I'm talking about that feeling when you finish a short story, and, for a brief while, it is the best thing you ever created. Then... it sucks. How can you think a story is so good and then when you reread it days later it just isn't so great? Is this a taste thing or a confidence thing? Why do I fall out of love with my stories?
Why does that feeling fade?
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It doesn't fade for those things you really nail. They may require some smoothing, some reconsideration of details, etc., so you need to get your head in a place where you can do that. But some efforts are inevitably better than others in artistic terms. I've written a lot of things that, frankly, are just crap. I keep them, for God knows what reason . . . it's just too much trouble to throw them away, and the cheapness of computer storage these days makes doing so a stupid idea.
But, I have some I'm proud of, and was proud of at the first draft stage. Those I have worked on further, to clean up the prose, make the story more effective. Two such got picked up for publication after being posted in critique forums, one of them here.
Nothing I've ever submitted through standard channels has got past Square Zero, but that's life, I guess.
You need to be able to separate you, dear writer, from you, da reader.
caw
But, I have some I'm proud of, and was proud of at the first draft stage. Those I have worked on further, to clean up the prose, make the story more effective. Two such got picked up for publication after being posted in critique forums, one of them here.
Nothing I've ever submitted through standard channels has got past Square Zero, but that's life, I guess.
You need to be able to separate you, dear writer, from you, da reader.
caw
I'm the opposite. I'm most critical when it's fresh.
Right after I finish it is when I'm most sure it's utter crap.
Then I come back later and think "hey, this isn't so bad..."
Right after I finish it is when I'm most sure it's utter crap.
Then I come back later and think "hey, this isn't so bad..."
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I think it's an essential part of the creative process. If we didn't think something was good while we were writing it, we wouldn't write it. And if we didn't at some point want to tear it apart, we'd never edit it.
ClaraBrooks
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I think it's just a case of over-familiarity. The few stories I've written that I am actually proud of (I think there may be 3 -- very short) I've read through so many times that none of the words really surprise or interest me anymore. Also, I guess your sense of self-loathing does eventually kick in - I don't know though, I'm still proud of those particular stories.
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They say a director is only as good as his last movie. Once you finish a story, you're thinking about the next one. You're in a different place, mentally and creatively.
Writing is a humbling experience for me. I pretty much think everything I write is not very good. I see mistakes everywhere, holes, etc. The whole process is an improving one. But really, what writer thinks she's good? Do you really want to be Faulkner?
ETA, I think you can tell when you have a good story. At least, in my slim experience, I've had a few pieces (a very few) that I'm proud of and others liked to read, and I felt that. Like it was true to myself. Otherwise, if I'm in doubt about something, I usually trust that it's hinky and chalk it up to experience if it's not going anywhere.
ETA, I think you can tell when you have a good story. At least, in my slim experience, I've had a few pieces (a very few) that I'm proud of and others liked to read, and I felt that. Like it was true to myself. Otherwise, if I'm in doubt about something, I usually trust that it's hinky and chalk it up to experience if it's not going anywhere.
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I love my work as I'm writing, and just after I've finished. When I come back to it a few days (or weeks) later though I see so much wrong with it that I think I must have been high while writing. Plot holes, characters acting out of character, inadequate descriptions, not knowing what the hell is going on when I'm the one who wrote it, etc.
At that point I see just how much work I'll have to put into editing/revising, and I no longer love the story. It doesn't get better as I edit. The more I look over it the sicker the sight of it makes me until I've had enough. However, once its been accepted for publication I'm proud of it all over again...but I still don't want to look at it anymore!
At that point I see just how much work I'll have to put into editing/revising, and I no longer love the story. It doesn't get better as I edit. The more I look over it the sicker the sight of it makes me until I've had enough. However, once its been accepted for publication I'm proud of it all over again...but I still don't want to look at it anymore!
When I get that feeling I can be pretty darned sure I just wrote something editors are going to reject with forms.
One time in thirty-five years did I write something that I thought was brilliant, something that I thought was the best I could possibly write, and that sold to a national magazine first time out. I still think that was the single best piece of writing I've ever managed.
Pretty much every other time I've really loved a story, thought it was just perfect, it either didn't sell at all, or sold way down the line to a small magazine, and vanished without a trace.
The reverse is also true. I've written a lot of stories that I though sucked. I'd read through them, think, "Man, I could write better than this when I still used a crayon", but the stories sold immediately, and often sold and sold and sold.
It didn't take long to learn that what I think of a story means nothing. Even the mood I'm in can make a story look good or bad. So I just write them and submit them. To paraquote a famous SF editor, "My job is to write them, and it's the editor's job to judge them, so I do my job, and let him do his."
One time in thirty-five years did I write something that I thought was brilliant, something that I thought was the best I could possibly write, and that sold to a national magazine first time out. I still think that was the single best piece of writing I've ever managed.
Pretty much every other time I've really loved a story, thought it was just perfect, it either didn't sell at all, or sold way down the line to a small magazine, and vanished without a trace.
The reverse is also true. I've written a lot of stories that I though sucked. I'd read through them, think, "Man, I could write better than this when I still used a crayon", but the stories sold immediately, and often sold and sold and sold.
It didn't take long to learn that what I think of a story means nothing. Even the mood I'm in can make a story look good or bad. So I just write them and submit them. To paraquote a famous SF editor, "My job is to write them, and it's the editor's job to judge them, so I do my job, and let him do his."
If I don't like a story of mine, it's usually because something fundamental is broken, usually the core concept that inspired the narrative.
I sure wish I knew what this whole "selling" thing was about...
I sure wish I knew what this whole "selling" thing was about...
. . . I recognize that it suffers from the defect of having been written by me.
Me too. But I've pretty much given up on that concept.
caw
I tear everything I write to shreds after the honeymoon period. Not literally, of course...I do keep it saved on my hard drive, and backed up several places.
It could be anything that sets me off and makes me loathe it after a little while. The protagonist's name, use of dialogue or lack thereof, or any perceived imperfections that I've gleaned based upon reading the mofo for the umpteenth time.
I do, however, think that's mostly attributed to being overly familiar with the piece. It's like eating the same food every single day; after a while, you grow to hate it. When you stop eating it for a bit and come back to it after eating other things for a while, you can appreciate it again.
God knows I've written enough things I ended up disliking and putting way back on the shelf, only to revisit them sometime later like, "Huh. This is way better than I remember."
It could be anything that sets me off and makes me loathe it after a little while. The protagonist's name, use of dialogue or lack thereof, or any perceived imperfections that I've gleaned based upon reading the mofo for the umpteenth time.
I do, however, think that's mostly attributed to being overly familiar with the piece. It's like eating the same food every single day; after a while, you grow to hate it. When you stop eating it for a bit and come back to it after eating other things for a while, you can appreciate it again.
God knows I've written enough things I ended up disliking and putting way back on the shelf, only to revisit them sometime later like, "Huh. This is way better than I remember."
I vacillate.
Usually i love the story when it's fresh, so much so that i send it out before it's really ready. In the W1S1 room we've started calling this Sudden Submission Syndrome. Then when i get the story back i look it over and hate it. So i tinker and send out again (this process sometimes repeats itself 4 or 5 times). But a few months after the final tinker when i go back to read it (usually after its garnered several more rejections) i decide the thing's not as bad as i thought.
I'm getting better at holding a story back, but i doubt i'll ever be able to completely overcome my SSS.
We writers sure love to ride our emotions.
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I often hate a story right after it's finished. My husband is my main critiquer, and by the time we get done going through it together, I often love it. But after it collects a few rejections, I not only hate it but also notice that it takes on a distinct odor. Once it's finally accepted, I think it's wonderful again. It's complicated. 
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In agreement.
I once sent four stories to a magazine that buys a good 75% of everything I write. I thought, wow, three great stories and one that is meh.
They rejected three and bought the meh.
(I since sold two of the rejected three, so all was not lost.)
But boy did I judge wrong. The one story which was different, weird, not usually what they bought, and they bought it.
One can never tell. I do what James does. I write and send out and try to be optimistic about each one. I do the best job I can on each and so far, I sell most (but not all) of them.
How much of yourself do you put in your stories? I sold the first three, well, technically, the first four short stories I write, but it was hit and miss for a while after that.
In an effort to make sales easier, I did two things. 1. I started really studying magazines I wanted to sell to. I picked a magazine I wanted to sell to, and erad as many back issues as I could find. The trick to this is someting most new writers get wrong. You shouldn't read magazines in order to give teh editor a story like teh ones he's already published, but to give teh editor something he not only hasn't published, but something only you can give him.
A setting the editor has never seen, one that comes alive, coupled with realistic characters the editor has never seen, will sell almost anything, if done well. Couple this with a plot the editor has never seen, and you've probably made a sale.
2. I reread every short story I'd written. In doing so, I realized that every story I'd sold was chock full of me.
And in reading that magazine, and then a lot of others, I realized that what none of the editors had seen was me.
I grew up in a little farm town that has roughly one hundred people at best. A railroad ran through the center of town, and a grain mill stood where the only road and the railroad intersected. I knew every inch of that town, and every inch of teh fields, streams, and woods for miles around. I knew everyone who lived there, and pretty much every farmer who brought soybean and corn into town at harvest time. Like all the boys in town, by age twelve, I was working on those farms, bailing hay, chopping weed out of soybean fields, etc.
That town carries some fame because it's considered the birthplace of Wilbur Wright, though he was actually born one mile outside of town. The house still stands there, now a museum. So some articles have been written about it, but not a single short story ever used that little town, the country around it, or the people, as a setting.
Why should there be? In a little farm town of that size, how many writers will it produce?
To editors, that town was as esoteric and as unique as Mars. More so. Hundreds f writers set stories on Mars, but not one had set a story in Millville, Indiana.
An darned few used characters like those I grew up around.
Not one, anywhere, had me in it, either. Putting yourself in a story is not being a Mary Sue, if you do it right.
I sold a story to Ellery Queen called "Wild Strawberries". I'm the central character. But this really means I became the central character. In this story, set in Millville, and I wrote the setting well enough that Janet Hutchings praised it in teh blurb for the story. It was, remember, a setting she had never seen.
As the story opens, the MC's wife has just bought groceries, and the MC sees she bought a carton of strawberries. He eats one, and the story flashes back to his youth, back to a patch of wild strawberries he found as a teenager..
Anyway, the central character had a girlfriend who got pregnant, and who, in her anger at his rejection, stomps a patch of wild strawberries he shows her. That patch of wild strawberries was real, and I guarded it like you wouldn't believe. I've never tasted strawberries as sweet.
He's too young to bear this responsibility, so he talks a friend into buying him some whiskey. He takes his girlfriend back to the strawberry patch, gets her so drunk she passes out, and places her on the railroad track. A train kills her.
He gets passing out drunk himself, but he blames his best friend for buying him the whiskey, and the best friend even thinks he's responsible. The best friend goes to jail, and the murderer lives happily ever after.
I was the character. The setting was real in every minute detail. All the characters were real, even the girlfriend. Except she never got pregnant, so I didn't get her drunk and place her on teh railroad. What really happened was mundane. She came to her senses and broke up with me.
I made my first thousand dollar sale by writing about that town, and those people, because I knew it and them well enough to bring both setting and character alive on the page.
I did the same thing by using a couple of other esoteric places I lived long enough to know the setting and the people.
I've written werewolf stories, SF stories, mysteries, westerns, MG, and you name it, but still used that town and those people, or those other two paces, and those people. Like Ray Bradbury, I sometimes have to move that town and those people a long, long way, but they're willing to pack their things and come along.
How many short stories have been set in your town? If your town has been used, what about your neighborhood? What about that big, empty house down the street? How many have had your neighbors, your friends, your teachers, and you as characters?
Whatever genre you write, if you can learn to give editors not what they already have, but what they can't get anywhere else, you'll sell a lot of stories, if you do your part and make the setting and characters come alive.
Gee, James. That's a lot to chew on. I think I'll sit on that awhile and reply with a PM.
@James, I could see your last post as an article in a writers' magazine. Words of wisdom there.
Agree fully. James, you're good at selling stuff. You should sell this.
caw
I've sold a few articles to writing magazines, but I haven't even tried to do so for quite a few years.
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James, that was so vivid that I felt as though I lived there too! (Born & always lived in big cities.)
And about the falling out of love with one's stories - I often find old stories about the house and wonder 'who on earth wrote this?' -and it's me! Sometimes they are a good surprise and other times a salutary example of what-not-to-do. They need to brew and marinate for a month or more, sending them of too soon is risky.
And about the falling out of love with one's stories - I often find old stories about the house and wonder 'who on earth wrote this?' -and it's me! Sometimes they are a good surprise and other times a salutary example of what-not-to-do. They need to brew and marinate for a month or more, sending them of too soon is risky.
Thanks.
I send them all out the moment I finish them. I know letting them sit a while helps many writers, but I fall into the opposite category.
Over the years, I've tried just about everything that many other writers find helpful, including letting a story sit. For me, it was a disaster. I doubted everything about every story I let sit, wanted to change this, that, and the other, but when I tried, it resulted in a mess.
William Saroyan got his big break by writing and submitting a short story per day to Story Magazine. He intended to do this for a month. I don't remeber teh day, but somewhere around day twenty-one or twenty-two, he wrote and submitted a story called "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze", and the rest, as they say, was history.
I've read about a huge number of other writers who write fast and submit quickly, usually the day after they finish the story.
For me, it's just my natural tendency. I wrote each of my first four stories in three days or less, submitted them they same day, or the next morning, and they all sold. In fairness, I didn't even know you were supposed to do more than one draft, and I'd never even heard the concept of letting a story sit for a while.
I'm lousy at rewriting or revising one of my own stories, unless an editor asks for specific changes. I' very good at it then, but if I have to find and make major changes on my own, I suck.
Anyway, writing stories very fast, and submitting them the moment they're e finished, has always worked well for me, so I've stuck with it.
Trapjaw
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Excellent advice! This really fleshes out and illustrates the old "write what you know" adage in a way that any writer can relate to.
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