Category: Commentary

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Editing Fiction is Subjective: The October Dreams Controversy

by David Kubicek

Editing fiction is subjective. The best stories don’t always make the most money while some seriously awful stories make millions.

An irritating misconception in our society is the notion that the size of one’s paycheck is in direct proportion to the quality and importance of one’s work. Unfortunately, this misconception is often applied to writers, even by other writers and editors, who should know that one editor’s gem is another editor’s piece of crap. Don’t believe me? Check out some rejections of famous writers here.

Many years ago Jeff Mason and I edited a collection of horror stories, October Dreams: A Harvest of Horror (Kubicek & Associates, 1989), because we weren’t happy with the quality of stories being published in the current crop of original horror anthologies. We thought we could do better, and judging from our book’sOctober Dreams reception, I think we succeeded, or at least we collected a group of horror stories as good as anything on the market.

After OD was highly recommended by Booklist, major distributor Baker & Taylor ordered it by the carton, making it  a best seller for our tiny company. One of the stories–“Mr. Sandman”, by Scott D. Yost–was selected for inclusion in Karl Edward Wagner’s The Year’s Best Horror Stories XVIIL Someone even tried to nominate OD for a Horror Writers of America award, which is where the trouble started.

We were informed that October Dreams was not eligible for an award because the writers were required to have been paid three cents per word or more to be considered “professional.” We’d had the audacity to pay our contributors one cent per word–which actually was per 1,000 copies printed, so with each printing our contributors would be paid again.

This set off a minor controversy. On one side were those of us who argued that work shouldn’t be judged by how much a writer is paid (writers are often undervalued anyway) but by how good the writing is. The other side argued–and these were mostly writers who met the three cents or more threshold–that writers had worked long and hard to be paid three cents a word or more and–God forbid–shouldn’t have to compete with writers who are paid less even if the story is better [my italics].

Professionalism does not have to do with how much writers get paid for their stories, nor does it have to do with how popular a writer is.  I know of one writer–who I will not name–who had a huge payday, on the order of $1,000 per word for two words, the words making up his famous name. The story attached to that name was utter garbage and would have been rejected immediately if it had been written by an unknown writer. 

Professionalism has to do with having cultivated the skill to tell a good story. It has to do with having learned the writing craft to tell it well. It has to do with having learned how to approach agents and editors when marketing your story. It has to do with how you handle rejection. And, above all, it means doing your best work even when you reach the level of fame where editors will pay you only for your name because your name will sell magazines.

Few writers are able to make a living writing fiction, and many highly-respected literary magazines pay only  in copies, and many excellent stories are rejected by many editors before they find a home. Editing is a subjective process and has more to do with how well an editor likes a story than on how well it is written or how much the writer is paid for it. A famous name on a story doesn’t necessarily guarantee its quality; how well the story is written does.

For more information about David Kubicek’s books click here.

 

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Nuggets of Wisdom from Prominent People

by David Kubicek

I have long been a connoisseur of quotes, those nuggets of wisdom packed into a few well-chosen words. Here are a few of my favorites:

On Writing

In early 1988 a Lincoln Journal-Star reporter asked me what advice I would give to aspiring writers. I replied that they should see a psychiatrist to figure out why they have this masochistic urge (the first page of the Journal-Star article is here, and the second page is here). Years later I came across this quote from Dorothy Parker in which she expressed the same sentiment but more eloquently: 

“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”

Ernest Hemingway said:

“Write as well as you can and finish what you start.”

I try to follow his advice. I have no problem with the first part because I’m a bit of a a perfectionist, but the second part causes me more grief, as my stack of unfinished manuscripts will attest to. Although, in my defense, some of the unfinished stories are just delayed; “Prospect Street” and “Time Capsule”, which can be found in The Moaning Rocks and Other Stories, were completed after lying dormant for more than 20 years because it took me that long to figure out how to end them.

I also try to emulate Elmore Leonard, who said, when he was asked to what he attributed the popularity of his detective novels:

“I leave out the parts that people skip.”

And I agree with writer Donald Windham, who said:

“I disagree with the advice ‘Write about what you know.’ Write about what you need to know, in an effort to understand.”

On Culture

Ray Bradbury used the following quote from Spanish poet and Nobel laureate Juan Ramon Jimenez as the epigraph to Fahrenheit 451, his 1953 novel about the desensitization of our culture:

“If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.”

And speaking of book burning, Ray Bradbury said:

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

“Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.”–H.L. Mencken.

On Human Beings

Here are some comments about the human condition that caught my eye over the years. Some of them are serious and some are tongue-in-cheek:

“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what is not true; the other is to refuse to accept what is true.“—Soren Kierkegaard.

“Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.”—Robert A. Heinlein

“It is amazing how much you can accomplish when it doesn’t matter who gets the credit.”—Harry S. Truman.

“Whether you think you can or think you can’t—you’re right.”—Henry Ford.

Our world is not divided by race, color, gender, or religion. Our world is divided into wise people and fools. And fools divide themselves by race, color, gender, or religion. — Mohamad Safa 

“Society is like a stew. If you don’t stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.”—Edward Abbey

 

“I learned that it is the weak who are cruel, and that gentleness is to be expected only from the strong.”—Leo Rosten.

On Intelligence and Politics

In July, 2020, the approval rating of Congress was 18%. This low regard for the legislative branch of our federal government is not new. Mark Twain, who died in 1910, said:

“Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

For many years I’ve said that some people consider ignorance to be a virtue and that I try not to use the question “How stupid can you be?” sarcastically because some people take that as a challenge. Then I came across this quote from writer Isaac Asimov, who expressed the same sentiment but did so more eloquently:

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’.”

For more information about David Kubicek’s books click here.

 

 

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How I Mark My Writing Progress

by David Kubicek

Many writers measure their progress by how many words they write each day. I’m not one of them. The words I write today may be discarded tomorrow or cut in the second or third draft. For me, the  words that matter most are the ones that end up in my final draft.

The idea for my young adult dystopian novel Empath first came to me in 2011. I wrote 25,000 words, wasn’t happy with the direction of the story, and set it aside for a few years.

In 2016, shortly before the election, I took it up again. The day after the election, I set it aside and didn’t work on it for six months.  The novel was a speculative fiction story set against the backdrop of a totalitarian regime 200 years in the future–I feared that by the time it was finished and published, bookstores would shelve it in the “Contemporary” section.

But eventually I took it up once more. I tried to take it in a new direction, wrote some new scenes and discarded them. Finally I discarded everything and started over. I did this two or three more times. I cranked out a lot of words, which I discarded before even completing  one draft. In all, I deep-sixed over 90,000 words, more than enough for a complete novel.

One reason I kept starting over was that Kassidy, my main character, was too passive. She reacted to things that happened to her rather than striving for a goal and making things happen. The other reason was that Empath was too much like many other young adult dystopian novels: heroine is pissed off at the leaders of her society, heroine leads a band of rebels to overthrow the government, etc. Ho hum. Yawn.  I wanted something different.

Then in January of 2020, out of nowhere, “something different” dropped into my head. A complete idea. That has never happened to me in all the years I’ve been writing. It dropped into my head at 10 p.m. and kept me awake for two hours as my mind worked feverishly to iron out some details. Apparently, while I struggled through these early drafts, my subconscious mind–a frequent collaborator–had been hard at work, and it chose this moment to reveal to me the fruits of its labor.

But it hasn’t been easy sailing since then. There are lots of kinks I need to iron out as I work through the first draft. With a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work I expect to have a complete draft of Empath by June 2021. I won’t give any plot spoilers but will describe it only as a young adult dystopian time travel romance.

One thing I want to make clear is that in my novel, the instrument of our present day civilization’s near demise has always been a plague because a pandemic is cleaner than an atomic war–it kills people but leaves the architecture intact. It was a pandemic in 2011 when I conceived of the story, and it is a pandemic today as the novel finally nears completion.  It’s not, as they say, a story ripped from the headlines; my story was in progress years before the novel coronavirus made the scene.

One thing I can say, though, is that COVID-19 has allowed me to do some hands-on research about what it’s like to live during a pandemic. But I would have preferred to do my research in a library.

For more information about David Kubicek’s books click here.

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The Most Important Writing Lesson I Learned

by David Kubicek

This is the most important writing lesson I learned: Don’t be afraid to stop for a moment to examine things in your story, whether they are physical wounds or the characters’ actions and emotions.

I learned this in a summer fiction workshop at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln more years ago than I care to count. I had turned in a story called “Clinical Evaluation” [pause for shameless self-promotion–it’s in my collection The Moaning Rocks and Other Stories]. A petty crook is shot during a liquor store robbery gone wrong, and his body is taken to the morgue where Willy, an inebriated custodian cleaning the morgue during the graveyard shift, imagines that this guy isn’t dead but only paralyzed and is trying to alert someone before the pathologist starts cutting on him in the morning.

The manuscript I turned in described the victim’s wound as a “gunshot wound to the head,” and that’s all. My teacher, Charlie Stubblefield, said he wanted to see a more detailed description of that wound. He wanted me to really get into that wound. So I did that in the revision.

“Clinical Evaluation” was the first story I sold, to an anthology of fiction, poetry, and artwork called The New Surrealists. But the lesson I had learned was not only about being specific with my descriptions. The lesson is: Don’t gloss over things, whether they are one-paragraph descriptions or entire scenes, if they are relevant to the story.

 I follow Elmore Leonard’s rule—“I try to leave out the parts that readers skip”–so I sometimes find myself wanting to skim over something or cut it out entirely because I think it will slow down the story. But one thing you must keep in mind is that it will take you much longer to write a scene than it will take your reader to read it. So even if a scene seems to be moving slowly for you, your audience may zip through it quickly and enjoy reading it as much as you enjoyed writing it.

Just remember that each scene must have a reason for its existence. You are giving the readers information they need, or you’re moving the story forward characterwise or plotwise. This doesn’t mean that every scene that has a reason for being should be in the story. That’s something for you to judge in the second draft and for your beta readers to judge before you unleash your brainchild on an unsuspecting public. I always ask my beta readers to tell me what parts of the story they didn’t like and why–in particular, what parts of the story they wanted to skip.

You may think I’ve diverged quite a bit from describing that simple head wound, but I haven’t. The lesson I took away, the most important writing lesson I learned, is to not be afraid to stop for a moment to examine things in your story, whether they are physical wounds or the characters’ actions and emotions. Don’t summarize elements that may be important to your story, even if you may have doubts while writing the first draft. If something doesn’t work, you’ll find out soon enough, and you can fix it in a later draft.

For more information about David Kubicek’s books click here.

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Celebrate Banned Books Week 2019

 

Banned and Challenged Books

by David Kubicek

Read a challenged or banned book to celebrate Banned Books Week 2019, which runs from September 22 through September 28.

If you haven’t chosen a banned book–or several–to celebrate, here are some lists of banned and challenged books. There are plenty to choose from.

I have opted not to choose a book to read from the lists this year because I’m in the process of reading Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, her sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale (published 33 years later!).

Being the decadent reprobate that I am, I’ve read many of the books on the BB lists already, some of them two or three times or more, and although The Testaments was just released last week, I’m sure it soon will be, like its predecessor, challenged and/or banned–if it hasn’t achieved that status already (censors can act swiftly when they detect the scent of something they might not like).

But do celebrate Banned Books Week, which comes around every year in the last week of September, and celebrate the authors. You know you must have touched a nerve when certain people want to prevent others from reading your what you have written.

For more information about David Kubicek’s books click here.

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A Rainbow for El Paso

by David Kubicek

A Rainbow for El Paso

I spent a couple of nights in El Paso in July 1983. When I looked out the window of my motel room after a brief shower and saw this rainbow, I immediately grabbed my camera.

I dedicate this photo to the memory of those who were killed and wounded in the El Paso Walmart shooting while doing their shopping last weekend, and to the hundreds of thousands who have died or have been personally touched by gun violence over the years–and to the hundreds of thousands who will die before their time, and to their friends and families, until civilians are no longer allowed to purchase military grade weapons. 

For more information about David Kubicek’s books click here.