Coffee With David

It is startling and intimidating when you have spent your life trying to prefect your art and you come across something that shows how you have missed critical points. Over the last few weeks, I have been reading a book that focuses on writing organic stories and writing masterful works.

When I first picked up the book, I admit I had a prejudice to it. I am no master by any stretch of the imagination, yet I have read a lot of the books on writing. Some very serious like John Gardner’s must read The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers to books that can be titled “How to Write a Novel in 60 Days While Putting a Roof on Your House.” As I read on I found myself having questioned I had strived to figure out for more years than I want to think answered and new possibilities rose. After the second chapter, I realized many of my approaches had been wrong.

As a result of what I was learning I came to conclusion I needed to put my writing on hold until I finished the book—or nearly. So I stopped the production of these blogs and my stories. By this weekend, things will be rolling again with a new light and a new foundation of story telling.

Back to the plotting boards I go….

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for information on the blogs, novels, and short stories I write.

Last night as I finished my rough draft of “The Indebted”, I ran into a fellow author and friend. We started discussing how to take a story or any piece to market. I have read and do follow the market in regards to what magazines want and do my best to aim at them. Yet, one of the things that is obvious escaped me. That is the creation of a hit list per genre that I write.

What you do is sit down and compile a list of 20 or so places you want to be published—really desire that your name is in their magazine. Then you go back and justify to a friend or yourself why you want to be published in each particular magazine. Once you have finished that and have done your research on those magazines, you now have your hit list of who you will send your works to.

Once you send a piece and it gets rejected, reedit it and then send it to the next one. Work your way from number 1 on your list to number 20. Why start at number 1? Maybe you don’t think the story is all that good or that you could possibly make it into that publisher. Let the overworked and underpaid editors be the decision makers on that. They are paid to ferret out the good works that will fit their magazine needs. If you have done your research, then you have not wasted their time. (If you have not done your research, then what are you thinking?) This seems so obvious when you read it, and my friend admitted that it took being told in a MFA about it to realize that yes, this is something every writer who is serious about their work should do.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for updates on blogs, short stories, and novels that I am writing.

If you have seen my website( www.davidalanlucas.com) you will have seen a change in the schedule of my blog production. There are two main reasons for this change and they both come from the juggling of schedules. The first juggling act is between my writing career and my job that pays the bills. As I have written in previous entries, my level of free time has drastically reduced—thus less time to write for now. The other reason is a philosophical juggling act that writers seem to be facing today. The questions change depending upon the writer’s media. In my case, the question is: Do I spend my time blogging, writing short stories or writing novels?

I read on another blog about a writer who was pondering the decision between blogging and writing novels. (http://www.murdershewrites.com/2009/03/24/do-you-book-or-do-you-blog/) Which should you spend more time doing? According to her, the industry is pretty split. Publicist urge writers to blog for obvious reasons. Editors of course want more novels. So it is a balancing act that every writer must find their own resolution to it. I am still a fledgling author facing this question and when I pondered it recently I went looking for advice. Of course, there is always lots of advice.

By accident and looking for some other subject to relax with after reading a lot of conflicting advice on this balancing act, I ran into a recorded presentation given by Ray Bradbury in 2001. (http://scifitime.com/sciencefictionwriting/ray-bradburys-video-lecture-on-writing/) I watched this presentation not expecting it to provide my answer. While he did not talk about blogging at all, he talked about his life as a writer and the various genres and media that he wrote in. One piece of advice he gave, as this is what helped make my decision, was to focus more on short stories than on novels. Some of the reasons he gave was very convincing. The reason I latched onto was that with short stories you are able to not only learn the craft but get back faster response to what you write.

When you write a novel you spend at least six months to a year—or much longer—working on a story that you do not know if you will sell. A short story takes a lot less time. For Mr. Bradbury, he was producing a short story a week. In my case, I am not as fast due to my lack of writing time and my personal struggle with my specific learning disability (SLD) that demands I write many, many, many—did I say many—drafts of a story to be sure the piece of fiction is of good quality and missing an of the errors that my SLD produces without me realizing it at the time.

As a result of my watching this lecture by Mr. Bradbury and my search for the balance point, I have devised the following priorities:
1. Obviously, my bill paying job has to be first.
2. Short story production.
3. Blogs
4. Novels.

I am reducing the frequency of Coffee with David blogs to once a week and I have spread out the novel blogs rather than having them both be produced on the same day. So, my new schedule is:
Sunday: The Guardians
Monday: Fiction
Tuesday: Short Fiction
Wednesday: Coffee With David
Saturday: Dark Medicine

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for updates on short stories, blogs, and novels that I am writing.