DITCHWALK

A Road Less Traveled

Topics / Books / Docs

About / Archive / Contact

Copyright © 2002-2023 Mark Barrett 

Home > Archives for Fiction

The Lost TYOTE Queries

October 11, 2010 By Mark 2 Comments

While digging through boxes recently I found some old rejections I received in response to queries about my short story collection, The Year of the Elm (TYOTE). In looking them over most seemed to confirm what I’ve been saying lately: the industry doesn’t care about the quality of your work, it cares about the marketability of your project. If you’re an unknown writer you’re probably out of luck regardless of your storytelling skills. If you’re a well-known celebrity and can’t spell your own name, you’re probably looking at a book deal.

The majority of rejections I received were photocopied form slips. (My favorite was the quarter-page slip that had been cut from a single sheet of four such notices. How much time had it taken to cut those pages into quarters, and how much money had it actually saved?) What seems abundantly clear in retrospect is that none of those agents made any sort of determination about the quality of my writing before saying no. They looked at the project only long enough to determine whether they could sell the collection, and since short story collections are death in the marketplace that determination took two seconds. Feedback about the quality of my work couldn’t be provided because those agents probably didn’t read far enough along to have an opinion.

Again, I understand all that in a business context. I don’t fault agents or editors for churning through submitted projects as quickly as possible, and I’m thankful to those who sent me any sort of reply. (Some couldn’t even be bothered to do that, despite the fact that I always included an SASE.)  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction, Publishing Tagged With: agents, feedback, query

Burning Desire

October 4, 2010 By Mark 2 Comments

I had occasion over the weekend to dig through some old boxes of scripts and stories I wrote years ago. I found some duplicate copies and stuff I no longer cared about and decided to get right of the dead weight.

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard about writers burning their early works, but it seems to have been a fairly common occurrence. And I can understand the appeal. Fire as metaphor and ritual seems to be a human constant, signaling everything from death to purification to rebirth.

I had about five thousand pages to dispose of, and believe me, I wanted to burn them. I wanted the act, the warmth of the fire, and the ashes. Particularly the ashes.

Because we live in a world dying from greenhouses gasses, such things are frowned upon these days, and recycling is the norm. So I recycled.

But I wanted to look into that fire.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: ~ Tangents, Fiction Tagged With: fire, writing

The Storytelling Life

August 27, 2010 By Mark 4 Comments

If you are interested in telling stories I want you to do something for me. I want you to protect that desire from your friends, your family, your peers, your online acquaintances, the literati, the critics, the publishing world and, most importantly, you.

If you decide at some point that storytelling no longer interests you that’s fine. What’s not fine is to think there’s some metric by which you must measure success. And the last possible metric you should measure success by is money.

I’ve been paid for my storytelling skills more than once. I have been and am a professional writer. But the storytelling I’ve done that has made money is only part of my storytelling life. The epicenter of that life, the core of my storytelling drive, is the mystery and promise of the blank page. It has been that way since I was a child, and I have protected that core from every assault waged against it.

I have not, however, always put storytelling first. For much of my adult life I put relationships ahead of my desire to tell stories, and I have no regrets about that. To do anything else would have been unthinkable to me. If life is short, and it is, then it’s for damn sure too short to be spent satisfying an itch while the people you love go wanting.

There were of course times when I was frustrated. And there were times when I could have written but I wasn’t supported in doing so. But even during the worst of it I didn’t feel as if I had to make a final decision one way or the other. I didn’t have to choose precisely because I never intended to let storytelling go. What I want you know is that you don’t have to choose either.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Ditchwalk.com, Fiction Tagged With: craft, life, storytelling, writing

On Being Cold-Blooded

August 16, 2010 By Mark 3 Comments

For most of the summer I’ve been living across the street from the house where Truman Capote wrote In Cold Blood. There’s not a day goes by that map-in-hand tourists don’t pause to take pictures, and on the weekend sizable walking tours stop for brief lectures from culturally earnest guides. It’s a pretty house, and unique to the area, and if you’re interested in owning a piece of history it’s on the market for $18 million.

I’ve never read In Cold Blood, and don’t plan to. I’ve long known about the horrific murders the book is based on, and a year ago I watched one of two recent movies about Mr. Capote. In retrospect I can only say I wish I’d skipped the movie, too. (Not that it was badly done.)

As I’ve written before, there’s a fairly strong connection between celebrity and literary success. More so than I think there ought to be. There’s also a fairly strong connection between sensationalism and literary success, and again I wish that wasn’t the case. Not surprisingly, combining these two commercial appeals can create a potent mix in terms of expected sales.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: ~ Tangents, Fiction Tagged With: Capote, Truman

The Dysfunctional Workshop

August 10, 2010 By Mark 4 Comments

For the purposes of this post I’m going to break the universe of fiction workshops into three categories. First, there are helpful workshops that teach you something useful. Second, there are boring workshops where you learn little or nothing, but nothing bad happens. Third, there are dysfunctional workshops where you risk damage to your writing soul.

Careful readers will have deduced that this post is about the third category. What it’s not about, however, is legitimizing the self-centered writer — a malady considerably more prevalent in the writing universe than the dysfunctional workshop. There is a ton to learn about writing fiction, and some of the lessons you learn will be hell on you. There will be times when you will be so sure you’re right you’ll bet your life and still be flat-out wrong.

Nothing that follows excuses authorial narcissism. Fiction writing requires an author to constantly debate their own weaknesses and biases, even if only for reasons of self-preservation. Because if you can’t police your own nonsense, others will be happy to do it for you.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: drama, ego, Fiction, workshop, writer, writing

On Willow Street

August 9, 2010 By Mark Leave a Comment

I am a pigeon. A big-city pigeon.

I am walking. Another pigeon is walking behind me. We are looking for food.

When I stop walking you may notice I stand with one foot up, as if I am injured. When I walk, you may notice that I am dragging a small branch with me.

The branch is stuck to my foot. I don’t know why it’s stuck to my foot, but it is. I am dragging it around with me when I walk, and holding it up off the ground when I rest.

I walk in a straight line, just back from the curb. The pigeon behind me wanders. If you stop to look at me and my branch I will walk around you and continue in a straight line.

If you move in front of me again I will stop and wait to see if you leave. If you don’t leave I will wait longer. If the other pigeon sees something to eat lying on the sidewalk in your shadow I will run to the food and eat.

If you come too close I will fly a few feet away. I won’t fly any farther than I would otherwise, but you will see the little branch is not keeping me grounded.

If you stay back just a bit more, I will stop and hold my foot up. If you move around you will be able to see my foot, but you will not be able to see what is keeping the branch attached. It may be a wire. It may be that one of my toes is stuck through a split in the branch. I don’t know.

If you stay where you are, I will stay where I am. If you wait, I will wait, too.

And I will look at you and you will look at me and I will look at you and you will look at me and I will look at you and you will look at me and I will look at you and you will look at me and I will look at you.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Fiction, Non Sequiturs Tagged With: Brooklyn

F&FW: The Most Important Thing [10/10]

August 6, 2010 By Mark 1 Comment

This is the most important thing anyone will ever tell you about the feedback process. Because feedback from readers is the only way you’ll ever know if you hit what you were aiming at, this is also the most important thing anyone will ever tell you about being a writer:

You have to have enough ego to take the crap,
but not so much that you can’t listen.

Nothing else is more important to your overall success. Not your natural talent, not your connections, not luck. Nothing.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: crit, critique, feedback, Fiction, workshop, writer

F&FW: Respecting Readers [9/10]

August 5, 2010 By Mark 2 Comments

Readers are hard to come by, and good, trusted readers are almost impossible to find. If you disrespect your readers or trivialize the effort they put in, they may not want to read your work again. Worse, if they do read for you again they may not give you their honest opinion — either subconsciously, out of a desire to avoid another bad experience, or on purpose, to punish you for being a jerk.

Trusted readers are people who show a consistent capacity for providing useful feedback. Maybe they simply have a good batting average; maybe their batting average isn’t great, but they’re particularly sharp about plot logic or character development. Such readers are rare, and should be treated accordingly.

Trusted readers come in two flavors: people who can reliably respond about the effect a story had on them, and people who can articulate why something in a story didn’t work. The difference between the two is that the people in the second group are almost always writers themselves. While honest readers are valuable, professional-grade writers who are willing to give you feedback are worth their weight in gold.

If you have the choice, get feedback from as many readers as you can before asking for feedback from writers. If you’re confused about any reader reactions, the writers might be able to help you solve those problems, but the reverse will probably not be the case.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: crit, critique, feedback, Fiction, workshop, writer

F&FW: The Advanced Writer [8/10]

August 4, 2010 By Mark 1 Comment

As you grow in craft knowledge you will probably need fewer readers in order to get the same information from your feedback. Where before you may have needed the weight of opinion to convince you that a problem needed addressing, long experience will tell you almost immediately which reader concerns are important — either because they are outright mistakes, or because the resulting effect was not what you intended.

Too, as your craft knowledge grows, you may be able to get as much out of a one-on-one response as you do from a workshop. Part of this is that you won’t need to learn the basics, and part of it is that you will know how to ask focused, craft-based questions of your readers.

As always, the goal in doing so is never a defense of your work, but rather trying to determine whether and why an intended effect failed, or why a reader was brought up short by something you wrote. Unless the issue is one of editing (typos, syntax, grammar, etc.) the issues readers report are almost invariably sourced not at the location of the confusion, but somewhere else in the story. Learning how to identify the source of a problem from feedback about the effect of a problem is the goal, and being able to do so consistently is a practical definition of mastery.

When you have reached this level of expertise you will still need readers, but you will probably not need a formal or large workshop in order to gauge your own work.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: crit, critique, feedback, Fiction, workshop, writer

F&FW: What To Give [7/10]

August 3, 2010 By Mark 1 Comment

Whether you’re in a workshop or not, giving feedback on other people’s stories helps you as a writer. A key question involves the formality of the response you give, and here my views are decidedly aligned with writers and others who focus on craft, and decidedly against critics and others who focus on meaning or worth.

For example, here’s a blog comment I wrote on a site a few months ago, on the subject of ‘critiquing’:

I don’t disagree with anything you say here. It’s a good introduction, and particularly so because you guard against giving the reviewer authority. Every writer will define themselves by their ability to listen to and sift responses. And of course that’s one of the benefits of a workshop: you can have confidence that issues that affected the majority are substantive simply because of the number of people agreeing on a point.

The one thing I might add here is that over my writing life I’ve de-emphasized the formality of the critiquing process to the point that I no longer even use that word. Why? Because the word is both formal and critical, and I find that both of those aspects of the reviewing process tend to goad the reviewer into responding as a critical authority.

When I respond to something, or offer to respond, I simply promise feedback. It’s a useful descriptor that imposes no weight of responsibility or attitude on the process. Too, because almost all feedback is useful, it allows for anyone to contribute — and there is always a shortage of readers. (To say nothing of trusted readers.)

If you’re a beginning writer and you have the opportunity to respond to someone else’s work, take it. Don’t worry about formal responses, don’t try to explain the author’s story to them and don’t try to write it for them. Just read the story, note your own reactions to what’s happening, and report those reactions.

Why is this important? Because what a writer is trying to do is create specific effects in your mind. Only by reliably reporting your experience with a story will the writer know if those effects were achieved. The job of the writer is to figure out why the intended effect may have failed in your particular case. Your job as a reader is to tell the truth of your reading experience.

This is one area where workshops tend to complicate the feedback process because of the social dynamics involved. Nobody wants to come off like an idiot in a roomful of their peers, and more than a few people will be determined to come off like geniuses. Not only does having the floor lead to words like ‘verisimilitude’ and ‘anthropomorphism’ being used more in a twenty-minute span than you will ever hear them used during the rest of your life, it prompts readers to pontificate about everything from the comma to the meaning of life, none of which ever really helps fix the story.

As a reader, if you genuinely believe you know why you had trouble with a work, go ahead and give your reasoning. But remember: the most important thing you have to give to any writer is your honest reaction. If a writer doesn’t have the craft knowledge to judge and act on what you’re saying, the complexity and detail of your analysis probably won’t matter.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: crit, critique, feedback, Fiction, workshop, writer

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • …
  • 9
  • 10
  • 11
  • 12
  • 13
  • …
  • 17
  • Next Page »