Today’s find is, in some ways, a useful follow-up to yesterday’s post. Allow me to present James Plath’s “21 Tips to Get Out of the Slush Pile.” You can bet that I’ll be referring to this fiction-focused list as I continue to revise my previously-rejected story.
Enjoy, and have a great weekend. See you back here on Monday morning!
“Working on a story. Am determined to get it submission-ready!”
So read a post I “tweeted” on Monday. Lo and behold, somebody actually read what I wrote. And she wrote, in turn:
“@erikadreifus what does submission-ready mean to you?”
What an excellent question. Not just for me, but for all of us practicing writers.
My response on Twitter basically said that I couldn’t possibly address the question in 140 characters. I promised to do so here, instead.
So here’s what I think “submission-ready” means to me: I think it means that I’ve brought the work in question to a point where I can’t envision further edits/changes/improvements. At least, not imminently. And I believe that an editor/agent/publisher will read past the first few lines/pages and take the work seriously.
Now, it does happen that I submit a story or essay or poem (or novel or short story collection), receive a series of rejections (the best ones provide some constructive comments/feedback), and am then prompted to revisit the work. I might ask others who haven’t yet shared their time and insights to read and comment, too. Although I won’t necessarily withdraw the work from any journal/contest/agent/publisher where it might still be waiting to be read/decided on, I’ll refrain from submitting it anywhere else until I’ve had time to consider changes and, more often than not, revise further. In this sense, “submission-ready” is not a constant. It evolves. Because, unfortunately, what I might consider initially “submission-ready” may not necessarily be “acceptance-ready”! In fact, the story that sparked my tweet is one I believed “submission-ready” quite awhile ago, but am revising once again.
I’m eager to hear from others on this. What does “submission-ready” mean to you?
As a fiction writer, I’ve never been especially inspired by characters. I know that that sounds awful. I simply don’t write “character-driven” fiction, and, much to my discontent, I don’t ever find myself “possessed” by a character who simply begs to have his or her story told. When I’m lucky enough to find inspiration for a story, it generally comes from ideas and/or circumstances.
Which is one reason why I was captivated by Gabriel Packard’s interview with Peter Carey in the new (March) issue of The Writer. Here’s some of Carey’s response to Packard’s question, “What is the process of writing a novel like for you?”:
“When I’ve finished a novel, I always feel so empty I think I’ll never have another idea. So when I have an idea, a single idea, I feel blessed….I’ll never ever start with characters. They are there to be discovered. Indeed the greatest pleasure, at the end of the novel, is to have made characters who are multidimensional and complicated.”
Ah, there’s the rub. You still need to come up with characters who are multidimensional and complicated! The ideas alone can’t sustain the fiction!
P.S. Carey’s new novel, Parrot & Olivier in America, sounds fantastic (and I’m not just saying that because I have a doctoral degree in modern French history and once took an entire class on Alexis de Tocqueville!). It goes to the top of my tbr list.
I am definitely ensconced in my New York life, but everyone once in awhile I admit that I fantasize about absconding to Paris, where I’ve had the great good fortune to spend some chunks of time in the past, or maybe to another distant locale or two. So I was happy to discover a new blog this week called Writer Abroad (maintained by Chantal Panozzo), and for today’s find I’m going to point you to two posts summing up “Eight Good Things for Writers to Bring Abroad. (By the way, I discovered Writer Abroad via a new feature on the Guide to Literary Agents blog, Seven Things I’ve Learned So Far.)
Have a great weekend, everyone! See you back here on Monday!
“I remember [Donald Barthelme] urging me during one conference to consider writing a novel—probably because at the time I mainly wrote prose poems that barely extended into the territory of the short story, and Don always liked to mix things up a bit. The very idea, though, alarmed me. I couldn’t imagine ever writing any single thing that continued into hundreds of pages, and my squeaky timid protest to Don’s suggestion was, “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
His response surprised me. “Whenever I begin a novel,” he said, “the beginning never stays at the beginning. It ends up in the middle, or near the end. It never stays put where I started.“
I’d always assumed that one began a novel by starting on page one and slogging through to the last sentence, so this revelation served as some relief to me, and made the task of writing a novel appear a little more approachable. Still, I don’t think I fully understood him until I began, years later, to work on my first novel, and found myself putting together its different sections like pieces of a puzzle that had as yet no defined borders, while trying to discover and answer my own secret twenty questions.
Source: Philip Graham, “Any Novel’s Negative Twenty Questions”