Relativity

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Still, once you’ve read all the magazines and books, and watched Tom Selleck tell you about cosmic strings, nothing beats talking to a real scientist. Secret weapon number six is the knowledge that many scientists are SF fans. I’ve never had any scientist I approached refuse to help me. If you don’t know any scientists personally, call up the public-relations office of your local university, museum, or science centre and let them find someone who you can talk to.

  And when you do have your story or novel finished, ask the scientist if he or she will read it over to check for errors. I’d never met Dr. Robert W. Bussard (inventor of the Bussard ramjet starship) or Dr. Dale A. Russell (curator of dinosaurs at the Canadian Museum of Nature) when I asked them to look at the manuscripts for my novels Golden Fleece (which features one of Bussard’s ramjets) or End of an Era (which is about dinosaurs), but both instantly agreed and provided invaluable feedback. Of course, when your story or book does see print, do be sure to send a free autographed copy to anyone who helped you out. But that’s not a secret weapon…it’s just the golden rule.

  Heinlein’s Rules

  There are countless rules for writing success, but the most famous ones, at least in the speculative-fiction field, are the five coined by the late, great Robert A. Heinlein.

  Heinlein used to say he had no qualms about giving away these rules, even though they explained how you could become his direct competitor, because he knew that almost no one would follow their advice.

  In my experience, that’s true: if you start off with a hundred people who say they want to be writers, you lose half of the remaining total after each rule—fully half the people who hear each rule will fail to follow it.

  I’m going to share Heinlein’s five rules with you, plus add a sixth of my own.

  Rule One: You Must Write

  It sounds ridiculously obvious, doesn’t it? But it is a very difficult rule to apply. You can’t just talk about wanting to be a writer. You can’t simply take courses, or read up on the process of writing, or daydream about someday getting around to it. The only way to become a writer is to plant yourself in front of your keyboard and go to work.

  And don’t you dare complain that you don’t have the time to write. Real writers buy the time, if they can’t get it any other way. Take Toronto’s Terence M. Green, a high-school English teacher. His third novel, Shadow of Ashland, just came out from Tor. Terry takes every fifth year off from teaching without pay so that he can write; most writers I know have made similar sacrifices for their art.

  (Out of our hundred original aspirant writers, half will never get around to writing anything. That leaves us with fifty…)

  Rule Two: Finish What Your Start

  You cannot learn how to write without seeing a piece through to its conclusion. Yes, the first few pages you churn out might be weak, and you may be tempted to toss them out. Don’t. Press on until you’re done. Once you have an overall draft, with a beginning, middle, and end, you’ll be surprised at how easy it is to see what works and what doesn’t. And you’ll never master such things as plot, suspense, or character growth unless you actually construct an entire piece.

  On a related point: if you belong to a writers’ workshop, don’t let people critique your novel a chapter at a time. No one can properly judge a book by a piece lifted out of it at random, and you’ll end up with all sorts of pointless advice: “This part seems irrelevant.” “Well, no, actually, it’s very important a hundred pages from now…”

  (Of our fifty remaining potential writers, half will never finish anything—leaving just twenty-five still in the running…)

  Rule Three: You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial Order

  This is the one that got Heinlein in trouble with creative-writing teachers. Perhaps a more appropriate wording would have been, “Don’t tinker endlessly with your story.” You can spend forever modifying, revising, and polishing. There’s an old saying that stories are never finished, only abandoned—learn to abandon yours.

  If you find your current revisions amount to restoring the work to the way it was at an earlier stage, then it’s time to push the baby out of the nest.

  And although many beginners don’t believe it, Heinlein is right: if your story is close to publishable, editors will tell you what you have to do to make it salable. Some small-press magazines do this at length, but you’ll also get advice from Analog, Asimov’s, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

  (Of our remaining twenty-five writers, twelve will fiddle endlessly, and so are now out of the game. Twelve more will finally declare a piece complete. The twenty-fifth writer, the one who got chopped in half, is now desperately looking for his legs…)

  Rule Four: You Must Put Your Story on the Market

  This is the hardest rule of all for beginners. You can’t simply declare yourself to be a professional writer. Rather, it’s a title that must be conferred upon you by those willing to pay money for your words. Until you actually show your work to an editor, you can live the fantasy that you’re every bit as good as Guy Gavriel Kay or William Gibson. But having to see if that fantasy has any grounding in reality is a very hard thing for most people to do.

  I know one Canadian aspirant writer who managed to delay for two years sending out his story because, he said, he didn’t have any American stamps for the self-addressed stamped envelope. This, despite the fact that he’d known dozens of people who went regularly to the States and could have gotten stamps for him, despite the fact that he could have driven across the border himself and picked up stamps, despite the fact that you don’t even really need US stamps—you can use International Postal Reply Coupons instead, available at any large post office. [And those in Toronto can buy actual U.S. stamps at the First Toronto Post Office at 260 Adelaide Street South.]

  No, it wasn’t stamps he was lacking—it was backbone. He was afraid to find out whether his prose was salable. Don’t be a coward: send your story out.

  (Of our twelve writers left, half of them won’t work up the nerve to make a submission, leaving just six…)

  Rule Five: You Must Keep it on the Market Until it has Sold

  It’s a fact: work gets rejected all the time. Almost certainly your first submission will be rejected. Don’t let that stop you. I’ve currently got 142 rejection slips in my files; every professional writer I know has stacks of them (the prolific Canadian horror writer Edo van Belkom does a great talk at SF conventions called “Thriving on Rejection” in which he reads samples from the many he’s acquired over the years).

  If the rejection note contains advice you think is good, revise the story and send it out again. If not, then simply turn the story around: pop it in the mail, sending it to another market. Keep at it. My own record for the maximum number of submissions before selling a story is eighteen—but the story did eventually find a good home. (And within days, I’d sold it again to a reprint-only anthology; getting a story in print the first time opens up whole new markets.)

  If your story is rejected, send it out that very same day to another market.

  (Still, of our six remaining writers, three will be so discouraged by that first rejection that they’ll give up writing for good. But three more will keep at it…)

  Rule Six: Start Working on Something Else

  That’s my own rule. I’ve seen too many beginning writers labor for years over a single story or novel. As soon as you’ve finished one piece, start on another. Don’t wait for the first story to come back from the editor you’ve submitted it to; get to work on your next project. (And if you find you’re experiencing writer’s block on your current project, begin writing something new—a real writer can always write something.) You must produce a body of work to count yourself as a real working pro.

  Of our original hundred wannabe writers, only one or two will follow all six rules. The question is: will you be one of them? I hope so, because if you have at least a modicum of talent and if you live by these six rules, you will make it.r />
  Word-Processing Tricks

  Many writers have tried electronic style checkers, such as Grammatik or Correct Grammar, which are sold either as stand-alone utilities or are included as components of word-processing programs. And most who have tried them have given up on them: their advice is more often wrong than right, and the “errors” they perceive often aren’t errors at all.

  Still, the idea of getting help with revisions from your computer is appealing. Fortunately, you already have all the tools you need: they’re standard features of your word-processing program. Most useful of all is your word processor’s “search,” “find,” or “locate” function.

  Whenever I finish a story or novel, I start a seek-and-destroy run for the word “very.” It’s almost never necessary, and can usually be eliminated: “the alien was very menacing” reads just as effectively as “the alien was menacing.”

  A few other good search-and-replace candidates: “utilize” should almost always be replaced with “use,” “fro” is almost certainly a typo for “for,” “in order to” should be changed to just “to,” and “the fact that” can be replaced with just “that.”

  Next, seek out adjectives and adverbs. The easiest way to do that is with a search for “ly” followed by a space. If you needed an adjective or adverb to modify another word, perhaps you didn’t choose the right word to begin with. For instance, if your “ly” search turns up “really large,” substitute “huge” or “gigantic.” If you’ve found “pounding loudly” substitute the more vigorous “thundering.”

  Next, track down anything you overuse. Me, I tend to employ too many em-dashes and semicolons. I could search for each occurrence and review it in context, but I prefer instead to do a global search for those punctuation marks, replacing them with a highlighted version (depending on your word processor and display, you could replace them with italicized versions that show up as inverse video, or boldface versions that show up in a different intensity, or, if you work in a graphics-mode program, select a different color before each one, and then return to black afterwards). I then scroll through my document, and can see where I have too many of them close together. Afterwards, I just reverse the process, doing a global search-and-replace to turn the ones I’ve left intact back into their normal print attributes.

  Also worth hunting down are exclamation marks. One can exclaim only short words or phrases, such as “Drat!” or “My God!” (Try to exclaim, “But it turned out that the alien planet they were on was really Earth!” It can’t be done, and writing it that way just makes you seem histrionic.) And if you find two or more exclamation marks in a row—Holy cow!!!—eliminate all but one of them.

  One thing you should not track down, though, is the word “said.” Almost all of your speech tags should be of the form “he said” or “she said.” Only beginners constantly look for alternatives to the serviceable, invisible “said.” (For all his virtues, Stanley G. Weinbaum was a beginner when he wrote his classic 1934 story “A Martian Odyssey,” which has a character named Putz ejaculating his lines…)

  Finally, do a search-and-replace to check your profanity, and make sure it’s appropriate for your market. The “Drat!” and “My God!” I used above are okay for a column like this, but if you’re writing real adults in real situations, you may want something harsher. (On the other hand, in polishing my novel Starplex, I realized that it would likely appeal to teenagers as well as the adults I had in mind when I wrote it, so I tracked down all the scatological and copulatory profanity, and substituted milder terms.)

  What else can your computer do to help you? Plenty. Most writers notice during proofreading if they’ve started two consecutive sentences the same way. But it’s also bad form to start two consecutive paragraphs the same way, and that’s harder to spot. Again, your computer can come to your rescue. Set your right-margin to the highest value your program allows (and, if you’re using a non-graphical program, select the smallest point-size for your text that you can), then reformat the document. You’ll end up with almost all of your paragraphs as single long lines, scrolling off the right-hand side of the screen. You can then compare how each paragraph begins. Doing that on the file containing this article would have made it obvious that two consecutive paragraphs above start with “Next.” If you didn’t notice that yourself, this technique is for you.

  Of course you know you should use your spell checker, but—please!—learn to trust it. If it tells you that a word in your manuscript is spelled incorrectly, it probably is. If the spell checker doesn’t offer an alternative, then look it up in a dictionary. I was amazed recently to see a manuscript from an author who has ten books in print in which “congratulations” was consistently misspelled “congradulations.” Doubtless years ago, the first time her spell checker had flagged the error, she’d assumed her spelling was correct and the database lacked the word, so she added the incorrect form to her personal dictionary.

  (Speaking of spelling checkers, one of the most common questions I get asked by Canadian writers is whether they should use Canadian spellings when submitting to an American market. The answer is no: use Canadian spellings when submitting to the Tesseracts anthologies or other Canadian markets; British spellings (which aren’t the same thing) when submitting to Interzone or other British markets; and American spellings when submitting to Analog or other U.S. markets.)

  One thing your word processor can’t do for you is properly count the words in your manuscript. The standard at most publications is to use “printers’ rule,” which counts every 65-stroke manuscript line as ten words, regardless of whether the line happens to be full (after all, the word count is supposed to give the production editor an idea of how much space the piece will take up in the publication). Actual grammatical word counts usually are ten to twenty percent below the value given by “printers’ rule.” If you can set an infinite or zero page length in your word processor, then the line count multiplied by ten will give you the word count according to printers’ rule; otherwise, multiply the number of lines per page by the number of whole pages, add the number of lines on the partially full first and last pages, then multiply by ten.

  Still, your computer’s word count may be your most important motivator. The best way to make it as a writer is to set yourself a daily target figure and not stop working until you’ve reached it (my own is 2,000 words; for most full-time writers, the target is between 1,000 and 2,500). Every few minutes, I do a word count to see how much more work I have to do until I can knock off for the day—which, having now reached that figure, is precisely what I’m going to do right now. But don’t you quit writing today until you’ve reached your own word-count goal…

  Cover Letters and SASEs

  Over the last two years, we’ve talked about how to make your stories better. This time, though, I want to look at the items you mail out with your stories: cover letters and self-addressed stamped envelopes. My wife Carolyn Clink and I recently edited the Canadian SF anthology Tesseracts 6—and we were shocked by how many people didn’t know how to handle these two companions to any good submission.

  Cover Letters

  Most editors expect to receive a cover letter with your manuscript. It should be short and sweet:

  Dear [editor’s name]:

  Enclosed is my 4,300-word short story entitled “Zombies of Zubenelgenubi” for consideration in CyberCanuck.

  My work has previously been published in On Spec and Tesseracts 4.

  The manuscript is a disposable copy; I enclose a letter-sized SASE for your reply.

  Make sure your address and phone number appear in the letterhead (they should also be on the manuscript). And, for Algis’s sake, spell the editor’s name correctly (Kristine Kathryn Rusch used to bounce anything from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction that had any of her names wrong). Also specify the publication you are submitting to—many editors work on multiple projects simultaneously.

  If you have some, list a few publication credits (major non
-fiction credits are okay, if you don’t have any fiction ones). If you have expertise related to the story, you could mention that, too (an astronomy degree would carry weight if you’re submitting to Analog). But don’t pad the letter with meaningless credentials: no one cares if you belong to the Canadian Authors Association (which has no membership requirements), that you workshop every week, or that your mother thinks you’re the new Isaac C. Heinlein.

  If the submission is disposable (meaning all you want back is the editor’s reply, not the story), say so here—and say it again on the manuscript.

  If there’s anything else the editor needs to know (for instance, that the story has been previous published, even in another language), say it. Carolyn and I were furious to discover one of the stories we wanted to take was an undisclosed reprint. And don’t think that just because the story hasn’t been published in English that you don’t have to disclose the fact that it’s already appeared in French—or the converse, of course—or that you don’t need to mention that the story has already been posted on your World Wide Web home page. You must lay out, in plain language, the entire pedigree of the work you are offering for sale.