dominance & submission
by uzwi
I read this & then this & I’m not sold (sorry Paul & Ellen).
Instead of upping the presentation-to-content ratio, & bringing your praxis into line with everyone else’s, you could ask yourself why you’re writing. As a result you might find you want to submit the story by stencilling it on to sixteen roughly torn sections of newsprint & burying it in some corner of a South Ossetian field at midnight. For a little more adventure, move to Rotherham & paint it, a sentence at a time, on randomly chosen cinderblock walls (no wall being closer than fifty meters to any other but all face north) over the next seven years. Or for stay-at-homes do what I often do: keep it on your hard drive until the mother of crashes makes it unavailable to anyone except a Scottish man with big frizzy hair & a complete collection of Tank Girl comics.
I’m not being perverse. Well, not entirely.
the m john harrison blog 
I’m commenting too much on your blog at the moment, but this is great. They sound – read – like, um, wankers.
Paul & Ellen are experienced professionals, of course, who between them have published many, many successful books & won many, many awards. Their advice here is professionally oriented & aimed at the novice: as a result, it has to assume that publication is the goal–after all, why would you submit, otherwise ? But I’ve always been prone to wonder if publication is the be-all & end-all of writing–indeed, both Paul & Ellen have heard me voice this opinion many times in terms more or less surreal than the post above.
I think it’s significant that paragraph formatting is one of the things that’s changing under the impact of online publishing, which, coincidentally, at its purest, doesn’t require submission. (Although I am now tempted to write myself a note every morning: “Mike, The M John Harrison Blog is simply not going to read your stuff unless you sharpen up on some of these format issues.” Actually, I bloody hate that I can’t indent & must always have a 2-line drop; but that’s growing up in the 1950s for you.)
an illuminating rant–especially in light of the restrictions that professionals like to place on art forms. In the art world if you have a blank in your resume–they want to know what you’ve been doing. How about making art? Why does the finished event/object become such a deity?
I remember again why I sometimes long to be reincarnated as a surf bum.
The blank, Mia. Couldn’t that be the art. A blank CV.
I guess it’s been done. (Ooops, I mean…)
I guess it’s been done.
Or,
I guess it’s been done.
Please don’t tell me that after years of struggling to write my book, I’ll fail because I haven’t indented or double spaced.
(your blog doesn’t do indents… I’ve just discovered. Or underlined italics. Just should have been underlined as italics.)
Yes, but science fiction isn’t *art* is it? As I remember you quoting someone or other. Just mass-produced commercial wankery, or some such. It’s why we drink and do bad drugs all the time, up here on the 98th floor of the Megapublishingcorp tower, to dull that throb of nostalgia we feel whenever we glance down at the streets.
(I hate it that I can’t submit a typewritten carbon copy on onionskin to this blog, but there you are.)
this is far better for the novice than the ridiculous amount of practical (typographical) advice out there…
Christ almighty, don’t you hate that Livejournal formatting?
http://ellen-datlow.livejournal.com/107439.html
I haven’t expected to have to read from one side of the screen to another since at least 1998.
question–do you guys remember when you were a novice? Of course you didn’t really think you were such, or at least I didn’t. I went blithely along painting what I thought were amazing paintings. The sheer, wonderful, ignorance and bliss in action. Occasionally I’d hit it–and those I can still look at.
Eventually (for me) that quality has merged with a critical eye that has no respect for my own feelings and an ability to listen to critical response.
But I’m truly grateful for those years of making where I insisted on painting my own way to where I was going.
onionskins buried under those sheep above at midnight…
could this be the beginning of another life crisis?
…bit of a carpet bombing syndrome…
Bit less of the ‘were’ please Mia!
Hi Paul. You could snailmail the onionskin to me, but I wouldn’t be able to do the conversion. I’d need the Tank Girl guy for that. Maybe we could start a serious fanzine, using a duplicator.
Is art/not-art automatically the issue, where publish/not-publish is concerned ? To me they seem to be different grids you can lay over the process. Some writing is public, some writing is private; some private writing is done in public. There are lots of motives & products which escape the opposition between art & not-art, or commerce & not-commerce; & the web constantly resolves what used to be quite destructive oppositions by supplying a venue for anything you can think of trying.
I also ask myself: if I was an old-media publisher, & I got the ms of something like The Sexual Life of Catherine M, would lack of para indents prevent me from recognising its potential ? Or would I be making an allowance or two there ?
Hi Brandon. I’m glad.
As someone who earns his living (sub-) editing on newspapers and magazines, I’m amazed people can get so picky about stuff. Some subs get annoyed with writers who won’t format things properly, but I always think, they write, that’s hard enough, I don’t want them to distract themselves exploring Word dialogue boxes. Anyway, have none of these guys heard of Find and Replace?
re: Mia’s last- Yeah, I remember; it hasn’t been that long 🙂 I’m glad I followed my own path as blindly as I did, too. It’s not led where I’d imagined, but what fun would that have been 🙂 And I’m satisfied with enough of the results.
A few years ago, I did a drawing called ‘Always Beginning Again’- Because I felt, still do, that I always am. You learn technique, process evolves, but the more you learn, the more you find there is to learn: The horizon never gets any nearer, or should. I’ll always be a novice at the next thing. But hopefully I’ll remember, occasionally at least, that I am.
Hi Uzwi. A fanzine would be very Steampunk. And of course old-media publishers won’t let the lack of indents in a manuscript get in the way of publishing it if they think they can shift some units. It’s not like joining the Masons. Not yet, anyway. But most books are mass-produced objects, which means at some point the original manuscript or cinderblock wall has to submit to the bovine rituals of book production. So either you put in the indents or if you can’t be bothered to someone else will have to. I don’t think that indenting especially hurts your artistic integrity, unless it’s very easily bruised . . .
Besides all that, I happen to agree with Mike. I’d rather do what I want than what a publisher/the SWFA/the Masons wants or expects. Wouldn’t everyone? And not all fiction requires the tickmark of bookhood, and all the (many, much worse than indent/don’t indent) compromises that implies. Even though, so far, most fiction out here in the web still looks a lot like the fiction out there in the bookshops.
Personally, I think postcards are the Way Forward.
think: Ray Johnson
I’m in
Mia, that’s a great tip. Thanks!
Eno thinks of himself as a non-musician. Kicking prose about mostly in private (but sometimes in public), it’s liberating to think of yourself as a non-writer, too, and lose some imaginary constraints.
You don’t need to press F12 with those cinder blocks, either.
Hi Martin. Yes, the fight not to be a writer. You lose it every day, but get up the next morning still determined.
Uzwi, and others:
Reading the replies here has made me very happy. The world could do with a few more people that are concerned with writing, over being a writer; I’m glad I’m not the only one. For me, publication is definitely not the be-all end-all. (And not only for the fact that I’ll most likely never be published!)
I’m also glad that I’m apparently not the only one that found the initial post about formatting to be a soul sucking tribute to the slow decline of the intarweb.
So, thanks.
There’s an author’s website that exclusively offers advice on writing. I’ve kept returning to it, mainly because it always annoys me but I can never work out why: all the advice there is sound, as it goes. And this has been bothering me, in a small way. Now, I think I understand. The site is actually about how to write things people will want to publish, and is directed entirely towards that end. A successful writer is actually defined there as a published one, so it was my mistake.
Thank you. It’s so obvious in hindsight, but at least I can stop worrying about it now.
Of course, if you have no interest in being published then you can format your fiction any way you like.
However, should you choose to send your little masterpieces out in the commercial world where thousands will read it (rather than the 20 on your website or blog) then it makes sense to format the work so as to make it easier for the person you’d like to sell it to to, gee–read it. It’s not as if correct/readable mss submission has just been invented.
Of course the content is important –I’m buying the content, after all. Proper format is the delivery system–I’d like to be able to read the manuscript submissions quickly as there may be (depending on what I’m reading for) hundreds.
And perhaps none of you realize that Mike is mostly kidding. He’s always sent his submissions (to me, in any case) properly formatted.
“Of course, if you have no interest in being published then you can format your fiction any way you like. ”
Thanks for your permission. I’ll do that.
I don’t understand why any of you feel that formatting a ms a certain way somehow impinges on your creativity. You write/create first–in any format that you as a writer feel comfortable in.
The formatting is the last step in the process–when the story is ready to go out into the world.
What’s the big deal?
When I was a young lad, my father submitted a poorly formatted manuscript and his editor beat him to death with a clown-shoe because of it. Ever since then, I’ve had a paralyzing fear of formatting and clowns.
There, I’ve said it. Back to therapy.
let’s admit it–artists are pissy. We just don’t like being told what to do even if it is thoughtful, logical advice.
Plus if you don’t fucking laugh at it all it gets to be heavy swimming wearing an iron attitude.
Speaking as the general manager of a small press, the standard manuscript format (double-spaced, paginated (x of y), with author’s name and piece title, in non-proportional font) has always been the most effective way for me and my staff to produce the physical product. It’s easier to read notes on double spaced MSS, and in the event they get dropped, the pagination helps us reshuffle the notes back into chronological order. But as a nod to those who prefer their own formats, we always ask for soft and hard copies of their chosen design and layout, that is, how they want the final product to look. Then it’s up to us to execute, using the MSS as something of an instruction manual, and the soft and hard copies in their preferred format as a mock-up and guide.
I can’t speak for all artists – but I’m prissy.
“Little masterpieces.” It sounds, Ellen, as if you don’t like or respect your would-be authors very much.
29 responses. Careful Mike. This is getting like Ellen’s Tomb. Oops. I mean, Lenin. Sorry.
Julian,
I respect those would be writers who respect me and my needs as an editor.
“Like” is irrelevant unless I actually KNOW the writer.
All I see of those writers I don’t know personally is their submission and whether it’s professional or not. (which means that the format is easily readable).
As someone who has worked with hundreds of writers in sf/f/h I think most of them (including Mike) will vouch for my “respect” towards him and them.