I'm delighted to have been asked to write a guest post on a new website called multi-story.co.uk (link at end, please read on). It's aimed at short fiction writers (although no height limit is specified, haha, joke) and runs competitions. I'm not known as a flash fiction / short story writer myself, but a couple of my blog posts provoked the site owners into contacting me. They'd also read and enjoyed
Peril and gave me some coverage (hopefully I'll get the same for
The Baptist!)
Multi-story looks like a very interesting site for those in shorts, offering respectable prizes, judging by professionals, low entry fee and a very comprehensive list of resources on the links page.
The chosen guest subject was one close to my heart - the trials and tribulations of writers that cut their teeth in the ether of peer review writing websites. I was that soldier. Delighted to say that one elephant joke was allowed. Here's the article...
Except for the lucky few, we’ve all been there: typed the closing lines of our first completed work of fiction; sighed with contentment; packaged the manuscript in a glossy folder depicting dolphins or kittens; anointed the query letter with a dab of perfume and presented Mrs Murphy at the Post Office with half a dozen packets of literary heaven.
‘Yes, Mrs Murphy, all this time, living in your midst, like a normal person. I am a writer!’ (Adopts mincing stride and a flourish of the hand).
Next day’s walk to work is on air, knowing that there won’t be many more such mundane days because the agent, publisher and film producer are in a bare-knuckle fight over who will make the most money from that blockbusting masterpiece now winging its way to the literary world.
A few celebratory bottles of wine and several days later the self-satisfaction of the perfectly packaged bundles is wearing off. A couple of weeks and you decide to redecorate walls of your study with all the rejection slips that begin to flood through the letterbox like Hogwarts invitations arriving at the Dursleys’. Clearly the agents and publishers you selected weren’t selected carefully enough. Might the action adventure of a philandering power generation engineer’s international swashbuckling be a little out of their genre? Writers and Artists Year Book in hand, you print another batch of submissions, make a mad dash to the stationers and endure sweaty tussles with other anguished authors over the last remaining large Jiffy bag. Another few weeks and a second wall of the study gets papered with the next wave of responses.
The logical next step presents itself. Consult an expert. Hand over a tidy sum of money to a professional third party in return for a critique of the manuscript, to try and understand why the rejections keep coming. A nice little man, with a peculiar talent for acidity, points out that characters, plot, pace & structure, use of language, narrative voice (what’s that?), dialogue, settings and theme are all awry. But the query letter is nicely fragrant. A discussion of these results with family and friends reveals that any number of them would have happily given you a similar kick in the privates for much less money than you paid to a stranger.
So, now you’ve been battered about the head with what is wrong with the masterwork, how do you put it right? A formal creative writing course is out of the question because you’re broke / agoraphobic / living in the middle of nowhere / in a foreign country / in custody. A bit of internet research reveals that you are not alone. There are global communities of aspiring writers posting their work online, critiquing each other’s efforts and striving to rise above the hoi polloi. Free-to-join websites run by reputable folk. Prizes of professional critique by editors from the big publishing houses. Success stories of authors that have been discovered and offered seven figure publishing contracts. You sign up, format your manuscript for online consumption and prepare for greatness. You are officially in a writers’ group. Happy days.
What happens next depends upon the architecture of the peer review website. In any case, a burst of compulsive activity is likely. You are a newbie and, unless you are somehow familiar with online communities and forums, all those beginners’ mistakes await you. Strangers will offer friendship. Strangers will crawl all over your literary masterpiece and tear the flesh from its bones. Internet trolls await, running out to engage you in flame wars of words if you should clop too loudly across their bridge.
You begin to gather feedback on the pages that you posted for virtual consumption. This involves a reciprocal arrangement with other writers, either in a structured one-for-one review system or through social networking. All of a sudden you’re not just a writer, you’re also a reader, a reviewer, a critic. Folk expect you to be able to constructively critique their work. You make mistakes, go with trends like less is more, show not tell, and where to stick your
Oxford commas. You exchange writer jokes on message boards e.g. Marriage isn’t a word, it’s a sentence. LOL. Other acronyms such as POV and IMHO start to become part of your parlance. It’s likely that you will regurgitate criticism, either acknowledging learning from the reviews that you’ve received or biting back at viewpoints and opinions that seem uninformed or spiteful.
Month three of online peer review and there aren’t enough hours in the day, enough days in the week, to do enough reviews, to earn enough credits for reviews of your own work, to network friends, to climb the mountain of the charts and attain that Holy Grail of a pro-crit. Waves of self-doubt wash across your frontal lobe as your chart ranking fluctuates. Newbie reviewers play havoc with your scores as they deliver novice critique of your work. You start to frequent the discussion forum and find solace in the company of other authors, your seniority growing. Is first person, post-modernist narrative voice passé? Should you rewrite in a less florid or less minimalist style to elicit more favourable reviews from the peer group? There seems to be a hard-core clique that know the secrets to all this, the mechanism of the charts and how to spam to the top without being seen to spam. It’s a tough time, you’re not getting anything written except reviews of other people’s work and you’re neglecting the ironing.
Month six and you’ve become a firm member of the old guard. Respected by veterans, dissed by paranoid newbies, considered a part of that alleged clique. Your revised work is doing well and it’s on final ascent to the summit of the charts. Your extended social network is brought into play, posting support requests on Facebook, Twitter and every form of social media known to authors and readers. The last day of the month approaches, there’s a photo finish, a Steward’s appeal and yes, you’re a winner! High fives all round, virtual back-slapping and emoticons aplenty on the forum.
The long wait begins. Will the professional critique confirm your writing skill, honed by crash-course experience in the intense editing and critiquing world of online peers? In the interim, you arse about on the forum, see off a few trolls and grace a few newbies with gratis reviews and critiques. Just for fun you designate a particular aspect of creative writing as your special focus area for the day, using Mittelmark & Newman’s How Not to Write a Novel as your bible.
On Mondays you severely and mercilessly critique a piece, soundly and resolutely thrashing it for excessive use of adverbs.
Tuesdays are an attack on two-dimensional characters, asking that they be fleshed out so that they leap from the page.
Wednesdays you add a little extra, advising the writer to titillate the senses by making sure that all settings are a tasteful olfactory, tactile, audiovisual experience.
Thursdays are the day to attack any speech tag other than ‘said’.
Friday is for fish and you go angling for inadvertent red herrings that mislead the reader.
Saturday deals with the identity parade syndrome, taking down an author or two that uses a mirror or other blatant device to give a photo-fit description of characters with big dark eyes, silken hair, a matching twin set in cornflower blue and average size breasts.
Sunday you weed out the clichés from a newbie’s work and leave them with the bare bones of a plot that then magically takes on the tone a Scandinavian detective drama.
You’ve discovered the power to weave straw into gold. Your username is by now well known on the site and has a well-earned reputation for being firm but fair. Empowered by the journey, it’s time to launch new forum discussion threads about the fine differences between similes and metaphors, the plausibility of hyperbole, and to draw attention to an outbreak of anthropomorphism in the newbie writings you have come across. Wikipedia serves you particularly well in the formulation of your position on these matters.
At last the professional critique of your novel opening chapters arrives online. Some jumped-up junior editor from a big publishing house has totally panned your labour of love. Two-dimensional characters. The plot premise is unbelievable. Stilted dialogue. Over-described, over-told, indefinite genre, unmarketable. It has to be a mistake. The reviewer must have read a different book to the one that tens, hundred of people have voted for with their virtual feet. You followed their suggestions to the letter, those experienced online authors with knowledge of narrative voice, point of view, story arcs, prologues, scene, sequels, antagonists, conflict, protagonist, sensory perception. The result was almost edible and some young know-nothing has regurgitated it in your face, in public, for thousands of peers to see. Well, she’s obviously wrong. To hell with the dead-tree publishers. You go straight to Kindle Direct Publishing and begin to upload your novel as an independent e-book. That’ll show them.
I’ll finish with a parable. Six blind men were asked to describe an elephant by touching its body. One felt the tail and said that the elephant was like a hairy rope. Another grasped a leg and said that it resembled a tree. A third handled the ear and was sure that it was a great flying bat. The fourth was snuffled by the trunk and said that an elephant was a mighty snake, bigger than a python. The tusk was touched by another who claimed that it was surely a unicorn. The sixth found its huge eye and knew that it must be a giant squid. None of them could describe the hole. [sic]
multi-story.co.uk is a new website aimed at short fiction writers. It has some very interesting content and an excellent links page.
No authors were hurt in the making of this post.
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