62. In Conversation with Short Fiction Author Liz J. Bradley (Part 2)

In this week's episode we continue the conversation with short story author Liz J. Bradley about her writing process and experience with both short fiction and novel writing. Tune in for insight on how to apply what you learn in writing short stories to novels, and her #1 secret for figuring out how to juggle a plethora of writing projects. 

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Transcript

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Welcome to Show. Don't Tell Writing with me, Suzy Vadori, where I teach you the tried and true secrets to writing fiction nonfiction that are gonna wow your readers broken down step by step. We're gonna explore writing techniques. I'm gonna show you a glimpse behind the scenes of successful writers' careers that you wouldn't have access to otherwise. And I'm also gonna coach writers live on their pages so that you can learn and transform your own storytelling. Whether you're just starting out, you're drafting your first book, you're editing, or you're currently rewriting that book, or maybe even your 10th book, this show's gonna help you unlock the writing skills that you didn't even know you needed, but you definitely do. I'm so looking forward to helping you get your amazing ideas from your mind onto your pages in an exciting way for both you and your readers, so that you can achieve your wildest writing dreams, and you're gonna also have some fun doing it. Let's dive in. Welcome back to the podcast show. Don't Tell Writing. We have part two in my series with Liz J. Bradley from Team Suzy and her a hundred Rejections for short fiction. Last week's episode, she shared with us all the details, how many she submitted, what that process looks like and how she does it. This week's episode is part two. We're gonna talk a lot about Liz's writing process. How does she manage to juggle everything, and how does she do it, what she's learned, what her plans are, and how this is going to play into her plans for her next novel. Liz J. Bradley grew up in a small town in central New York, but followed a career in the theater that took her from the ocean to the tundra to the Eiffel Tower. And in a creative pivot, she began to explore new worlds on the page instead of on the stage. Now she spends her days as an executive assistant. She supports Team Suzy here as well as other executives. She spends her nights telling space stories through prose and poetry. She hosts the Sci-Fi Snacks podcast, which you can link to you and grab in the show notes, and you can also find her online@lizjbradley.com. Not the writing itself though, Liz, we're talking about all the submission and all the sort of noise around this process that you've built. But what about the writing? So if we're, if we're doing, I mean, that first story you said was several months back and forth. But what typical, like for a thousand word story, how much time are you spending on these stories and is it getting faster? It's getting faster in some ways, yes, because there are, you know, I draft a lot cleaner now than I used to. I can. For a piece of flash fiction, which is anything under a thousand words, I can sit down and write that in a day or two and have a pretty clean draft usually. And when you say a day or two, like that's not eight hours a day, that's, oh no, that's, how much time is it? What's your process? I, I can't usually write for more than two hours would be my top. And that we're doing like Pomodoro. Writing sprints in that time. Drafting is my least favorite part of the entire process of writing. I will plan for forever. I like to have like a really clear picture in my head before I sit down because drafting is painful. I have a really hard time like getting my inner editor to not talk. So the drafting part, I try to power through it as quickly as I can because otherwise I get stuck thinking that I'm just the worst writer in the world. So anything per flash, it's probably like four hours to write the piece and then editing, which is my favorite part of the process. I, I did the math once and I was really, really upset about it actually, because. I've been doing a contest where I write DRLs, which are 100 words exactly like not 99, not 101, 100 words. You have to tell a complete story and I'll spend a week working on it and like the actual sitting down writing process part is maybe only a few hours. But when you extrapolate that out to like a novel, I'm like, I spend a few hours on every single like hundred word chunk. My novel, like I literally will never finish anything. So I spend more time per word on shorter stuff right now. But that helps when I'm writing novel length stuff because I've learned. I've learned a lot of things paying that much attention to the short fiction, so I know, you know, I'm not worrying about formatting stuff. I've got that pretty, pretty well. I know how to do dialogue with action beats, and I know what my voice sounds like, so I know how I like to kind of get a scene out there. So it helps me write the novel stuff faster because I've spent time. It's like doing a, a character study for an artist where they just spend like a week drawing hands. That's what flash fiction and drabbles and stuff is. For me, it's, I'm spending all this time working on. The pros itself, making sure it does double duty. Triple duty. Because when you don't have the space, every sentence, every word has to, yes, Liz, I've heard the wait. Yeah, absolutely. Double, triple duty. We talk about that a lot. Mm-hmm. And I know in terms of process, you said that you used Pomodoro or you a 25 minute Pomodoro. I'm, that's where you set a, you set a timer, typically 25 minutes and you write, and then you take a quick break and then you do it again and you stay focused. And I know too, Liz had shared we, she is part of my inner circle of writers that you can learn more about in the show notes, but. We, we did this exercise a couple of weeks ago where we were talking about our writing process and imagining what is the best writing day that you've ever had. And Liz had this aha moment where she'd been scheduling time in the evening after her kids went to bed and canceling on herself for these writing dates and realizing that she'd never really had a great, that's not when her energy was. And so she figured out that if she wrote on her lunch hour, she might be more successful. So. There's always things that you can tweak about your writing process. So if you're listening and going, oh my gosh, like she's talking about writing every day, or writing all the time, and I don't have that time, just use what time you do have. Just use what time you do have and figure out what process works for you. And that's, Liz is continually tweaking her process. And what's kind of neat, because you get to be immersed in this and helping and supporting other writers, and so you're always also thinking about your own process and how you can improve that as well. Okay. Yeah. So great results. Amazing story. Thank you so much for sharing all these detail. Is this what you expected when you started out? Like were you like, okay, I'm gonna get to a hundred rejections and I'm going to be doing this machine, and is this what, like are you happy with these results with nine published stories? I hope so. I, I'm thrilled. Honestly, I think it's really easy to get bombed down in. The rejections and the gatekeeping that comes when you want traditionally published goals. And there's always people telling you no and telling you you can't. I think when I sat down and I actually looked at like the percentages and numbers, I was surprised that I'm at average or above average on those statistics, which for me, it doesn't always feel that way because it feels like, oh, you're failing, you're failing, you're failing, you're not getting anywhere. You're not hitting these arbitrary goals that you know. I think it's really important to set goals that you can control. For a couple of years was like, oh, I'm gonna get an agent this year. I can control that. So that's not, that's not a goal for me anymore. My goal is to submit to agents. My goal is to write a better book. It's to write a better query letter. It's to do the things that I can. So like stopping and pausing for a minute and looking at all that I've accomplished and how far I've come was actually really. Really helpful and made me feel really good about my process. And actually I'm inspired because I looked at this list of things that I wanna write and I think people get scared in the beginning thinking that they'll run out of ideas and that's literally not are the problem. And as you more things. You're like, oh, well what about this idea? And this idea and ideas beget ideas. And so as you keep writing, you keep thinking of things that you want to write about or you wanna try. And so I have so many, my only regret is that I don't have more time to write and. You know, that may be that pie in the sky goal of I'm gonna be a full-time writer someday, and maybe I'll build up to it. We'll make, I know you're gonna do it. You're gonna do it, Liz, and we are gonna miss you so hard when you do too much. It always takes longer than you think, but I think reviewing what I've done and looking at all the stories that I've written. I feel really good about it. Like I am excited, I'm happy, I wanna keep writing and I wanna keep submitting. Yeah, it's awesome. That's what I was gonna ask you. Are you gonna keep going? Two years For sure. Gonna keep going. What's the next goal? So a hundred rejections achieved? Yeah. Technically my goal for this year was 52 submissions, which was one for each week, and I've already like surpassed that. My new goal for the year was a hundred submissions, and the other goal that I'm kind of shifting to is clearing out my editing section on my spreadsheet and getting them to submission ready. So I really, really wanna focus on carving out that time on my lunch hour and things like that to get these stories that. I'm still editing. I have feedback on all of them from my critique partners and I know what needs to be done. I just need to put in the time to get them to a polished place to submit and like I've got one that I'm looking at that is a capture the flag on the moon story. That is, I'm so excited about it and I wanna share it with the world and I wanna talk with people about it, but like. I know it needs edits and I just have to do it. So the new goal is to really clear out that editing queue so that I can be submitting these new things and replacing the things that are getting published with stuff that can kind of go in after it for submissions. So, I mean, the cool thing for listeners, if they don't understand how short story works, there's this neat thing too where you can actually republish the same thing, right? Like it's a reprint and so. Even if it's been published somewhere, usually there's a grace period and then you can keep submitting that same story and get paid for it again. Is that something that you're doing with those stories that have been published? Yeah, so I'm tracking. Each of my contracts has actually been different. Anywhere from they hold onto rights for a year. Two, it's three months, I think is the shortest. So I have a list of dates on all of the ones that have been published. Um, when can I start sending this back out? And most of them have an exception for, there are a lot of like best of this year anthology type things. And almost everyone has an exception on their exclusivity period if you're submitting to those. So I've actually. Submitted a couple of times, some of the things that I've already published to those anthologies and things like that, so that would be really cool. So amazing. Okay, so if your head is spinning, just listening to quiz and everything that she's been able to accomplish. Yes. She's super human and she's really got this down to is science, but you know, many writers have the opposite issue that you were just talking about. It's not about more ideas. It's like, oh my gosh, I have 20 things on the go. I always tell them to pick one and get it done, you know? How do you keep from just getting totally overwhelmed if you've got 30 stories that are sort of on the go? I mean, if anybody can do it, you can. And obviously you've managed to do it. How are you doing that? The secret in writing for me has been sharing my work with critique partners. So I, at the same time I started doing this, I had just joined a local groups from my library and like, check out your library because there are writers groups usually where you can start one through your library and then they host it. For me, I share almost everything that I write with these critique partners. I also share everything with my sister who reads kind of my zero drafts, and she is a reader. She's not a writer, so she's really able to tell me this is exciting, like I like this idea, and I find that Then talking about the different stories with people. Is the way that I can kind of prioritize in my mind what I'm excited about working on. And I think that following that excitement, really thinking about which story is the most exciting to you, it's how I got through my last novel that I wrote. I had been writing a young adult fantasy that was really dark and kind of sad and heavy, and I was like. COVID hit and I was like, I can't do this. Like I cannot keep working on something that's just so heavy and dark and isn't bringing me joy. I literally sat down and was like, what are things that make me happy? And I put them all together and I said, I'm gonna write a book with all of these elements like Kesha's, rainbow Album and Theater People. Space because it's gotta be set in space and all of these things that bring me joy, and that's kind of what I follow. I look at these stories and I go, which ones bring me the most joy? And those are the ones that I work on because I highly limited time, you know? Yeah. And you are really smart about it, like when you, because you do, you schedule your writing time because you have to, because your life is crazy. And you schedule your running time and when you sit down you have that spreadsheet, you look and you choose one thing when you do your timers for 25 minutes and you work on that one thing. Yeah. So even if you've got more things on the go and you're able to manage that because you have these systems in place, but it's still about finishing that one thing. Okay. So the elephant in the room here, we're doing all these other things, talk about,'cause we set out to write a novel. Mm-hmm. And. Honestly, I can't believe I'm even saying this. Please don't try this at home. But Liz is still writing novels, so can you talk a little bit about that amazing novel that you did that brought you joy, where that ended up? And I know the answer to this one because I don't read all of her short fiction. I could have possibly, it would take be a full-time job, I think. But I do help and get to, you get the privilege. Of critiquing some of the novel Link stuff. So talk about where that novel ended up and what you're working on now and how you're doing that. Yeah, and also doing all this other things and also being the most amazing. Team member word retain Suzy compartmentalizing. It really is about compartmentalizing your projects and so that, that joy novel for me is, it's technically still out on submission for queries, so I think that there are still e queries that are out. I have two full requests that are still out, that I have been out for a really long time. And yes, publishing moves very slow. I've kind of, I've emotionally moved on from the querying stage, so if I don't hear back from those last eight, I've already moved on essentially. Well, and and to be fair, because you're not gonna toot your own horn, you received some extremely warm. Rejections, um, where the feedback is. So positive agents absolutely love this book, and yet they can't figure out how to sell it because you combined a lot of different things, which were your joy spots, right? And you're like, what if maybe I can't sell it to this market? So true to Liz form. What are you doing now? Now I started from my query. So the first thing I wrote for the next book was my hook and my query, because it was. It was so hard to write a book that was 94,000 words and then distill it to her page, and that was, it really was. The marketability of that last book was tough because it didn't have a clear hook. It didn't have a one sentence thing that somebody would go, Ooh, I wanna buy that. I wanna read that. So I started. With that for the next book. So when I wrote the query, I did some pitch events. Blue Sky is actually kind of trying to bring back those pitch events and I had done those for the Joy novel that used to be on Twitter. And actually one of my girlfriends, one of my good colleagues, originally got her agent on Twitter. And yeah, tho those have died out. But Blue Sky is a new social media. Check it out. Um, sorry. Keep going, Liz. Yeah, no, and I think doing these pitch events, they have a lot now for work in progress pitch events where it's kind of just more about building community and sharing your story. And it can feel like, well, what's the point? The point is knowing your pitch going in. And now whenever I'm writing a chapter or I'm looking at it, I can look, I have my pitch posted like right on my wall, and I can go, what is the essence of this story? And is this chapter resonating with that? Because I don't wanna write. 50,000 words that I have to cut because it doesn't fit in the novel. So this time I wrote that back jacket copy and I know what the story is, and now it's about zooming in and expanding those pieces and making sure everything fits with this idea and this theme. So when I go out to query, it may shift a little bit based on kind of what I find as I write. But I'm somebody who works really well within structures. I think that's why I love like flash fiction so much is give me boundaries and I will work right up to the edge of the boundary and be as creative as I can within the box. So I've created that box for myself with this novel. Like, it's not that it can be anything.'cause that that's really hard when you sit down and it's like a hundred thousand words. That's how people end up with like 500,000 word epics. I'm kidding. People are like, should I just break it into three books? And I'm like, no, it doesn't work like that. Right? Yeah. So you gotta work within the confines. So I gave myself those confines. I wrote the pitch. And now I'm exploring what. The different characters that I've created, how do they exist inside the world where this is what we're talking about and this is what we're exploring. Yeah. I love how you've taken what you've learned in this short fiction journey and I mean, I've seen your writing just absolutely blossom and explode since we've, you know, since. Since I've met you and you were a newer writer when you first started working with me and my team and, and now it's like just so solid and you know what readers and what editors are responding to and all of that, you're able to take that and actually move it into that novel space. And so whenever happens, and you know this and you can kind of, I mean, it was hard, right? I know I was there. Yeah. It was hard to put that first book. To kinda let it go. We had many discussions about it, but it, it is, but you know that that's gonna come back from your experience of, I think, you know, when you get this more marketable one and get that out there, the hope is that, that there'll be some space for this other one that kind of doesn't have a home to your readers are going to just Absolutely eat it up because Yeah, I'll have, so things that are, make it you. Yeah, no writing is ever wasted and I think really internalizing that helped me move on from that book into the next one. And I always have something on the back burner that I'm really excited about that I don't let myself touch. So I already know the next, next book, and I'm not allowed to work on that until I get through the hard parts of this novel. And I think. It might be controversial because you hear it all the time in online spaces where people say short stories are harder than novels, and I don't think so at all. Like I am, I will fight. Tooth and nail novels are harder. I think they're different skill sets, but yes, say slightly. But I think that a lot of people, what it is, is they don't encounter the whole process in a novel. They write a first draft and they think I've written a novel. So novels are easier because I haven't engaged with the rewriting and the, the whole process being, being as strong as I can do. Yeah. Yeah. And 'cause people say, oh, well a short story has to be really, really polished. So does your novel. Yeah. You know? Absolutely. You have to do both. And so I think they're both very hard in different ways, but you can get through the hard, faster, and the shorter stuff. So yeah, I like that part. I think what's neat about the job that we both have on Team Suzy is that we get to see so many other writers' processes that we get to reflect on our own as well. And I don't, I don't write short stories and it's not because I think they're harder or anything else. I actually love the challenge of a novel, like holding all of that in my brain. Mm-hmm. And trying to piece through it. It's the reason I love developmental editing, 'cause I do it for other people as well, but holding all of that in my brain is part of the fun. Do I think I could write short story. I mean, we all think that we should. They haven't. Um, we don't. Okay. Yeah. Right. There are different types of stories. You're not gonna tell the same story in a hundred words as you are in a novel, like in 100 words. That story is about one single moment, one single choice flash fiction, where you've got a thousand words. That's about one change. And then a novel is about kind of. Transformation and whatnot, that you get to explore a a thousand of those little choices. And so what I think is great is that you can work on having a full story in each format, and that will help you because if you can write a complete story in a hundred words. What the important things are that get people interested, you know? Absolutely. And then that goes into your novel. Absolutely. Many, many writers do start there with a novel and then they add a bunch of stuff to make it not a hundred thousand words. And, and you've gotta be really careful that you're not just adding tea sipping, I always use that example, but making tea, it's gotta kind of be a lot more and, but it still needs to weave together. Amazing. This has been such a valuable discussion. I'm sure that the listeners are really jazzed and probably gonna go out and be your competition. Now, with all of these hard story submission. Bring it. I love it. Bring it, right? No, maybe outcome. Would you do it again? A hundred percent. A hundred percent. It's all about the journey and what I've learned about myself as an artist, as a writer, as a person. The amount of personal insights where I've had writing a story and just being like, oh, that's who I am. That's what I believe. That's invaluable. And so I would, I would never give it up for all the tears that I cry for. All of being hard making track right now. Just like, this is what writing should be, Liz, and this is what writing and immersing yourself in this space can be. And you've also gamified it for yourself, for those dopamines. Yeah. And, and several, you're, you're seeing a lot of success and I love that. Okay, so where can we find you? You also have a podcast, which is a really cool thing. Tell us about your podcast. I do, the podcast is called Sci-Fi Snacks, and each episode I talk about a short science fiction story that I've read, and I pair it with a snack because nothing is better than reading and eating good things. Season two is just about to drop, and that's gonna be all punk stories. So like steam punk, cyberpunk, pop, punk. All of that. It was a project for me that I chose to do it, to read more, to become a better writer, but also as the one project that I could do that had no gatekeepers. There's nobody telling me, no, you can't do this except for myself. So that's another joy project. Follow the joy. That's the theme. Do the things that make you happy. Great condo of you. Very me. Condo of you. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So yeah, so check that out. If you love science fiction, if you're interested, Liz could like. Totally educate you on all the different sub genres and things, which if you are interested in pursuing something, especially in science fiction, but it's really important when you're looking at short story to understand all these different markets. You've gotta understand what it is that they're asking for as well. Thank you so much for being on the show today. Liz, come on the show anytime. Thank you so much, Suzy. Bye. Thanks for tuning in to show. No. Tell Writing with me, Suzy Vadori. I'll me continue to bring you the straight goods for that book you're writing or planning to write. Please consider subscribing to this podcast and leading a review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever else you're listening. Also visit Suzy Vadori.com/newsletter to hop on my weekly inspired writing newsletter list where you'll stay inspired and be the first to know about upcoming training events and writing courses that happen in my community. If you're feeling brave, check the show notes and send us a page. If you're writing that isn't quite where you want it to be, yet for our show tell page review. Episodes. Remember that book and your writing is going to open doors that you haven't even thought of yet, and I can't wait to help you make it the absolute best you're feeling called to write that book. Keep going and I'm gonna be right here cheering you on. See you again next week.