The Writer’s DB Blog

Not using an RSS feed reader to keep up with your favorite web sites? Don’t even know what RSS is?

First of all, you should learn. As I tell everyone, sooner or later, RSS is great. It’s like having the web content you care about come to you the way e-mail does, so you don’t have to go out to dozens of different sites and fetch it.

Besides that, more and more WritersDB content is going to be available in RSS format as time goes on—especially shared market listings from other users. Once you’re in the habit of using RSS anyway, this is a tremendous convenience.

But in case you don’t feel like learning about RSS yet, it is now possible to subscribe to the Writer’s DB blog by e-mail. There you go.

Writing is a solitary activity; it’s useful to have the support of friends. People who will read your latest work and offer commentary. People who, if they hear you haven’t been writing, won’t let you get away with it. People who write themselves, and whose presence in your life helps to foster an environment of creativity.

Some of you reading this probably have accounts on Facebook. They have over 140 million active users, so I feel safe making that guess. The purpose of Facebook is to bring your friends closer, to help make them more a part of your life. That purpose should apply in the context of writing, as well as any other context.

So, I’ve taken advantage of their newly released “Facebook Connect” technology, which allows other web sites to integrate with Facebook. It is now possible, when you take certain actions on the Writer’s Database, to publish the news of those actions to your Facebook news feed, where your friends can see it.

I’ve started with four specific actions:

• When you send out a submission.
• When you receive a reply from a market. (Let your friends celebrate or commiserate, as appropriate.)
• When you update the word count for a manuscript in progress.
• When you add a new market to the Writer’s Database. (Your friends might want to submit there, too.)

When you perform one of these actions, you’ll be given the opportunity to publish the news to your Facebook newsfeed, and you’ll be given the choice of a one-line format or various longer versions, which include different levels of detail. For example, when you submit a manuscript for publication, you can choose to include just the title, the title plus the name of the market, or neither.

Please note: This is beta functionality. I’ve tested it with my own account, but that’s all. And Facebook’s own release of FB Connect happened in a bit of a hurry. If it doesn’t work as expected, please let me know, and please be patient.

The Clarion Writer’s Workshop was the best thing I ever did. One of the many reasons is that it was the most intimately I’ve ever been connected to a community of talented writer-friends. These new WritersDB features are not as good as Clarion—I guarantee it. But I hope they’ll help.

In the 2006 film “The Prestige,” Michael Caine plays an engineer who designs and builds magic tricks for stage magicians to perform. The film begins with Caine’s character explaining the three-part structure supposedly common to all great magic tricks:

1. The Pledge. The magician shows you something familiar. A coin. A man.
2. The Turn. The magician makes the familiar thing behave in an unfamiliar way. The coin vanishes. The man is sawed in half.

   But, he explains, the trick isn’t satisfying yet. Making a coin disappear isn’t enough. You need . . .

3. The Prestige. The coin is restored. You put the man back together.

Let’s think about that structure as it applies to stories—in particular, horror stories. Often, a horror story features an evil thing, either clearly identified (a murderous wooden doll) or mysterious (muddy footprints appearing overnight in the hallway outside your bedroom), stalking and trying to kill an innocent. At the end of the story, the evil thing kills the innocent, or the innocent destroys the evil thing.

The story has to end in one of those two ways. What else can it do? So when it does happen, it’s awfully easy for the reader’s reaction to be: “SO WHAT? Is that all?” In many horror stories, yes, that’s all. And that’s supposed to be enough.

The cry of “So what?” from your reader may be a signal that she’s still waiting for the prestige.

• The protagonist kills the monster . . . which is exactly what the monster needed, to become truly powerful.
• She exorcises the terrifying ghost . . . who has been working so hard to protect her, without her knowledge.

Done well, that reversal, that ultimate defeat right at the moment when the protagonist “wins,” can be more deeply horrifying than any of the struggle that precedes it. See Richard Matheson’s classic short story “Prey” for a fine example.

Am I saying that every horror story needs a twist ending? Certainly not. For one thing, they would rapidly cease to be effective. For another, this is a solution to a specific problem. Not every story has a plot with only two possible outcomes, both easily foreseeable. But if your story falls into that category, and if you were thinking of ending it when the protagonist gets sawed in half, think just a little longer. Consider whether there’s any way to deliver a “prestige.”

By default, the Writer’s Database offers some pretty simple choices for the status of your submissions:

• Pending
• Sold
• Rejected
• Withdrawn by author

For some writers, those may be inadequate. I’ve often (too often) used “Withdrawn by author” when the truth was more along the lines of “Market went out of business.”

Those of you submitting novels to agents may need submission status choices such as “Initial Query” and “Agent Requested More.”

Some writers like to keep track of “Rejected with Kind Handwritten Note” separately from form rejections. They count this as slightly more of a win.

Now, WritersDB supports all of the above, and more. You can define your own custom choices for Submission Status. Give them whatever names you please, and tell the system how to treat them: whether as Pending, Closed/Success, or Closed/Failure.

You can access this feature by clicking the “Record a Reply” link for any of your pending submissions, then choosing the last menu item under Submission Status: “”Customize submission status choices.” Also note that the Advanced Search feature on your list of submissions allows you to search any of the custom status choices you create.