Christopher C. Payne's Blog, page 10
June 8, 2012
90 Minutes to Live – A Dr. Collings Review
June 5, 2012
Interview with Christopher C. Payne, President of JournalStone Publishing
June 2, 2012
JournalStone Publishing Announces Hiring of Renowned Author-Scholar Dr. Michael Collings as Senior Publications Editor
May 28, 2012
Publishers Weekly’s review of Brett J. Talley’s The Void is released
May 25, 2012
Norman L. Rubenstein joins JournalStone as Senior Editor
May 22, 2012
2012 $2,000 contest winners announced!
May 21, 2012
JournalStone Publishing partners with Cycatrix Press on Nam3less Magazine
May 12, 2012
Limbus – A shared world anthology
May 4, 2012
Temporary Post Used For Theme Detection (4cc84a34-9ccc-4b02-96a2-526a90a2c971 – 3bfe001a-32de-4114-a6b4-4005b770f6d7)
April 29, 2012
Writing Tips – Publishing
We return with this last segment to our original question: What might it take, to be publishable? We have offered answers to that question in short posts detailing broad subjects. If you are new to this feature, those subjects can be found at each of their links. Editing, Criticism, Willingness to act on suggestions, Surprises, and Consistency.
We have said the least about the very first element required. It is the most obvious; your dream to be published requires a good story.
To begin any discussion of this, may we dispel a certain rumor—that a good story requires flawless writing? If you hold yourself to that standard, you will never complete a book. Even experts will argue over how many commas to, or not to, use in any given sentence.
Flawless writing does not exist. And, with that bizarre statement from a publishing house, we hope to tell you that powerful writing is better. Emotional writing should be your goal. Beautiful writing is something you can achieve, with your own little laptop, or clunky PC; even with your legal sized yellow pads…nothing in literature is flawless. Neither is any song flawless, nor any painting. There will always be a listener, a viewer, a reader, who will hate the thing.
Nothing pleases everyone. How many times have you heard a performer or music group profess surprise that their big hit was any sort of hit at all? Or complain that the song they loved best could not make the charts? We could name the top ten stories in modern literature and tell you to write just like those. But the flood of hate mail about that list would be extreme. We would be wrong with nine of our ten choices, according to many people.
What then, is a good story? How do you write something truly good?
Foremost, a good story comes directly from your heart. It will mirror what you love, and what you feel. It will also illustrate what you know, and what you believe. How will you know those qualities are making it onto the page as you write? You will laugh with your characters. You will cry with them. You will stop typing, sometimes, and just sit there—feeling. When you are swept away by your own imagination, then you are writing something good, and readers will approve. Readers want to open your story and see where you are taking them. They want to hear the sounds, to smell the smells. Readers want to begin imagining with you, and forget they are holding a book. You can give them that pleasure, with something subtle or something very grand, as long as it is real to you both.
Also, a good book will invite the reader back. A good writer will invite readers back, simply to hear the new words, and explore the new stories they might create. But a really good story will be read again, and again by the same reader. They will return for the emotions you made them feel. They will return for that special phrase, or that breathtaking twist. They will even return to feel the same frights, if you wrote them well.
It is fair to say that a good book should stand alone, but a great story will make its own space. Good characters will become a foundation for almost any scope of story the author cares to tell. Great stories and characters cannot be shaped out of a desire to recreate someone else’s idea. Good stories should be original, and unique to each author. That does not mean that Sci-Fi has no room for any more transporters or holodecks in the next great book. We cannot tell you there are too many Werewolves, or Vampires, or Dragons already written. But readers will notice a copycat writer, who is only filling pages in the easiest way possible. A good story will seem different, even if the themes are old, worn-out favorites. No song should ever been sung a single time, and then never heard again. No great story need be the first ever of its kind in the world.
Sometimes it seems they were. Please name the great whaling books before Melville’s classic. Oh, that is a very short list? Well, then again, no it isn’t a short list at all. There was quite a wealth of literature on sailing, and adventuring, and whaling in the 1850s. Melville only found some spark, some hard to define quality, and still, that classic tale was inspired by a very real event that made the important papers of the time. It wasn’t even a current event; the Essex was a ship sunk by a whale, thirty years before Moby Dick was written. Melville didn’t invent any language tricks; in spite of what you think of his literary style, it was common text for that era. Poor Herman even struggled with scathing reviews, and he considered The Whale to be his personal-best story.
The truth of all that is this: good stories withstand challenges and time. Great stories continue to grow and gain readers, even after wobbly beginnings.
Truly great stories have also been both long ones, and short ones. Many readers can’t tell you the actual length of their favorite book, because they get lost within it, and the numbers mean nothing. So, please don’t write to fit a specific page count. For generations there has been praise of some books which are quite easy to read in just a few afternoons. Honestly, only the author can say how many pages should be in any book. Page count is often a trick of formatting, and of book building. It is also a product of marketing, which comes after writing the thing anyway. Good stories are about the writing, not the math.
And suddenly we’ve come back to what a good story really isn’t. It isn’t flawless, with impeccable grammar, or a squeakingly correct word count. It is not even the perfect subject, which has never, ever, been read before. If you really want to know a secret…they don’t even have to be completely true.
Good stories can be what the author wants them to be. A good story just says, “Come along. This is going to be such fun!” When an author only struggles in a painful effort to write, the story will mirror their tone and distress. Frustrated authors can produce frustrating books. A good story is really—comfortable. Comfortable to write, comfortable to read; comfortable with itself and the challenge that someone might start listing its flaws. Any good story, written poorly, can usually be repaired if both the author and the publisher believe in it.
That sounds like we encourage you to break some how-to rules to get our attention. Well, as long as you are practical about it, yes, we are. Because we want you to write. We don’t want you to struggle with any part of this dream. We certainly don’t want you to give up, because you’ve told yourself that publishers are only interested in perfect writing. Good stories, even with some flaws, can be made better. And, that is our job. It is the role of the publisher to find something good for readers, and then make that story into the best book it can possibly be.
Have you a great story? We hope that you do, and that you share it. Does it thrill you when you read it? If it does, it should thrill us. Does it frighten you? If it does, it will surely frighten us. Are you so pleased with it, that you can’t wait to hear from us? Good! We hope that you feel that way about your work. If you love it, we believe we know some other people who will, too.
