Occasionally I come across a manuscript in which the writer tries to inject excitement where there really isn’t any. That’s considered an amateurish mistake.
Exclamation points are common in tweets and in advertising. In the newspaper business, the slang for the exclamation point is “dog’s prick.” (i.e. they really don’t like exclamation points.)
In books, exclamation points are permitted, of course. However, please don’t overuse them. The more they are used, the less effective they are. Even better? Write around the exclamation point where you can. The reader’s experience will be richer if they get the mood of the scene through context instead of spoon-feeding with them.
I retweet useful publishing links. A lot! Of all the people I promote on Twitter, I retweet Elizabeth Craig’s tweets most. Here’s the latest on finding time to write (posted by Skyraven.) Take a look and you’ll see why I pay so much attention to this blog.
When magazines or editors say they don’t accept simultaneous submissions, I usually ignore them. Fortunately, most don’t ask for that anymore. If someone does ask for it, it can be okay if they get back with a yes or no quickly. Asimov’s Sci-fi asks for an exclusive, but they do get back quickly and I like them, so I’ll gladly honor their request.
However, when a magazine says they don’t accept simultaneous submissions and provide no indication when they plan to get back to you, I ignore that policy. Some magazines and journals can take up to a year (or even more) to get back to you. That’s unacceptable to me. If someone else accepts in the meantime, I’ll be sure to let other publications know right away. Most are okay with that. For instance, I submitted a piece to McSweeney’s and later had to withdraw it because the story was accepted elsewhere. McSweeney’s editors didn’t give me a hard time about that at all. In fact, they congratulated me and sent a nice note.
There is a fantasy magazine (if you’re submitting, you’ll run across it) that requires paper manuscript submissions only. Their policy rationale is that since formatting and submitting hard copy is such a pain in the butt, it decreases their submission rate. I’m sure that’s true. I object to their policy on a few counts, though. It’s not environmentally-friendly. It takes much longer to submit, but if my submission was electronic, they could reject it or accept it much faster as well. They’re inconveniencing me on purpose. Where else would you put up with that in life? They’re cutting down submissions with a guerilla tactic. There are lots of writers and we’re obviously expendable. Okay. I won’t submit at all where I don’t feel valued. Problem solved on both sides, I guess.
There are also lots of magazines to which I can send submissions, so that Luddite magazine might not be the loss they think they are. I’m in business. Electronic submission is efficient. Therefore, I’ll work in this century and they can stick to the last one. The irony is, if this magazine were to accept, they aren’t chiseling the text in stone. They’d immediately be looking for an electronic copy of the manuscript! If they worked like everyone else, they’d already have one. Enough.
The main reason I feel it’s imperative to make multiple submissions is, we, as writers, have already waited for publication long enough. There’s a long lag time because the slush pile for fiction is deep. I sympathize. I’ve worked a slush pile (more on that in another post.) But from the submissions side, the process takes so long that if you submit one piece at a time, your odds of dying before publication are excellent.
Sometimes writers can’t decide from which viewpoint to tell their story. Here’s why your agent or editor rejected your work when, assuming everything else rocked the Casbah, the problem was that the narrative‘s viewpoint failed to engage them.
1. They wished you had gone with the viewpoint you didn’t choose. (They didn’t tell you because that’s not their job unless they’re already working with you.)
2. Your viewpoint choice works, but it’s simply not their cup of pee. It’s subjective. It’s not to their taste. You can’t blame someone for not liking something viscerally (any more than you would blame someone for preferring vanilla to chocolate (even though that choice is inexplicably insane.)
3. Third person is limited omniscience. (No, no one does pure third person omniscient anymore.) First person viewpoint is much more limited in scope. In third person, the author may slide into keeping the reader in the dark. The reader may resent you for it if the execution is flawed.
4. Your first person reads like third person. In other words, third person lends itself to a more dispassionate telling of events. First person viewpoints are parades for character. If the character doesn’t have much character (i.e. unique voice, perspective, expression and sounds like all the other characters) the road to publication ends in a dead-end ditch. If I’m going to be seeing through this person’s eyes for several hundred pages, I want to enjoy the company.
5. The first person’s point of view can be unreliable (not necessarily a con, often a pro) but your protagonist is a static wimp. This is similar to #4, except here I’m talking about action. In first person, it’s easy to fall into the mistake of making your hero (or anti-hero) watch the action. I once critiqued a script that had a lot of action, but the protagonist wasn’t doing any of it. He was always around the action, following it instead of initiating. That won’t fly in the long run.
BONUS:
Do what works for you. Tell the story your way and, keeping these points in mind, you’ll figure out how to proceed. (If you can’t…) An author critiquing at a writers conference once dismissed a manuscript out of hand. His reason? It was written in first person and he didn’t think there was enough of a market for that. There was a guy who had a very limited first person point of view.
You get the letter or the phone call. You’ve won a short story contest!
What happens next?
1. Dance.
2. Call your spouse. “I knew you could!” they say. “This makes all those times I watched the kids while you wrote…almost worth it! Dinner’s on you tonight, Snoogums!” Get your freak on.
3. Call your non-literary friends. “Congratulations!” they say. Then, “I have to get back to work. I don’t hang around a home office, alone all day celebrating like some people I know.”
4. Call your literary friends. “Congratulations!” they say, through gritted teeth. Make encouraging sounds. Assure them they could have won in your place, but it’s a subjective business. (True, though you will never, can never, think of these small triumphs as mere luck. To continue as a writer, you must know you deserve it all. Otherwise you’ll come to your senses and start making money doing something more people value, like grouting.)
5. Call your parents. “Congratulations!” they say. “How much money did you win?” For most contests, when you buy the celebration dinner tonight, there goes at least half. (I won $1,000 for a short story once. I blew that on paying taxes. Whoo-hoo.)
6. Go out for a coffee. This is an obvious ploy to tell strangers. They don’t care. Tip the barista well.
7. Wait for the prize and or publication. The prize may come along quickly assuming it’s a legitimate contest. If publication is part of the prize, it will be a long wait.
8. Discover typos or tiny changes you’d love, nay, need to make to avoid immortalizing the coming ridicule. They won’t make the changes. The release you signed but did not read said so in a sub-paragraph. You’ll try to pester someone about it, but the happy people who called to say you won will now no longer return your calls. (This is also when you figure out you gave away more rights to the story than you would have if you weren’t so giddy when they called. Don’t blame yourself. When they called to inform, you were like the zittiest kid at junior prom asked to dance by the prettiest girl.)
9. Before you can tell them you’re pulling it, you shall receive rejections from other contests and magazines for the same story who apparently thought it sucked. (Don’t let the spark of your enthusiasm get drowned out.)
10. (a) Publication and then anonymity as history moves on.
(b) Publication on the net will result in comments (possibly even an awful blog post railing against you as happened after one of my tiny triumphs) from a bunch of bitter losers who can’t believe their genius went unrecognized. Oh, they’ll be mean. They’ll demand the judges quit and express disgust at your existence, you know-nothing poseur!
BONUS:
11. Reminisce about your past triumph, write something else, put something else in the mail and sublimate your rage with a passive-aggressive blog post.
C h a z z W r i t e s . c o m 
