Preface: This essay was written by Tim Waggoner and is reprinted with his permission. I, too, have had a novel deal go bad under slightly different circumstances. My situation was that I sold a short novel on proposal to a seemingly well-funded specialty publisher, got a contract that everyone signed ... and the publisher abruptly went under three months later when their .com parent company started cutting off less-profitable subsidiaries. I had a lot of the same thoughts that Tim expresses here, so I hope that those of you who aspire to become published novelists will find this piece useful.

---

"They decided to withdraw the offer on your novel."

I hesitated, not quite believing what my agent had just told me. "What? Why?"

"The editor said she was no longer 'comfortable' with the book. Whatever that means."

The publisher in question had made an offer on my novel The Harmony Society over a month before. Not for a large advance, but they had seemed enthusiastic about the book. After years of trying to sell a novel, I thought I'd finally done it -- finally was a Writer with a capital W. And now this.

My agent commiserated with me a bit before promising to keep sending the book around. I thanked him and hung up. I knew publishing was a volatile business and that this particular house had a reputation for somewhat eccentric business decisions. But no longer comfortable with my book?

I felt awful. I'd come so close to achieving my dream of being a published novelist, only to have it yanked away from me -- two hours before I was due to attend a local science fiction convention as an author panelist.

Needless to say, I didn't feel like going. Even with dozens of short story sales to my credit, I felt like a failure and a fraud. I didn't want to have to sit on panels and pretend that I knew what the hell I was talking about. Didn't want to have to face friends and acquaintances and have them ask how things were going with my writing.

I was angry at my agent for pushing the editor too hard for more money and better contract terms, perhaps scaring her off; angry at myself for having been dumb enough to believe that the offer had been a firm one in the first place. Angry that I had no clue exactly what had happened to screw up the deal and that I probably never would. But most of all, I was angry that I had wasted so much time pursuing my dream. A dream which had turned around and bit me hard on the ass.

In the end, I went to the con, if only so I'd have some friends to complain to. They were all perfectly sympathetic, of course, but several of them said with a wistful tone, "At least you had an offer."

I felt like telling them the grass was definitely not greener on this side of the fence, but I didn't. I knew they wouldn't understand. I wouldn't have either, not before.

I moped around all weekend, felt miserable, talked about quitting writing, and stuck more than a few mental pins in an imaginary voodoo doll labeled EDITOR.

Then the con was over, my friends returned home, and I was left with only my wife to complain to. But I didn't feel much like talking anymore. I realized that I'd actually been fortunate to have a con to go to. While it hadn't exactly kept my mind off my stillborn book deal, it had, if nothing else, kept me busy and provided some measure of catharsis.

But now it was Sunday night and stretching before me was my first full week as a failure. The question was, what was I going to do with it?

The next day I sat down and started to write another book.

I wanted to get back on the horse, was afraid that I might never write a novel again unless I did. I used an outline which I had completed some months back so that I wouldn't have to worry about developing a plot and characters. I could just write.

And write I did, well over ten pages a day in between teaching college composition courses and caring for my then one-year-old daughter. I took all the emotional energy churning inside me and channeled it into my book, writing like a man possessed. I finished the novel, titled Necropolis, in twenty-nine days.

I tinkered with the manuscript, editing and revising over the next several weeks, then blasted it off to my agent. But now doubts began to set in. What if I'd written Necropolis too fast, hadn't revised enough; what if it was absolute crap?

Sure, my writers' group liked it, but how could I trust them? They were my friends; they knew how emotionally fragile I was just then. I could have probably scribbled out a grocery list and they'd have praised it as a surefire Nebula contender.

The con had taught me that I needed to keep busy, but I couldn't bring myself to write any more fiction, not then. Nearly a decade earlier, I had worked as a reporter for a small weekly newspaper, but I had written very little nonfiction since. Still, I occasionally thought about getting back to it, and now seemed the perfect time.

I threw myself into reading about nonfiction writing techniques and researching markets. I tossed around different article ideas, finally deciding to write a personal essay about my experience with testicular cancer. I developed a query letter, sent it out to fifty magazines, and sat back to wait. A few days later I received an e-mail from an editor at Penthouse. He was interested in seeing the article.

A couple weeks more, and the article was finished and in the editor's hands. The check was welcome, of course, but I had gained something far more important than money: I felt like my words were valued again -- not by my wife or my writers' group, not even by an editor of a national magazine. But by me. And I needed to feel that way, needed it like a man lost in the desert needs a drink of cool, clean water.

I toyed with the idea of saying to hell with fiction altogether and writing nonfiction exclusively, but I couldn't do it. Despite the instability (and occasional insanity) of a fiction writer's life, I loved it too much to quit. I returned to working on short stories and noodling around with novel ideas. My agent called to let me know he liked Necropolis and would start submitting it to editors.

I'm not the only one who's had a book deal go sour on him, of course. SF novelist J.R. Dunn (This Side of Judgment, Days of Cain, Full Tide of Night) once had an editor send him a two-page letter of revision for a novel. Dunn made the revisions, turned the novel in, and it was rejected.

"Naturally you're going to be furious when your book's rejected," Dunn says, "but you want it to be rejected for good grounds, not a minor technical point." It turned out the editor "basically didn't understand what a radio was. I told my agent to drop the publisher and go on to another, and that's what we did." The novel, This Side of Judgment, came out two years later in hardback to good reviews. Dunn says the moral is "not all editors are idiots" and advises writers to "keep banging your head against a wall" until your book finds a home.

Editor Gordon Van Gelder says that having a book deal fall through is "definitely not common at all." He advises authors to research a publisher to determine size, longevity and stability before submitting. Smaller houses are especially precarious financially.

Van Gelder assures that there is "no stigma" for authors who've had book deals collapse on them, and that actually the book's more attractive to other editors because it had a deal before. For instance, Van Gelder once bought a book by Tanith Lee that had been abandoned after the Abyss line of horror novels folded. Not only did Van Gelder think it a fine book, but it was a sequel and he felt Lee's fans should have a chance to read it.

"It was the right thing to do," Van Gelder says, "plus I made some money for St. Martin's in the process."

Happy ending time. My first daughter is now seven, and my second is two. I've long since gotten over my anger at my agent and continue to have a great working relationship with him. The editor who rejected my book because she was "no longer comfortable with it" was fired years ago. I have a full-time, tenure-track job teaching creative writing at a community college, and I've published over sixty stories in various anthologies and magazines.

Given the mergers and downsizing in publishing over the last few years, and the fact that The Harmony Society was a slipstream novel not easily pigeonholed, my agent and I decided to investigate the possibility of placing the novel with small-press publishers. A recent start-up, DarkTales Publishing, seemed a likely prospect. They publish offbeat horror/dark fantasy novels and have brought out work by such authors as J. Michael Straczynski, Yvonne Navarro and Mort Castle, among others. We decided to give them a try.

And they took my novel, with every intention of publishing it. But after a couple of years, the publisher realized their business had grown too big, too fast, and they needed to slow things down. DarkTales would still be bring out my novel, but they couldn't say when. So, after letting out a long sigh, I decided it was off to market once more.

The Harmony Society finally found a home with Prime Books. The advance was less than that offered by the original publisher, but the overall terms are much better. More important, my book is with people who are enthusiastic about it and who intend to do their best to promote it. If the original publisher had brought out the book, while I would've made more money on the initial advance, there would've been little to no promotion, and most likely The Harmony Society would've come and gone without much notice. I'm confident that Prime will do my book justice. Who knows? We might even sell a few copies, too.

Since placing The Harmony Society, I've also published an erotic mystery novel and a short story collection. As for Necropolis ... well, it's still making the rounds. I'm hopeful that one day it'll be published too, but if it isn't, it won't be the end of the world -- or my career, for that matter.

I've learned the most important lesson an author needs to learn: I don't need publication to feel like a writer. The only thing I truly need is to keep writing.

Final note: all the novels Tim mentions in this essay have found happy homes, as well as several others he hadn't even started at the time he wrote this essay.

Labels: novel, publishing, Tim Waggoner, writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

BlogThis!

by Tim Waggoner

Want to write horror? A lot of folks do. The mainstream publishing industry may have momentarily turned its collective back on the genre, but the small press scene is thriving, not to mention the burgeoning number of horror sites on the Web. Unfortunately, a great many stories published in these markets are uninspired (to put it kindly) and just plain bad (to put it honestly). Want your work to stand out from the rest of the lycanthropic pack? Want to start selling to larger and more prestigious markets? Want your horror stories to be so good that people breathlessly race through your prose, barely able to whisper an exhausted, "Goddamn, that was something," when they've finished reading?

It ain't easy. But I've got three tips to offer that will increase your chances of joining the dark pantheon of horror writers who kick major ass.

1. Beware of clichés.

Read widely, both inside and outside of the horror genre, so you can recognize plots that have been done to (living) death. Then you'll know better than to write a story which ends, "And it was all a dream" or "And then he realized as his lover sank her fangs into his neck that she... was... a... VAMPIRE!"

When I was in my teens, I wrote a horror story with the embarrassing title of "Scary Christmas." In it, a young punk torments and kills an elderly man whose ghost comes seeking Yuletide revenge. At least I had the good sense never to send this piece of crap out. Revenge stories are one of the biggest clichés in horror fiction, and beside that, there's no tension in them. Readers know exactly how they're going to turn out every time.

Still, you can make clichés work for you. In my story, "Blackwater Dreams," published in Bruce Coville's Book of Nightmares 2, I tried my hand at another ghostly revenge story. Only this time I took the cliché and gave it a twist. The man character, a young boy who blames himself for the drowning death of a friend, is visited in his dreams by his friend's ghost. He fears the spirit has come seeking revenge, but the friend isn't angry -- he's lonely. At the end of the story, my protagonist has to make a terrible choice: leave his friend to his loneliness, or join him in his watery afterlife.

In my story "Alacrity's Spectatorium," I twisted another cliché around. I took the notion that vampires don't cast reflections and created a dark mirror which displays only the reflections of vampires. What price would vampires pay for a glimpse of themselves in such a unique mirror? More, what would such a glimpse mean to them?

Instead of ending with a cliché, why not begin with one? Start with "It was all a dream" and build your story from there. Why not begin with a man discovering his lover's a vampire and see what happens after that? Or flip the cliché around. What if a vampire discovered his lover wasn't another nosferatu but was instead (shudder) a human?

And try to avoid the most overworked plot in horror fiction, which author Gary A. Braunbeck describes as a story in which the main character exists only to get "slurped by the glop." Stories in which characters are merely props to be eaten, drained, eviscerated, sliced, diced and turned into julienne fries by your monstrous "glop," whether it's a vampire, werewolf or the ubiquitous serial killer. These stories aren't just boring; they're insulting to readers who deserve better.

Probably the best way to avoid clichés is to adhere to one of the hoariest: write what you know. Draw on your own experience for your story ideas, write about the things that excite and disturb you, the people, places and events that form the unique fabric of your existence, which make your life different than any other that's ever been lived before. If you do this, you can't help but be original.

2. There's a difference between disturbing readers and simply grossing them out.

Too many beginners think that writing horror is all about detailed descriptions of disembowelments and gushing bodily fluids. They mistake the use of such elements for artistic audacity and cutting-edge (pun intended) writing. The truth is, though, that such writers are the literary equivalent of the kid who jams his finger up his nose and pulls forth a big old nasty booger so he can wave it in his friends' faces.

Good horror -- like all fiction that truly matters -- is about affecting readers emotionally. True, revulsion is an emotional reaction, but it's a simplistic one with a limited effect on readers. They finish your story about a penis-munching condom, think, Man, that's sick, and immediately forget all about it. You've failed to touch them save on the most shallow of levels.

I'm not saying you should avoid writing about the dark and disturbing. That's what horror's all about, from the quiet subtlety of a half-glimpsed shadow on an otherwise sunny day to the in-your-face nastiness of blood dripping from the glinting metal of a straight razor. But if you are, as Stephen King puts it, going to go for the gross-out, it has to arise naturally from the story itself, to be so integral to the tale you're telling that it can't be removed without making the story suffer.

In Gary A. Braunbeck's novella, "Some Touch of Pity" (also an excellent example of a writer taking a cliché -- the werewolf story -- and putting an original spin on it), there's a flashback detailing a character's rape. Not just the physical aspect of it, but what the character experiences emotionally as the rape occurs. The scene is absolutely brutal, but it's also completely necessary to the story. If the scene were toned down, or worse, removed, the story would be far less emotionally wrenching.

In my story, "Keeping It Together," forthcoming in the SFF-Net anthology Between the Darkness and the Fire, I write about a gay man living a heterosexual lifestyle in a home and with a family that he has created from his own desperate desire to be what he perceives as "normal." But it's an illusion which can't be sustained, and as the story progresses, the house, his wife and young daughter all begin to decay around him. In one scene he has sex with his wife out of a sense of husbandly duty, and since she is well along in her dissolution by this point, their lovemaking . . . damages her. I created this scene not merely to make readers go "Ooooh, yuck!" but to further dramatize the impact of such deep-seated denial on both my main character and those around him.

Remember that extreme elements, like anything else in fiction, are only tools to help you tell your stories in the best way you can. But like any powerful tool, they should be used sparingly, cautiously and always with good reason.

3. Give us characters we care about.

Let me say right up front that this bit of advice doesn't mean that we have to like your characters. It means your characters should be so well developed and interesting that we want to read your story to find out what happens to them. There are characters -- Captain Ahab, Sherlock Holmes, Hannibal Lector -- who aren't always likable (and are sometimes downright despicable) but who are so unique, so fully realized, that they can't fail to fascinate. Compelling characters is what memorable fiction is all about, whether you're writing for The New Yorker or Cemetery Dance.

In my story, "Seeker," which appeared in the White Wolf anthology, Dark Tyrants, I write about a disillusioned crusader who has lost his faith in God and has gone searching for a nest of vampires in order to prove to himself that there is some sort of spiritual aspect to existence, even if that aspect is evil. The plot runs on two tracks. First is a narrative of the crusader penetrating the forest where the vampires live, being attacked by them, and finally dealing with their leader (who I made not merely a vampire but one who has merged with the Wood itself). The second track details, through various flashbacks, the events that caused the crusader to lose his faith and make him so desperate to find a sign -- any sign -- that there's Something More to life.

If I did my job right, readers will be interested not only in the action in the story, but also in the crusader himself, so that when the story reaches its climax and the character's quest is fulfilled in a way he -- and hopefully readers -- never imagined (no, he doesn't become a vampire himself; remember what I said earlier about avoiding clichés? I try to practice what I preach), there's not only an emotional pay-off, but hopefully readers will leave the story thinking a little bit about their own spirituality.

There's a lot more to writing good horror, but if you take the three morsels of advice I've given you to heart, you'll create stories which will not only rise above the generic tales of flesh-munching zombies and blood-lusting serial killers that are out there, you'll create fiction worth reading -- and worth remembering.

---

This article was originally published in EWG Presents, July 1998 and was translated into Portuguese by Ricardo Madeira and reprinted on Terravista in July 2000.

Labels: horror, publishing, Tim Waggoner

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

BlogThis!

by Tim Waggoner

In Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea books, magic is accomplished when wizards learn the true names of things. Discover the true name of fire, and it is yours to command. In fairy tales, if you learn Rumpelstiltskin's name, the evil sprite is banished. Speak of the Devil, though, and he shall appear.

Names have power, especially in fiction. Use the right names, and the characters and places you write about assume added depth and resonance. Use the wrong ones, and your story at best will be forgettable, at worst, laughable.

While choosing the right names is never easy for writers of any stripe, authors of science fiction, fantasy (and to a lesser degree, horror) have an especially tough time of it. Mainstream writers can use the names of friends, relatives and co-workers. They can set their stories in their hometown and use the names of its diner, high school, laundromat, altered only slightly, if at all. But where can writers of speculative fiction go to find names for the characters and places which make up their more exotic dreamscapes?

You can start the same place many expectant parents do -- baby name books. Sure, they're full of ordinary names, but they also contain not-so-ordinary ones. A glance through one of my favorites, Beyond Jennifer and Jason by Linda Rosenkrantz and Pamela Redmond Satran, turned up the following: Adria, Amyas, Diantha, Doria, Garson, Kai, Merce, Sekka, Tamar and Zaraawar. All suitable for a science fiction or fantasy story.

There are other naming resources geared specifically for writers. The Writer's Digest Character Naming Sourcebook by Sherrilyn Kenyon contains, as the cover copy says, "20,000 first and last names and their meanings from around the world." The name lists are separated into categories such as Anglo-Saxon, Dutch, German, etc. I often choose character names by scanning the corresponding meanings. Want your fantasy warrior's name to mean brave? Try Cathasach. Want your villain's name to mean dark? How does Duvessa sound? Horror author Yvonne Navarro has complied a volume called The Reverse Name Dictionary which makes this process even easier.

Another resource that I sometimes use to come up with names is the phone book. Uncommon surnames, when used as first names, often have an archaic or fantastical feel to them. Choosing at random for this article, I found Hython, Krabill, Maddala, Norrod, Uffner ... I could go on and on.

Of course, these names don't work only for individual characters. They could just as easily be the names of alien races, or countries in a fantasy land.

Foreign language dictionaries can be of great help. If I'm writing a medieval fantasy and I don't feel like using the tired term wizard for my magic workers, I might turn to my Latin dictionary and find magus and veneficus. Neither floats my boat, so I start free-associating. What do magicians do? They perform tricks. I look up trick and one of the words I find next to it is artificium. With a little tweak, that becomes Artificer. And now I have a term that not only sounds good, it's more original.

A thesaurus works well for this too. For example, in my novel, The Harmony Society, I wrote a sequence which took place in a nightmarish hospital. I went to my Roget's, looked up hospital, and eventually came across the old-fashioned term fever house. Fever House -- what better name could there be for a place of madness and death?

And then there are those happy accidents when names just come to you. While I was in the process of plotting The Harmony Society, I was listening to the car radio and heard the singer refer to "Brother Nothing." Hot damn, what a great name! I thought enviously. But the next time the refrain came around, I realized I had misheard. Brother Nothing wasn't a name; the singer was actually saying, "Brother, nothing you can do will stop me," or somesuch. Thanks to the perversity of my own subconscious, I had a name for my novel's main antagonist.

Lest you become too self-conscious about choosing names, I'll let you in on a secret. Even such inevitable-seeming names such as Sherlock Holmes and Luke Skywalker seem that way only after the fact. It's a bit of folklore that children will grow to fit their names. It might not be true for real people, but it certainly is for fictional ones. As long as your characters' names aren't strings of unpronounceable consonants or inspired by Saturday morning cartoons -- "Look out, Commander Galaxy! Here come the Sinistars!" -- you should be all right.

Besides, I thought Luke Skywalker sounded pretty stupid the first time I heard it. And I hear the kid's gone on to do all right for himself.

---

This article was first published in the Nov. 1997 edition of Word Museum.

Labels: characters, names, Tim Waggoner, writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

BlogThis!

by Tim Waggoner

Have you ever thought about taking a creative writing class? Working writer or rank amateur, you can benefit from a good course in creative writing -- provided you know what to look for.

Teachers and writers have long debated the value of creative writing classes. Opinions vary, sometimes wildly. Some believe that writing can't be taught and taking such classes is at best a waste of students' time and at worst damaging to a nascent writer's development. Others believe that creative writing classes can provide a valuable educational experience, perhaps dramatically decreasing the learning curve on the way to a literary career.

So which is it?

The truth is, both views are accurate. The outcome depends on a number of factors: the instructor, the focus of the class, your fellow students and -- most of all -- you.

First, let's examine the reasons not to take a creative writing class.

Despite what you might think, instructors don't need any specific credentials to teach creative writing; though large universities generally insist upon both teaching and relevant publication credentials, many small universities and junior/community colleges only require one or the other. I've taught college courses for eleven years, and I've seen English instructors take on creative writing classes only because they thought teaching such courses would be a fun outlet for their own creativity, an outlet sorely needed after teaching endless sections of basic composition. But these instructors had no qualifications to teach creative writing -- no publications, sometimes no experience writing at all.

Other instructors have experience, but it's limited, often to poetry. Since verse is so poorly compensated in our country, poets are forced to find other avenues of making a living. And those avenues tend to be found in higher education. If you're an aspiring poet, this works in your favor. If, however, you desire to write fiction or creative nonfiction, this can be a problem. Instructors believe (or have been led to believe by the university system which spawned them) that having read and studied fiction in pursuit of their degree is somehow a substitute for actually writing the stuff.

(In all fairness, the same holds true for fiction writers who've never written poetry or creative nonfiction.)

One of my creative writing instructors in college was a published poet who readily admitted that his expertise didn't extend to fiction. But that didn't stop him from dispensing advice on how to write it.

Another problem with instructors is that they're often prejudiced against genre or commercial writing. They see anything other than literary writing as inferior hackwork. So not only aren't they as open as they could be to students who wish to write mystery, romance, science fiction, fantasy or horror, they usually aren't well read (if read at all) in these genres. And even if they are broad-minded enough to accept genre writing in their classes, they don't have the knowledge and experience to help students with the specialized demands of genre writing.

Sometimes instructors are hired to teach creative writing classes on the basis of their publishing credentials, which can seem quite impressive, especially to beginning writers (not to mention a naive administration). But a long list of credits doesn't automatically translate into an ability to teach. Often, professional writers can't articulate why and how they do what they do. They see the process of creativity as something mysterious and ultimately impenetrable. These sort of instructors can tell when a student's poem or story isn't working, but they have difficulty suggesting specific revision strategies.

The workshop method is still the primary technique used in creative writing courses, and this means that the success of a particular class depends heavily on the students involved, perhaps even more so than on the instructor him or herself.

Students don't come to creative writing classes automatically skilled at giving feedback. They need to be trained. I've had students tell me that since creative writing is supposed to be completely free-form expression (or so they believe) no one can possibly criticize someone else's work. It's all creative and therefore equally valid. If students aren't taught how to effectively critique one another's work, several varieties of bad, even damaging feedback can occur.

A good creative writing class should be a supportive environment, but taken to extremes, this can result in a class where every story and poem is great and wonderful, and nothing ever needs to be revised. These mutual admiration societies might be warm and fuzzy, but they do nothing whatsoever to help a writer grow.

The other extreme is when all a class does is point out flaws, sometimes quite bluntly and harshly. Classes like this, where students struggle to outdo one another in ripping each other's work to shreds, aren't just unpleasant experiences, they can be downright poisonous.

Then there are critiques which are too nitpicky, leading to a half-hour debate on whether or not someone should have used a comma or a period to end a certain line of poetry. And given that the class contains creative people, it's no surprise that there are critiques which focus not on how you can improve your work, but rather on how the responder would take your idea and write a different story or poem (something I was guilty of back in my college days).

Critics of the workshop technique argue that student feedback leads to group think, to writing by committee, and that it produces generic, bloodless work. You're better off, they say, staying home and writing on your own.

I currently have one student who, despite my urgings, has continually revised the first chapter of her young adult novel after receiving feedback from myself and the class, as well as editors and agents at a writing conference. And each time the writing becomes more labored and less interesting. She's trying to incorporate every suggestion and forgetting what it is that she wants to say. It's not uncommon at all to have individual students with this tendency, but an instructor has to be careful not to allow the workshop process to take over the class so completely that all people are doing is washing garbage instead of moving on to the next story, the next poem.

Yet another problem with workshopping is that some students become addicted to it. They ultimately end up never finishing pieces, perhaps never starting them in the first place. Giving and getting feedback has become their primary creative outlet. This can also happen with creative writing instructors who've taught for a while. The result is a class full of people who don't actually do anything except provide feedback on drafts that will never be anything but drafts.

The final problem with creative writing classes comes from how they are evaluated. Properly, such classes should be graded on a pass/fail basis. If you meet the course requirements -- completed all assignments, participated in feedback sessions, demonstrated improvement -- you pass. However, some classes, usually due to school policy, are graded A through F. But creative writing is difficult to evaluate in this fashion. Assigning a grade of D (poor) or F (failure) isn't too tough, but just how does one rank a story or poem objectively as excellent, good or fair (A, B or C)? In the professional world, critics can't always agree on a work's merits, so how can a single set of faculty at one school arrive at a codified set of guidelines for determining the quality of student work?

The answer is they can't, and grading is often left up to the subjective tastes of the individual instructor. Work is deemed excellent -- or good or average -- for no other reason than because the instructor says it is. If you don't care about grades, then this doesn't matter. But if you do care about them (and most students do), then this can create a class where students try to figure out what the instructor thinks an A story or poem is, and then attempt to write such a story solely to get the grade. You can argue that this situation approximates writing for a specific audience's tastes, and therefore might be a valuable learning experience in and of itself. But such a situation discourages students from experimenting and self-exploration, both vital aspects of education.

After all that, you might well be wondering why anyone in his or her right mind would ever think about taking a creative writing class. But despite the potential pitfalls, there are still plenty of good reasons to enroll, because when a creative writing class is conducted properly, it can be an extremely effective learning experience.

If the instructor is a working professional -- someone who consistently writes and publishes -- students can gain a great deal. The workshop method is partially based on the apprentice model, and apprenticeship has been one of the primary methods our race has used to pass on knowledge throughout history. Together, a skilled master and an eager, willing apprentice can work educational wonders.

The guidance students receive from an experienced writer-teacher can be invaluable. And this guidance isn't limited to feedback on written work. It can take the form of advice on publishing, networking and marketing. Often, professional writers are able to use their contacts to help advanced students who are ready to begin publishing.

The feedback from fellow students who've been trained to respond properly to each other's work can also be quite helpful. Several years ago, a fellow instructor of mine decided to audit my creative writing class in order to get feedback on his poetry. He came incognito, and it wasn't until the end of the course that the other students had any idea he was an instructor. So many people write in isolation that having a group of like-minded individuals to share their work with is a godsend.

Are you someone who's always wanted to write -- or used to -- but aren't able to any more because between work, family and the house you just can't find the time? A creative writing class can provide you with a structured environment and make you write. You'll have specific deadlines to meet and by the time the class is over, you should have several polished pieces ready to send out. So crunched for time that you can't make regular class meetings? Many schools now offer creative writing courses online. Assignments are emailed to instructors and fellow students for feedback and classes sometimes meet virtually in chat rooms for lecture or Q&A. You'll miss out on some of the intangibles of face-to-face feedback, and you probably won't have the same sense of community as you would in a physical classroom, but for many busy students, online courses are proving to be effective alternatives to the traditional classroom experience.

If you're already a professional writer, you can still benefit from creative writing classes.

A class can be a good way for you to stretch your creative muscles. Are you primarily a nonfiction writer? Then focus on short stories or poetry. Even if you don't switch specialties or pick up a second career, the creative techniques you learn will make your nonfiction that much better.

Are you a fiction writer? Then concentrate on poetry. The emphasis on economy and a heightened sense of language can improve your stories on a sentence level, and the focus on communicating profound experience can give your fiction more depth.

Are you a poet? Try creative nonfiction or fiction. Both can provide opportunities for a broader exploration of experience and meaning, plus the narrative techniques you'll learn can be plugged right back into your poetry, giving you a greater range of literary tools to draw on.

The workshop setting can also expose working professionals to other ways of approaching and solving writing problems. Too often writers become set in their ways, used to working with a limited number of well-used (and well-worn) techniques. Beginning writers haven't had a chance to settle into creative ruts yet, and they come up with all sorts of interesting (to say the least!) ways of telling their stories. It's this fresh perspective that can energize a world-weary (and perhaps word-weary) pro.

Suffering from writer's block? A creative writing class could be just the thing to help you break through it. The deadlines, along with feedback and encouragement from others, might well be just the thing to get you going again.

Ever thought about teaching or conducting workshops? There's an old saying that the best way to learn something is to teach it. The opposite also holds true: one of the best ways to learn how to teach a thing is to first be a student of it. Take a creative writing class and pay attention to how the instructor teaches. You can pick up a wealth of information on various teaching techniques and exercises (which you can swipe for your own classes), but it can also teach you about classroom management, and how to effectively -- and often tactfully -- give feedback to students. Plus, your instructor can become a resource for you to consult when you start teaching your own classes.

So what should you look for in a creative writing class? How can you tell a good one from a bad one?

First, check out the instructor's credentials, both publishing and teaching experience. Ask for a bibliography of the instructor's work and try to read some of it before signing up for the class. If the instructor is a published author, has had at least some teaching experience, and you like what you read, then it's time to take the next step.

Meet with the instructor if you can, or speak with him or her on the phone. Ask to see a sample syllabus for the course and the textbooks, if any. Find out what sort of methods the instructor uses to teach creative writing and what sort of goals the instructor has set for the course. Find out what you should get out of the course -- what sort of knowledge and skills -- by the time it's over. During this conversation, ask about the instructor's writing and teaching philosophy, and try to get a sense of your prospective teacher as a person. Is this someone who you think you could work with and learn from? Someone you can see apprenticing yourself to for the next several weeks?

And if you're a working writer yourself, find out whether the instructor is going to feel threatened by having you in the class. Some teachers -- especially if they've had little training or limited experience -- might not be able to handle what they see as a challenge to their expertise and authority. And you definitely don't want to spend a semester locking horns with your instructor in order to determine who's the alpha-writer.

As with anything in life, there are no guarantees. The creative writing course you sign up for might turn out to be a frustrating waste of time or it could be one of the best educational experiences of your life. But if you take care in selecting the right course and instructor, you'll have done a great deal to ensure that the creative writing class you take will be the best one for you.

---

This article was originally published as "How to be Class Conscious" in WRITERS' Journal, July/August 1998.

Labels: Tim Waggoner, writing, writing workshop

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

BlogThis!

by Tim Waggoner

"It's not what you know, it's who you know."

That bit of conventional "wisdom" is often cited by writers to explain everything from rejection letters to the lousy state of publishing. It's not my fault, they think. It's the publishing good-old-boy network keeping me out.

There's no denying that networking is important -- perhaps even vital these days -- in creating a writing career. But too many people hold a narrow view of what networking is. They imagine standing around at a publisher's party at a conference, free drink in hand, schmoozing with editors and agents, regaling them with wit and wowing them with a verbal description of their latest (planned) 300 thousand word opus. But in its purest sense, networking is simply about making connections, and you don't have to be a mainstay of the New York publishing scene to do it effectively.

One of the first ways that writers can start making connections is by taking classes. Creative writing classes are offered through colleges and universities, of course, but they are also sponsored by adult continuing education programs, libraries and local arts organizations. Taking a creative writing class can provide an excellent opportunity for feedback from a (hopefully) skilled instructor, and from other student writers. But it can also provide the beginnings of a writer's network. Your instructor will be able to point you toward resources -- reference books, writing programs and conferences in your area -- which can, if nothing else, decrease you writing career learning curve.

Your instructor should be able to give you advice on publishing, perhaps even provide you with some contacts. But the truth is that many creative writing courses are staffed by instructors who've published little, if at all. Always try to learn something about an instructor's credentials if you can before signing up for a class. Ask to see a bibliography of the instructor's published works, and try to track down and read some of them. Caveat emptor.

But even if the instructor is far from a best-selling author, that doesn't matter much. Because the most important networking opportunity is the chance to connect with your fellow students. From creative writing classes, writers' groups are born. Groups which can continue providing feedback on your work long after the class ends; groups which also can pool their knowledge of marketing and submission strategies.

But what if there aren't any creative writing classes offered in your area? How can you establish a writers' group then? By advertising, naturally. Put up notices in libraries and bookstores. WANTED: ONE WRITERS' GROUP.

Author readings and signings are other excellent networking opportunities. You might be able to chat with the author for a bit and ask questions. (Maybe even more than a bit since signings and readings are notorious for being poorly attended. You may well have the author all to yourself.) You can also meet other beginning writers. Take a notebook with you and, at an appropriate time, announce you'd like to form a writers' group and pass the notebook around for interested parties to write down their addresses and phone numbers. You can also pass out business cards if you have some (and you should).

The Internet has been a boon to writers. You can take classes online and connect with other writers via newsgroups and chat rooms. You can exchange stories for critique through e-mail and of course share those all-important marketing tips.

Author web pages are also wonderful resources. Not only do authors sometimes post articles on how they got started or offering advice to newcomers, often authors' e-mail addresses are also provided. Got a question or two? Go ahead and e-mail an author, though don't be surprised if he or she's too busy to respond. And don't bombard them with "where's my reply" follow-ups. Annoying people is not an effective networking strategy.

Writers' organizations are also great networking resources. Often, you need to have only one pro story sale under your belt to join as an affiliate member. You won't be able to vote in officer elections or for awards, but you'll be entitled to receive the organization's publications, such as handbooks, newsletters, even directories of members (with those handy e-mail addresses). Even if you haven't made a pro sale yet and don't qualify for membership, you can still often purchase and subscribe to an organization's publications.

Conferences and conventions are prime networking opportunities. Not only can you attend workshops and informative panels on writing, but you can often speak with program participants -- authors, editors and agents -- in the hall after a panel or at other slow times during a conference. Come prepared with questions and always bring along a manuscript or two. Never thrust your work upon someone, though. Always wait to be asked.

You can also become a program participant yourself with only a few sales to your credit. I began sitting in on panels at Science Fiction conventions after only having sold a handful of stories. All I did was write the conference's director of programming, introduce myself as a local writer, list my credits, and relate my desire to be on a few panels.

My first convention as a program participant made all the difference in my career. Not only did the other writers see me more as a peer, I was able to find a writers' group which counted several published novelists among its members. I can't begin to tell you how much I've learned from them, and far more important, I made some great friends.

And that's what networking is all about, really. Not cold-bloodedly using other human beings to advance your career. It's about making connections, making friends. I began this article with a bit of writing wisdom. Let me close with another: Good writing happens when good people get together.

Good careers can happen, too.

Labels: networking, publishing, Tim Waggoner, writing

Posted by Lucy A. Snyder | Link For This Article

BlogThis!

Site text is copyright 2000-2009 or as noted. Questions? Comments? Want to reprint/repost something? Send Lucy an email.