When I was a kid, I had a couple of recurring dreams. One of them involved surviving (and sometimes not surviving) a full-on zombie apocalypse. The other involved the Giant Dipper, the great old roller coaster at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.

And, yep, for you fans of eighties horror movies, that’s the same roller coaster in The Lost Boys. My dream had nothing to do with teenage vampires, though. In it, some friends and I were making the slow, initial ascent along the steep grade at the beginning of the ride, gearing up for the big plunge which set the coaster into overdrive.

Except that’s not the way it worked in my dream. Halfway up the track the Giant Dipper started to sway. Quicker than you could scream “Earthquake!”, we knew that we were in trouble. Our car stalled out. Old white-washed two-by-fours creaked beneath us like an arthritic skeleton. Nails screamed and boards started splintering. Scrambling, my buddies and I piled onto the track and started pushing the car to the top of the grade, figuring our only chance of survival was getting it over the hump, jumping back in, and riding the roller coaster to safety before the whole thing collapsed like a pile of Pick-Up-Sticks. In my dream we’d put our shoulders to it and muscle that car, and we’d work against gravity, and we’d gain inches and backslide feet and start again. Sometimes we’d make it, and sometimes we wouldn’t. In that way, I guess the odds of surviving crumbling roller coasters and zombie apocalypses are a lot alike.

Anyway, the last few days I’ve been remembering my roller coaster dreams as I work on a novella. At first I thought it would be a short story — hoped so, anyway, because I had already jumped the deadline — but then it turned into something bigger. Which is kind of like setting out to build a carny ride and building a Giant Dipper instead. Still, I kept at it, hammering up two-by-fours, slapping on white paint, doing some John Henry action nailing down steel rails… In other words making progress, but a little bit too slowly to make me happy, and with too much uncertainty to let me rest easy at night.

Oh, I’d done all right up to a point. I’d laid track for half the story. The plot was going fine, and the characters were developing nicely. An aside: I’m one of those guys who figures out how to write a story by doing just that — writing. I don’t necessarily know a lot going in. Usually I start off with the seed of an idea, or maybe an opening image enticing enough to start me looking for the tale that goes along with it. I play with those initial bits of inspiration, and I wait for the creative cylinders to fire in my imagination that’ll give me more.

Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. If things take off, I settle in and keep at it line by line. I tend to write stories in sections that are two to five pages long, and I craft the early ones as if I’m building a foundation, and then a framework. I outline as I go, jotting notes on 3″ x 5″ catalog cards I’ve scavenged from library jobs (yes, I believe in recycling). Most of these notes focus on plot and character. But as I get in further into a piece, I begin to look for something else… something that will stitch together the aforementioned elements and jolt enough lightning into the whole enterprise to make the story’s blood start pumping.

I don’t like to define what that something else is too exactly. Oh, I could try. I could crank out some terms from Lit Theory 101 and toss them your way, but those always seem a little antiseptic to me. Or too specific. Let’s just say what I’m looking for in that something else is the heart of the story. Beating, bloody, and alive. And, hey, I admit that’s a little visceral, but that’s the way I like it (which is probably no surprise considering that so far in this essay my Metaphorical MixMaster has churned up zombie apocalypses, roller coaster calamities, and even John Henry — all I can say is, at least I’m sparing you any boxing metaphors this time out).

Anyway, that something else is what every story really needs. Plot is fine, so is character, but the heart is what the story’s really about. It’s what makes the other elements live and breathe. And while the heart may develop from the plot or the characters, I don’t necessarily hear it pumping until I’m well into a tale. Working that way can be kind of scary, like performing an operation when I can’t even feel the patient’s pulse.

Which means that sooner or later I have to get in there with the literary equivalent of a defibrillator to get things pumping. And that’s why — for me, anyway — writing the first half of a story is usually a lot harder (and slower) than writing the second half. To get back to my dream of the Giant Dipper, it’s like that long and desperate slog pushing the roller coaster car up the grade, muscling it towards that exhilarating race down the other side that ends with this writer’s two favorite words: The End. For me, that slog is the hardest work there is in writing, and the most frustrating. Plus, there’s no way around it. Either I find the story’s heartbeat and muscle my roller coaster car over the hump, or I don’t… in which case the tale hits the dead file, making the sad transition from “work in progress” to “story fragment ready to join yesterday’s coffee grounds in the garbage pail, along with that tuna-fish can the cat licked out.”

That’s the uncertain territory I’ve been charting with this novella for the last week. It stalled out on me, but I kept my shoulder to it and kept pushing. Even in moments when I wasn’t rereading the manuscript, the story didn’t stray far from my thoughts. I spent several days looking for its heart. Rereading what I’d already written. Thinking about the situation I’d set up. Thinking about the characters I’d created, and who they are, and where they’re going, and why. Thinking about sound and fury (because there’s a lot of that in this story), and what it should signify, and what an empty deal the whole tale would amount to if I couldn’t get a clue about that.

And that’s when I started to hear the first murmur of a heartbeat. The story takes place in the old West, and it’s about a group of characters looking for a mythical place that may or may not exist… a cave where dead men hunger for the blood of the living and humans are treated like so much cattle. Fifteen pages in, I had my guys sitting around a campfire out in the desert, listening to the youngest among them tell a story about the place. He’s the only one who claims to have been there, the only one who knows (at this point in the story) whether the cave is real or not. That’s the scene where I hit a wall, and my unlikely band of adventurers sat there for several days waiting for me to push their story forward. The wind whipped around them and the campfire crackled, and I hunted for words right along with the narrator. I thought about those men — the preacher, the bounty killer, the blacksmith, the dynamite man, and the kid with the scorched face who earns his money telling stories in a bar. And it was that last thing that finally struck home. Because each of those characters had his own story, but for a couple of them those stories were a kind of currency. I thought about that currency, and — most importantly — how those two men used it. And pretty soon I began to hear a heartbeat out there in that desert, and that’s when I knew I’d found my tale.

Right now, I’m hearing that heartbeat loud and clear. So let me say adios and get back to work. I’m over the hump. It’s time to pile into my metaphorical MixMaster of a roller coaster alongside John Henry and those post-apocalyptic zombies, and take it for a ride.

Stop thinking you have the rejection letter market cornered. No author—despite popularity—has boasted immunity from these painful notes. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. After all, a rejection letter can serve the author just as much as it serves the publisher or editor. I’m not just talking about handwritten notes or suggestions from the editor; impersonal form responses can also make you a better writer.

I invited a close friend to submit something for one of the anthologies I was working on a few years ago and was excited when her story showed up in my mailbox. She is a fantastic writer, but I found myself unmoved by her tale. So, I had to send her a rejection letter, something I hated doing. She was very cordial, moving on to her next project, which was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award, I might add.

About three months later, the author sent an email, thanking me for the rejection letter, stating that after working on other projects, she’d reread the story and was mortified at what she had submitted. She was grateful that I did not publish the piece in question, as she feared it could have destroyed her budding career. Now this author was not writing from a beginning level, mind you, she admitted working under a number of deadlines and rushed the story in question. Something I wager she’ll never do again.

However, beginning writers will obviously produce vastly inferior works in comparison with those they produce after years of honing the craft. Just as the hideous ashtray a world-renowned sculptor might have produced as a child is far inferior to the works of art he or she now has displayed in prestigious galleries and museums. We mature and develop as we identify our mistakes, making the most of them. That’s why rejection letters, although painful, are very important.

In his book On Writing, Stephen King offers a rare glimpse behind the Wizard of Oz’s curtain, revealing the painful scars of a young man with aspirations of a publishing career:

By the time I was fourteen . . . the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and kept on writing.

In a recent interview, Ray Bradbury spoke about his early struggles for a successful writing career:

It was a long, slow process with a thousand rejections. I’m still getting rejected this late in time. The important thing is to continue writing and continue being in love with books, authors, and libraries.

It’s hard to fathom Ray Bradbury struggling with rejection letters, isn’t it? But, if he’s still receiving these tortuous slips, what makes you and I think we deserve better? And what can we learn from this?

Keep writing. Even if you have wallpapered your writing room with rejection letters, keep writing. That’s certainly good advice, but perseverance will only prolong the agony unless you improve your craft. So, how does one do that? Well, you have to be able to distinguish good writing from the bad.

My wife worked as a bank teller a number of years ago and related the process used for identifying counterfeit currency. “You can’t spot a fake unless you can identify the genuine article,” she’d said. “We study real money, immersing ourselves in it to the point that anything counterfeit sticks out like a sore thumb.”

That’s why we as authors should read as much of the good stuff as possible. If we study the good stories, immersing ourselves in them, we’ll be able to identify the bad aspects of writing and avoid them. And every now and then, we will make a discovery that changes how we think and write forever after.

Some call it intuitive perception, some call it an epiphany, and some call it self-enlightenment. I call it the Aha! Moment.

You know what I’m talking about; it’s that crucial moment where the light bulb comes on over your head, leading to a verbal confirmation such as, “Aha!”

Most of us have experienced many of these moments in our writing, but there is always one or two that stick out as the turning point in our career.

I asked ten writers who are just breaking into the publishing markets what their Aha! Moments were in hopes that we could gain some insight on what made their work move from rejection to acceptance. The responses are as diverse as the writing styles these talented individuals employ. I’m hoping these answers lead you to your own epiphany moments, and to fewer rejection letters.

Nate Kenyon found his Aha! Moment in self-editing:

I’d sent the first few chapters of Bloodstone off to Five Star and I got an email asking to see the rest. I knew from previous editors’ feedback that Bloodstone was too long and had too many characters for a first novel. I’d tried to edit it before, but I’d been unable, or unwilling, to cut it down enough to make it work, and I’d always received the same reasons for rejection.

This time I decided to ruthlessly chop away as if I were editing someone else’s manuscript rather than my own. I even made up a fake author’s name to put on the cover page: Tyson Soule. I worked all night and by the next morning I’d cut over forty thousand words. I sliced whole characters out and streamlined the entire plot. I sent the revised novel in, and had a contract offer a short time later.

I’ve been much better since at taking off my writer’s cap when the first draft is done, and putting on the editor’s cap to make the tough decisions. For his part, Tyson isn’t talking. I just hope he doesn’t take it personally.

Sarah Langan’s Aha! Moment came about five years into attempting to sell a few short fiction pieces and her first novel. She related her work as being a square peg that didn’t fit into the conventional round holes of literary magazines like Glimmer Train, the now defunct Story, and Zoetrope:

I realized that so long as I wrote about ghosts and dead people, no matter how literate, big publishing would not accept me.

In the late 90s, genre was verboten. Single girl, Candace Bushnell crap was all over the bestseller lists, and the literary world was obsessed with loading their first author picks with recipes. Weird but true. So I expanded my search, and for the first time since I was a teen, started reading horror and science fiction.

I subscribed to Cemetery Dance, poured over Datlow’s Fantasy and Science Fiction, and went online, and found the HWA, too. I spent another year or so learning from what I read, and figuring out what my fiction needed to work as genre, then submitted a few stories to Chizine. Trish Macomber, who was the fiction editor there at the time, accepted a story called “Taut Red Ribbon.” It was the first story I’d written without an internal sensor, and on that day, I think I found my true voice. Things got a lot easier after that, not because the doors of publishing opened or anything, but because after that, I always wrote exactly what I wanted, instead of the literary crap that bored me to tears.

John R. Little experienced his Aha! Moment while attending the inaugural Borderlands Bootcamp:

Tom Monteleone was critiquing a story of mine and he said something to the effect that I was great at coming up with wonderful concepts and ideas, but I always forgot to include a story.  Great concepts and interesting characters were fine, but I didn’t take the time to be sure there was a rocketing plot in it. From that point, I always made sure the story was never lost, and my sales started taking off immediately.

Bev Vincent suffered the exact opposite. He didn’t have a plot or story problem, he says his earliest works of fiction were built around plot ideas and populated by characters that served it:

My characters didn’t have much personality, and their motives were never explored or particularly obvious to anyone, including me.

In 2000, I wrote a story about a man suffering from an OCD disorder that made him constantly sure he’d just hit someone with his car. This is a plot idea, but what elevated the story, in my opinion, was that it wasn’t really about his perilous drive to a convenience store on Halloween night, when the streets were alive with potential hit-and-run victims. The story got inside his head and showed readers what it was like to be him. What were his challenges and trials and tribulations? What did he want? In a way, it inverted my approach—the plot became of service to the character, instead of the other way around.

“Harming Obsession” resonated with readers, more than anything else I’d written to that point. I realized that I had to stop treating my characters like pawns on a chessboard. I used to begin new stories as soon as I had an idea. Now I wait until I have an idea and a sense of who the major players are and what motivates them. I described this revelation in an essay, saying: “Story is what characters do when presented with a situation.” It shifted my focus away from events and onto the characters.

Mary SanGiovanni found her Aha! Moment during her studies at Seton Hill University’s Master’s of Popular Fiction program:

I had read a story I wrote for the workshop, which was comprised of romance writers, SF writers, and YA writers. I had anticipated, I admit with some degree of shame, harsh critiques because of the genre writers in the group; I didn’t expect them to understand horror, or what I was going for, or any of the supernatural elements and their place in the story. But when I was done reading a beginning portion of the story, we began to discuss it.

The romance folks gave opinions and insight into the effectiveness of the character’s interpersonal relationships, and the young adult folks offered suggestions on clarity for the supernatural elements. It affected one critiquer enough to make her cry, and she had to leave the room. There was a long, deep silence after that, in which one of the romance writers said (and I’m paraphrasing here), “Well, at least you know you wrote something that touched someone.”

That was the moment, I think, that I realized several things. One, I realized that you can learn about writing in your genre by reading and listening and understanding the strengths of writing outside your genre. A great story is a great story, regardless of genre, and the best work utilizes the skill sets and strengths of many genres.

I also learned that, particularly in horror, which is a genre whose very foundation is pure emotion, gore for gore’s sake, say, or an awesome, scary monster, or cool and creepy vignettes are all meaningless if, as a writer, you don’t reach that core part of a reader where the emotions lay.

What makes horror memorable, marketable, and enjoyable over multiple readings is the reader-to-character recognition of and relation to basic emotions. I have miles to go before succeeding on a level I’d like, but I think that learning those things changed my writing—not just in quality or marketability, but in the overall enjoyment of writing it.

Mark Justice says his Aha! Moment came while voicing an audio version of one of his stories:

I don’t know about other writers, but I have an enormous blind spot when it comes to typos. I would pour over my manuscripts, dutifully fixing all mistakes. Later, when one of my first readers would check the manuscript, another dozen or more typos would rear their ugly heads.

My brain, it seems, sees what it wants to see, glossing over the missing or transposed letters and substituting the right word at the right spot.

It wasn’t until I was invited to produce an audio version of one of my stories for a website that I made a breakthrough. This was a story that had gone through several revisions, one that I had read at least 10 times or more. It was, I thought, as good as I could make it.

And when I read it out loud I was mortified. I found new typos, clumsy phrasing and questionable grammar. I did a rewrite on the spot, ending up with a better story.

Now I read everything out loud before I submit. It’s made a difference in the quality of my work and in the number of acceptances.

The embarrassing part is that a guy who has worked in radio for over 30 years should have figured this out quicker.

Maurice Brauddus had a few Aha! Moments hit him at the same time:

I’ve been blessed to have a good set of mentors at every step of my career. My first one, Wayne Allen Sallee, always believed that when you were ready, a mentor would show up. He was the one who introduced me to the convention scene (literally: he convinced me to attend the World Horror Convention in 2002 and introduced me around). So lesson one came with learning to build the business side of writing by developing contacts and meeting my peers (who would become invaluable over the years).

The second came from a workshop I attended at that same con, taught by Uncle Mort (Mort Castle). I’m a pretty good natural storyteller, but that’s a far cry from (or at least only the first step in) being a good storywriter. So we were doing a writing exercise with him where he had us tell either a funny or sad story from our childhood. I wrote how I always wrote and turned in five pages. He looked it over and said, “You realize your story doesn’t begin until page three.” In one simple sentence, he diagnosed the major stumbling block to my storytelling. I needed to start the story where the story begins.

The next year I won the short story contest at the World Horror Convention.

Nate Southard is another author who found his Aha! Moment while attending the Borderlands Boot Camp:

I learned so much during that weekend, and it really made my writing stronger and cleaner. If I had to pick a bit of advice as the best, I’d say it was the instructors’ suggestion to submit my work to top markets and trickle down, rather than try to work my way up from the bottom. I’ve found that communicating with these markets has done more for my career and recognition level than just about anything else I’ve done, and the feedback I’ve received from the editors of these markets has helped my writing improve by leaps and bounds. In the past few years I’ve seen plenty of talented writers slog through because of some outdated notion of starting at the bottom and clawing your way up. It really doesn’t need to be that way.

Bob Freeman found his Aha! Moment the first time he typed the words The End after completing his novel Shadows Over Somerset:

Here’s how I see it… How many times have we been at a dinner party or the local watering hole and you’re chatting someone up and the question gets asked, “So, what do you do?” Invariably, as soon as you say writer, your conversational foil will respond with, “You know, I’ve always thought about writing a book.” How often do you think biochemists or brain surgeons hear that? The short answer is none, and it’s because most people think writing is easy, until that is, they sit down to actually do the work.

I fell into that category, thinking of myself as a writer long before I had actually paid my dues, staring down the demon that is the blank page, and seeing the battle through to the bitter end. Oh, I’d started dozens upon dozens of novels, none of them getting past the first paragraph or so. Writing is hard work. You spill your guts with every keystroke and the ink as it strikes the paper is drawn from your own sweat and blood. Did I just show my age? I think you catch my meaning just the same.

So, yes, my first and most important battle in my quest toward becoming an author was, in my opinion, the most crucial for each and every one of us who have chosen this path. I sat myself down in a chair and I wrote the damn thing. And you know what, I’ve never looked back. Each successive novel has come easier. Of course new challenges arise, but that’s okay…such is the nature of the beast.

Brian J. Hatcher’s Aha! Moment came while working with a deadline:

Framed and hanging on the wall of my home office, I have a dollar bill commemorating my first professional sale and a letter from Governor Joe Manchin III of West Virginia complimenting me on a story I’d written. Both these mementos on my wall I have because of “The Hungry Earth,” a short story published in the anthology Legends of the Mountain State. This was the story that almost didn’t happen.

Two weeks before the anthology’s deadline, I realized I was in trouble. Editing wasn’t going well; the problems with the story were plentiful and egregious. The characters didn’t ring true, the middle collapsed like a sand castle against the coming tide, and the ending was trite and unrewarding. I came to the painful realization that the story might not be salvageable. I had another story idea, but I wasn’t sure if two weeks would be enough time to get it into shape; but either I had to try or give up entirely.

The next two weeks became my Writer’s Hell. I wrote, edited, wrote more, went back to the first story to see if maybe I could somehow come up with a way to fix it, found it to be as bad as I remembered, then wrote still more. With only one day left before the deadline, I had the new story completed.

However, I wasn’t satisfied with it.

It seemed rushed, and of course it was. I felt I needed more time, but there was none left. I considered sending Michael Knost—the editor of the anthology—an e-mail telling him I wouldn’t be able to send him a story. I wanted to give up, and I almost did. Finally, I decided to send the story and hope for the best. It still took me ten minutes to assemble the courage to click the send button on the e-mail.

Michael accepted the story, and the boost it gave my career and the praise I garnered for it is, as the saying goes, is history.

It would seem the moral of this story is that I published because I finally overcame my insecurity and hypercritical nature. But that isn’t true. If I would have had the confidence and courage, I’d have sent the first story; and instead of framed mementos on a wall, I would have another rejection letter, well earned.

When I began my writing career, I had big dreams of making it. Writing would be easy, publishing even easier, and laurels would be gratuitously heaped upon me. “The Hungry Earth” helped me put away such foolish, meaningless dreams. Writing will never be easy; and for that, I am grateful. Every story I write is harder than the last. Every sentence, every word, takes an ever-growing effort. I struggle, even with these few words I write now. I get frustrated, I even consider quitting, yet I keep writing. I believe this utter inability to be satisfied is the flamma magna, the alchemical flame that transforms art into something greater than the artist. The fire will guide me and help me grow, as long as I don’t let it burn me down. I learn more, I see more, and I want so much more from my work. Let others dream of making it. May I never be fulfilled. May I never look upon my work and say, “I am content.” I would rather go to my page and say, “Let’s see if I can do better.”

Michael West found his Aha! Moment after finding first readers outside the genre:

I had experienced great success in the “for the love” markets—magazines that paid very little or nothing but contributors copies, and I just could not understand why the professional (and even semi-professional) markets kept passing on my work. Then, I made the decision to open up my circle of readers. Up to this point, I’d only shown my work to people who read or watched nothing but horror. These readers were true fans of the genre, and they knew its various conventions. They were forgiving of certain aspects of my plots and characterizations, because this was the way people in a horror story act, and these were things people in horror stories do.

However, when I started to show my fiction to readers who, in some cases, did not even like horror, these “outsiders” did not look the other way on these issues. They helped me make my characters more believable, their motivations much clearer, and they allowed me to finally find my true voice. When I began to write tales about real people, with real problems, who just happened to find themselves in terrifying, unbelievable situations…I began to sell.”

As a maturing writer, you should always be on the lookout for Aha! Moments. They come unexpectedly, and they almost always make such an impact that you’ll see results almost immediately.

So, don’t let the rejection letters discourage you. Keep writing, and pay attention to the things that will improve your craft. Your turning point could be one Aha! Moment away.

***

MICHAEL KNOST is an author, editor, and columnist of horror, dark fiction, and supernatural thrillers. His most recent work is Writers Workshop of Horror, a collection of articles/interviews by/with some of the biggest names writing dark fiction today. Mike has written many books in various genres, edited anthologies such as the Legends of the Mountain State series, Spooky Tales from Mountain State Writers, Appalachian Winter Hauntings (with Mark Justice). He has also served as ghostwriter for several projects, including associations with the Discovery Channel and Lionsgate Media. To the Place I Belong will be published in 2010, a supernatural novel based on a Southern West Virginia coalmine. To find out more, visit www.MichaelKnost.com.

When CD approached me about doing this piece on how-to writing books, I first asked, “Why?” Their response was “Why not? We’ll pay you.” After the quick dismissal of all that philosophical baggage, I then asked, “Are you sure you want someone who doesn’t write fiction?” Again, they soothed me: “That’s exactly what we want, just do a survey, and throw in a bit of opinion, and viola!” So, first understand that fact: I don’t write fiction, I write about fiction, and so read this type of book primarily for biographical info on the writers I enjoy, and then to see what I can learn about writing that might inform my reviews and interviews (ok, and maybe a little to see if I could actually do it some day, a temptation I’ve so far happily resisted—like Helen Holm of The World According to Garp, I seem to be a reader by inclination). That said, here comes the first pronouncement. It is my firmly held belief that:

YOU CAN’T LEARN TO WRITE BY READING A HOW-TO BOOK ON WRITING, YOU CAN ONLY LEARN WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR WRITING.

That’s the skinny, the unvarnished truth. Any published writer worth his or her salt will confirm this: it’s like diet pills, or get-rich-quick schemes, or playing Beethoven to your baby to insure he becomes a genius, and all that other mystical, magical, pseudo-scientific hogwash that we all instinctually long to believe in: nothing comes for free, especially publishable prose. Most agree that becoming a proficient writer comes only through hard work, determination, and, perhaps most important of all, persistence. No magic wands, no magic bullets, just good old, mundane, endurance.

So, how do you become a better writer?

I think, first , that, you need to be a voracious reader, better yet a critical reader, to be a good writer. So, read, read, read, and make it a point to read outside of the genre you wish to work in. Other people have been there before you, and the evidence rests in libraries and bookstores everywhere. Read to learn.

Then, instead of reading so-called how to books about writing, you’re probably better off first investing in a small reference library, which includes, but is not limited to, the following invaluable items:

WEBSTER’S UNABRIDGED DICTIONARY

ROGET’S THESAURUS

THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE by Strunk and White

THE BIBLE

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

THE COLUMBIA HISTORY OF THE WORLD

OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY

THE DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL LITERACY

THE BOOK OF LISTS

THE HERO WITH A 1000 FACES

BULLFINCH’S MYTHOLOGY

Once you have these basic tools of the trade, however, feel free to purchase all the writing books you desire, both as learning tools, and as cheap sources of inspiration. There are many, many books on the subject, many of them worthy. Well organized, certainly memorable, any or all of the following should help aspiring writers in their unending quest for guidance and reassurance:

ON WRITING, by Stephen King, worth the price of admission if only for his rant on adverbs and his sage advice about relying on Strunk and White’s little masterwork.

LESSONS FROM A LIFETIME OF WRITING: A NOVELIST LOOKS AT HIS CRAFT, by David Morrell, a very intimate, very informative, very engaging book.

A WRITER’S TALE, by Richard Laymon. Laymon tells it like it was, for him. Heartbreaking at times, but inspiring too.

THE COMPLETE IDIOT’S GUIDE TO WRITING A NOVEL, by Tom Monteleone. You’d have to be a complete idiot to ignore this book (ok, not the joke I really wanted to do, but Tom is a pretty formidable fellow).

WRITING POPULAR FICTION and HOW TO WRITE BEST SELLING FICTION, by Dean Koontz, both oldies, but goodies.

WRITING THE NOVEL, SPIDER SPIN ME A WEB, and TELLING LIES FOR FUN AND PROFIT, by Lawrence Block. Block has likely forgotten more about writing than most writers will ever know.

WRITING HORROR, edited by Mort Castle, HOW TO WRITE TALES OF HORROR, FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, edited by J. N. Williamson, and ON WRITING HORROR: A HANDBOOK BY THE HORROR WRITER’S ASSOCIATION, all featuring articles from stars of the genre.

DARK DREAMERS and DARK THOUGHTS ON WRITNG, edited/compiled by Stanley Wiater. Books about writers.

UNDERSTANDING COMICS, by Scott McCloud. Yes, it’s about comics, but it’s also about storytelling.

ZEN AND THE ART OF WRITING, by Ray Bradbury. Hey, it’s Bradbury.

WRITING SHORT FICTION, by Damon Knight. Knight knows his way around the short form.

ADVENTURES IN THE SCREEN TRADE and WHICH LIE DID I TELL: MORE ADVENTURES IN THE SCREEN TRADE, by William Goldman. The titles say it all.

ON WRITING, by George V. Higgins, THE MERRY HEART and READING & WRITING, by Robertson Davies, and BIRD BY BIRD, by Francine Prose, because it’s my article, damn it.

But, you don’t have to rely on these obvious suspects. There are also other sources of wisdom about writing and the writing life from non- traditional sources. Some say, for instance, that Hemingway’s book, DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON, is really about writing, rather than bullfighting. I’ll leave it up to you to decide.

Paula Guran’s 2001 article “Tribal Stand,” available on the web at http://www.locusmag.com/2002/Commentary/Guran09_Standard.html tells a lot of truths about the horror genre and the writing profession, things that many people still don’t want, but need to, accept. Another source of wisdom about the writing life would be the numerous introductions and story notes that Harlan Ellison has penned over the years for his collections, which inarguably provide a wealth of information about one writer’s journey, and about the trials and tribulations and joys of pursuing the craft.

OK, we all long for simplicity, so let’s put up some lists. One fruitful source of practical wisdom about writing is Norm Partridge’s MR. FOX AND OTHER FERAL TALES, an outstanding collection featuring a lot of his fiction and nonfiction. Here’s a piece Partridge culled from that work for an article which originally appeared in the e-magazine Hellnotes back in October 2005. I’ve further whittled that summary down, without, I hope, diminishing its impact (Partridge’s preferred version can be found on his website, www.normanpartridge.com):

A little more streamlined are Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of writing, which although incorporated into a longer how-to book by Morrow in 2007 (titled, not surprisingly, ELMORE LEONARD’S 10 RULES OF WRITING), first appeared as a part of an article in the New York Times, titled “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle.” They are, as paraphrased from that article:

You can learn a lot from professors Partridge and Leonard, I think. I’d like to close this article, however, with two bits of profound wisdom I’ve picked up in my travels. The first is from Neil Gaiman, who, reflecting on the best
advice he ever got from a writer, wrote the following on his 4/22/08 blog:

Finally, perhaps the sagest, most succinct advice on writing you’ll ever encounter is set forth below. Gleaned from the writings of notable East Texas philosopher and word wrangler, Champion Joe Lansdale (you can find a slightly longer version in his Introduction titled “Livestock, Roses, and Stories” from FOR A FEW STORIES
MORE), the two tenets of his faith are set forth under the heading:

I hope the two quotes above put everything in perspective. If not, get cracking on reading all those how-to books listed above.

“The Care and Feeding of a Style Sheet”
by F. Paul Wilson

I think it started back in the mid 80s with Barry Malzberg’s The Engines of the Night. As I read through the essays, I noticed a paucity of commas—conspicuous by their absence from introductory clauses and elsewhere in the text. Since Barry was (and is) more conscious than most about style, I figured they were MIA by design. So I paid attention and realized I didn’t miss them. In fact, the prose flowed more swiftly and surely than it might have with them in place.

Hmmm.

So I began dropping certain commas in my fiction, experimenting with short stories first, then with a novel. I forget which book it was—Black Wind, perhaps—but I remember receiving the copyedited ms and discovering that the editor had added back all the commas I’d left out. Ack. I think it might have been Black Wind because I remember referring to the editor as a commakaze (sorry, but it’s true). So I had to go through the entire ms and remove those commas.

I was also starting to break out my dialog more—keeping it paragraphed away from narrative. I’ve discovered there’s something about the eye-brain connection that likes white space around text; it allows the mind to grasp meaning more quickly and clearly. Faster comprehension lends a sense of narrative momentum, which leads to the I-couldn’t-put-it-down reading experience. Copyeditors (to their credit, only occasionally) would attach my dialog to a preceding or succeeding narrative paragraph. I would have to go back and undo it.

After a couple of novel-length bouts of wasting precious writing time correcting the “corrections,” I asked why they couldn’t accept the quirks in my deathless prose. I learned that each publisher has its own style sheet that copyeditors must follow; if I wanted exceptions, I simply had to let them know.

Was that all it took? Cool.

So I started adding a note to the beginning of each ms asking the editor not to add commas or fiddle with my dialog paragraphing. As time went on and my idiosyncrasies multiplied, I created a formal style sheet that’s now included with every ms.

This is what it looks like nowadays. Feel free to copy and adapt to your own preferences.

TO THE COPY EDITOR

STYLE SHEET for (title)

No insult intended if the following appear to be basic common sense rules to you, but all are raised because of past difficulties.

Commas

I use the serial comma; other than that, I find most commas intrusive and use as few as possible. Please discard all your hard and fast rules about commas (i.e. with introductory clauses greater than 9 words, with if and when clauses, and so on). Add a comma ONLY when you feel it’s absolutely necessary for clarity. If it doesn’t enhance the sentence, please leave it out.

Who/Whom

I follow Theodore Bernstein’s “doom of whom” rule and use whom only when it directly follows the preposition; otherwise it’s who all the way.

The question mark

NO question mark with rhetorical or uninflected questions. (“You’re really mad, aren’t you.” That’s a statement.)

Paragraphing

I have my own way of paragraphing dialog—I like to break it out. It’s neither terribly unique nor radically unorthodox, but some editors can’t resist tacking a line of dialog onto the preceding narrative paragraph. Please don’t do that here.

Apostrophes

Certain characters in this novel haven’t pronounced the “g” in the suffix “-ing” for so long that drawing attention to its absence seems superfluous. So I have dispensed with those particular apostrophes.

Also…

The internal monologues of the above characters are in the same bad English they speak. (If they speak trailer-parkese, they won’t think in MFAese; they’ll stick to their patois.)

Thank you.

I don’t want to leave the impression that a writer’s relationship with the copyeditor is adversarial—you tugging toward “art” (whatever that is) and the hidebound copyeditor dragging you down to mundanity. Not at all. You both want the same thing: a perfect book. But the copyeditor is paid by the publisher to follow its guidelines . . . unless guided otherwise.

One thing I’ve learned: Good copyeditors are gold. They can make you look your best. You see your ms so often you become blind to its errors. A good copyeditor will spot them and flag them. No one’s perfect, and errors inevitably slip through, but the two of you are in league to hunt down and kill as many as possible. Typos and grammatical gaffs annoy readers and pull them out of the story. You do not want your reader out of your story.

The nice thing about staying with the same publisher is that you have the opportunity to work with the same copyeditor on subsequent mss. Becky M (I won’t give her last name because she may not want it floating around the Internet) and I have been working together for quite a few years now. She knows my quirks and will even remind me when I deviate from them. But Becky goes beyond that. Not only is she a usage and grammar whiz, she’s wise in the ways of the world, especially NYC where Jack roams. She’s caught me and called me out on errors regarding subways and hospitals and all manner of city sundries. She never ceases to amaze me with her fact-checking abilities. As long as she’s in the business, I want her on my books.

One last thing: If and when you do work up a style sheet, be polite. You’re entering a partnership with the copyeditor, and a sure way to sour that relationship is to come off as an arrogant son of a bitch. As perfect as you might think you are, you have made mistakes and you want them found and corrected before the book hits the shelves.

If you ask writers to name the most important writing skills to master, most of them will include discipline and time management way up on the list. Because thinking about writing is nice, but actually making the time to sit down and do it is a lot more crucial. You can have all the skills and tricks and sheer talent of any of us, but if you don’t make time in your life to write, your novel is not going to happen.

Whenever I appear at a school or a college or even a convention of readers and fans, and I’m talking about writing, I ask the audience if they think they could write just three pages a day. I usually get a lot of cautious affirmatives, and even some indignant “of-course-I-cans!”

I smile, and I tell them I’ve just given them the Secret of the Universe. If you want to write novels, just write those three pages a day. Figure it out: 3 pages a day (and let’s take off week-ends for whatever else needs attention in your life) works out to 15 pages a week, and around 60 pages a months. In six months, you will have a 360-page manuscript.

Not a large novel . . . but not a small one, either.

When people hear this, they are amazed because they’ve probably never bothered to do, as they say, “the math.” It inspires new writers and aspiring novelists because it reduces the task of creating all those pages into something that at least seems do-able.

And I gotta tell ya: every time I finish a book, and finally print-out all the pages at once, and get a look at that huge stack of pages, bigger than the phone books of most cities, I am still amazed that anybody can write that much about anything. And, hey, I did it!

But then, after I sit there for a few minutes, I get this great feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment-yeah, I think, I did that, and it feels good.

You can get that feeling too, and believe me, there’s nothing like it.

Here what another writer said:

“When I start a book, I always think it’s patently absurd that I can write one. No one, certainly not me, can write a book 500 pages long. But I know I can write 15 pages, and if I write 15 pages every day, eventually I will have 500 of them.”– John Saul

But there’s an important corollary to that Secret of the Universe: you have to write those 3 pages every day. Or, you have to write enough over a 5-day period to average 3 pages a day. That requires something all real writers have-discipline. It’s the ability to make yourself do the writing. It’s being so dedicated to a goal, you don’t let anything get in your way of achieving it.

News flash: The only way you’re going make discipline a part of your life is by learning how to manage your time. But don’t worry about it; I’m going to show you some ways to do it. No time like now, so let’s get started . . .

Analyze Your Time and Your Self

Before you can get serious about discipline, you have to take a good, hard, honest look at the hours in your day and your week. If you’re into charts and that kind of thing, then by all means, make one which gives you a picture of your life in terms of the hours and days and who wants a piece of you and when . . .

If you’re like most of us, you have some kind of job, which is taking up a considerable chunk of your time. That is obviously time you need to . . . ah, work around, as they say.

Answers please:

Who Are You and What Do You Do?

These are questions only you can answer, but I can speculate a bit, and maybe anticipate some of the scenarios, which may apply to you and your situation. Right up front, I’m going to tell you finding time to write is not just possible; it’s easy. My experience, and from what I hear from successful writers, tells me that a major source of discipline comes from the desire to write.

If you want to write, you will.

If you want to make excuses for writing, you’ll do that, too. But we don’t need to dwell on that one. You probably know about that all too well.

Time is what it’s all about. Your job is to find the time to do what you want in your life. It’s there, but you might have to work hard to find it.

Getting Jobbed

If you have a full-time job, no matter what you do, you already have anywhere from seven to ten hours of your day already spoken for. I have a friend who drives in and out of Boston each week and spends three hours every day. That is essentially wasted time (if we can discount the vigilance and skill required to keep him from auto accidents and related mayhem).

If that describes you, you might want to think about using that time to dictate stories, journal entries, story plots, character profiles, scenes of dialogue, or even whole chapters. This may be awkward at first, but if you get one of those digital dictation recorders (voice activate), you can give it a shot and see how it feels.

I’m not sure it was true, but I can remember somebody telling me Ellery Queen never wrote a word-he dictated everything, gave it to his secretary, then went over it with a red pencil, before giving it back to her for another run through the typewriter. So, look, it might work for you, too. Sure beats just sitting there staring at the license plate of that Taurus in front of you, don’t you think?

Writing for Your Supper

If your job requires you do a lot of writing each day, that could have a definite effect on the amount of writing you get done when you’re not at work. If you write for a newspaper, advertising or government agency, a law firm, or even an insurance company, you might be burned-out by the time you get home. The last thing you feel like doing is more writing . . . and that’s lethal.

The worst situation is having a job in which the writing you do there is competing with the writing you want to do on your own. That can be discouraging and depressing and may eventually force you to make a very serious decision. And I’m talking about a life-changing one. Like: quit the job or quit writing.

I think I said in an earlier chapter how important it is to have a job that keeps you from writing. I repeat this point because it also relates to time management and discipline. If you’re doing something all day that has nothing to do with writing, then, all the better. Psychologically, you’re pumped to get home and get a few words down.

Being a Creature of Habit

How are you on deadlines? Repetitive tasks? Routines?

Do you keep your lawn maintained on a regular basis? Change the oil in your car when you’re supposed to. Call your mother, your kids, your friends timely enough for them to not wonder if you stumbled into some fissure in the earth?

What does your basement look like? Your garage, or your workbench? Do you like to hang things on pegboard? How do you feel about filing cabinets? A lot of writers I know feel very comfortable walking around in office supply stores; do you?

Your answers will give you some heads-up on the kind of personality you have, and just how easy or tough it is for you to stay organized enough to create a writing schedule and stick to it. And I don’t mean you have to be some obsessive-compulsive automaton or a loony neat-nik, either. My desk and office gets progressively cluttered and full of paper the deeper I get into a project. Anyone who walks in will think a tornado takes a regular spin through the place-and it does, the tornado of mutant thoughts in my head all day long. But don’t think I’m not organized, because I am. I know what each flung paper is and why I’m keeping it around. When I finish the story, article, column, book, script, or whatever, I pick up everything, file it, or toss it, neaten up the office, and move on to the next project.

Okay, enough about you. The above should get you thinking about the way you work and your work habits you’ll need to cultivate or change to fit the writing regimen you need to create. We all have good habits and bad ones. You need to make writing something (good or bad) a part of your day. You need to make a necessary habit (like brushing your teeth) you’ll feel bad about shirking.

Schedules

Everybody is different, and everybody has a load of different parameters running through their lives. So, it’s not that important what your schedule actually is . . . only that you have one.

I can’t spend a lot of time on this because a schedule is a personal thing. For instance, unless I have very pressing deadline, I practically never write on weekends, which is reserved for family stuff, but some writers (who have so little time during the week) use their weekends to do all their writing each week.

The other thing about making and keeping to a schedule is that you shouldn’t carve it into a stone tablet. Take it for a given that some days things just aren’t going to work out and you’re going to miss the hours and pages you planned.

Don’t let it bug you. Forget it, and move on to the next day. And don’t try to make up the page tomorrow. You’ll make yourself nuts if you try to crank out double the amount you decided was feasible in the first place. Never look back, only ahead.

Some writers keep one of those erasable plastic schedule-makers on their wall next to the desk. They write in what they need to do for a week or two in advance and they see it each day and they check off how well or poorly they’re doing. If it works for you, keep doing it. But watch it. Some of the wall-chart people I know get carried away with, and start figuring out ways to run statistical analysis on their productivity with time-motion studies and percentage pie-charts and a bunch of other stuff that becomes the reason for its own existence and ends up stealing away writing time or worse, an excuse not to write.

My best advice is to keep experimenting with your schedule until you find one that:

1.) is realistic in terms of pages per day. Three pages is doable for most people. Fifteen is not.

2.) Doesn’t conflict with the needs and schedules of others in your life-such as bosses, spouses, kids, friends, etc.

3.) Is flexible enough to absorb the unexpected changes it will endure.

The important thing about your writing schedule is it feels right to you. It should work well enough that you feel good about sticking to it, and the results you get. A bad schedule is one you look at like a jail sentence of any required repetitive task you don’t like doing (one of mine is mowing a lawn . . .man I hate that!).

Just remember: the longer you do something, the more likely it will become ingrained and easier to do the next time. Kind of like the muscle-memory thing with a golf swing. It takes while to kick-in, but when it does, you stop thinking about it so much, and just do it.

Rules of the Game

Now, in order to make the schedule easier to maintain, I’m going to lay out a few tips, which are actually rules. Not titanium-clad, but you better pay attention.

Avoid Distractions

Very crucial. Don’t set yourself up to be interrupted. So tell yourself, and mean it, you’re not going to answer the door or the phone. If you don’t have an answering machine, get one. At the least, get caller ID so you can answer if it’s urgent or an emergency.

If you are a computer person, don’t schedule your time on the Internet and email as the same time for your writing. The Internet is great and so is email, but they can be huge timesinks for writers. Peter Straub once told me he added up the amount of email he wrote over an average six-month period and he said the wordage equaled a small novel(!), which made him think twice about responding so dutifully to all his correspondents.

Make a general announcement to the rest of the family or roommates that you CANNOT be interrupted when you’re writing. At first, nobody will take you seriously, but if you establish up front that repeated distractions will make you very cranky, you will get the respect you need. Be insistent. Nobody will take it seriously unless you do.

Lastly, if something is distracting you on a consistent basis. . . and messing with your output, you need to isolate it and REMOVE it from your writing environment. Don’t ignore the problem. It’s only going to make things worse.

Hide the Remote

One of worst time-eaters in our lives is the television. True, it has been a fantastic invention, but I don’t think I being hyperbolic when I say that even with 200+ channels of all-digital cable TV, there are many occasions when there isn’t a thing worth watching.

Stop watching so much TV. If you add up the number of hours you watch in a week, you’ll get depressed because it’s time you can’t get back, time you could have spent writing.

Tell yourself you’re not one of the watchers; you’re one of the creators. You are one of the people who create the stories the herd of sheeple want to watch.

Writing Fast

Years ago, when I was still in graduate school, the only time I had to write was late at night–between 10:00 p.m. and midnight. The lateness didn’t really bother me. I was younger and it wasn’t that big a deal to subsist on 4-5 hours sleep just about every night. What did present a problem was the lack of continuous hours in which to write.

I remember one evening I had gone over to the University of Maryland campus to listen to a friend of mine, the late Roger Zelazny, who was scheduled to do a reading to the college science fiction society. He was an established writer and he did this sort of thing a lot. Afterwards, we went out for coffee and talked writing. I guess I’d been complaining, because I recall Roger telling me his solution to short windows of opportunity: faster writing.

At first, I figured he was kidding around, but he shook his head. He meant it. He said it was all in the way you looked at it; and the best way was to pretend you were giving yourself an “essay exam” like the ones in college. You remember them–you had 45 minutes to fill as many “bluebooks” as possible; and therefore, convince your professor you were brimming over with information and knowledge.

And that’s the point of this particular advice. I know it sounds silly, but write faster. (And yeah, I can hear some of you yelling and screaming, but I already told you how I feel about the “one good sentence” phonies, right?)

If you can teach yourself to write as fast as possible, the results will be obvious-you’ll have more material to work with. And with computers playing so heavily in writer’s lives these days, the idea of typing so fast you’re manuscript is full of mistakes is not so terrible. (But don’t forget: Roger was telling me this before the computer age. So, he wasn’t being glib about not worrying about how easy it would be to fix typos.)

Okay, bear with me for a second here, while I wax metaphorical–by using sculpture as our example. If you’re trying to create a statue, and you have to mix your materials from scratch, the idea would be to get the clay or mud or plaster (or whatever your glop might be . . .) into some kind of recognizable shape as quickly as you can. Then, you can take a more leisurely time shaping and sculpting your basic form. The idea is to achieve an elementary shape, which can be tweaked and fine-tuned later.

The value in writing fast is you end up getting something on paper. I’m tempted to say get anything on paper because the biggest stack of bad writing is infinitely better than no writing.

Space versus Time

Finding a space where you can do your writing is a major factor of time management. Ideally, you can sequester yourself in a spare bedroom, a “sewing” room, a den, or even a little cubicle in the basement. If you have to invent a new space in the attic or over the garage, well, maybe you better grab your toolbox and your measuring tape.

Having a special, writing space set aside can have a great impact on the amount of real writing time you get done. If you have a desk where you can spread out your papers, your reference materials, notebooks, disks, etc., and leave them there all the time, you have just gained many writing hours over the course of a year. Think about it. If you’re forced to write in a space, where you must set up each time you want to write, you waste time doing that.

Keep Out!

One of the other things you want in your writing space is a door to keep yourself in and everybody else out. There’s nothing worse than getting interrupted repeatedly when you only have limited amounts of time at your disposal. And if the door has a lock on it, even better.

And if your space has a phone in it, unplug it. Leave it out in the hall. The worst habit to get into, when you’re locked away, is to let the world in with you . . . when you’re supposed to be letting out the world inside you. Same goes for a window-you don’t need one. But if you have one, make sure you have curtains, or that it looks out on something essentially bland and not very distracting. A brick wall would be great.

And lastly, if you don’t have a spare room, a basement, or garage loft, then set up and start typing in the bedroom or the kitchen table. Plenty of great books have been written in both locations. I used to write on the dining room table in my graduate school apartment. I wrote maybe 20 short stories with that set-up. Then, I moved to this really tiny townhouse and my desk was in the living room–a space that held my big-assed IBM Selectric on a desk . . . but no television. I wrote a couple of novels in that wide-open, high traffic area.

If you have a laptop computer, you can write no matter where you go. In the car on long trips (when you’re not the driver), in planes and airports, and even doctors and dentists’ offices. In fact, I’m sitting at my car dealership as I write this sentence, waiting for my 35,000-mile check-up to be finished. (Everybody else in here with me is sitting around with kind of slack expressions on their faces. But me, hey, I’m being my usual creative self.)

The point is clear: you find whatever space you can, and you put it to the best use you can.

c) Final Considerations

Okay, everything I’ve been talking about is all well and good, but what do you do if none of it’s working?

In other words, your job and you commitments to family friends, organizations, etc. is so great (at least for the present) that there’s no way you can write three pages a day. No way you can even write anything each day. You’ve looked at things realistically, and you don’t see a regular schedule-the schedule needed to produce a novel–available until some wholesale changes can be made or planned that will take some time into the future (like a new baby gets older, a different job is found, a new roommate, a change in your relationship with spouse or otherwise special person, etc.)

So what do you do?

Couple of things:

1.) Start writing other kinds of things. If all you have time for is a journal entry, do it. Even if you hate poetry, try you hand at it. Or write a quick essay in which you express an opinion about something that really pisses you off (they’re the easiest ones to do . . . . Try your hand at short stories. The idea is to take on projects that you know can be completed within the parameters of your daily routine. 2.)

3.) Keep the novel as your primary project. Write scenes, character sketches and biographies, plot outlines, and other parts of the process that are short enough to be adapted to your fractured, or non-existent, schedule. 4.)

5.) Don’t give up. No matter how hard it is for you to find time and maintain discipline, tell yourself you’re not giving up-ever. That’s why selecting projects with finite, close-at-hand end-points (suggestion #1)is so important. If you can create a psychological atmosphere in which the time you do spend results in some finished projects, you will be in better shape to persevere. 6.)

Just get used to it, like this guy once said:

“Being a writer is like having homework for the rest of your life.” — Lawrence Kasdan

So, if you forget most of what I just told you. At least remember this stuff:

(1) Time Management and Discipline are two of the most important skills a writer can develop. If you don’t spend the time writing, nothing gets done.

(2) You will be able to create a realistic, workable writing schedule only after making a realistic assessment of your habits, personality traits, obligations, and daily routine.

(3) Train yourself to be disciplined and follow your schedule. There will be many things in your life, which will intrude on your writing. Do whatever it takes to remove them.

(4) Don’t be discouraged. Writing takes time. Your time. Whatever time you can invest will be rewarded.

Okay, that’s it for today.

“Rewrite Junkie!”
by TM Wright

I’ll admit it, I rewrite almost continuously (which would, of course, be “continually”). I rewrite rewrites, and then rewrite the rewritten rewrites. And, when the thing (meaning “the story”) has lain around unread for a month or two, I reread it (with, of course, nearly perfect objectivity, by then), then rewrite it again! Am I compulsive? Yes. What drives that compulsion? The need to get it right! And who’s to say when it’s “right”? I’m to say when it’s right. Not the readers (who haven’t yet read the particular product of my compulsion), not the agents (ditto), and not the publishers and editors (ditto again): I’m to say when it’s right. In fact, I’ve already rewritten the previous 111 words at least six times. I’m a rewrite junkie!

That said, you should accept as gospel that you can easily rewrite a thing until it lies gasping, nearly dead, drained (by all those damned rewrites) of its vibrancy, its will to live, its punch! “But,” you say, “does that mean a story only has punch if it’s imperfect?” Flapdoodle, of course, because, though we all know what “imperfect” is, we can have no idea at all what “perfect” is (and it is not, I’ve been told, ending a sentence in a preposition). But that’s odd, too, isn’t it? Because if we can say, with certainty, “that’s imperfect” (that being the sentence, metaphor, phrase, piece of dialogue or whatever we have just committed to paper [meaning, for most of us, “the computer”]) then, also with certainty, we know what “perfect” is: but we don’t, and we can’t. We can’t, because we’re so vastly imperfect–we see only a narrow spectrum of light, hear only a narrow spectrum of sounds, smell only a very narrow spectrum of odors, et cetera, et cetera. We’re as imperfect, imprecise and full of error as a right-hand turn on a left-hand curve. “So how, tell me how,” you say, “can I, this vastly imperfect being, make my piece of writing perfect?” And the answer is simple: you can’t, and you never will. Not, that is, unless you accept such whiny phrases as “as perfect as possible, ” or “as perfect as it can be” as alternatives to “perfect,” which they are, of course, “perfect” being unattainable, at least to our limited and pitiable five senses and intellect.

Okay, then, you say to yourself, why should I rewrite compulsively? I’m not saying you should rewrite compulsively: I’m saying I do. Maybe, for you, rewriting is simply not important. Maybe you feel, like many writers, that rewriting is unnecessary, that it’s anathema to the creative process (“You don’t re-experience an orgasm, do you?” you’ll say. “You simply get it right the first time.”). And, hey, if that works in your creative world, I raise my glass to you: perfection (or one of its alternatives, noted above) flows from your precious gray matter to your fingers to the keys to the computer screen (or typing paper, given your technological predilections), like fine wine flowing through a glass tube and into a paper cup. ]

We rewrite, many of us, to make perfect what we can never make perfect–our literary children. We should rewrite simply to make those children better. We should rewrite to get rid of crap like passive voice, meaningless repetition (because, of course, not all repetition is meaningless, only meaningless repetition is meaningless, only repetition without use or necessity is meaningless), errant commas and dashes and rambling parenthetical comments, continuity that has no hope of scanning well, endings that do not please or (again) punch (if we want them to punch: “Shouldn’t all endings punch?” you ask, and I answer, No. Sometimes the rest of the story, the part that leads to the end of the story, should punch harder than its ending. But that’s up to you and your particular literary child or paper cup full of fine wine), meandering, tedious beginnings, characters who do not convince us they’re real (who convince us only that they’re pretending to be real), or simply annoy (without purpose), and whose dialogue sounds more like coins dropping on tin than the whispers, music, agony and free verse that most literary characters can, and should produce.

Getting a piece of writing perfect through continual (or even continuous) rewrites is as impossible as defining perfection itself. But we all do it (or we should do it, or we should aspire to do it, or, oh well, eschew it for that perfect orgasm the first time, all the time, every time) because our literary children are really us in costumes made of metaphors, analogies, beginnings, endings and kick-ass cover art, and, since it’s clear to everyone, including us, that we’re as imperfect as the universe can possibly allow any living creature to be, we need to introduce our literary children to the world at large in a light as bright, pleasing and awesome as we possibly can–their own light, of course. We need those literary children to come so close to perfection, in the eyes of our readers (all of whom are exactly as imperfect as we and our children are), that we will be seen, in that light, as all-but immortal.

In other words, we (read as I, and possibly you¸ too) continually rewrite because we are not immortal, because we’re almost nightmarishly imperfect, and so we’re very, very afraid. What are we so afraid of? We’re afraid of being rejected, laughed at, ridiculed, sent packing, and spending the rest of our lives (the rest of our lives) in soulless and painful anonymity (no matter how much our loved ones revere us as geniuses) and then, when life is ready to leave us, hoping that we’ll end up like Van Gogh, anyway–immortal in the afterward.

Should you be a rewrite junkie, as I am? I don’t know. Maybe your writing is always perfect (or as perfect as it can be) the first time, every time, which means you’re perfect. If so, send me the secret of perfection, okay? In the meantime, I’ll take yet another look at this damned thing–a final look (Sure. )–and hope for the best.

“Where Do You Get Your Ideas? A Cautionary Guide”
by David Niall Wilson

Let me preface this by saying I seldom have to go anywhere to get ideas, figuratively or literally. They assault me on the way to work, invade my dreams, are handed off to me in daily conversation or through the words of others. They come at me so fast and furiously at times that I have no chance to make notes. Consequently, a lot of them are lost, found again, molded and re-shaped into entirely new ideas. I make no apology for that. The first part of this essay is going to cover the trappings of finding ideas and the mechanics behind it. Then, before I let you go, I’ll tell you what I really think about where the ideas come from, and why at times they come so slowly, and with such reluctance. That’s later, though. For now, let’s talk nuts and bolts.

There are different circumstances surrounding every piece I write, and I can’t always just clip the top piece off the stack and fit it to the necessary mold. There are themed anthologies, markets with deadlines, and shared worlds out there waiting to put roadblocks between your fingers and the keys, and the best way to prepare for these is to have a good arsenal of ideas and inspiration filed away and ready for quick-draw action. Over the years I’ve compiled a short list of almost sure-fire sources for story ideas that work for me. This isn’t to say they will work for you, or for anyone else, but it stands to reason that if you apply these methods in your own fashion you’ll come up with twists and modifications to make them your own.

Reading is a great source of inspiration, but if you truly want it to inspire you, you have to “read outside the box.” Buy a copy of The Weekly World News, or the National Enquirer. I’m not suggesting you should write a story about Bat Boy, or that Satan is really appearing in the smoke from Bin Laden’s campfires, but there are a lot of ways to take inspiration from a tabloid. Look at the pictures. Read the trivia section. This is a large, regular feature in The Weekly World News, and the facts presented are bizarre and thought-provoking if you allow them to be. What is the world’s most poisonous spider? Where is the darkest cave on the planet? What is the wingspan of an African Fruit Bat? None of these questions, by itself, makes a good story idea, but if you start wondering about those fruit bats, then you head off to Google and look them up and find that the Mende tribe believes that these bats are often witches in animal form. If you think about that dark cave, the darkest cave on the planet, and then think about what it would be like to be in that cave, alone, sealed off from the world – - and add in thoughts left over from fruit bat research, you can see how plots might thicken and gel.

Another source I’ve returned to again and again, even to the point of getting the entire run of the magazine up to 1999 on CD Rom, is The National Geographic. I know at least one other author who has mined these pages. When I published “The Tome,” author Brian A. Hopkins sent me a story that eventually made its way onto the honorable mentions list of “The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror,” and that story was titled “The Night Was Kind to Loretta.” It was inspired by the way peat bogs preserve dead bodies. It was first discovered in a National Geographic article. These magazines are absolutely full of old relics, old ruins, and break downs of ancient civilizations, information on animals, tribes, poisons and legends. In many cases you can not only grab a great idea from the issue in hand, but all the local color and background research you need to give the story authenticity. If you have the issues on CD, or use the online index at their website, you can take the main elements of a themed anthology and type them into a search box. You’d be surprised how often the combinations of words bring you inspiration that would never have occurred without the sometimes obscure references the search will return.

Today’s modern, technologically savvy generation will know what’s coming next. Google. Yahoo. Metacrawler. These are the names given to the muses of the computer age. If you need an oriental legend, a vaguer reference to voodoo, or the formula for absinthe, just ask Jeeves. If you need city names, character names, news articles and court cases from the 1700s, they are at your fingertips. If you have several elements and can’t for the life of you figure out how they might fit together in a story, you can slap the group of them into a search window, separated by plus signs, and dare inspiration to slap you in the face. It’s not really easier to find ideas this way, but the sheer volume of material available makes it a near certainty that, if you stick with it, vary your search terms, and keep your mind solidly outside the facts, looking in with “what if?” on the tip of your tongue, you will find something to write about.

Old books are another good source. Hit the thrift store, or the stacks at the local library. Look for obscure old reference books, court cases from the 1700s and 1800s, books on medicine and folk lore. Read accounts of battles and wars, books on canning fruit and skinning deer, and who knows where you’ll end up?

I used to laugh when people asked me where I get my ideas. My canned response was, “I live my ideas.” One of my favorite examples of the truth of this statement is derived from a trip I made to Northern Virginia to visit Elizabeth Massie one year. Beth lives in the middle of nowhere. The instructions for reaching her house involve “go this many roads past this barn, look for two big silos.” In other words, I should have had a native guide, or at least I should have arrived by daylight.

As it turned out, I hit that last stretch of highway (using that term very loosely, I assure you) and headed out in search of the correct number of roads, and some silos. Shortly after the sun began to drop, I drove straight into the Twilight Zone.

I missed the correct road, as it turned out, by one. There was still a little bit of light out, but not much. I drove down a back road for a while until I saw to guys approaching on the side of the road. Figuring that out in the boonies everyone would know everyone, I stopped, opened the window, and stared. In fact, if they hadn’t been staring back at me, I’m sure it would have seemed rude. These guys looked like hillbilly drug addicts straight out of a zombie movie. I asked about the Massie farm, and explained about the silos, and they stared vacantly. They mumbled something about knowing a guy named Massie, who it turned out after a long rambling grumble of a speech, had lived in some city far away and had no known connection to the family I sought. They told me I had made a wrong turn.

No kidding.

At this point I just wanted to get away, so I drove farther down this side road. Ahead was a church. When I got closer, I saw that the church said FOR SALE on the front. It was run down as hell and had a small graveyard in back. Just past it was an old green house. There was a car out front with the dome light on, and I thought I’d see if I caught someone coming home from shopping, or something. Maybe a neighbor who knew more about the neighborhood, so to speak.

I parked in the driveway and approached the car. About then, I knew I’d made mistake number two. The car was up on blocks. The dome light was lit, and the radio was playing. There was a guy sitting inside, listening to the radio, and since I’d already approached, and he was already looking at me, I figured I might as well get on with it. It didn’t help that this guy looked enough like Charles Manson to be his twin.

He asked if I was “lookin’ fer’ Herb.” I allowed as how I was NOT looking for Herb, but for Beth Massie and family, and asked if he could direct me. He looked me up and down, and then got out of the car and told me that the guy inside could probably help. I didn’t know any polite way of saying no way I’m going in that house, so I followed him. He opened the door, and then parted an old sheet that hung just inside. The place stank of animal musk and mildew. As I entered, I heard a piano, very off key, playing inside. Charles Manson leaned over my shoulder and said.

“We’re a commune of musicians.”

To myself I said, “Right, whoever that is plays the piano, and you play the radio out front?”

We entered another room, and the guy playing that piano stopped and turned to me very slowly. I swear he was the spitting image of Little Richard. He asked.

“You lookin’ for Herb?”

I told him my story again. He stared at me. He stared at Charles Manson. He finally admitted he didn’t really know anyone in the area, other than the mysterious Herb, but that the two silos I was looking for were actually one road back.

I’m not sure how I got out of there, but I do remember I didn’t expect to. I got into the car and hit the road fast and hard, spraying gravel and nearly ending up in a ditch. I found the main road, went one more down the highway, turned, and less than an hour later I was seated in Beth’s living room, telling this same story to Beth, her family, Brian Hodge, Mark Rainey, Wayne Allen Sallee and the entire Pseudocon crew.

Beth looked at me in horror and said, “You didn’t stop at the ‘green’ house?”

Needless to say, the point of all this is that this incident became a story. The story was “Are You Lookin’ for Herb,” and it was published in Flesh and Blood Magazine. That story will stick with me forever, both the real, the surreal, and the fictional outcome. There are always moments in our lives we can’t explain. There are times when we seem to step into some other world and then, after we come back, the memories fade to a hazy blur. These make great backdrops for stories. The things we half remember can be filled in with another half tailor made to bend them to the service of our imaginations.

And that ends the first part of the essay, the nuts and bolts part I promised. Now I’ll get on to the meat of the sandwich, so to speak. I’ve long said that I don’t consider myself a genre writer. I’ve written a lot of dark stories, some science fiction, some mystery and even a little romance, but I wrote them as stories first – they fit the niches in the world of publishing after the fact, for the most part. Among those works are a lot of things written to fit molds, and then there are others. Important stories, even important books, that don’t lend themselves so easily to definition. I didn’t find them in the National Enquirer, or with Google.

That isn’t where the best stories come from. The stories that you will be remembered for, and the ones that will haunt you all the days of your life are the ones you know you have to write. You don’t find the idea for them in a magazine, or a book, or by watching the news, though these things can trigger the emotions, or memories that drive them. You don’t bend them to fit clever, themed anthologies, or chop out important parts to make word count. When you write one of the stories that define you, you have to be ready to carve that definition from your experience and serve it up to be read, criticized, admired, or spit on by readers, editors, critics and the world.

I’ll go so far as to say I believe a lot of the other stories, the clever ones, the entertaining ones, the themed ones, and those we actively search for are crutches to keep us from falling into the abyss where the real words lie. The wild words, I call them, the ones that stalk you when you sleep and tug at your nerve endings when you write. I’ve said before that you need to be able to write your pain. It isn’t just pain, though. You have to be able to write your emotions as you really feel them. You have to be honest with what you want to say and not cripple your prose so people won’t see it and equate it with the mind that created it. You have to be willing to own your words, and your work, your inspiration, and your personal darkness. You can’t fall short of what you know to be true and expect it to ring anything but false in the final analysis.

Those stories – those “ideas” – are always with us. They present us in ways our talent and our clever plots never will, and in the end, those who read the work that matters will remember. They may not like you, or understand you, but if asked which of the things you wrote made an impact, they will unerringly point to the one that was the most difficult for you to put on paper. If you’ve read such a story, you know it. If you’ve written such a story, you also know it, and you know how many more are lurking in the shadows, waiting to escape into the world.

There are a lot of levels to writing, shades of gray and layers of expression stain every word. Don’t ask where the ideas come from, though, because the very act of asking is a form of denial. You know where they come from. The key is in finding the courage to set them free.

“A Breakdown of the Break-In”
by Kealan Patrick Burke

Among the questions I get asked is this one, which pops up quite a bit:

“How did you get a story in Cemetery Dance?” or “How did you end up editing Taverns of the Dead?”

Unlike a lot of the questions put to me, these come with simple answers. Answers so simple, in fact, that they lead me to wonder why the question needed to be asked in the first place. If the inquisitor wants to know the process by which a story leaves my hands and ends up in the pages of a magazine, that I can understand. When writers set about submitting their efforts for the first time, it’s not a bad idea to ask someone the proper way to go about it, or to look it up. I did the same thing when I started out.

To this, I respond by telling the writer (a) to pick up a copy, or better yet copies, of the magazine they intend to submit to, to get familiar with the sort of stuff the editor is looking for, (b) to read the guidelines carefully (sending a vampire story to a publication that has an Absolutely No Vampires sign over the door won’t win you any brownie points), and (c) make sure your submission is neatly typed, typo-free, polished, and has your name and address in the upper left hand corner of the cover page so the editor knows where to find you if they need to.

However, if the writer is asking me what magic button I pressed to get my story into the magazine, who I fooled, or where I found the key to the executive washroom, then they are more likely to get scrutinized with the same intensity one usually employs when studying viscous matter on a petri-dish. Because this kind of attitude–that writers who get published in respectable magazines MUST be scratching someone’s back or kissing someone’s ass–drives me nuts. To such people, the concept of hard work, learning from rejection, and the betterment of craft, is an alien one. You’ve been published in that magazine, so now you need to tell them how they do it, what the trick is to get in with the ‘clique’. They prescribe to this theory methinks, because the long hard road seems too much like hard work. These quick-fixers would rather squander their time trying to find the magic mushroom that once devoured, will lead them through the wondrous gates of Publicationville, rather than having to sit down and work at it like everyone else.

And that’s a shame, because for quick-fixers, the desperate need for instant gratification usually leads to them self-publishing before their work is polished enough to be seen by the reading public, or turns them into trolls, who dedicate themselves to the online persecution of other writers, usually successful ones.

To the second question: “How did you end up editing Taverns of the Dead?” the answer, assuming I’m being asked about the process of editing and publishing an anthology is: (a) Come up with a theme, or if you don’t have one, then an angle that makes your project different from the multitude that have preceded your arrival onto the anthology scene, (b) compose a list of the writers you’d like to see in the book and find contact information for them (usually pretty easy to locate these days as almost every writer has a website and an email address), (c) compose a professional letter of invitation (invites to the tune of: “Hey Buddy, want to, like, be in this book I’m, like, doing?” rarely yield a response), and send it. Remember to let the writers know from the start that for now you’re only looking for an expression of interest until you get a publisher, because you can’t expect any writer to come on board a project or spend time writing a story for one that may never see the light of day, (d) with a provisional list of interested writers, compose an equally professional query for the publisher. There’s no need to prattle on for pages about how great the book is going to be and why they’d be mad not to publish it. Instead, introduce yourself, briefly, outline your idea, and provide your list of interested authors, (e) wait, which means do not hound the publisher with emails. Wait. Or, if you absolutely positively cannot wait for more than a few months (scroll up for a reminder of my opinion on quick-fixers), then drop the publisher a polite email asking if they’ve had a chance to look at your query. Then WAIT. If you get turned down, don’t get disheartened. Simply send that query out again, and again, and again, until you find someone who’s interested. If no one bites, it may simply be a case of bad timing, or maybe you don’t have the names a publisher wants to see (anthologies are always a tough sell, unless you’ve got a King, Straub, Barker, Koontz or Rice original story in the bag. Trying to get those stories would fill an essay by itself, so…maybe some other time.) So, assuming you do manage to get a publisher interested (f) you do a happy dance that wouldn’t look out of place among the drunk Irish guys at a wedding, then sign contracts, agree on a pay rate for you and the authors, and set a time period for submissions (at least five or six months. Sometimes the longer you allow for stories, the more chance you have of getting a story from even the busiest of your contributors), (g) once the stories start coming in, you find out just how tough the editing game can be, because you’ll be a lucky editor indeed if every single story you receive from your contributors is what you were looking for. After all, even the best writers write a bad story every now and again, and if you decide you’d rather not risk insulting someone you consider a hero of yours, then you’ll put that story in the book, and pay for it later when the readers and reviewers have their say. Better to have the courage of your convictions and only take the stories that fit your vision of the book. Assuming you don’t blatantly offend the writer of the story you’ve deemed unsuitable, I think you’ll find they’ll take it in their stride. Every professional writer faces rejection at some stage, and it rarely matters who doles out that rejection. If you’re polite and your reason for passing on the story is a fair and specific one (“I don’t want this, ya jerk” will get you your ass handed to you, and with good reason), then there shouldn’t be a problem, and you get to keep your book on track. (h) Once all the stories are in, acceptances and rejections dealt, contracts returned and signed, payment to the contributors taken care of (though this can come later depending on the terms of your contract), it’s time to decide the order in which the stories appear in the anthology. I’ve been asked more than once if this really matters, and it absolutely does. If you put the tales in willy-nilly, you run the risk of having thematically similar entries, or ones in which the setting is the same, appear too close together, which will only lead the reader to compare them, criticize your judgment, or assume the whole book is going to be exactly the same tale told by different writers. Go for variety. With your stories in order, next you have to (i) format your manuscript, following traditional guidelines, or those set out on the publisher’s website. If you don’t know what format the publisher prefers, ask. After that, all that remains is for you to deliver the book (again, using traditional methods). The rest is up to the publisher.

The other way in which the question, “How did you end up editing Taverns of the Dead?” can be taken?

It would be better for all concerned if I left that one go. I think we’ve seen enough viscous matter on petri-dishes for one day, don’t you think?

“Dr. Frankenstein’s Secrets of Style”
by Norman Partridge

Okay. Since you’re a prospective horror writer, I’m sure you’re familiar with our old buddy Dr. Frankenstein. You’ve read Mary Shelley’s classic novel, maybe a few anthologies chock full of Frankensteinian stories, and you’ve seen those old movies, too.

There’s a scene in most of those movies. One that I love. Where the good doctor’s son, or grandson, or granddaughter, or (better yet) some conniving interloper invades the doc’s dusty old castle and finds a big thick book entitled Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s Secrets of Life and Death, which naturally spares the prospective mad scientist a whole bunch of hair-tearing, grief, and anguish when it comes to learning the fine art of monster-making.

When it comes to developing a writing style, I doubt that I can be as helpful as the good doc was with his dusty tome. But I’ll try.

First off, let’s make like Victor Frankenstein and conduct an experiment. Here’s what you do: get yourself down to the local book emporium. Ignore the cappuccino bar and the dessert counter and all those celebrity “autobiographies” penned by ghostwriters. What you’re looking for is the horror section. You’ve been there before, haven’t you? Sure… I’ll bet a big wad of green money that you have.

Okay. Mission accomplished. You’re standing in front of several rows of books with black spines dripping bloody red lettering. I know you’ve read many of these titles already, so here’s what I want you to do: select several you’ve missed, but make sure they’re written by authors you’ve read before. Some of those “big names” we’re all familiar with.

Buy those books. Take them home.

Lock the doors. Close the drapes. Just like Dr. Frankenstein getting down to the business of serious experimentation, you don’t want anyone to know what you’re about to do.

Place the books on a table in front of you. Now comes the hard part. But remember— you’re doing it the way Dr. Frankenstein did. In the name of science and knowledge. Remember, too, that if nothing else the good doctor was certainly adept at dissection.

One by one, snatch up those books. Rip off the covers.

Title pages too. Peel the spine. Then find a thick black felt-tip pen (I recommend Marks-A-Lot). Cross out any further mention of the author’s name—page headers, bio section, whatever.

Now… sit down and start reading. Maybe the first chapter of each book, maybe less. Again, I’ll pull out my wad of green money, and I’ll bet that you can tell the Stephen King books from those written by Dean R. Koontz just as easily as you can identify an Anne Rice or Peter Straub novel.

You want to know why?

King, Koontz, Rice, and Straub all have discernible styles, that’s why.

* * *

Of course, the aforementioned quartet of bestselling authors has been at this game a little longer than you have. They developed their respective styles through countless hours of hard work.

Work on short stories and novels, that is. Telling story after story, getting each one down on paper, typing “The End” time and time again. Learning what works and what doesn’t by trial and error. Even learning unconsciously. Because, let’s face it, no beginning writer sits down at the good ol’ word processor and says, “Forget all that story and plot junk… today I’m going to develop a style.”

Well, maybe someone has tried that. Actually, I wouldn’t doubt it. But I’m still holding that green money, and I’ll bet that any misguided boob who attempted such an endeavor failed miserably.

Because your writing style comes from within. In fact, you’ve probably already got it, or at least a good chunk of it. You just don’t know about it yet. But maybe I can help you find it… or at least show you where to look.

All you’ll need is a shovel and a stout heart.

Now, follow me to the cemetery….

* * *

Here we are. Cool fog raising gooseflesh on your arms. The full moon shining up above. Gnarled branches scratching the night sky. A forest of marble monuments and granite headstones looming before you.

You recognize the scene, don’t you? Sure you do. Any horror writer worth his salt recognizes Dr. Frankenstein’s favorite bone garden. Just as you remember why the good doctor invariably makes the cemetery his first stop.

It’s the mad scientist’s very first rule—if you’re gonna make a monster, you’re gonna need parts.

Creating a writing style isn’t much different. Just as the Frankenstein Monster is a crazy quilt of dear-departed humanity, your writing style is an amalgam of influences. Which is why you must read— and read widely— if you want to write.

Mad scientists open graves. Writers open books.

I knew this from the start, long before I ever became serious about publishing my fiction. I worked for several years in the local public library, during which time I read the very best the horror genre had to offer. From Poe to Bradbury, from Matheson to King and on through Lansdale and Schow, I absorbed the lessons of those who labored in Dr. Frankenstein’s cemetery long before I ever picked up my shovel.

But I also learned a great deal from writers in completely unrelated genres. For me, crime writers were a big influence in developing every element of my work. I learned a great deal about mood from writers who specialize in crime noir. And when it comes to pace and plot, I found my best teachers in writers such as Elmore Leonard, John D. MacDonald, and Dan J. Marlowe.

I didn’t confine my reading to novels, either. I found anthologies especially valuable. In the space of a single anthology, I’d invariably be exposed to as many styles as there were stories. Not all of them were successful or effective, of course. But sometimes it’s just as important to learn what doesn’t work as what does work… and why.

Now, please don’t get the impression that I’m telling you to imitate other writers, especially when it comes to style. I certainly wouldn’t advise you to do that.

But I’d be less than honest if I didn’t tell you that a certain amount of imitation is unavoidable. Especially for a writer who’s just starting out. H. P. Lovecraft’s early work strongly echoes Poe. Other Lovecraft stories strongly recall the tales of Lord Dunsany. Robert Bloch began his career as a student of H. P. Lovecraft, only to evolve into one of the finest psychological suspense writers of his generation. Ramsey Campbell also followed in Lovecraft’s footsteps, publishing Cthulhu mythos-inspired fiction as a teenager. But Campbell didn’t stop there. He continued to grow and evolve, and today he is one of the most original stylists in horror fiction. While Campbell is still more than capable of putting a twist on Lovecraftian themes, his style of writing is now thoroughly his own. In fact, these days more than a few young writers have begun their careers by imitating Ramsey Campbell.

So, consciously or unconsciously, every beginning writer imitates. Including me. Looking back, some of my early stories reflect stylistic influences that didn’t quite pan out. Like “Body Bags,” the Vietnam war horror story written as a first person account that dripped with passages of lush, Poe-like description which was completely inappropriate to the story’s timeframe. Or the overblown fantasy-epic fight scenes which read like something written by Robert E. Howard on steroids. Or the “surprise ending” stories which certainly didn’t make anyone forget the nasty punch-to-the-gut climaxes patented by Robert Bloch in his prime.

So I had my share of misfires, but the truth is that some of those imitative stories actually did work out. While compiling my short story collection, Bad Intentions, I was surprised to rediscover early tales written while I was obviously under the sway of writers as disparate as Dennis Etchison and Joe R. Lansdale. But reading those stories today is kind of like looking at a ten-year-old photograph of yourself. Sure, you recognize the guy in the picture, but the clothes you’re wearing may surprise you!

So while a certain amount of imitation is necessary, in the final analysis it’s just another way of developing your own creative filter, of learning what works and what doesn’t. But it’s certainly not the end of the process, and I’ll tell you why.

No matter how high you aim, no matter how talented or successful or popular the writer you choose to emulate, you’ll find that imitation is not only a dead end, it’s also a trap.

Let me give you an example. In the early eighties, the horror field was booming. Stephen King enjoyed a huge popularity. Naturally, many writers set out to be “the next Stephen King.” They wrote knockoffs of ’Salem’s Lot, replacing King’s vampires with zombies or werewolves. They wrote limpid apocalyptic “thrillers” which paled when compared to The Stand. Neighborhoods of haunted houses populated with Jack Torrance wannabe’s sprung up, and it seemed that every high school class (in fiction, anyway) contained at least one telekinetic teenager meant to rival Carrie White.

Publishers jumped on these books, each one eager to create “another Stephen King.” Because of this, some of the King clones had a pretty good run in the eighties, publishing one book after another while pulling down some pretty healthy paychecks.

Then the bottom fell out. The public caught on. “Why buy a King clone,” they asked, “when the real thing is still going strong?” The clones stopped selling. Publishers lost money.

Many houses stopped buying horror novels entirely or cut their horror lines dramatically. The King clones, some of whom had become accustomed to healthy advances, suddenly couldn’t sell their new novels. To this day, the horror novel market has not quite recovered from the glut of unoriginal fiction which appeared in the eighties.

* * *

Okay. You’ve been warned, and you’re still determined to make a go of this mad scientist business. You’re stitching your monster together, working every day.

You’re reading. You’re writing. You’re putting in the time.

But you don’t want to overdo it, especially when it comes to style. You’re walking a fine line. A dash too much mood, an extra dollop of flowery description, and your horror stories will read like parodies. They’ll invoke laughter rather than fright.

It’s the “hey, Ma, look at me write” syndrome, and it’s usually the result of over-polishing your prose.

One of the hardest things to learn as a writer is when to quit. Some beginners become so obsessed with making each story “perfect,” each line of prose “deathless,” that they sabotage their own fiction by revising it to death. And sabotage is not too strong a word. Because overblown description, multiple metaphors, and overused similes can wreak explosive destruction upon your tales of terror.

Too much of a good thing is indeed too much of a good thing. Remember that.

But also remember that even Dr. Frankenstein had his failures. That nasty bit of business with Igor and the abnormal brain, for example. But the good doc wasn’t a quitter. When things didn’t work out the way he’d planned, Victor Frankenstein always got out his shovel and headed back to the cemetery.

* * *

So don’t give up. Put in the time. Write those stories. Read those books. Stitch that monster together.

One day he’ll be stretched out on that slab before you, just like in the movies. You put him together—an experiment here, an influence there—but I think you’ll find that he doesn’t quite look like any of those things you made him from. He’s no sum total of his parts, this guy. He’s an original.

And just when you’re ready to throw the switch and juice him with electricity he’ll probably surprise you by sitting up and stalking off completely on his own. See, you’ve already done that—all the work you put in, that was the juice your monster needed. Your creative spark gave him life.

Just look at him.

You can even holler “It’s alive! It’s alive!” if you want to.

Because this monster’s lookin’ good, isn’t he?

That’s because he’s got style.

* * *

[This essay is excerpted from the Subterranean Press edition of Norman Partridge’s Stoker-winning collection, Mr. Fox and Other Feral Tales, which features both early short stories and advice for writers looking to build careers in horror and suspense.]

“You’re Only As Good As Your Last ISBN” or “Do You Really Want To Be Doing This?”
by Rick Hautala

Let’s look at the situation. Literally there have to be millions of people who say they want to write a book. I regularly get letters, phone calls, e-mails, or personal approaches from people (usually at book signings, which is one reason why I don’t do many signings), asking me to write their story with them. The idea is simple. They have a “great” idea, something way better than anything that’s being published today, and they’re more than willing to share their idea with me. My part in this, at least the way they see it, is easy. All I have to do is “write it for them,” and then we’ll split the money fifty-fifty.

Sounds easy, huh?

Especially for them.

They have no idea what writing a novel really entails. Or maybe they do. Maybe they’ve tried and failed. In any event, if they keep writing, they’ll probably end up reviewing books for Amazon.com., slamming the works of others … under a pseudonym, of course, or using no name at all except “a reader.”

And these are just the people I meet.

No doubt every published author has met such people.

So every year, I’m sure there are literally millions of people who say they want to write a book (or screenplay—I hear that a lot lately). Of that number, a tiny percentage of them actually start writing, and of that number, an even smaller percentage of them actually finish the book. Of those books that actually get finished, a very small percentage is any good. And even of the ones that actually are any “good,” I’m sure only a miniscule percentage is publishable … that is, if the person has enough literary market savvy to jump through the hoops of finding some way to get their manuscript to an agent or publisher (that’s a whole ‘nother story).

Then the odds really start stacking up against you because of all the books published, only a small number actually get promotion and succeed. Most of what’s published sells so poorly, in fact, that 1) the publisher declines to publish the author’s next book (if the author has the determination to go through the ordeal of actually completing a sophomore effort), or 2) the author decides the writing business doesn’t love him or her enough, and gives it up to find a job much less demanding but a lot more remunerative … with a steady paycheck and benefits, no less.

So how in the name of all that’s good and beautiful does a writer actually go about making a living at it?

I’m not talking about those authors who have a day job and devote any and all available off hours to the task of writing. And I don’t mean those writers who have a trust find or a gainfully employed spouse or life partner who is willing to support them in their chosen calling (and pay for their medical benefits). I’m talking about that small percentage of people who can’t stop writing no matter what. It “drips out of my head,” as my friend Glenn Chadbourne is fond of saying. If some people aren’t writing, they’d be up on the roof of a building with a rifle and scope. I pity them partly because I’m one of them, and I know their pain.

So even if you beat all these odds, even if you’ve done what most people only talk about doing when they’re drunk (and I’m NOT talking about dating Jennifer Aniston), what are your chances of actually making any kind of living writing books?

Okay. There are those select few whose first book “gets noticed.” They have the “hot” book and they get the push from their publisher, so they get the astronomical sales. Then they get the movie deal and the multi-million, multi-book deals with one of the best publishers in the country. Their first book may even make it onto the New York Times bestseller list (but a lot of books that are lucky enough to get that push don’t make it onto the lists). These are the select few, and the odds are better, I think, that you’ll get hit by lightning (although that wouldn’t be nearly as much fun).

Then there are the rest of us—the working writers in the trenches who don’t have the mega-deals, who don’t have the movie deals, who don’t have the financial backstop, but who do have to write and who do have a readership. Sure, that readership would move on and find someone else to read if our next book never came out. That readership also has a handful—sometimes a very large handful—of “favorite” authors, many of whom are in the same boat. Not many readers would miss out if our next book was never published, and what do you do if your last book didn’t sell so well?

Oh, it may have been a perfectly fine book. It may, in fact, have been the best book you’ve written to date. (Aren’t they all?) But for whatever arcane reasons, sales of your last book were … let’s say, “disappointing.” Your career path is going down what I affectionately call the “death spiral.” That’s where the sell-through our each of your books is progressively smaller, so the publisher prints fewer and fewer copies of each successive book until the projected print run for your new novel is so insignificant the publisher tells you they’d just as soon not put it out. “Good luck placing your book elsewhere.”

If you don’t take the route of doing work for hire (novelizations or other such projects—and that’s also a whole ‘nother story), and if you have a good working relationship with a publisher and a sympathetic editor), short of quitting this demanding business, you might consider putting your next book out under a pseudonym.

I’m sure there are many reasons for authors to use a pseudonym. Some authors start out publishing under a pseudonym because they want to mask their real identity, like Zorro or Batman. Or an author may be so prolific he or she doesn’t want to glut the market with too many books with his/her name in any one calendar year. So they come up with a new name. I’m thinking Nora Roberts writing as J. D. Robb, and Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman.

On a much smaller scale, that’s pretty much what prompted me to start publishing under my pseudonym A. J. Matthews. For personal reasons I refuse to go into, I had stopped writing for about a year. By the time I got back to it, I had a backlog of books (The Mountain King, The Hidden Saint—my Poltergeist: The Legacy novel, Bedbugs, and The White Room) lined up to be published. That, and the fact that my previous publisher was not supporting my books the way they used to, made putting The White Room out from Berkley under a pseudonym a no-brainer.

A pseudonym offers a writer a whole new lease on life. You have no track record. There’s no history of “disappointing” or declining sales. You’re tabula rasa. I’ve said it jokingly … well, okay—you caught me—only half-jokingly … that perhaps having two “half-assed careers” could add up to one “full-assed” career, and that’s the beauty of using a pseudonym. You have a fresh start. You can use your new name to publish books that are uncharacteristic of your previously published work, or you can use the pseudonymous books as a way to get into print books you just have to write. Either way, you have more books out in the marketplace, earning more income, and who knows? Maybe one of them will finally be the one to hit big?

So if you’re one of the very small percentage of people who wants/can/and does write novels, and if you find you want to keep doing it (or are unable to stop—an entirely different situation), you might find that a pseudonym is a good outlet for work that’s been building up inside of you. Otherwise, you might head on down to the hardware store and buy a rifle and scope.

And I’d hate to see that happen!