Stories

Dealing with rejection

So I submitted “That Idiot Show” and have already received my first rejection. Just dusted myself off and submitted it again.

All the books on writing tell you this is exactly what you should do. Get rejected, keep submitting, and keep writing stories for submission. It’s great advice, often from writers who’ve received enough rejections themselves to wallpaper every room in their homes, and likely beyond. You’re supposed to get over it.

Of course, when it came to the first piece I submitted for publication, “By the Will of the Gods,” this is not what I did at all. I got rejected four times and basically let it crush me.

I tried working on new stories. I tried revising “By the Will of the Gods” to get it into what I thought might be a publishable state for other markets. But yes, I let those rejections crush me. I let my creative initiative flounder, and if it weren’t for “By the Will of the Gods” getting accepted by Analog, I wonder if I might have actually finished another work of fiction.

It’s really easy to let rejection crush you. It’s absolutely necessary to not let rejection crush you if you want to sell your writing. I think it’s all right to let rejection get you down, but try and be kind to yourself and let yourself know it’s not the end of the world if any one piece doesn’t get sold. Professional writers often have multiple novels sitting in a trunk somewhere they know will likely never see the light of day. Mope, grieve even, and then try and move on.

The challenge of writing science fiction after years of writing science journalism

So I'm finally pursuing my lifelong dream of writing science fiction. I pretty arrogantly and naively thought that given nearly 20 years of experience as a science journalist, writing science fiction might come easily to me. Couldn't have been more wrong.

So how is writing science fiction different from writing science journalism? Well, first and most obviously, in science fiction, you have to make things up. Since I have years and years of experience in a job that emphatically stressed that I not make things up, I do think that was a key mental block for me. I felt like I had to research everything I could to make sure everything except the actual fiction didn't ring false. It still often feels like squeezing blood out of a stone trying to complete a story. (Researching has its place, but writers often fall back on researching when they should instead be writing.)

Imagining a world is fine for me. I suspect that's true for most aspiring sci-fi authors — worldbuilding is the easiest and often the most fun part. But there's so much more to completing a publishable sci-fi story than worldbuilding. I think that's what brings down a lot of would-be sci-fi authors.

I do think my years of journalism experience are finally beginning to help me out. It took relearning some key techniques. To put it in a way that many veteran journalists will understand, a lot of my adjustments to my writing style have to do with craft, not art.

Most of journalism is craft, not art. There is of course art involved in things such as writing beautiful prose, but a lot of what sets expert journalists apart from beginners is knowing how to use the rules to your advantage, and knowing the rules well enough to exploit the loopholes or when to break the rules altogether.

I'm finding that much of writing fiction is craft, not art. I find this reassuring, since it suggests that with enough experience, I can hopefully learn craft that will help free up my art.

x) Questions.

At the heart of journalism are questions. When you get an assignment, you know the story you eventually write has to answer a number of key questions — all the varieties of who, what, where, when, why and how. You go out and try to get those questions answered as best as you can, and to also answer any more questions that pop up during the course of your reporting.

Creative non-fiction isn't all that different from regular journalism. Often you add the number of questions you ask to create an immersive experience — for example, "What was a person thinking or feeling?" or "What kind of sensory and other details can I provide to create a deep portrait of a character, place, time or so forth?"

To write publishable science fiction, I basically have to ask and answer questions I usually don't in journalism. For instance, I'm finding writing dialogue pretty difficult because I almost never put dialogue in news stories, and I wouldn't be allowed to modify or invent dialogue even if a news story did call for or permit dialogue, so that part of my writing brain is under-developed or atrophied. I have to learn how to ask questions such as "How can I make this dialogue not sound stilted?" or "What can I replace that adverb with?"

If you want me to write explanatory text, I can do that all the live-long day, since that's what I do for my job. But fiction usually asks authors to show, not tell, so I have to ask myself different questions in order to write in a way that shows, not tells.

Devising characters is currently turning out easier than I thought, since I did take some courses back in journalism school on immersive journalism. You ask characters all kinds of biographical questions and rely on the most interesting answers. What I currently find challenging is devising ensembles of characters that have interesting interactions. I'm used to acting as a biographer as a journalist, but not arranging them in ways that can drive a story forward, since I can't really do that as a journalist. (At best, I can try and find interesting ensembles of characters as a journalist, but that's not usually the kind of journalism I write.)

x) Structure.

When it comes to writing news, after you've answered as many of your questions as you can, you figure out what information you do and don’t need to present, you structure the order in which these answers appear, and you tailor the words, sentence length and other features of these replies that are most appropriate for your readership.

The veteran journalist will know that learning how to properly structure a story will save them a great deal of effort. Basic structures include the Inverted Pyramid, the Martini Glass, the Kabob typical of Wall Street Journal features, and so on.

With creative non-fiction, writers play around with the structures of stories a little bit more. But when it comes to the wide world of fiction, there are a huge amount of structures available, especially if you consider the kinds of experimental structures often seen in literary fiction.

Obviously I'm familiar as a reader with all kinds of structures in fiction, such as the three-act structure, the hero's journey, and so forth. What's tricky with using any structure in writing is to not seem formulaic. Journalism is much more forgiving in this regard than fiction — no one really cares if you're formulaic in journalism, but it can be a real problem in fiction.

I'm growing to understand some of the structures used in the dialogue of some of my favorite fiction. Aaron Sorkin definitely has some formulas in his dialogue for "The West Wing" that are effective but tiresome after a while. I liked some of the dialogue in Satoshi Kon's "Paprika” and in William Goldman's "The Princess Bride." I'm thinking of really inspecting conversations in classic comedies such as Marx Brothers movies.

The structure I'm finding most comfortable right now is mystery. Maybe that's due to years of reading and watching mysteries — Sherlock Holmes mysteries were probably my first love before science fiction — or maybe it's due to a few years I spent as a crime journalist. The mystery genre has a host of structures with which one can tell intriguing stories, and I'm finding it helpful to use aspects of those structures in stories that one wouldn't at first glance think of as mysteries.

In the latest short story I've written, tentatively titled "That Idiot Show," I use a three-act structure, but I varied it a bit to keep it interesting for myself. The first act introduces the protagonist, the second the deuteragonist, and the third is essentially a dialogue where they have equal footing. The act breaks are basically variations on a theme as well — "Get me out of here," "Get me out of here even if it kills me," and "Should I get her out of here?" A simple structure, but one I think works for this story.

In terms of getting a hang of the basics of structure and other aspects of craft in fiction, the books I've found most helpful are Hallie Ephron and Sara Paretsky's "Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel" and Writer's Digest's "Crafting Novels & Short Stories." They've really helped me look at fiction writing in a no-nonsense kind of way.

x) Drama.

A key problem in switching from the kind of science journalism I'm used to writing to science fiction is drama. Readers of the kind of science journalism I'm used to writing are used to the payoff simply being "That's new!" or "That's weird!" Although science journalism has kept me abreast of a lot of the latest discoveries in science, most of those discoveries do not in and of themselves suggest the kinds of conflict or characters that I would personally want to write about in a sci-fi story. A cool idea is not enough for a story.

Ira Glass has mentioned that the core of many stories on "This American Life" is that someone did something wrong. That's what makes for an interesting story — a character and a conflict — as any playwright or screenwriter will tell you.

Personally, I mostly hate "ripped from the headlines" fiction. When it comes to science fiction, I want to write more fanciful characters and conflicts. As I mentioned before, I'm still struggling with ways to invent good characters and conflict, and to create ensembles of conflicting characters. Hopefully I'll get better over time.

The underlying milieu of "By the Will of the Gods"

There are two classic forms of science-fiction storytelling typified by “Star Trek” and “Sliders.” In one, a crew travels from world to world, encountering and interacting with fascinating alien cultures. In the other, the same holds true, only the cultures are human, not alien, representing alternate histories.

If not handled carefully, a “Star Trek” kind of story can wander into ‘planet of hats’ situations, but when done well, the result can be acclaimed “Star Trek” episodes such as “Darmok.” The real weakness of “Star Trek” storytelling is related to production costs — it makes no sense that all these alien races are basically humans with funny ears, noses or foreheads, close enough to interbreed. At the same time, the fact they do resemble humans is part of the strength of these stories, because these exotic cultures can clearly reflect on the human condition.

In contrast, a weakness of the “Sliders” kind of story is that multiverses are potentially composed of an infinite number of parallel worlds. It’s overwhelming, and if anything can happen, then everything can seem boring. There are, of course, ways that writers have found to deal with this concern, but it remains a challenge.

The milieu of “By the Will of the Gods,” in which I hope to set many more stories, aims to take what’s best about both “Star Trek” and “Sliders” stories. In this milieu, countless worlds across the Milky Way were seeded with humans, and each of these human lineages was made unique in some way. At times these differences are relatively minor, such as having two moons in the sky instead of one; at times they are major, such as everyone being immortal.

As such, you get the potential for stories like “Star Trek,” except it makes sense they are all human. And you can get “Sliders” kinds of stories, without getting swamped by infinite possibilities. Of course, you have to deal with questions such as who scattered all these different human lineages across the galaxy, and why, but that can lead to interesting stories as well.

Inspirations for "By the Will of the Gods"

A friend of mine asked me what my inspirations for my SFF might be. I found that an interesting question to answer, as I feel what I generally like reading in SFF are not necessarily reflective of what I hope to accomplish when it comes to any one of the SFF stories I write, or even of my SFF writing in general.

“By the Will of the Gods” is a sci-fi murder mystery set in a world whose culture was not like any particular culture on Earth, while also reminiscent of several different Earth cultures. As such, although I drew from classic models in the mystery genre such as Chandler novels and Bogart films, I also was strongly influenced by mysteries from writers of Asian descent, such as the Feng Shui Detective series from Nury Vittachi, the Night Market series from Ed Lin, and the Singapore Noir book, edited by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan. When it comes to what specifically influenced the sci-fi in the story, I think Philip K. Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle” and Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix series come to mind and maybe the most recent wave of hard sci-fi space opera writers, such as Aliette de Bodard, Charles Stross and Alastair Reynolds, but also anime such as Cowboy Bebop and Ghost in the Shell, as well as films such as Blade Runner. (The training montage in the novelette was influenced not only by the classic “The 36th Chamber of Shaolin,” but also my own experiences in martial arts.)

The universe in which “By the Will of the Gods” is set has slightly different influences than the story itself. I’m aiming for it to remind readers of Star Trek and Babylon 5, but also to some degree of Jorge Luis Borges, Philip K. Dick, Iain M. Banks, Dan Simmons, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Michael Moorcock, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Jonathan Swift. The models I think of striving toward when it comes to my SFF writing in general will likely be Michael Chabon, Charles Dickens, Jorge Luis Borges, Raymond Chandler and Victor Hugo, with maybe some Neil Gaiman and maybe some Philip K. Dick. (I do have a special place in my heart for French authors such as Hugo, Flaubert and Balzac — it would be nice for me to review their work and see what techniques of theirs I might adopt now.)

That said, each of the SFF stories I have planned are meant to stand alone and have very distinctive voices. My next story, “That Idiot Show,” will be fantasy, and is inspired in large part by Kelly Link.

Giving thanks for "By the Will of the Gods"

There are a bunch of people I'd like to thank for reading my first sci-fi submission, given how clunky it was. Naturally, I'd like to first thank the editor of Analog, Trevor Quachri, for thinking it worthy of acceptance.

A bunch of old friends had some kind and constructive words to say — Constantine Mountrakis, Emma Salo, Joven Carandang, Leah Schnelbach and Ryan Phelan. Christophe Maso of the Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers group welcomed me into his home for hours to talk with me about my work. And while I didn't find the Critters Writers Workshop especially helpful, Rebecca Wilcox there was very nice, which was definitely appreciated given how often my submission got rejected.

Geoff Landis was very supportive and insightful, and it was always good to get approval from a major pro in the field. My old partner in crime, Lou Mazzella, had some great ideas that led to a scene that helped fix some major problems with the structure of the initial draft.

Tara North, no mean writer herself, probably provided the most analysis and most constructive criticism. The story probably owes the most to her, for which I thank her greatly.

And last but not least, I'm always going to thank my first reader, my beloved wife Sarah Fecht.