Mistake No. 69: Submitting a good idea

If you’re a new writer, having a good idea is good, but submitting a good idea may not be good enough.

You don’t need me to tell you that breaking into magazines and newspapers is hard. Attracting an editor’s attention – merely getting a reply to your emails – is tough enough. And there are hundreds of other writers trying to do the same. Oh, they’re finding it tough as well, which is good for you, but they’ve got good ideas too, which is not so good for you – and some of them will have ideas that are better than yours, which is even worse for you, and further increases the likelihood that your idea isn’t good enough.

Ideas are currency in this business, and new writers sometimes underestimate their importance. New writers sometimes focus on the writing. New writers worry about things like “my unique style”. But it’s not really about the writing. Most people can write. Just like most people can sing. Being able to sing is fairly boring these days: witness the talent shows. But having something better-than-good to sing: that’s more interesting.

Ditto in writing. Your ideas, at least in the beginning, need to be better than good, and better than those of writers who are already established.

Why? Because good ideas are everywhere. Established writers are filled with them. And if you were an editor, presented with a good idea from an established writer and a good idea from a new writer, whose would you plump for?

When starting out, the ideas you submit to editors need to be great: great enough for an editor to take a risk on you, great enough to be a better bet than the safe and reliable regular writer and his good-but-not-great idea.

And it’s not that new writers don’t have these great ideas. They do. I see them. But sometimes I sense that they may be nervous of submitting them, perhaps scared of their greatness, or reluctant to introduce themselves to an editor via their best ideas, fearful of being subsequently expected to live up to that standard for ever more, and prove themselves to not be flashes in pans.

So what do they do? I’m not sure. Perhaps set them aside, or push them to the back of their minds, and then submit a good-but-not-great but less scary idea instead.

If that’s you, I think this is the wrong thing to do.

Do not save your great ideas. You need them now, while they’re at their most valuable to you. Besides, your great ideas run the risk of dating, losing their ‘moment’, or being grabbed from the swirling ether of ideas by someone else. Knock the editor out with them, and do it now.

Know what else? It’s a myth you need to live up to this standard. I’m not suggesting you lower your standards – by all means have great ideas until you die – but once you’ve impressed an editor with a great idea, he may well take more time to consider your good ideas, and to roll with a couple of them because, after all, he does use good ideas, but would rather use the good ideas of someone he knows a bit, and trusts a bit – and, after your great idea has been sold and delivered, you will be one of those people.

Eventually you may not even need the good ideas so much. The ideas might come to you from editors. “Knock us up 800 words on diabetes would you?” I was asked once, if not in those exact words. It’s not even an idea, is it, let alone a good one. But it was given to me as I was, I imagine, seen as someone who’d come up with a great idea once, with some good ideas more than once, and followed through with them all. The editor trusted me to deliver something interesting enough to fill the slot he was looking to fill with something relatively standard.

(It took years for that to happen to me, by the way. It hasn’t happened in ages.)

I’m not saying stop coming up with good ideas or discarding your good ideas. But in the beginning, push them to become great ideas. Ask more of them. Will yourself to have more and more good ideas, because some of them will on closer inspection prove to be great ideas, and will stand out from the others. And they’re the ones to take to an editor in the early days, when you’re trying to break in.

Look upon this as preparing to take-off. You need max-throttle and a full tank to get into the sky. Once you’re up there in orbit, editors will see you more easily. There’ll be a bit of cruising, and a bit of gentle turbulence, and perhaps the odd alarming moment where the complementary peanuts get stuck in your throat or you convince yourself you’re about to flush yourself down the loo, but at least you’ll be airborne.

Sending off merely good ideas? You’re sort of just taxi-ing on the side of the runway.

Mistake No. 68: Impatience

I see a lot of student papers which come to me a day early.

By that I mean that the writer should not have sent it to me when he sent it – but slept on it instead.

The article-writing process – from the first glimmer of the idea, all the way through to submitting the completed piece to the editor – demands time. I think most writers understand this. You cannot complete the various stages of research and writing and more research and rewriting and editing as you’re waiting for the tea to brew.

But when the final hurdle approaches, I get the sense that some writers choose to sneakily run around it and get to the glory of the finish line that little more easily and that little bit sooner than deep down they know they should.

It’s easy to give in to this temptation. That satisfied, light-shouldered feeling of having put away a piece of work is so appealing that you can, bluntly, cheat a bit when it’s within arm’s reach.

Recognise that the ‘nearly ready to go’ stage is a danger time – a moment when you’re liable to trip up. It’s that time when you are more likely to give your article a cursory read-through when what it needs to be given is a thorough read-through. You’re rushing, you’re skipping words, you’re going ‘blah, blah’ in your head and jumping down to the next paragraph.

The thorough read-through that’s needed may only be bearable after a good night’s sleep – or at least not before you switch your attention to a different piece of work and return to this one later.

If you’re bored of the whole thing, make it your business to find the mistake in your work. Challenge yourself to spot the blooper. We all make errors and, as I’m fond of saying, it’s important that we make them and learn from them and have no shame about them. No piece of work is perfect and there is always room for improvement. Find that one thing. Replace that not-quite-right word for a better word. Is that an extra space? Do you really need that comma? Make it a sort of goal.

The usefulness of this exercise is that if it’s a biggie which you do eventually find, it’ll shake your confidence in the work, somewhat. Well, good. If a massive error has slipped through and you’re on the brink of submitting it, then perhaps you need a reassessment of the rigour of your revision process.

And if it’s only a smallie, then you may be able to find another smallie, and perhaps another, and in a few minutes you’ll have improved your work, and it’ll still have been worthwhile.

And then you can submit it. It’ll still not be perfect, but it doesn’t need to be.

I guess this is a call for slowness. In the modern race to dash off words to the world – emails, tweets, texts, facebook updates – I wonder whether we’re getting too speedy at producing words which deserve a more leisurely delivery. You’ll have heard of the Slow Food Movement. Well, I guess I’m advocating a kind of Slow Words Movement. Take it easy. Savour your words – and your revision and editing. Stride that final hurdle with elegance and grace and enjoy the final stretch.

Mistake No. 67: Where there's a Bill...

I’ve written before about writing competitions of which I disapprove. You’ll find some background at the Copyright page on my blog. And as I said last year, it’s a mistake not to read terms and conditions.

So here we go with another, this one from Cornish Traditional Cottages, who are inviting short articles for their “What I love about Cornwall” Writing Competition. The prize is apparently a holiday, but I can’t see mention of it on the page at the time of writing. Here’s a condition:

“By submitting an entry to the Competition, you give Cornish Traditional Cottages (CTC):
Permission for your entry to be published in any promotional material and grant CTC a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide licence to republish your Competition entry (edited if required) in electronic format and hard copy for promotional purposes free of charge…”

This, you understand, stands even if you don’t win the competition. Every entry can be used.

I tweeted CTC and asked: “Why are you requesting a free worldwide license to use all entries? Why not just winners?”

There was no response to that, and so I emailed, and received this from their Marketing Co-ordinator:

“There can only be one winner for this competition and we may wish to display other entries that do not win in promotional material. We hope to include one entry a month in ‘Cornwall Living’ magazine…”

Did she not think that the writers of material used promotionally or published in a commercial magazine should be recompensed? Response:

“The winner of the competition gets a free holiday in Cornwall and if any other entries are used they will gain from exposure. There is no intention to make money from the competition, apart from any benefits from our name being mentioned alongside the writers. It’s not compulsory to enter and from the responses we have received so far people seem happy to go ahead with these terms and conditions.”

Or perhaps they don’t understand them. Or haven’t read them. Just a thought.

Anyway, what this boils down to, if you enter your work, is that CTC can use your material in lots of ways to promote their business and not pay you a penny.

They have a photography competition too. Here’s a clause:

“The photographer retains the rights to all of his or her media, and by submitting, grants permission to CTC to display or use submissions in any promotional material free of charge.”

You may or may not have heard of the Artists’ Bill of Rights Campaign, who promote ethical standards towards entrants of creative competitions, mainly in photography, it seems. I figured they're the best people to address this with CTC further, and on that basis I’ve reported the competitions to them.

Why does all this matter?
Surely if someone wants to enter a competition and cede the rights specified in the T&Cs, why should it be anyone’s concern but theirs? Everyone needs to look after number one, right?

If you think that, first please go read the Bill of Rights, and click across all the tabs. The Rights Abuse tab and the Exploitation tab contain particularly interesting stuff.

Here’s a digested version of edited highlights of what they have to say, for those in a rush: businesses need words and images for their promotional material and marketing; they could buy those words and images from writers or photographers; but – boohoo – that costs money; so a cheaper alternative is to run a competition with ‘rights grab’ terms, and wait for usable material to come in for free.

Examples? I can’t beat the following Bill of Rights line: “The travel industry are very enthusiastic about acquiring your holiday photographs so that they can produce their holiday guides and brochures at least cost.”

Quite.

You may still be thinking this isn’t important or anyone else’s business. But if new / amateur writers and photographers volunteer material through competitions such as these, have you considered what might happen to the livelihoods of the copywriters and photographers who might normally be hired and paid to supply what is now being offered for free?

And this is not merely potentially eroding their income: there is also a larger creative issue at stake.

Taking photographs of the great outdoors and writing brochure or marketing material is bread-and-butter work for some snappers and scribes: the kind of work that pays the bills, and buys them time to work on bigger stuff – that experimental photography project or exhibition, that screenplay sitting in the drawer. All jobbing writers have regular work which they can rely on, and often this allows them the luxury to work on the novel – or even to get involved in other stuff, like give readings to kids.

When regular work is lost, that time is denied us. Output is curtailed, and our creative culture is weaker for it.

Be attracted by the chance to ‘gain from exposure’ and enter competitions such as those described above by all means, but doing it with your head in the sand would be a shame. Because if you intend to make a living out of words or images one day, you’ll be excavating under the foundations of the industry you hope will eventually support you.

Mistake No. 66: Twin brackets, commas and dashes

Good day. Here’s a little lesson which I hope you’ll find useful.

Consider three sentences:

The poet Angela Smith (who had travelled from the Shetlands) said the book festival was a huge success.

The poet Angela Smith, who had travelled from the Shetlands, said the book festival was a huge success.

The poet Angela Smith – who had travelled from the Shetlands – said the book festival was a huge success.

What is the difference between the three? It boils down to the level of importance of the additional information in the middle of the sentence.

We get that Angela Smith said the book festival was a success. That she travelled from Scotland is unimportant in the first sentence, neither unimportant or especially important in the second, and important in the third.

Use brackets when the information is an ‘aside’, of minor relevance, non-essential to the reader, and not referred to again later in the piece of writing.

Use commas when the information is of very roughly equal priority to other facts in the article, and is something you’d like your reader to note and know.

Use dashes (not hyphens, by the way) when you want to emphasise the information, for some reason. In the third case, the writer might be trying to convey the sense that the book festival was so highly regarded, so worthwhile, that somebody made the effort to travel from a remote corner of the country to attend. Alternatively, it may be intended to reflect the dedication of the poet to the festival circuit and to her fans.

(I don’t always practise what I preach, and sometimes chuck a large portion of text between dashes when I have an unwieldy and long sentence, just to make it more digestible to the reader, even when it isn’t really worth emphasising. You can probably find examples on the blog. I don’t recommend you copy me.)

Note that in these situations, you need an ‘opening’ comma, bracket or dash, and a ‘closing’ one too. Too many new writers make the mistake of putting one in, usually the first, and forgetting the other. You should be able to lift out the two punctuation marks and the content they enclose and leave a sentence which still makes grammatical sense, and is punctuated correctly:

The poet Angela Smith said the book festival was a huge success.

I’ve covered this before, with respect to brackets, here.

Note, while I’m here, that unless you have previously made reference to a poet, and are now revealing the poet’s name, using commas, like this, is best avoided:

The poet, Angela Smith, said the book festival was a huge success.

This is because there are many poets in the world, and you are referring to a particular one – the one who said the festival was a success. Treating her name as additional and, by implication, optional information is inappropriate, as it is clearly important for the reader to know which of the world’s many poets paid the festival this compliment.

When you are talking about an individual in a unique role, commas are fine:

The Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, said the book festival was a huge success.

Mistake No. 65: Net losses

I read a tweet last week, on the day of the Wikipedia blackout, by a writer pointing out that journalists might have to actually spend the day doing some proper in-depth research – for a change! – rather than click into the collaborative online people’s encyclopedia and trusting the information they found there.

It was partly tongue-in-cheek but there was a valid point underneath it all: it is very easy to become reliant on the net, or certain parts of it, for your work. As far as research goes, there are still alternative and effective means of conducting it, internet-free: calling organisations and professional bodies, speaking to experts, using the local library (and its librarians), for instance. And ditto getting ideas: yes, web chat rooms are terrific for generating them, but so too eavesdropping in a supermarket queue and reading old copies of magazines, for instance. It’s not all about the web.

I can’t help feeling that this must be impacting the content of what gets written, by established and new writers alike, even when that material is written for print, not web – perhaps not necessarily for the worse, but still. I often see decent enough articles by students which fall just slightly short of the mark, and which would possibly be saleable were they not so blatantly researched exclusively via the web. Sometimes, they’re just short of life.

Some of the poorer giveaway signs include a sudden throwaway internet reference – “if you don’t believe me, go Google it!” – or strings of lengthy URLs provided in the article’s body. I see this a lot. Why, when you are writing for a print reader, would you send him off to the internet before you’ve finished your article? Your goal is to inform the reader there and then, wherever he may be – quite possibly on an underground train with no web access. Don’t go sending them scurrying off to log on before you’ve finished your job. Maintain engagement. Add a website to your ‘info’ sidebar at the end, at best, once you’re done.

I don’t bother with magazines any longer, a student told me the other day: you get a greater diversity of news and views online. Maybe you do, but this still saddened me a bit. You already know that you need to read and research print publications if you want to write for them. But more than that, I still think you’re more likely to stumble across and read about a subject about which you don’t know much while turning the pages of a journal. When you’re browsing online, it’s so easy to click away into the hundreds of distracting and time-wasting options presented to you or just point your browser to the specific information you habitually seek out. Surely newspapers and magazines still broaden horizons?

I don’t want to give the impression I’m fixated on print and refuse to accept the march of the web and ebooks and the rest. Print may or may not survive in the decades to come, and I don’t expect to feel especially nostalgic if it dies by the time I retire. But the fact of the matter is it’s not gone yet. We still have it. If it goes, that’s one thing, but as it appears to be still kicking, let’s not turn our backs just yet.

So I guess this is a little plea to de-web and un-net yourself for a bit – if not necessarily physically, but mentally – attitudinally. Granted, this is a bit rich given I’m writing a blog and asking you to read it online – but consider spending some hours away from the www. Make as if it had stopped existing for a day. What would you do? How would you go forward? What would you read? It might reinvigorate a lost writerly dimension in you.