by Bruce BethkeGood morning, and welcome to my new and as yet unnamed column. I thought about calling it something old-school, such as "From The Publisher's Desk," or else something wildly dadaistic, such as "Cud of the Mad Cow," but we've already got a ruminating goat, so I gave that up. Instead the first order of business this morning is to announce the Name This Column! contest, to run for an unspecified length of time and end when someone comes up with a name I like, the winner to receive the usual merchandise prize, etc., etc., etc.
Please don't pester me about any official rules or formalized judging criteria for this contest. I really don't have the patience for it.
The purpose of this column is to do a weekly catch-up on developments, site plans, and the questions that show up during the course of the week and never seem to be answered adequately. It's intended be a dialog between me, the originator of this gloriously half-baked experience, and you, the loyal readers of this site. Yes, you — both of you. I can see you from here.
And with that said...
Site News
Obviously, the general site redesign planned to debut in January and the fiction showcase planned to debut in February didn't happen, for a variety of reasons I don't care to go into in depth now. Suffice to say that January was a hellacious month and February was not much better, but things seem to be on an even keel now, so the redesign will, beginning this week, begin to creep forward cautiously again. Frankly I was hoping to land a few million in Federal bailout funds to launch this shovel-ready project and put dozens of American writers and website designers back to work, but apparently my hopes were insufficiently audacious, not to mention pointless. Ah, for the golden days of CETA, when any stupid arts-related project could get Federal funding, provided it promised to produce nothing useful...
False Starts and Fragments
One of the inadequately answered questions to emerge recently regarded false starts, and the whole question of how you keep your story moving after the first scene or your novel from petering out after the first two chapters. As it happens I am sort of an unintentional authority on false starts and promising beginnings that lead to naught, as over the course of a 30-plus-year career I have accumulated bales of them.
Literally, bales. Never mind my complete inability to throw that stuff out; that's a topic for another time. But in retrospect, the one factor that distinguishes the stories of mine that succeeded from the beginnings that failed is that, when I began writing what would in time turn out to be a successful story, I already had an ending in mind.
I didn't always get to that ending. Oftentimes the characters came alive on the page, hijacked the story, and took it off in a different direction that turned out to be much better than what I'd originally planned. But I at least had an ending in mind, and therefore had some means by which to judge whether what I was writing was getting me closer to that ending, whether there was a better ending that could be reached instead, or whether I was just floundering, flailing, and wasting time.
As always, your mileage may vary, what works for me may not work for you, etc., etc. But if you find yourself continually starting stories that end up frittering away into nothingness after that first glorious rush of new creation, consider jotting down a few notes about how you think the story might end, before you dive into that opening first paragraph.
Speaking of Beginnings and Endings
I have a book here, The First Five Pages: A Writer's Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile, by Noah Lukeman.
"Noah Lukeman is a literary agent based in New York City whose clients include Pulitzer Prize nominees, New York Times bestselling authors, Pushcart Prize recipients and American Book Award winners..."This is one of these things I've become convinced is insider myopia. There is a Christmas party I go to every year, and every year I end up cornered by the same would-be writer, who after years of trying is still struggling to get the first chapter of her first novel utterly perfect. "Because if you don't hook the editor on the first page and set the hook by the end of the first chapter..."
That may be true of publishing industry insiders, but speaking now as a reader, I can't think of a single time when I ever finished a book or story and said, "Wow! What a great beginning! Too bad the story totally crapped out at the end, but I can't wait to read something else by this writer and see how he begins his next novel!"
A great beginning may be what gets an editor interested in your story, but it's the ending that sells the reader on wanting to read more of your work. Too many writers, I think, put too much agony into writing and rewriting the beginning, and give scant attention to providing the reader with a satisfying ending.
Ergo, today's advice: concentrate on getting to "The End," first. You can always fix the beginning in the rewrite. In fact, once you've written the ending, you may discover that what you thought was the beginning wasn't the beginning at all, and that your story actually began earlier (unlikely) or later (more likely). A lot of first novels I've read actually begin at the start of Chapter 2.
Yummy Delicious Good Writing
A few weeks ago I tossed off the comment that the books behind Door #3 were selected randomly. That was an unfortunate choice of words. To some extent the prize bin selections are random, in that they're composed of what's currently available, and I can't always count on finding the books I would choose to give away in an ideal, cost-free, world. But the choice of the books I put behind Door #3 is not utterly without thought.
As for whether these books are all examples of "good" writing: that's too subjective for me to claim. For example, there is at least one Booker Prize winner currently in the bin, and the Booker Prize is absolutely huge. (And unfortunately, limited to U.K. and Commonwealth writers only.) Personally I've always found Booker Prize winners to be just too damned depressing to finish reading, but clearly a significant number of someone elses out there think those sorts of books are the cat's a##.
So I try to include a very wide variety of books in the Door #3 group: some that I think are terrific, others that I don't have much regard for but other people clearly think are quite terrific, and yet others that may not rank so highly on anyone's terrificness scale but are simply very entertaining.
Also, never overlook the motivational value of downright bad writing. An awful lot of significant literary careers have begun with a reader throwing a book or magazine down in disgust and saying, "Heck, I can write better than that!" (To which a weary significant other in the room often answers, "Oh yeah? Prove it.")
Emerging Voices
Finally, we've been conducting a little informal survey lately of what's being published in the current crop of commercial fiction magazines, and frankly, our preliminary findings are a bit dismaying. Aside from a few minor technological cues here and there and some earthy Anglo-Saxon terminology that would have been out-of-bounds a generation ago, I'm really not seeing anything that could not have been published 25 years ago.
Has the field of SFF really run out of gas? (Phlogiston, dilithium, whatever?) Have there really been no new writers in the past twenty years who have stood the whole field on its ear, the way the way William Gibson and Orson Scott Card did in the 1980s with Neuromancer and Ender's Game, respectively?
Your thoughts, comments, and observations, s'il vous plait?
~brb
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