The Unparalleled Fiction Publishing Expertise and Many Writing Accomplishments of Unpublished Guy


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Mighty Fiction Writing Blog

Unpublished Guy earned a BA in professional writing from Old Dominion University, an educational institution that obviously has a long tradition of academic excellence, since it has the word “old” in it. With this degree Unpublished Guy mastered all aspects of writing: creative, technical, and journalistic. Although he recently used a colon, he has a strong preference for the em dash. He also likes to connect two similar sentences with a semicolon, followed by the word, “however,” followed by a comma. But Unpublished Guy’s biography digresses. After mastering all aspects of writing, it was only natural that Unpublished Guy should obtain a masters degree, which he did—an MBA—which is practically an MFA, since it shares two thirds of the same letters.

An additional advantage of Unpublished Guy’s MBA would be a capacity to market and promote this fiction book, Ambrose Bierce Falls into a Worm Hole, that far exceeds the typical writer that finds marketing unseemly and beneath the creative writing craft. Unpublished Guy would be most enthusiastic about developing a strategic marketing plan and providing hands-on support to the marketing of the book. He would be delighted to work with an acquisitions editor to compromise his artistic integrity in order to appeal to a profitable book reading segment of the population.

Finally, you might ask, “What has Unpublished Guy publish?” It is not possible to render in words on paper (or monitor) the publishing history of Unpublished Guy. Instead, I direct you to what he has not published, so you can judge his publishing based on the publishing failures he has not had.

  • Never had a copy of a published fiction book sent to the remainder bin
  • Never received a negative review for fiction work published in print
  • Never sold his body to have an independent bookseller carry his self-published fiction book

On the other hand, he has been praised by such notable figures as ’relatives’ and ’friends’. Most notably, his heroic creative writing efforts have been transcribed in an epic that rivals the literary fortitude of Beowulf or the Iliad.

Selecting a Short Fiction Contest for Mathematically Astute Writers

Since I am shallow, I can think of no better criteria than calculating the ROI (that’s return-on-investment in business parlance) to select a fiction contest. ROI takes in account both the cost and potential payoff. A contest with $20 entry fee with a $3000 prize might be more attractive than a free contest that offers a sample copy of a special issue of a literary magazine—unless you really, really, really liked the stories in the magazine or could foretell the future and see that that particular issue would be a collector’s item worth thousands of dollars; of course, in the latter case you would need to calculate the time value of money to see what thousands of dollars received X number of years in the future would be worth to you now.

A basic ROI calculation as applied to these contests would take the entry fee and subtract it from the prize and then divide the entry fee, resulitng in a percentage. For example, a contest with $10 entry fee and a $500 prize would have an ROI of 4900%. However, this is only the case if a win is a certainty, which of course, it is not. It is therefore necessary to make a simple adjustment by applying the probability that I will win the contest and applying the probability value to the potential prize. In the example already described, I might determine the probability to be a tenth of 1%, which would be reasonable in a contest with 1000 submissions and all submitters are of equal talent with stories that are equally appealing to the contest judges. For the calculation the prize is now only worth 50 cents. When I plug this value into the equation, the ROI is negative 95%, which means I lost 95% of my investment.

This is a good start, but I will make another trivial adjustment to my costs. In my case, I have a monstrous story that will require some work. I will need to add the time I spend on reworking the story to its cost. I will assume that an hour of time is worth $42, and it will take me an hour to rework 250 words. Developing the example contest through this indisputably sound line of reasoning would result in an increased cost of $170 ($40 per hour to rework 1000 words plus the $10 entry fee.) Now, the ROI is a negative %99.7.

The prospects for a profitable short fiction contest are beginning to look grim.

Writing Cerebral Fiction is Like Gutting Chickens on an Assembly Line

Often I find writing to be a thoroughly unenjoyable task. It’s no wonder I haven’t published anything when I can’t finish writing anything. Even when I employ the Mashed Potato Method of fiction writing, I get stuck where I just start thinking too much. Right about step three when the writing starts getting more detail-oriented. Then the mental debates begin—about word choice, sentence order and structure, sorting through underlying meanings and symbolism that begin to surface and whether I should develop them. Completing the short story starts feeling like I am working on an assembly line gutting chickens with arthritic hands that are seizing up into in some malformed claws. Except in the case of writing it is my brain that gets knotted up.

I’ve always experienced the world like a big brain mounted on a pair of puny legs. Thinking, analyzing. Not a lot of doing. (Even when I do something, such as this web site, then it is about not doing something. The site after all, is unpublished guy, not published guy.) It is only natural that his should carry over to the my writing. What do I mean by cerebral fiction, anyway?

I mean writing that is less plot-driven, inward-looking to the point of being turned inside out in some deconstructed contortion, and as inert as Xenon. Just what I enjoy reading. Wish I enjoyed writing it more. When I try to break out of that cerebral mold it just gets that much worse. I start to feel like I am in the tenth hour of my chicken-gutting shift. Both my hands have ceased working altogether, and I have to resort to pounding the guts out of the chicken with the sides of my hands.

John Gardner Zen Writing Exercises

What might some of John Gardner’s Art of Fiction exercises looked like if he had a pathological obsession for Zen koans and parlour games?

4a. Describe a landscape as seen by an old woman whose disgusting and detestable old husband has just died. Do not mention the husband or death. Also, do not mention the woman.
4b. Describe a lake as seen by a young man who has committed a murder. Don’t mention the murder or the young man or the lake.
4c. Describe a landscape as seen by a bird. Only use prepositions and conjunctions.
4d. Describe a building as seen by a man whose son has died in a war. Don’t mention the son, death, war, the man, or the time of day. When describing the building, you may only mention the color of the building, what animal it is like, and whether it is larger or smaller than a bread basket.

3. Write three effective short sentences: each less than two words and involving a different emotion. Do not mention the emotion.

Think you’re up to the challenge? Share your response with the rest of us by contributing a comment.

The Mashed Potato Method of Writing a Fiction Story

As I have mentioned before, the downfall of my past fiction efforts has been an overly designed approach. I have written and completed a handful of short fiction stories using this approach, and some of them have turned out OK; however, I have not yet published a fiction story.

Recently I was inspired by Richard Dreyfus, and decided that I would create my own method of writing fiction (short story or novel), the Mashed Potato Method of Writing a Fiction Story. (I wasn’t sure whether it should be potato or potatoes. Most likely a serving of mashed potatoes contains more than one potato, but Mashed Potato Method had a better cadence.)

At this stage you have opened your word processor or text editor. If you opened your word processor, you have, of course, taken the necessary time to try out a few different fonts to see which will look best for your new fiction story. My daughter is fond of script fonts.

First, your start with a healthy dollop of mashed potatoes, malformed and misshapen in a horrible fiction story blob.
Just start writing without much thought. Cut and paste writing material from other fiction story drafts and other disconnected vignettes you may have written. Go ahead and throw in long tracts from Wikipedia that you may have unearthed while researching aspects of your story. Just keep heaping spoonful after spoonful of mashed potato fiction onto the plate.

Mashed Potato Writing Fiction Method – Step 2: Knock Off the Top

Do you now have a heap of fictional starch on your plate that has approached the size of your head? (In other words, you head is beginning to ache at the bewildering chaos of content now populating what should now be an absolute writing mess.) If so, you can now begin writing and rewriting, shaping the mounds of potato fiction until your story has a nice Devil’s Mountain flattop.

In this step, you are cutting back on a lot of the junk you have thrown into the story, if you can call it a story at this point. Deleting paragraphs, Rewriting paragraphs down to sentences or words. Reorganizing large fiction lumps from one side of the plate to another. Striving for a coherent and compelling fiction story.

Mashed Potato Writing Fiction Method – Step 3: Apply the Fork

Your story may now begin to resemble Devil’s Mountain, but it does not look quite right—time to fine tune through careful application of the fork. In the previous step, your story writing was the mashed potato sculpturing equivalent of clearcutting the rain forest. Now careful pruning of your mashed potatoes in order, attending to the detail of word choice and ensuring that no participles are dangling. I used to call this working on the crinkly bits of the fjord.

How well does this new system work? Since I have adopted this new approach to writing fiction, the results have been amazing. I think they speak for themselves. After eleven months, I have completed nearly 30% of a short fiction story. In a few short years, I will be ready to submit it to literary publications.

The Difference Between Creative Writing and Technical Writing—Eating Pigeons

What do you think a pigeon would taste like? Would it be dark meat or white meat? Do they fly as much as ducks or geese? That would mean dark meat. Do they mostly walk around on sidewalks and window ledges? Then perhaps some white meat.

The stereotype of the starving artist has discouraged many potential fiction writers. In a biography about the science fiction writer Philip Dick, I read a story about his starving writer period when he was cranking out potboilers. According to the story, he was taking pot shots at pigeons on his window ledge for food.

From an early age I read voraciously and wanted to be a writer. When I was younger, I read a lot of stories by science fiction authors like Philip Dick. I took a creative writing course in high school, and thought that I would take the literary writing path.

After evaluating a few schools, I ended up at Old Dominion University in 1992, because it had a strong creative writing program. At the time, the Associated Writer’s Program, an organization that supports writers and creative writing programs, was located on campus. (It has since moved to George Mason University, which from what I understand now has a strong program of its own.)

I started in Old Dominion’s creative writing program, taking an introductory writing course and a literary writing workshop. The head of the program, and my instructor for both courses, disputed the whole notion of suffering as a requirement for being a fiction writer. He was fond of saying, “If you need to suffer, put your hand on a table, raise a book over hand, and then drop the book. Now, that you got the suffering out of the way, you can focus on the writing.”

That should have been reassuring, and it was a little. Nevertheless, as a I progressed through the program, the fact that I would need to money to eat began to gnaw away at me. I started to think about eating pigeons. I prefer dark meat, but wrangling pigeons on window ledges made writing fiction for a living much less appealing.

Faced with the prospect of shooting pigeons on the window ledge for food, I decided to set aside the literary writing dream and exchanged it for the practical, stable career path of technical writing. I had learner the lesson: the difference between literary and technical writing.

I got a BA in professional writing, which was a hodge podge of different writing courses, including creative writing but also including technical writing and journalism. Besides, I thought I could still do the fiction bit part-time.

I went on to take an internship as a technical writer, which led to a technical writing job after I graduated. Eventually, my fulltime career moved from technical writing to marketing. I tried writing fiction on the side. I suppose some writers have been successful going down that path.

If writing literary fiction on the side had worked for me, however, I probably wouldn’t have a web site call “Unpublished Guy.” Would I have been the next John Updike? Probably not. Barely Published Guy?

So how does pigeon taste? I’ve heard it described as very dark meat with the texture of liver, but I guess it depends on where you eat it.