We at Pathfinder Chronicler, along with our friends from Wayfinder are pleased to announce our first Pathfinder Fiction contest.

Eligibility: No entry fee [or purchase] is required, and all rights in the story remain the property of the author. The Contest is open only to those who have[not been] professionally published. Professional fiction publication (a story, not an adventure or an RPG product) is deemed to be at least 5 cents per word, from Paizo or another major publisher. Entries must be unpublished and may not have won any prize or award in the past. Cannot be a judge or related to a judge through family, real life friend or affiliate. Online pals are ok. You must be the legal age of 18 to participate. If not, one of your parents or legal guardians must submit a signed, written statement that they have read, understood and agree to these contest rules with your entry, and that such agreement constitutes acceptance of these Contest Rules on behalf of you and themselves.  If you have a question, contact us at pfcontestquestions@pathfinderchronicler.net.

Contest Period: Starting August 15th, 12:00AM, Pacific Time, Pathfinder Chronicler will be accepting short story submissions for our Pathfinder Fiction Contest 2010. Deadline for all submissions is September 12th,11:59pm Pacific Time. On September 25th, five finalists will be revealed to go on to the final round. During the final round, Paizo’s Fiction Editor, James Sutter will blindly choose through the finalists, deciding upon the Pathfinder Fiction Contest winner. That winner will be announced October 1st.

Entry in the Contest: You can enter the contest by submitting (1 and only 1) short story based on Paizo’s Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting, set in the world of Golarion. You may also use all sources available in the Pathfinder Chronicles line. If you have no access to Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting or material, you may access Pathfinder Wiki for online information. Your submission must be in English and fall between 3000-4500 words. Each entry must have a cover page with the title of the work, the author’s name, address, telephone number, email address and an approximate word count. Every subsequent page must carry the title and a page number, but the author’s name must be deleted to facilitate fair judging. All entries are final. No revisions are accepted. . Submissions must be original, unpublished fiction, well written, and free of grammatical errors/typos. Please, no novel excerpts, poetry, or stories written for children. Any entries or submissions which depict or glorify overly graphic, lewd, obscene, vulgar or profane behavior, or which utilize lewd, obscene vulgar or profane language, either as part of the submission or as the name of the submission, will be disqualified at the sole discretion of Pathfinder Chronicler and/or Wayfinder. Email entries to pfcontest@pathfinderchronicler.net. You are limited to (1) entry into the contest.

Winner Selection: panel will judge eligible entries equally on the basis of: sustained writing ability (25%), topic creativity (25%), originality (25%), and overall excellence (25%).

Prize: The winning entry will be allotted a special honor in Wayfinder #4. Your piece will be given up to 4500 words of space as well as more art to better visualize your story. Pathfinder Chronicler will also award a 100-dollar Paizo Gift Certificate and feature your story during our Week of Wayfinder. Finalist’s stories will also be featured permanently on Pathfinder Chronicler.  Two runner ups will receive $50 Paizo Gift Certificates. Upon publication of Wayfinder #4,  the contest winner will have their winning story published on Pathfinder Chronicler with all the featured art from Wayfinder.

Original Work of Authorship: You hereby warrant and represent that (a) you own all rights to all Entry Materials submitted by you; and (b) all such Entry Materials are original works of authorship on your part and have not been copied, in whole or in part, from any other work and do not violate, misappropriate or infringe any copyright, trademark or other proprietary right of any other person or entity. If it is discovered that the above is not the case, your piece will be immediately disqualified.

General Release: This contest is void where prohibited by law. By entering the Contest, you release Pathfinder Chronicler, Wayfinder, Paizo, participating sponsors, companies, subsidiaries, affiliates, directors, officers, employees and agencies (collectively, the “Released Parties”) from any liability whatsoever, and waive any and all causes of action, related to any claims, costs, injuries, losses, or damages of any kind arising out of or in connection with the Contest or delivery, misdelivery, acceptance, possession, use of or inability to use any prize (including, without limitation, claims, costs, injuries, losses and damages related to personal injuries, death, damage to or destruction of property, rights of publicity or privacy, defamation or portrayal in a false light, whether intentional or unintentional), whether under a theory of contract, tort (including negligence), warranty or other theory, to the extent permitted by law.

James Sutter Q&A

This just in!  Very important advice from the Final Judge.  We sent James Sutter a Q&A interview to help everyone put their best foot forward.   Hope this helps!

 

PFC: It would seem that a lot of people have a hard time writing a short story. The characters and the events are usually too lofty to resolve in 3000-4500 words. In preparing to write a short story of this size, what would you suggest?

JS: ”With a short story, I think it’s important to bite off a tale that you know you can chew. Even in a novel, you don’t need to knock off a god or take over a kingdom in order to create something that feels fun and epic. That’s even more important in a short story. You only get a few scenes, at most–make sure that what you want to tell can fit in that. If it can’t, ask yourself if there’s a smaller subset of your chosen story that could stand on its own. And with a short story, there’s no time to wander–make sure you know how everything ends before you start. A novel’s a journey–a short story is a race from the start to the end.”

PFC: This year you held a fiction workshop at PaizoCon. There was some discussion concerning expository dialogue that detracts from the overall fluidness of the piece. How does one get a lot of ideas across without using the mouth of their characters entirely?

JS: ”This is a big deal for fantasy fiction, and I think that ultimately the answer is to trust the small details… work them in wherever it feels natural, and portray as much as you can with characters’ attitudes and actions. If someone casts a spell, and the characters around him don’t pay him a second glance, that tells the reader that magic must be common in your world. It’s important to avoid the “As you know, Bob…” construction, as in, “As you know, Bob, we live in a highly magical society, where spellcasting is common even on street corners.” I first ran across that term (“As you know…”) in Cory Doctorow’s excellent Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction, and it perfectly encapsulates a common problem.
That said, it’s not an easy problem to beat. In other genres, you’re dealing with the real world, so you don’t have to outline anything. Normal rules apply. In SF, nothing is sacred, and you need to get what makes your world different across to the reader as subtly yet comprehensively as possible. So show rather than tell where you can, introduce an outsider character if you must explain in dialogue (sometimes you just can’t get the idea across any other way), and above all make sure your characters talk like people from your world. Real people don’t spend a lot of time enumerating the premises of their existence. Make your characters’ assumptions about common knowledge speak louder than your explanations.”

 
PFC: It is known among the community that when writing Paizo Pathfinder fiction, it is “verboten” to use world shattering cataclysmic themes in those stories. Of course, this is fan fiction and anything is possible. Would you judge such a piece more harshly?

JS: “Nah. Half the fun of fan fiction, as opposed to canon, is that you can do whatever you want to the characters without anyone saying otherwise. If I’m not paying for a piece, who am I to say that Asmodeus doesn’t come down to earth, hook up with Durvin Gest, and then turn Jalmeray into a giant spaceship so that he can travel to a universe where Firefly never got canceled?”

PFC: Could you recommend three books that capture the flavor of what you like to read?

JS: “Oh man… I’m not sure I could, honestly! My tastes for Pathfinder Fiction are much narrower than when I’m just reading for pleasure. For Pathfinder Fiction, I’d say I was really influenced early on by things like Joel Rosenberg’s Guardians of the Flame and Keepers of the Hidden Ways, or Richard Knaak’s Dragonrealms series… I like fantasy that’s action-packed but still has a lot of focus on characters, witty dialogue, etc. China Miéville’s also at the top of my current fantasy book pile. For general reading, though, I’d say you can’t beat something like Dan Simmons’ Hyperion or Clive Barker’s Imajica for sheer world-building.”

PFC: As an editor of fiction, we have heard that the first thing you ask a writer to do is make a pitch, more specifically, a “Hollywood Style” pitch. Could you tell us more about this and how it can help a writer begin the development of their story?

JS: “Ah, the Hollywood pitch… I was a little leery of it at first, but the longer I do this, the more I understand why it’s so effective. The thing is, an editor often doesn’t have time to read a whole long synopsis of your story. The publisher definitely doesn’t, and the CEO doesn’t have time to listen to your name. And perhaps most importantly, the public isn’t going to bother listening at all unless you can shout something interesting as they walk past. So I generally think it’s a good idea to be able to describe the essence of your story in one sentence, which is only possible by touching on media the person you’re talking to is already familiar with (or else by using a lot of commas).
For instance, Dave’s “Hell’s Pawns” in Council of Thieves started as “Half-elf Sherlock Holmes and tiefling Watson,” and Prince of Wolves was “Indiana Jones meets Brotherhood of the Wolf in Transylvania.” By playing off those popular references, he was able to give me a basic framework in only a few words, as well as an idea of tone and feel (which is incredibly hard in one sentence). I don’t think all short stories need to be easily pigeonholed using existing works–and I’d contest that Dave’s certainly aren’t–but if you can’t explain the hook of your story in one sentence, you probably don’t know what your hook is yet. Dig deeper. Refine.”
 
PFC: In your experience James, as an editor and writer, tell us two things that keep you interested in a story, and two that make you want to stop reading it?

JS: “Things that always interest me are good world building–new cultures, new systems of magic, new monsters and weird panoramas–and characters with real heart and wit. Good dialogue is incredibly difficult to write–I feel like I can make witty banter all day in person, but the second I try to put words in a character’s mouth, I feel stilted and awkward. If someone can achieve a good voice for their character–think Walter Slovotsky from the aforementioned Guardians of the Flame series–I’ll follow that character through a whole slew of sequels. If you can make someone care about that character, then the plot hardly matters anymore. There’s a whole genre–I think it’s called “mainstream literature”–in which stuff almost never happens. At least, not the interesting stuff where people explode or go to the moon or ride a dragon. It’s just people talking. If you can make that work, and then add a bunch of awesome SF elements, you’re golden.
For things that immediately make me stop reading a story, rough prose is painful for editors, and even when it’s done “artistically,” we’re likely to look askance at it. I’ve been known to talk at length about hearing the music of a given sentence, and doing whatever you need to in order to follow that rhythm and patter, but it’s important to know the rules before you break them. When I read The Road by Cormac McCarthy, my first reaction was, “No punctuation? Who does this guy think he is, anyway?” (The answer, apparently, is Cormac McCarthy. But it still didn’t endear him to me.) In short: spellcheck, proofread, make your friends proofread it. And after bad prose, the worst thing that can happen to a book is for it to be boring. If nothing’s happening in a scene, either put in some snappy dialogue or move it along. Use cliffhangers. Drag your reader through, by force if you have to.”

PFC: Not every person has the good fortune to have outsiders as proofreaders to check their text, what recommendations would you give for those that do not?

JS: “First, I’d challenge that assertion: If you’re part of this contest, you’re part of an online community. Hit up your friends. They don’t need to be writers, either–sometimes the best editors are terrible authors, and vice versa. In many cases, an editor doesn’t need to know how to fix something broken in the plot–that’s the author’s job–they just need to say “hey, I got confused here,” or “this chapter was really boring and didn’t make sense.” As the author, you don’t have to take their advice, but it’s good to recognize that if several people stumble over a section, it probably needs revision.
For actual grammar and spelling, beyond what Microsoft Word can offer, I’d say to finish the piece and then let it sit. Give yourself a day or two before you pick it up again and proofread. If you try to do it too soon after you’re done, your eyes will see what you wanted to write, not what you actually wrote.”

PFC: What is the difference between great Pathfinder Fiction and great fiction that fails this contest?

JS: “That’s a tough one to quantify, except to say that good Pathfinder fiction has all the things I mentioned above–good characters, an interesting plot that draws you through, cool new world-building (or world-exploring) elements, polished prose, etc. The most important thing is that it should feel of Golarion, as if it grew naturally within the setting. That doesn’t mean ladling on the proper nouns, but there’s a difference between a story that feels set in the world and one that’s a generic fantasy story with some find/replace deity names thrown in.”
 

PFC: As a writer, where do you personally find inspiration?

JS: “In media! For the longest time, I had a weird love/hate relationship with that fact. I felt guilty about spending time watching movies, reading books, or listening to music, because I felt like I should be spending that time making my own fiction or music. It wasn’t until many years of self-flagellation later that I realized the quality of my work actually suffered from that sort of puritanical work ethic–without taking in new input, my output was constantly rehashing the same material. Nowadays, when I read a book or see a movie that I really love, I inevitably say “Wouldn’t it be fun to write something like that?” The stories that come out of that rarely resemble the media that inspired it, but it’s important to keep your head stocked with the ingredients of fiction, and to learn from what others are doing that you like (or hate).”

PFC: If you were in this contest, how would you start preparing for it and just how long would you think writing a 4500 word piece should take?
 

JS: “I’d probably start by writing down every idea I could think of, then narrowing in on the ones that excited me the most and trying to flesh them out until one really took off. I’d then figure out how I wanted it to start, how it should end, and how to get from point A to B. I’m a firm believer in outlines these days. As for how long writing 4500 words should take… there’s no way to tell, even for me personally. I’ve had weekends where I can do 5000+ words a day and have them all be golden. I’ve had days where my eyes want to bleed trying to squeeze out 500. It takes as long as it takes you. But that’s not an excuse to slack! Make yourself write for a set amount of time, or a certain number of words. The first few lines of any given writing session are always the hardest, and if I can get 1000 words, I can probably get 1500.”

 
PFC: Is there any single book about editing and writing that has changed your work dramatically to a professional level?

JS: “Cory Doctorow’s aforementioned Complete Idiot’s Guide has a lot of really useful, easy-to-digest information, and Stephen King’s On Writing is inspiring. And of course, I’d be remiss not to plug the authorial advice from a bunch of my favorite SF legends in my new Planet Stories anthology, Before They Were Giants. That book was really my not-so-secret opportunity to ask my heroes for pointers and anecdotes regarding their ascent to the SF firmament. So there’s three for you!”

 
PFC: It is said that there are writing conventions used in the craft that separate amateurs from professionals, can you name one that the writers in this contest should pay particular attention too?

JS: “I’m not sure what exactly is meant by conventions in this instance. If we’re talking about formatting a manuscript, that’s really useful for submitting stories for publication (and outlined well in Cory’s book), but not necessary in this context. In terms of stylistic conventions… I’d say that when in doubt, you want your style to be as crystal clear as possible. Don’t let your wordplay get self-indulgent. Get in, tell your story, and get out. Unless you specifically want to insert the narrator as a character, you want your readers to forget that you even exist. Don’t be a storyteller or a performer. Be a window. And part of that is making sure your piece is well edited!”

 
PFC: Who are the writers you look up to as role models?  How do they enrich your own writing through your experience of reading them?

JS: “To quote Sean K Reynolds’ constant refrain: “I wrote a book on that!” Though I wasn’t able to get everyone I love–next time, Dan Simmons, next time!–Before They Were Giants from Planet Stories is all about that question. I won’t spoil it!”

PFC: What common writing mistake makes you cringe as an editor?

JS: “Off the top of my head, I’d probably say dialogue that doesn’t sound like real people talking. Even if you’re writing high fantasy, it’s important to listen to how your friends and family talk, and learn from that. Contractions, for instance, are everywhere–when in doubt, you should probably use them.
Since it’s so hard to pick just one, however, I asked my fellow editors for their opinion:
Christopher Paul Carey: “Point of view goof-ups… hopping from one character’s head to another when there hasn’t been a precedent set.”
Judy Bauer: “Dangling modifiers! That’s when a modifying phrase doesn’t actually modify the part of the sentence it’s attached to, such as: ‘Known for its fabulous glasswork, Taldor’s monarch is rather a slouch.’ (The comma means that whatever comes next should be what the first phrase is referring to, but in this case it’s broken–Taldor may be known for its glassworks, but “Taldor’s monarch” is not!)”

Thank you James for your insight!