worn a few ribbons like this out ...
One of the best things that can happen to a writer is to find a good story. One of the aptest places is in a slush pile, where one peruses so many potential stories that … belong in that purgatory, really. They’re repetitive or derivative or just bad.
But this story … this beautiful intriguing glorious story … is trapped in the slush pile because its author is, shall we say, inattentive to the the care and feeding of the English language, as a tool (or, in a few cases, a weapon) to help show off the story, to bring the readers in and carry them along for a beguiling ride as the tale unfolds.
So it does indeed pay dividends — and actual money, in my case — to pay that attention. I found a story like that and fell in love with it, despite the author’s absolute welded-on determination to follow the Twain philosophy of pitying the man who had such a sere imagination as not to be able to spell a word more than one way … and a like revulsion for matters of gender, tense, and subject-verb agreement generally. Such a mechanical laxity that it threw folks out of the story; not just me. Other readers complained about the difficulty of following the story because of the writing mechanics.
They then abandoned it, perhaps because this happened to be just the latest goat rodeo presented for readers’ comments.
But I had fallen hard for the story. So I copied and pasted the whole thing into a separate document, edited it for spelling, run-ons, comma-splices, and inconsistencies, and sent that version to the original poster. Who wrote back asking me to go in on polishing and promoting the story. Thus began … a team effort. It took months. It spit out iterations of the story until both of us, I think, were frustrated, discouraged, and almost ready to give up. Then one iteration happened that the actual editors of the magazine this slush pile belongs to sent us a note of encouragement and interest for, and … next thing we knew we had a sale.
Except now, we had to make it a piece of fiction that could be sold, instead of just cheered for in commentaries; we had to make logic work, and physics apply, and … we had to turn our protagonist into a believable mortal instead of a superhero (I call this de-Louis-L’Amouring).
About a third of the story got lopped off. About two-thirds of our hero’s deeds got left out, and the remaining third got changed from the sort of thing you see in an action-adventure flick to … something you could do, yourself, if you were stuck in a rough situation and determined not to just turtle up and die. That version caused us to receive checks. I sent a “final version” we had hammered out in email to the original writer as our submission, and the writer submitted it.
Well, submitted … a version. And the editor, after scolding us for not being able to use the same name for the same character consistently throughout the story, not to mention not being able to agree on the names of minor characters at all … bought it. Cleaned it up. Published it. Sent us checks. It was my first fiction sale. Several times since, I’ve worked (starting pretty much the same way, falling in love with a story that needed to be presented so other readers would love it too) with different other authors, and good stories have ended up being sold. But I’ve learnt what I consider *the* lesson: be a support member, not a named co-author.
Selling my own work, where I know exactly what I’m sending in, takes work enough.
Have you had any experience as being one of a team of authors?
