How to Pursue Contest Entries: 10 Guidelines

February 10, 2012

Ron Seybold contest, lit journal, literary, submissions , 1 Comment

Contests are a great way to get your writing finished enough to share with the world. In the early days of my quest to learn fiction, I entered more than a few. I started by entering contests run by well-known literary publications. It might have gotten the writing completed (my short stories), but the fees would be used elsewhere now, after what I’ve learned.

I have 10 guidelines I like to have a contest meet. You can score your contest prospects along these marks. It’s really hard to get a 10. And you will want to submit in a passionate way to overlook the entry fee, the Number 1 guideline below. It’s your tuition, after all — you learn something from everything you do to support your writing. My guidelines:

1. I like an entry fee of under $20. Anything higher feels like fundraising to me.

2. I like a contest that completes and will anoint a winner in less than six months. Three is better. Life is short. Just decide, already.

3. I like a contest where I have a good idea of the number of first-round judges, and who they are. Otherwise, it’s usually grad students who volunteer. Not to be dismissive of less-practiced writers, but I never was crazy about 24-year-olds judging my stories.

4. I like a contest where I don’t have to be someplace to receive the prize. Travel costs money too, and I want to use my money for book research trips.

5. I like a contest with a cash prize, not a book contract. Publication in a lit journal Of Note might be worthwhile, too. If your goal of entering a contest is to get your writing noticed.
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Settings gain extra desire through experience

December 2, 2011

Ron Seybold setting, teleplays-TV Leave a comment

David Milch is one of the great storytellers of our time. His medium is TV. NYPD Blue. Deadwood. And now he tells the story of horse racing, one that he’s lived through as a compulsive creator. It’s his own experience at the track that makes him so careful while creating the new HBO series Luck, airing in January.

In the LA Times, Geoff Boucher interviewed Milch about the excitement of filming a story (with director Michael Mann) about Santa Anita Park. How he’s been there a lot. Milch jokes that “no, it was my cousin. My cousin spent a lot of time there.” But listen to what he says about the settings you write from your own experience.

The setting is exciting, yes, but there’s some nervousness in making it too. You want to get it right. You always feel a particular duty of care to whatever world you’re trying to portray, but then you especially feel it when there is a lived experience against which you’re measuring the activities of the imagination. I think that sense of responsibility is compounded. That’s one of the reasons I was so grateful to Michael, to bring that separate eye. That really enriched the end product.

Just don’t be holding out hope yet for a completion of the superior Deadwood, where HBO got cold feet about the costs of that stellar story and ended its run prematurely. Like leaving out the last four chapters of a novel. At the NY Times, an interview included this grim humor.

“Every man’s entitled to hope,” Mr. Milch said with a laugh. “It looked like we were getting close, about six months ago. It’s a complicated transaction, so we’re moving forward in other areas.”

Like a new deal to film the works of William Faulkner. No kidding. Milch has Iowa Writer’s Workshop chops, after all. They know a little about story there.

Don’t despair: A novel takes awhile

November 3, 2011

Ron Seybold novel, practices, revision Leave a comment

The novel, nearing completion

I’m in the final stretch of my novel Viral Times, doing the Ultimate Edits based on the reading and revision notes that I received from Jill Dearman — last summer. For a very fair fee, she read and marked 350 manuscript pages of the Summer, 2009 version of the novel. (I also got a five-page summary of the weak areas and the strengths of the writing.)

I am just doing the calendar math here, and June of 2009 — when I was pulling together and slashing down 144,000 words to 98,000 — is, yeah, about two and half years ago. There’s reasons as well as excuses about that span of time. A growing writing workshop practice, reading hundreds of pages of Manuscript Group books. It could have gone more quickly.

But I’m using the collective energy of National Novel Writing Month to get the end of this Ultimate Edit. It’ll be ready to read on Dec. 17. Just in time for flu season. Have a look at the work in progress — complete with a log of how the work progressed — at viraltimes.net. Leave me a comment, too.

Fiction opens eyes where journalism cannot

October 31, 2011

Ron Seybold character, hbo, Journalism Leave a comment

David Simon

Utne Reader has named The Wire‘s co-creator David Simon as one of its 25 Visionaries changing our world. In the Reader‘s package on Simon, a former Baltimore Sun crime reporter, you can follow a link to a 2009 interview with him by Bill Moyers. At the NPR website you’ll see Moyers ask Simon if telling a story in fiction, with characters in the HBO series, gets through to help address injustice.

I did a lot of jounalism, a lot I thought was pretty good. As a reporter I was trying to explain how the drug war doesn’t work. I’d write these very careful and well-researched pieces. They would go into the ether and be gone. Whatever editorial writer coming behind me would write “let’s get tough on drugs,” as if I hadn’t said anything. And I would think, “man, it’s just an uphill struggle to do this with facts. When you can tell a story with characters, people jump out of their seats.”

Simon went on to talk about part of that fiction success is the “delivery system of television,” but added that they got to “tell the story we wanted to tell.” When you see the words “Based upon a true story” at the start of any movie or book, that fiction is relying on facts — but they are chosen, because all art is about choices. What’s more they’re wrapped around characters, compelling people who act like the megaphones for the emotions and conflicts around any subject: public education, public safety, and yes, public health, like in Viral Times.

Why You Must Revise, Blast It!

August 24, 2011

Ron Seybold craft, editing, revision Leave a comment

To get published, or to be published.

Even if your goal is to self-publish, revision is a crucial step in writing any book. Writer’s Digest offered me this advice this morning in my in-box:

In her book, Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose says that “…for any writer, the ability to look at a sentence and see what’s superfluous, what can be altered, revised, expanded, or especially cut, is essential. It’s satisfying to see that sentence shrink, snap into place, and ultimately emerge in a more polished form: clean, economical, sharp.”

Despite that the vehicles carrying your writing to the market are changing every minute—whether you’re Tweeting, blogging, submitting to online/print publications, pitching conventional publishers or planning to self-publish—the cream still rises to the top. Your writing has to be edited and rewritten until it shines. The competition has never been tougher, and that’s why it’s important your work is vigorously self-edited and revised before you ever submit to editors or agents. Learning to edit and rewrite your own stuff is more crucial than ever.

And just so you know, you face competition whether you publish yourself, or ink a deal for a publisher to pay for the paper and ink. Even if you have the skills and drive to create and publish a book on your own, making something people want to read — that requires revision.

So get to it. There’s a lot of help out there.

Greatest Hits: using -ing verbs

July 31, 2011

Ron Seybold Grammar and Style, workshop Leave a comment

Back in 2006 I posted a short piece about the difference between -ing verbs and the other forms of the verb. It’s also got nice advice on what Dr. Peter Clark calls “branch to the right.”

So while -ing is a natural part of English, and maybe a significant part of your true voice, it is gentle, not powerful. Clark has another column about some of the best advice he got on writing strong. He calls it, “Branch to the right.” It means get your subject and verb as close to the beginning of the sentence as you can, then follow them with your subordinate clauses. “Even a long, long sentence can be clear and powerful when the subject and verb make meaning early,” he says.

You can read the full post here. It includes a link to Clark’s fine book. I use -ing in our Workshop as an exercise. We’re filling out the September tables now. You can be sign-ing up for a spot even now.

Trimmed-out parts of nonfiction can become singles

July 14, 2011

Ron Seybold agents, amazon, e-books 3 Comments

Much like the music business using 45s of the 1960s and 1970s, today’s publishing is using smaller bits of books to attract sales of the complete work. The e-book option was exercised on a chapter omitted from a book by NPR’s The Math Guy, Keith Devlin. His new book The Man Of Numbers had a chapter dropped onto the cutting room floor that Devlin and his agent Ted Weinstein produced and have published as a single, available across all the ebook reader platforms.

There’s about 70 such Singles in the Amazon Kindle store, many  of them fiction in the form of short stories. Amazon wants an author to have a complete book for sale in order to get a Single into the store. The Singles, of course, have always been digital files; a few years back they were PDFs that you didn’t even need a Kindle to read.

The extra material from Devlin’s book is about Leonardo DaVinci and his 600-year jump on Steve Jobs. More importantly, it’s a way for Devlin’s traditional publisher to let the author test the waters, permitting authors to create these singles. Devlin cut his own deal in publishing to make the Single appear, but he needed permission from Man of Numbers publisher Bloomsbury to do it.

Independent singles in the record business could spark a complete album, and still do. The record label took its standard cut of the sales, though. Book authors who write long — especially the nonfiction writer like the one that I’m editing this week — can generate their own higher-percentage revenues from a single. Bloomsbury figures short works like this single will help sell The Man of Numbers. It also serves as a roadmap for making a good but standalone chapter an earner for an author. More details at the Paid Content website. Weinstein wants everybody to understand he’s not adding “publisher” to his business card, and he’s still an agent. That’s his story today, anyway. Good agents will see these allied deals and partner with their authors.

Synopsis: tough, but essential

July 13, 2011

Ron Seybold agents, synopsis Leave a comment

I call a synopsis of a book essential because this summary is packed with the essence of the story. Whether it’s aimed at non-fiction or a novel, a synopsis is an important tool to use in selling your writing. It also has benefit to you during the writing. Re-creating your synopsis, once every few weeks, lets you restate and polish what your work is designed to accomplish.

Over at the Guide to Literary Agents blog, Chuck Samubchino serves up an example about how to craft a complex synopsis: one with lots of characters. This is the mission for my novel Viral Times, which sports seven main characters. Five are important enough to have their own first person POV during the book. The action happens on three major locales.

Samubchino uses the example of creating a complex synopsis for the movie Traffic. This is a film bristling with characters and varied settings. He uses a good technique, organizing the story by setting. There are three major locales in Traffic, and his synopsis covers each setting with three paragraphs each, such as “In Mexico:” Yes, just nine paragraphs. You have to keep it short, no matter how long the book is on a final draft.

You’re unlikely to get something useful for a synopsis after a first draft. So this task, which is useful if you’re selling your book or publishing it yourself, is also an exercise in rewriting.

That vs. Which

July 1, 2011

Ron Seybold Grammar and Style Leave a comment

The more you write, the more often you’ll run into the fork in the road called that versus which. That is, which do you use and in what instance? A new book in the Workshop’s library is Woe is I, one that bills itself as “the grammarphobe’s guide to English in plain English.” It’s true — and possessives are also a meaty chunk of the book — this book by Patricia T. O’Connor is written in plain English. So that’s why, which you might have guessed from the book’s scope, Woe is I delivers a ruling on That v. Which on page 2.

The sentence above uses which correctly because the clause containing which can be pulled out the sentence — and we still get the point of the sentence. Not all clauses are so conveniently set off by commas, though. The clause that is bereft of commas is the one that needs that. One best way of thinking of this is, “can I get away with which here, or do I take the default of that?” That makes “which” a fast friend of the comma. Meanwhile, “that” is often the best choice in every other circumstance. O’Connor leaves us with a little epigram to sort out the distinction. Commas, which cut out the fat Go with which, never with that

Steadfast vs. Changing Characters

May 18, 2011

Ron Seybold character Leave a comment

Life is change, goes the mantra which the Buddhists use. Many of our characters in our stories experience changes. The pull of transformation is strong, a way to keep readers engaged. As Tom Waits said in his great song, we all want to know How’s It Gonna End? Choosing a steadfast character offers a different kind of ride for the reader. This person is buffeted by events that try to pull him away from his core beliefs.

Your Hollywood antiheroes are classic steadfast people: Cary Grant in His Girl Friday, or Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past. You have a pretty good idea how it’s going to end for a steadfast character: The way they began their life. You take on an extra challenge in putting a steadfast character at the heart of your story. Their code of conduct either has to be absolute, or one worth defending. Empathy provides a smoother path for the latter code; the hero has to be fighting the good fight we can rally around.

A character of evil can be steadfast, too, but you can tax the patience of some readers to stay close to such a character for hundreds of pages. Steadfast characters have a life of their own they must live, and nothing that crosses their path changes their outlook. They can be harder to embrace or root for, though. A changing character is more common, but if your storytelling skills are up to the challenges, steadfast gives you a way to tell your tale against the grain.

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