DeepGenre

Katharine Kerr June 16th, 2006

Back in the days of the late, lamented GEnie online service, Damon Knight opened a topic in which people could post the first thirteen lines of a story they had written, and he would critique it. When we were planning this blog site, I thought it would be a nice tribute to his memory to do the same in this new site. We will be polite about your work here, but we are not cheerleaders. Speaking just for myself, Katharine Kerr, I can be quite fierce about bad prose.

If you still wish to post lines, and if one of your goals is to write professional prose, then here are the guidelines for submission.

1. Thirteen lines only, as per above, of the opening of a short story or novelette only. Novels have their own rules, which are much more flexible and require more time to critique than anyone here can give. Why only 13 lines? These days, overworked editors are only going to look at that much of your story. If it intrigues them, they will read more. If it doesn’t, they will read not one word further. Thus the opening is your one shot to have your work taken seriously. It has to be good. I don’t want to read any whining along the lines of “it gets better later on,” or “I was just trying to set up the background.”

2. Absolutely no fan-fic. If anyone posts fan-fic, it will be deleted. (Kevin’s footnote: Fan-fic here means fiction using someone else’s world and/or character without their express permission. Public domain materials belong to everyone, so you can write about Dracula, Frankenstein and King Arthur all you like, and there’s a long tradition in the genre of doing just that. However, while the owners of licensed properties such as Buffy/Angel, Babylon 5, Star Trek, Doctor Who, and the many DC and Marvel comic titles have been known to look at spec scripts, it’s less common with standard fiction. Moreover, we simply don’t want to deal with the literary hassle of keeping straight what is canon and what is not (especially with endlessly reinvented characters like Superman) and likewise with the legal troubles caused by reading fanfiction dealing with licensed properties that editors may ask us to write for in the future. The same goes for invitation-only shared worlds, such as Wild Cards and Thieves World, and is even more true for single-author worlds such as Rowling’s “Hogwarts” and Tolkien’s “Middle Earth.” Stories set in the Cthulhu Mythos are in the weird eldrich dark between copyright and public domain, but are acceptable, if you must. However, we’d generally like to see your own original characters in your own original worlds, rather than the creations of someone else’s fancy. Similarly, if you started your character and/or world as part of a roleplaying game, please try to sand off the serial numbers so we won’t hear the dice rolling the background.)

3. No first drafts. Professional authors revise before submitting work to anyone. I don’t care if you heard a distorted version of some crack by Heinlein that seemed to say you didn’t have to. If you can’t stand to revise, get another line of work.

4. In that spirit, always spell check before you post. Editors are unimpressed by spelling errors on the first page of a story.

5. If you don’t own a copy of Strunk and White’s ELEMENTS OF STYLE, get one and read it. Read it carefully, thoroughly, and repeatedly until you can avoid the elementary mistakes all new authors make.

6. Put your full name at the bottom of your 13 lines at the end of your email. That way I can attribute your work to you and avoid boggles like double postings.

Why am I so confident that I know what editors want? In my day I have edited three anthologies of short stories, that’s why, as well as having submitted work to various editors myself.

How to Submit Your 13 Lines

If you still want our critique, send your opening lines to:

No attachments or fancy formatting necessary. Just paste the text straight into the body of the e-mail.

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