to three or four more of these, I’ll feel even more tapped-in. Or maybe I’ll be totally over it =)
Just got back from the first day of Nebula Awards Weekend (or maybe it’s the second day)
Posted by R. H. Kanakia on May 18, 2013
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The glory and magic of the ten-hour writing day
Posted by R. H. Kanakia on May 15, 2013
About two weeks ago, I accidentally spent ten hours revising a novel. I don’t quite know how it happened. I certainly didn’t intend to do it. I just got really zoned in and, before I knew it, five hours had passed. Then the same thing happened again in the evening!
What made this interesting for me is that it happened on a Monday, which is the same day that I was teaching my class and taking Spanish. For the whole year, I’d pretty much assumed that three hours was about as much as I could manage on a Monday (and I often didn’t manage even those three). And now here I was with proof that if I wanted to, I could allocate ten hours!
Of course, it did come with some costs. I wasn’t able to do any of my other work on that day. Nor was I able to undertake the 2-4 hours of reading that I like to do every day. But still, ten hours of writing! That’s really productive. That’s almost as much as what I average in an entire week.
For years, I’ve assumed that I was writing about as much as it was possible to write. It’s no secret that writers–even professional ones–are often fairly unproductive. There are tons of famous writers who only wrote for three hours in the morning and then just puttered about for the rest of the day. There are plenty of countervailing examples, of course, but three hours of writing per day remains a very respectable sum and that is generally what I aimed for.
I have to say, though, that I am suspicious of anyone who says that they write three hours a day. To me, that sounds like on some days they write three hours and on some days they write nothing (or very little), which means that their average is probably more like 1.5 hours. And that’s pretty much where mine is. Ever since I started taking statistics on my writing, I’ve averaged about 90-100 minutes of writing a day.
I generally cap out at around 4 hours. In the last year and a half, I’ve only had 7 days where I wrote for between 4-8 hours and 2 days where I wrote for more than 8 hours. That’s what keeps my average writing time low. In order to have an average of three hours a day, every 5 minute day would need to be balanced by a six hour day and I simply don’t have very many of the latter
But the ten hour day unlocks whole new potentialities. If I can just clear one day a week and make it an eight or more hour writing day, then my overall productivity will double.
So…that’s what I’m going to do. Today I put the plan into motion and had my very first pre-planned eight-hour writing day. It was excellent and extremely productive. I did eight hours of writing and still had enough time for a nap and a walk.
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For me, a road trip is usually an inward journey
Posted by R. H. Kanakia on May 12, 2013
Well, I got here! I am exhausted. But I also had a really exhilarating five day drive. I got a lot of great thinking done. Whenever I drive cross-country, people always tell me to take it easy and maybe see something along the way (or they tell me to try to do it in three days, which is just insane). But I don’t know how people do that. I always get so zoned into the highway that stopping feels out of the question. The closest I came to a sight-seeing stop on this trip was taking fifteen minutes, at a highway rest stop, to stand on Utah’s Bonneville Salt Falts (they were awesome–you’re basically standing on a sea of death. There are dessicated insects all over the top of it).
The thinking that I do while driving is utterly unlike any of the thinking that I do in the rest of my life. I think maybe it’s because driving is utterly unlike anything else I do. It’s basically sitting down for eight hours and staring straight ahead. But you can’t fully zone out because you need to maintain the minimal concentration needed to avoid hitting something. It’s a bit like the thinking that I do when walking, I guess, but I never walk for a whole day.
Anyway, I thought about my life and all kinds of other things (like the edits that I want to make to This Beautiful Fever). But mostly my life. Good times.
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While driving across country, I completely forgot about this blog.
Posted by R. H. Kanakia on May 10, 2013
I wrote Monday’s post last Thursday, so I’ve gone a week without thinking about this blog. Err…so…I am spending the summer in Berkeley. And I decided to drive there. I’m surprised no one has questioned this decision: it was obviously extremely cost-ineffective. Flying would’ve been substantially cheaper. And you don’t really need a car to live in Berkeley.
The truth is, I just really like to drive. And I like driving across the country the best. This is my fourth time going between SF and DC. I’ve now done (/slash am doing) it by all four major routes: I-10/I-20, I-40, I-90, and (now) I-80. I guess there’s also I-70, but whatever.
When I drive across country, I don’t really _do_ anything. Sometimes I stop and visit a friend, but I actually don’t have very many friends who live between the coasts. And when I’m on the highway, I get way too zoned-in to want to stop and drive.
I do my best thinking while driving. I can never go on a trip of longer than 500 miles without having some kind of epiphanic moment. However, my last two cross-country trips were marred by these horrible headaches that I developed halfway through, which turned the rest of the trip into an endurance test. This time, I’ve been wearing my contacts and a pair of sunglasses (one of my recent epiphanic moments was realizing that sunglasses actually have a purpose outside merely looking cool), and the headache has remained at bay.
Some solid thinking has been done and is being done. Also, some useful thinking. I just got back some notes on This Beautiful Fever from my agents (really, really good notes) and I’ve been slowly plotting out the changes I’m going to make. I think the major thing writing-related insight I’ve had this year is that at some point you need to rigorously interrogate your own text and ask all the questions that you avoided while writing it: What does this character want? Why does this event happen? How did this custom arise? Why don’t they use this technology to solve that problem?
It’s difficult and annoying work, but the result opens up startling new possibilities.
Err, well…at least I hope it does.
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Giving out a little bit more information about _Enter Title Here_ (err, and also participating in that Next Big Thing meme)
Posted by R. H. Kanakia on May 6, 2013
When I searched for ‘Study Machines’ this is what Googe Image Search gave me.
Three months ago, Brooke Wonders tagged me in that “Next Big Thing” meme that was going around. I intended to write a post about it (since it was the first time I’d ever been tagged in a meme, woooo). But then I didn’t, because I was in too early a stage w/ the book (I’d just completed the first draft) and I didn’t want to commit myself to it if I wasn’t going to go further with it. But now I feel like the book has a little more get-up-and-go to it, so I think I’ll stop being coy.
What is the working title of this book?
It used to be Study Machines, but I developed that title back when I thought it was going to be an SF book. It also has a fairly specific context that no longer makes sense. So now it’s called Enter Title Here. I am completely in love with this title. When I view the output from Scrivener, it really does look like I’ve forgotten to give the book a title.
Where did the idea for the book come from?*
I can answer this question! Twas July 17th, and I was reading Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity, a book of financial reportage that was edited by Michael Lewis. In retrospect, this was a poor decision, since the book was not very good. I only read it because I was in my Michael Lewis phase. However, as part of a bit of color commentary on the economy of Korea, there’s a whole section on student suicide that contains this passage:
In 2005, in the first rally of its kind, hundreds of high school students demonstrated in central Seoul, shouting, “We aren’t study machines!” They gathered to mourn 15 students fro around the country who had killed themselves, apparently because of intense pressure to succeed. (p. 154)
For some reason, I really loved this passage. After reading it, I thought, “There’s a novel in this! What if I was to write about a dystopian future where kids have to, like, study really hard or something…”
I walked around my neighborhood a bit and thought about it. And I slowly realized, “Wait, this doesn’t need to be a dystopian future. This is now. This is real life. In the present day, many high school kids work really, really, really, really hard.”
So I decided to write about one of them.
What genre does your book fall under?
It’s pretty squarely a contemporary young adult novel. My first book with no guns! Not even one! It was, surprisingly, not very hard to write a realist novel. I always wondered how people did it. How did they decide that this prosaic situation was more worth writing about than that prosaic situation? Not that there’s anything wrong with writing about prosaic situations. In fact, I think it’s better than writing about really weird situations. I prefer to read about ordinary life. But still, it does seem to pose conceptual problems. In SF, you know something is worth writing about if people think it’s super cool when you describe it to them. In realist novels, something can sound utterly boring when described but actually work really well on the page. Anyway, now I know the answer: when you find the right prosaic situation, it doesn’t seem prosaic at all (at least, not to you).
What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
I will not play this game. This game does not interest me at all.
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
The novel you’re reading is the novel that is being written by an Indian American high school senior who plans to use it as her ‘hook’ for college admissions; however, her carefully-managed self-transformation into a ‘typical’ American teen is interrupted when one of her teachers accuses her of plagiarism.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
I actually thought about writing this book last summer, when I first thought of it, but I held off because I wanted to revise that other (terrible) novel first. In the end, holding off was probably a good idea, since it let me do some additional brainstorming. I didn’t go into winter break intending to write this novel, but then I just went ahead and did it, because it seemed silly to spend day after day groping around for another short story when I already had this idea that really excited me. I wrote it in thirty-one days (Dec. 18, 2012 through Jan. 17, 2013). I didn’t set out to write it in exactly one month. It just turned out that way.
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
A lot of the book is inspired by my own anxieties over getting published and whether I really knew how to write stories (it’s primarily told as a monologue to the literary agent who’ll be reading it, which I thought was cute, since I expected to be querying agents about it).
Since I didn’t go to a large public coeducational high school (the graduating class at my all-boy’s catholic HS was 36 people), I also read all these ethnographic studies of high school to see if I could fake the social dynamics a little bit (yep, that’s how I roll).
Will your book be self-published or presented by an agency?
Assuming nothing goes horribly wrong, I guess it’ll be represented by my agent at Greenhouse Literary. However, that seems like it’s a ways in the future, since we haven’t even started to do anything with the last book.
My tagged writers
I will not tag anyone, since I am not sure: a) which writers read this blog; and b) whether those writers have already done this or not.
*Note, in this question is normally listed (in most posts that use this meme) as “Where did the idea come from for the book?” That is a dreadfully awkward wording and it’s an example of the trouble that you can get into when you try to contort a sentence to avoid ending it on a preposition.
Posted in Writing | Tagged: study machines | 2 Comments »
The difference between a sequence and a scene
Posted by R. H. Kanakia on May 2, 2013
I’ve been reading a lot of screen-writing manuals (as research for a novel, not because I want to write screenplays). And it’s been pretty fascinating. The nice thing about screenplay books is that they’re incredibly prescriptive. One of the most popular ones–Save The Cat–says that your second act turning point MUST occur on page 25. Not on page 23, or on page 27…page 25 is where it’s got to be.
If I was actually trying to write screenplays, I imagine I’d find it infuriating. But since I’m a novelist, I think it’s actually a bit nice to have a book that’s unafraid to give real advice. Most writing manuals are a bit froofy and guarded. There are too many examples of famous and beloved novels that contain some really bizarre decisions. For instance, what is up with Wuthering Heights? Why is it told as a weird story-within-a-story? And why does it leap forward, halfway through, and begin talking about the children of the protagonists’ in the first half?
So novel manuals are afraid to say anything definite. But that means they just don’t say anything at all. You come away from them thinking that the way to write a novel is to just read a lot of novels and then write a novel. Which is fine. It’s even true. But you don’t need a book to tell you that.
One interesting thing that I learned (from Save The Cat) was this distinction between scenes and sequences. The author, Blake Snyder, describes a sequence as a part of the movie where the dialogue is intercut with a lot of action (an action sequence, a sex scene, a negotiation, the operation of equipment, driving a car, etc.)
I thought about this when revising my novel Enter Title Here. In This Beautiful Fever, there are maybe two parts that I think of as being really locked-in: places where everything falls away and I feel really gripped by the narrative. And they both have what I’d call a sequencey feeling to them: there’s an interplay of action and dialogue and internal monologue that works really well. When writing them, I thought of them as setpieces and I used them to anchor what I thought of as the “acts” of the novel.
In Enter Title Here, I feel as if these sequences are more common, but still limited in number. There are maybe six or seven of them.
It’s tempting to say that novels need to have both scene and sequence, but I’m not sure that’s true. There are definitely novels that are all sequence. For instance, Emile Zola’s Nana has roughly eighteen chapters and each of them is basically this fantastic ten thousand word setpiece. In one of them, she’s performing a play. In another, she’s spending all of some dude’s money. Etc. Etc.
Grapes of Wrath* is also much more sequence than scene. Not only is it intercut with these fast-moving impressionistic chapters that are a bit orthogonal to the main plot, even the main plot often has a lot going on (I’m thinking of, for instance, the strike, or the Joads’ midnight drive across the desert).
I would say that Mrs. Dalloway is also mostly sequence. There’s never a moment at which people aren’t somehow in motion.
It’s also tempting to say that sequence is better than scene. I think there is something to that. Sequence certainly engages the interest in a certain kind of way. But plenty of novels work very well without it. Evelyn Waugh’s comic novels don’t really contain any sections that aren’t just two people conversing. I’d also that Jane Austen is much, much more dialogue than action. Even when people are strolling and talking, the environment never really impinges on their perception.
*Speaking of Grapes of Wrath, the other day I was thinking about Ma Joad lying on the floor of the truck during their ride across the desert and I got chills. Oh man, I’m getting chills right now, just writing about it! That book is really, really awesome. I was also thinking that there is some alternate reality where Grapes of Wrath is indisputably the greatest American novel: the alternate reality in which the Steinbeck’s socialist revolution actually came to pass. There’s such an element of prophecy to the book. When it closes, you can feel that something has to change: that there’s no way this rotting system can totter on for even another five years. But, unfortunately, it did. It tottered on right into the modern day. So Grapes of Wrath has to content itself with just being a wonderful novel, rather than a piece of our history.
Posted in Writing | Tagged: novel writing, scene, screenplay, sequence | 4 Comments »
Beginning to revise Study Machines (except that now it’s called Enter Title Here)
Posted by R. H. Kanakia on May 1, 2013
I’m in the process of revising Study Machines (the contemporary YA novel I wrote during Spring Break). Except now it’s called Enter Title Here, which makes me laugh every time I think of it. I’m (surprisingly) really enjoying the revision process. On Monday, I spent ten hours cutting 10,000 words. About 1500-2000 of those were in full scenes, the rest was bits and pieces. I’m a bit shocked by it. I literally cut words as rapidly as I normally write them. And I really have no idea what it is that I cut. I think it was mostly extraneous descriptions (describing two gestures where one would do) and shortening dialogue (cutting places where characters said the same thing twice). But it’s hard to tell if I’m tightening the manuscript or just thinning it.
When I revised This Beautiful Fever, I also cut about 9,000 words. But in that case, it was a horrible death-slog through the text. I cut words at a rate of (I’m not kidding) about 150 an hour. I’d spend three hours cutting and all I’d have to show for it was the loss of two manuscript pages. Am I just a better writer now? Or is Enter Title Here a looser book? Or am I going too far in my current cutting?
I dunno, probably a combination of all three.
When I cut words, I do take solace in the idea that there’s nothing sacred about these specific words. I wrote most of them between the hours of 8 PM and 12 AM while I was sitting in either: a) the incredibly cold–and normally uninhabited–living room of my parents’ flat in New Delhi; b) my dad’s (much warmer) office, in that same flat; or c) the window seat of my bedroom in a Sri Lankan villa. These were not words that I sweated blood over. I wrote them in a blind rush. And if I’m cutting too much, then the new words that I write will probably be better and more thought-out than the ones that I cut.
Overall, I am really not a very good reviser. I always look for ways to avoid reimagining the draft in significant ways. It’s obvious (at least to me) that there’s no way I’m telling this story in the most effective and economical way. But, while I know that on an intellectual level, my heart does not agree. It’s kind of in love with the current form of this story. Oh well, that is where the critique process comes in. It was only after it’d gone in front of a few eyes that I was able to make the (fairly significant) changes that This Beautiful Fever needed. I don’t really even need to get suggestions from my critiquers, it’s just that once I know that there are problems in the draft, then my mind finally starts addressing itself to the task of fixing those problems, rather than rationalizing them away.
Posted in Books | Tagged: study machines | 1 Comment »
Five software programs that’ve improved my productivity and given me peace of mind
Posted by R. H. Kanakia on April 29, 2013
This is what your scrivener screen can look like, if you are a power user (which I am not).
I’ve always scoffed at writers who blogged about the software tools they use. Mostly because that stuff doesn’t really matter at all. And I continue to stand by that. None of these tools makes you into a better writer.
In fact, most technological advances haven’t improved the writing. Jane Austen wrote her manuscripts in pen and they’re still unsurpassed.
But…technology does make your life easier. It makes writing more pleasant and less aggravating. And that’s worthwhile too. Not everything has to be so grimly focused on “But does it improve the writing?” If it improves your happiness and productivity, then that’s a good enough reason to use something.
Freedom – I can’t overstate how useful I find this program to be. Almost 90% of my writing is done while it’s enabled. It’s a program that disables the internet for the amount of time you specify. Really, all it does is put thirty seconds of work between you and the internet. If you want to use the internet (before the time is elapsed), you can just restart your computer. But those thirty seconds are enough! I won’t say that I don’t spend some of my writing time staring at the wall or checking my twitter feed on my iPad. But, by and large, it’s really cut down on the amount of time-wasting I used to do. It’s also trained me in the correct habits. Sometimes I forget to set it and I’ll have written for an hour and a half before I realize that I actually do have access to the internet.
Microsoft Excel – It would be a misnomer to say that I have a “submissions spreadsheet.” Really, I have a spreadsheet that I use to track everything in my life that’s important to me (including my submissions). It started out as a simple submissions tracker and over the last nine years I’ve added more and more functionality to it. The core of the sheet has become my Daily Log: a place where I record my writing output (both in terms of minutes and words), the number of hours I’ve spent reading, my TV-watching time, the number of calories that I ate, and my social media activity, and also includes short notes on what I worked on and what other things I did on that day (in addition to a few other fields). But there are other important sheets to. I have a log of every book I’ve read for the last three years (which includes capsule reviews of each book). And there are ancillary sheets: one on which I tabulate various statistics re: my life, one for my finances, one to track novel and nonfiction queries, one for MFA applications, etc. I am sure that there are dedicated software packages for life-tracking, but I really don’t think that any of them have the flexibility of Excel and portability of Excel.
Dropbox - In March of 2009, I suffered a hard disk failure that wiped out three months of work. Since then, I’ve used Dropbox. There’s really only one way to use it. Just move everything in your My Documents folder to your Dropbox folder. And from then on, just treat your Dropbox folder like your My Documents. I’ve actually gone even further and put my entire iTunes library in there, because I am tired of having to reconstruct it from CDs and backup discs, but that might be going a bit too year. Yes, I do spend $99 a year to get an extra 100gb of Dropbox space. It’s totally worth it. If you have multiple computers, Dropbox also keeps the files in sync (which is really the only way that a person can use more than one computer). This has the added benefit of turning your computers into de facto backup drives for each other. It is still worth making a physical backup (on a backup drive) every once in awhile, since it is possible for Dropbox to spaz out and delete the files on your computers (happened to me once, because I did something stupid–was able to pretty easily restore the files using the Dropbox web interface, but still…)
Scrivener - Yes, I’ve become one of them. I’m not saying that Scrivener is the greatest thing ever, but it is useful. For those who aren’t in the know, Scrivener is a word-processor that is specifically designed for writing long documents–screenplays, novels, reports, etc. I’ve used it to write two projects now, and I have to say that it is really useful to be able to see the structure of your whole work at a glance and to be able to move things around as needed. Furthermore, I can tell you that doing all the reformatting that was necessary to put This Beautiful Fever into the approved form for submission to contests, publishers, and agents was a nightmare, and I think that Scrivener does all that work for you in a much more efficient way. Scrivener also has a number of outlining tools that I haven’t made as much use of, since I don’t do much outlining, but I think that they’re probably pretty useful to some people, maybe.
The thing about transitioning from one software package (Word) to another (Scrivener) is that it’s never perfect. There’s always that one feature that’s missing. Scrivener is missing a lot of features that I use in Word. The formatting and page layout options aren’t as detailed. The interface isn’t as clean. Doing stuff like alphabetizing data or inserting charts is harder. It’s not easy to make stuff pretty in Scrivener.
But it’s exactly those features which make Word such a disaster. The formatting system that underlies Word is fine for short documents, but in a longer document (even one as simple as a novel), it eventually gets completely snarled up and starts causing weird problems.
I still use Word for most word-processing (including writing short stories). But for novels and longer stories, Scrivener is pretty darn good.
Evernote – Been using it for ages. It’s just a good way to jot stuff down. The main benefit is the easy synchronization between computers and mobile devices (my iPod / iPad). It’s where I put all my random ideas, story notes, lists, etc.
Posted in Writing | Tagged: dropbox, evernote, excel, freedom, scrivener, spreadsheet, writing apps | 2 Comments »
I’ve now achieved every one of the eleven productivity goals that I set for myself in the summer of 2009
Posted by R. H. Kanakia on April 26, 2013
In the summer of 2009, I made a list of five productivity milestones I wanted to hit in the next five years. With the recent acquisition of my thousandth short story rejection, I now have ALL of them.
Some of these goals were obviously harder to achieve than others. I hit my 120th story and millionth word like two years ago. But still, at the time I wrote this list, I was nowhere close to any of these goals. I’d written about 300,000 words and 70ish stories and only had maybe 350ish rejections. So these goals were only achievable if I put in an order of magnitude more effort than I was currently doing.
That summer was also maybe six months before I quit drinking, I was nowhere close to getting my life in order. In fact, at that point, I was about to apply to eleven MFA programs that’d all reject me in the coming year. But, nonetheless, I went ahead and made these goals. And, in the coming years, I took them seriously. I feel like there’s a lesson here, of some sort, even though that lesson is totally counter to the advice I usually give (which is to set low-ball goals that you are sure of being able to achieve).
[1] Achieved on 9/9/9
[2] Achieved on 4/25/10
[3] Achieved on 5/13/10
[4] Achieved on 8/26/11 (nineteenth month sobriety anniversary too)
[5] Achieved on 9/9/10
[6] Achieve on 4/21/11
[7] Achieved with rejection by…somewhere, I dunno…around 6/30/10
[8] Achieved with a rejection by…I dunno…Asimov’s? Around 12/19/11
[9] Achieved on 4/24 with a rejection by Asimov’s
[10] Achieved on, I believe, 10/27/10
[11] Achieved w/ submission of This Beautiful Fever to an agent on 12/19/11
Posted in Writing | Tagged: goal setting, productivity | Leave a Comment »
Some thoughts (and additional statistics) re: my thousandth short story rejections
Posted by R. H. Kanakia on April 25, 2013
If I had a nickel for every rejection I’ve gotten, I’d have…$50 (and fifteen cents)
Well, it finally happened. I got my one thousandth rejection! And then I got three more. And now I have 1,003. And I’m too lazy to temporarily delete the last three, so all of the below will be the numbers for 1,003 rejections.
I started submitting on Dec. 20th, 2003 (meaning I’ve gotten approximately 2 rejections a week for nine years). These rejections arise from submitting 142 stories to 255 publications (and contests). However, the vast majority of those publications only saw 1-4 submissions from me. Actually, over half my rejections are accounted for by just 20 publications (as shown by the table below).
|
# |
Name of Magazine |
# of Rejections It Gave Me |
Cumulative Rejections by Magazines 1 to # |
|
1 |
Lightspeed |
73 |
73 |
|
2 |
Clarkesworld |
46 |
119 |
|
3 |
Shimmer |
43 |
162 |
|
4 |
Asimov’s |
36 |
198 |
|
5 |
F&SF |
35 |
233 |
|
6 |
Strange Horizons |
35 |
268 |
|
7 |
Daily SF |
32 |
300 |
|
8 |
Apex Magazine |
31 |
331 |
|
9 |
Medicine Show |
26 |
357 |
|
10 |
Analog |
25 |
382 |
|
11 |
Ideomancer |
24 |
406 |
|
12 |
ASIM |
21 |
427 |
|
13 |
Abyss and Apex |
18 |
445 |
|
14 |
Fictitious Force |
17 |
462 |
|
15 |
WotF |
14 |
476 |
|
16 |
Ceaseless Skies |
13 |
489 |
|
17 |
Flash Online |
13 |
502 |
|
18 |
Baen’s Universe |
12 |
514 |
|
19 |
Aeon Specfic |
11 |
525 |
|
20 |
Pedestal |
10 |
535 |
As you can see, just four publications have given me a fifth of my total rejections. Eleven publications are responsible for 40% of my rejections. Out of these top twenty publications, I’ve only sold stories to five of them. For many of these publications, I’m probably amongst their top 20 or 30 most prolific submitters.
Although I submit to both literary and SF publications, only 87 of these rejections are from literary journals. The rest are all from SF magazines.
My pace of submission has increased significantly over time. My first 500 rejections took me 6.5 years to accumulate. Receiving the last 500 took only 3 years. And that’s not even counting rejections from novel agents, publishers, and nonfiction publications (all of which are types of submissions that I only began sending out in the last two years). And, as you can see, my pace of rejection is still only increasing (I attribute this to my increasing numbers of submissions to lit-mags, which allows me to have an extra 20-30 submissions out at a time).
- 300 – August 8, 2008 (401 days to next milestone)
- 400 – September 13, 2009 (282 days to next milestone)
- 500 – June 22, 2010 (268 days to next milestone)
- 600 – March 17, 2011 (208 days to next milestone)
- 700 – October 11, 2011 (185 days to next milestone)
- 800 – April 17, 2012 (197 days to next milestone)
- 900 – October 31, 2012 (173 days to current milestone)
I have to say, I am proud of the record of determination and tenacity that this represents. But…I have to say, I once polled authors on how many rejections they’d gotten in their lives and I learned that it doesn’t usually take 1,003 rejections to get to where I am today. I’m not quite sure why it’s taken me so many more stories and so many more submissions to get my double-handful of publications. Furthermore, it’s not like it’s smooth sailing for me. I don’t see any slowdown in the pace of rejection. In 5-6 months, I fully expect to be posting about my 1,100th rejection. And I’m not sure how happy I am about that. I kind of feel like, at this point in my writing life, I should be past getting 25 rejections for every acceptance, but that’s where I’ve been for roughly the last 2.5 years.
The obvious answer is that I should be writing less and putting more time and care into my work. But I’m honestly not really sure whether I do put less time into each story than other writers. Earlier in my career, I didn’t do much revising, but nowadays I spend quite a lot of time on my stories. My short stories are usually the result of 12-25 hours of labor and a number of redrafts. I’m not sure how much harder I could be working on them. I think that my increased prolificity is just because I work longer hours than most writers. For instance, many writers say that they work two hours a day, but I know that their estimates are soft. They’re not counting the days when they did nothing. Or the days when they intended to work two hours but only worked an hour. They’re not counting the month of vacation they took. I count all those things. Even inclusive of everything, I work about 100 minutes a day. Which is not where I want to be, but it’s pretty good.
But, at the same time, I feel like I’m not getting quite the results that I want. I don’t know. In everything, there’s always a tension between refining your method and trying something new. And right now, I really don’t see any obvious improvements to make in my method other than engaging in more and more redrafts. I really think at this point, the answer is to just keep writing stories. I am still learning things, and I do think that the stories I’m writing nowadays are better than the ones I wrote at this time last year. Oh well, we’ll see.
I’ve stopped expecting to be that person who gets suddenly discovered and has this meteoric rise. Maybe I didn’t work my cards right for that. Maybe if I’d held off on submitting for ten years…maybe if I’d relentlessly honed one story until it was perfect…maybe if I’d gone about things a bit differently…I don’t know.
I all the time hear people say that they’re not willing to do something because it somehow doesn’t fit into their psychology. For instance, people say they’re not willing to network or to use social media because they’re too shy / anxious / awkward / introverted. And, I always think, “Well, yeah, that’s definitely a choice that you can make…but it’s going to hurt you. It’d be way better to just gather your courage and do what you know you have to do.”
So I am suspicious of myself when I say that I don’t feel psychologically equipped to take that laid-back, aristocratic way of doing things–submitting only one story every three months and trusting that it’ll get picked up, because people won’t have acclimatized themselves to the essence of you-ness. But that’s just not what comes naturally to me. I think it’s hard to find a method that allows you to produce work that you’re happy with. And mine has brought me a lot of success and has allowed me to springboard past a lot of rough patches that would’ve brought down other people.
The main argument against my method is that it seems to involve a lot more work per unit of success than many other methods do. But if that’s how it is, then that’s how it is.
Posted in Writing | Tagged: rejection milestones | 6 Comments »
