Today’s post is something of a reminder to myself, as this spring I’m writing to spec a little more aggressively than I normally would. That means I’m keeping an eye out for calls for certain kinds of stories, ideally in publications that will carry the sort of cachet my university will recognize. I find that writing to spec–writing for a specific audience or venue without any guarantee the piece will ever see the light of day–keeps my creative juices flowing, and in many cases it helps me to drain my perpetually overfull Stories to Be Written folder.

I heartily recommend writing to spec when you can, especially when it seems your brainpan feels a little on the dry side. But I offer that recommendation with three asterisks.

First, try not to force it. I tend to do well under deadline pressure, and my mind likes to tweak, twist, and recombine ideas, which usually means I can come up with a good fit for a collection or a special issue on fairly short notice. There are times, however, when I recognize that my idea isn’t especially interesting or original, or when the topic involves an expedition well outside my wheelhouse. Sometimes it’s energizing to face and embrace that sort of challenge, but it’s also worthwhile to recognize that there are stretches in our lives when we’re just not ready. If you fiddle with an idea or start drafting a story and it just doesn’t seem to be working for you, it’s well worth saving the file and setting it aside for some other time. and you can be sure that another call for a special issue is somewhere on the horizon.

Second, going in it’s worth knowing that even a very fine story might not find a home at the destination you have in mind. This piece, for example, was written in response to a specific call, but the length of it, my sense that I didn’t have many profitable ways of expanding it, and a few other variables made me realize I’d probably have a hard time revising it or finding a home for it elsewhere. It’s not a bad idea to write with open eyes, knowing that your story (while tailored to a specific call) is best left open enough to travel well. One collection I’ve submitted to, for instance, has received 240 entries for about ten spots, per the editor. I wrote that story, however, with enough circumspection so that I can put it back into rotation easily if it doesn’t fit into one of those vacancies. It’s determinedly tailored to suit the needs of the collection, but it stands well enough on its own that I think it will find a spot in a different venue somewhere down the road.

And with that in mind, it’s a good idea to maintain a hopper so that you can sit on a story that doesn’t fit a given collection or special issue for a little while. In the case above, more than 200 writers are going to be left with 200 stories that are focused on a given topic, a given theme. Those pieces will flood the submission market as soon as the special issue is filled. Lots of editors are going to see lots of stories that look a little same-y. Knowing that’s going to be the case, I plan to set my submission aside for several months if it’s not accepted. I’ll revisit the piece to see if I can slough off any content that was tailored to the venue I had in mind, and with luck fresh eyes will sharpen and brighten the story. It doesn’t guarantee I’ll get the piece published somewhere down the road, of course, but I hope it will translate into fewer pieces finding their way into The Folder of Misfit Stories.

Not long ago I finished a draft of a novel, and I plan to leave it in the hopper for a few more weeks so that I can look at it with fresh eyes when I’m between other writing deadlines. The manuscript is far too long, a bit over 115,000 words, but by the time I’m done revising it I expect it will be closer to 95,000.

In On Writing, which is a lovely and valuable guide, Stephen King recommends trimming by about 10% from the first draft to the next. In most cases, however, I find I can trim quite a lot more because of two pronounced tendencies of mine: I tend to use quite a lot of apposition, and I tend to overexplain the narrative state of affairs to the reader. Apposition is something of a stylistic tic for me. It’s never a pure echo or simple repetition, but an effort to add depth and tease out nuance. I’ll certainly snip away some instances of it, save a few words here and there. The real word-count savings will come, however, when I lop off slabs of prose I added to guide the reader.

That’s a hard habit to break. As a professor, part of my job is to reach both seasoned and less experienced readers, so that we can all take a long look at craft. I routinely loop back and recap so that folk can see where we’ve been and where we’re going. As a reader myself I often lean toward mysteries, where I know full well that clues are hidden away in bits of exposition. While it’s perfectly fair game to slip in a single surreptitious hint and never mention it again, I tend to enjoy the reading experience more when missing some critical bread crumb is not the end of my engagement with the game. The authors I like best tend to present the same clues in different guises, so the conclusions their detectives finally draw are foregone, if not obvious.

Deciding what the reader needs, however, always feels to me like finicky business. As the author I always know where things are going, so it can be hard to spot those moments when a little extra connective tissue would do the reader a world of good. At the same time, too many callbacks to passages past can make reading feel like a chore, or–the far greater sin, in my opinion–make the reader feel as though the author doesn’t trust them enough to piece the sequence together.

When I revise this time around I’m going to try to err on the side of respecting the reader, clearing away some of my overgrown attempts to steer them down the main trail. I hope that by doing so I can gently encourage them to look around and enjoy the prose a little more, trusting that the path will still get them to the end, even if they have to cross a few grassy patches. So that’s my little takeaway for the day: when in doubt, cut–but save the file before you do, just in case.

Let us first enjoy one of the more delightful musical productions of the 21st century:

And now let us speak of narrative craft.

Over the past several months I wrote my first novel, completing it on December 14th, just a couple of weeks off my projected schedule. Right now the manuscript is languishing in a drawer (and on about 19 backup USB drives), and I’ll revisit it when I can look at the story with relatively fresh eyes.

In terms of composition, perhaps the most useful thing I did was allow myself to Draft Deliciously, by which I mean self-indulgently, quieting the inner editor who would prefer that I pause and hammer at every word choice and syntactic gesture until I’m convinced that I have it more or less right. You can see a good example in that last sentence: the existence of “thing I did” offends me, but it’s better to get the essential idea down and move along than to sit staring at the screen for five minutes trying to decide if “strategy I adopted” or “element of my approach” will appease my authorial superego, who’s kind of an ass.

What that means, practically speaking, is that my first editorial run will involve more cornstarch than anything else. And cornstarch, in this context, is all-purpose thickener, any additive one might use when the gravy is a little bit too watery. (You know what else you can use as an all-purpose thickener? Instant mashed potatoes. See how I brought that around? They hand out doctorates for that.) For instance, in plenty of places I signal the tone of a moment with a simple expression or gesture: the word “smiled” appears 83 times total in my novel, alongside 26 occurrences of “grinned.” (To my credit, characters only “beamed” twice.) It’s a long document, about 117,000 words in the Delicious Draft version, but those sorts of cues always seem lazy to me. When I go back in for the first edit I’ll do my best to signal emotion with contextual cues to indicate fitting feelz. Instead of “Cordelia smiled,” you’ll get “Cordelia splashed a little Irish cream in her hot cocoa, stirring it in and appreciating the delicate clink of the spoon against the sides of her mug.” I won’t dispense with “smiled” entirely, of course, but I’ll try to use it more sparingly if I’m able to convey the tenor of a scene without leaning on it as a placeholder.

You can probably see the problem with that approach: the manuscript is already overlong, and adding cornstarch and/or instant potatoes will add a couple thousand more words. I’m actually fine with that–but the risk involved is that I’ll bog the novel down with gestures of that kind, the molasses I prophesied back in the header. I don’t have an easy answer for addressing those excesses at this point, and I know already (based on notes to myself I’ve jotted down over the past two weeks) that I’ve got to add a little content here and there for clarity. Plus it’s a horror novel, so I’ll be splashing a few buckets of blood on certain scenes as well. The standard length of a horror/dark fantasy novel (he said, reaching out from a landslide of asterisks) is about 75,000-100,000 words, so I’ve got more than a little work in front of me.

I know that the last run of revisions will find me giving my superego free rein as I Edit Ascetically. With luck that more murderous version of your friendly neighborhood bald man will be vicious enough to whittle the manuscript down into fighting trim. In general I have a healthy mistrust of Future Me, who has historically been fairly unreliable, but I have reason to believe I can at least depend on that guy to be an unrepentant jerk.