Poets often keep a variety of pets – loyal or silent companions who have kept them company while they sat and worked, or who even helped to inspire some of their poems. The Victorian poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti is thought to have owned, at one time or another, […]
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In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle considers the remarkable achievements of the greatest Elizabethan poet nobody reads George Gascoigne wrote the first original poem in blank verse, the first prose comedy, and arguably the first English novel. He wrote the first treatise on prosody (the […]
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In part 2 of this 1931 article about mystery story techniques, George Dyer offers his suggestions for how to drop hints about who the real criminal of the story is.
Read part 1 of the article Murder for Profit: Mystery Story Techniques here.
By George Dyer
Writer’s Digest, April 1931
Your murderer is a combination of your own feelings, modified by the character and appearance and background of some real person of your acquaintance. Your victim is a variation on your own particular of Editor Jones. Around these two group other personalities, families, friends, business associate, accomplices as required.
Obviously, in this game you do not introduce your murderer plainly labeled with the brand of Cain. The crime is committed, the man who will turn out to be the killer is introduced as casually as possible, and then for the required number of thousands of words, the game is on! By every legitimate method you attempt to throw the reader off the scent; in every fair way the reader tries to detect you at your work of concealment and to be able to say, at the last page, “I guessed it all along.” If this is true, he wins. If his reaction is “Why didn’t I see that,” you’ve won. If he reads straight through to the end and exclaims, “That’s not fair,” and gives adequate reasons, then you’ve probably broken the rules.
This concealment of the guilty man patently involves other characters. Others are suspected and dismissed, or die violently in a similar fashion to Editor Jones. This raises the knotty problem of how many suspects are advisable.
In the mystery short story, the ideal number of suspected persons would appear to be limited by the construction of the vehicle, to three. One of these is the Obvious Suspect, a villain if there ever was one, and with every reason and opportunity to commit the crime. He is for the thoughtless reader-player; only such a person will accept him as the culprit in the solution. The second may be classed as the Suspect, or Middle Suspect, and the writer may find it is wise to make him the actual criminal. He may be given either motive or opportunity, but either motive or opportunity must be apparently impossible. This fact of an apparent alibi in one or the other element will cause the stupid among the writer’s opponents to dismiss him from the suspected list, while the very clearness of the opportunity or motive given him will cause the intelligent reader to disregard him as too obvious. That, at least, is the writer’s hope. The third is the Buried Suspect, who is inserted to draw the clever reader’s attention from the really guilty man. He may also have either motive or opportunity, may have been heard to speak bitterly of the deceased, or covetously of the stolen object.
In consideration of so constricted a form as a short story, only two grades of reader intelligence can be reckoned upon; the Clever, and the Dull. In the preparation of a mystery story of this kind, it is often helpful for the sake of clarity to set down a list something as follows:
The Obvious Suspect–(to throw off the Dull Reader).
The Middle Suspect–(Actual Criminal).
The Buried Suspect–(to throw off the Clever Reader).
The longer detective novel or novelette, however, should be built with five levels of suspicion for four grades of reader mind. In this case, the table looks more like this:
The Obvious Suspect–(for the Very Dull).
The Less Obvious Suspect–(for the Dull).
The Middle Suspect–(Actual Criminal).
The Buried Suspect–(for the Clever).
The Deeply Buried Suspect–(for the Very Clever).
It will be seen that the same trio of suspected persons appears in both lists, and that the Middle Suspect may just as well be made the guilty man in the solution of the novel-length work.
In the longer piece, five levels of suspicion would only be the minimum. But more than five seems inexpedient, since a greater number of intentionally manufactured suspects will increase the confusion of minor characters. The case-hardened reader of detective stories may be trusted to suspect everyone in the narrative without any deliberate implication on the part of the writer.
Continuing the example above, Editor Jones dies, very painfully. A man is seen running away from the spot, say, with a knife in his hand. He is apprehended, found to be an individual known to have borne a grudge against the late editor. With the chart filled out in blank before you, you enter this character’s name after the heading “Obvious Suspect.”
The police view the body, the coroner appears. A friend of Editor Jones turns up, plainly broken up by the death. Perhaps you have him admit that he was near the spot by chance, but permit him to show that the murder would mean nothing but loss to him. If he is your actual criminal, you enter him after “Middle Suspect.” Then, as your tastes dictate, the super sleuth with his Watson, or the young District attorney, or the newspaper reporter arrives, and picks up the subtle clue which you have thoughtfully deposited near the corpse.
It is difficult not to be trite in the discussion of clues. The burned cigar butt, the handkerchief smelling faintly of musk, the finger-printed pistol, have all been worn thin to transparency. But you will find that an actual consideration of the murder, by you, of a real Editor Jones, will offer better things than these for your use.
Thus the story unrolls. Bit by bit, and always in the most casual fashion, you produce the scraps of evidence upon which the final solution is to be based, dropped in among other facts which are red herrings dragged across the trail. Here is where your superior knowledge helps you, for you are well aware of what is coming, and so realize what is significant and what is red herring, while the reader must sort out what he believes to be important without the advantage of fore-knowledge.
In passing, I have found it convenient to keep a list of the misleading occurrences on a separate sheet. For all these must be explained, during the narrative or at its conclusion.
It is useful, occasionally, in this game of outwitting the gentle reader, to put the detective character somewhere in the scheme of suspected persons. Either he or the deceased, through a hint of possible suicide, may very well be jotted down as the “Deeply Buried Suspect.” At some point in the action it is advisable to have the actual criminal suspected, and then apparently cleared on a motive or opportunity alibi which looks unshakeable until ultimately proved false.
Opinions differ widely as to the amount of blood which should be splashed around the walls and carpets. Personally, I agree with the contention that one murder, or two at the most, should suffice for either short story or novel-length mystery. Each subsequent killing, it seems to me, detracts further from the effect of the first, but that is a matter of individual taste.
And in the last analysis, the whole conduct of this game of “murder for profit” is a matter of individual taste, how you play it, within the compass of the rules sketched above, and even, of course, whether or not you choose to play it at all.
It is a game, a good game, and the author has the more interesting side of the board. He is quite willing to say keenly, as he puts a sheet in his typewriter and moves forward his first pawn: “Checkmate to the better player!”
[You might also enjoy this 1981 Writer’s Digest article about tips for writing popular fiction.]
Learn more or sign up for the Writer’s Digest University course, Advanced Novel Writing.
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If you’re a poet who enjoys writing rhyming poetry, you’re sure to have heard the standard publishing industry credo: No one is publishing rhyming poetry these days. Trying to find a literary journal that will accept and publish rhyming poetry can be like finding a needle in a haystack! And while it’s true that the current trend in literary magazines shows a preference for free verse poetry, don’t give up just yet on ever finding a home for your rhyming verse. The research experts here at Writer’s Relief can never resist a challenge, so we’ve scoured through our resources and discovered twenty literary magazines that DO publish rhyming poetry!
Able Muse focuses on metrical and formal poetry. This journal requests…“well-crafted poems of any length or subject that employ skillful and imaginative use of meter and rhyme, executed in a contemporary idiom that reads as naturally as your free verse poems.”
The Raintown Review prefers to receive formal/metrical poetry, but that interpretation ranges from traditional to experimental.
Rat’s Ass Review, where the founding editor, David M. Harris, states: “Send me your best poetry. I don’t particularly care whether it’s formal or informal, metrical or free verse, rhyming or not.”
Rattle publishes an eclectic mix of both free verse and traditional poetry.
Sliptongue publishes traditional forms of poetry only, with an erotic subject matter.
WestWard Quarterly is looking for rhyming poetry with consistency and natural word order in the rhyme scheme.
Whistling Shade states that the work they accept includes “poetry of any form, including lyric verse that employs rhyme and meter, and there is no word limit.”
Ancient Paths is a predominantly Christian publication that accepts both rhyming and free verse poetry.
The Asses of Parnassus accepts “short, witty, formal poems.”
Better Than Starbucks has an entire section dedicated solely to rhyming poetry!
The Chained Muse is an online publication that promotes 21st-century classical poetry.
Light Poetry Magazine has this fun note on its submissions page:
“We’re open to work from the left or the right,
to formal or free verse, refined or with bite,
to thought that’s like ours or that’s different by half:
we just want good stuff that’ll make people laugh.”
Measure Review is a magazine dedicated to formal poetry, and they “strive to publish poetry that takes risks while working within clearly defined frameworks.”
The Society of Classical Poets accepts rhyming poetry and requires that the poem also has some type of meter.
Sparks of Calliope accepts both free verse and traditional poetry.
Tahoma Literary Review looks for a balance between different poetic forms and styles, accepting a mix of free verse and formal poetry.
The Eclectic Muse believes in spearheading a revival of traditional poetry and features several rhyming poems to demonstrate the kind of poetry they accept.
The Lyric Magazine was founded in 1921, making it the oldest magazine in North America devoted to the publication of traditional poetry.
Rhyme Zone focuses on rhyming poetry, and they also accept previously published work!
Unsplendid is a triquarterly online literary magazine and accepts several different forms of poetry, including sonnets, villanelles, sestinas, and more.
Now that you’ve found twenty needles in the proverbial literary journal haystack, be sure to submit your rhyming poetry! If you also write free verse poetry or short stories—or have written a novel or memoir—Writer’s Relief can help you find the best markets for those genres. Our research experts can help you target the best markets and boost your odds of getting published. Submit your free verse poetry, short story, or book to our Review Board today!
Question: Do you prefer free verse or traditional rhyming poetry?
Since its launch in 2017, Substack has quickly drawn attention from the media industry for its potential to launch a new business model for writers.
The platform’s simplest promise — making it easy to set up a subscription and collect payment from readers — has writers’ attention. Is this is the new place we have to be to make money writing?
Substack is an email list platform for writers. It helps you do everything other platforms do — accept subscribers, send emails, see analytics, manage an email list — plus, it facilitates a paid subscription model.
It’s one of the easiest business ventures to set up technically: Create an account and a publication with Substack in about five minutes, import your email list if you have one and set up or connect a Stripe account to receive payments.
Readers subscribe monthly or annually, and most publications offer a discount for the annual subscription. Substack also recommends publishing some free editions to let readers test the waters before paying.
A $5-per-month and $50-per-year price level is common. But Bill Bishop’s “Sinocism,” the platform’s first official newsletter, according to Nieman Lab, charges $15 per month and $168 per year. Others charge $60 or $100 per year, so you can land on a price point that works for you and your audience.
If your publication is free, you can use Substack for free. If you charge for a paid subscription, Substack keeps 10 percent of the subscription proceeds plus about 3 percent in processing fees.
Anyone can start a publication on Substack; sign up is free, and you don’t have to meet any requirements.
Early adopters and currently popular newsletters are largely about tech, politics and popular culture, written by journalists in those beats as a side hustle or a career change after leaving a media company.
You don’t need a huge subscriber base to make a paid newsletter worth it — 200 subscribers paying $5 a month means $1,000 (about $870 after fees) each month for writing one to four newsletters per week. Plus, the volume of work doesn’t increase as revenue increases.
However, building that base of paid subscribers can be significantly harder than building one for a free subscription.
For example, tech writer Jared Newman built a base of 17,000 subscribers for his free newsletter, “Cord Cutter Weekly,” largely thanks to his ability to promote it in his tech-industry articles, he writes for Fast Company. From that base, he gained 200 subscribers in a year for a paid spinoff newsletter, “Advisorator.”
Substack says about 10 percent of a newsletter’s subscribers typically become paid subscribers. So if you want 200 to pay, aim for 2,000 total on your free list. (Also consider that Substack’s early newsletters, from which it pulls those stats, are relatively niche or run by authors recruited because of their loyal audiences.)
To give you a better idea of who’s using Substack successfully, here are eight writers who earn money through the platform, plus some details about how they do it.
Emily Atkin has been a climate reporter since 2013, first at ThinkProgress, then at The New Republic, in addition to contributing to other publications. But she believed climate reporting could be better than it was at traditional publications.
Atkin left her full-time job to launch “Heated” in September 2019 and deliver daily original reporting and analysis on the climate crisis. The newsletter is already among the most popular on Substack, with thousands of subscribers paying $8 per month.
“I’m hoping this will pay for better reporting, so that I can go to more places and talk to more people,” Atkin told Storybench last year.
Jacob Cohen Donnelly, managing director of audience and growth at cryptocurrency site CoinDesk, created “A Media Operator” in August 2019 to write about the business side of building a media business.
“I believe that, to do a newsletter well, it’s important to think about it as its own standalone product,” Donnelly writes in a recent post for AMO.
Donnelly has worked in media for nearly a decade, as a freelance writer and a marketer. Through AMO, he shares his insight on how the news is covered, plus which trendy tools and products (such as Substack) are worth your time when building a media business.
Nicole Cliffe is a freelance writer who pens Slate’s parenting advice column, “Care and Feeding,” and was the co-founder of the now-defunct site The Toast.
She has been publishing “Nicole Knows,” a potpourri of beauty, pop culture and general life observations and advice since February 2018.
It was among the pilot newsletters for Substack’s “community” feature, launched last year, which supports discussion threads for newsletter subscribers. Whether discussing memes, new movies or parenting quandaries, the “Nicole Knows” community remains engaged.
Substack lists the newsletter among the site’s most popular. “Nicole Knows” is a rare non-niche newsletter that’s killing it on the platform — so take notes if you want to build an audience on the strength of your voice and personal brand.
Judd Legum, the founder and editor of political news site ThinkProgress, put together “Popular Information,” a daily newsletter of in-depth information and analysis on government and politics. It’s one of Substack’s most popular, with thousands of subscribers.
As Atkin does with Heated, with “Popular Information,” Legum addresses a weakness in conventional reporting in his niche.
“There’s something fundamentally broken about news delivery as a process,” Legum told Wired ahead of the newsletter’s launch in 2018. “…I’ve felt more and more strongly that I wanted to start something new that could circumvent the system.”
While general and political news publications rely on horserace reporting to draw readers’ attention, Legum uses the subscription model to build trust and loyalty, and curate an audience eager to read more in-depth reporting.
After 15 years as a journalist, Luke O’Neil launched his newsletter, “Welcome to Hell World,” in 2018 to share reporting and personal essays on a variety of topics, tied together with the theme of the world’s transformation into, in O’Neil’s words, a “pit of despair.”
Through the newsletter, he wanted to cut through the niceties of traditional news writing and get the opportunity to speak about how upsetting things like “baby jails” are to him, even as he’s reporting on them.
Creating a direct relationship with readers through the newsletter subscription lets him do that in a way he never could when he wrote for publications like Esquire, The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian.
“It’s kind of cool, instead of working for f—ing Hearst, which is a billion-dollar company with thousands of middle managers, just working for the people who read my newsletter,” O’Neil told WBUR last year.
In addition to revenue from the newsletter — 1,100 paid subscribers out of 7,000 total as of July 2019 — the newsletter garnered O’Neil a book deal. Indie publisher OR Books approached him to turn his essays into a book, and it released “Welcome to Hell World” (the book) in September 2019.
Heather Havrilesky is an essayist who writes the relationship and lifestyle advice column “Ask Polly” for “New York” magazine’s “The Cut.” Molly is “Polly’s evil twin,” Havrilesky’s outlet for all the things polite and uplifting Polly can’t say.
Despite its parallel to the advice column’s name, Ask Molly isn’t strictly advice. Newsletters include Havrilesky’s personal essays on life and culture in addition to responses to reader questions.
Havrilesky has been dolling out advice professionally since the mid-90s, starting with a now-defunct online magazine called “Suck,” and she’s a pioneer in online media.
She kept the advice going at her own blog for about 10 years after “Suck” shuttered in 2001, pitched it to “The Awl” and finally caught the eye of “New York” magazine, which invited her to write the column’s current iteration.
With the “evil twin” lens in “Ask Molly,” Havrilesky has found a clever way to spin off a personal brand on the shoulders of her popularity in traditional media.
The pop culture–obsessed publication “Two Bossy Dames” is a case study in emerging platforms over the past half decade.
It started as a Tumblr blog, launched subscriptions on Tinyletter, garnered supporters on Patreon and, in 2018, migrated to Substack to put publishing and revenue in one place. Its content has shown up on Medium, and it has a relatively small but engaged Twitter following.
According to Substack, Two Bossy Dames makes the authors a significant side income, but isn’t their full-time job. Each of the writers, Sophie Brookover and Margaret Willison, keeps busy with other work, as librarians and culture writers.
Ryan O’Hanlon is another creator Substack notes as a successful side hustler on the platform, and his newsletter, “No Grass in the Clouds,” is a good example of finding success in a narrow niche: soccer through an analytics lens.
O’Hanlon is a freelance writer and host of the soccer podcast “Infinite Football,” previously a senior editor at sports and culture site The Ringer, where he hosted a (different) soccer podcast. He’s also a former collegiate soccer player — he’s well-suited for his niche.
Launched in December 2018, “No Grass in the Clouds” promotes O’Hanlon’s podcast, shares his essays on the sport, and publishes analysis and news for paying subscribers.
Substack is often the first brand we connect with paid newsletters, but it has competitors and alternatives.
The ability to make money as a writer feels increasingly threatened by shuttering media companies, rolling layoffs and growing competition.
Many experts laud the (re)emerging subscription model as a way for writers to take success into their own hands, cut out the intermediary and make money directly from readers.
But — like profiles of early successes in blogging — promises of the logistical ease ignore a serious barrier to a lucrative subscription business: building an audience.
“Directly singing for your supper to readers is always going to prioritize people who already have an audience, who already have a certain amount of privilege, or who are speaking to an audience that has a certain amount of money,” newsletter pioneer Ann Friedman told Vanity Fair’s Claire Landsbaum.
Many successful Substack writers built audiences by writing for traditional publications first — many in a very different media landscape. It might be wishful thinking for a new writer to try to follow their example when the path has already shifted so much.
Similarly, while a platform like Substack ostensibly helps with discovery, the company benefits most by supporting the most successful creators. It grew by recruiting writers with large audiences, and it would be wise to continue to nurture those brands.
Like media platforms before it — see: Medium, YouTube, Patreon, Kindle — Substack eliminates incredible tech barriers for creators, allowing you to focus on creating while delivering your content where your audience wants it.
Ultimately, however, your success on these platforms depends on your ability to develop your own brand and cultivate a loyal audience.
Photo via GuadiLab / Shutterstock
The post Can You Earn Money Through Substack? These 8 Writers Prove You Can appeared first on The Write Life.
First-time authors sometimes make a grave mistake when seeking a book editor for their first manuscript.
When I started as a freelance editor, I couldn’t put my finger on the problem. But, as my client list grew, I realized why I was secretly getting frustrated with a few of their books.
Highly experienced editor Shawn Coyne expresses the problem succinctly and memorably: “A lot of people just want to dump their goo on an editor and have the editor form that into something for them.”
When weary writers submit their premature manuscripts to editors too soon, both parties will inevitably become frustrated.
For the most part, I don’t believe first-time authors do this knowingly. They just don’t know any better. They’ve written what they believe is a workable first draft, and because they want to do the process right, they begin looking for editors for hire.
But a first draft should never be sent to an editor, unless you’re working with — and willing to pay — a developmental editor to help you create a workable draft.
Authors who submit under-cooked books are subconsciously motivated by the twin specters that haunt every writer, every day: fear and resistance.
They may fear they don’t have what it takes to be “a serious writer,” so they send their “goo” to an editor in the hopes that the editor can affirm their work and make it monumentally better.
Unwittingly, these authors place the burden of failure (or success) onto their editors’ shoulders.
Or, maybe the writer has been working on their book for three months, or a year, or many years, and they’re so tired of looking at the thing that they send it off because they just want to be done with the process. In Steven Pressfield’s parlance from The War of Art, that’s Resistance.
In fact, Pressfield writes, “Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance. Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul. That’s why we feel so much Resistance. If it meant nothing to us, there’d be no Resistance.”
How much does a first-time author’s first book mean to them? The world.
So how much Resistance can they expect? Planet-sized.
When you’re up against a foe like that, I don’t blame authors who’d rather have the editor fight that battle.
But that’s not our job. As the writer, this is your fight.
The question that arises then is: When is the right time to hire an editor?
Consider these questions, and be brutally honest with yourself in answering them before figuring out how to find an editor:
I hear the fear that sits within every writer’s heart when a first-time author and client asks me that one question I dread: What do you think of my book?
What they’re actually asking is: Is it any good?
If an editor answers that question — they often won’t unless they’ve been hired for a manuscript critique — they’re likely going to be bluntly honest. Why?
If they’re experienced and good at what they do, they’ve read a ton of books. They know the industry. They know what’s considered publishable. And they will stack that knowledge against your book, and your book may not come out looking so well.
Every writer suffers from doubt that their book will be good or even acceptable.
When John Steinbeck wrote East of Eden — a phenomenal book — he recorded this in his journal, which was later published in Journal of a Novel: “I know it is the best book I have ever done. I don’t know whether it is good enough.”
To me, that’s one of the more astounding admissions of self-doubt from a writer who had experienced both critical and commercial success. In other words, even Steinbeck feared that the “goo” of his manuscript wasn’t ready.
Steinbeck needed at least six years to write East of Eden based on notes he’d taken about the Salinas Valley for most of his life. Arguably, he needed his lifetime to write what he considered his masterpiece. He wrote, “I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this.”
Toward the end of that years-long journey, as he dove headlong into finishing East of Eden, Steinbeck wrote letters to his friend and editor, Pascal Covici, which were posthumously published in Journal of a Novel in 1968.
When considering whether or not your book is ready for an editor, think about Steinbeck’s challenge to himself: “You can’t train for something all your life and then have it fall short because you are hurrying to get it finished.”
Writer, this is your fight. If it’s your first, prepare for 15 rounds.
This is an updated version of a story that was previously published. We update our posts as often as possible to ensure they’re useful for our readers.
Photo via GuadiLab / Shutterstock
The post When is the Right Time to Hire a Book Editor? appeared first on The Write Life.