My Writing Progress

This has been a good week for writing. After feeling stuck and unfocused for about three weeks as I settled into my new home, I am finally making progress on my novel again. I'm trying to flesh out four scenes that a reader in Paris suggested could be emotionally deeper, and this week I've made progress on two of them. One of those is my incredibly troublesome first chapter. This time around, it was youtube that helped me out. I set part of the chapter in a cockfighting arena (my novel's called Rooster), and there was some very illuminating (and very sad) footage on youtube about this subject. I set some videos to play and just wrote while I watched them as if I were simply documenting what I saw. The 500 words or so will probably reduce down to a few sentences, maybe less, but the most important thing is that it helped me move forward again, and I think I have some authentic details.

I also had an exciting lunch on Wednesday. Mary Yukari Waters, the writer I've raved about on multiple occasions here, met with me in a great little restaurant called Hurry Curry. I'm going to interview her for this blog and for, The Los Angeles Review, Upstairs at Duroc SmokeLong Quarterly, and this first conversation was very illuminating. Plus, she offered to give me a blurb on my book if I never need it!

The Los Angeles Review officially accepted "Red Man, Blue Man" and a small literary magazine in Paris called Upstairs at Duroc accepted a piece of flash fiction I wrote called "Enchantment." They actually asked me to do a public reading at the publication party, but alas, I'm here and they're there.

SmokeLong and the Merits of Online Publishing

Some of you may know that I'm a staff editor for an online magazine called SmokeLong Quarterly. The weird name comes from an old Chinese term used to describe short short stories (under 1000 words) that can be finished during a cigarette break. A couple of my stories had been requested by them a few years ago, and last year, as a result, they asked if I would join the team and help them sort through the hundreds of submissions they get every week.

Our latest version just came out yesterday, so I wanted to give a little plug. But, I also wanted to talk about the merits of online publishing. Agents and grants will often give less value to stories that have been published online. For one thing, online magazines have more space for less money, so technically they don't have to be as selective. Online magazines are also newer, so they have not had the chance to build a reputation yet.

But, online publication has its advantages. I was skeptical at first. As soon as my story came out, though, I was really surprised by how valuable this publication was. Agents may only be looking at big print names like Ploughshares, Manoa, or Zoetrope: All-Story, but the average person is more likely to learn more about you from the internet. When my story was published, within weeks it was the top hit you got when you Googled my name, swamping out the records from my previous five years of scientific research. As a result, two blogs ended up liking the story and posted links to it on their blogs. These were people I didn't know, so they were helping to get my name out into the world without my having to ask them. In 2008, SmokeLong got over one million hits on the internet, with nearly 90,000 unique viewers. That's a lot of readers.

Nowadays, I think online publishing is getting more respect as some publications have been around for a few years. SmokeLong is going on six, and there are other publications that I really admire like FriGG and Noo Journal. These places have editors that usually volunteer their time (like me) and who write themselves. They tend to take care in their readings and, because they make no money, they are doing it to help promote writers. SmokeLong reviews everything anonymously and several editors read through the story before almost all decisions are made. We also interview every writer who gets published in each issue. It's some nice exposure.

Of course, it's important--if you are trying to publish through mainstream publishers--to also get the agent. For me, I work on having stories that will help my query letter look good and stories that will be read by as many people as possible. That means publishing both online and in print.

Tips for Writing First Paragraphs

Figuring out how to start your story is one of the hardest challenges when you are revising your work. If you've been reading about publication trends, you've probably felt threatened by the importance of that first paragraph, how it is your only chance to win a reader over and get their attention. Without that perfect opening paragraph, publishing is hopeless! I'm sure this is true to some extent, but I wanted to share some less stressful advice on how to think about your novel first paragraphs.

I'm a staff editor for the online flash-dedicated SmokeLong Quarterly. (We had over 88,000 unique visitors to our site in 2008.) I'm also a regular at book stores and libraries, often perusing books I've never heard of before. When I approach a new story (our submission process keeps the authors anonymous) or a new book, rarely do I make any sort of decision based on the first paragraph. Titles matter. Covers matter. (I'm just being honest.) And, usually, I'll read three to five random paragraphs throughout the work to get a feel for the quality of the writing. That is to say, that I look at almost everything EXCEPT for that first paragraph. Why? Because the first paragraph has been given so much attention that it is sometimes misleading as to how an author writes and also because, at least to me, so many of them sound the same as writers try to introduce the character, the setting, the time, the conflict, all in a few sentences.

A few months ago, I had the extreme pleasure of having dinner with Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander and Paint It Black and the young adult novel Kicks. Aside from serving some great food -- I particularly remember the beautiful cheese platter -- Janet gave me some great reassurance on writing the first paragraph, something that I admit to completely revising about seven hundred times. Janet said simply, Don't worry about telling the reader EVERYTHING. It's true. Isn't there something enticing about getting into a book slowly, uncovering the details of time and place and character piece by piece? What Janet said really took a lot of pressure off of me, and I was able to cobble together a first paragraph that I was much happier with than I had ever been before.

Another point I want to make about the first paragraph is that the first sentence and the "hook" are not necessarily the same thing. I've seen this get confused over and over again among writers. The hook for a book is more of a the short statement about the story that can be used to capture someone's attention. A girl watches her family from heaven after being killed and cut up into little pieces. A father tries to save his son in a post-apocalyptic world. These sentences get you attention, but they are not the first sentences of the works they describe. I think the term got confused when writers were trying to convey the idea of capturing a reader's interest with that first sentence. Of course one should strive to do that, but keep in mind that the sentence can be a snag rather than a hook. The one sentence doesn't have to inspire the reader to finish the whole book. It only has to get the reader to go to the next sentence, which should make the reader go to the next sentence, until they find themselves unwittingly led to that beautiful end of your story, something that is also challenging to write.

Lastly, you don't necessarily have to worry about perfecting your last paragraph until you have your story complete. This, of course, depends on your writing style. But, if you are like me, your story may evolve so much that what you thought you were writing about in the beginning isn't what you ended up writing about at the end. Your revision may consist of throwing away 30,000 words, just to pick a random number completely out of thin air. The beauty of revision is that you have 20/20 hindsight so that you can tailor your first paragraph to lead you most effectively to your last.