Hello?

My apologies to those who have checked my blog recently and found it un-updated. I have been in the process of actually writing my stories, and I am about done with one. So that is where my time has gone into.

Now, I have to get back to this story, but I do have an interesting post today (like any of my posts aren’t interesting? Tcha.)

These are my 59 random questions about writing:

 

Does a story have to have a beginning? A Middle? An End?

How many characters have to be in a story?

How many viewpoints can you tell a story from?

Is it possible to write a story in the second person?

Is it wrong to get a great idea from one of your favorite stories and write it?

What would it be like to kill the main character of the story?

Does a story have to have a point?

Should you use a semi-colon in a place where you are not sure whether to use a comma or a period or should you re-structure your sentence?

Do stories have to have words?

What are words?

Where is the line between complicated and confusing?

Are they the same thing?

Do you as a writer have to be interested in a story to make your readers interested?

Does a genre specific story have to be mainly about that genre?

Can you write a story in one go?

Is bad technique compensated for by good concept?

Is there a limit to how good you can be at writing?

Is writing more important to the writer or the reader?

What determines how good a story is? Sales? Readers? Critics? Writer’s opinion? All of the above?

Why do fools write?

Can you break the rules of writing?

Are there rules of writing?

Who wrote the rules of writing?

How many people does it take to complete a story?

Is it wrong to base your story on real-life events?

Do you have to read books to write books?

Have you written before this life?

How long can you make a story before your reader quits reading it?

Should a writer’s unfinished work be completed posthumously?

Are you a writer?

Can you write?

Do you write?

Do you have to write in only one genre?

Where do you get your inspiration?

Is the color blue an appropriate writing topic?

Is writing comparable to film making?

Which came first, the writer or the story?

How much story would a blind old tory write about if he had a story?

Is publication the end all of writing?

Is it right for a writer to defend or explain his works to those who write against them?

What would happen if you combined two unrelated story ideas together?

How many great stories were never recognized because no one picked them up?

What rights does an editor have when it comes to editing your story?

Should stories contain subjects that are objectionable if it isn’t central to the plot? As in Sex? Drugs? Racism? Sexism? Other isms?

Should a writer use a pseudonym?

What in god’s name were you thinking when you picked up that pen for the first time?

Does this list have an end?

If you have the answers well that’s too bad for you. If you don’t I hope I’ve made you think.

CME

Note: The answer to the last question is "No." Make up your own questions and post them as comments on this page!

Comments

[Joanna Celeste]

As a published writer, I really appreciate how this blog goes over these questions (some of them) that get posed to us as we journey into the world of "creating vs the critics", and have to work our own way through what should be, and what doesn't have to be.

When I started my formal study of writing, there were so many rules that it made writing no fun whatsoever, and I quit for about two years. Then I got inspired by a friend's artwork, and wrote one of my most successful stories ever, about an ailing girl and her relationship with the flowers in her front yard. It had been published twice (and almost three times, except for a content conflict with the magazine, though the editor loved it) when I happened to show it to another editor at a book fair. This editor snatched the story from me, whipped out a pen, and started "correcting" it.

She basically rewrote my story, including changing the point of view, the tense, the supporting characters (the flowers), and said maybe if I made those corrections, it might be worth submitting for publication, because as it was, it was a hack job.

I very nearly said "Well this hack job has just launched my career, thank you very much". But it didn't seem like it would get me anywhere, so I just nodded, thanked her for her input, and put it away. One tiny correction was valid, the rest I threw out.

I was confident because I had already won with the story, on several counts (besides just getting published). But I wonder what might happen to a writer who is just starting out, and by chance gives their masterpiece over to someone who "edits" it and calls it a hack job.

I personally have a "reader" (much like Steven King, among others) that is the one person I show all new works to, and if she likes it, I show it to others, and if she doesn't, it gets trashed, or reworked until she does like it, because she always manages to know when I was writing purely for my own satisfaction, and when I was actually communicating something [I believe there are two categories of writing, but that is another comment for another day].

(My reader also knows when to help me stop editing my story, because occasionally I would edit a story on and on, until I completely lost what I originally wanted to write about. Anyone else ever have that experience?)

When my reader loves my story, and duplicates what I wanted to say, I feel like I've won with my story. Publishing it, having other people enjoy it, creating the effects with my writing that I set out to create--those are just more and more wins. I think to the degree that a person wins with their writing, they become somewhat invincible, because they are less and less likely to be effected negatively by other people criticizing their work.

Which is not to say that all criticism is bad. It's just got to be done right, and with the right intention.

I've been an editor and a proofreader professionally, and it is kind of a cold-blooded job. You're strictly looking at "does this make sense" and "is this structured per proper grammatical standards, so it makes sense"? On one hand, you're looking at the story with a clear perspective - you don't know anything about the universe besides what is written on the page, whereas the author has a huge wondrous creation in his universe, and occasionally he assumes that the reader will know by telepathy what is going on, like the author omits very important data because it's obvious to him. On the other hand, because you don't have the reality of this universe that the author does, it can be easy to miss the underlying communication the author is going for, and by approaching it solely from a technical point of view, you edit it so much that you lose or injure the author's original communication.

For instance, recently I was asked to edit a story, and I glanced it over and the writer had used about forty ellipses in a five-page story. This was an amateur, and I knew I was going to have a lot of work to do to make the story flow well and make sense. I rejected the story without even reading the first paragraph. Sounds totally cold, but I had a limited amount of time I could spend on editing, and I knew this was approximately a four-hour job (from previous experience editing about 50 stories).

I happened to get the story again, in the proofreading stage, and I figured I might as well edit it, since the story was haunting me, and after all I had been unfair to reject it so quickly. The writer was indeed an amateur, it took four hours to make it easy to understand, and if I hadn't been doing it as a volunteer job, I would have recommended him to a professional editor. But how do you make comments on someone's work? You can't come right out and say "My gosh, man, don't you know anything about grammar?" Because I know as a writer that I had to work a lot to get to where I am, and I'm still learning with each story that gets published and with each editor I work with.

So it's sort of a matter of how advanced are the writers you are editing for, and how much criticism can you levee against them without being a total jerk, and in a way that actually gives them tools to become better writers the second time around.

There are two editors I can recommend as really extraordinary editors: David Bartlett and Rosemary Delderfield. Rosemary is a professional, and if anyone ever needed assistance or guidance on editing, her email is rdeld@hotmail.com.

I think you can write stories perfectly in fifteen minutes, the first time through, and you can have stories that go through several stages of editing to get to the point where it communicates exactly what you want.

But in any case, editors know technical skill, the author has his basic communication, and if done right, I think you can have a team experience that results in a far better story than if you were going at it alone.

Any other editors want to comment? Or people who have had their works edited?

Best,
Joanna Celeste

[Joanna Celeste]

PS: I wanted to clarify that the story I was editing (above) was part of a short story anthology, and we had about 5 different editors working on various stories. So I rejected it, and had it re-assigned to another editor, and then looked at another set of stories for proofreading, and the story happened to be in that section as well.

I would not reject someone's story for publication without at least having the author use a professional editor. But I can understand an editor who has about two thousand stories to go through for an eight-story magazine, and barely glancing at a manuscript before determining it is not worth their time.

But there are good avenues for publication, for writers who are just starting out. It is actually possible to have your first story get published.

On the other hand, you have stories of authors who got so many rejection slips they could literally wallpaper a room with them, and now they're among the most famous in the world. :)
-JC

[Chris Eberhard]

Thanks for the comments Joanna! You've got some awesome points here, thanks for reading and answering the questions.

Hey, share with the readers a way to find that story of yours, the one that launched your career! I've read it and I know they'd want to!