Apex Magazine is back from hiatus! One of my favorite short fiction magazines for years, Apex has consistently had fantastic stories, as shown by the many (many) awardsthey've won or been nominated for over the years.
I'm reading through their first new issue now. I'll post a full review later, but I can already tell they've retained the high bar for quality they've always had. The very first story, out of the gate, left me devastated, in a good way: just profoundly moving.
So when they announced they were doing a 15-minute online writing workshop with author Tim Waggoner, I leaped to sign up.
Sure, I had some skepticism. Most of the past workshops I've been to have been at least an hour, and even that felt short. How much could we cover in just fifteen minutes?
It turns out you can cover basically everything you need to cover, to dissect why a piece of short fiction isn't working.
I sent in the first six pages of a horror story I have that I like, that I've edited multiple times, but that also keeps getting rejected. I assumed it was a problem with the story, but I was having trouble seeing it.
Tim had no such problems. In just fifteen minutes over voice chat, he went right to the heart of the problem with my story: the motivation for my protagonist is too impersonal. Then he broke down some issues with my style -- too many short paragraphs, too much exposition up front -- that I realized are habits I need to break, because other readers have mentioned them before for other pieces (different readers saw different issues. Tim saw them all).
I wasn't all criticism, though. He also gave me techniques to use to prevent making these same mistakes again. Such as keeping a separate document open for exposition, writing it there and only there during the first draft, and then coming back and pulling from that doc while editing, inserting only what the reader has to know, and then only when they need to know it. Or combining the first few pages into a single paragraph, then breaking it up during a read-through, to end up with more natural-feeling paragraphs.
He was spot on, in everything he said. I already started re-drafting the story based on his feedback. Not only that, but I'm also editing a second story with his feedback in mind; when re-reading it after the workshop, several of those same problems leaped out at me.
Many thanks to Apex Magazine for organizing the workshop, and to Tim Waggoner for running it! I learned a lot in a short amount of time, and I'm very grateful.
