Addressing Unreasoning Fear, and Openings

by

In Today’s Journal

* Addressing Unreasoning Fear
* The Value of Openings
* Of Interest
* The Numbers

Addressing Unreasoning Fear

So this excellent fiction writer hadn’t written any fiction for several months before s/he wrote a story for the Echoes of Hemingway contest.

I emailed the writer recently to suggest s/he could keep the fiction flowing by jumping into the Bradbury Challenge and writing at least one short story every week.

S/he responded with “Thanks, good suggestion. The thought excites and scares me simultaneously.”

Here’s my response. I suspect several other writers out there need to be reminded of these things:

Yup. It scares you because of that unreasoning fear I’m always talking about. And that’s 100% critical mind, trying (and currently succeeding) to stop you from writing.

After all, what’s the worst that will happen if you write (and publish) a short story every week?

1. Somebody won’t like it.
2. So what? What about all the readers who WILL like it?
3. Shrug. Write another story.

You know how to write fiction, and you know what great fun it can be. You only need to get over the notion that it’s “important” in some way. You need to let go and just write. …

[If you’re worried about genre and] if you can’t settle on a label to slap on it for publication, maybe go with “general fiction.” Not a big deal. It’s a few minutes of really great entertainment.

As for “After writing for the contest I am excited to just jump into another story, feet first, no thinking,” all I can say is “So do it.” …

Stop screwing around and analyzing everything and just have fun writing stories (short stories and novels).

To me, even the business side of things is secondary or even tertiary. After all, you’ll have nothing to license (or “sell”) if you don’t prioritize the writing.

I’ll always be honest with my opinions, and often bluntly so. I respect good fiction writers too much to pull a punch that needs, in my opinion, to be thrown.

But that nagging bottom line remains: Only YOU can set your jaw and actually write your characters’ story.

I’ve thanked Dean Wesley Smith numerous times for shining a spotlight on Heinlein’s Rules and WITD for me, but every time he says, “Yeah, but YOU did the work.”

And he’s right. So I’m passing that along to you. It’s the other side of the “if you build it, they will come” coin. If you don’t build it, there’s nothing for them to come to.

I really hope this helps. I hope you can snap out of it, take a breath, let go of all the unreasoning fear and whatever other mind games you’re playing with yourself, and just write.

For a fiction writer, there is nothing better.

Here’s the thing:

The only cure I’ve ever found for that deep, aching desire to write fiction and the seemingly endless frustration that accompanies it—and I have to rediscover it almost every time—is to nix the excuses, shut out whatever else is going on around me, sit down, put my fingers on the keyboard, and write.

As far as I know, there is no other cure. You just have to suck it up, take a deep breath, and plunge in.

The Value of Openings

In the recent contest, I rejected only three stories during the first read-through.

Two were not stories. They were more vignettes. Another might have been a good story—it might’ve even vied for first prize—but I couldn’t get through the opening.

The depth of setting description was there—eventually—but it didn’t start until a few hundred words into the story. If I hadn’t been reading for a contest, I would’ve stopped reading before I got to the description.

Before the description finally arrived, I had no sense of whether, as a reader-participant in the story, I and the characters were inside or outside or whether it was dark or light, rainy or dry, wind or no wind, warm or cold, the smells in the setting, any tension, etc.

(I later learned from the writer s/he’d inserted a ‘joke’. I didn’t get it or notice it, and anything ‘inserted’ by the writer is author intrusion anyway.)

When the characters were finally introduced, I eventually realized they were inside a room with a desk. There was even a hint of tension about… well, something. I never did find out what. The writer probably revealed what the tension was about eventually, but by then I was gone.

The point is, I had no sense of the characters’ physical appearance or their clothing or what was going on. Some of that came later, but even after I could sort-of see the characters, I almost immediately lost track of which character was which. The confusion was palpable.

As I keep saying, the opening of any story is of maximum importance.

The PURPOSE of the opening is

  • to ground the reader in the setting by forcing him to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel the physical aspects of the setting and the characters, and
  • to let him feel the tension and the emotion through the physical and emotional senses (and opinions) of the POV character.

In other words, the purpose of the opening of the story is to pull the reader into the scene and ground him enough that he is propelled into the rest of the story.

Of course, you can include jokes and deeper thoughts and themes and all of that in your story if they’re pertinent.

But if you don’t nail the opening—if you don’t invite the reader in and make it impossible for him to leave—chances are good he won’t make it to the jokes and deeper thoughts and whatever else. Just sayin’.

Of Interest

Dr. Mardy’s Quotes of the Week: “Doing Good”

ADVANCED MAGIC BAKERY… Chapter Five BE SURE TO READ THIS, ESPECIALLY HOW TRAD PUBS MAKE MONEY ON YOUR WORK. Corporations don’t exist to help you. They don’t even know you’re out there, and you matter not one whit. Corporations exist to make money

The Numbers

The Journal…………………………… 1020

Writing of Blackwell Ops 46: Sam Granger | Still on the Ghost Trail

Day 1…… 1814 words. To date…… 1814

Fiction for June………………………. 25849
Fiction for 2025………………………. 489301
Nonfiction for June……………………. 12490
Nonfiction for 2025…………………… 138640
2025 consumable words…………….. 621431

2025 Novels to Date…………………….. 12
2025 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2025 Short Stories to Date……………… 27
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)…………….. 116
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 10
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 297
Short story collections……………………. 29

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Questions are always welcome at harveystanbrough@gmail.com. But please limit yourself to the topics of writing and publishing.