Writer's Block? Get Someone to Start it for You.

In many of my past blog posts, I have writing about trying to find inspiration. This week, I’ve found a new way to get some inspiration and to submit to a magazine with specific instructions. In my mind, a writer will have a much better chance at getting published if an anthology (in this case) has specific instructions.

I think specific instructions often eliminate many writers, giving me a better chance of acceptance. Also, I think that many writers are just looking for literary places they can recycle their rejected works. If these writers are faced with submitting a piece they already wrote to another magazine versus writing for another magazine, I think they will recycle their old. Anyway, let me get more specific with this inspiration.

I stumbled across it once in the past, but again just the other day. The anthology was calling for works that all began with the same paragraph. I once submitted to a literary review that all used the same line, but never a paragraph. In my past submission, I was rejected, but not with complete failure. They asked me to submit again sometime and told me they enjoyed my style. Ah, hope! It’s nice to see sometimes.

With focusing on my screenplay lately, I have written few short stories. These instructions were calling me to write. How hard could it be to write, when they’ve already started the writing? With a 5,000 word cap, I hammered out a story half of that but in a little over an hour. I actually think that this is one of the better pieces I’ve written in a long time. Hopefully, if you are stuck with writer’s block, you will fair well with one of these pieces too!

Which Words Count?

Reading a massive amount of e-mails this week on a listserv used by the online tutoring company that I am employed by, I picked up quite a few lessons on what I do wrong in writing. When writing creative fiction, I very easily convince myself to go ahead and throw grammar rules out the window.However, I learned by doing this I threw my chances of being published out the window as well.

So what are literary journals looking for that depends so much on grammar? Well, they want to see the writer get to the point. Whether this means eliminating repetition, extra words, or writing in the active voice, doesn’t necessarily depend on the different journal. The reader wants the author to get to the point. The reader wants to see the action happen. The literary journal wants to give the reader what she wants.

Recently, I read The Portrait of a Lady. I realize that I may be going against many in the literary community by saying it was one of the worst books I have read, but I’ll write it anyway. The story moved slowly, contained little action, mostly description, and repeated the same images. Yes, many of the images were beautiful and poetic, but I think they overwhelmed the story for 500 of the 600 pages. I literally yelled at the book “What is your point?!”

Don’t let your story fall into the pit of the yelling editor. Writing in the active voice helps to keep the reader involved in the action, limits the author’s intrusion on the reader, and lessens the wordiness. This has been my biggest struggle. At this point, I am revising my unpublished works, making sure they are in the active voice, eliminating unnecessary words (“that” is a big one), and ridding the paper of repetition. I suggest if you want to revise your rejected works the first thing you do is make sure you are writing in the active voice and not repeating yourself.