"The Talk" (Part Two) by Bruce Bethke

...continued from Part One...

"Mr. Bethke? How do I become a writer?"The Snark is strong with me. You have no idea how hard it is not to answer, "Well, what exactly is a writer? It's someone who writes, isn't it? Have you ever written anything? You have? Congratulations! You're a writer!

"Next question?"But it's cruel to leave the kid hanging there gaping and floundering like that, so instead I answer: "As a writer, words are the tools of your trade. Learn to use them with precision. Now, is that really the question you meant to ask, or do you actually mean:

"How do I become a successful, commercially published, writer of genre fiction?"Nine times out of ten that restatement of the question meets with agreement, and then we have the basis from which to begin an intelligent conversation. The tenth time the kid actually does want to become some kind of artist or poet or free-form literary genius or something, and then the only possible answer is:

"To become a True Writer, you must find some quiet place where you can work without interruption or distraction, and then you must write, at least ten hours a day, every day, for the next ten years. You must write, write, write, never once listening to all the people who want to tell you that your writing is terrible or that you're wasting your life. You must struggle, and suffer, and learn to live on ramen noodles, and do battle every day with the terrifying emptiness of the blank page, until you at last find your own, unique, expressive voice. Then, and only then, will you be able to enter into communion with, and begin to channel for, your secret inner Muse."This advice is sheer fatuous nonsense, of course, but any with luck it'll keep the kid out of everyone else's hair for the next ten years.


¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤
The more I consider the question, the clearer it seems to me that one cannot become a writer. One either is a writer, both blessed and cursed with a need to write that borders on OCD, or else one's time and energy is better spent doing just about anything else. The evidence to support this assertion is conclusive. As millions of teachers and students prove in hundreds of thousands of classrooms every day, if a student lacks the innate desire to write, all that trying to force them to become a writer does is take them from "I don't want to write" to "I can't write," and if the teacher really pushes the issue, the rest of the way into "I'm not gonna write, and you can't make me!"

So in order to have an intelligent conversation on this topic, we must first assume that the innate desire to write, so strong it borders on being a compelling need to write, is there.

While we're on canards, let's dispose of another right away. No one, but no one, can teach you exactly how to become a successful, commercially published, award-winning, or the worst lie of all, best-selling writer, much less how to get every word you write published. Anyone who claims they can do this is trying to sell you something, most likely a workshop, a seminar, or a self-help book.

And I'll have more to say on this in a minute, but first: if you can't learn to become a writer, much less learn the secrets of becoming a successful writer, then why are we having this conversation?

Because if the initial spark is there, you can always learn to become a better writer. And while writing for publication always involves the risk of failure, by becoming a better writer, you can tilt the odds of succeeding in your favor.

Here's how to do it. After thirty-some years in the trade, and after getting to know hundreds of published writers and meeting perhaps thousands of aspiring writers, I have identified these four factors as the key traits that separate the successful writers from the vast herd of wanna-be's, amateurs, has-beens and never-weres. The traits critical to success as a writer are:
talent
good craft skills
good work habits
luck
"Well, duh," you say. "Paging Captain Obvious."

No, in point of fact, it's not obvious at all...


¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤
About Talent:
There's no getting around it; it's almost impossible to succeed as a writer without at least some modicum of innate talent. Some of the most pathetic characters you'll ever meet in the writing trade are the people with superb craft skills and great work habits, but absolutely no talent. This ain't prose karaoke, folks. While your friends and writing group might love it, very few people in the publishing industry care how well you can perform a story that's almost exactly the same as one Isaac Asimov or Robert Heinlein made famous sixty years ago.

The saddest part is, some of these poor benighted souls will soldier on for years, always thinking that one more workshop, one more creative writing class, one more seminar, or one more self-help book is going to make the difference. Not to be unkind, but Writer's Digest makes a fortune off these poor sods. (In fact, it's very important not to be unkind, as every once in a while one of them turns out to have an astonishing amount of raw talent: it's just been buried under years of accumulated course syllabi and witless writing group critiques, and nearly smothered to death.)

Sometimes I think of raw talent as an ember, which needs careful tending in order to become a fire. Other times I think of it as a double bitted axe, with which you're as likely to cut off your own foot as clear the forest. What I have observed consistently is that good craft skills, good work habits, and a little talent beats lousy craft skills, lousy work habits, and great gobs of God-given raw talent every time.

Talent, it seems, is very much like beauty. If you're blessed with an overabundance of it, there's a pronounced tendency to coast and never develop your other abilities. Then one day the talent falters, and your latest book flops so badly it leaves a smoking crater, and you're left wondering, "What the Hell happened?" Some writers never recover from this. Instead, they call it "writer's block"

And then they start buying self-help books about it...

About Good Craft Skills:
There's a tendency to think of this in terms of simple line-level skills, but this goes far mere punctuation, spelling, grammar, and sentence structure. The best writers I've known really think of story-telling as a craft; they think of their stories or novels in the same way that a master cabinetmaker thinks about a piece of furniture he or she is making; and they are always working on refining their skills and improving their tool set. The best writers never trust to talent and luck to carry them through, and they're never afraid to throw out entire sentences, paragraphs, chapters, or even books if they're not working.

(And I have lots more to say about this subject, but that's the next column.)

About Good Work Habits:
Good work habits are just exactly what you know they are; you're just deluding yourself if you think that writing fiction is some kind of ethereal artistic thing that's above all that. A lot of would-be writers seem to think that writing fiction requires spending a lot of time sitting on their duffs, thinking high-flown thoughts, and waiting for one or the other of the Muses to stick her tongue in their ear. The history of literature is strewn with the wreckage left by promising writers who had an abundance of talent and great craft skills, but terrible work habits. There is no more damning epitaph for a writer than, "He did brilliant work -- when he felt like doing it."

Ask yourself, which would you rather leave behind: an awe-inspiring body of finished work, or a pile of fragments and clutter that leaves people thinking, "Wow! What promise! What potential! I wonder what he could have done if he'd ever gotten his @#($* together?"

About Luck:
There's no denying it: Luck is the joker in the deck, the wild card that trumps everything, the -- pardon the expression -- Golden Snitch that wins the game in defiance of all logic, sense, and justice. We all know of some writer who's been lucky enough to become insanely, maddeningly, wildly successful, despite an utter and complete dearth of talent and skill. (Although, let's face it: if asked to name such a writer, each and every one of us would point to a different one. The critical deciding factor here seems to be, "Any writer more successful than me!")

For every undeserving writer the Fates have smiled upon, though, there are probably thousands more no one has ever heard of, because when they took their swing, they had the bad luck to miss the tree and hit their own foot instead. The ways in which a writer's luck can turn bad are beyond counting. Right story, wrong time; right story, right time, wrong editor; right story, right time, right editor, wrong publisher; right story, right time, right editor, right publisher, wrong cover artist...

...to be continued...

______

First appeared here in 2013

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"The Talk" (Part One) by Bruce Bethke

And once again, Spring returns to the North Country. In the space of two short weeks we've gone from watching the glaciers calve...


To watching the trees bud, the grass turn green, and the crocuses, tulips, and daffodils erupt from the ground in a glorious riot of color, only to get nommed to bits every night by hordes of ravenous bunnies.


Still, the flowers keeping trying. You have to admire that.

Along with the flowers, another sure sign that Spring has returned are the messages like this one, which have begun popping up in my email Inbox lately:

"Dear Mr. Bethke,

"I teach [subject] at [school], and I was wondering if you'd be interested in coming in to talk to my class about..."Actually, yes; schedule permitting, I would be delighted to come in and speak with your class.

Why?

My reasons are complex, and not always altogether clear to me. Some part of it is born of a simple and honest sense of altruism. Another part is born of a nagging sense of obligation. When I was a cocky young brat just starting out in this business, a lot of older and more experienced writers and editors were much more patient with me than I really deserved. While it's too late to repay their kindness now, I can pay it forward, so this is something I always try to do.

Then there is another, somewhat more mercenary and perhaps less admirable part.

I wouldn't do anything so precious as to claim that I do this for market research, or to "keep a finger on the pulse of the next generation" or anything like that. But the truth is, these conversations always end up being very educational for me. We who live and work inside the ant farm of SF/F publishing tend to take the long view, and given half a chance will tell you all about some story that Arthur C. Clarke first published in Galaxy in 1952. We tend to forget that out there, in the so-called real world, time continues to slide by -- and it does so in the form of window, about ten years long. For most people out there, five years ago is ancient history, and five years in the future is almost unimaginable.

Couple that with the other ten-year window -- that short span of years between the age when a young person is old enough to begin reading for pleasure and the age at which his or her literary tastes have become ossified for life -- and it's enough to make you feel positively Tralfamadorian.

So from time to time I feel the need to step out into the rushing time-flow, to talk to this year's crop of students, but mostly to listen and learn. And some of the things I learn are astonishing.
Science fiction, fantasy, horror? Those bright lines of demarcation between genres and subgenres that we in the business claim to see so clearly are invisible to younger eyes. Steampunk elves? Sure. Fighting vampires and zombies on spaceships? Why not? As long as the story is exciting and the imagery is engaging, all else can be forgiven.

Print, video, graphic novels, online gaming? It's all one continuous media space now, and the different incarnations of a given property are all just different points on the same continuum. Books, live-action movies, animated movies, graphic novels, and video game cut scenes are all treated as equally valid. "The movie was cool but the game totally sucked" is a trenchant critique.

Star Wars? Bring that up in a classroom today and you're most like to spark an argument over whether Disney's decision to close down LucasArts and turn all game development over to Electronic Arts was a disaster or a catastrophe. "Oh, you mean the movies? I think my Dad still has those on DVD and watches them once in a while."

Star Trek? "Wasn't that movie with Chris Pine and Zach Quinto great? I am so waiting for Into Darkness to open next week!

"What, you mean the old stuff, like with Captain Piccard, or the really old stuff, that my Grandpa still watches?" To this generation, the original Star Trek occupies the same cognitive space that old Flash Gordon serials occupied for mine: some pretty cool ideas, hampered by hammy acting, plodding scripts, and laughably cheap special effects. The idea that Into Darkness is a re-imagining of a thirty-year-old idea bothers them no more than the idea that The Wrath of Khan was an expansion of "Space Seed" bothered their parents.

Harry Potter? "I think my older sister read all those books. I'm more into Twilight. And World War Z. And The Walking Dead. And The Hunger Games."

Doctor Who is a series you watch on Netflix. Any mention of Dr. Who is sure to start a vigorous argument over which one's the best Doctor -- Matt Smith or David Tennant -- with one smug girl in the back insisting they're both wrong, it's Christopher Eccleston. Mention Jon Pertwee or Tom Baker, or how wonderful it was to see Elisabeth Sladen one more time in "The Stolen Earth," and all you'll get is a roomful of blank looks. "Who?"

Radagast the Brown gets a surprising amount of name recognition. The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are those films by Peter Jackson. Dwarves are awesome. Elves are probably gay. (This last assertion is always followed by a sudden nervous look around, and then, "Not that there's anything wrong with that.")

A generation of steady indoctrination has failed: most girls still don't want to be kick-ass warrior women. They want to be Disney princesses, or better yet a Disney princess with a longbow and a talking unicorn for a companion.

If dwarves are awesome, tharks are even more awesomer. Disney totally botched the deal with John Carter, because the film really resonates with teenage boys, most of whom have watched it on DVD or Blu-Ray and can't wait for the next one to come out. I haven't yet had the heart to tell any of them that it took 80 years for this one to get made, so they're probably in for a long wait.

Only Goths like Batman. Captain America is awesome (now that was a surprise), and boys don't want to be Batman or Superman, they want to be Tony Stark -- provided they also get Gwyneth Paltrow in the deal.

No teenagers read comic books any more. They can't afford to.
Of course, this is all incidental. The kids aren't there to teach me -- at least, not consciously -- they're there to hear me teach them The Secret. And no matter how I might try to steer and control the conversation, it always ends up with one brave student finally getting up the nerve to ask:

"Mr. Bethke? How do I become a writer?" Oh, boy...

...to be continued...

______

by Bruce Bethke, May 10, 2013 

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"The Trouble with Advice" by Bruce Bethke

Thirty-five years ago I was living in Los Angeles, shopping my demo tape all over Hollywood, and trying to take my musical career to the next level. Auditions and callbacks were few and far-between, though, so I spent a lot of time either in my apartment or else down at the beach, watching the nonstop freak show, scribbling away in my notebook, and doing my best to follow in the unsteady footsteps of Jim Morrison. In my mind's eye the images from those days remain remarkably razor-sharp: I can still see the shape and color of the inside walls of that small apartment, and the way the cockroaches danced and scattered when I flipped on the lights, and the faces and houses in the surrounding low-rent but not altogether unpleasant neighborhood -- and the best places to go for cheap but still edible Asian or Mexican food -- and the near-miraculous way the smog would sometimes lift, sometimes for entire hours at a time, and the skies would clear enough for me to see the mountains, a thousand yards off in the distance. I can still remember all the different back ways and side streets I used to take to walk or bike down to the beach...

Many years later a business trip brought me back to Los Angeles, and one morning I found myself at loose ends in Hollywood with a nice rental car and a few hours to kill. On a lark I decided to drive back to my old neighborhood, to see if anything had changed.

Oh, it'd changed, all right. It was now not so much a low-rent neighborhood as the exterior daylight set for some low-budget post-Apocalyptic sci-fi movie. The ghetto bars on almost every window weren't all that much of a surprise to me, but I didn't expect to see the coils of concertina wire on the perimeter fences and rooftops of the remaining businesses, or the gang graffiti tags on pretty much every flat vertical surface, or the knots and clots of young men standing around on the sidewalks and street corners, glaring at me with narrowed eyes, as if trying to decide whether I was worth the effort of car-jacking or if they should just bust a cap on my fool ass for trespassing on their turf.

I took a few heartbeats to soak it all in, then hit the gas, found the nearest freeway entrance ramp, and just about kicked the accelerator pedal through the floor in my desire to light up the afterburners and get the flaming flying hell out of there.

_____
L. P. Hartley once wrote, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." This is not merely a truism but a serious problem for those in the advice trade, both those who would like to give it and those who hope to receive it. Maps both physical and cognitive are constantly changing, and the best we on the giving side can do is tell you what the landscape looked like when we last went that way.

To those who hope to receive advice, remember: any advice you receive from someone who's already been there and done that is by definition old. It may be useful as-is. More likely it will require some straining and filtering to be useful in the here and now. Much of it might be completely irrelevant, and some of it -- such as the mental map of a certain neighborhood in Los Angeles that I drew back in the 1970s -- might actually get you into serious trouble if you were to try to apply it now.

Case in point, when I first decided to get serious about writing science fiction for professional publication, about thirty years ago, there were six "pro" magazines on the newsstands, perhaps two dozen good-paying semi-pro mags, and at least a half-dozen book publishers with healthy lines of mass-market paperback originals. The typical editorial response time ranged from four to six weeks, and if you lived reasonably frugally it was possible to pay the month's rent with one decent short-story sale.

Since I wasn't having consistent success at first, I decided to sponge up all the advice I could find from the established Old School pros. It took me years to realize that their advice was in turn rooted in a time when there were two mail deliveries daily, no paperback originals market, a lot of pulp magazines on the newsstands -- for that matter, a lot of newsstands -- and far fewer writers competing for the available publication space. Back in their day, if you lived in New York, it was possible to mail a story to Astounding in the morning, get it back with comments from John Campbell that afternoon, rewrite it overnight and remail it the next morning, and have Campbell's check in-hand the following evening -- and that was at a time when 5-cents per word was serious money.

Now? There are, what, three major pro magazines left? A vast plethora of minor pro and semi-pro markets ranging from brilliant to awful, a paperback originals market that's coughing blood, an entry on the Endangered Species List for "neighborhood bookstores" tagged Believed Extinct in the Wild, and a good short-story sale might... Pay your cell phone bill for a month, and leave enough left over for lunch at Taco John's?

So how much of the advice that I sponged up from the Old School pros -- or even that I developed myself, from my own experiences in the 1980s and 1990s -- do you suppose is relevant now?

_____
There is no going back to the way things were. Heck, there's not much point in going back more than a decade. When I first decided to revive The Slush Pile Survival Guide, I thought, "This will be easy. I've been writing this kind of stuff for twenty years! I'll just go back into the deep archives, exhume my old columns, and -- "

And discover that the world has changed in the years since then, far more than I imagined. True, many aspects of good story-telling haven't changed since the Neolithic age, but the business of selling your fiction and getting it published has changed almost beyond recognition in just the past ten years. A few of my old columns are still useful as-is, and a few more contain nuggets of information that might conceivably be reworked into something useful now, but most are now better off taken to the county hazardous waste site and left for safe disposal.

That is the challenge you face, when you read advice from any established old pro. You must be a discerning reader; you must weigh and evaluate what you see and determine what's relevant to you. I can't tell you with absolute assurance how to break into publication in today's fiction market, because I didn't do it, and I'm not the one who's trying to do it now.

Remember, I became a successful and award-winning fiction writer in a different century. And in a foreign country.

______

Posted by ~brb February 22, 2013  

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Submissions and Slush Pile Update #4

Twelve weeks into our 2019 reading period, things aren’t quite where I wanted them to be, but on the whole, I’m cautiously optimistic. New submissions continue to show up in an unsteady stream: we’ll see fifteen new stories one day and two the next. The weekends are particularly submissions-intensive. Thus far we’re mostly keeping up with the flow. As of this morning there are:

• 29 stories either with a first reader or waiting to be assigned to a first reader
• 19 stories waiting to be rejected (form)
• 16 stories waiting for me to write a personal rejection
• 12 stories waiting for me to send an acceptance letter
• and here's the blockage: 65 stories in the holding tank, either with a second or third reader or in the “Well, do we buy it?” bin. Of these, 53 have been here more than 30 days, and 25 have been here more than 60. 

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Submissions and Slush Pile Update #3

Six weeks into our 2019 reading period, we’ve settled down to a pretty consistent average of seven new submissions daily. Of these—

• 60% are first-round no-comment rejects, for any of a number of reasons.

• 10% are set aside waiting for me to write a personal rejection, because the story deserves more than just a “Thanks, but we can’t use this story at this time.”

• 5% are sitting in the Probably Accept bin, but we haven’t made the final final final decisions yet.

At some point I’ll start writing about the 60% and the 10%, because there’s much to be said about these stories and why we chose not to accept them that might be of value to other writers. Until there’s time to do that, though, here’s one quick hint: we reject stories, not writers. Just because one story you sent us got a quick form rejection, that doesn’t mean the next story you send us might not be exactly what we’re looking for.

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Submissions and Slush Pile Update #2

Three weeks into our 2019 reading period, things seem to be progressing nicely. Submissions slowed for a few days but then returned to their normal pace, and we’re still on-track to receive between 200 and 250 new stories this month. I’m pleased to report that thus far we’ve been getting every new submission received into the hands of a first reader within 48 hours, and getting through first-round reads and first-round decisions within seven days.

For about 65% of the stories we receive, the first-round is as far as they go. For a multitude of reasons these stories just aren’t what we’re looking for right now, so we’ll thank the authors kindly for giving us the opportunity to consider their story and wish them good luck placing it elsewhere. I’d love to be able to send each and every author a detailed explanation as to why we aren’t holding their story over for further consideration, but there simply isn’t the time.

The point I want to stress, though, is that every story submitted to us does get at least one full reading, and generally a first read and then a second skim as we discuss them in first-round triage. We have not yet succumbed to the temptation to reject a story based solely on the author’s cover letter alone—though there have been some close calls...

Thus far we have a small handful of clear BUYs in the hopper, a very few RFWs (requests for rewrites) pending, and a fair number of stories we’re holding over for a second or third re-read. We should begin sending out acceptances this weekend, and if all goes well the new SHOWCASE site should also go live this coming Saturday.

Stay tuned,
~brb

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Re Submissions

Here’s one more thing we’ll be adding to the Submission Guidelines ASAP:

Please do not send email with HUGE (multi-megabyte) attachments to our submissions email inbox. Such submissions just overflow the inbox, clog up the pipes, and end up being deleted unread. If we want to see your author’s photo in all its glorious 16MB hi-res beauty, we will ask for it after we’ve accepted your story and put it under contract, and then you’ll be directed to send it to a different mailbox.

In the meantime, if you’ve tried to send us a submission in the past 48 hours and gotten a “mailbox full” bounce-back message, be advised that we’ve located the source of the problem, plunged the pipes, and everything should be flowing freely again. 

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The Book, and its Cover

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“You can’t judge a book by its cover.”

Everyone says that, but does anyone actually believe it? Yeah, sure, there may be a few edge cases out there who ignore the cover art and withhold judgment until they’ve actually read a good portion of the content—and of course, there’s the National Library Service braille and audio book library, which I wholeheartedly support—but most prospective readers judge books...

a.) first, by the recommendations of their friends—

b.) then by prior experience with the author, if any—

c.) then by recommendations from famous media personalities—

d.) then by published reviews and online ratings—

e.) then by the reputation of the author, if they have no prior direct experience—

f.) then by a quick glance at the cover art—

g.) and then, God willing, by actually reading a significant portion of what’s behind that cover.

Hence the problem for the indie publisher, and especially an indie publisher like Rampant Loon Press, which likes to focus on new and upcoming writers who are just beginning to build their reputations. If the author doesn’t already have an established rep (scratch b and e), and we don’t have the budget for the kind of publicity and advertising campaigns needed to get major traction with c and d, that leaves us with a, f, and if we’re very lucky, a little d, mostly in the form of online reader reviews, as tools to use to coax prospective readers along to point g, which is the entire objective of this exercise.

As for going bigger on d: no, seriously, we don’t have the budget for that, and thanks for offering to help, but it isn’t just a matter of coming up with another $50 or $100 or so. It costs a minimum of $425 to get into Kirkus Reviews, and the costs of a serious advertising campaign just go up from there. Online advertising is nominally cheaper, but not very effective: for all the money we’ve spent on Facebook and Amazon ad campaigns, we’d be better off if we’d just heaped dollar bills in a big pile and set fire to them. At least then we’d be warm. 

As regards a, that’s something you can’t buy or force to happen, no matter how much money you throw at it. You can only try to build a community of people who might eventually become friends, and that in a sense is what we’ve been trying to do, with greater or lesser degrees of success, ever since the launch of The Ranting Room back in February 2005. (Hmm. There’s still some good stuff out on that site. I should loot it and recycle it here.)

But—building a community of writers, and people who like to read? To build a community of people who are by nature quiet, reclusive, introverted, and averse to communal activities?

Well, it’s certainly a challenge. And for my next I trick, I shall enter the Iditarod with a sled pulled by a team—of cats!

I suppose I could go the c route, or rather the pseudo-c route, and pretend to be a famous media personality. That could work. If you make your pond small enough, it’s easy to look like a big fish. If I claimed to be leading a literary movement—or better yet, a revolution!

Nah. No. That’s not me. I’ve been resisting that siren’s call for 35 years, and it’s been the source of much tension around here. Stupefying Stories: it’s not about me. It’s about the writers whose stories I want lots of other people to read, because they’re writing great stories.

Which brings us, in a rather longer and more roundabout way than I’d planned, to item f, and to Stupefying Stories #22: how we planned it, how we picked the stories we wanted to include in it, how we decided on the cover story, and how we wound up choosing between two potentially terrific pieces of cover art:

...to be continued...

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Status Update: 10/23/2018

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With the 2018 reading period all wrapped up, we’re deep in the throes of book production. If you submitted a story to us in 2018 and have NOT received either an acceptance or a rejection from us by now, please query, as it means something has gone off-track.

If you’ve received an acceptance from us and have replied to it, the next step is that we will send you a contract.

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And that’s a wrap

---

“...good luck placing it elsewhere.

“Kind regards,
“Bruce Bethke
“editor, Stupefying Stories”

Hmm, hmm, re-read it one more time to avoid the ohnosecond*, looks okay, click Send, and...

We’re done! Okay folks, we have now responded to every short story submission sent to us in our 2018 reading period. With a few exceptions—and if you’re one of those exceptional people, you already know who you are—if you sent us a story this year, you should by now have either an acceptance or a rejection in-hand.

If you have NOT received either an acceptance or rejection from us, please send a query to submissions@rampantloonmedia.com, as it means something’s gone askew.

Now, on to contracts and copy-editing—which may take a little longer than planned, as Adobe unleashed yet another insufficiently tested “upgrade” on Adobe Sign users this week, crippling our e-contracts system and causing a mob of customers with torches and pitchforks to try to storm their office.

Well, I suppose we could always go back to paper contacts and US mail... 

Cheers,
Bruce

* ohnosecond: the period of time that elapses between the instant you click ‘Send’ and the instant you realize, “Oh no, did I really send that?”

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Letters to the Editor

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Quentin Walker writes:

“I am a writer in my free time and an avaricious reader [...]”

(Good opening. We like writers, and always need more readers. And if you’re a writer who writes without also reading, you’re probably going to be a lousy writer. I think you meant voracious, though, not avaricious.)

“When submitting short stories, do you accept anything with horror Lovecraftian themes? Or do you just like straight science fiction and fantasy?”

First off, if you want to know what we like to see in submissions, our Submission Guidelines are always a good place to start. If you take a quick look at them, the first thing you’ll notice is that we are CLOSED to unsolicited submissions right now. At the moment we’re in the last stages of cleaning up after our 2018 open submissions period, deeply into contracts & copy-editing mode, and down to the last two acceptances and six rejections I need to write and send.

But as for Lovecraftian horror in particular

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Status Update: 10/15/18

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Just a few metrics for you this morning. Of the more than 800 submissions we received during our 2018 reading period—I don’t have a solid final number at this moment, as we had some issues with submission tracking and stories being sent to old email addresses and such that we didn’t get fully nailed down until June—we are down to the following numbers.

• ACCEPTED - 52 stories
• Contract pending - 10
• Standalone novellas - 1
• Accepted for SHOWCASE - 19
• Already published - 7


• TO BE ACCEPTED - 24
• For SHOWCASE - 3


• PENDING FINAL DECISION - 37
• Standalone novellas - 4
• For SHOWCASE - 5 (probably to be accepted)
• Main sequence stories - 28

With 76 stories already accepted or tagged as to be accepted—counting those accepted for SHOWCASE separately, which we should have been doing all along—basically, we have 28 “main sequence” stories in the final bin and the space and budget to accept 14 at most.

We should be finished making our final choices by this evening.

Cheers,
~brb

P.S. I’ve had some authors ask if their story was silently rejected. I know we’re from Minnesota, The Passive-Aggressive State, but we don’t do silent rejections. If you submitted a story to us this year, you will receive a response.

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Status Update, 10/10/18

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(Using the illo of a P.O.’d cat in a pink bunny suit, just because I haven’t used it in a while and want to see if facebook picks it up.)

Ten days after the end of our 2018 reading period, we’ve got things pretty close to settled down. Out of the more than 800 stories, novelettes, and novellas that showed up in our inbox in the past six months, we’re down to selecting the final 40 or so really outstanding tales we can use. I’m pleased to say that this reading period has reinforced one of my core beliefs, as well as one of the fundamental raisons d'être for Stupefying Stories: there are a lot of really good writers out there, writing a lot of really terrific stories, and somebody needs to be doing something to help readers find these writers.

This “Somebody” character, though: whenever I catch myself writing or saying “somebody” ought to do something, I stop in my tracks. No, the proper way to state the question is, “What can I do to make this happen?”

Hence Stupefying Stories. Finding, selecting, and publishing these brilliant stories is one-half of the answer. Now comes the grimy work: drawing attention to the stories we’re publishing.

For the next six months, then, that’s what we’ll be concentrating on: publishing books and trying to draw attention to them. In all honesty, I’m not entirely sure how to do this. I’m very familiar with the way the publishing business used to work, but what worked five years ago doesn’t work today. Hell, what worked even six months ago doesn’t work today. I suppose, if I were to start publishing barking mad political screeds...

TRUMP! KAVANAUGH! PELOSI! SOROS!

No. Get thee behind me. That’s not who I am. As someone who remembers the past sixty-some years, I have trouble getting worked up about the current outrage d’jour. 

So instead, expect to see more activity on this blogsite, and particularly more writer- and reader-oriented content. My work schedule changed right after Labor Day and I lost the Thoughtful Hour I used to have every morning for reflection and writing, but I’ve pretty much adapted now. I have a sizable backlog of mail to be answered, and much of it involves thought-provoking questions that deserve public answers.

Expect also to see new SHOWCASE stories going live at 7am Central time every Saturday morning. We have stories already in the queue through the end of November, and I’m really pleased with the way the new incarnation of SHOWCASE is taking form. I’m particularly excited about our first three-part serial in years: “Market Futures,” by M. Ian Bell. Look for it in November. This is a test case, and if it gets a good reception, we have at least one novel we’d like to serialize beginning in January of 2019.

Finally, we expect to release the long-delayed Stupefying Stories #22, sometime next week. We have more books already in the queue behind it—but this is enough for one day. I have to have something to write about tomorrow!

Cheers,
Bruce Bethke
Editor, Stupefying Stories

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Talking Shop

Op-ed: “How to Write Heroes: An Incomplete Primer” • by Auston Habershaw

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Previously: “How to Write a Good Bad Guy”

Okay, so the first thing to keep in mind here is that the idea of what makes a “hero” is enormous and varied and in most cases culturally and historically informed—defining the term is a much slipperier task than you think. So in the interest of brevity, let’s cut to the chase: for the purposes of this article, the hero of your story is the main character, and their task is to resolve the conflict. Everything else—whether they’re good people or bad people, whatever their shape/gender/race/sexuality, whether they’re powerful or weak—all that is subject to the kind of story you are trying to tell and it’s not my business to interfere. However, it is my objective to tell you how to write your heroes better, and by better I mean more interesting, more compelling, and more memorable. So, my rules:

#1: A Hero is Actively Engaged in Resolving the Conflict

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Status Update • 7 August 2018

With Stupefying Stories #21 now out on Kindle, we’re moving ahead with back-office work. We have six more Stupefying Stories books—magazines? bookazines?—currently in various stages of development and scheduled for release between now and December, as well as three new original novels and three reissues. If you picked up a copy of #21 during the recent free ebook promo, thank you, we hope you enjoy it, please give it a rating and a quick review on Amazon if you like it, and keep those bug reports coming. We’re finding typos galore in it and want to fix as many of them as possible before we finalize the print edition. Send your comments and corrections to feedback@rampantloonmedia.com. We will read and respond, if only to say, “Thanks, we found that one already.”

If you’ve submitted a story to us in the past 90-ish days: also, thank you, and the FSPRC are doing a great job of paring the surprisingly large number of submissions we’ve received down to the short list of stories we can afford to buy and publish. If you submitted a story before August 1 and are still waiting for a response from us, you should get it by the end of this week.

Finally, as promised, we’ve updated our submission guidelines. In particular, note the new section: “Twelve Stories That Are Nearly Impossible To Sell To Us Right Now.”

To reiterate: we don’t post submission guidelines because we’re constipated prigs with delusions of godhood. We do so because time is finite, and we want to concentrate our attention on the stories that fit our needs and the writers who create those stories. The language in the submission guidelines may seem a bit harsh, but believe me, about the hundredth time you’ve seen a story that begins with a mysterious eastern European count and then introduces Lucy, Mina, John, and Van Helsing...

Hey. How come no one ever begins a story with a mysterious eastern European count and then introduces Lucy, Ethel, Fred, and Ricky? That’s what I want to know.

Kind regards,
Bruce 

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Talking Shop

Op-ed: “How to Write a Good Bad Guy” • by Auston Habershaw

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The villain is a key role in any adventure story. It’s really, really hard to have Star Wars without Darth Vader. There is no Infinity War without Thanos. Hell, there’s not even a 101 Dalmatians without a scenery-chewing Cruella De Vil.

Despite this clear need for a villain, however, not every villain is up to the task. A great many villains just do not tickle the imagination and fail to make their stories click with the audience. They’re dull and, worse still, forgettable. Can you think of a really good book, story, or movie with a forgettable villain? I can’t.

So, how do we avoid this? Well, here I present my (incomplete) list of things to do to write a good villain.

#1: A Villain Complicates or Creates Conflict

First, a villain exists to create or complicate conflict and tension in the plot. To use English-major speak, the villain frequently (though not always) serves as the chief antagonist for the plot—in other words, they are the ones that usually create the conflict that the protagonist needs to resolve. Even in the case where they are not the antagonist (case in point: in the film Titanic, Hockley—played by Billy Zane—is the villain but is not the chief antagonist, as he does not create Rose’s conflict), they always serve to complicate or heighten that conflict. So, Darth Vader indirectly orders Luke’s aunt and uncle killed, which creates Luke’s drive to become a Jedi and defeat the Empire. Likewise Belloq, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, is always there to take away the things Indy wants most (the idol, Marion, the Ark), thereby driving Indy forward.

This is arguably the most essential thing a villain does and any character that fails to do it is not actually a villain at all. It’s just some lady with a cool outfit and a bunch of dopey henchmen.

#2: A Villain Invites Comparisons to the Hero

Second, the villain acts as a thematic counterpoint to the protagonist. By understanding the villain, we likewise understand more about the hero. Killmonger is such a wonderful villain in Black Panther because he is the direct counterpoint to T’Challa—where T’Challa is a child of privilege, Killmonger is a child of poverty; where T’Challa is unsure, Killmonger is driven to the point of obsession. This can also be seen in the relationship between the Joker and Batman (Chaos vs Order) and, to skew more literary, between Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver in Treasure Island (Jim is youth, innocence, and honesty, Silver is age, cynicism, and lies). Much as the bass guitar adds volume to a band’s sound, the villain adds richness to the hero’s journey—through the villain, we understand the purpose of the story better.
   
#3: A Villain Must Have an Understandable Goal

“Ruling the world” is not a goal. Say it with me now: Ruling the world is not a goal. Why not? It’s way, waaay too vague. The villain needs to have a purpose, and that purpose needs to be specific enough that the audience can understand it. This is essential for us to fully comprehend what the villain represents and why we must reject it. Villains are characters, not forces of nature beyond our ken.

For this reason, I would not characterize the xenomorphs in the Aliens franchise as villains—and the movies understand this, too (or, at least the good ones do). The villains are always human beings—guys like Burke who are willing to sell out Ripley and her friends in order to make some money. We understand their goals and, therefore, we understand the stakes of the story and why the villain must be stopped. The scariest thing about Mustapha Mond in Brave New World is that his plan, horrifying though it is, makes total sense given a certain point of view which we, the audience, recoil from.

#4: A Villain Must Be a Well-Developed Character

Beyond their goals, a good villain must be more than just a caricature of a person. They can be single-minded, sure; they can be crazy and over-the-top, but they require facets like any other person. The reason for this is not to make them likeable or identifiable (though a villain can be these things), but rather to make them a reasonable counterpoint to the hero (that second purpose, remember?). Even though Vader seems a completely single-note character, we know there is depth there—Obi Wan hints of their shared past, there is a certain mystery about him—who is he? What is his deal? How did he become evil? All that is important (really important, as it turns out) and it is essential to keeping the audience invested in the struggle between good and evil.

The more real the villain seems, the more terrible their agenda becomes. They are not sketchy metaphors with legs—they are living, breathing people. Real people cannot be written off as “just crazy.” A real person forces you to engage, and that makes the villain more effective on the page or on the screen.

#5: A Villain Must Stir Negative Emotions

We must not completely admire our villains, because then they become heroes and your story is suddenly very different. I’m not saying that the antagonist can’t be a good person or that a villain can’t be sympathetic on some level (they totally can), but a villain is not a villain if they cannot force the audience to gasp or scream or rage. Accordingly, the villain must be deviant from accepted norms in some notable way. This might sound obvious, but the world is full of bland villains who are supposed to be hated, but who have no emotional effect on the reader and, therefore, fall flat.

In the end, the villain can (and should) be a central part of what makes any story tick, but they need to be treated as a character, not a plot device.

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On the day Auston Habershaw was born, Skylab fell from the heavens. This foretold two possible fates: supervillain or sci-fi / fantasy author. Fortunately he chose the latter, and spends his time imagining the could-be and never-was rather than disintegrating the moon with his volcano laser. He is a winner of the Writers of the Future Contest and has published short stories in F&SF, Analog, and Galaxy’s Edge, among other places. His fantasy series, The Saga of the Redeemed, is published through Harper Voyager—the final installment of which, The Far Far Better Thing, will be released in November of 2018. He lives and works in Boston, MA, and you can find him online at aahabershaw.com.

His first appearance in Stupefying Stories was “Thief of Hearts” in Stupefying Stories #7, and his next appearance will be “Upon the Blood-Dark Sea,” coming soon. 

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Talking Shop

Op-ed: “The Whole Alternate History Thing” • by Bruce Bethke

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The temptation when writing alternate history is to assume that your one chosen detail of history has changed, but everything else—and everyone else—has remained roughly the same. Yes, in your timeline Lincoln lost the 1864 election and as a result the Union settled for a negotiated peace with the Confederacy—but a decade later, you’ve still got General Custer in command of the 7th Cavalry as it rides across the Dakotas, towards its fateful appointment with the Sioux on the Little Bighorn.

Wait a minute. General Custer? General George Armstrong Custer? Who rose through the ranks so rapidly because he was the hero of the Battle of Appomattox Court House? Which in our timeline took place on the morning of April 9, 1865, which means that in your timeline, it never happened?

You begin to see the problem?

History is Brownian motion expressed in human lives. We like to imagine that we see grand sweeping vistas and irresistible forces working to produce inevitable results, and those sorts of patterns are easy to discern (or at least imagine we discern) in hindsight. But to the people living in the moment, it's just a constantly swirling blizzard of tiny changes, which only later can be thought to have had a pattern. Case in point: as I was toying with the idea of an alternate timeline that might flow from one event, the tiny changes began to snowball with astonishing rapidity. The U.S. never got into the Spanish-American War—

Well, some claim this war was a historical inevitability. In the 1890s the United States was feeling its oats, and the State and War departments were full of younger men who’d missed the Civil War and were eager to prove themselves. If not Spain, then somewhere else: perhaps Mexico, or maybe China. We were a pugnacious young country then, and history as told now conveniently elides the fact that in 1895 we even went to the brink of a shooting war with England over the border dispute between British Guiana and Venezuela. Luckily, trouble elsewhere in the British Empire pulled our chestnuts out of the fire, by motivating the British to accept a negotiated settlement so that they could turn their full attention to more important matters, and by the end of the Second Boer War the Brits had decided we might be more useful as allies than adversaries.

But let’s stick with our initial assumption: that the U.S. never got involved in the Spanish-American War, and the jingoistic faction in our government didn’t find another suitable war to take its place. What kind of snowflakes are in motion and perturbed by this change?

How about these? In 1892, as part of a modernization program, the U.S. Army replaced the post-Civil War single-shot Trapdoor Springfield rifle with the Krag-Jorgenson, a beautifully made bolt-action rifle whose .30-40 cartridge was perfectly suited to hunting whitetail deer. Likewise, in the same year they retired the venerable .45 caliber 1873 Colt Single-Action Army (a.k.a., the SAA, or “Peacemaker” of cowboy movie fame) and replaced it with the brand-spanking-new 1892 Colt Double-Action Army, in the then-new caliber of .38 Long. Similarly, in 1895, the Navy and Marine Corps adopted the 6mm Lee, the rapid-firing high-velocity wonder weapon of its days, along with the Colt “potato digger” machine-gun in the same caliber and the M1892 Colt .38 revolver.

In the Spanish-American War, American casualties in combat were relatively light: for every American killed in battle, ten more succumbed to tropical diseases. This was largely due to the poor training, morale, leadership, marksmanship, and equipment of the Spanish soldiers, a fact which George Orwell would comment on at considerable length forty years later in Homage to Catalonia.

Once in a while, though, the Americans ran into Spanish soldiers who were well-trained, -led, and -equipped, and then it was a different story. The Battle of San Juan Hill, for example, would probably be considered a classic military clusterf### of the please-let’s-change-the-subject variety now, if not for the involvement of a certain future President. In this battle, a force of 15,000 American troops assaulted a hill held by about 750 Spanish troops—no, I did not drop a zero—who were adequately trained, led, dug-in, and armed with the latest Mauser rifles.

The Mauser came as a nasty shock to the Americans. It was more accurate, more powerful, and had longer range than the Krag. Worse, some of the American troops were still armed with Trapdoor Springfields, and when they fired their black-powder .45-70 cartridges they may as well have been lighting smoke grenades and waving flags saying (in Spanish), “WE’RE HERE! SHOOT AT US!” The Americans took 1,400 killed or wounded before they overran the Spanish positions, and probably wouldn’t have taken the hill at all without excellent use of supporting fire from their Gatling guns.

Nonetheless, take the hill they did, and in due time they won the war, thus gaining control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. Whereupon a new problem arose: some Filipinos weren’t happy with the notion of trading one colonial master for another, and the Philippines promptly erupted in a bloody guerrilla war that lasted years.

If the .30-40 Krag-Jorgenson was a disappointment in Cuba, the .38 Colt proved to be a disaster in the Philippines. As many Americans learned to their profound but very short-lived dismay, you could shoot a charging Moro tribesman six times in the chest with the Colt .38, but if you weren’t lucky enough to hit his central nervous system, he could still decapitate you with his parang before he died or you finished reloading.

It was as a direct result of these two experiences, then, both related to America’s involvement in the Spanish-American War—the inadequacy of the Krag in Cuba and the failure of the Colt in the Philippines—and a third experience, that of the discovered folly of equipping the Army and Navy with completely incompatible rifles when soldiers and Marines might end up fighting side-by-side—that the War Department launched two crash development programs. The first was to find a rifle and cartridge that equaled the Mauser and met the needs of both the Army and the Marines, and the result was the legendary M1903 Springfield, with its entirely new .30-03 cartridge—which had some teething problems, and was quickly superseded by the .30-06. The second was to find a pistol and cartridge that would stop a charging Moro in his tracks, and the result of that was the equally legendary Colt 1911, and the all-new .45 ACP cartridge.

And to imagine a 20th Century without either .30-06 rifles or Colt .45 automatics...

Well, now you know why my alternate history prognostication process seized up shortly after 1900.

~brb

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Talking Shop

Status Update: Some Lessons from the Slush Pile

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In the slightly more than three months since we reopened to unsolicited submissions, we’ve received nearly 600 stories. We do log and track every submission received, and we do generate stats and look for trends. Our submission guidelines and reviewing processes are not everlasting and unchanging: we will be refining them as we move forward.

For an example of a process change, beginning in mid-June, we began sending confirmation-of-submission-received messages to all authors, to reassure them that we had in fact received their story and logged it into our tracking system. The confirmation message now includes the tracking number, which makes it much easier for us to respond to author’s queries. Going forward, you should receive a confirmation-of-receipt message within 72 hours of submitting your story, and we’ll be working to shorten that response time. 

For an example of a guidelines change, let’s talk about zombie stories. We aren’t quite ready to declare that we won’t consider them at all, but we are getting very close to shooting them on sight. Please, read Stupefying Stories #20, or at least SHOWCASE. If you don’t have a story better than “Zombie Like Me” by Clancy Weeks or “Lucky” by Russell C. Connor, we’re probably not the market for it.

That’s “better than,” not “almost as good as.” We see a lot of stories that might best be described as prose karaoke—but that’s a topic for another column.

The slush pile did get a bit backed up while we were in Iceland, but I’ve waded in with my metaphorical plunger and gotten things flowing again. The slush must flow. As of this morning we have 48 stories tagged as to be rejected, but for one reason or another the rejections haven’t been sent yet. (Most often it’s because the story has been tagged as needing a personal rejection, because either I or one of the first or second readers has something substantial to communicate to the author. {And no, K., I am not going to ask that author whether she was on drugs or off her meds when she wrote that story.})

We have 44 more stories on hold, which most often means they’re off with a second reader. One of the little behind-the-scenes changes we’ve made recently has been to expand our cadre of second readers. The first readers have the easy job: they just have to separate the wheat from the chaff. The second readers have to grade the wheat and make recommendations, and that job is considerably harder.

My job, of course, is to make the final cuts. Choosing to buy Brilliant Story “A” and reject Brilliant Story “B” is not fun. I have a whole new level of respect for George Scithers and Charles C. Ryan now.

Right now we have 16 stories tagged to be accepted, but that part of the process has been taking a back seat to getting the slush flowing and the book production process rolling again. As of 0700 this morning we had 20 stories out with the first readers, although that’s probably up to 25 by now.

It’s been a messy past three-plus months, but the business is making forward progress again.

Upward and onward,
Bruce Bethke

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The Slush Pile Survival Guide

"The Talk" (Part Three)

by Bruce Bethke

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Previously, in "The Slush Pile Survival Guide:" Part One | Part Two. 
And now the horrible, terrible, no good, very bad conclusion...

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This is the part of The Talk where English teachers and Creative Writing professors wince, aspiring writers plug their ears and sing, "La la la, I can't hear you," and even successful authors with long lists of publication credits sob and cry out, "Please, God, say it ain't so!" The essential dichotomy we're dealing with here is:

• Writing fiction is a craft, which frequently aspires to be an art.
  
• But publishing fiction is a business.
   

And what, pray tell, is exactly the sort of business that publishing fiction is?

Entertainment.

This is where most discussions of the craft of writing run off the rails. We writers love to talk about all the fiddly little bits that make up the things we do. We can spend hours debating things like symbolism, metaphor, deconstructionism, narrative voice, character development, the three-act structure, and the proper use of the Oxford comma. 

Admittedly, there is value to be gained from having these sorts of discussions. The conventions of manuscript formatting are important to the aspiring writer, not in and of themselves, but because nothing screams "I'm an amateur!" at an editor as loudly as a page filled with single-spaced block paragraphs. Grammar is important, not because Miss Thistlebottom has her hobgoblins and they must be obeyed, but because it's the protocol that makes coherent interpersonal communication possible, and without coherence you have word salad. Words are the tools of our trade and it's important to know what they mean and how to use them correctly, not because we revere Webster's Dictionary like a bible, but because you don't want editors to laugh as loudly when they read your story as we did when we read the one that began with a description of the terror and loathing the lead character felt when he saw a man "wearing the cossack of Christ."

But all this is inside baseball. I have resisted coming to this conclusion for a long time -- resisted it quite vigorously, in fact -- but the evidence I've seen in two years of reading slush pile submissions is incontrovertible. To become a successful, commercially published, fiction author, you do not need to be a great writer.

You need to be a great story-teller.

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Are these really two distinctly different craft skills? The evidence of the slush pile says so. Every day I see and reject submissions that are simply overflowing with brilliant, genuinely beautiful writing, submitted by people who seemingly have no clue as to what a story is or how to tell it. Conversely, every once in a while I'll accept a submission that, if judged purely as a piece writing, has very serious flaws -- but Holy Cow, is there the story there!

You want to know something? That's (sort of) okay. Sloppy grammar, inconsistent voice, mangled syntax, and bungled tense are all mechanical problems. We can fix those in the edit cycle. We have the knowledge, we have the technology, and from time to time we have the time.

But no amount of editorial bondo can fill the void left by the complete absence of a story.

"Okay," some smartass in the back of the room always says at about this time. "Purely for my own reference, in your mind, what exactly is a story?"

That's easy. Any creative writing textbook -- say, How to Write Short Stories, by Sharon Sorenson -- will give you the stock answer:

"A short story is a narrative. It tells about imaginary events that happen to imaginary people, and the events lead to a crisis. [...] In the most simplified description, a short story has a beginning, middle, and end. The characters meet and somehow resolve a conflict, thereby permitting the author to convey a message, otherwise called a theme."

That's not enough, though. Remember, for the business of commercial publishing, we don't need stories that are merely very well-written; we need stories that are entertaining.

And this is where I begin to venture onto unstable ground, because this is a relatively recent epiphany for me. I never gave it much serious consideration when I was a working writer. I just did it, and most of the time it seemed to work. Thinking very seriously now about the distinction between the two...

The more I consider it, the clearer it seems to me that writers who consistently produce entertaining fiction are engaging in a form of temporally abstracted performance art, not unlike a musician laying down tracks in a recording studio. Knowingly or not, they are telling a story to their audience, but delivering it in a media format that can be enjoyed later, at the individual audience member's convenience.

Entertainment comes in many flavors. If you've ever watched a master story-teller at work -- Jane Yolen, for example (and if you ever get the chance to listen to her tell stories, by all means, do so) -- you'll be astonished by how interactive the process becomes. A great story-teller doesn't just plod through the words: she can make the audience laugh at the jokes, chuckle and smile at the wit, gasp with surprise at the horror, or shudder with chills at the terror. A great story-teller can make his or her audience cheer when the heroine tries and wins; choke-up when she tries and loses; sigh when someone falls in love; and snarl when that love is betrayed.

In short, a good story-teller elicits an emotional response from his or her audience.

A great story-teller can elicit that response without even being in the same room. Some can even do it at a distance of centuries. 

To revise and expand upon Ms Sorenson's rather antiseptic and clinical description, then:

"A story is a narrative that tells about events that happen to people (or equivalents thereof). A short story has a beginning that engages the reader's interest, a middle that rewards that initial interest by pulling the reader deeper into the story and engaging him or her on some kind of emotional level, and an ending that leaves the reader feeling, 'Wow! Thank you for telling me that story! Please tell me another!'" 

Note that a great story does not leave the reader feeling something like, 'Wow! That was really awesome, the way you used that McDonald's Shamrock Shake on page 4 as a metaphor for rebirth!" That sort of reaction only comes from other aspiring writers.

And herein we see the problem inherent in trying to become a good story-teller by exposing your stories to your writing group or creative writing class...

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So how does one become a good story-teller? At the moment, I honestly don't know. As I said, this is all a rather recent epiphany for me, and I'm still working out the implications. Was I born with an innate ability to tell stories that other people find entertaining (most of the time), or is this a talent I developed by accident during the decade I spent doing music and theater, before I ever started to get serious about being a writer?

When I have a workable theory, I'll let you know. Until then: keep writing!

Kind regards,
~brb

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