Writing Excerpts and Entering James Jones First Novel Fellowship

 

After blogging about taking two years to rewrite six novels, I received some nice comments from an editor at Shenandoah about an excerpt I had submitted.  She suggested, however, that I submit an excerpt from the beginning of the novel—that way the reader could get acquainted with the characters and the setting as the ‘story’ develops.  Good advice, I thought.  Excerpts from the middle or near the end of the novel might be harder for them to stand on its own without the necessary character developments or backstories.  That would depend on the novel or its structure.

While contemplating the beginning of the novel as a stand-alone excerpt, I suddenly realized (or forgot) that the James Jones First Novel Fellowship deadline was near—for those who have not published or self-published a novel.  Since they require the first fifty pages of the novel and a synopsis/outline, I decided to take a closer look at those fifty pages (even going through each chapter three times, then those fifty pages three more times as I did before).  I figured since the first fifty pages (or the first three chapters) is what I normally submit to agents, I’ll benefit from that, too.

After submitting my entry, I then created that new excerpt for Shenandoah.  From chapters One-Four, I cut out the parts not relevant to the ‘story,’ though relevant to the novel, thus cutting the length down from 11,276 words to less than 8,000 words, their maximum length.  I titled the excerpt, “Ask Questions Later.”  By then, unfortunately, Shenandoah’s submission period had closed (they had reached their quota early and wouldn’t reopen for several more months.)  So, I had to find another market that accepted novel excerpts—so long as they could stand on their own.  Fortunately, I found several.

Years ago, I used to do this with my first Penang-set novel.  Parts of the five chapters have been published fourteen times in six countries, including the US, UK, and Australia.  I had less success with excerpts from other novels.  Maybe I hadn’t tried hard enough to market them or gave up too soon or failed to update them after a rewrite…

I’m now considering rewriting the first fifty pages of all six novels before the year is out (half way through, actually) and seeing what I can fashion into excerpts that can stand alone. Hopefully the excerpts can attract interest in the novel itself as I continue submit to agents.  So far, I’ve resisted self-publishing, despite some amazing success stories, or co-publishing, despite one enticing offer.  (That first novel could’ve been published twenty odd years ago in Singapore!  Regrets, maybe.)

Plenty of novels, of course, have grown from published short stories (and plenty of unwritten novels have died after that first chapter since it had nowhere to go, even though it worked as a short story).  Plenty of novels have also spawned excerpts or short stories as well.  It goes both ways.  As I writer, you got to do what you can with your fiction, take those necessary steps that can lead to publication and move you closer to where you want to be.

              —Borneo Expat Writer

 My interviews with Malaysian writers:

Ivy Ngeow author of Cry of the Flying Rhino, winner of the 2016 Proverse Prize. 

Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban Journey

Preeta Samarasan, author of Evening is the Whole Day, finalist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2009. 

Chuah Guat Eng, author of Echoes of Silence and Days of Change.

Malachi Edwin Vethamani, author of Complicated Lives and Life Happens. 

 

Catching Up: Reading a Backlog of Short Stories…

I admit I had been putting off reading several collections of short stories.  I kept them on a separate shelf divided by those I’ve read, those I haven’t.  A couple of months before the end of last year, I committed myself to plowing through them once and for all.  I began with Nadine Gordimer’s anthology, Telling Tales with award-winning writers like Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, and Arthur Miller. 

Then came Bobbie Ann Mason’s Shilo and Other Stories; Joanne Greenberg’s Rites of Passage (read the first story a couple of decades ago, liked it, but never got around to reading the rest); Isaac Asimov’s Nine Tomorrows (signed copy, though second hand.  “The Last Question” blew me away—never saw that great ending coming!)  Later, I came across an interview where Asimov stated that was his favorite story.

Next, I read Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America (I sort of met her in Madison, Wisconsin before I knew who she was, other than a writer making photocopies, before I began writing my own stories.  Never on a first name basis, though; a missed connection).  Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth (loved her first collection so don’t know why it took me years to read this.); Alice Munro’s The Love of a Good Woman; The Stories of John Cheever (the big red hard cover that won the Pulitzer Prize); The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford (another Pulitzer Prize winner); and Thomas Pynchon’s Slow Learner (his early work).      

I was just getting warmed up.  I then read three anthologies:  American Short Story Masterpieces edited by Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks; Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, third edition, R.V. Cassill; and Anthology of American Short Stories edited by James Nagel.  These last three alone had combined pages of 3,038, which may explain why I kept putting them off.  Some of the stories were repeats of what I had read earlier or years before.  Many of those, I reread.  Others I had never heard of, nor the writers (some brilliant stories, too).  I enjoyed the sheer variety of great, well-written short stories, some dating back 170 years.

Some stories you read once and stays with you a lifetime like an Edgar Allan Poe story, or Jack London’s “To Build a Fire.”  Haunting stories about life and death and survival, like escaping capture in the desert and finding yourself sharing a cave with a panther as in Honoré de Balzac’s “A Passion in the Desert.”

So, the next time you have the urge to pick up a collection or an anthology of short stories, do so.  You won’t regret it.  In fact, it may inspire you to write one of your own, even set in your own country like Malaysia—a great story, no matter where it is set, is a great story…. I began writing my own set-in-Malaysia stories a couple of years before I decided to move here for good.  One of the stories, “On Fridays,” after rewriting it (rewriting all my stories), is appearing this summer, as a reprint, in Thema (USA).

Next up, or maybe next decade, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare which I bought four decades ago when I was still a bachelor living in America before I began to write...

        —Borneo Expat Writer

 My interviews with Malaysian writers:

Ivy Ngeow author of Cry of the Flying Rhino, winner of the 2016 Proverse Prize. 

Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban Journey

Preeta Samarasan, author of Evening is the Whole Day, finalist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2009. 

Chuah Guat Eng, author of Echoes of Silence and Days of Change.

Malachi Edwin Vethamani, author of Complicated Lives and Life Happens.