What an Intermediate Writer Needs to Know

By DeAnna Knippling 

I blogged earlier about what a beginning writer needs to know.  At least, that was the title.  Really it was a collection of what I learned (or should have learned) as a beginning writer, combined with what I observe from other beginning writers now, the struggles that they go through.

And now for intermediate writers.

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What makes an intermediate writer?  How do you know that you’ve moved on from beginner status?  Do you need to master everything on the beginner list?  (Even master writers haven’t mastered everything on the beginner list.)  No, what seems to happen is that an intermediate writer is born one morning when they wake up and say, “I am incompetent.  I am completely and utterly incompetent.  Although, admittedly, not as incompetent as Jane Doe over there who wants to tell me all about the novel she's going to write someday.”  Beginning writers seem inordinately cocky and arrogant.  The life of an intermediate writer is filled with rejections, self-doubt, and redefinition of what one previously thought of as strengths.

I’ve seen a lot of people stall here with some variation of “But I’m doing everything the writing books are telling me; why am I not selling?” or “I just don’t have time anymore.”

In no particular order, what I’d advise an intermediate writer to do and learn:

1. Look up the Dunning-Kruger effect again.  Understand that a loss of confidence does not necessarily reflect a lessening of abilities.  It gets better.
2. Deliberately experiment with different genres, both in reading and in writing.
3. Looking at stories from different perspectives is often beneficial, both in asking other people to read your work, and in reading them out loud or in a different format or font.
4. Heinlein’s rules are practical instructions rather than an ideal to be strived for at this point. 
5. The focus changes from “learning the rules so you can break them” to “learning control.” 
6. What once seemed a strength now seems like a particular weakness.  It’s all relative.
7. Jealousy may become a serious, career-killing problem.  Several considerations:  Is this person a hard-working writer who obviously spends a lot of time putting words on the page?  Is this person being coached or edited by a much more skilled writer?  Has this person retreated from the writing world since their one big hit?  Is this person using a ghost writer?  Identify the person involved with the greatest amount of skill and study their work. 
8. “Craft” and “skill” are excellent watchwords--at this point.  Beware of any writer who spends more time talking about art than technique--at this point.
9. The working definition of a story tends to be, for now, “a collection of story elements that don’t suck.”  Characters that don’t suck plus setting that doesn’t suck plus plot that doesn’t suck, etc., etc.
10. Steal from life.  You’ll rarely get caught.
11. Focus on becoming a working writer:  work.  Everything you write should be treated as part of your profession.  Do not turn in sloppy, late, unclear work.  Blogs, query letters, synopses, stories, social media, interviews, appearances:  all your work should be done in a timely, professional fashion.  As often as possible, prove yourself reliable, agreeable, willing to learn and take feedback.
12. Continue typing in material and testing it with various methods of analysis.  The question to answer, at least on a subconscious level, is:  Why do I like this so much?  or, from a darker perspective, Why am I so jealous?
13. Build writing speed.
14. Start working on releasing any dependence on editing and re-editing and tweaking and quite possibly editing again, well, a revision would be nice, there’s always another typo to find or another mistake to fix, ha-ha, of course I haven’t submitted this yet, it’s only been seven years, are you kidding?
15. If you have not involved yourself in your local writing community, consider doing so.  Feel free to retreat from it as necessary.  You will take different things from the community at different times:  for now, focus on learning practical information and on meeting people who are as driven as you.
16. Be kind rather than honest with feedback to people who are not begging for criticism.
17. Beg for criticism, but do not respond to it.  Say “thank you,” even if thanks are unwarranted in this particular instance.
18. Areas of interest:  

• Openings
• Closings
• Scenes
• Conflict
• The wide variety of ways any given beginner’s element can be addressed
• Atmosphere/mood/theme/emotion
• Style
• Finding weaknesses or missing pieces from your beginner’s journey and ameliorating them

  19.  Don’t pretend to be an expert, but people are always desperate for honest information.
  20.  Continue to maintain your health, relationships, and sanity on a daily, practical basis.  Stories are an addiction; expect nightmarish withdrawal symptoms if you manage to work up a habit.

I was constantly swamped with the mosquitoes of doubt during this period--I can’t stress this enough.  This is something that can only be pushed through by work.  If I had stopped to think about art for art’s sake, or whether I was making anyone’s life any better for having read my stories, I would have stopped writing.  Put your head down in the weeds and write:  that’s about the only thing that will get you through this period.  Be a worker, not an artist; keep dreaming of large and wonderful things, but put your nose to the grindstone, blindly and unceasingly.

Here are some of my favorite reading  and research suggestions for intermediate writers:

• The Copyright Handbook, Nolo Press
• NaNoWriMo
• Save the Cat!  by Blake Snyder (the whole series)
• 2K to 10K:  Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love, by Rachel Aaron
• 45 Master Characters, by Victoria Lynne Schmidt
• Wonderbook, by Jeff VanderMeer
• Techniques of the Selling Writer, by Dwight V. Swain
• Anything by Karen Elizabeth Gordon, but especially The New Well Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed
• GMC: Goal, Motivation, and Conflict, by Debra Dixon
• Story Engineering, by Larry Brooks
• Hooked:  Write Fiction that Grabs Readers at Page One & Never Lets Them Go, by Les Edgerton
• Any Internet search for “craft writing books” or “craft writing blogs”
• Books by publishing writers on how to sell work in your genre
• The Dummies/Idiots guides related to writing
• Duotrope.com, Ralan.com
• The website Preditors & Editors (yes, it’s spelled like that)
• Following or friending your favorite living authors on social media
• Setting up your own blog, not named after your first novel
• Make sure to have watched and studied the following movies:  The Fugitive.  Star Wars (the original one).  The Princess Bridge.  The Avengers.  Fight Club.  Titanic.  Thelma & Louise.  They will come up repeatedly in classes and discussions

What are yours?

I Just Finished a Short Story! What next?

By DeAnna Knippling

(Editor's Note:  This post is in response to a reader request.  We do listen to you!)

So you’ve written a short story. You’re not sure whether it’s any good. You’re not sure whether it

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matters if it’s any good. You’re not sure whether you need to cut your story down to a specific length, or to pad it out. Should you send it to a professional editor? Or should you just delete it? Is it really even a short story? You’ve asked yourself so many questions and done so much research online and head so many conflicting opinions that it doesn’t even matter anymore.

First: whatever choice you make, it’s the right one.

Whether you decide to submit or not submit, where to submit, whether to self-publish; those are choices that nobody else can make for you. How do you make those choices? Trial and error. Lots of error. Whatever choice you make will be a learning experience, all right.

Second, some practical suggestions:

• Use standard manuscript format. One, it’s more professional. Two, you might as well make the process a no-brainer. Three, if you format all your stories the same way, you’ll start seeing paragraph pacing better. Six huge paragraphs in a row become blatantly obvious. And for goodness’ sake, do backups and save your files with a different version number every time you open it. 
• Filter your readers’ feedback down to two things: satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Most readers will tell you they like or don’t like something...then proceed to give you a reason for that that has nothing to do with the real strengths or weaknesses of the story itself. 
• Decide whether you’re going to submit to markets or self-publish (a discussion beyond the scope of this blog post). The easier, lower-risk choice is probably submitting and will thus be the focus of the rest of this blog post. 
• Find your short story markets. I use Duotrope.com, because I have to track a lot of short stories. But I hear good things about Ralan.com and the forums at absolutewrite.com, or you could check out the current Novel and Short Story Writer’s Market from Writer’s Digest. You could also check out the websites of the markets listed in any reprint anthology (e.g., a Year’s Best collection), or, as a last resort, get involved with the short story community for your genre(s) and read the markets yourself. <sarcasm>
• Write up a template cover letter. I recommend using standard business format, even in email. First paragraph: States that you’re sending such-and-such story, at so many hundred words. Second paragraph: Brief publication credits and/or bio of relevant-to-writing details. Don’t provide a synopsis unless requested. 
• Pick a short story market and research the editors’ names and titles, the types of stories they’re looking for (read an issue or two), and any wonky formatting requirements, like straight quotes. If you don’t know how to switch to straight quotes or what straight quotes are--look it up. You’ll need that feature fairly often. 
• Skim through your story one last time, not to edit but to make sure you’ve done a spelling and grammar check and that you have the right version. 
• Assemble and send your short story package--cover letter and short story--as instructed by the submission guidelines of your market. 
• Track your submission, either in a spreadsheet of your own, on a site like Duotrope, or both. You need to know a) where you sent the story, b) when you sent it, and c) when the panic date is. The panic date is about thirty days after that market's estimated response. If the market doesn’t give an estimated response time, then I’d go for 180 days. Send a query letter to the query address (if there is one) after the panic date. If you don’t hear back thirty days after that, send them a note withdrawing the story and move on. 
• Keep sending out the story and getting it rejected. When it comes back in, send it out again. Don’t edit it unless you plan to delete and rewrite. Given a choice between writing new words and fussing with old ones, you learn more with new ones. 
• When you get accepted, look over the contract. I’m not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that any short story market that tries to get more than the rights to publish the story in the formats in which it currently publishes is writing a sloppy contract. You don’t have to turn down the contract; just say that you aren’t interested in selling translation rights or movie rights or audiobook rights or whatever and make them update the contract. Read The Copyright Handbook, which is the legal guide to covering your butt as a writer. This is not optional. 
• Keep an eye out for when the rights revert to you. Two years seems about the maximum for the current short story market. You get to sell short stories as many times as you can get away with it. You have to call them reprints, but if you want to sell them after your rights have reverted, more power to you. And -- perfect time to self-publish, if you’re into that kind of thing. The Copyright Handbook, I’m telling you. It’s there to help you make money. 
• Don’t work for free until you’ve exhausted the paying options. “Exposure”.  It’s the reason that writers, artists, and musicians have such problems making a living at their profession. Please try not to contribute. Ironically the places that pay in “exposure” have the least amount of “exposure” to give. 

Third, a sense of perspective about short story submissions: you’re going to get rejected. A lot. More than a dozen times per story, easily. And editors, no matter how much they complain about the quality of the submissions they get (the really good ones don’t), know all about the learning curve, and how much work it takes to get to be a professional. So if you’re worried about submitting a bad story--well, I won’t tell you not to worry. You will. But the good editors just blow the bad stories off. Besides, it’s often the stories you hate that sell the quickest.

 And finally, no regrets. You wrote, you finished. Send it out, publish it, and keep working.  No matter what else happens, you're ahead of every single wannabe out there who has an idea for a story.  Plus it all gets easier as you go.  Not soon.  But it does.

About the Author: DeAnna Knippling started freelancing in May 2011 and wouldn’t be able to do it without her wonderful family and friends, especially her husband. In fact, she owes a lot to Pikes Peak Writers for helping her be a better writer, especially through the Write Brains, both in the lectures and in meeting lots of other writers.

Her reason for writing is to entertain by celebrating her family’s tradition of dry yet merry wit, and to help ease the suffering of lack of self-confidence, having suffered it many years herself. She also likes to poke around and ask difficult questions, because she hates it when people assume something must be so.

For more kicks in the writerly pants, see her blog at www.deannaknippling.com or her ebook How to Fail & Keep on Writing, available at Smashwords, B&N, Amazon, and OmniLit.