Staring at the Screen
Okay. So, I am responding to notices about opportunities to have my work published or produced or read as I see them. No more “I’ll do them all at once” which means I don’t do them. In the instant I see the posting, I decide the piece to send based on what the theater, literary review, or whatever says it wants and what it has published or produced by others. Then the steps to submit.
I check whether the piece I am thinking of has been looked at by me recently. If not, I read it and make any changes. I check whether the opportunity wants the file name a certain way or only accepts files in certain formats or doesn’t want my name on the document. I check whether they want a cover letter or other statement. If they do… I start staring at the screen
I have looked at examples of cover letters. I have read blogs about how to write an artistic statement. I have matched the style of my “short” bio to those I have seen online. No amount of research has prepared me adequately for completing the cover letter box.
Read my stuff on Medium or elsewhere. I am not shy about writing about myself. I am the king of TMI. Writing online about my experiences and opinions empties my brain to allow room for being creative in writing for film, stage, television, or literary review.
I rarely stare at the screen writing a play, short story, screenplay, whatever. I write until everything comes out, hit save, and do something else. The one exception is writing lyrics. I am still learning so the process is more work than fun.
I just finished my submission to a fiction prize. It took me an hour to write the cover letter with short bio. The latter part is easy. I have bios of various word counts stockpiled. Cut and paste. Read to see if I want to adjust anything. Done.
The first part, the cover letter, gives me brain freeze. I am going to write a paragraph about the piece I am submitting and a paragraph about my writing style. Again, the latter part is easy. I have a few sentences about my approach to writing in my Submittable profile. The last one sounds a little disgruntled, I know. Here it is:
My writing illuminates the experience of being from quirky, queer, well-traveled, disabled, educated perspectives. I am heavily influenced by post-modernist writers like Edward Albee, Jorge Luis Borges, and Doris Lessing. I hope audiences and readers decide whether my work is engaging enough for them personally without applying standards I am not trying to meet.
Yeah, disgruntled. I would love to be gruntled. That won’t happen until people stop telling me: there’s no story arc in a piece about the evolution of a character; the narrator goes off on tangents; or the ending leaves the protagonist in a quantum state where all the probabilities of what can happen next still exist. The fact is that we evolve without a story arc, we go off on tangents in the middle of things, and we all exist in a quantum state. I am writing about the experience of being, which for me rings truer than the beats of a traditional plot.
Anyway, the part of the cover letter that stops me in my tracks is explaining what the piece I am submitting contains. If I could encapsulate it in a paragraph, it would be flash fiction. The plot summary must cover enough to present a clear picture. With so many elements going on in a piece, excluding things seems like I am leaving stuff out (which I guess is the meaning of excluding).
The plot summary must describe the significant moments. You mean the surprise ending, too? How much do I give away? I know synopses must include the ending or else you will hear a sonic WTF! regardless of how far away the recipient is. Doesn’t the person reading submissions want to wait to see how things turn out (or in my work, are left hanging)?
Nothing would be simpler if I could write “Character A does this, causing Character B to say this, which motivates Character C to do….” The problem is my work is a lot of words (like this blog) with people saying interesting things and playing off each other but doing surprisingly little. That mirrors life.
Okay, after that I started staring at the screen. Time to see what’s happening at the bird feeders.
