Tag Archives: Fiction writing struggle

Rejectomancy, where have you been all my life?

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Wow, I can’t believe it has taken me this long to find Aeryn Rudel’s wonderful site Rejectomancy

I’m a guy who landed his first published piece by blogging about the hidden meaning in all the rejection letters I was getting so it amazes me I haven’t come across Aeryn’s site earlier.

Aeryn has this super fun concept of Rejections as a way to show how you are leveling up your skill as a writer. 

You basically score points for rejection letters, acceptance letters and the situations around them — like getting two rejections in one day or whether or not the rejection was a personal rejection or a form letter.

The XP points correlate to different levels which correlate to “spells” (which appear to be still under construction) and to Resistance levels, which have fun names like “Baby Bunny”  and “Adamantium.” 

I love the way Aeryn has taken something like rejection letters, a thing that can be negative on a personal and emotional level, and gamified it into something fun and motivating.  This tells me a lot about how he must handle adversity. I wish I had that kind of attitude!

He also shares his rejection stats < >and has other helpful writing advice such as his Pro or Not Pro, that is the question post.

Go check out his site and leave a comment if you have been a follower or have similar experiences you want to share

  • James

Changing the approach

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I’ve heard that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity.  For fiction writing there is truth to that, as you have to be a bit insane to pursue fiction writing with an expectation of getting paid to do it.

The saying has me thinking about changing my approach to see if I can a few more land sales.

My current process is:

  1. Wait until inspiration strikes (if ever) and write a story
  2. Find a market that the story might fit and submit
  3. Get a rejection then GOTO step 2

A better approach might be to:

  1. Target a market that suits me
  2. Write something appropriate for the market and submit
  3. Get a rejection and GOTO step 2

The new approach requires me to abandon that whimsical, spur-of-the-moment, writing that occurs when an idea for a story hits me.  There is fantasy in my head that all of the great fiction authors operated by writing whatever the hell they felt like. It feels wrong to force myself to deal with the hand-cuffing constraints of catering to a specific market. My creative side wants its freedom, dammit!

But there is also an analytical side of me that likes this surgical approach — dissecting the stories they have bought, feeling through the structure, the language, looking for the fingerprints in the tales that made those first readers and editors salivate like Pavlov’s dogs.

So who is my victim target market?

I have picked out Points in Case. They do funny well and I do like me some funny.  They publish funny lists and I feel like a funny list is a reasonable bar to hurdle; the word count is relatively low so my thinking is that I should be able to come up with list stories pretty quickly.

In practice, however, making a funny list is harder than it seems. As the individual “funny” items are added to the list, you start to question your ability to determine if something is funny or not.  Sometimes things I think are funny are just weird, or worse yet, offensive.

I have already submitted one list story to P.I.C., which was promptly rejected. I currently have another one sitting with them that I like a lot better. Whether or not it gets accepted is up to the fiction gods at this point (and we know how finicky they can be) but, then again, that’s all part of the craft.

Have you tried writing to specific markets before? If so, let me know in the comments how that worked out for you.

-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