Birthday Weekend

This Friday was my birthday.  It was an exciting day, filled with lots of events featuring George R. R. Martin.

One of the most interesting bits of the assorted lectures, interviews, and Q&As that I got to listen/participate in involving Mr. Martin was his advice to aspiring writers.  While I sometimes consider myself an aspiring writer, I have been writing less and less, so I payed close attention to his advice, knowing full well that I may not use it while I don't have a product to peddle.

The bit of advice was the importance of networking in the writing world.  When Mr. Martin was breaking ground as a writer, Science Fiction and Fantasy magazines were a big part of the cultural landscape.  And there were a ton of those magazines.

With the advent of the internet, many of those magazines have gone under, or switched to a purely online version.  They just aren't as prevalent or important in the scene as they once were.

But part of this advice was important: many of the writers we now know and love started off writing short stories.  Honing their story-telling writing short stories led to writing novel-length fiction and science fiction/fantasy, which we now all know and love.

I see this elsewhere as well.  I've been reading the Barnes & Noble Leatherbound Classic of H. P. Lovecraft's The Complete Fiction for a while now.  So far it's all been short stories, which I love but it takes much longer to get through because you don't carry momentum through the book.  You get into a short story, and then it ends, and you have to get into a new one.  But I digress.  Lovecraft, a household name in the Horror genre of literature, made his name in short fiction, Edgar Allan Poe made his name in short fiction, and George R. R. Martin began his career in short fiction.

This leads me to believe that Short Fiction is a medium in which to hone the craft of storytelling, even if it's not a publishing endeavor.  In the past it was a way to get your name out there via magazines and periodicals, many of which have gone under, and all of which are on the decline.

But what we have now are blogs, forums, and more.  The short stories don't have to get your name out there in the writing world, but they do have to build a portfolio of stories, honing your craft and establishing your voice.

This is something I plan on honing on this blog in the foreseeable future.  I hope you like reading stories, because I plan on posting an increasing amount of short stories in the short future.  Whether anyone reads them is a moot point to me, because more than anything else I want to practice creating a story, and telling it over the medium of writing.

I appreciate any and all criticism, constructive and otherwise.  Another take-away from the George R. R. Martin interview yesterday was that writers learn from rejections.  At an early stage in his career, Ray Bradbury wallpapered his room with rejection slips --which are smaller than normal sheets of paper-- from submitting his writing to magazines and periodicals.  Knowing that your writing isn't quite good enough makes you want to sharpen it to being much better.  Constant praise raises nothing but entitlement and laziness.  My writing has always been met with praise and little criticism, and I think this is one of the things that has made my writing stagnate into nothingness.  And I want to write again, whether it ever gets published or not.

I don't want to be a household writing name, I just want to tell stories that I enjoy.  And I hope you, my friends on the internet, enjoy these stories as well.