Bewildering Stories Editorial

by Jerry Wright

The Bewildering Stories Writing School

After last week's editorial on "Rejections" (and the hits just keep on coming...) Don appended a little comment about the possibility of my finding more of our various articles and editorials on writing. I thought that was an extremely good idea, and so I spent an afternoon digging through our archives in search of gems and nuggets about writing. And over the last four years there have been screeds aplenty. So...

The Silverberg article entitled "Thanks Bob" begins with a succinct explanation of exactly what constitutes a story.

His prime comment:

There is such a thing as a universal plot skeleton, an essential narrative formula that all successful writers of... fiction use."
And this formula is one that I have told our would-be writers to use time and again: A character is faced with a problem that he needs to solve, and he either solves it, or fails to solve it, and is in some way changed.

Sadly, Asimov's never did maintain a link to that article, however, a link to Silverberg Part II does exist in issue 114.

Moving on, we had a little article about the Source of Ideas in Issue 134 and a detailed screed about clumsy construction and mechanics of writing in Issue 175 entitled "Right Writing Rites".

We then move on to Thoughts for Beginning Writers in Issue 177. Changing the subject, but only slightly, I wrote why much of the "postmodern" writing does so little for me, and assuming you want to write stories people want to read, you might think about the ideas expressed in the article Modernism.

Because we have so many talented writers who seem to be delighted to be part of the Bewildering Stories Family, they too have many enlightening things to say. So we'll list 'em.

Start at the Ending a dialog between Kevin Ahern and Don Webb
Short Fiction Vs. Novel by Carmen Ruggero
Action and Plot by Don Webb
Bob Sellers and Don Webb on Sentences
The Art of Flash Fiction by Gloria Watts
Viewpoint and Composition by Clyde Andrews, Mike Leier and Don Webb
Rejections The editorial that started all this...

So, along with a strong recommendation that all aspiring writers read our Submissions Page, I can now send everyone to THIS editorial for a (we hope) complete dip into "The Bewildering Stories Writers School".

And by the way, as has been mentioned several times elsewhere, just to toot our own horn a bit, BwS is one of the few webzines that actually has editors who edit. It was funny. I was reading an editorial from, if I remember correctly, Issue 52, crowing about the fact that we actually had a bit of a backlog. And now we have a backlog that reaches more than a month and a half into the future.

Bewildering Stories is for BOTH readers and writers, and between us all, we can go staggering into the future.

Ye Copy Editor’s note: our backlog in short fiction now extends to two and a half months. We have a lot more leeway, though, in long fiction — novels and novellas — and in non-fiction.