February 13, 2025 • 53 mins
In this episode, award-winning short story writer and editor Dan Coxon joins me for an in-depth chat about writing short fiction.
We look at the definition of a short story, the different structures they can have, the pitfalls to avoid, and best practices for editing.
Dan also shares his best tips on getting short stories published, sharing vital insights on what it's like to be an editor with a publisher. You can also find a very helpful explanation for writing cover letters.
It's a must-listen for anyone keen to learn more about writing short stories and getting them published.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
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(00:23):
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Thank you very much for listening.
Enjoy the show. Thank you for listening to the
Fantasy of Writers tour sheds. I'm your host, Richie Bulling.
(00:45):
And today I'm delighted to be joined by the award-winning
writer and editor Dan Coxon Down.
Welcome to the show. Hello, thank you very much for
having me. Thank you very much for joining
me very kindly giving up your time to share your wonderful
wisdom on writing short stories.I got a taste of this wisdom of
Fantasy con in October last year.
(01:07):
And Dan, you were a part of a brilliant panel where you know,
which was all about writing short stories.
And I've made so many notes. I picked up so much.
It was a really good panel actually.
It was one of the best ones I'vebeen on I think.
I think it was Andrew Hook was on it as well.
He was chairing it. Yeah, Alan Ashley was on it.
(01:29):
Alan Ashley. Yeah, there's a really, what was
her name? The lady from the publisher.
She was like a slush reader and it was really interesting.
Yes. Oh, I didn't know her because I
can't remember what her name was.
We should put the I'll try and find dig it also the panel
(01:49):
listings in the description anyway.
But yeah, I learned so much and based on everything that you
they taught me in that panel, I went away and I've been writing
those short stories and I'm pleased to say finally got some
of them new ones published. So that sounds you don't thank
you very much that's. Exactly what we want to hear as
(02:10):
well. I mean, obviously it forces us
out of the market. But now, I mean, it's, it's
really nice. I think that's one of those
things that the panels and, and things like this podcasts as
well are really good for is it'sjust hearing other people's
experiences as much as anything else.
Because it means you can kind ofyou can kind of take a shortcut
(02:30):
to where you want to be. Because you can, you can talk to
somebody or listen to somebody who has already been where,
where you are right now or whereyou want to be and kind of learn
from their mistakes before you get to it.
Yeah. Oh I forgot the name, it was
Hesper Leveret. That's right.
That's perfect. I think she reads for lunar
station course later, is that right?
(02:51):
Yes. Something like that, Yeah, yeah.
Good magazines check out. But yeah, the reason why I
wanted to ask you to come on to the show is because a lot of
listeners do write short stories, and we've got a very
busy disco community and there'sa lot of people swapping stories
all the time. And we have a really nice sort
(03:12):
of space where people share the highs and lows for short story
writing because there's a lot ofrejections.
And then every now and then you get the great news that you've
got the successful outcome. And people are always looking
for ways to get those interesting ideas that capture
people's imaginations and that we stand out.
(03:34):
But there's so many pitfalls as well.
And we were talking just before we started recording where we
got some of them. Yeah, before we can.
Yeah, I think. It's interesting you mentioned,
you mentioned that because it's the first thing that I always do
whenever I do run a workshop or whenever I talk to kind of
students or anything is talk about kind of the, the editor's
side of things. Because because I work as an
editor as well as a writer, I kind of see both sides of it.
(03:55):
And it is just the fact that thedefault is always no.
I was literally on blue sky talked about this the other day
as well. Because we receive, I mean the,
the numbers that I we normally churn out is for like a couple
of recently I know Pete, someonethat received over 400
submissions for one spot in an anthology.
(04:17):
I also know someone who got 800 for four spots.
So I mean, just the numbers are just stacked against you and
you're basically as an editor just saying no to everything
because you have to. You can't say yes to everything
because we just can't publish itall.
So it is just no, no, no, default no.
And in order to be the one that doesn't get the no against the
(04:37):
yes, it's not enough just to write a good story.
It has to literally stand out and pop out somehow.
And I mean, obviously there's more complex processes in that
most editors go through like a longlist, shortlist kind of
process. So in an ideal world, you want
to get yourself onto a longlist or a shortlist and then at least
you've got a chance because it'smaybe like, you know, one in 10
(04:59):
or something by that point. So slightly more reasonable
odds, but it is, I mean, yeah, Ithink it's a mysterious kind of
alchemy of this sort of coming up with both ideas and then
actually the execution of the story to kind of come up with
something which is unique but also really good and really well
(05:21):
told, I guess is the sweet spot tell.
Us what you don't How did you get into writing?
What's your journey being like and what why the short stories
appeal to you so much? The journey has been a long one,
it has to be said. I mean, I was literally
remembering the other day sitting down and writing really
(05:42):
bad kind of pastiches of WilliamS Burroughs back when I was sort
of a teenager. So it would have been, what, 30
years ago? And I didn't remember writing.
There was a competition at the local library for a Horror
Story, and I think it was only about 2000 words.
(06:03):
And I remember writing out by hand in a big lined exercise
book and I remember the story very clearly, I think only
because I wrote it very early onin my kind of writing career,
because it really wasn't very good and it was enormously
derivative and it didn't even really make any sense.
It was just like throwing in horror tropes just for the sake
of it to try and get some kind of like jump scare reaction, I
(06:23):
guess. But yeah, I mean, that was that
was the early days. I had a couple of publishing
successes back then in my teenage years, which I still
have copies of at least one of them I think, and I'm still kind
of slightly proud of it. It's quite a good story.
So it wasn't all rubbish, but itjust took a long time to work
out what I was doing. I've veered away from from genre
(06:48):
for quite a long time as well. I was kind of trying to write
much more literary fiction, trying to write kind of more of
a literary novel as well for a while.
And none of that, it didn't really work because it wasn't
really me, if I'm honest. I've kind of, I've been around
long enough now that I can come to the conclusion that actually
I was trying to trying to force myself into areas that I didn't
(07:09):
actually go to. Whereas if I just left my
imagination to do what it wantedto do, it actually went to much
more interesting places. But sometimes it's about that's
almost kind of about self knowledge as much as it is
about, you know, writing skill or writing advice.
It's just reaching a point whereyou know what it is actually
that you have to offer. Yeah.
(07:31):
And then you learn through trial.
Now, don't you Like, yeah, thosewe kind of, we do these things
because you feel like it's the right or you think it's the
right thing to do. But when you try it out, just
doesn't, doesn't feel like you say it doesn't feel right.
You don't enjoy it and it feels like a chore.
And it's interesting. I mean, it still all was kind of
(07:53):
mileage for me. So in terms of like learning the
ropes and learning kind of writing skills and stuff, even
if I was writing in a different genre or trying to write in
different genres, it was still about learning what works for me
and what doesn't work for me. And quite for my kind of own
personal weaknesses and strengths are as a writer and
trying to play up to the strengths and try and iron out
(08:15):
the weaknesses. And as I've gone on, So I mean,
now I work as a proofreader and editor, like not quite full
time, it's more or less part time, but but freelance, but
quite a wide variety of publishers.
And because of that, I've now kind of learned the editing
skills so that I can see my own weaknesses a bit better and
actually I'm able to fix them a bit better.
(08:39):
I always say to people that I, it's kind of like most people, I
talk to you about this, they kind of nod and go, Oh yeah, I
do that as well. But it's like, I'd write a
story. This is kind of like up until I
kind of worked out what I was doing.
I'd write a story and I'd read it and I'd kind of know that
something was wrong. But I kind of think to myself,
oh, I can kind of get away with it, or I'd be a load of work to
(08:59):
fix it. So I think maybe I just kind of
fudge it a bit and let it stand.Those are exactly the things you
need to because it's like you are the closest person to that
story in the entire world because you have written it.
So if you can see them and they're bugging you, I
absolutely guarantee other people are going to notice them
and they're going to bug them a hell of a lot more.
(09:21):
So those are the things it's learning to listen to that inner
voice and say, OK, yeah, that's a bit off.
That sentence isn't quite working or that passage isn't
working or whatever. And say, OK, I do need to fix
it. I need to go back.
I need to do some more work on it.
And I have a friend in America for a while who was a writer,
quite a successful writer, who his kind of motto was always do
(09:42):
the work, do the work, do the work, go back, work at it some
more. And I kind of picked that up
that it's like, yeah, you can always be doing more work on it,
and in itself can sometimes bring its own problem.
I know people in the past who'vegot kind of stuck not publishing
stuff because they're kind of never finished with anything and
(10:05):
they always feel that things arenot good enough.
But I think on the whole, most of us are in the other
direction. Most of us are kind of like, we
know we know there's things a bit wrong with that story I just
wrote. We know it's like 2000 words too
long and the main character doesn't really make sense and
the ending is kind of unsatisfying that we kind of try
(10:26):
and kid ourselves that we can get away with it and we probably
can't. So have you always been drawn to
short stories? I think so in the first
instance. I mean, I did.
I had multiple aborted novel attempts over the years.
I did write really, really bad, like generic fantasy epic quest
(10:49):
novel when I was, I don't know what about 16 or something, I
think, and I've actually still got it somewhere.
I have it in a folder. I can't quite bear to look at
it. I thought at some point I might
I might dig it out and see what lessons there are to be learned.
I suspect what the case with it is, is probably very competently
written, but really derivative and obvious and probably not of
(11:14):
much interest to anybody, I suspect.
But I mean, getting published asa novelist is it's so much
harder than getting published asa short story writer as well.
So I kind of feel like with short stories, you're never
going to get like the massive sales that novelists get, but
you do kind of get lots of little kind of confidence boosts
and affirmations along the way that can kind of boost the
(11:37):
confidence and keep you writing.Whereas I think it's I, I always
have like some incredible respect and awe for these
writers who just like out of thegate, just sit down and write
like 120 thousand word novel andspend like two or three years
doing it with like no prospect of getting published.
I'm like that. So you've you've got to have
quite a bit of kind of self-confidence to back yourself
(12:00):
to do that. I've just just done that for
like the last two or three years, just writing a novel.
And I tried getting an agent where they got absolutely
nowhere with that. And so I'm going back and
editing it now. But I just got so fed up of
committing yourself to that project.
And I think it had been so long since I'd written a short story
(12:23):
and gotten anything published that I almost forgot what I felt
like to be a writer like, in terms of like having that
confidence and belief that you can actually do it.
Because it is like a barren signwhen you're writing a novel, a
long piece like that. And.
It is as well. I mean, I think it is as well
the fact that the writing short stories, you can write it and it
can go out there and be published somewhere and someone
(12:45):
can be reading it. And within not that long a
period of time in the greatest scheme of things, you know,
maybe within months of you having written it, someone could
be out there reading it. And for any writer and any piece
of writing, you know, I kind of always feel like it's not really
complete until somebody's read it.
Otherwise you are just kind of journaling in a rather weird
(13:07):
way. But it's that kind of, but it's
like you get that kind of not necessarily that feedback, but
it's that sense that it's out there in the world and then it
has a life of its own. It sounds like having children
or something, but it's it's kindof out there and it has a life
like separate from you out therein the world.
You can be. Feels like it's quite a big
(13:27):
thing. Yeah, you're creating something
that someone else is connected with, and that's why you do it.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
And I just. Give other people some pleasure
and entertainment or just a little bit of an escape.
It's amazing. And I think as well, I mean, I'd
love short stories and I always have read a lot of short
stories, which is interesting because we're always told over
(13:48):
and over again that short stories don't sell.
But, you know, all the big publishers kind of would turn
their nose up at any kind of short story collection and quite
often anthologies as well, although I do edit those for a
couple of kind of medium publishers.
And but yeah, there's always this kind of, you always get fed
the line there. Short stories don't sell.
They don't sell the way that novels do.
But there are a lot of us who really, really love reading
(14:11):
short stories. And I always gravitate towards
like interesting looking new short story collections.
Yeah. Especially if they're writers
who know what they're doing withshort stories.
So they're either, you know, either specialists in the short
story or they would have whatever, have kind of like
shown their their short story skills over the years.
I just, yeah, I find it really fascinating to read them, partly
(14:33):
because you get lots of different snapshots, especially
if it's a single author collection of short stories.
You kind of get lots of like little bursts from their mind
instead of just getting this onekind of big panoramic vision.
You get like lots of little kindof shorts that just kind of show
you lots of different facets of kind of where their brains are
(14:55):
and how they think and. It's like looking at a starry
sky rather than the moon. Yeah, exactly.
And that's. A nice point to sort of ask you
this question is like what, how would you define a short story?
Because I think we said before, again, before we were talking,
like a lot of people set out to write them well, really haven't
(15:15):
read them and not much of an idea or understanding of what it
actually is. Yeah, I mean, I do think for a
lot of people it's just an, it'san entry point because it's easy
to sit down and write a short story.
Whereas as we just said, I mean,sitting down and writing a big
full length novel is, is difficult.
It's a major commitment. Whereas, you know, I could sit
(15:36):
down tomorrow and write a new short story and it can be pretty
much finished in the course of aday.
So when you're starting out, I think it seems like it's a good
idea and a nice easy way in. But I think because of that, a
lot of people start writing short stories without having
read very many. So what they actually think is a
short story is quite often more of just a character study or a
(15:59):
single scene from something thatpotentially could be a novel or
at least a longer work of some kind.
And because of that, as a short story, it's quite often quite
kind of unsatisfying. And the pacing is quite quite
often wrong as well. You'll find if people are
writing in that kind of way, they're thinking more of kind of
novel pacing where you kind of ease things in.
(16:19):
You have time to kind of describe who the character is
and what they're doing and stuffbefore anything really happens.
You've not got that time in a short story.
In a short story, it really doesneed to just cut straight to
your point and what you're what you're about.
And I think it's probably the biggest single mistake I've seen
in people who are kind of starting out with short story
(16:40):
writing is that they kind of, they misinterpret to some extent
what the short story does or cando.
And so they end up doing that. They end up just writing like
the opening to a novel or a scene from a novel, or like I
said, sometimes even just a character study where nothing
really happens. They're just kind of explaining
who this character is. And those are all valid types of
(17:02):
writing. And they absolutely have their
place and can be really constructive in terms of
building something longer, but they won't necessarily have a
lot of success if they try and sell it as a short story.
So if you're writing for yourself just to try a character
out or see how a scene would work or whatever, that's
brilliant, but you won't necessarily have a lot of
success trying to find a home for it to get it published.
(17:24):
One of the biggest things that Ialways struggled with is is like
you say, just understanding the structure of the story and what
it what it can be. And I think when I was at that
panel, like you mentioned, like a few different things, like to
think of like moments or like stand out moments or points in
(17:44):
people's lives, whether you haveto make decisions or points of
change. I think when I started thinking
about it like that, that really did help.
It is very much, I mean, it's very much getting to that crux
of what that that person, that character was about.
Like I said, it's like jumping straight to like the meat of a
novel. It's kind of like, you know, if
you think about novels in terms of scenes, which I think
(18:04):
nowadays, a lot of kind of the thinking on at least kind of
creative writing end of it is interms of thinking about it as
like major scenes. And then you kind of stitch
those major scenes together. The short story is almost like
just jumping straight to your biggest major scene.
You always don't want to be messing about around with any of
the rest of it, and you almost don't want to be messing around
with the ending. Because I think we might have
(18:26):
said it on the panel. Actually, quite often the best
short stories are the ones that do leave things a bit open at
the end. I cannot remember where I read
the quote or who it was that said it, but there is a quote
somewhere about how the best kind of ending for a short story
is it should reach some kind of ending, but it should kind of
(18:46):
imply life going on beyond it. You want there to be kind of a
suggested implication that actually it's not an end.
There is a whole life going on beyond it and things are going
to be different to how they werebefore the story.
So something has changed, but what you're just focusing in on
is that period where things change and when that person's
life kind of skews off in a different direction or whatever
(19:10):
that's. Right.
That's to me that's where it allclicks and makes sense when you
to explain it like that. Yeah, it's.
It sounds exciting as well, doesn't it?
So I would want to read that. But if if you were talking to a
person like to be honest, when you're talking to anyone knew
they're the kind of things that you want to get to really
(19:30):
because they're the most interesting things in that
person's life. Potentially they're may be the
most defining things or what thehow you say the the crux point
in which their life has changed direction.
I mean, I love. So a lot of what I write is kind
of within what's generally considered to be either the
weird or the uncanny, depending which kind of school you prefer
and where you're coming from, and probably depending on which
(19:52):
story I've written as well. But I mean, I feel with those
quite often that crux point is avery specific thing, because
it's the point where the main character, whoever they may be,
suddenly realises that the worldisn't what they thought it was.
That they thought the world was one way and that this was how
the world worked. And actually they reached this
(20:13):
crux point in their life where something really strange and
weird has happened that's completely unsettled them.
And they kind of come to the realisation that actually they
had it all wrong and the world was not what they thought it was
at all. And there's a certain level of
kind of fear that comes out of that.
So it does kind of play back into horror.
But I did a really interesting panel with Jeremy Dyson, who
(20:34):
wrote League of Gentlemen a couple of years back now.
And we end up talking about it there and about how actually
it's very similar to the way life is as a child.
When you're a child, everything is weird and uncanny.
It's like, I remember one of my kids being like really amazed
because we saw, was it? We saw like a man and he had a
(20:54):
beard, but his beard didn't meetup with his hair.
There was like a gap between hisbeard and his hair like a child.
This was like mind blowing. It's like, what beard doesn't
meet his hair? How could this possibly be?
And I think they just go throughthat their life, our lives in
these in our early years where just like everything is like a
realisation about the world. We're constantly discovering new
(21:15):
stuff about the world that we didn't know.
And as you get older and become an adult, you kind of lose that
a little bit. Generally speaking, most weeks
are pretty much like the previous week and it will kind
of comes a bit same. So that kind of that feeling
again, the kind of reigniting, that feeling of the world being
a bit strange and a bit weird and actually maybe we've not
(21:35):
understood everything about it. And there are whole things about
the way the world works that we could just discover if we just,
you know, turn down the right street or the wrong St.
It's really interesting. And that's with the weird and
uncanny. Not all the time, but a lot of
the time that's kind of what it focuses in on is that point in
the character's life where suddenly everything changes and
(21:57):
suddenly you're like, you know, however you want to put it,
their eyes are opened or the veil is pulled away or whatever.
You know, it's that point. And that's why you get things
like cosmic horror and stuff. I mean, cosmic horror kind of
plays into that huge amount as well because that's all about
suddenly realising there are these ancient gods that are out
there and which is all harm. And it's like, again, it's
(22:19):
pulling away that veil. It's like the everyday veil of
the world is gone, and actually you're seeing a completely
different world. Yeah.
Or indeed, Trump's inauguration feels a bit like.
That recording that on the the very day, we'll see how we see
how we are when this Peps all comes on.
So you mentioned before about the pitfalls and you said it's a
(22:41):
good place to start. And I agree because there's a
lot of ways people can go wrong.And you mentioned one before
about writing something that isn't quite a short story.
But you've as an editor, have you come across any other
common, common pitfalls that people make with short stories?
I mean, to be honest, the, again, this is where we had a
discussion online the other day and it started with a friend of
(23:04):
mine who's editing in anthology explaining why she was saying no
to everybody. I think she felt bad about it,
but a lot of it is in that firstkind of page or two.
I mean, I know we this gets hammered home every time and
people get very angry because they kind of say, well, why am I
just being judged on the first page?
And it's like, well, because I'mlooking at 400 manuscripts and
if I don't like your first page,I don't have the time to fix
(23:27):
everybody's first pages. You know, I'm looking for one
that I like from the get go. And so because of that, I think
a lot of people start their story too soon.
They start this story too early,and there's too much preamble.
You get a lot of stories starting with kind of like
somebody waking up in the morning, going downstairs,
making themselves a cup of coffee, getting some breakfast.
(23:50):
Oh, and then a letter comes and oh, what's with this letter?
And it's like, we don't need allthat preamble.
If you need it as a writer, write it.
By all means, write it if that then gets you into that
character's head and gets you tothe right place.
But the joy of working on laptops and things nowadays,
this is very easy to cut things out.
So you can just draw a line and cut that out, put it in a
separate file so you don't lose it.
(24:13):
And if you decide in the end that was much better with it,
you can always put it back in. But I would say 99% of the time,
if you can cut as much as you can bear to bring yourself to
cart from the beginning of a story is almost always stronger
for it because you'll be starting right in the middle of
where the action happens. And I've actually done it myself
where I've cut that kind of section at the beginning.
(24:33):
So maybe cut, say, a page at thebeginning of the story.
So I kind of think, OK, I was just working it out in my head
and getting into the character and getting into the situation.
The reader doesn't need this, I'm just going to cut it.
And then I've tried to put some of it back in kind of as a
flashback later on, and I've actually found I didn't need it
at all. It doesn't even need to go in as
a flashback. It was just completely
unnecessary information. But it was almost just like my
(24:55):
brain getting up to speed when Isat down to write.
And it's actually quite a good piece of advice for breaking
writer's block as well. It's just sit down and write,
even if it's terrible and nothing is happening.
And after a while your brain just gets up to speed and you
get into the character and into what's actually happening, and
that's when it happens. But then cut.
(25:15):
I mean, you know, I'm an editor by trade, so I want to cut
things all the time anyway. But yeah, I think especially
nowadays, now that we're not working on, you know,
typewriters with correction fluid and things anymore, it is
very easy. Just keep different.
I mean, I keep, I don't keep absolutely everything.
I will cut some stuff completely, but certainly if I'm
(25:38):
cutting whole kind of passages out, I'll keep them somewhere or
I'll keep earlier drafts. So I'll keep multiple drafts of
a piece of work. And then if I decide that I have
absolutely just mucked it up, I can always revert back.
I never do. It's just a safety net.
It just enables me to do all that stuff and do kind of
slightly risky, daring things, feeling there's that safety net
(26:00):
there. But I'd never use it.
I never go back to earlier drafts.
It is just, it's a psychologicalthing.
If they weren't there, I'd feel really anxious and concerned
you. Usually take your best bets out.
There might be like a sentence or a little phrase that you like
and you just keep that. I mean, occasionally and
occasionally I've taken things out and then just used them
somewhere else because I liked it.
(26:21):
It just didn't belong there in that story, so I've just used it
somewhere else. It does happen occasionally and
quite often it happens, I find, with phrasing.
And actually it kind of happens whether I want it to or not with
phrasing, and I find that we alldo this is that you have certain
phrases and certain images even that are very personal to you
(26:43):
and that you will use over and over and over again.
For some unknown reason when I came to put my last collection
together it turned out if I wanted to have like a slightly
posh character in any story I always called him Miles.
Had like 4 characters called Miles across all the stories.
On Miles Joe. Well, exactly.
(27:04):
It was that kind of character. It was like, it was like, you
know, it just, they were all kind of like slightly different
characters. But it's like if he was slightly
posh, then he was called Miles. So I had to change all of those.
But we have all these little quirks, all of us do one way or
another. So sometimes it's about you can
kind of take something out and then actually realise you'll
(27:25):
rewrite it in another story anyway because it's still there
in your head, so it will just reappear by itself.
So it's interesting that you sayto this first page, obviously I
love them opening lines and theyare so like impressive when you
get one that just just grabs youstraight away, gives you a bit
of a intrigue and stuff like that.
(27:45):
So what would you recommend? I mean, the hook is the arguably
the most important part of the story.
So what advice do you have? In all honesty, I mean, it's
like we all want to be surprised.
We all want to have something that's just going to kind of
like make U.S. Open our eyes and go, OK, but
it's also going to make sense. And this is what I see a lot of
people run into. I mean, I have seen it before
(28:06):
when someone's come up with a really interesting leave on
first line, but maybe like firstkind of paragraph or two and
it's really interesting. And then it just immediately
lapses back into what we were talking about earlier.
And it's like, oh, then they go downstairs and make themselves a
cup of coffee and get some breakfast.
It's like you can't just do thatopening if you've got to then
sustain it and it's got to go somewhere almost immediately
(28:28):
afterwards. And there is a complaint,
certainly. And I think it is actually
fairly valid complaint because I've seen it quite a lot, which
is that I actually think this, Ithink it came from TV series.
So in America as in particular things like Netflix TV series,
they very much need to prove themselves with a pilot episode.
(28:50):
So they'll make a pilot episode,and then if the network thinks
it's good, then they'll Commission the entire series off
the back of that pilot. Because of that, they have a
tendency to throw everything into that pilot.
It's like every idea they've got, every joke they've got.
If it's a comedy, every bit of action, if it's an action film,
whatever, all of it goes into that pilot and then they've got
nowhere to go. And then by like the middle of
(29:12):
the first season, it's just kindof ground to a halt and
everyone's a bit bored with it because actually they had
nowhere else to go. They put it all in that first
little boat. But we seem to be copying it in
the fiction world, and especially in novels and
especially in genre novels, thatidea that the 1st chapter's got
to be like, blow your socks off,amazing.
It's going to throw everything at you.
And then it has nowhere to go because you can't.
(29:33):
You can't in terms of like narrative arcs then go up from
there because you've already started about as high as you're
going to get. I don't know if you remember
watching the TV show The Bodyguards.
I didn't. Oh no, I did.
Actually, I did. It started off with a bomb
threat on a train. That's right, yeah.
Honestly, it was one of the bestopening 20 minutes of ATV show
(29:55):
ever seen. And then you could be a writer
as that. As could what?
There's anything afterwards? Well, that's.
Literally about the only thing Iremember from the entire show.
Yeah. Is that Bob on the train?
I mean, as far as I'm concerned,that was the program I think.
I don't think there was anythingto do with that bomb again after
that. No, I don't think it was.
No, I think that was just them setting up the character and
stuff. But it's just, I mean, now you
(30:16):
see these people do it in novelsand it's a real problem I think
at the moment because it's very much the preferred form.
And if you are approaching publishers or approaching
agents, quite often you're only sending them like the first
chapter or three chapters or whatever it is they've asked
for. So you basically need to do as
much work as you can in that small sample, but then you still
(30:37):
need to have somewhere to go afterwards.
And it's, it's managing that trick that you've got to put
everything in. And yet still they've got to
have more than everything to fill the rest of it up with.
And you see people doing in short stories, I've seen in
short stories where people go all in on the kind of the first
page or two, have it starting right in the middle of something
(30:57):
really interesting and really exciting.
And then it kind of dips and kind of sags in the middle where
they're kind of treading water and kind of going, I've got to
get up to 4000 words. So if I just do like 2000 words
in the middle of this happening and then I can get to the
exciting bit at the end again. But in all honesty, short
stories are weird. And they will be whatever length
they want to be. And the more I work as an
(31:20):
anthology editor working with other writers, the more I find
that they, the lengths of stories get away from people all
the time. Even people that have been
working, you know, as writers for years and have multiple
books under their belts still. They say, oh, yeah, like, you
have 4000 word story. And then they'll come back like
two months later and say, I'm really sorry.
It's like 8 1/2 thousand got away from me.
(31:43):
Or they come back and say, Oh yeah, I kind of cut it back and
it's actually only like 1 1/2 thousand.
But that's because this, each particular story I think needs
to be as long as it needs to be.And there's always, well, not
always, but there's often stuff you can cut out to make it
shorter. But equally, sometimes it just
wants to be longer. Yeah, it just wants to run and
(32:05):
run, and you've got other ideas you want to put into it and
other things you need to happen to get to that end point.
And then by the time you get there, yeah, you've suddenly
been in novella. I know it's it's actually beast.
I mean it's quite weird like as I've been getting more into
short story writing being like doing brainstorming sessions and
writing plans off of stories andstuff and thinking I that that
(32:27):
one's about two and a half thousand.
That one's about 5000. And because you kind of get an
idea of what you need to write, what you need to cover, and
then, I don't know, I suppose itcomes with experience, doesn't
it? You just get an idea of what
it's going to come out like at the ends, roughly.
It does. I mean, one of the things I did
(32:47):
teach a workshop point about like last year, I think on kind
of working an idea before you start writing it, because we
don't talk about it very much. A lot of the kind of workshops
and the creative writing coursesand things concentrate quite
heavily on the actual act of writing and they're putting
their sentences down the page and how you structure things,
how you build character and all these kind of things.
(33:09):
But actually, I think there's a lot to be said, especially for
those of us who have quite busy lives to kind of working an idea
quite hard before you start writing it.
So rather than just having an idea and then just sitting down
and writing it, actually fully interrogate that idea.
And we worked on the workshop through a series of things
whereby by the first thing you'dask yourself, is it, well, have
(33:30):
I seen this before somewhere? Is that the first idea that came
into my head just because I've seen it elsewhere, either
because it's a cliche or it's a trope or we've, you know, seen
something recently or read something recently that was a
bit like that or whatever. And nine times out of 10, it is.
That's not a personal failing byany means.
That's just the way our brains work is that we draw on things
(33:52):
that are familiar to us. So then you can have to kind of
say, OK, well, in that case, I can't just do that because
that's what we've seen before. And you have to start coming out
with other ideas. And one of the things that I
kind of suggest to people is in order to make ideas more
personal and also more interesting as a reader is
(34:13):
bringing other elements in. So I actually, I was working
through this example with my 13 year old on the way to school
the other day because he was doing a piece of work.
So the example I said was if youcame up with an idea, OK, I'm
going to write a story about a boy wizard play.
Now, obviously a boy wizard has been done before, and not even
(34:33):
just by JK Rowling long before that.
He's like, boy, he's a wizard, they're OK.
Well, what else could I put in? You can't say.
Well, OK, well, I'm quite interested at the moment in
what's going on with the International Space Station.
So the International Space Station is actually going to be
decommissioned and they can be building a brand new top, like
top of the range kind of state-of-the-art space station
to replace it. It's like, OK, well maybe we
(34:55):
could send being a wizard if we set in the future and it's on
that International Space Station, because I'm really
interested in that. And then you can kind of think
and say, OK, well maybe if I'm sitting on the space station
instead, I'm actually really interested in sci-fi stories and
stuff at the moment. So maybe we make it a near
future sci-fi thing. And then maybe instead of being
a magician, maybe he's got some kind of psychic power or
something. Yeah.
(35:15):
OK, well, that's kind of interesting.
And actually what I'm kind of interested in kind of like
quantum entanglement and the waythat kind of works at the
moment. So maybe we can work that in
somewhere that actually his kindof psychic ability or whatever
he has is somehow he's quantum entangled with something
somewhere and he's in the space station.
And then suddenly you just take all these elements and put them
in and you've got an entirely different story, which a is
hopefully slightly more originaland less like that kind of trope
(35:37):
that we're all used to. But also it ends up being very
personal to you. And I've done this multiple
times and you can do it with, there's different aspects you
can bring in. So you can bring in kind of
different periods that you want to set things in.
If you're interested in a particular period, you can have
different writing, like different story styles.
So they can do an epistolary novel.
(35:59):
I did a novel that was told entirely through a transcript,
not a short story that was told entirely through transcripts of
interviews with these band members of a band who had the
lead singer who had gone missing.
And I actually did that as a cutup technique.
So I wrote them all. I wrote each interview out just
from beginning to end basically in character and then cut them
(36:20):
all up and rearranged them and put them in different orders and
stuff until I got it working. And it's just like, and that one
in particular as well as I want to do that story.
And I was also kind of obsessed with the like the really early
days of the Seattle grunge scenebecause I lived in Seattle
briefly. So I thought, well, OK, let's
set it in the Seattle. This is grunge band in early
Seattle. We do this cut up technique.
(36:40):
I ended up writing lots of little bits and pieces in
between some song lyrics to kindof dotting in between them and
stuff as well. And then it becomes something
else. Whereas I'd just written a
straightforward story about a guy in a contemporary band who
goes missing and his bandmates wonder where he's gone.
It's less interesting and it's less personal, and you're kind
(37:02):
of doing two things at the same time, which is you're making it
more original. But also, I think you're
investing yourself more emotionally in it.
And I think as a writer, when you're emotionally invested in
what you're writing, it shows. I think the reader can
absolutely tell where something means something to you
personally. I think that's, that's when you
get that right as well. I think that's when you've, I
(37:23):
think that's when it gets to like the special kind of role.
You feel like you've you've you've shared the experience
haven't. You it is, and I think I mean
that it is one of the things I like writing in general and not
just short stories, is it is at its best the there's like a
direct connection to someone else's imagination.
I mean, you're literally formingpictures in your mind that
(37:44):
hopefully are pretty close to the pictures they formed in
their mind, which is a pretty incredible thing when you
actually think about it. And if you can get the writing
kind of sharp and good, then it it should be fairly close to
what it was that they were originally imagining.
Yeah, it's really interesting when you were describing that
(38:06):
type of structure that you use the FS3 and using like the fun
scripts, because I think you said something very similar
fantasy con and I went off and Iwrote a short story in the form
of A to do list. Oh, yes, I do.
Yeah, Yeah. And I don't know, I think
there's, there was other examples under there was like 1
(38:26):
of like Amazon reviews and I told the story of your Amazon
reviews for there's all different ways you could tell
that story, isn't it? And leave gaps for the readers
to fill. That was one of the exercises
that I ran on the workshop originally.
So yeah, it was a the game. People come up with a story idea
and then, yeah, you kind of justbefore you're about to do it,
you drop in there. OK, now you've got to write that
(38:47):
as a list. It can be a list of anything.
It could be a shopping list. It could be a list of
instructions, like you say Amazon reviews, whatever, but
just write it as a list and justsee what happens.
And that's one of the things that I actually really like and
I encourage people to do as wellis just is to do things to see
what happens. It's like I've never written a
story that's the transcript of tapes before.
(39:08):
I've never done a cut up technique before.
Well, let's do it. Let's do it and see what
happens. It might be awful.
It might not work at all. In fact, I've just had, so I had
a novel manuscript that I couldn't land anywhere and it
was about 7075 thousand words. It kind of varied a little bit
depending which draft I was using, but I thought, OK, it's
not landed anywhere I can't finda home for at the moment.
(39:29):
I'm going to like really cut it down.
So I cut it down to 50,000. I cut 1/3 of the word out.
I cut down from 75 down to 50 tosee what happened.
It's like, what does it look like if I do that to it?
And actually it turned out it was a lot better.
I'm really much happier with it and much more proud of it.
The ending was still wrong, so Irewrote the ending, but I just,
(39:52):
the exercise of doing it, even if it still doesn't land
anywhere, taught me things aboutmyself as a writer and about the
act of writing. So I kind of learned just
general rules about writing and what works and what doesn't, and
about being succinct and to the point and.
Not giving too much back story and all these kind of things,
but at the same time, I learned things about myself and about
(40:14):
what my strengths were and the places where I tend to go a bit
off track and meander a bit. I did cut a lot of back story.
And it turns out actually again,like we're talking about drafts
earlier. It's like I went back and looked
at the longer draft and I was like, I just didn't need any of
that. I thought I did.
I thought it was really important that we understood
what had happened to this character and blah, blah, blah.
(40:35):
But actually we just needed to know that he'd lost his job and
that was it. It's almost like one sentence.
He's lost his job. We don't need to know what that
job was. We don't know why he lost it, or
it was part of an economic downturn and they were making
cutbacks to the office. And we don't need any of that.
We just need to know he's lost his job.
That's the only important thing to this story, yeah.
I was going to ask you because editing short stories, it's we
(40:58):
tricky. I mean, the temptation is there
when you're editing something short just to go through line by
line and but as a professional, as I say, how would you
recommend approaching? I think the thing to do is to do
multiple passes. I'm a massive fan of doing
multiple passes and having them looking for something different
every time. So do it by all means.
Just do a kind of big overall structure pass where you're
(41:21):
like, OK, well, is the structureworking?
Let's just get quite a quick read.
You don't need to be doing like very intricate read, quite a
quick read over it to see what'sworking, what isn't.
But then you can do passes just to tighten up the language,
tighten up the grammar. I quite often do a pass just to
check for the things that I knowI do badly, like putting in too
much back story, for example, like the stuff that I know I'm
(41:43):
pretty bad at. There's normally at least one
pass that I do on the story thatwill be something specific to
that story as well. Like for example, when I did the
cut up technique, when I did do a pass to make sure that
actually it did all still make sense and I wasn't mentioning
things before they should have been mentioned and all this kind
of stuff. So all of that basically, and
(42:04):
then probably still do another couple of passes at the end of
it just to Polish it. And just one good piece of
advice actually is I know peopledo it in different ways
actually, but just kind of mixing up so you're reading it
or experiencing it in a slightlydifferent way.
So I know I tend to do a thing, which I know some other writers
do, which is putting into a different font, which sounds
(42:24):
ridiculous. We put into a different font,
maybe even a different, slightlydifferent size or change the
line spacing so it literally just looks different.
Suddenly things will jump out ofyou that you didn't see first
time around. But I know other people also use
my programs that will read it out to you so they can actually
hear like a voice, albeit an AI generated voice.
(42:46):
Reading it to you or reading it out loud yourself is another
good way of doing it, but it's just mixing up the way that
you're approaching it and not just staring at the same text
over and over again. The suddenly stuff just jumps
out. And like we said earlier as
well, it's just like if you get a little bit of a feeling that
there's something that probably isn't right about it, then yeah,
(43:08):
that's a, that's a big flag thatprobably needs fixing and
listening to that voice. We've covered a lot about the
writing side of it and before wefinish up, I was just going to
ask you a little bit about the publishing side and the process
(43:29):
when basically when you finish writing, you're getting all
ready to go out. What would you recommend in
terms of like cover letters? I mean, I know people spend ages
on cover letters and probably ornecessarily so, but what?
What is that approach? I mean, it is really funny in
that I do find that editors, I mean, it's again from having
(43:50):
been on both sides of the desk for both submitting and having
submissions. But I do find that editors
sometimes have a very specific requirements of letters that are
things that I would never expectas an editor.
So it never even occurred to me.Like for example, I don't like
having knowing too much about the story.
I would like to just experience the story.
I don't want a summary of it in the letter because I want to be
(44:11):
able to just sit down and read it and experience what a reader
is going to experience. But I know some people like to
have a summary. Generally speaking, I would say,
though, covering letters as short as possible as you can
bear to make them, We don't wanttoo much information.
It's normally so all of the information about the story
upfront. So in terms of what it's called,
(44:34):
how long it is, whether it's been published anywhere else, if
you're looking for a reprint, anything like that, that all
goes right at the very beginning.
So it's all quite kind of, you know, immediately in the
editor's eye line. It absolutely is worth putting a
authobiography in unless they ask you not to, because even if
you think you haven't achieved very much, that in itself can
(44:55):
sometimes be a selling point. Sometimes the fact that you are
a new voice and a fresh faced author is the selling point.
So it's just worth letting them know just a little bit about who
you are just because they don't know you.
They know nothing about you. And then just a thank you and
sign off. Generally speaking, I think I've
(45:17):
seen some terribly, terribly long ones, and I've seen some
that have gone completely off piece, and I've seen some that
have tried almost like a really hardcore sales pitch technique.
And this is going to be the beststory you've ever read.
Your mind's going to be blown when you read this.
And it's like, OK, now you're setting that up.
So if I'm not my mind's not blown at the end of the first
sentence, you just know it's going in no pile, don't you?
(45:38):
I mean, it's like, I think you've oversold that one a
little bit. But we do.
We always used to get those. You'd get a few of those every
submission period. I really don't need it.
You really don't need a hard sell.
Most editors would just want to get to the story as soon as
possible, but they just want to know what it is.
They just want to know what is this story.
I mean, if you're submitting to somewhere that takes multiple
(45:58):
genres, make sure you mentioned which genre it's in or that kind
of thing. And certainly in the biography,
just anything that you think is relevant.
So it doesn't need to be like a a full CVI.
Have seen some before. I've literally seen ACVI have
been sent ACV, so we don't need ACV.
You just need any kind of relevant writing experience.
(46:20):
And equally, even if you don't have any, even if you've just
gone to a couple of conventions or whatever, just say that they
just want to know who you are. I said sometimes that is the
selling point because if they really like the story, it's like
great, I've discovered a new writer.
This is brilliant. Everyone would love to discover
a new writer. So it's by no means a bad thing
if you haven't got a lot of credits under your belt.
(46:43):
I'd just be upfront about it andjust say, Oh yeah, I'm just
starting out, but I've had a couple of things.
Really hope you like it. Yeah.
What do you think about finding publishers?
Where do you recommend people look for ideal?
It's yeah, it's interesting. It depends what you, what you
want to do. You kind of have to be clear
with yourself with like where you want things to end up.
I mean, nowadays I I don't writevery many short stories because
(47:05):
I just don't have time because I'm so busy editing things and
stuff as well. So because of that, I only
probably write 4 or 5 short stories in a year.
I'd kind of like more to land sort of in anthologies or larger
magazines. So I tend to look out for
anthology calls quite a lot justbecause they feel slightly more
(47:26):
permanent to me. But I mean, if you just wanted
to get something out there, there's plenty of kind of like
online fiction magazines and stuff as well that are
absolutely fantastic and publishing great work.
My biggest thing that I've done,I mean, I've tried various
things over the year to try and find markets.
And in all honesty, I mean, we used to have a group of us who
(47:48):
wrote very kind of similar fiction, used to have a
spreadsheet that we'd share amongst us that would have like
a list of, of markets. And then we kind of, we didn't
rank them as such, but we had like the top tier, middle tier,
bottom tier. So it was kind of the ones we
really want to get into, the ones like, OK, yeah, I'd be
happy to be there. And the ones like, OK, if I
can't land anywhere else, there'd be kind of good, but not
(48:08):
quite so bothered. And the problem I found was it
was so long between me writing stories, every time I went back
to it, like half of them had gone out of business.
It became obsolete very, very quickly.
So actually joining things like Facebook groups or whatever
social media you happen to use, almost every social media now
has some kind of groups function.
(48:29):
And there are always groups for submission calls and quite often
kind of genre by genre. So, you know, if you write
horror, find your horror submissions groups and people
would just post in there when they've got anthologies coming
up, when they've got like magazine calls for submissions
or if they're starting a new magazine or whatever.
And I find for me, that is much more helpful than like trawling
(48:52):
through massive lists on some database somewhere because apart
from anything else, they quite often will give you specific
submission guidelines. They'll give you some idea of
what they're looking for. You get much more of a sense of
what they are and what they're looking for.
And it's very current. They're like literally want
stories right now. They're sitting there saying we
want you to send stories insteadof just kind of cold calling on
(49:15):
people who might already have 800 stories sitting on their
desk. Yeah, I've been using a platform
called Chill Subs recently. I've not used that one.
I've heard of it. Someone mentioned it in one of
the workshops I ran. It's it's I've been very
impressed by it. I used to use Duotrope.
Yes, I see that I got banned from Duotrope, could never try
(49:39):
to make a login and just would say, oh, you've been banned.
So I was like but someone. 'S prime against duotrope, yeah.
God knows what I've done too, but but Chill Subs is really
good. It's like, so they have
different types of services. You've got free one where you
can just go on and you can filter down all your publishers
and stuff by sub genre and workouts and all that.
(50:01):
But did you have paid services as well?
And one of the paid services which I just did a little month
trial of because I was quite interested in it was someone who
works for a publisher that they are an editor that they work
with and read your story and then selects 10 publishers that
would be suitable OK to submit to.
I just thought that was I've never seen that service before.
(50:23):
No, I don't see that. That that is quite cool and I
got the results back to the day and it did work.
Really interesting and helpful. So I've sent it off to a few and
we'll see what happens. That is interesting because
that's actually something I've done for a university before, is
you go and talk to the creative writing students and they give
you a sample of their work and talk about the project they're
working on. And then, yeah, the idea is you
(50:44):
then give them some advice on kind of where actually they
might feasibly send that and whomight be interested in it.
And I think it's always worth getting that more kind of
specific feedback from someone who actually knows the scene and
stuff. It's one of the reasons things
like conventions are really good, because you can go and you
can see all these different publishers and what they're
doing and the kind of stuff they're bringing out and hit
(51:04):
them talk on panels. And you just get a flavour for
what people are like and what people are looking for and that
kind of stuff in a way that I don't think you do just by
trolling people's websites. Yeah, brilliant.
Well, Dan, it's been absolutely fantastic chatting with you.
Thank you very much for giving up your time.
I know you're a busy guy, but it's I feel like I've learned
(51:24):
loads even more than what I learned at the panel.
So thank you very much that's. Right, you're very welcome.
I'm always happy to chat about it and I suspect I'll be doing
more panels in the near future as well.
It's always good practice. And where?
Where's the best place to go to learn more about you and your
books and your writing? Well I do have a website which
(51:45):
is just www.dancoxon.com. I have to say I don't update it
as often as I should do, but there is AI run a newsletter
from that as well, which you cansubscribe to on the website,
which I do send that out about once a month that has details of
anything new I've got coming outand stuff.
(52:06):
Which is actually when I first set it up, I thought there
wasn't going to be anything on there, but actually it turns out
every month I have something going on.
It is nice to be able to shout about events and stuff as well
as you know and podcasts you know, as well as actual books
and stuff. If you get the chance as well,
you're going to have to go down and see down at a POW and also
check out Right in the Uncanny. Which award-winning was British
(52:30):
Fancy award-winning book? Yeah, I'm still really proud of
writing The Uncanny, I think. Yeah, I think it's really good.
And writing the future, the one after it.
And yeah, I'm writing the murders, the third one.
Published by Telling as well. Liverpool based publisher.
Yes, and nice people. Oh well, thank you very much.
Links for everything will be in the description.
(52:51):
And thank you everyone for listening to the whole Thank you
for listening to the Fantasy Writers Tool Shed.
If you'd like to join our writing community on Discord and
get access to fantasy writing classes and books on Patreon,
check the links in the description.
And if you don't want to miss any future episodes, be sure to
follow or subscribe as a supportthe show, leave a quick rating
(53:14):
on Spotify or iTunes and share this episode on social media or
with anyone who you think may beinterested.
Thank you very much for listening.
Thank you for listening to the Fantasy Writers Tool Shed.
If you'd like to join our writing community on Discord and
get access to fancy writing classes and books on Patreon,
check the links in the description.
And if you don't want to miss any future episodes, be sure to
follow or subscribe. And to support the show, leave a
quick rating on Spotify or iTunes and share this episode on
(00:23):
social media or with anyone who you think may be interested.
Thank you very much for listening.
Enjoy the show. Thank you for listening to the
Fantasy of Writers tour sheds. I'm your host, Richie Bulling.
(00:45):
And today I'm delighted to be joined by the award-winning
writer and editor Dan Coxon Down.
Welcome to the show. Hello, thank you very much for
having me. Thank you very much for joining
me very kindly giving up your time to share your wonderful
wisdom on writing short stories.I got a taste of this wisdom of
Fantasy con in October last year.
(01:07):
And Dan, you were a part of a brilliant panel where you know,
which was all about writing short stories.
And I've made so many notes. I picked up so much.
It was a really good panel actually.
It was one of the best ones I'vebeen on I think.
I think it was Andrew Hook was on it as well.
He was chairing it. Yeah, Alan Ashley was on it.
(01:29):
Alan Ashley. Yeah, there's a really, what was
her name? The lady from the publisher.
She was like a slush reader and it was really interesting.
Yes. Oh, I didn't know her because I
can't remember what her name was.
We should put the I'll try and find dig it also the panel
(01:49):
listings in the description anyway.
But yeah, I learned so much and based on everything that you
they taught me in that panel, I went away and I've been writing
those short stories and I'm pleased to say finally got some
of them new ones published. So that sounds you don't thank
you very much that's. Exactly what we want to hear as
(02:10):
well. I mean, obviously it forces us
out of the market. But now, I mean, it's, it's
really nice. I think that's one of those
things that the panels and, and things like this podcasts as
well are really good for is it'sjust hearing other people's
experiences as much as anything else.
Because it means you can kind ofyou can kind of take a shortcut
(02:30):
to where you want to be. Because you can, you can talk to
somebody or listen to somebody who has already been where,
where you are right now or whereyou want to be and kind of learn
from their mistakes before you get to it.
Yeah. Oh I forgot the name, it was
Hesper Leveret. That's right.
That's perfect. I think she reads for lunar
station course later, is that right?
(02:51):
Yes. Something like that, Yeah, yeah.
Good magazines check out. But yeah, the reason why I
wanted to ask you to come on to the show is because a lot of
listeners do write short stories, and we've got a very
busy disco community and there'sa lot of people swapping stories
all the time. And we have a really nice sort
(03:12):
of space where people share the highs and lows for short story
writing because there's a lot ofrejections.
And then every now and then you get the great news that you've
got the successful outcome. And people are always looking
for ways to get those interesting ideas that capture
people's imaginations and that we stand out.
(03:34):
But there's so many pitfalls as well.
And we were talking just before we started recording where we
got some of them. Yeah, before we can.
Yeah, I think. It's interesting you mentioned,
you mentioned that because it's the first thing that I always do
whenever I do run a workshop or whenever I talk to kind of
students or anything is talk about kind of the, the editor's
side of things. Because because I work as an
editor as well as a writer, I kind of see both sides of it.
(03:55):
And it is just the fact that thedefault is always no.
I was literally on blue sky talked about this the other day
as well. Because we receive, I mean the,
the numbers that I we normally churn out is for like a couple
of recently I know Pete, someonethat received over 400
submissions for one spot in an anthology.
(04:17):
I also know someone who got 800 for four spots.
So I mean, just the numbers are just stacked against you and
you're basically as an editor just saying no to everything
because you have to. You can't say yes to everything
because we just can't publish itall.
So it is just no, no, no, default no.
And in order to be the one that doesn't get the no against the
(04:37):
yes, it's not enough just to write a good story.
It has to literally stand out and pop out somehow.
And I mean, obviously there's more complex processes in that
most editors go through like a longlist, shortlist kind of
process. So in an ideal world, you want
to get yourself onto a longlist or a shortlist and then at least
you've got a chance because it'smaybe like, you know, one in 10
(04:59):
or something by that point. So slightly more reasonable
odds, but it is, I mean, yeah, Ithink it's a mysterious kind of
alchemy of this sort of coming up with both ideas and then
actually the execution of the story to kind of come up with
something which is unique but also really good and really well
(05:21):
told, I guess is the sweet spot tell.
Us what you don't How did you get into writing?
What's your journey being like and what why the short stories
appeal to you so much? The journey has been a long one,
it has to be said. I mean, I was literally
remembering the other day sitting down and writing really
(05:42):
bad kind of pastiches of WilliamS Burroughs back when I was sort
of a teenager. So it would have been, what, 30
years ago? And I didn't remember writing.
There was a competition at the local library for a Horror
Story, and I think it was only about 2000 words.
(06:03):
And I remember writing out by hand in a big lined exercise
book and I remember the story very clearly, I think only
because I wrote it very early onin my kind of writing career,
because it really wasn't very good and it was enormously
derivative and it didn't even really make any sense.
It was just like throwing in horror tropes just for the sake
of it to try and get some kind of like jump scare reaction, I
(06:23):
guess. But yeah, I mean, that was that
was the early days. I had a couple of publishing
successes back then in my teenage years, which I still
have copies of at least one of them I think, and I'm still kind
of slightly proud of it. It's quite a good story.
So it wasn't all rubbish, but itjust took a long time to work
out what I was doing. I've veered away from from genre
(06:48):
for quite a long time as well. I was kind of trying to write
much more literary fiction, trying to write kind of more of
a literary novel as well for a while.
And none of that, it didn't really work because it wasn't
really me, if I'm honest. I've kind of, I've been around
long enough now that I can come to the conclusion that actually
I was trying to trying to force myself into areas that I didn't
(07:09):
actually go to. Whereas if I just left my
imagination to do what it wantedto do, it actually went to much
more interesting places. But sometimes it's about that's
almost kind of about self knowledge as much as it is
about, you know, writing skill or writing advice.
It's just reaching a point whereyou know what it is actually
that you have to offer. Yeah.
(07:31):
And then you learn through trial.
Now, don't you Like, yeah, thosewe kind of, we do these things
because you feel like it's the right or you think it's the
right thing to do. But when you try it out, just
doesn't, doesn't feel like you say it doesn't feel right.
You don't enjoy it and it feels like a chore.
And it's interesting. I mean, it still all was kind of
(07:53):
mileage for me. So in terms of like learning the
ropes and learning kind of writing skills and stuff, even
if I was writing in a different genre or trying to write in
different genres, it was still about learning what works for me
and what doesn't work for me. And quite for my kind of own
personal weaknesses and strengths are as a writer and
trying to play up to the strengths and try and iron out
(08:15):
the weaknesses. And as I've gone on, So I mean,
now I work as a proofreader and editor, like not quite full
time, it's more or less part time, but but freelance, but
quite a wide variety of publishers.
And because of that, I've now kind of learned the editing
skills so that I can see my own weaknesses a bit better and
actually I'm able to fix them a bit better.
(08:39):
I always say to people that I, it's kind of like most people, I
talk to you about this, they kind of nod and go, Oh yeah, I
do that as well. But it's like, I'd write a
story. This is kind of like up until I
kind of worked out what I was doing.
I'd write a story and I'd read it and I'd kind of know that
something was wrong. But I kind of think to myself,
oh, I can kind of get away with it, or I'd be a load of work to
(08:59):
fix it. So I think maybe I just kind of
fudge it a bit and let it stand.Those are exactly the things you
need to because it's like you are the closest person to that
story in the entire world because you have written it.
So if you can see them and they're bugging you, I
absolutely guarantee other people are going to notice them
and they're going to bug them a hell of a lot more.
(09:21):
So those are the things it's learning to listen to that inner
voice and say, OK, yeah, that's a bit off.
That sentence isn't quite working or that passage isn't
working or whatever. And say, OK, I do need to fix
it. I need to go back.
I need to do some more work on it.
And I have a friend in America for a while who was a writer,
quite a successful writer, who his kind of motto was always do
(09:42):
the work, do the work, do the work, go back, work at it some
more. And I kind of picked that up
that it's like, yeah, you can always be doing more work on it,
and in itself can sometimes bring its own problem.
I know people in the past who'vegot kind of stuck not publishing
stuff because they're kind of never finished with anything and
(10:05):
they always feel that things arenot good enough.
But I think on the whole, most of us are in the other
direction. Most of us are kind of like, we
know we know there's things a bit wrong with that story I just
wrote. We know it's like 2000 words too
long and the main character doesn't really make sense and
the ending is kind of unsatisfying that we kind of try
(10:26):
and kid ourselves that we can get away with it and we probably
can't. So have you always been drawn to
short stories? I think so in the first
instance. I mean, I did.
I had multiple aborted novel attempts over the years.
I did write really, really bad, like generic fantasy epic quest
(10:49):
novel when I was, I don't know what about 16 or something, I
think, and I've actually still got it somewhere.
I have it in a folder. I can't quite bear to look at
it. I thought at some point I might
I might dig it out and see what lessons there are to be learned.
I suspect what the case with it is, is probably very competently
written, but really derivative and obvious and probably not of
(11:14):
much interest to anybody, I suspect.
But I mean, getting published asa novelist is it's so much
harder than getting published asa short story writer as well.
So I kind of feel like with short stories, you're never
going to get like the massive sales that novelists get, but
you do kind of get lots of little kind of confidence boosts
and affirmations along the way that can kind of boost the
(11:37):
confidence and keep you writing.Whereas I think it's I, I always
have like some incredible respect and awe for these
writers who just like out of thegate, just sit down and write
like 120 thousand word novel andspend like two or three years
doing it with like no prospect of getting published.
I'm like that. So you've you've got to have
quite a bit of kind of self-confidence to back yourself
(12:00):
to do that. I've just just done that for
like the last two or three years, just writing a novel.
And I tried getting an agent where they got absolutely
nowhere with that. And so I'm going back and
editing it now. But I just got so fed up of
committing yourself to that project.
And I think it had been so long since I'd written a short story
(12:23):
and gotten anything published that I almost forgot what I felt
like to be a writer like, in terms of like having that
confidence and belief that you can actually do it.
Because it is like a barren signwhen you're writing a novel, a
long piece like that. And.
It is as well. I mean, I think it is as well
the fact that the writing short stories, you can write it and it
can go out there and be published somewhere and someone
(12:45):
can be reading it. And within not that long a
period of time in the greatest scheme of things, you know,
maybe within months of you having written it, someone could
be out there reading it. And for any writer and any piece
of writing, you know, I kind of always feel like it's not really
complete until somebody's read it.
Otherwise you are just kind of journaling in a rather weird
(13:07):
way. But it's that kind of, but it's
like you get that kind of not necessarily that feedback, but
it's that sense that it's out there in the world and then it
has a life of its own. It sounds like having children
or something, but it's it's kindof out there and it has a life
like separate from you out therein the world.
You can be. Feels like it's quite a big
(13:27):
thing. Yeah, you're creating something
that someone else is connected with, and that's why you do it.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
And I just. Give other people some pleasure
and entertainment or just a little bit of an escape.
It's amazing. And I think as well, I mean, I'd
love short stories and I always have read a lot of short
stories, which is interesting because we're always told over
(13:48):
and over again that short stories don't sell.
But, you know, all the big publishers kind of would turn
their nose up at any kind of short story collection and quite
often anthologies as well, although I do edit those for a
couple of kind of medium publishers.
And but yeah, there's always this kind of, you always get fed
the line there. Short stories don't sell.
They don't sell the way that novels do.
But there are a lot of us who really, really love reading
(14:11):
short stories. And I always gravitate towards
like interesting looking new short story collections.
Yeah. Especially if they're writers
who know what they're doing withshort stories.
So they're either, you know, either specialists in the short
story or they would have whatever, have kind of like
shown their their short story skills over the years.
I just, yeah, I find it really fascinating to read them, partly
(14:33):
because you get lots of different snapshots, especially
if it's a single author collection of short stories.
You kind of get lots of like little bursts from their mind
instead of just getting this onekind of big panoramic vision.
You get like lots of little kindof shorts that just kind of show
you lots of different facets of kind of where their brains are
(14:55):
and how they think and. It's like looking at a starry
sky rather than the moon. Yeah, exactly.
And that's. A nice point to sort of ask you
this question is like what, how would you define a short story?
Because I think we said before, again, before we were talking,
like a lot of people set out to write them well, really haven't
(15:15):
read them and not much of an idea or understanding of what it
actually is. Yeah, I mean, I do think for a
lot of people it's just an, it'san entry point because it's easy
to sit down and write a short story.
Whereas as we just said, I mean,sitting down and writing a big
full length novel is, is difficult.
It's a major commitment. Whereas, you know, I could sit
(15:36):
down tomorrow and write a new short story and it can be pretty
much finished in the course of aday.
So when you're starting out, I think it seems like it's a good
idea and a nice easy way in. But I think because of that, a
lot of people start writing short stories without having
read very many. So what they actually think is a
short story is quite often more of just a character study or a
(15:59):
single scene from something thatpotentially could be a novel or
at least a longer work of some kind.
And because of that, as a short story, it's quite often quite
kind of unsatisfying. And the pacing is quite quite
often wrong as well. You'll find if people are
writing in that kind of way, they're thinking more of kind of
novel pacing where you kind of ease things in.
(16:19):
You have time to kind of describe who the character is
and what they're doing and stuffbefore anything really happens.
You've not got that time in a short story.
In a short story, it really doesneed to just cut straight to
your point and what you're what you're about.
And I think it's probably the biggest single mistake I've seen
in people who are kind of starting out with short story
(16:40):
writing is that they kind of, they misinterpret to some extent
what the short story does or cando.
And so they end up doing that. They end up just writing like
the opening to a novel or a scene from a novel, or like I
said, sometimes even just a character study where nothing
really happens. They're just kind of explaining
who this character is. And those are all valid types of
(17:02):
writing. And they absolutely have their
place and can be really constructive in terms of
building something longer, but they won't necessarily have a
lot of success if they try and sell it as a short story.
So if you're writing for yourself just to try a character
out or see how a scene would work or whatever, that's
brilliant, but you won't necessarily have a lot of
success trying to find a home for it to get it published.
(17:24):
One of the biggest things that Ialways struggled with is is like
you say, just understanding the structure of the story and what
it what it can be. And I think when I was at that
panel, like you mentioned, like a few different things, like to
think of like moments or like stand out moments or points in
(17:44):
people's lives, whether you haveto make decisions or points of
change. I think when I started thinking
about it like that, that really did help.
It is very much, I mean, it's very much getting to that crux
of what that that person, that character was about.
Like I said, it's like jumping straight to like the meat of a
novel. It's kind of like, you know, if
you think about novels in terms of scenes, which I think
(18:04):
nowadays, a lot of kind of the thinking on at least kind of
creative writing end of it is interms of thinking about it as
like major scenes. And then you kind of stitch
those major scenes together. The short story is almost like
just jumping straight to your biggest major scene.
You always don't want to be messing about around with any of
the rest of it, and you almost don't want to be messing around
with the ending. Because I think we might have
(18:26):
said it on the panel. Actually, quite often the best
short stories are the ones that do leave things a bit open at
the end. I cannot remember where I read
the quote or who it was that said it, but there is a quote
somewhere about how the best kind of ending for a short story
is it should reach some kind of ending, but it should kind of
(18:46):
imply life going on beyond it. You want there to be kind of a
suggested implication that actually it's not an end.
There is a whole life going on beyond it and things are going
to be different to how they werebefore the story.
So something has changed, but what you're just focusing in on
is that period where things change and when that person's
life kind of skews off in a different direction or whatever
(19:10):
that's. Right.
That's to me that's where it allclicks and makes sense when you
to explain it like that. Yeah, it's.
It sounds exciting as well, doesn't it?
So I would want to read that. But if if you were talking to a
person like to be honest, when you're talking to anyone knew
they're the kind of things that you want to get to really
(19:30):
because they're the most interesting things in that
person's life. Potentially they're may be the
most defining things or what thehow you say the the crux point
in which their life has changed direction.
I mean, I love. So a lot of what I write is kind
of within what's generally considered to be either the
weird or the uncanny, depending which kind of school you prefer
and where you're coming from, and probably depending on which
(19:52):
story I've written as well. But I mean, I feel with those
quite often that crux point is avery specific thing, because
it's the point where the main character, whoever they may be,
suddenly realises that the worldisn't what they thought it was.
That they thought the world was one way and that this was how
the world worked. And actually they reached this
(20:13):
crux point in their life where something really strange and
weird has happened that's completely unsettled them.
And they kind of come to the realisation that actually they
had it all wrong and the world was not what they thought it was
at all. And there's a certain level of
kind of fear that comes out of that.
So it does kind of play back into horror.
But I did a really interesting panel with Jeremy Dyson, who
(20:34):
wrote League of Gentlemen a couple of years back now.
And we end up talking about it there and about how actually
it's very similar to the way life is as a child.
When you're a child, everything is weird and uncanny.
It's like, I remember one of my kids being like really amazed
because we saw, was it? We saw like a man and he had a
(20:54):
beard, but his beard didn't meetup with his hair.
There was like a gap between hisbeard and his hair like a child.
This was like mind blowing. It's like, what beard doesn't
meet his hair? How could this possibly be?
And I think they just go throughthat their life, our lives in
these in our early years where just like everything is like a
realisation about the world. We're constantly discovering new
(21:15):
stuff about the world that we didn't know.
And as you get older and become an adult, you kind of lose that
a little bit. Generally speaking, most weeks
are pretty much like the previous week and it will kind
of comes a bit same. So that kind of that feeling
again, the kind of reigniting, that feeling of the world being
a bit strange and a bit weird and actually maybe we've not
(21:35):
understood everything about it. And there are whole things about
the way the world works that we could just discover if we just,
you know, turn down the right street or the wrong St.
It's really interesting. And that's with the weird and
uncanny. Not all the time, but a lot of
the time that's kind of what it focuses in on is that point in
the character's life where suddenly everything changes and
(21:57):
suddenly you're like, you know, however you want to put it,
their eyes are opened or the veil is pulled away or whatever.
You know, it's that point. And that's why you get things
like cosmic horror and stuff. I mean, cosmic horror kind of
plays into that huge amount as well because that's all about
suddenly realising there are these ancient gods that are out
there and which is all harm. And it's like, again, it's
(22:19):
pulling away that veil. It's like the everyday veil of
the world is gone, and actually you're seeing a completely
different world. Yeah.
Or indeed, Trump's inauguration feels a bit like.
That recording that on the the very day, we'll see how we see
how we are when this Peps all comes on.
So you mentioned before about the pitfalls and you said it's a
(22:41):
good place to start. And I agree because there's a
lot of ways people can go wrong.And you mentioned one before
about writing something that isn't quite a short story.
But you've as an editor, have you come across any other
common, common pitfalls that people make with short stories?
I mean, to be honest, the, again, this is where we had a
discussion online the other day and it started with a friend of
(23:04):
mine who's editing in anthology explaining why she was saying no
to everybody. I think she felt bad about it,
but a lot of it is in that firstkind of page or two.
I mean, I know we this gets hammered home every time and
people get very angry because they kind of say, well, why am I
just being judged on the first page?
And it's like, well, because I'mlooking at 400 manuscripts and
if I don't like your first page,I don't have the time to fix
(23:27):
everybody's first pages. You know, I'm looking for one
that I like from the get go. And so because of that, I think
a lot of people start their story too soon.
They start this story too early,and there's too much preamble.
You get a lot of stories starting with kind of like
somebody waking up in the morning, going downstairs,
making themselves a cup of coffee, getting some breakfast.
(23:50):
Oh, and then a letter comes and oh, what's with this letter?
And it's like, we don't need allthat preamble.
If you need it as a writer, write it.
By all means, write it if that then gets you into that
character's head and gets you tothe right place.
But the joy of working on laptops and things nowadays,
this is very easy to cut things out.
So you can just draw a line and cut that out, put it in a
separate file so you don't lose it.
(24:13):
And if you decide in the end that was much better with it,
you can always put it back in. But I would say 99% of the time,
if you can cut as much as you can bear to bring yourself to
cart from the beginning of a story is almost always stronger
for it because you'll be starting right in the middle of
where the action happens. And I've actually done it myself
where I've cut that kind of section at the beginning.
(24:33):
So maybe cut, say, a page at thebeginning of the story.
So I kind of think, OK, I was just working it out in my head
and getting into the character and getting into the situation.
The reader doesn't need this, I'm just going to cut it.
And then I've tried to put some of it back in kind of as a
flashback later on, and I've actually found I didn't need it
at all. It doesn't even need to go in as
a flashback. It was just completely
unnecessary information. But it was almost just like my
(24:55):
brain getting up to speed when Isat down to write.
And it's actually quite a good piece of advice for breaking
writer's block as well. It's just sit down and write,
even if it's terrible and nothing is happening.
And after a while your brain just gets up to speed and you
get into the character and into what's actually happening, and
that's when it happens. But then cut.
(25:15):
I mean, you know, I'm an editor by trade, so I want to cut
things all the time anyway. But yeah, I think especially
nowadays, now that we're not working on, you know,
typewriters with correction fluid and things anymore, it is
very easy. Just keep different.
I mean, I keep, I don't keep absolutely everything.
I will cut some stuff completely, but certainly if I'm
(25:38):
cutting whole kind of passages out, I'll keep them somewhere or
I'll keep earlier drafts. So I'll keep multiple drafts of
a piece of work. And then if I decide that I have
absolutely just mucked it up, I can always revert back.
I never do. It's just a safety net.
It just enables me to do all that stuff and do kind of
slightly risky, daring things, feeling there's that safety net
(26:00):
there. But I'd never use it.
I never go back to earlier drafts.
It is just, it's a psychologicalthing.
If they weren't there, I'd feel really anxious and concerned
you. Usually take your best bets out.
There might be like a sentence or a little phrase that you like
and you just keep that. I mean, occasionally and
occasionally I've taken things out and then just used them
somewhere else because I liked it.
(26:21):
It just didn't belong there in that story, so I've just used it
somewhere else. It does happen occasionally and
quite often it happens, I find, with phrasing.
And actually it kind of happens whether I want it to or not with
phrasing, and I find that we alldo this is that you have certain
phrases and certain images even that are very personal to you
(26:43):
and that you will use over and over and over again.
For some unknown reason when I came to put my last collection
together it turned out if I wanted to have like a slightly
posh character in any story I always called him Miles.
Had like 4 characters called Miles across all the stories.
On Miles Joe. Well, exactly.
(27:04):
It was that kind of character. It was like, it was like, you
know, it just, they were all kind of like slightly different
characters. But it's like if he was slightly
posh, then he was called Miles. So I had to change all of those.
But we have all these little quirks, all of us do one way or
another. So sometimes it's about you can
kind of take something out and then actually realise you'll
(27:25):
rewrite it in another story anyway because it's still there
in your head, so it will just reappear by itself.
So it's interesting that you sayto this first page, obviously I
love them opening lines and theyare so like impressive when you
get one that just just grabs youstraight away, gives you a bit
of a intrigue and stuff like that.
(27:45):
So what would you recommend? I mean, the hook is the arguably
the most important part of the story.
So what advice do you have? In all honesty, I mean, it's
like we all want to be surprised.
We all want to have something that's just going to kind of
like make U.S. Open our eyes and go, OK, but
it's also going to make sense. And this is what I see a lot of
people run into. I mean, I have seen it before
(28:06):
when someone's come up with a really interesting leave on
first line, but maybe like firstkind of paragraph or two and
it's really interesting. And then it just immediately
lapses back into what we were talking about earlier.
And it's like, oh, then they go downstairs and make themselves a
cup of coffee and get some breakfast.
It's like you can't just do thatopening if you've got to then
sustain it and it's got to go somewhere almost immediately
(28:28):
afterwards. And there is a complaint,
certainly. And I think it is actually
fairly valid complaint because I've seen it quite a lot, which
is that I actually think this, Ithink it came from TV series.
So in America as in particular things like Netflix TV series,
they very much need to prove themselves with a pilot episode.
(28:50):
So they'll make a pilot episode,and then if the network thinks
it's good, then they'll Commission the entire series off
the back of that pilot. Because of that, they have a
tendency to throw everything into that pilot.
It's like every idea they've got, every joke they've got.
If it's a comedy, every bit of action, if it's an action film,
whatever, all of it goes into that pilot and then they've got
nowhere to go. And then by like the middle of
(29:12):
the first season, it's just kindof ground to a halt and
everyone's a bit bored with it because actually they had
nowhere else to go. They put it all in that first
little boat. But we seem to be copying it in
the fiction world, and especially in novels and
especially in genre novels, thatidea that the 1st chapter's got
to be like, blow your socks off,amazing.
It's going to throw everything at you.
And then it has nowhere to go because you can't.
(29:33):
You can't in terms of like narrative arcs then go up from
there because you've already started about as high as you're
going to get. I don't know if you remember
watching the TV show The Bodyguards.
I didn't. Oh no, I did.
Actually, I did. It started off with a bomb
threat on a train. That's right, yeah.
Honestly, it was one of the bestopening 20 minutes of ATV show
(29:55):
ever seen. And then you could be a writer
as that. As could what?
There's anything afterwards? Well, that's.
Literally about the only thing Iremember from the entire show.
Yeah. Is that Bob on the train?
I mean, as far as I'm concerned,that was the program I think.
I don't think there was anythingto do with that bomb again after
that. No, I don't think it was.
No, I think that was just them setting up the character and
stuff. But it's just, I mean, now you
(30:16):
see these people do it in novelsand it's a real problem I think
at the moment because it's very much the preferred form.
And if you are approaching publishers or approaching
agents, quite often you're only sending them like the first
chapter or three chapters or whatever it is they've asked
for. So you basically need to do as
much work as you can in that small sample, but then you still
(30:37):
need to have somewhere to go afterwards.
And it's, it's managing that trick that you've got to put
everything in. And yet still they've got to
have more than everything to fill the rest of it up with.
And you see people doing in short stories, I've seen in
short stories where people go all in on the kind of the first
page or two, have it starting right in the middle of something
(30:57):
really interesting and really exciting.
And then it kind of dips and kind of sags in the middle where
they're kind of treading water and kind of going, I've got to
get up to 4000 words. So if I just do like 2000 words
in the middle of this happening and then I can get to the
exciting bit at the end again. But in all honesty, short
stories are weird. And they will be whatever length
they want to be. And the more I work as an
(31:20):
anthology editor working with other writers, the more I find
that they, the lengths of stories get away from people all
the time. Even people that have been
working, you know, as writers for years and have multiple
books under their belts still. They say, oh, yeah, like, you
have 4000 word story. And then they'll come back like
two months later and say, I'm really sorry.
It's like 8 1/2 thousand got away from me.
(31:43):
Or they come back and say, Oh yeah, I kind of cut it back and
it's actually only like 1 1/2 thousand.
But that's because this, each particular story I think needs
to be as long as it needs to be.And there's always, well, not
always, but there's often stuff you can cut out to make it
shorter. But equally, sometimes it just
wants to be longer. Yeah, it just wants to run and
(32:05):
run, and you've got other ideas you want to put into it and
other things you need to happen to get to that end point.
And then by the time you get there, yeah, you've suddenly
been in novella. I know it's it's actually beast.
I mean it's quite weird like as I've been getting more into
short story writing being like doing brainstorming sessions and
writing plans off of stories andstuff and thinking I that that
(32:27):
one's about two and a half thousand.
That one's about 5000. And because you kind of get an
idea of what you need to write, what you need to cover, and
then, I don't know, I suppose itcomes with experience, doesn't
it? You just get an idea of what
it's going to come out like at the ends, roughly.
It does. I mean, one of the things I did
(32:47):
teach a workshop point about like last year, I think on kind
of working an idea before you start writing it, because we
don't talk about it very much. A lot of the kind of workshops
and the creative writing coursesand things concentrate quite
heavily on the actual act of writing and they're putting
their sentences down the page and how you structure things,
how you build character and all these kind of things.
(33:09):
But actually, I think there's a lot to be said, especially for
those of us who have quite busy lives to kind of working an idea
quite hard before you start writing it.
So rather than just having an idea and then just sitting down
and writing it, actually fully interrogate that idea.
And we worked on the workshop through a series of things
whereby by the first thing you'dask yourself, is it, well, have
(33:30):
I seen this before somewhere? Is that the first idea that came
into my head just because I've seen it elsewhere, either
because it's a cliche or it's a trope or we've, you know, seen
something recently or read something recently that was a
bit like that or whatever. And nine times out of 10, it is.
That's not a personal failing byany means.
That's just the way our brains work is that we draw on things
(33:52):
that are familiar to us. So then you can have to kind of
say, OK, well, in that case, I can't just do that because
that's what we've seen before. And you have to start coming out
with other ideas. And one of the things that I
kind of suggest to people is in order to make ideas more
personal and also more interesting as a reader is
(34:13):
bringing other elements in. So I actually, I was working
through this example with my 13 year old on the way to school
the other day because he was doing a piece of work.
So the example I said was if youcame up with an idea, OK, I'm
going to write a story about a boy wizard play.
Now, obviously a boy wizard has been done before, and not even
(34:33):
just by JK Rowling long before that.
He's like, boy, he's a wizard, they're OK.
Well, what else could I put in? You can't say.
Well, OK, well, I'm quite interested at the moment in
what's going on with the International Space Station.
So the International Space Station is actually going to be
decommissioned and they can be building a brand new top, like
top of the range kind of state-of-the-art space station
to replace it. It's like, OK, well maybe we
(34:55):
could send being a wizard if we set in the future and it's on
that International Space Station, because I'm really
interested in that. And then you can kind of think
and say, OK, well maybe if I'm sitting on the space station
instead, I'm actually really interested in sci-fi stories and
stuff at the moment. So maybe we make it a near
future sci-fi thing. And then maybe instead of being
a magician, maybe he's got some kind of psychic power or
something. Yeah.
(35:15):
OK, well, that's kind of interesting.
And actually what I'm kind of interested in kind of like
quantum entanglement and the waythat kind of works at the
moment. So maybe we can work that in
somewhere that actually his kindof psychic ability or whatever
he has is somehow he's quantum entangled with something
somewhere and he's in the space station.
And then suddenly you just take all these elements and put them
in and you've got an entirely different story, which a is
hopefully slightly more originaland less like that kind of trope
(35:37):
that we're all used to. But also it ends up being very
personal to you. And I've done this multiple
times and you can do it with, there's different aspects you
can bring in. So you can bring in kind of
different periods that you want to set things in.
If you're interested in a particular period, you can have
different writing, like different story styles.
So they can do an epistolary novel.
(35:59):
I did a novel that was told entirely through a transcript,
not a short story that was told entirely through transcripts of
interviews with these band members of a band who had the
lead singer who had gone missing.
And I actually did that as a cutup technique.
So I wrote them all. I wrote each interview out just
from beginning to end basically in character and then cut them
(36:20):
all up and rearranged them and put them in different orders and
stuff until I got it working. And it's just like, and that one
in particular as well as I want to do that story.
And I was also kind of obsessed with the like the really early
days of the Seattle grunge scenebecause I lived in Seattle
briefly. So I thought, well, OK, let's
set it in the Seattle. This is grunge band in early
Seattle. We do this cut up technique.
(36:40):
I ended up writing lots of little bits and pieces in
between some song lyrics to kindof dotting in between them and
stuff as well. And then it becomes something
else. Whereas I'd just written a
straightforward story about a guy in a contemporary band who
goes missing and his bandmates wonder where he's gone.
It's less interesting and it's less personal, and you're kind
(37:02):
of doing two things at the same time, which is you're making it
more original. But also, I think you're
investing yourself more emotionally in it.
And I think as a writer, when you're emotionally invested in
what you're writing, it shows. I think the reader can
absolutely tell where something means something to you
personally. I think that's, that's when you
get that right as well. I think that's when you've, I
(37:23):
think that's when it gets to like the special kind of role.
You feel like you've you've you've shared the experience
haven't. You it is, and I think I mean
that it is one of the things I like writing in general and not
just short stories, is it is at its best the there's like a
direct connection to someone else's imagination.
I mean, you're literally formingpictures in your mind that
(37:44):
hopefully are pretty close to the pictures they formed in
their mind, which is a pretty incredible thing when you
actually think about it. And if you can get the writing
kind of sharp and good, then it it should be fairly close to
what it was that they were originally imagining.
Yeah, it's really interesting when you were describing that
(38:06):
type of structure that you use the FS3 and using like the fun
scripts, because I think you said something very similar
fantasy con and I went off and Iwrote a short story in the form
of A to do list. Oh, yes, I do.
Yeah, Yeah. And I don't know, I think
there's, there was other examples under there was like 1
(38:26):
of like Amazon reviews and I told the story of your Amazon
reviews for there's all different ways you could tell
that story, isn't it? And leave gaps for the readers
to fill. That was one of the exercises
that I ran on the workshop originally.
So yeah, it was a the game. People come up with a story idea
and then, yeah, you kind of justbefore you're about to do it,
you drop in there. OK, now you've got to write that
(38:47):
as a list. It can be a list of anything.
It could be a shopping list. It could be a list of
instructions, like you say Amazon reviews, whatever, but
just write it as a list and justsee what happens.
And that's one of the things that I actually really like and
I encourage people to do as wellis just is to do things to see
what happens. It's like I've never written a
story that's the transcript of tapes before.
(39:08):
I've never done a cut up technique before.
Well, let's do it. Let's do it and see what
happens. It might be awful.
It might not work at all. In fact, I've just had, so I had
a novel manuscript that I couldn't land anywhere and it
was about 7075 thousand words. It kind of varied a little bit
depending which draft I was using, but I thought, OK, it's
not landed anywhere I can't finda home for at the moment.
(39:29):
I'm going to like really cut it down.
So I cut it down to 50,000. I cut 1/3 of the word out.
I cut down from 75 down to 50 tosee what happened.
It's like, what does it look like if I do that to it?
And actually it turned out it was a lot better.
I'm really much happier with it and much more proud of it.
The ending was still wrong, so Irewrote the ending, but I just,
(39:52):
the exercise of doing it, even if it still doesn't land
anywhere, taught me things aboutmyself as a writer and about the
act of writing. So I kind of learned just
general rules about writing and what works and what doesn't, and
about being succinct and to the point and.
Not giving too much back story and all these kind of things,
but at the same time, I learned things about myself and about
(40:14):
what my strengths were and the places where I tend to go a bit
off track and meander a bit. I did cut a lot of back story.
And it turns out actually again,like we're talking about drafts
earlier. It's like I went back and looked
at the longer draft and I was like, I just didn't need any of
that. I thought I did.
I thought it was really important that we understood
what had happened to this character and blah, blah, blah.
(40:35):
But actually we just needed to know that he'd lost his job and
that was it. It's almost like one sentence.
He's lost his job. We don't need to know what that
job was. We don't know why he lost it, or
it was part of an economic downturn and they were making
cutbacks to the office. And we don't need any of that.
We just need to know he's lost his job.
That's the only important thing to this story, yeah.
I was going to ask you because editing short stories, it's we
(40:58):
tricky. I mean, the temptation is there
when you're editing something short just to go through line by
line and but as a professional, as I say, how would you
recommend approaching? I think the thing to do is to do
multiple passes. I'm a massive fan of doing
multiple passes and having them looking for something different
every time. So do it by all means.
Just do a kind of big overall structure pass where you're
(41:21):
like, OK, well, is the structureworking?
Let's just get quite a quick read.
You don't need to be doing like very intricate read, quite a
quick read over it to see what'sworking, what isn't.
But then you can do passes just to tighten up the language,
tighten up the grammar. I quite often do a pass just to
check for the things that I knowI do badly, like putting in too
much back story, for example, like the stuff that I know I'm
(41:43):
pretty bad at. There's normally at least one
pass that I do on the story thatwill be something specific to
that story as well. Like for example, when I did the
cut up technique, when I did do a pass to make sure that
actually it did all still make sense and I wasn't mentioning
things before they should have been mentioned and all this kind
of stuff. So all of that basically, and
(42:04):
then probably still do another couple of passes at the end of
it just to Polish it. And just one good piece of
advice actually is I know peopledo it in different ways
actually, but just kind of mixing up so you're reading it
or experiencing it in a slightlydifferent way.
So I know I tend to do a thing, which I know some other writers
do, which is putting into a different font, which sounds
(42:24):
ridiculous. We put into a different font,
maybe even a different, slightlydifferent size or change the
line spacing so it literally just looks different.
Suddenly things will jump out ofyou that you didn't see first
time around. But I know other people also use
my programs that will read it out to you so they can actually
hear like a voice, albeit an AI generated voice.
(42:46):
Reading it to you or reading it out loud yourself is another
good way of doing it, but it's just mixing up the way that
you're approaching it and not just staring at the same text
over and over again. The suddenly stuff just jumps
out. And like we said earlier as
well, it's just like if you get a little bit of a feeling that
there's something that probably isn't right about it, then yeah,
(43:08):
that's a, that's a big flag thatprobably needs fixing and
listening to that voice. We've covered a lot about the
writing side of it and before wefinish up, I was just going to
ask you a little bit about the publishing side and the process
(43:29):
when basically when you finish writing, you're getting all
ready to go out. What would you recommend in
terms of like cover letters? I mean, I know people spend ages
on cover letters and probably ornecessarily so, but what?
What is that approach? I mean, it is really funny in
that I do find that editors, I mean, it's again from having
(43:50):
been on both sides of the desk for both submitting and having
submissions. But I do find that editors
sometimes have a very specific requirements of letters that are
things that I would never expectas an editor.
So it never even occurred to me.Like for example, I don't like
having knowing too much about the story.
I would like to just experience the story.
I don't want a summary of it in the letter because I want to be
(44:11):
able to just sit down and read it and experience what a reader
is going to experience. But I know some people like to
have a summary. Generally speaking, I would say,
though, covering letters as short as possible as you can
bear to make them, We don't wanttoo much information.
It's normally so all of the information about the story
upfront. So in terms of what it's called,
(44:34):
how long it is, whether it's been published anywhere else, if
you're looking for a reprint, anything like that, that all
goes right at the very beginning.
So it's all quite kind of, you know, immediately in the
editor's eye line. It absolutely is worth putting a
authobiography in unless they ask you not to, because even if
you think you haven't achieved very much, that in itself can
(44:55):
sometimes be a selling point. Sometimes the fact that you are
a new voice and a fresh faced author is the selling point.
So it's just worth letting them know just a little bit about who
you are just because they don't know you.
They know nothing about you. And then just a thank you and
sign off. Generally speaking, I think I've
(45:17):
seen some terribly, terribly long ones, and I've seen some
that have gone completely off piece, and I've seen some that
have tried almost like a really hardcore sales pitch technique.
And this is going to be the beststory you've ever read.
Your mind's going to be blown when you read this.
And it's like, OK, now you're setting that up.
So if I'm not my mind's not blown at the end of the first
sentence, you just know it's going in no pile, don't you?
(45:38):
I mean, it's like, I think you've oversold that one a
little bit. But we do.
We always used to get those. You'd get a few of those every
submission period. I really don't need it.
You really don't need a hard sell.
Most editors would just want to get to the story as soon as
possible, but they just want to know what it is.
They just want to know what is this story.
I mean, if you're submitting to somewhere that takes multiple
(45:58):
genres, make sure you mentioned which genre it's in or that kind
of thing. And certainly in the biography,
just anything that you think is relevant.
So it doesn't need to be like a a full CVI.
Have seen some before. I've literally seen ACVI have
been sent ACV, so we don't need ACV.
You just need any kind of relevant writing experience.
(46:20):
And equally, even if you don't have any, even if you've just
gone to a couple of conventions or whatever, just say that they
just want to know who you are. I said sometimes that is the
selling point because if they really like the story, it's like
great, I've discovered a new writer.
This is brilliant. Everyone would love to discover
a new writer. So it's by no means a bad thing
if you haven't got a lot of credits under your belt.
(46:43):
I'd just be upfront about it andjust say, Oh yeah, I'm just
starting out, but I've had a couple of things.
Really hope you like it. Yeah.
What do you think about finding publishers?
Where do you recommend people look for ideal?
It's yeah, it's interesting. It depends what you, what you
want to do. You kind of have to be clear
with yourself with like where you want things to end up.
I mean, nowadays I I don't writevery many short stories because
(47:05):
I just don't have time because I'm so busy editing things and
stuff as well. So because of that, I only
probably write 4 or 5 short stories in a year.
I'd kind of like more to land sort of in anthologies or larger
magazines. So I tend to look out for
anthology calls quite a lot justbecause they feel slightly more
(47:26):
permanent to me. But I mean, if you just wanted
to get something out there, there's plenty of kind of like
online fiction magazines and stuff as well that are
absolutely fantastic and publishing great work.
My biggest thing that I've done,I mean, I've tried various
things over the year to try and find markets.
And in all honesty, I mean, we used to have a group of us who
(47:48):
wrote very kind of similar fiction, used to have a
spreadsheet that we'd share amongst us that would have like
a list of, of markets. And then we kind of, we didn't
rank them as such, but we had like the top tier, middle tier,
bottom tier. So it was kind of the ones we
really want to get into, the ones like, OK, yeah, I'd be
happy to be there. And the ones like, OK, if I
can't land anywhere else, there'd be kind of good, but not
(48:08):
quite so bothered. And the problem I found was it
was so long between me writing stories, every time I went back
to it, like half of them had gone out of business.
It became obsolete very, very quickly.
So actually joining things like Facebook groups or whatever
social media you happen to use, almost every social media now
has some kind of groups function.
(48:29):
And there are always groups for submission calls and quite often
kind of genre by genre. So, you know, if you write
horror, find your horror submissions groups and people
would just post in there when they've got anthologies coming
up, when they've got like magazine calls for submissions
or if they're starting a new magazine or whatever.
And I find for me, that is much more helpful than like trawling
(48:52):
through massive lists on some database somewhere because apart
from anything else, they quite often will give you specific
submission guidelines. They'll give you some idea of
what they're looking for. You get much more of a sense of
what they are and what they're looking for.
And it's very current. They're like literally want
stories right now. They're sitting there saying we
want you to send stories insteadof just kind of cold calling on
(49:15):
people who might already have 800 stories sitting on their
desk. Yeah, I've been using a platform
called Chill Subs recently. I've not used that one.
I've heard of it. Someone mentioned it in one of
the workshops I ran. It's it's I've been very
impressed by it. I used to use Duotrope.
Yes, I see that I got banned from Duotrope, could never try
(49:39):
to make a login and just would say, oh, you've been banned.
So I was like but someone. 'S prime against duotrope, yeah.
God knows what I've done too, but but Chill Subs is really
good. It's like, so they have
different types of services. You've got free one where you
can just go on and you can filter down all your publishers
and stuff by sub genre and workouts and all that.
(50:01):
But did you have paid services as well?
And one of the paid services which I just did a little month
trial of because I was quite interested in it was someone who
works for a publisher that they are an editor that they work
with and read your story and then selects 10 publishers that
would be suitable OK to submit to.
I just thought that was I've never seen that service before.
(50:23):
No, I don't see that. That that is quite cool and I
got the results back to the day and it did work.
Really interesting and helpful. So I've sent it off to a few and
we'll see what happens. That is interesting because
that's actually something I've done for a university before, is
you go and talk to the creative writing students and they give
you a sample of their work and talk about the project they're
working on. And then, yeah, the idea is you
(50:44):
then give them some advice on kind of where actually they
might feasibly send that and whomight be interested in it.
And I think it's always worth getting that more kind of
specific feedback from someone who actually knows the scene and
stuff. It's one of the reasons things
like conventions are really good, because you can go and you
can see all these different publishers and what they're
doing and the kind of stuff they're bringing out and hit
(51:04):
them talk on panels. And you just get a flavour for
what people are like and what people are looking for and that
kind of stuff in a way that I don't think you do just by
trolling people's websites. Yeah, brilliant.
Well, Dan, it's been absolutely fantastic chatting with you.
Thank you very much for giving up your time.
I know you're a busy guy, but it's I feel like I've learned
(51:24):
loads even more than what I learned at the panel.
So thank you very much that's. Right, you're very welcome.
I'm always happy to chat about it and I suspect I'll be doing
more panels in the near future as well.
It's always good practice. And where?
Where's the best place to go to learn more about you and your
books and your writing? Well I do have a website which
(51:45):
is just www.dancoxon.com. I have to say I don't update it
as often as I should do, but there is AI run a newsletter
from that as well, which you cansubscribe to on the website,
which I do send that out about once a month that has details of
anything new I've got coming outand stuff.
(52:06):
Which is actually when I first set it up, I thought there
wasn't going to be anything on there, but actually it turns out
every month I have something going on.
It is nice to be able to shout about events and stuff as well
as you know and podcasts you know, as well as actual books
and stuff. If you get the chance as well,
you're going to have to go down and see down at a POW and also
check out Right in the Uncanny. Which award-winning was British
(52:30):
Fancy award-winning book? Yeah, I'm still really proud of
writing The Uncanny, I think. Yeah, I think it's really good.
And writing the future, the one after it.
And yeah, I'm writing the murders, the third one.
Published by Telling as well. Liverpool based publisher.
Yes, and nice people. Oh well, thank you very much.
Links for everything will be in the description.
(52:51):
And thank you everyone for listening to the whole Thank you
for listening to the Fantasy Writers Tool Shed.
If you'd like to join our writing community on Discord and
get access to fantasy writing classes and books on Patreon,
check the links in the description.
And if you don't want to miss any future episodes, be sure to
follow or subscribe as a supportthe show, leave a quick rating
(53:14):
on Spotify or iTunes and share this episode on social media or
with anyone who you think may beinterested.
Thank you very much for listening.
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