Hello all... I've been reading the slush pile (and a pile of other stories) and I'm coming up against some common mistakes so I thought'd I'd take a few minutes' break and talk about them.
The theme of this note: sentences matter. Your stories are made up of sentences, people. They make paragraphs, paragraphs make scenes, and scenes make stories. Trying to build a story out of shoddy sentences is like trying to build a house out of rotten wood. When you're proofreading and revising, pay attention to your sentences!
There are writers who live and die by their other people editing their writing, and writers who sweat bullets over every word. I don't particularly care which kind you are (I know several of both) but one thing you should never forget is to proofread your work before you send it for publication.
Let me say that again. Proofread your work.
PROOFREAD!
Now, a couple little things:
1. Every BattleTech story should have an epigraph. That's four lines: A location (city, zone, ship, etc.), a planet, a province and/or realm, and a date. At the start of every story (REQUIRED!) and usually at the start of any scene that doesn't happen at the same time as the previous.
2. Never, ever, italicize the possessive or plural "s" at the end of BattleMech or fighter names. It's Wraith's, not Wraith's
3. Light, medium, heavy, and assault are never capitalized in conjunction with 'Mech. You don't go out and drive a Compact car, or a Luxury sedan. So it's assault 'Mech, not Assault 'Mech.
4. Vehicle names are not italicized. It's Demolisher Heavy Tank, not Demolisher Heavy Tank.
The last thing I want to mention today is what's called active voice. It is normally compared to passive voice, like so:
Active voice: He heard the bullets strike the tank's armor.
Passive voice: He could hear the bullets strike the tank's armor.
Never use two words when one will do. Look at the difference in the sentence. In the active voice, he did something. He heard the bullets... In the passive, he was able to do something. He could hear the bullets... well of course he could hear them. Syntactically it doesn't even mean that he did hear them, just that he had ears and it was physically possible he could have heard them. Whenever you catch yourself saying your characters were able to do something, see if it's not just better that they actually DO something.
So...
"She could see the birds..." should be "She saw the birds..." or "He could feel the heat radiating..." could be "He felt the heat radiating..."
Now... read the first part of this post again. Note the important sentence (I'll put it in boldface this time, just to make sure): When you're proofreading and revising, pay attention to your sentences!
Do not get bogged down, when you're writing, making sure all your verbs line up. I utterly despise proofreading. I hate it. But I make myself do it, because I make mistakes when I write. I write stories fast. In bursts. If I proofread everything while I wrote I'd never--EVER--finish a story. Get used to the idea of going back over your work.
It will pay off in the end.
The guidelines say that BattleCorps is looking mainly for character-driven stories. That was true before I became editor and even more true now that I am, but I’m noticing that a lot of people seem to misunderstand what that means.
A character-driven story is just that—a story where the characters are the driving force of the story. That does not mean that the story has to be just about one character, but rather that the conflict that moves the story along, that the emotional impact of the story, should come from character rather than plot or setting.
For instance, let’s say I’m writing a story about the destruction of of a world as a planet that supports life. We know from sourcebooks that the Word of Blake deploys bioweapons that destroys the planet’s ability to support human life, but how do we approach that story?
We might say “We’re going to write about the Word of Blake admiral orbiting in his WarShip, giving the order to destroy the word.” Which is fine… but then the story isn’t about the destruction of the planet—it’s about that Word of Blake admiral. (For the sake of argument lets assume there are Word of Blake admirals—I know he’d accurately be a precentor of some sort, but bear with me).
“But what do you mean?” someone might ask. “That guy just killed a world!”
So what? What’s a world but a singular concept: one world.
“But there’s millions or billions of people on that world,” someone might protest.
So what? What is a billion people? The current population of China? Again, singular concepts. A billion. The population of China. You probably can’t conceive mentally of what a billion people looks like.
This is what makes students bored in history classes. Teachers give statistics like “Stalin’s regime was responsible for the slaughter of 25 million Soviet citizens in the forties and fifties,” and students yawn. Because most people cannot conceptualize 25 million people.
So the teacher might try harder… “25 million people means he killed the equivalent of every living person in California.” Some people might raise an eyebrow or stop doodling, but not many. So the teacher might try again.
“25 million people means he killed the equivalent of every person in 250 NFL football stadiums at a sold-out game.” If the teacher took the time to ask each person to visualize they last time they were in a stadium, and then visualize every single person they saw dead, then the students might get it.
This long example has this point: That Word of Blake admiral killed a world. Since he commands a flotilla that may go on to kills dozens more worlds, his ship will paint a dozen kill markers. He doesn’t care about the 25 million people—they’re just a number.
Where’s the impact in a story like that? What drives that story, the admiral or the abstract concept of 25 million people? Unless that admiral sits up at night, thinking about eating his sidearm and playing with millions of little icons on his computer screen, I think you can guess…
Now. What if we wrote about a major in the planet's aerospace militia? A man with a family being killed by this bioweapon, whose men are being killed by this bioweapon, who is probably himself being killed by this bioweapon? What would this man do? He knows 25 million people are dying, but he doesn’t care, because he’s too busy watching the 15-25 people who are most important to him in the world dying. The death of the planet has an immediate and direct effect on him. Where might those effects drive him?
What kind of story might that be? Where is the emotional component of that story going to be? Is that going to be a man sitting at a console on a WarShip, comfortable in a chair, pushing a button and eradicating a world or a man strapped into a ninety-year-old, probably-malfunctioning aerospace fighter with a mass of forty tons racing into orbit to fight two million tons of WarShip?
Character-driven stories don’t mean every story has to be the life and times of No-Name Joe, just out trying to defend his family from the big bad universe. Stories about Victor Steiner-Davion are still about the man, not the world. It does mean, though, that the force that moves the story along should be the character himself, or things that happen that directly influence him.
This is particularly difficult in Classic BattleTech fiction because so much of the emphasis of the universe is on inanimate things: big walking tanks called BattleMechs. But if we remember that ’Mechs are nothing without pilots in them, we can begin to bring the character to life inside them.
