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The Quill is an occasional blog about creative writing and the process of writing creatively.
By TheSupercargo
As promised in my previous entry, this is a brief analysis of the reviews the extract of Elin’s Story has received on YouWriteOn.com.
 t the time of writing, Elin has received eleven reviews of which I have removed two. We’re allowed to remove one review for every five we receive, which can improve the overall score the extract has and its placing in the charts. (Every time you collect five reviews the software the site uses recommends the review with the lowest rating to remove.)
In fact, I’ve removed one review since publishing the previous blog entry and improved the standing of Elin’s Story in the charts considerably. From 27 she’s now floated up to position 21! (A position she shares, it has to be said, with 19 others.)
Reviewers write a short text – there’s a 100 word minimum, but most people go beyond that – and then rate each text on eight criteria. The result is transformed into stars.
Judging by the breakdown of voting which you can see in the right-hand panel above, the features of this bit of Elin’s Story that my readers like the most are: the characters, my use of language and the dialogue. The aspects that people like the least are the story’s pace and structure.
Looking at the written reviews bolsters this picture. I get considerable praise for my writing generally (use of language), for the dialogue and the characters. One reviewer even makes a point of saying she likes Nell and the friction between Geoffrey and Walter. When a reviewer praises characters by name it must mean the characters have come alive for that person.
The big divide seems to be over the narrative voice and the pace of the story (the two seem to go togther). One reviewer writes approvingly of “the pov which in effect converts a lot of the narration to internal dialogue…” Another writes “Changes in point of view were smoothly managed and gave life to the characters.” And a third “Although the prose is quite heavy, I found the pace and flow of the writing carried me through…” But a number of the reviewers who commented were less enthusiastic: “There are a lot of different points of view, including one in first person, and I felt that also affected the pace of the story.” And “…you had so many switches of scene and points of view that it made the read difficult.”
One reviewer felt the story was over-researched (“swamped by the wealth of research”), another found it “reasonably well written …but …over-detailed…”. On the other hand the two other reviewers who mentioned the research were very positive: “This is a very well-researched piece. I enjoyed the setting very much indeed. I felt I could see and smell London.” And “A very well written piece, obviously well researched.”
Five reviewers gave me detailed punctuation, grammar and vocabulary feedback, and three spotted anachronisms. (Well, two of them are anachronisms, one I’m not sure about.) I also had one very useful specific suggestion about improving the start which I think I will incorporate or at least try out.
I had not expected this exercise to be so motivating, but since deciding to post on the site my productivity and daily engagement with Elin’s Story has increased to the point at which I’m now casting around for another competition to take part in, hoping it will carry me on to complete the novel. I’m looking in particular at the Historical Novel Society International Award. Not so much because I seriously believe I’m in with a chance of winning, but for the two deadlines, 30th September and 30th November, which actually seem achievable.
Watch this space!
Additionally [18th May]
I posted a link to the YouWriteOn extract as well as a different sectionin Elin’s own voice to the Written Word Ning (Fiction Addicts Group) and received some good feed back from there too.
I’ve now responded to Chris Singh, Adele and Arlene individually. Many thanks!
Since writing the above, Elin’s Story on YouWriteOn has received one more review and dropped from 21 to 25 in the charts.
This entry also appears in my blog at the Written Word Ning.
By TheSupercargo
  f you read my previous entry At the Quill, then you’ll know that I submitted the first 7000 words of my novel Elin’s Story to an online competition called The Next Big Author at the end of March.
Well, it’s been a month now and the competition is over (and I didn’t win) so it seems like a good moment to review it and the reception that Elin’s Story received.
I’m going to break this into two parts. In this blog entry I’m going reflect on The Next Big Author Competition itself. In the subsequent entry I’ll take a look at the comments and score that Elin’s Story received.
Okay, The Next Big Author is a competition run in co-operation with an Internet site financed by the British Arts Council called YouWriteOn.com. YouWriteOn.com is an Internet site which allows participating writers to submit up to 7000 words of a novel, or a full short story, and have it peer-reviewed by other participating writers. The whole process is free of charge, and I’m still trying to work out whether the whole thing is entirely charitable, a sink for UK tax money, or whether they actually make money by selling publish-on-demand services.
I’m a little suspicious because there are certain elements of the site and of the competition which don’t feel exactly kosher.
For example, the Next Big Author has its own Internet site, but channels people to YouWriteOn.com in a way that is a little reminiscent of some Internet spam sites. The Next Big Author site, in its rules for the competition, says that entries need to receive “4 reviews and ratings during April 2012 to enter the YouWriteOn.com story charts”. But the rules on the YouWriteOn.com site are quite clear that you need eight reviews and ratings before you can enter the charts.
The system that YouWriteOn.com uses assigns your text randomly to another participant, and randomly assigns another person’s text to you to review and rate. You have four days in which to write and submit your review. Once you’ve done so, your text will be randomly assigned to another participant within 24 hours.
If you read my previous entry you’ll know that within five days of my submitting Elin’s Story I managed to review seven or eight other people’s texts so could expect 7-8 reviews of Elin’s Story in return . I was expecting other people to be as quick off the mark as I was, but that was not my experience. Instead each of the reviews that I received in April took the reviewers three or four days to write. As the system waited 24 hours between receiving a completed review and sending my story out for review again, you understand that I was frustrated to get to the end of the month with only seven reviews.
Elin’s Story never even entered the charts in time for consideration in The Next Big Author Competition.
Possibly I was unlucky. In the last 10 days since the end of April I’ve received four more reviews. The story has entered the charts now (it’s riding at 27 at the moment, tied with 18 others).
So, a bit of a disappointment. On the other hand, the competition did give me the motivation to put together a longer piece of text and make it public. It also gave me feedback from a variety of readers which I will take a look at in my next blog entry. And, actually, placed 27th (even though tied with 18 other people) isn’t so very bad.
I’ve decided to leave the extract from Elin’s Story up on the site at least until the end of this month and see if new reviews and ratings might lift it a little higher.
Interested in the winners of The Next Big Author Competition? Go here!
Interested to read the extract from Elin’s Story on the YourWriteOn site? Go here and click on “I want to read sample chapters from this book”.
This entry is also posted at my blog on The Written Word Ning.
By TheSupercargo
 urther to my previous entry: it’s been 5 days since I last received a review, so whoever was assigned my text to read on 4th April is cutting it a bit fine to complete their review within the four day limit. I’m impatient to see my reviews and score and as I can’t see the score till I’ve received 4 reviews, I’m not looking at what the reviewers have written yet either. (This isn’t me practicing self-discipline – more self-preservation. I want to have a few different opinions so I don’t let myself get hung up on one. As I am very likely to do.)
In my last, I wound up suggesting that friends and readers who are not registered at YouWriteOn might register and write me a voluntary review – but I now realise that won’t help my chances in the competition as voluntary reviews and scores are not counted into the score. Fair enough – that would make it too easy to cheat by campaigning for votes (or encouraging people to give negative scored or reviews to others).
So, if you’ve read the extract, don’t write me a review on YouWriteOn, but if you feel like it, please DO send me a review. (If you don’t have an e-mail address for me, use this site’s Contact form – follow the CONTACT link at the top of the page.)
And the link to Elin’s Story on YouWriteOn is http://youwriteon.com/books/bookdetail.aspx?bookguid=62edaee3-9612-4db7-817a-cc20d4378bc4
Even if not registered with the site, you should be able to click on “I want to read sample chapters from this book” and do just that.
OK, just wanted to get that of my mind.  Thanks for reading.
By TheSupercargo
 n 26 days of work during March I see from my spreadsheet that I managed to write for an average of nearly 3½ hours each day and averaged about 379 words per hour. That doesn’t look like an awful lot I know, but it was an improvement on both February and January.
The main reason I didn’t work more days in March was a week’s visit to London to celebrate my mother’s 90th birthday on the 15th. I got back home on 22nd and almost immediately started working on the latest rewrite of the first 7000 words of Elin’s Story. On 30th March, I was able to submit it to The Next Big Author, an online writing competition.
The Next Big Author competition is described on its Internet site as the “February 2012 Writing Competition”, the period for submitting entries was 17th – 31st March, and the result will depend on the score each text has attracted by the end of April.
If I’ve understood everything correctly (and I’m only 90% sure that I have) “The Next Big Author” is in part a ploy to promote an Arts Council financed Internet site called YouWriteOn. At least, one has to be a registered user of YouWriteOn to take part in the competition and everyone already registered is automatically entered into the competition. The prize – for the Top Ten most highly rated novel extracts submitted before the end of March – is to have your text read and analysed by a professional publishers’ reader at the Little Brown Company.
What’s involved in this competition? First of all you have to register and submit your story to YouWriteOn. After you’ve posted your text, you have to accept and review a submission by someone else and your text is presented for review to another person who has also registered to take part. For every review of someone else’s text that you write, your text is presented to another person for review. The idea is to collect at least eight reviews from different people. (You need eight reviews before your text is eligible for the YouWriteOn charts.)
Of course I hope to be one of the ten prize-winners at the end of the month, but besides that I’m looking forward to reading the feedback I get from my reviewers, who after all are all people in the same boat as me; writing creatively and hoping to become authors. Up to now I’ve not gone out of my way to solicit reviews, and though the few friends and family who’ve read bits have been encouraging, I’ve not had much feedback from people I don’t know who have no reason to see the best in the text.
’m a bit nervous about the feedback I’ll get, truth to tell. Nervous, but excited too.
As part of any review you write for YouWriteOn, you have to mark each text on eight different things (Plot, Dialogue, Setting, Characterisation, Use of Language, Pace and structure, Narrative voice, Theme) using a five point scale. So the top mark that any reviewer can give to any text is 40 and the bottom mark that any reviewer can give is 8. I’m going to guess that the marks one receives for the eight plus reviews are averaged out, since I see that it’s possible to try to improve your score by removing the marks of one reviewer for every five reviews you receive. In other words it’s not the number of reviews that you receive after eight that matters, but the score that each reviewer gives you and how that affects your average result.
After a time – after you have been reviewed by several different reviewers – you hope that your overall score will begin to reflect an accurate consensus of the quality of your work. You also hope that your score will be sufficient to put you in the Top Ten.
In order to get at least eight reviews I have to review at least eight texts by other people. When you accept a text to review, you have four days in which to review it and you’re promised that if you review within about 36 hours that your own text will have a better chance of being given to someone else to review. I posted my story on Friday, 30 March, and at the time of writing five days later, I’ve reviewed seven. One more to go!
I have absolutely no idea how many people have entered texts for this competition, and because YouWriteOn runs all year, I guess, a couple of the texts I’ve been given to review were posted some time ago. But four of the seven were posted in the last three days of March, so I’m guessing all of them were by people hopeful to be The Next Big Author.
 o what do my competitors look like?
This is going to sound really obnoxiously self-satisfied but of the seven texts I’ve reviewed so far, only one of them is of a similar quality to my own. I don’t think I’m blind to my own limitations as a writer saying this. I really don’t!
One of the reviewed texts was (I promise you!) barely literate. Three others were peppered with spelling and grammar mistakes and misused words (and two of these were written by people with cloth ears for dialogue). One text was written by someone whose language seemed lifted from American TV series for teenagers, full of clichés and stereotypes. One text was well-written but … well … boring.
And one, one was a gem. Really well-written with rounded characters, a fascinating setting and an interesting idea. I’d be happy to share a place in the Top Ten with that one, and not terribly disappointed to be pipped at the post by it. But the shame of being beaten by any of the others!
Elin’s Story has received two reviews so far, but I’m holding myself back from reading them till I have a clutch of five or six.
If you’re interested in reading my current version of Elin’s Story this link should take you to the right page: http://youwriteon.com/books/bookdetail.aspx?bookguid=62edaee3-9612-4db7-817a-cc20d4378bc4 If that doesn’t work – go here http://youwriteon.com/search/ and search for ELIN’S STORY. That should find it.
If you’re not registered with YouWriteOn, then all you can do is read the story, but if you are registered you can see the one page summary too … and write me a review. (Hint  )
Ah, don’t take that hint seriously. See here. [This para added 8th April 2012]
OK, enough. Cheerio for now!
This entry also posted on my blog at the Written Word Ning.
By TheSupercargo
  here is a scene in The Player of Games, a science fiction novel by Iain M Banks, in which the protagonist, Jernau Gurgeh, while swimming backstroke, is dictating into a microphone that is tracking his movement up and down a swimming pool. I have to confess that even I found that unlikely, but what an exciting idea!
My ideal has me leaning back in my armchair, eyes closed, feet up and arms relaxed, speaking my novel into the air while somewhere across the room a computer records my voice and puts my words into accurate text. Alternatively, I see myself walking in the countryside, pausing by inspiring scenery and dictating poetic descriptions that, far away, the computer in my home turns into immortal poems.
Every four or five years over the last fifteen or so I have invested in the latest example of voice recognition software in the hope that now my dream will come true. It hasn’t – yet – but hope springs eternal in the human breast.
I can’t remember who made the first software I tried out, but I know I had a stint with IBM’s, and now I’m working with Dragon NaturallySpeaking from a company called Nuance. This is the first time I’m using a microphone which does not attach me to the computer with a cable – certainly an improvement. But I still have to sit here looking into the screen in order to catch all the errors the software generates.
It’s not terribly conducive to keeping up a creative flow.
The instructions I have tell me that I should speak in full sentences and as naturally as possible and that this will help the software to identify correctly what I’m trying to say. That works part of the time, but much of the time – especially when I’m writing fiction – I dictate as I think: I say something, I change my mind, I repeat, I hesitate, I pause for thought, I go back and change words, phrases, punctuation. And Dragon doesn’t always like me to do this. Just at the moment it seems to be behaving itself remarkably well – yes I’m dictating this and I think Dragon knows I’m talking about it and is on his best behaviour.
But it does have a nasty habit of using completely the wrong pronouns. In the last sentence of the previous paragraph I actually dictated “is on its best behaviour” – and when I dictated that phrase in quotation marks just now, Dragon printed “is on the best behaviour”.
The other frustration is the punctuation. I try to use only commas, dashes and full stops, but even these tend to get in the way of my flow. More irritating though is that Dragon only understands the word “full stop”, it seems, in three times of every five uses. I never know whether it’s going to print a punctuation mark or whether it’s going to write out “well stop”, “stop”, “will stop”. In desperation at one point I taught it a new pronunciation for the punctuation mark in which I sing – that works but it doesn’t really save my sanity.
Supposedly the dictation program programme is supposed to get better at recognising my pronunciation and style as we go along, and I think it does in fact. (Now, I just had to sing a full stop there!) But he it doesn’t seem to be getting better very quickly will stop.
I’ve been using Dragon mostly for translation work over the last few months. I find it easiest to read Swedish and translate in my head sentence by sentence and then dictate. And I also use it for blogs now and then – and I suppose that’s going to become more frequent in the future now I am preparing a second “business” homepage. But though I try weekly to use Dragon for creative writing, I do it because I feel I ought to try rather than because it is a pleasure and a help.
 ooking back over the last month I see that I have managed to exceed my target average of two hours writing a day but my average number of words a day has dropped by about 300 words. I managed a blog entry each week, as resolved, but once again did not manage to write much more than 5000 words for Elin’s Story – though I did manage 150 words more than last month. Once again I started writing a short story but didn’t complete it, though I did manage to submit a short story (“Elephantasy”) of 6300 words – it was one I wrote last year – so I satisfied a part of my commitment to the W1S1 year.
The series of articles that I pitched to an Internet magazine in January has been accepted, and I wrote and submitted another in the series, but I’ve no idea when they’re going to be published so I won’t crow about it and tell you the publisher just yet. I should add that there is a distant and vague promise of some sort of income from these articles, but I’ll believe it when I have the cash in my hand.
As I mentioned above, I’ve started gearing up to publish and administer a new homepage. After three and a half years of trying to write my novel and living off my savings, I’ve come to the sad conclusion that I need to have an income. I am breathing life into my firm, John Nixon English Language Services, marketing myself principally on the Swedish market. Hopefully it will bring in some paid work. I have one customer, so if I can get just one more that will be a 100% improvement. Ah, the joy of statistics!
Deciding what to put on the static pages of my new homepage is fairly straightforward, but I can’t just have static pages. I’ll need a blog and a podcast and probably the occasional video film as well, so I’m planning that at the moment. Language Services implies an interest in language and languages, so I’m anticipating a blog about English and Swedish and the Swedes’ use of English (and perhaps the English’s use of Swedish). Many years ago I started writing a book about Viking Words – the 10% of everyday English words that we have inherited from Old Norse. Now I’m thinking about disinterring that and maybe turning it into material for a podcast. We shall see.
Hopefully, I will find Dragon more useful for writing this material than I have found it for creative writing. Of all the four voice recognition software I’ve tried over the last 15 years, this is by far the best. Despite my complaints above, I do believe it has improved my productivity. It’s also better at spelling English than I am, which is another point in its favour! Though I have to say I am constantly surprised that, though I have it set to British English, it insists on spelling “program” with the American spelling. It is the only word it does this with: colour, organise, centre, analyse, fibre, traveller, manoeuvre, defence, catalogue … but program. Most peculiar.
And as another guide to productivity, let me just say this text of 1200-odd words took me about an hour and ten minutes to write and another 50 minutes or so to correct and post to both blogs where it appears.
This entry also posted on my blog at The Written Word Ning
By TheSupercargo
’ve done quite well in keeping to my writing resolutions this past month, but I haven’t been as successful as I might have been. I didn’t really get started until some days into January and I didn’t start keeping a log until the beginning of the second week. (Yes, I’ve been keeping a log in a spreadsheet!)
My primary resolution was to write for at least two hours every day, and that I seem to have kept. To be sure I missed one or two days, but I seem to have worked for about four hours every day between the 9th and 29th January. My best day was Tuesday the 17th when I wrote for nearly 7 hours. On average I’ve written around 1400 words each day, but I’m counting not just the words I’ve written creatively, but also everything I’ve written as translation work, for my blog, and in letters and tweets. I don’t think this is cheating (he said, crossing his fingers. All my writing is creative of course. )
My writing resolutions also included producing about 10,000 words for Elin’s Story: sadly I only managed half of that. Though my most productive day for creative writing was Tuesday 24th when I wrote nearly 2700 words, of which 2350 for Elin.
I was also supposed to write a complete short story, and to submit a short story to a market somewhere, this in order to live up to my commitment to the W1S1 project. Well, I started writing a short story and I managed to write 900 odd words for it, but I haven’t completed it yet. As for submitting a story, I have one to send but the mental threshold of making it ready and putting it in an addressed envelope turned out to be rather higher than I anticipated. I shall grit my teeth and send it off this month.
I did write a couple of articles (about 1800 words) and submit them together with a pitch to an online magazine. If they’re accepted then I have a market for, say, another 15 articles of about 500 words each submitted over the next five months. I don’t know whether web journalism really counts as story writing though; grey area maybe. About 6000 of the words I wrote were teaching material for Mera Förlag, and so something I will get paid for eventually. It would be nice to be paid for everything I wrote, but I’m grateful to have a small income at least for some of my writing.
I also resolved to try and publish at least one blog entry every week. I’ve managed to keep this resolution though it hasn’t been as easy as I had anticipated. I’m really not terribly satisfied with a couple of the blog entries I published in January. One (Resolutions) is the truncated remnants of a podcast script four times as long that I spent hours writing but eventually had to abandon. It was a disappointment, but I was right to abandon it – I was letting it take up far too much time and it wasn’t going anywhere.
Well, that’s my review of my writing in January. As I say, not as outstanding as I could have wished, but not a complete failure either. I’m hopeful I will be able to do better in February.
This entry also posted on my blog at the Written Word Ning.
By TheSupercargo
 ovember is the cruelest month. Yes I know that TS Eliot thought it was April, but for me it’s November. As the days get shorter and darker and duller, so I begin to feel all my pleasure, all my delight, all my creativity, all of it, spiralling away like water down a plughole.
It’s like this every year and yet, for some strange reason, every year it surprises me.
I’m probably suffering from some obscure form of masochism. Why else, despite my seasonal affective disorder (not to mention my history of melancholia), would I choose to live in a country where every winter is a plunge towards Ragnarok?
Yet I’ve lived in Scandinavia for 29 winters now and every year it’s the same story. If I had the money and the opportunity perhaps I would choose to commute to the southern hemisphere, leaving around about October and returning sometime in March – or better still set up a permanent home somewhere on the equator. But things being as they are, here I am.
So it was really no surprise that despite the enthusiasm I expressed in my previous blog entry under this title – and despite my achievements at the beginning of October – that the latter half of that month saw me sinking into gloom. Although not a registered member of the Write1Submit1 community, during the first two weeks of October I wrote two short stories of about 6000 words each and although I didn’t submit either of them I did go to the trouble of finding possible markets and planning submissions before the darkness descended.
October blended into November and I lost my mirth. I did try rather hard (and with a certain amount of success) not to forego all my custom of exercise, but it went very heavily with my disposition and this goodly frame the Earth came to seem like a sterile promontory; and this brave o’erhanging firmament appeared no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
Hamlet should be played in November.
Of course, my novel took a nosedive as well, deep into the mud, and nothing I could do – and I did try – seem to be able to revive my creativity.
But then came December and with it, Advent, and all the Swedish rituals of candles and lights and Lucia the Light-bearer began to revive my spirits. To help things along, I dug out my old daylight lamp and gave myself a good dose every morning while meditating over my cup of tea. I’ve no idea whether it does any actual good (in terms of raising serotonin levels) but it seems to have a positive psychosomatic effect on me.
Also, early in December I was introduced to a new piece of software (new to me) called Scrivener – intended for the writer having to cope with very long texts. I fell in love with it, bought the full version, installed it on my computer and spent most of the rest of the month transferring Elin’s Story and all my research into the format of a Scrivener project.
The eager beavers who annually produce a 50,000 word novel for NaNoWriMo can laugh, but all I have to show for three and a half years writing on my first novel is about 35,000 words of text. (To be sure, I may have written getting on for 100,000 words of background and back story, but that doesn’t count.) I think we can safely say I will never take part in the National Novel Writing Month as long as the month in question is November.
And so comes Christmas and New Year and a time for resolutions and new beginnings. My New Year resolutions include writing at least 10,000 words of text for Elin’s Story per month, and writing at least one short story and submitting at least one short story in response to the W1S1 monthly challenge.
I also resolve to write at least one of these blog entries each month, to keep anyone who is interested up-to-date with my progress. (And I’ll publish it on TheSupercargo.com as well as on The Written Word Ning.)
If you’re interested, you can read the beginning of Elin’s Story here: The River Rippled – Elin’s Story Begins
By TheSupercargo
 couple of weeks ago a link passed along on Twitter took me to the Write One Sub One site. The W1S1 folk are inspired by Ray Bradbury’s early working method which he called “Persperistance”. This saw him writing a short story each week and immediately submitting it to a publisher. He was a young man at the time and an unpublished author, so it was a kind of training for him in story writing, deadline keeping and marketing. It also had a forward motion about it that carried him over the rejections when they started to come.
On the W1S1 site there’s a video clip from an interview with the elderly Bradbury where he talks about his method. About the rejections, he says that, when you’re writing at the intensity of a short story each week, you don’t really notice them. “You’re momentarily bothered, but you figure they’re all stupid … and your ego keeps you going.”
Can’t say that ever worked for me when I was 17. Every rejection brought me down, but then I wasn’t writing and submitting a story each week. I was doing what, I guess, many people do. I was writing a story (or a poem), submitting it and then waiting in agony for weeks. Finally, as time dulled my expectations, I might start a new piece. Then the rejection would come, and bury me in misery. Neither my ego nor my method of working were strong enough to break me out of that cycle.
It’s not, says Bradbury, that what you’ve written is actually good: “you look back later and you see that the stuff really is dreadful and shouldn’t have been bought by anyone!” But through sheer persistence, perspiration and the act of writing itself, over time he became a better writer and gradually he sold one or two, then ten or more until finally he was selling the majority of the stories he was writing.
The W1S1 people set themselves the task of emulating Bradbury during 2011 and have been writing and submitting either weekly or monthly, and reporting back to the blog, pepping one another and promoting the publishers who have accepted their stories. They are not writing – as far as I can see – specifically to sell (though I’m sure they’re happy if they manage that). What they are doing is submitting to a very wide range of publishers, including internet “flash fiction” publishers, and to competitions, where there is some sort of editorial process.
Added value
n the Internet world, anyone can be a publisher and for almost no cost and very little extra effort you can publish your stories (poems, articles, whatever) on the net whenever you want. (And you’re welcome look on this site under Articulations for some of my stuff. ) Some people will see what you’ve done; some may even read through to the end; very very occaionally you get a comment. But if you submit to an editor, you get very considerable added value.
First, you can be sure someone you don’t know and who doesn’t know you is going to read what you’ve written. Further, the editor is someone who has taken on the task presumably because he or she has an interest in literature, and will read what you’ve written with an impartial, critical eye. You need this because the probability is that a lot of what you write really is dreadful and shouldn’t be bought by anyone!
Bradbury’s perspiration and persistence did not break down the walls of the publishing houses by a process of attrition. Rather, his method was a way for him to develop as a writer. He developed because he wrote and re-wrote. His method also helped him surf over the post-rejection depression and continue to write and develop.
Painful though it is, editorial resistance and rejection is a necessary part of the process by which one becomes better as a writer.
The second value that submitting to a publisher gives is that, when you are accepted, you know you’re likely to reach a wider audience that if you simply published your writings yourself. Sure, you can pull out all the stops and learn to market your homepage, attract visitors, Facebook Likes and Google +1s, but … you wanted to be a writer, didn’t you? Not an Internet marketeer.
The edited sites (and the edited print publishers) are likely to have a greater audience than most of us can aspire to on our homepages because they are edited. Because they publish a selection of the best material that comes their way, they build up an audience of people who don’t want to wade through poor quality, unedited writings scattered all across the Internet in order to find that rare brilliant diamond. It’s easier and more certain to read the material published on an edited site – then perhaps you won’t like everything that’s served up there, but at least there’s a better chance that it’ll be of good quality.
The third major value I see in submitting to publishers is that as your work is published here and there, you build up a portfolio of published writing. Not only do you get better as a writer, but you are in an increasingly better position to approach the next publisher and be taken seriously. The top publishers, the ones who are in a position to pay you for your work, the ones who can commission writing, the people you go to with your 300,000 word novel or the manuscript of your Collected Works, they are even more difficult to reach than the e-zine and small press editors. But they are more likely to be civil if you already have a track record of editorial support.
Persperistance and The Supercargo
 es, I’ve been turning this over in my mind for quite a while. Coming across Bradbury’s interview and the Write 1 Sub 1 site helped to crystallise it. It feels a bit late to join in the W1S1 crowd now – their year-long project has only a couple or three more months left to run. (Of course, if they decide to step on into 2012, then I might sign up.) But there’s nothing to stop me trying some Persperistance on my own.
So, from now for the next 6 months (it feels good to have an end to work towards), I’m going to try to write a short story each week and submit a short story each week. Maybe not the same story. I want to give myself a chance to re-read and rewrite. But that’s the plan.
And to start the ball rolling … between 29th September and 7th October (slightly more than a week, I know) I wrote the first short story I’ve written and completed for a long time. The working title is “Elephantasy” and it’s just about 6000 words long. Though it’s set about 20 years in the near future it’s less science fiction and more literary fiction (which seems to be the current genre name for fiction that doesn’t fall into any obvious genre). I shall put it aside now and let it rest and revisit it in a week or two before submitting it somewhere.
Watch this space!
By TheSupercargo
 Granta’s 113th edition featured “The Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists”, doing for Spanish writers (in translation) what the magazine has previously done for “The Best of Young British Novelists” (numbers 7, 43 & 81) and “The Best of Young American Novelists” (numbers 54 & 97).
As the editors of this edition Aurelio Major and Valerie Miles point out, this is the first time Granta has published a whole edition of non-English writers in translation. Personally, I think it’s to be welcomed on those grounds alone. (Apparently — this was news to me — Granta has been publishing a Spanish language edition for 7 years, though whether Granta en español is a translation from English or an independent Spanish language magazine I don’t know. I really hope it’s the latter.)
So, top marks for this effort!
It also gives me an opportunity to say something about the problems of creating an anthology of this sort. I’ll use Granta 113 as the example, but my comments apply equally to the earlier “Best of Young Novelists” (and similar collections under other mastheads).
How do you anthologise a novelist?
To give a fair picture of a writer’s ability in the form of a novel (which is a long and large piece of writing, with space for character development, extended description, and so much more), really, the only way is to publish a full novel (or perhaps a novella). Magazines just don’t have that space. I suppose they might try a serialisation, but Granta has, I think, only ever tried this on one occasion. (They serialised George Steiner’s The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. in Numbers 2 & 3 in 1980.)
Instead magazines are more likely to publish extracts. But because extracts, naturally, are rarely self-contained, they tend to be jagged, obviously incomplete. It’s difficult to find a decent extract from a novel that fairly presents the author’s competence as a novelist.
 For this reason, the usual practice is to publish short stories. Short stories are rounded, complete and show off a writer’s ability very nicely. The problem with them, though, is that they are not novels. If, like Granta in the “Best of …” series, the magazine promises novelists, then filling its pages with short stories is a bit of a cheat.
So why not call the anthology “The Best of Young Short Story Writers?” Apparently the general public don’t get nearly as enthusiastic over short stories as they do over novels. Short stories are like poems, they have a niche audience who love them, but in the wider world the reading public just won’t buy them like they’ll buy novels. At least, so I’m told.
So, in Granta 113 what we find are examples of writing by 22 novelists, 13 of whom are represented by short stories.
Beyond that, though, you’d expect the contributors all to have published at least one novel, wouldn’t you? I would. True, most of them have (and some have been very prolific), but there are three contributors who don’t seem actually to have completed and published one single novel yet. I’m still trying to work out how they qualify as “novelists”. I’d guess there was a slip in the meaning of the word between English and Spanish if I didn’t know Granta had performed the same sleight of hand with their earlier “Best of …” editions. (For example, Adam Mars-Jones appeared twice in Granta’s Best of British lists –- numbers 7 and 43 -– with a 10 year gap between, before managing to complete his first novel.)
To be fair, the editors are frank about this being a bit of a guess. They write:
In ten years’ time we will see if our choices were correct, how many of the writers in this collection will have lived up to their promise, how many of them will endure.
Looking on the bright side, though, it means the actual proven ability to write a novel is not a prerequisite for a young writer to be taken as a novelist. At least, not by that part of the literary establishment represented by the editors of literary magazines.
Maybe young writers might find that encouraging. (This somewhat older writer does! )
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Links to follow
Granta.com – the page for Granta 113: http://www.granta.com/Magazine/113
By TheSupercargo
In her current blog entry, Swedish writer Inger Edelfeldt writes about the historical novel she once set out to write but abandoned. It was to take place in Milan in the 16th century. With fine self-irony, she describes her research efforts until finally, she gave up …
Jag är inte den sortens författare. Jag är lat eller nåt. Jag orkar inte ta reda på vilket skrå som stod i vilket gathörn år 1519, och vilket slags läder skorna gjordes av.
 “I’m not that sort of writer. I’m lazy or something. I just can’t make the effort to find out which guild was based on which street corner in 1519, or what sort of leather shoes were made of.”
So unable to research the book, she abandoned it. (Even though, she writes, she really liked the first 100 pages she’d managed to write – which were set in the countryside and where she was more able to use her imagination.)
My situation seems in some ways the opposite. As a student of history (and one-time history teacher), I can’t stop myself researching. Whenever I come across a question, I have to go look for a true historical answer. It’s only when I’m satisfied that nobody knows the answer that I can let my imagination off the leash and dream up an answer or explanation.
Of course, writing the novel stop dead while all that’s going on.
I am coming around to the belief that successful historical novelists have a genetically inherited ability to balance fact and fantasy.
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Links
Inger Edelfeldt’s author blog (pÃ¥ svenska) here: http://edelfeldt.blogspot.com/
Inger Edelfeldt’s English Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inger_Edelfeldt
The illustration of Inger Edelfeldt speaking at the 2010 Bokmässan in Göteborg comes from Wikipedia Commons. It’s currently used to illustrate her Swedish Wikipedia entry here: http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inger_Edelfeldt
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