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Getting a bead on Stanley Schmidt

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Getting a bead on Stan.

Stanley is the Editor of Analog Magazine.

As you may or may not know, I have been reading some of Stanley Schmidt’s work in order to get a feel for what he might like in a Sci-Fi story.   My theory is that all things being equal, learning about the man’s interest and style of writing could help me to tailor my stories toward something he has an interest in.

The biggest thing I have learned about Stanley is that he is really just looking for a good story.  My assumption is that there are a lot of those, so I need to hedge my chances by writing in a style and maybe even including content that will catch his fancy.

Here is what I have learned so far:

1) Stanley like music. He includes it as a trait of the Kyyra (Alien race) it in his book “The Sins of the Fathers”. Reading online about Stanley and Analog showed me that Analog magazine employees have also formed an informal band.

2) Stan loves to end a chapter with a hook or cliffhanger for the next chapter.

3) He does a lot of telling in his writing.  I am basing this on “The Sins of the fathers” which was written in 1975, so his writing style may have changed a bit since then.  But it’s good to know that he probably doesn’t consider telling ( as opposed to showing) as much of a mortal sin as some fiction aficionados do.

I had recently read Issac Asimov’s “Foundation” prior to reading Stan’s book. It could just be the temporal proximity of the two rattling around in my brain, but it seems that Stan’s writing style is very similar to Asimov. It made me think that  Asimov may be a mentor of sorts for him. There is also mention of a “Foundation “ in ‘Sins of the fathers” which seemed an awful lot like Stanley’s way of tipping his hat to Asimov.

4) Stanley has a degree of inefficiency in his writing. I think we all do, but the one sentence I really keyed off of was when he used a phrase that was something to the effect of  “He changed the subject”, then went on to show the changing of subject in the dialogue.  If you show the action happening, you really don’t need to tell about it beforehand.

What I gathered from this is that Stanley should be pretty forgiving if I inadvertently do something like that.

I am sure there is a lot more to learn about this man, but I am probably better off just working on perfecting the stories I have to tell, and not worrying so much about tailoring my stories to please one editor.

James

A Little Competition

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I have started wondering how I stack up, how I compare to the rest of world writing skills wise, that is.

Comparing is a tough thing to do. You know right off that you likely aren’t the best. If you were you probably wouldn’t feel the need to compare in the first place. In fact, I figure that’s likely true of the top ten percent of anything.

So that puts me under the ninetieth percentile right away.

But then, I have never been published, that is the whole point of this blog, chronicle my struggle to get published.  And there are A LOT of books out there, so if I face the fact anyone who is currently published automatically has me beat, well, that puts me down the ranks quite a bit further.

And I also know that my grammar and punctuation skills leave a lot to be desired. That’s gotta drop me below all of those unpublished English teachers.

But before I hit rock bottom, I realized that there are a lot of people in the world who don’t write fiction at all, and there are illiterate people, and still others who didn’t even graduate High School. I doubt that they’re writing the great American novel.

I would think that makes my fiction better than at least half the people in the world; the ones who haven’t written, the ones who can’t write, and those others who sign their name with an “X”.

Then I remember the idea that my friend Matt put to me one day:

“I think it’s a bad idea for parents to tell their kids that they are better than other kids.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if you start them thinking in terms of a hierarchy, then the kids will have to know, that while they are better than some of the kids, there will be other kids that are better than they are.”

And I always thought a little competition was a good thing.

When Matt and I had a contest to see who could write the most, as in total word quantity in a week,  I won with 14,580 words.  I don’t have a record of what final word count he had, but both accounts were way more words than either of us had previously put to paper in a week.

Yet it still didn’t seem like a lot of words.

I mean, I am sure I could do better if I pushed.  There were two days in there where I spent the evening with friends, and lots of time when I was just too lazy to write.  But it was a weird feeling, that nagging in the back of my mind that while I was on the couch watching TV, or out having a drink, Matt was likely gaining ground on me, pecking away at his laptop.

But before you think that I bested Matt, you need to know that he has ALREADY been published.  Yeah, the check-in-hand kind of published I am shooting for.  And that, my friends, is the real contest.

But then like a lot of things, it’s not really against the other kids, is it?  It’s really me against myself.

And those dammed gate-keeper editors…

James