Writing and Publishing Fiction

Does Entering Fiction Contests Feel Like Playing the Lottery?
photo by Jeffrey Beal

Last week I announced that I would rework the incomplete novel that resulted from July Novel Writing month to enter a short story contest. I could take one of two approaches to begin this task. I could be true to the vision of the artist and complete the story first and then shop around for a suitable contest. Alternatively, I could take the shallow route by selecting a fiction contest first and then rewrite the fiction to improve the chances of winning that particular contest. I'll be taking the shallow route.

An Unpublished Guy visitor made an insightful comment to a previous post about fiction writing. This individual, who has a blog of her own, observed that I used the writing equivalent of leftovers and recommended that I try starting fresh.

The fourth of July and four days into July Novel Writing Month. Four days of staring at a blank page wondering what font I should be using to write my novel. I settled on Verdana. I prefer sans serif, but it's not as overused as Arial.

Now that I have font selection settled, I have to figure out what the novel should be about. I suppose I could brainstorm, but I've decided to dredge up one of my older short stories and repurpose it as a novel length story. The particular story I had in mind was originally intended to be a multi-layered tome of symbolism like Moby Dick, except the source of my ambition was the epic poem, Jerusalem, by William Blake.

I decided to try a novel approach to a book reviews, and write a review of the reviews of the book before I have completed reading the book. Why would I do that? Do a Google search on "book reviews [novel title]," and you will find many reviews by Amazon.com reviewers and other bloggers. You could consider it a collaborative review of sorts, where different opinions build on each other, rather than another rambling, unrelenting, self-involved soliliquy. By sticking to the first 3/5 of the book, I can reduce the chance that I will spoil the novel for others that might wish to read it—although The Unconsoled is not a novel that I would expect to end with a lot of clarity. As the title of this post states, I am going to give the 3/5 review of reviews treatment to The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro. (Hopefully, I have done more justice to his name than I did for poor Nabakov Nabokov. Since most of the reviews are lengthy, I will simply take snippets with links to the larger articles. (Unfortunately, I accessed several of the articles through a free trial with highbeam.com, so it is a bit of work to get at the full articles.

Some novels are rumored to be too dense, arcane, or pretentious to be read in their entirety. Those sorts of novels are my specialty, and I have been emboldened to complete five such novels from beginning to end: 100 Years of Solitude, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Foucault's Pendulum, Moby Dick, The Tunnel.

The Italo Calvino novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler, opened me up to a completely different type of story-telling. First, the story is written in the second person point of view. You know the second person, that point of view you are warned not even to try, because it is nearly impossible to make it work, but every writer at some point tries anyway. Well, Calvino pulls it off. How?

The knock against second person is that the writer doesn’t know anything about the reader, so how can the writer pretend to know how the reader would think or feel any of things that the writer assigns to the second person character. In this case the bridge is made by identifying with the reader as a reader and nothing else, simply someone who is beginning to read a Italo Calvino’s book, If on a winter’s night a traveler.