The Sun Never Shines

Unfiltered documentation of my attempts, failures, and hopefully success to get a debut novel published. #autofiction #unreliablenarrator 

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Good news! I got my first rejection...

I thought it was a good idea to take one of the most compelling extracts of my novel and remold it into a short story that I could send in to a few magazines. 

I started with The Masters Review and since I don’t have the patience to wait for months, I paid for fast feedback. I also added the option to get a detailed critique instead of just the simple accepted or rejected note. This turned out to be a well-worth investment and it is why the title of this post is Good news!

The Masters Review, like many other magazines, uses www.submittable.com, which makes it so much easier to keep track of multiple submissions and results. No more checking your inbox and spam every day to see if you got a reply.

First of all, here is my cover letter that I pretty much copied from an article about how to make the perfect cover letter.

Dear Editor, Thank you for considering my work. I am an emerging writer with only a small scattering of published pieces. I appreciate all the time and attention my work receives. I look forward to hearing from you. This extract from my novel in progress is a simultaneous submission. I will withdraw the piece immediately if it is accepted elsewhere. I am a business entrepreneur from Norway, living in Greece since 2006. My work has been published twice in Kingston College’s Best of International Creative Writing Summer School anthology. It is a course I have participated four times to help me learn the craft. Sincerely, Anders Wennesland

Anyway, my short story was rejected, but the feedback was encouraging and it lead me to an idea of a revision that might turn out much stronger. I also got a statement that I can use in my cover letter to other magazines and publishers. In addition, they actually recommended me to send in to a few specific magazines that further helps me get noticed. 

This is how the rejection letter begins and if I had not paid extra for the extensive critique, it would have been the only information I would have to go on. 

From: The Masters ReviewTo: Anders WenneslandSubject: RE: [The Masters Review] The Sun Never Shines.Dear Anders, Thank you for the opportunity to consider "The Sun Never Shines." for New Voices. We are grateful you thought of us and we appreciate your participation in our Fast Response Option. Thank you also for requesting an editorial letter for your piece, “The Sun Never Shines.” Submitting this piece for critique allows me (and other editors on staff) to spend more time with individual submissions and really dig into what is working well and where some opportunities for revision lie.

I’m afraid I’m going to pass on this story for publication, but I’m more than happy to provide some feedback on this piece, as I think it is situated at a really nice place for revision and near to your final vision. Keep in mind the following is only the opinion of one editor, and these things are highly subjective. With that said, I’ll try to offer comments that I think might help you improve this piece and ready it for publication.

So instead, I get this full review of my short story which represents a micro-cosmos of the full length novel. It gives me the confidence that all or most elements, including my rather experimental duet structure, are working and that the story itself is intriguing. 

At the very outset, “The Sun Never Shines,” posits a kind of mystery. Jessica, the narrator’s partner (wife? girlfriend? Just a line of context could be nice if this is to be read standalone), is going to be murdered at some point, and it is that tension that energizes the entirety of the excerpt. The looming threat of violence, coupled with the narrator’s recollections of his first violent encounters, creates a wonderful tension, and we as readers are left wondering when the axe will fall. 

It is a deft choice to not reveal Jessica’s death in this piece. To do so would be perhaps too overt, and by withholding it from the reader you allow the flywheel of the mind to turn, contextualizing the story and leaving the end of the piece with an effective ambiguity. Is it the Albanian who kills Jessica? Does she drown swimming while drunk? Is the narrator the killer after rough sex gone wrong? 

By guarding these details you allow your audience to have to sit in a sort of between space where any and none of the possibilities are true. All of it comes together to help your tone tell the story. There is evidence seemingly everywhere: mysterious drinks, darkness, an unknown character. It all comes together to make something very tense. In revision, experiment with ways that can help increase the tone through simple description of setting. You are doing this well with things like the tray of drinks, but how can you enhance descriptions of say, the dark ocean or the narrow city streets so that they too become as menacing as the other story actors.

To this point I haven’t brought up the italicized sections yet, those where we dip back into the narrator's past for his recollections of violence (mainly things like pub brawls). Their inclusion in the story leads me to believe that they are somehow linked to the in scene sections, but as of this draft I am not quite seeing how they inform one another. If I had to guess, I would think that they might be there to set up the narrator as a possible suspect, and that the violence demonstrated in these sections points to his potential for violence in the present moment. However, in these sections the narrator is often the victim of violence, not its perpetrator, and they all seem to have relatively low stakes, which is the opposite tone we get from the prose throughout the rest of the narrative. I think you can earn these sections more if you enhance the stakes within them. 

What happens if our view of the narrator drastically changes as the recollections go on? They could move from fairly innocent to more insidious, and not only would this increase the tension, but also make your main character more ambiguous, which is exactly what you want in a story where mystery and suspicion is key. It would, in a way, make him unreliable. How do we know what he tells us is the objective truth, and not just perception through a warped lens? Finding more linkages between these sections apart from the violence is what will really create conversation between them, but as of now it serves as context that isn’t really clicking given the excerpted form.

One of the things that tends to slow prose down is the use of passive voice. Passive voice is the sentence level decision to use forms of the verb “to be” (is, are, was, am) in place of using more active verbiage. I’ll provide some more examples from the text. On page 1 we have the line, “Her elbow is leaning against the white paper tablecloth.” By using passive voice here the prose is slowed down, becomes leaden. However, if you rely on more active verbs, the sentence gains energy, like so, “Her elbow leans against the white paper tablecloth.” In terms of one sentence, this is a small change, but accumulated over the course of an entire piece you can really start to conserve narrative energy and funnel it into other places like theme and character. Another example from the same paragraph is, “There is this young Albanian man standing next to her,” which could easily be rewritten as, “A young Albanian man stands next to her.” By using active voice where applicable (you will, of course, always need to use some passive voice for grammar) you can hook readers by making the storytelling “faster.” Conserving space in an already contracted form like a short story is paramount in ensuring that you always arrive at the right level of prosody. Something to look out for as you revise.

This piece has a very well-developed tone and suspense, and I have confidence that it will find a home. After revision, you might consider submitting to the following journals: The Gravity of the Thing, Pithead Chapel, The Hunger, and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. All are great venues and I could see this piece finding a home in any one of them.

Again, thank you so much for your submission. I hope these comments help you understand your writing for the better.

It was a pleasure reading your story, and I hope you keep submitting! Best, Benjamin Kessler 

So now I have a name and a recommendation quote to refer to in my next cover letter. Not bad. I also got some very important feedback in terms of readers experience, especially for the back-story parts of the duet structure. It made me realize that I could actually add another part of the story here instead, which I will do in my revision and post soon. 

My goal now, is to get one acceptance in pretty much any literary magazines, so that I can use this as a reference when submitting the entire novel to agents or publishers. 

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And suddenly I began to hear the sound. It seemed like it had always existed, but it had evolved over millennia far below the threshold of my perception. It had amplified, starting from an almost absolute silence, seeking my ears (or maybe the zone of my temporal lobes, found at the interface of vibration and sensation) like an arrow finding its target, and in the end, amplifying billions of times from its original point, it slid through the great audile gate of my mind. The sound, that began as small and inoffensive as the buzz of a tiny fly, almost inaudible, oscillated like a siren, but on a frequency all its own and with a certain glissando that gave it an almost-tactile velvetiness, as though your fingers softly rubbed a petunia’s soft, fibrous petals. In just a few seconds, the sound gained corporality and became yellow. It twisted into my brain like a corkscrew, ever more powerful, oscillating up-down, up-down faster and faster, rising asymptotically from audible to loud, surpassing the thresholds of acceptability, then tolerability, until it transformed into a howl of gold. I felt that the amplification would never end, and a destructive hysteria, a terror synchronized with the mad growth of the sound, encompassed me, mastered me, and substituted itself for me, against all of my efforts to maintain my identity. The sound had exceeded my ears’ capacity to hear, maybe dissolved them into flame, when the second part of my dream unleashed itself. I was knocked down violently by invisible hands, dragged out of my bed, sheets and all, and thrown against the furniture on the opposite wall. In other iterations, the abuse did not stop here. I was carried, with an ever increasing speed, through strange rooms, on tunnel-like roads covered by trees, reaching infinite speed, while the tongues of flames of the former sound burned my body. They exploded my head and spread me out triumphantly through all of space, through all of time, through all being, until being itself burned and the bubbling fire took its place, thickening, multiplying, concentrating, and endlessly amplifying. Howl of fire, falling and rising a billion times a second, my howl and God’s, my terror and triumph, horror beyond horror, happiness a billion times exceeding happiness …

"Blinding" by Mircea Cartarescu

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The Road to a Published Novel

Welcome to my author blog where you can follow my progress of getting the autobiographical fiction novel “The Sun Never Shines” published.

It is a project I have been working on for 5 years and finally I am getting ready to start sending out and hopefully find a publisher who dare to take in on. On the way, I have participated in four creative writing courses to get up to speed with the technical expectations of the craft. I have also kept an ongoing dialog with one of my teachers, who is currently correcting my first draft. I will share excerpts from my writing as well as extracts from both rejection letters and other feedback. 

My writing is self-taught and raw. I firmly believe that all authentic art must come from that inner source that resides in all of us. I do not believe in either talent or hard work as driving forces for meaningful writing. I solely rely on the latent ability to open up and access the creative powers that have always been there waiting to be released, to take form. 

My main inspirations are authors like Mircea Cărtărescu and Bruno Schulz, who both seem to have those powers free-flowing through their writings. Other authors to mention is W.G. Sebald and Karl Ove Knausgaard. The former feels to me like he writes without the ego involved at all, while the latter relies a lot on his strong and insecure ego, but seems to bypass it by his incredible fast and seemingly formless writing process. 

All four have mastered the ability to access their deeper selves, dipping their pen in that universal stream of creativity and truth. Or as Pamuk Orhan said in his Nobel Prize speech: “The angle on my shoulder whispering words in your ears.”

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