Sue Burke's Blog, page 51

Why writers sometimes fail

I was asked by an unhappy movie producer why a writer could turn in a fine script, but the next one by the same writer would be bad. Here’s my answer:

We writers ask ourselves the same thing. Why is one piece of writing succesful, and the next one isn’t? We worked on it the same way, just as hard, with the same excitement and love, and no one liked it. Why?

Well, among other reasons, unless we’re rewriting the same thing over and over, or following a formula as if creative works were McDonald’s hamburgers, every story is an experiment. Sometimes experiments fail.

"You write a hit the same way you write a flop," said Alan Jay Lerner of the writing team Lerner and Loewe. Lerner won three Oscars, among many other awards, and everyone in the world has heard his hits, which include My Fair Lady, Camelot, and Gigi. He also wrote 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with none other than Leonard Bernstein as a collaborator, and it’s perhaps the worst flop in the history of Broadway.

What went wrong? Nothing. The creative process went as normal. There are no guarantees. Martin Amis called bestsellers a “ridiculous accident”.

This is why writers drink. We can, perhaps, accept the inevitability of random failure, but those around us don’t always understand.

— Sue Burke

How to find me at Wiscon

I’ll be on two panels and one reading this weekend at Wiscon 41, a feminist-focused SF convention:

Saturday, May 27, 1 to 2:15 p.m., Conference 4, Broad Universe Rapid Fire Reading. Eight members (including me) of Broad Universe, an organization for women writers and editors of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, will read brief works. I’ll read an essay about how much money Miguel de Cervantes earned for one of the greatest novels of all time, Don Quixote de la Mancha. You’ll be horrified by how little.

Saturday, May 27, 4 to 5:15 p.m., Conference 5, Women of Atheism. Four of us will speak on not believing in the existence of deities and how that affects our perspectives and lived experiences. Come and talk about what you believe and don’t believe.

Sunday, May 28, 1 to 2:15 p.m., University C, Speculative Fiction in Translation. Rachel S. Cordasco, Arrate Hidalgo, and I will talk about who gets translated, why, and what you might enjoy reading. If you come, you’ll receive a reading list, some M&Ms, and even a free book (supplies are limited).

— Sue Burke

Tor has announced my novel!

I love the cover art. Read all about it here:
http://www.tor.com/2017/05/12/semiosis-sue-burke-cover-reveal/

— Sue Burke

“Amadis of Gaul” is finished!

Back in the Middle Ages, tales about King Arthur reached Europe from Wales, and soon everyone was telling them – and they also told spinoff stories. In Spain, one spinoff dealt with Amadis of Gaul, a knight who lived (supposedly) after “the passion of our lord Jesus Christ” but before King Arthur. In his day, Amadis was the greatest knight in the world.

That story came down to us in the form of a fat novel called Amadis of Gaul. I just finished translating it from medieval Spanish into English as a blog. The final post went up today. You can read it here.

Amadis of Gaul became Europe’s first best-seller and created a genre that persists to this day in such works as Game of Thrones.

I began translating it eight and a half years ago, posting a chapter or partial chapter weekly, and I had fun. The story offers adventure, love, and magic. It’s also very medieval, with a huge cast of characters and intertwining stories. While women had a set place in society, that place might be commanding a realm or dispensing sorcery. There’s humor, but at times laughing at the suffering of others or telling jokes whose punch line we’ve forgotten. And there’s romance and sex. Amadis was born out of formal wedlock, as was his son.

The story teaches a lot about a society long ago and far away, both different and similar to our own in unexpected ways. Knights sometimes felt troubled by the violence of their duties, and the burdens of office weighed heavily on those who directed and defended realms: it has always been known that governing is complicated.

The blog will remain up for all to read and savor. I’m now working on getting the four-book novel out in paper and ebook format.

For years, I’ve spent my Fridays working on Amadis of Gaul as a seemingly never-ending challenge. I’m glad I did, and I hope you enjoy the fruits of my labor.

— Sue Burke

Don’t just say no

I’m a writer, and after you write a story, you send it to publishers. Often they send it back, saying no. Rejection remains one of the most disappointing aspects of writing life, an ongoing source of sadness and even despair.

Rejections and fun clearly don’t mix – except this one time.

I wrote a horror story about vampires and started sending it out. The story made the second cut in an anthology, but not the final one. Oh, well. I sent it out again right away and got a response of “close, very close” from the editor. Not bad!

Then … the very next magazine rejected it with a note saying it was “cruel and evil.” Evil? A vampire horror story? Isn’t that the point? I laughed about it with my writer friends, and for a while I was known as “evil Sue Burke.”

The next magazine rejected it with (this was by snailmail) a preprinted note saying: “We CELEBRATE your achievement!” Although the editors couldn’t take the story, the note said, they wanted me to know how proud they were of me for having written it and taken part in the furtherance of literature. Or something like that. I think they meant it because they dropped a sprinkle of confetti into the envelope – really cool confetti. I used it to decorate my desk lamp.

I kept sending the story out, got rejections both bland and encouraging, and on the 21st try, I found a magazine that loved it and took it. A few years later the story was even reprinted in an anthology. All’s well that ends well.

I learned four things from this adventure:

1. Confetti should accompany all rejections. Or, now that we send most manuscripts out via internet, a picture of a cute kitten. How hard would that be?

2. Rejections are about the story, not about the writer, which is too bad because I really enjoyed being evil.

3. As we all know, rejections are a necessary step toward publication. We can even make a game out of them. I wish I could remember who I learned this from so I could give her credit: Try to see if you can achieve a certain number of rejections in a single day. She suggested five, so I made that my goal. The most I’ve ever gotten is three.

4. I need more rejections if I’m going to win the rejection game, which means I have to get more submissions out there – so if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go write something. As a parting gift, here’s a picture of a cute kitten. Celebrate your next rejection with it. We all deserve a little fun.



Also posted at the Red Sofa Literary blog.

— Sue Burke

Spanish has five genders, almost six

April 23 was El día del idioma, the day to celebrate the Spanish language (because Miguel de Cervantes was interred on that date in 1616). If you forgot to celebrate, here’s another chance.

If you studied Spanish, the first thing you learned is that nouns have gender. “The moon” is la luna (feminine) and “the sun” is el sol (masculine). Some words change their ending to accomodate gender: “the boy” is el niño and “the girl” is la niña. There’s not always a lot of logic behind this – why is “speed” feminine, la rápidez, and “waste” mascuine, el derroche? – so you simply have to memorize the gender.

But wait! There’s (always) more to learn.

Some nouns are epicene. That means they have the same article (el or la) and the same word for both sexes. For example, “the goat” is la cabra. If you want to specify the sex, you say la cabra macho, “the male goat,” or la cabra hembra, “the female goat.” A number of animals are epicene, such as “the squirrel,” la ardilla, and “the vulture,” el buitre. There’s no logic, so rote memorization is your only recourse.

Some nouns are gender common. That means the word stays the same, but the article changes to show if the person being referred to is male or female. Quite a few words fall into this category. “The artist” is la artista or el artista, “the soldier” is la soldado or el soldado, and “the martyr” is la mártir or el mártir. When you memorize the word, you have to memorize how to use it.

A smaller list of words are gender ambiguous. “The sea” can be masculine or feminine, la mar or el mar, as can “the sugar,” la azúcar or el azúcar. If you have any free brain cells left, memorize these details, too.

(Some words change their meaning completely depending on whether they are feminine or masculine. El cometa is “the comet” and la cometa is “the kite.” Memorize these if your brain hasn’t exploded yet.)

Finally, Spanish has no neutral nouns, but it has some neutral pronouns: esto, eso, aquello, ello, lo. But now we’re getting into grammar, and I’m not going there today. Mercifully.

— Sue Burke

LJ 18th anniversary

Ten years is a long time. A lot has changed here and with me, often but not always for the better. But you know that.

Still, we've had fun and learned things along the way. That won't ever change. Thanks for reading -- and for my LiveJournal friends, letting me read you.

-- Sue Burke

How do you translate “you?” It’s hard

When you’re translating, the little words can be big problems, especially “you.” It’s one of the hardest words to translate. In Spanish, the word “you” can be tú, usted, ustedes, vosotros, vosotras, os, ti, vos, se, te, lo, le, la, uno, una, los, las, les. I know how to translate “you” by the context, although at times I need a fair amount of context, and expressing the precise meaning in English can be another challenge.

In under four minutes, this TED video explains why there are so many possibilities. Who knew it was so complicated?

http://ed.ted.com/lessons/one-of-the-most-difficult-words-to-translate-krystian-aparta

— Sue Burke

Dreamwidth – or, the Russians are coming!

I’ve read the new Terms of Service for LiveJournal, and they aren’t encouraging. They will also never affect me directly in all likelihood. Three thousand user accesses in 24 hours, which is what it takes to trip the most odious provisions? I’m not that popular. They also may not apply to someone with a paid account, which I have.

In any case, I doubt the rules will be enforced on anyone in the United States. Russians restricting the free speech of Americans in America? Not a good way to win friends and influence people. (Facebook is still diputed territory, though.)

Still, LiveJournal is now under Russian law, which bans “gay propaganda” and political solicitation, among other things. (Such as depicting Putin as a gay clown.*) Again, this has more to do with Russian politics than anything else. At the same time, American politics don’t fill me with confidence right now, and American-Russian relations could move in any direction without notice due to as little as a witness testifying at a US Congressional committee.

For that reason, I’ve created a Dreamwidth account: https://mount-oregano.dreamwidth.org/ I haven’t done much there yet. It takes time to set up an account, and I have paying work to do and fiction to write. Still, I’ll be cross-posting. I want to be prepared for whatever might happen. I like LiveJournal and don’t want to give it up, so I’ll be here as long as I can.

But we live in troubled times.

— Sue Burke

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How to edit – humbly

Writers often fear being edited – actually, we fear bad editors. Every writer needs an editor. Our work can always be improved by a good editor, but it can also be damaged by a bad editor. What’s the difference between good and bad?

I was once asked my opinion of another editor on a team project who had become enraged by the same repeated error in the text. I said, “He must be inexperienced, because experience teaches humility.” I only need to think about how often and how stupidly I have erred to know how humble I need to be. I learn new things about writing every day. Humility matters, but how can we make humility operational?

One way to understand humility is to understand that writing is a test with many right answers. An editor who wants to make things “sound” right without a thorough, humble justification for those changes may have marked a right answer as wrong – unjustifiably. Probably, that editor wants to make the text’s style sound more like he or she wrote it: some editors unhumbly and perhaps unconsciously impose their own style. But writers have the right to their own style, which is created by seemingly minor word and punctuation choices.

The first thing, I think, is to fix only those things that are objectively wrong. For example, something might be misspelled or incorrect according to an authority like the Chicago Manual of Style, or it might cause problems for reader comprehension.

To identify what’s objectively wrong, an editor needs to know what’s objectively right – and there’s the rub. I can illustrate this on the sentence level. Consider this opening sentence from a newspaper report from a war:

It was a lovely false spring day when we started for the front this morning.

Is “lovely false” too flowery for the news? I have some doubts about that, but I’m going to hold them in abeyance for now. I can always come back.

Then the article describes a war plane overhead, which doesn’t try to kill our reporter. Instead, it flies on.

But, as we watched, came a sudden egg-dropping explosion of bombs, and, ahead, Reus, silhouetted against hills a half mile away, disappeared in a brick-dust-colored cloud of smoke.”

First, isn’t it wrong to begin a sentence with a conjuction? No, it isn’t. In Modern English Usage, H. W. Fowler calls that “rule” a superstition and fetish, and he adds, “to let oneself be so far possessed by blindly accepted conventions as to take a hand in enforcing them on other people is to lose the independence of judgement that would enable one to solve the numerous problems for which there are no rules of thumb.” So in an effort to protect my independent problem-solving judgement, I’ll approve that “but.”

I’m a little unconvinced by “egg-dropping.” I think it sounds better to say, “explosion of bombs like dropped eggs,” but I’m not the writer here and “egg-dropping” is not objectively wrong nor does it confuse the reader, so on that standard I’ll let it pass unchanged.

The comma between “and, ahead” is optional, although the strictest rules do call for it. If this were my own sentence, I’d leave it out due to the proliferation of commas in that sentence. But I’m not the writer, and the writer has the right to opt his own way. No violence has been done here to the English language.

Beyond a doubt, the sentence contains inverted word order and other complexities. If this piece were intended for people whose grasp of English is weak, such as language learners, I might want to untangle those words, but the audience here (via the North American Newspaper Alliance) contains high-level readers. Instead, I’ll admire the way the sentence moves chronologically through a series of events and describes them succinctly.

Soon, our writer reports that the road overflows with refugees.

There was no panic at all, only a steady movement, and many of the people seemed cheerful. But perhaps it was the day. The day was so lovely that it seemed ridiculous that anyone should ever die.

Ah, now I see why it was a lovely false spring day. Irony! It’s so often wasted on editors.

I also see “...the day. The day...” The two sentences could easily be joined, “But perhaps it was the day, which was so lovely...” Still, there’s nothing objectively wrong here. In fact, putting “lovely” in its own sentence serves to emphasize the idea. So, again, I’ll let the writer indulge in a little stylistic flair. It’s his byline, and I know he’s not going to get to review my edits.

Finally, the crowds of refugees and retreating soldiers become so dense that the reporter’s car must turn back.

“People looked up at the sky as they retreated. But they were very weary now. The planes had not yet come, but there was still time for them and they were overdue.”

Omigod, missing punctuation! “... there was still time and they were overdue.” There should be a comma between “time and” to be perfectly correct, shouldn’t there?

Maybe. Punctuation is fairly fixed because it relates to the grammar of a sentence, so it is something easily parsed, and there should be a comma between two independent clauses before the conjunction. Still, that rule operates with leeway. British English tends to eschew commas to an extreme that I think sometimes interferes with understandability, but I’m not British so take that opinion for what it’s worth. Ernest Hemingway often left them out for effect: to show how closely some ideas followed each other. I don’t fully approve, but I see his point.



In fact, this report is by Hemingway, “The Flight of Refugees,” filed on April 3, 1938, from Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. I can see lots of nit-picky ways to alter his words, but he won a Nobel Prize in Literature, and I haven’t. For all I know, the people I edit will someday win a Nobel. Except for a humble, justifiable reason, I ought to let them sound like their Nobel-worthy selves.

Another thing editors should be aware of: “correct” English varies from place to place, so remember your place and your author’s place. A Texan might say, “I’ve not had the pleasure of meeting you” instead of “I haven’t had…” Except for a humble, justifiable reason, don’t mess with Texas. You’ve been warned.

Know where you are in the process. The enraged fellow editor mentioned earlier thought the writer was seeing his corrections and stupidly failing to apply them as she continued her work. In fact, she had turned in the completed piece some time earlier. The editor’s part in the process was to correct errors for publication, not to educate the writer, who had (lucky her) exited the process by then.

And read a lot! Study good writing to understand its breadth and see how much is “correct.” There’s no one right way – in fact, there are an amazing number of right ways, including some I don’t approve of, but it’s my job to know that they’re still correct.

If you want to read more masterful wartime reporting, I recommend this: a dispatch from the World War II D-Day beachhead, “The Horrible Waste of War ,” by Ernie Pyle, who won a Pulitzer for his work. Note how he uses “you” to bring the reader to the beach, but he only needs to use that word a couple of times. I know some editors who would object to “you” in a news report, but Pyle died in combat and there is still time for those editors.

— Sue Burke

Also posted at my professional website, www.sue.burke.name