News You Can Bruise for 2009 March 31

(4) Tue Mar 31 2009 21:12 Slush Pile Tips: Okay, all the Thoughtcrime Experiments line edits are out and everyone has been paid. There's one story that still needs some rewrite but we're ready to start laying this sucker out.

I thought I'd take the opportunity to publish some of our hard-won Slush Pile Tips(tm), amazing rules that, if followed slavishly, will launch your fiction into some metaphorical orbit. Rules marked with an asterisk are ones that we still consider to be good advice even though we're publishing a story that violates them.

A lot of the things we've noticed are small things, but just fixing them won't necessarily fix the story. These are more like code smells: signs that something is wrong at a deeper level.

• When writing science fiction about particle physics, take special care to correctly spell the names of elementary particles.
• Is there a gun in your story? Do you feel a need to mention the exact make and model of the gun? The gun may be too important to your story.
• Long scenes that take place inside hallucinations are tiresome. Also symbolic dreams outside of fantasy. Nothing in this scene is really happening!
• Don't put the full name of the POV character at the start of your story. This didn't even make sense in the 1950s. It makes your POV character seem like a pompous ass who thinks in newspaper articles describing their exploits. Obvious exception if pompous asshood is your intention. Sumana says: also an exception if character's name is incredibly awesome.
• Memory erasure/recording is overdone.
• Also people throwing up in bar bathrooms.
• Also airport bathrooms.
• * There is an oversupply of SF stories with a noir style or detective mystery theme. We got a lot of really good ones, but we didn't feel like we could publish more than one. I've written one I think is really good that I can't get published. Now I think I see why.

  It's kind of strange, if you think about it. Traditional hard-boiled noir is pretty much dead, but traditional hard-boiled noir that's also SF is alive and kicking.

• If no one in your story is British, do not call any female a "lady".
• Sumana says: unctuous businessmen should either be over-the-top funny or more understated and realistic.
• * Leonard says: do not use "thumb" as a verb meaning "interact with a handheld device."
• * Any reference to Pandora or Pandora's box is a bad sign. Doubly bad if it's in the title.
• Some infodumps are worse than others. If the premise of your story is laughably ridiculous, an infodump will call attention to the fact. The absolute worst is the gratuitious infodump, which painfully restates that which has already been adequately shown, just to make the reader suffer.