The dangers of research

One of the pieces of advice all writers get is that, if we want to be published, we have to study the market.  The thing is, when I do that, I come away from the exercise thoroughly depressed.

I got into SF in the 1980s.  I fell in love with the stories of Anne McCaffrey, Mary Gentle, Joan D.Vinge, CJ Cherryh.  I loved Anne McCaffrey's straightforward storytelling style, the richness of her invention of Pern and its people.  I adored Joan Vinge's The Snow Queen.  I turned green-eyed with envy over the incredibly detailed descriptions of life on board CJ Cherryh's The Pride of Chanur, and the hyper-real portrayal of the ship's operating procedures,

Recently I decided to tackle the short story market, and came up against the present-day magazine world.  And here's where I started to despair.  Call me old-fashioned, but I do like my stories to have a beginning, middle, and end.  And I want something to change between the start and end of the story.   I've lost track of the number of published pieces I've read recently that don't follow those basic rules, that aren't really stories.  The beginning never seems to change into a middle, and in some cases there wasn't even an end.  I was left thinking "is that it?" when the story ended.  They're character studies, or little vignettes, the sort of thing a novelist might write while discovering their story or getting to know their characters.  They certainly aren't story in their own right.

So now I have a dilemma.  Should I try to write like this just to get published?  I don't really want to. I like my stories to have a strong narrative drive, and for something to change in them. For me, it's not enough to show a weird planet or weird culture and say "look at this!"  I want to know why you want me to look at it.  What message does that scene contain?

For me, writing has to do something.  It has to make a point, or explore a theme.  So I won't be writing  vignettes any time soon.  And I know that some of my themes are intriguing magazine editors, because they're telling me so in their feedback.  So I'll continue to write stories with a beginning, middle and end, exploring ideas I feel passionately about.  Because that's who I am as a writer, and I'm not prepared to change that.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

Aim for the top

Over the Christmas break I spent several hours updating my list of paying magazines that accept science fiction stories.  It was tedious hard work, but the outcome was a pleasant one.

The first thing I noticed was that there were a lot more magazines to submit to than last time I did a list.  The big difference is that a lot of them are purely digital, or digital first with an anthology or possible paperback publication later.  This makes their overheads smaller, and gives the magazine a better chance of surviving in tough times.

The next thing that struck me was that the big magazines were still there, even after the toughest recession for a generation.  Asimov's, Analog, Fantasy and Ścience Fiction, all the magazines I'd grown up reading, were still there.  And these unchanging bedrocks of the SF short story market still welcome new writers, a reassuring business as usual. 

What has changed is my attitude towards submitting my stories to these magazines. When I first started magazines like Asimov's and Analog were worshipped as gods.  There was a feeling that you could only send stuff to them if you'd been published elsewhere.  They were "big" magazines, too good for the beginner writer.  I no longer believe that advice.  Take at look at their submission guidelines, and both magazines explicitly state that they're always on the lookout for new talent. This is an invitation a writer rarely gets.  It's more usually 'we don't know you, so you're not welcome here'.  So I've changed my way of thinking about these bastions of the SF scene.

I now know my writing is as good as any published author's.  The thing which will bring a sale or not will be content of the story.  Looking back through some old ones, I see how I fudged the science in them.  I didn't try and explain how something worked.  Now I've realised I can't dodge the challenge.  But equally, researching is so much easier now with an iPad and ready access to the vast resources of the Ihe internet.  I can put in the science, because I can easily research it.

I have set a goal for 2015 to submit five short stories each month to magazines. I've done January's submissions, and yes, two of the stories went to Asimov's and Analog.  My mindset is different.  Instead of thinking "why would they be interested in me?" I now think "why shouldn't they be interested in me?"  2015 is going to be my short story publication year.