reblog – Words Deferred

Reblog: Acceptance Rates — Aeryn Rudel

Earlier this week, I mentioned personalized rejections. Lo and behold, Aeryn Rudel, the rejectomancer himself, recently provided a timely post about acceptance rates, personal rejections, and the editorial thresholds authors have to cross to actually sell a story.

Submission tools like Duotrope and Submission Grinder provide some rough statistics for reported acceptance rates, but even these have low sample sizes, and inevitably suffer from some systemic inaccuracies.

However you slice them, the numbers are daunting, with hundreds—or even thousands—of submissions being whittled down to only a handful of acceptances. This is the cruel math of short fiction publication. It’s nice to get some perspective from someone who has been submitting a lot of short fiction for years, and is kind enough to share his experience with the rest of us.

Recently, I was discussing the chances of getting published at some of the big genre markets with my author pals, and a few numbers were thrown around, some by yours truly. These numbers were mostly guess-work. None of us really know the exact percentage chance we’ll make it out of the slush pile and onto the editor’s desk, to say nothing of our chances of actually getting published. Then I remembered a few markets had actually told me how close I’d gotten to publication in their rejections, relating my near miss in terms of percentages.

Check out the rest over at Aeryn Rudel’s Rejectomancy…

Reblog: Finding Confidence — John August

This week’s reblog comes from screenwriter John August, of the popular Script Notes podcast. If you’re a fan of Script Notes, his SubStack Inneresting is really just more of the same in text form. I’d highly recommend it.

As usual, August comes at his topics from a screenwriter’s perspective, but the discussion pertains to any kind of writer. This one is a mailbag post addressing questions of confidence in writing.

First, there’s the question of insecurity vs. arrogance. I think most of us struggle with this in some form or another, even if we don’t have full-on imposter syndrome. When I was young, I read some advice that suggested cultivating both feelings simultaneously: be your own biggest critic, while also remembering all the ways that you’re fantastic. It’s a bit of a mental magic trick, but it’s a good goal to strive for.

Other questions include whether it benefits a writer to be unpopular or self-obsessed, and what to do when you’ve lost your confidence.

Read the rest over at John August’s blog, Inneresting…

Reblog: Just Say No to Artificial Intelligence In Your Creative Pursuits — Chuck Wendig

This week’s reblog is a timely rant by Chuck Wendig in the ongoing argument over AI art. Chuck definitely falls on the anti-AI side, which is where I land these days as well.

If I paid an actual artist actual money to paint me Batman and Mario doing the bat-nasty, the artist would be the one executing. The artist is still the artist. I’m just the guy paying the artist and asking them to give me what I want.

This is a great articulation of an argument against “prompt engineers” being artists. Sure, it’s a lot faster to ask AI to generate 50 slightly different versions of the picture you want, but your input is really no different than if you asked an actual human artist to do it. There is a certain serendipitous process of discovery and choice in the work of creating art.

Commissioning art is not the same as making art, no matter how detailed your prompts are.

Check out the full post on Wendig’s blog, Terrible Minds...

Reblog: This Year in Books (2023) — Nathan Bransford

Today’s reblog is Nathan Bransford’s recap of 2023. Bransford has worn many hats over the years: author, agent and editor, and is uniquely equipped to sort signal from noise in the writing and publishing landscape. This year’s takeaway is that it’s a weird and uncertain time to be an author or work in publishing.

Major acquisitions continue, nobody knows what’s going to happen with AI or the social media landscape, and we have yet to see what the long-term effects of the pandemic will be on the industry as a whole.

Check it out over at Nathan Bransford’s blog…

Reblog: A.I. and the Fetishization Of Ideas — Chuck Wendig

I subscribe to more blogs than I could ever read, and the notifications steadily accumulate in my email inbox. This past weekend, I was making a vain attempt to clear through some of it, and I came across this post from Chuck Wendig.

In his usual rambling blog style, Wendig asserts that the problem with A.I.-generated art—whether that be visual media or text—is the fetishization of ideas and indifference to execution.

But again, the idea is a seed, that’s it. Ideas are certainly useful, but only so far. A good idea will not be saved by poor execution, but a bad idea can be saved by excellent execution. Even simple, pedestrian ideas can be made sublime in the hands of a powerful craftsman or artist. Not every idea needs to be revolutionary. Every idea needn’t be that original — I don’t mean to suggest the plagiarism is the way to go, I only mean in the general sense, it’s very difficult (and potentially impossible) to think of a truly original story idea that hasn’t in some form been told before. The originality in a narrative comes from you, the author, the artist. The originality comes out in the execution.

It is there in the effort.

(And any writer or artist will surely experience the fact that the execution of an idea helps to spawn more new ideas within the seedbed of that singular garden. Put differently, driving across country is so much more than plugging the directions into Google Maps — when the rubber meets road, when you meet obstacles, when there are sights to see, you change the journey and the journey changes you, because choices must be made.)

And herein lies the problem with the sudden surge and interest in artificial intelligence. AI-generated creativity isn’t creativity. It is all hat, no cowboy: all idea, no execution. It in fact relies on the obsession with, and fetishization of, THE IDEA. It’s the core of every get-rich-quick scheme, the basis of every lazy entrepreneur who thinks he has the Next Big Thing, the core of every author or artist or creator who is a “visionary” who has all the vision but none of the ability to execute upon that vision. Hell, it’s the thing every writer has heard from some jabroni who tells you, “I got this great idea, you write it, we’ll split the money 50/50, boom.” It is the belief that The Idea is of equal or greater importance than the effort it takes to make That Idea a reality.

Read the rest over at Terrible Minds…

Reblog: The Grand (Chaotic) Master Plan — Daniel Gomez

This week’s reblog comes from StarNinja (a.k.a. Daniel Gomez), who discusses the problems with villains who craft master plans so perfect and unpredictable that everything the protagonists do plays right into their hands.

So there’s this thing that happened a couple years back where every movie villain had to be a meticulous, devilishly detailed, timed to the very millisecond, chaos magician master planner. If the good guys where competent and intelligent, the villain was even more so, disguising their super duperly complex schemes as “random chaos” that no one can predict because there’s no way to plan for this kind of madness!

What’s hard to portray in fiction is when a villain has to improvise. When something comes up the villain didn’t plan for, either thanks to the hero’s meddling or because of a cool twist thanks to outside actors, as a writer, your options are “villain improvises” or “it was part of the plan the whole time!”. Consider the “getting caught on purpose” trope we see a lot these days. If the heroes capture the villain in the 1st Act, it can’t be because the villain fucked up. No, they wanted to get captured from the start. Because if there’s chaos, it must be planned…?

I really do like the idea of throwing out the “master plan” trope, or at least having the master plan not always work out. It’s common writing advice to mess up your protagonist’s plans and force them to adapt. Why would it be any different with villains? Surely a villain who can adapt and overcome problems is even scarier?

Read the full post over at The Wormhole Less Traveled…

Reblog: Don’t dribble out morsels of information within a scene — Nathan Bransford

Today’s reblog comes from Nathan Bransford, who discusses some of the nitty-gritty details of getting across information when a scene is on the move.

Sometimes it’s hard to know when to reveal different pieces of information. Bransford suggests the simple and expedient route: give the reader the information they need to understand the scene, and give it to them up-front. Don’t make a scene a puzzle to piece together as you read it.

When you’re honing the narrative voice within your novel, you will likely get into all sorts of trouble if you try too hard to faithfully recreate a character’s contemporaneous thoughts. You probably won’t give the reader the context they need and you’ll risk disorienting the reader with inadequate physical description.

Remember, the narrative voice is storytelling to a reader. You are not transcribing the literal thoughts of someone in an alternate world (unless you’re writing something very experimental). It weaves in a character’s contemporaneous thoughts, but you have to make sure the elements the reader needs are present.

One major pitfall of trying too hard to stay true to a character’s thoughts is that some writers will wait for a “pause” in the action before they show the character observing their surroundings and concoct triggers for characters to look at things.

Read the rest over at Nathan Bransford’s blog…

Reblog: Want to Build Tension? Encourage the Reader to Ask Questions — Angela Ackerman

Today’s reblog comes from Angela Ackerman, guest-posting on Jane Friedman’s blog. She discusses how to use the push and pull of tension to draw the reader in and keep them wondering what will happen next.

We can make good use of the reader’s need to know by building scenes that cater to it. For example, imagine a jerk character in our story who is dating two women, Alice and Shai. Neither is aware of the other, which is just how Logan wants to keep it. But in an epic goof, he asks them both to meet him for dinner at the same restaurant on the same night.

When the women arrive (at the same time, of course), that’s conflict. When they both cross the room, unaware they’re meeting the same man, that’s tension.

Tension draws readers in by causing them to mentally ask questions:

Will the women find out Logan’s dating them both?

Will he worm his way out of it somehow?

What will the women do?

Will there be a big blowout?

Strong tension follows a pattern of pull-and-release—meaning, you let the tension build until it reaches its peak then resolve it by answering some of those unspoken questions.

Read the rest over at Jane Friedman’s blog…

Reblog: The Mystery Box Is Broken — Justin Kownacki

Today’s reblog is courtesy of Justin Kawnacki, who discusses the “mystery box” style of storytelling, as popularized by J.J. Abrams and the show LOST. This kind of storytelling has driven many of the biggest successes on TV and streaming in the last decade or two.

Still, shows like LOST and Game of Thrones prove that just because you can capture audience attention with this formula, it isn’t necessarily easy to wrap up these shows in a satisfying way, or even in a way that avoids outright enraging your audience.

In the case of Lost, those myseries were compelling questions like: Who are all these people? Where are they? Why are they there? (When are they there?) How did their plane crash? How will they survive? What unseen force is behind all of this? Who can we trust?

In the Abrams formula for storytelling, more mysteries = better stories, because every new answer creates more new questions. This means the audience will keep coming back to scratch their intellectual itch, and spread the word about the mysteries in the process.

To be fair, in the case of Lost and other stories that have used this model — including Game of Thrones, Westworld, and nearly every Christopher Nolan film — he’s mostly right. Audiences do love mysteries, and they enjoy trying to piece hidden clues together in order to see if they can figure out the ending before everyone else does.

But: a mystery is not necessarily a story.

In theory, there’s nothing wrong with using the Mystery Box as a storytelling tool.

The problem is the way it’s been used, and the troubling effect it’s had on audiences.

Let’s take a look at the impact of the Mystery Box on pop culture, and then consider one tweak to the formula that could fix nearly everything that’s wrong with it.

Read the rest over at Justin Kownack i ‘s blog…

Reblog: Why Plots Fail — Tiffany Yates Martin

Today’s reblog comes from Tiffany Yates Martin over at Jane Friedman’s blog. She discusses some reasons why plots can fail, because the important components aren’t working in harmony.

Many authors embark on a new manuscript with one of two common inspirations: a great idea for a plot, or a fascinating character and situation.

Both can be good springboards for story, yet without more development, each may result in stories that peter out, dead end, or get lost in rabbit holes (especially during the breakneck pace of NaNo).

Plots most commonly fail when:

they’re approached as an isolated element of story, a series of interesting events for authors to plug their characters into, or

when interesting characters are randomly loosed into an intriguing situation with no specific destination or purpose.

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