The Dark blog #1: What does Sofawolf look for in a story?
#1 of The Dark Blog
I've toyed with the idea of doing a writing blog several times.
I keep putting it off because I think, "Why does what I say matter to anyone?" Kyell Gold, after all, writes about writing, more frequently, more eloquently, and to a more diverse audience than I. We have writing podcasts (such as Unsheathed and Fangs and Fonts). We have the Furry Writer's Guild. We have a M.C.A. Hogarth, a prominent writer in the community, who just got elected as vice president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Why do my words matter among so many skilled voices?
And then I keep returning to the idea because despite all the reasons listed above, a lot of people still keep asking me for my thoughts.
So this is it, a writing blog. The Dark blog.
The topic of this first blog was inspired by a recent conversation with Ocean on Twitter (@OceanTigrox): what does Sofawolf look for in a story?
I am by no means all of Sofawolf. I'm an editor for two publications (Heat and Hot Dish), and I help choose the stories that get published in those two. And I do mean help. Both Heat and Hot Dish have four slushpile reviewers, whose opinions are combined to guide the editors in making the final decisions.
I am speaking for myself here, not for all of Sofawolf. I am, however, also trying to distill conversations I've had with other Sofawolf editors about why we publish some stories and not others into the points below.
My suggestions will also lean towards Heat and Hot Dish stories, as those are the projects I work on and also the ones people seem most interested in when they ask me what Sofawolf looks for in a story. So expect some discussion of sex and the like, but I will also try to make the points more generally applicable where possible.
Since examples always help make theoretical points more precise, I'll illustrate with some examples pulled from Heat #11. As such, SPOILER WARNING!
- We want a good story.
The most damning criticism a story gets in the slush pile is "Nothing happened," and this is probably the most common reason for us to reject a story.
Clearly in every story _something_must happen, so when we say that nothing happened, we mean that nothing of significance happened. What we want is a plot: a character is unable to get something that they desire (conflict), tries and fails to get it with mounting consequences (rising action), and is forced to make a big decision or perform a monumental action to obtain the desired object (climax). This is a very condensed and over-simplified plot. Not all stories have elements that look quite like this.
However, at Sofawolf, we get some stories where the plot goes like this:
"Hey, I want that."
"No, you can't have that."
"Pleeeeeeease."
"...Okay."
And that's it. The entire plot between conflict and climax takes place in four short lines of dialogue. Nothing (of significance) happened.
We see these small plots a lot more in Heat and Hot Dish than in our other anthologies. They publish erotica after all, and many writers mistakenly think that we just want a good, long, oh so hard sex scene, so the plot only serves to get us to the sex as fast as possible. ("Oops, I ordered a pizza, but I don't have any money to pay for it.") This results in lop-sided stories, where the conflict, rising action, and climax--all of the plot--might all take place in the first two pages, followed by many, many pages of sex.
What we want to see is a story with a conflict introduced in the beginning, a climax at the end, and in between a good helping of rising action (and sex, if it's Heat or Hot Dish).
To look back to Heat#11, Tempe's "The Case of the Gelatinous Gemstone" is a story about a mystery. It opens with the introduction of the mystery and ends when it is solved. All the events of the story are related to the solving of that mystery. Yes, even the sex. Huskyteer's "Lines" is a story from beginning to end about Judi's attempts to find financial success as an actress while supporting her girlfriend. Slip-Wolf's "Jewels of Remorse" is about a heist on an alien planet. These are big, full plots. Something happens in them.
- We want good characters.
What makes a good character is even more wishy-washy and harder to pin down than what makes a good story. Two things that commonly make us happy are characters that are complex enough that they take more than a sentence to describe and characters who develop over the course of the story.
Not every character can or even should fit these criterion, but we love it if at least the main character fits one if not both. For a good example of this, look at Gentry in "Jewels of Remorse." Gentry is definitely complex. He is skilled, flirtatious, agile, manipulative, and more than a little bit full of himself, and at the same time he has started to grow severe concerns about his chosen profession of thievery. And these descriptors are in themselves needing elaboration: the line he draws between what he considers to be acceptable or not meanders and waves. He also develops over the course of the story, coming to decisions, changing his mind.
In contrast, in "The Case of the Gelatinous Gemstone," almost every character has a single defining personality trait and that's it. There's also no character development. Everyone is, personality-wise, the same at the end of the story as they are at the beginning. But that's okay. This story is a comedy, focused on watching these distinct, simple personalities bounce off each other to humorous effect. Ensemble casts, especially in stories as short as these, often require not having the characters be as complex.
Koris from Kyell Gold's "Fundamental Natures" is an interesting case. Koris is a complex character, to be sure, but he too ends the story as basically the same person as when he began it. I would still call Koris a good character who helped convince us to publish this story. Why? Because even though as the events of the story unfold, Koris's personality remains unchanged, it's those same personality traits--namely his brashness and sense of self-importance--that are responsible for all the major developments in the story. If Koris had been any different, the story would never have happened the way it did. That's another way to have a good character.
Some stories focus so heavily on characters that some traditional plot elements fall by the wayside. These stories still have their conflict and climax, but less rising action and more moments of characterization. The climax also tends not to be a big external event and more of a moment of realization for the character. This is true of both Helena in my story "Da Capo al Fine" and Than in Whyte Yote's "Lip Service."
This last type of story is generally harder to pull off, in my experience. Maintaining reader interest is more difficult. One way that Whyte Yote and I deal with this is to have some form of time limit imposed on our characters. Helena is having more and more trouble distinguishing reality from memory, and she realizes she does not have much time before she is completely unable to function. Than is serving a mysterious bear at his restaurant. He only has so long to figure out who this bear is before he leaves and is never seen again.
This is a very long-winded way of saying there are many ways of having good characters. Complex characters who develop are the simplest way (and four of the six stories in this issue take that way), but at a base level, we want to see characters who are important enough to their stories that replacing them with another character would result in a totally different story.
- We want variety.
After going through the entire slush pile, we usually get one or two stories so good we know we want to publish them, and we also get several stories (often stories with so little plot or character) that we know we do not want to publish them. But this still leaves a bunch of stories left in the middle: good enough that we could publish them, but not so great that we must. How do we decide which of these to use?
Honestly, a lot of things influence our decisions. If I talked about all of them, I would be here for hours, so I'll restrict myself to talking about variety.
Variety is a big deal. We like seeing different things in our anthologies and don't want to publish five or six variants on the same theme. (Unless, like Historimorphs, it has a broad theme, but we still want variety within that theme.)
Going through Heat #11 again, the stories fit into the following genres: mystery, romance, heist*, slice of life, sci-fi, and fantasy, in that order. Three stories take place roughly in the present day, two in the future, and one in the past. One story features a straight pairing, one stories gay, two lesbian, one bisexual, and one swaps between a gay and straight pair at different points in the story. Two are light-hearted, humorous, and playful, two are serious and dramatic, and two are in between. For artists and authors alike, we featured a mix of brand new faces and long-time veterans of Heat.
Looking back at Heat #11, there was one way in which I wish we had more variety: story length. All the stories in that issue are 6000 words or more, which is medium to long for Heat.
All that said, sometimes having stories that are similar in some ways is good too, if they show us different perspectives on the same material. "Lines" and "Da Capo al Fine" both deal with the adult entertainment industry in some way, "Lines" with phone sex and "Da Capo al Fine" with adult movies, but from there the stories diverge and go in very different directions. We often find stories like these in the slushpile that pair up nicely. They don't always make it to final printing however.
How does a writer take this into account, given that variety is largely determined by what others write?
One way is to emphasize the features of your story that are unique.
Unique setting? Emphasize the features of that setting, the food and drink, the language, the landscape, and so on. Huskyteer does a great job of this. A lot of stories we receive are set in urban/suburban America. Her stories are often set in distinctly British locales, with enough regional flair to make them stand apart.
Unique character occupations? Emphasize the aspects of that job (and how it impacts the characters' lives) that other jobs would not have. "Lip Service" does this very well. It's a character piece focused on a waiter at a restaurant. We see many, many different aspects of his job, how he interacts with the bartender, other waiters, or customers, what he does when he gets bored, what causes him to get bored, how he carries himself, what he thinks of himself, and so on. "Lip Service" feels very alive not just because Than is a richly developed character, but because his job is also presented in all its richness too.
Another way to take variety into account is to look back through the stories we have published and find things we have not covered before. If we've never published a story about a topic, it might well be because we've never received a story about that topic.
- The plot don't stop when the action gets hot
Cheesy title, I know.
But this is a big point that gets comes up a lot, especially regarding Heat. It's an erotic anthology, but as we've pointed out above, we don't just want a thin lead-in to an over-long sex scene. What's the right amount of sex to have?
For Heat, we like there to be some sex (or at least some really sexy elements) that is in some way relevant to the plot. A good test for this is to replace the sex scene with a fade to black, cutting the scene off before the sex starts and then starting up again after it finished. If fading to black causes the reader to miss key details of the plot or characterization, the sex scene is probably good for Heat.
Let's go with examples again, since seeing a variety of ways to deal with sex scenes can help jumpstart the creative engine. In "The Case of the Gelatinous Gemstone," the sex scenes are used to keep jogging one character's mind into solving the next part to the mystery. In "Jewels of Remorse," it's during the sex that Gentry realizes that he cannot keep taking advantage of the people he is having sex with. In "Lines," in addition to illustrating how the main character's job as a phone sex operator actually works (which is important later in the story), the sex scenes also illustrate the relationship between Judi and Iga. In "Fundamental Natures," the first sex scene illustrates Koris's trickstery character and the second reveals an important plot point, introducing Koris to his doppleganger. In "Lip Service," the sex scene is the one big action point in the entire story: Than makes a snap decision to follow his mysterious customer into the bathroom and give him oral, which it is quite obvious the customer was not expecting or perhaps even wanting. Everything prior to that moment was teasing Than with his lack of knowledge and everything after that point was Than dealing with the fallout of his decision.
Here, "Da Capo al Fine" is the odd one out. It doesn't have a sex scene. Lots of sexy stuff happens, and there is a paragraph devoted to one character's erotic fantasy, but no on-page sex.
My last piece of advice is a paradoxical one: really good sex scenes tend not to be about the sex. Too much focus on the sex itself can make the scene feel mechanical. (Insert Tab A into Slot B.) What makes sex scenes feel more sensual and passionate--and yes, even erotic--are the characters involved: how they act during sex, how they react to having sex, what they try to get out of sex, and so on. Focusing on those aspects of a sex scene also help make these scenes more relevant to the story in terms of characterization or plot development.
* Yes, "Jewels of Remorse" is science fiction, but it is a heist story before it is a science fiction story.