Wanna Be a Writer? Read Short Stories—And Write Them. At Short Story University.

 

A friend of a friend, an avid reader, now has the time and space to give writing fiction a shot. He’s super smart, and an avid reader. I was asked, how would I recommend he go about it?

Decades spent writing, worrying about writing, workshopping, taking courses, reading craft books, staring into space, submitting, not submitting, writing a ton a day, not writing for 18 years, crying silently in darkened bathrooms, has given me a super valuable perspective on this.

My advice is worth more than you might imagine given my modest professional catalog. Why you ask? Because like you, I am weak-willed and not that special. And yet, look above.

Since 2012 I publish most of what I write in nationally distributed professional magazines. Multiple stories and or novellas a year.

So. Listen to me.

The Truth that Will Set You Free

I’m gonna say stuff that is so simple it’s stupid, and yet, I have to say it, because so many people I know who say they want to write, and publish, don’t do this.

Read short stories.

Sure, you can read short story collections by authors you love. That’s okay. You can read themed anthos, that’s good, too. You can read Year’s best’s–that’s also good. Read the award winners! Why not! Read old award winners? Cool. Read anthologies in adjacent genres to your target genre? Also cool. Read classics, from a century ago? You have my blessing…

Do that and while you do that, or afterwards, get some actual fiction magazines being published RIGHT NOW and read them.

Read these magazines cover to cover. Finish the stories whether they grab you or not. Read the whole damn thing.

Maybe this is obvious, that you would do this, but in my experience, it isn’t. I didn’t, for years. I read year’s bests and single author collections. And so I wrote these stories that didn’t fit into the moment, into the magazines, my dialog with the genre as I had known it growing up. Stories influenced by classic… older, authors. Mostly old white guys. Writing in the old white guy voice to the young white guy in me that loved reading the old white guys.

I wrote. I didn’t sell things. I got sad. I stopped writing.

I never stopped reading. Novels mostly. But no more short stories for a long time.

Then… I started up again, and this time, I walked to the newstand at Copley mall and picked up an issue of Asimovs, one of Analog, and one of F&SF and I went home and I read all three. Then I read Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, online, for free.

Now, I’d read years bests for a decade. Or most of what was in them. And these magazines were the places most of the years best stories had been selected from.

But reading the actual source magazines was a completely different experience. The uncollected, uncurated, unawarded stories were vital for me to figure out how to do this.

Why Does Actually Reading Magazines help you Sell Your Work?

If you do this for six months, read three or four magazines consistently, cover to cover,  your brain will map out the story-space for each publication, AND the superset story-space of them all.

What The Hell is Story-Space?

Story-space is a higher dimensional construct–my own invention— an n-dimensional manifold, a candy colored rainbow lens flare that you can crush down and stuff into a glowing gem on the infinity gauntlet.

Storyspace has a zillion dimensions.

Characters. What kinds of people? Aliens? AIs? Demons? Angels? Robots? Farcical fairy tale creatures?

What historical time periods? Alternate history? What milieus? What kinds of worlds? What kinds of dystopias?

What kind of plots? Puzzles? Character Arcs? Literary epiphanies?

Nitty gritty. How is AI, information technology, space travel, FTL climate change, handled? How do people handle traditional elements… vampires? Clones? Cyborgs?

Brandnames. Song lyrics. How is it done? How are people doing it now?

If you are writing literary fiction… what are the limits of how unlikable the characters can be? (Hint: They can be utterly detestable!) 

Collect literary epiphanies in a used Atloids tin. Detail in dry erase marker on your fridge what makes each story epiph. Or write it down in a pocket sized spiral notebook with one of those orange half pencils they give out on miniature golf courses. If you use a ballpoint pen this won’t work.

For any kind of story, in any genre… how much sex is there, and how is it rendered? What words are used for the naughty bits?

How much violence is staged, and how graphic is it? How much action?  How much dialog? How much introspection? How much narrative info dump?

Ever notice how short stories and novels don’t include car chases?

As you read each story the question isn’t so much did you like it but rather, what in the story do you think was liked? What is expected? What feels fresh? What feels classic and familiar… or timeworn but well crafted and easy to read?

What’s hard to read, challenging… but dense with meaning?

Can you Sum Up Why I should Read Magazines in One Paragraph?

What will happen to you, as it happened to me, is the subconscious machine in your head that makes all your shit up will enter into a dialog with the literature you read, the stuff you’re reading now. That is being written now!

That editors are buying now.

Depending on what kind of person you are, you may end up writing to market, or, you may end up shaking your story fist angrily and farting in its general direction. Fixated on what you want to add to the moment, what you think your genre is missing. Maybe you are an underrepresented voice and you bring that to the field. Maybe you’re not. That’s okay. Both things are okay.

Maybe you’re genre mixing, smashing; maybe you write in your unique voice purely idiosyncratically, because you’re a genius. Well, good for you!

I STILL THINK SHORT STORY UNIVERSITY WILL HELP YOU. AND YES I HAVE GONE INTO ALL CAPS AND I’M SORRY. I’LL STOP NOW.

Whatever happens, you’ll know what you’re up against. And you’ll be informed by the moment.

So. You’re reading. Now what?

The Most Obvious Advice Ever Given that Nobody Listens To

Write.

Write a lot. Write every day. Stop watching TV if you have to. I know that sounds harsh, but everything is on demand now and you can watch it later. Read and write. Eat, do self care, bathe now and then, make a living, don’t neglect your kids or partner, and yeah, maybe you don’t have as much time as you’d like, most people don’t. What time you have, read and write, every day. 

Share what you write with people who also write and talk to them.

Fancy word for that is workshop.

Google how to find them and how to run them. Read my descriptions of workshops on this blog, in the sidebar, it’s a category.  And if you live in a place without workshops, or your schedule doesn’t permit it, join my mailing list if an online video conferencing experience appeals to you.) 

But before you start rewriting stuff, send some of it out raw to the places you want to sell to. Send out enough to know if you’re a genius who doesn’t need workshops, classes, craft books. If everyplace you like rejects what you send? 

Then you need workshops.

Worry about ruining your good name? Use a pen name on these test submissions. Ruining your name isn’t really a thing, but it’s okay if you’re afraid of that. 

Google how to write covers letters. Google how to find markets. I could cut and paste links here, but you know, google this stuff yourself, you might find something I don’t know about. Submission grinder is a great resource.

Read writers guidelines. (Google Magazine Name plus Writers Guidelines or Submissions. This is usually faster than using the site-nav.)

Obey the guidelines with regards to file formats, word counts, multiple submissions, simultaneous submissions. Don’t do anything cute to try to get attention. Don’t send stories in the postal mail in pizza boxes. Or use stripper themed delivery services. Don’t collar editors at conventions and shove smudged manuscripts at them. These things rarely work. 

Submit the stories the way you are supposed to. What’s in your cover letter? Google that. Or skip it. No cover letter for you. See if that works or not. Why am I being so cavalier? Because you are going to write a lot of these things. 

They’re not precious anymore. 

Use a tracking website to track your submissions, Submission grinder is free, or you can pay for Duotrope, or you can do it yourself in a spreadsheet. If you use Submission Grinder, the data is shared and you can see how fast people are selling stories and getting rejected, you can see a sample of that data, and this can be useful.

Or it can be a sick twisted obsession. Good luck with that. 

How Much Must I Write to be in Short Story University?

Finish a short story a week.

Submit a short story a week. It doesn’t have to be a story a week, you can have a pipeline and be working on a few, editing some, starting others, but on average, a story a week flys out of your computer and into the world. 

Very quickly you will have stories at all the places you care about, waiting and some you don’t even read. But you read the guidelines! So you haven’t sent anything absolutely terribly inappropriate; only stuff they won’t buy, which you can find out, for free, by them not buying it. 

Should you read every market you submit to? Yes. Can you submit to them without reading while reading other markets in that genre? Yes. 

How Do I Write So Many Stories?

By letting yourself write bad ones.

Don’t have any ideas? Google ‘writing prompts.’ Use them. 

Or use your bad ideas. I dare you. 

Don’t worry about publishing your stories yourself because they aren’t selling for the first year. Publishing is gonna take a lot of time and effort and short fiction doesn’t sell well anyway, so no. No. Just no. Indypub is not part of Short Story University. You can do Indy in your spare time if you want, but don’t let it decrease your output. Don’t let your publisher hobby make you drop out of Short Story University

How much money will you make the first year? Not enough to matter.

This is your apprenticeship, your college, your training course. If you do this for two years and have a 100 stories you have shopped around at 10 places each? That’s a 1000 submissions dude. (Math!) 

When you have ten stories out? Every day… you’re one day away from, maybe, selling your first story–or your first two, three, or four stories. 

You’re in the game! IN THE GAME I TELL YOU!

If you do this for two years, taking 4 weeks off for good behavior, and have the 100 stories and  the 1000 submission entries and you haven’t sold anything? 

I will buy you a drink, or a meal, or a huge cartoon mallet which I will let you hit me over the head with. It will be padded. I won’t let you kill me. But you’ll want someone to hit. It can be me. 

I won’t get hit, though. You will sell stories. I know you will. There is simply no way you can’t. Because nobody does this for long without some success. Absolutely nobody. 

Success may be getting twenty bucks and getting published on in some webzine, at first. It may be like that for some time. I’m not promising you miracles. I don’t know you. What I do know, from doing this for decades, is that people who read a lot and write a lot sell stuff sooner or later. 

Thats’ it. This has been called “Dare to be Bad,” (Google it) by two writers who have been editors, who rejected all my work in the 90s. They’re great at what they do, both the writing and the editing. (sniff). The writers are KKR and DWS. Again, use the google. If you aren’t committed enough to use the google you can’t be a writer. Seriously

There is nothing in this article that you didn’t know. I have told you nothing. And yet, you read this. Because you want to do this, and you haven’t, you haven’t committed, you haven’t finished watching Game of Thrones, you have a hard job and a time-sucking family and you’re busy and have medical and mental health issues and…

I get it. But you’re reading this inane article still. 

Oh. And after you throw out your TV? Turn off your social media the first year. Turn it back on when you start selling and then, if you keep up the output, roll that conversation into the conversation with the texts themselves you are having.

If you stop reading or writing, stop social media-ing. 

Why the Short Story Obsession? I Write Novels. Or Have Started One…

Oh. Why am I not talking about novels, when most people read novels and most of the money is there and there are actually more professional first novel slots than short story slots?

Because you can’t write novels fast enough to learn how to write, most of the time.

You’ll be trapped in your novel’s voice, its logic. Its craft level. Until you finish it and workshop it and submit it. If you write a lot, if you write 2-6 novels a year, and do what I said, with the short stories? You’ll be fine. Maybe. But you probably won’t, because you don’t have the time. 

How do I know? Twenty years of workshops, conventions, and being an underachiever, that’s how. 

You’ll bog down, unpublished novel person. You’ll pick at it. You’ll wonder if you should start anything new. You won’t. You’ll finish it… sort of. The one person you give to read it won’t get to it for a year and you’ll stop being their friend. I’m not joking. You’ll be super angry. You’ll find some new people to read it and they will tell you things that break your heart.

Hey, you didn’t do this in a week. This took a year. So you’ll have to find other people to look at it. Maybe pay them. Maybe in a class you’ll take next year. So until then, watch a lot of TV and post to facebook every day. And fuck those people who read the thing. Or couldn’t read the thing. Don’t they know how long you worked on it?

You’ll realize, you’re doomed. You can’t do this. You’ll publish the book yourself.

Nobody will buy it.

You’ll find yourself crying quietly in darkened restrooms. 

Don’t do that. Okay, I do know people who skipped shorts and just wrote novels and they were fine. But… look I’m not that special a person. I am not a paragon of willpower. Remember that guy that cut his arm off to escape when he got trapped mountain climbing? I’m not that guy. (I had a character do something like that once… it was awesome. That novella didn’t sell…)

The folks I know who skipped Short Story University? One threw his TV out the window and sold a novel before he came to Clarion. None of his clarion shorts sold. He went on to become a bestselling author. 

Some people just aren’t short story writers. But you know, he wrote six in six weeks. 

The other one I know of wrote five novels in a few years, knew they were bad, sold the sixth, and is a pro now. 

So that is possible, and if you do that? Again, I owe you a drink, a meal, or you can hit me in the head with the cartoon mallet. 

I recommend Short Story University. It can be attended for free, if you want to use libraries and other free services, craft books instead of classes, free internet interactions rather than conventions. You can part time it, an hour or two a day, or go full time it if you are bloated with privilege.

It will be worth it. Two years. It’s an associates degree. 100 stories. 1000 submissions. You want this. You can do this.

Now go and do it.

POST UPDATE!

Since writing this I’ve had a lot of traffic that makes me think there’s a need here, specifically for the Workshop part of my advice above. My course would help transfer workshopping meta-skills to folks who aren’t in major markets, who don’t have local writer communities to draw on. If this interests you, PLEASE JOIN MY MAILING LIST so you get the course announcements in time to take them.