{"id":3768,"date":"2006-12-26T12:50:58","date_gmt":"2006-12-26T20:50:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2006\/12\/26\/3768.html"},"modified":"2006-12-26T12:50:58","modified_gmt":"2006-12-26T20:50:58","slug":"items-writing-advice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2006\/12\/26\/items-writing-advice\/","title":{"rendered":"Items: Writing advice"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>In the past few days, I keep coming across various items of advice and commentary about writing.  (The focus here is on speculative fiction and, to some extent, on short stories.)  Here are some of 'em:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Kelly Link on going <a href=\"http:\/\/ccfinlay.livejournal.com\/56645.html\">Beyond Competent and Accomplished<\/a> in your writing. (Courtesy of Charlie Finlay a few months ago.)  Reminds me of Emma Bull and Will Shetterly's advice to our Clarion class to \"fail gloriously.\"<\/li>\n<li>Nalo, speaking as an editor, on <a href=\"http:\/\/nalohopkinson.blogspot.com\/2006\/12\/things-fall-apart-centre-cannot-hold.html\">signals that a story is going off track<\/a>.  Some of these don't happen often in submissions I read, and some don't bother me at all (she notes up top that some of them are her own subjective feelings), and one or two I actually disagree with; but overall it's a good list with lots of good advice.<\/li>\n<li>Keith Snyder's <a href=\"http:\/\/www.journalscape.com\/keithsnyder\/2006-12-19-12:05\"> Instructor\u2019s Letter<\/a> to his <a href=\"http:\/\/www.greenriverwriters.org\/nipw.html\">Novels In Progress Workshop<\/a> students. (Scroll down past the unrelated video to the text of the entry.)  Here, too, I don't agree with everything on the list (unsurprisingly; it would be hard to find a list of writing recommendations that <em>everyone<\/em> agrees with), but again overall it's well worth reading, even for non-novelists.<\/li>\n<li>Patricia C. Wrede's <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sfwa.org\/writing\/worldbuilding1.htm\">Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions<\/a>, written ten years ago.<\/li>\n<li>The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lshelby.com\/rasfcFAQ.html\">rec.arts.sf.composition FAQ list<\/a>.  A work in progress.  You may be particularly interested in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lshelby.com\/rasfcFAQ.html#librarians\">brief section on reference librarians<\/a>, which explains how to use the Stumpers list to get answers to questions.  (There's also a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.faqs.org\/faqs\/writing\/sf-composition\/\">much older version of the FAQ<\/a> (from 1999) that's significantly out of date in various ways, but that does contain one particularly good piece of advice about MS formatting: \"Essentially:  Spend ten minutes getting to know what the [standard manuscript] format is, stick to it, and stop worrying about it.\")<\/li>\n<li>Speaking of Standard Manuscript Format, I coulda sworn that I had linked to various explanations of SMF online, but apparently I never did.  Here are some--though I should note that some of these were written quite a while ago, and even though they all recommend Courier, some editors these days prefer Times.\n<ul>\n<li>Kent Brewster's <a href=\"http:\/\/www.speculations.com\/format.html\">Manuscript Formatting for Beginners<\/a><\/li>\n<li>William Shunn's <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shunn.net\/format\/story.html\">Manuscript Format: Short Story<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Mary Soon Lee's <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.cmu.edu\/~mslee\/format.html\">Standard Manuscript Format<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Chuck Rothman's <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sfwa.org\/writing\/format_rothman.htm\">MS Preparation<\/a><\/li>\n<li>John Gregory Betancourt's <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sfwa.org\/writing\/format_betancourt.htm\">The Obligatory Manuscript Format Article<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Not quite on the same topics as above: I just came across an entry of mine from 2002, titled <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2002\/09\/27\/633.html\">Repetition<\/a>, asking that people stop sending us unsolicited revisions, especially without telling us that they're revisions.  I've been meaning to post such a note recently, 'cause we've again been seeing this a lot, but I see now that I can just repeat what I said then, because it's still true.  Of course, if saying it four years ago didn't help, then repeating it now won't help either.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the past few days, I keep coming across various items of advice and commentary about writing. (The focus here&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,27,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-links","category-speculative-fiction","category-writing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3768"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3768\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}