Stories of the future - science fiction, foresight and the future

The same applies as I wrote in the Clarion South: Week 1 Learnings:

Ok, so these are some of the general learnings I took away from all of our sessions with this week. Though this doesn’t include the handouts, these are the observations I made during the crit sessions which resulted from some of the general discussions. I wrote these in my notebook as things I would try to reference in my own writing:

• Writing and life: No matter what, you never overcome the problem of isolation as a writer. You’ll have times when your writing is not working, when you’ve had a row with your partner, where things seem like chaos. Ten minutes later you need to be at your keyboard - that’s the difference. Writing can be a lonely business. Writers build a community amongst other writers, keep in touch with each other’s work, but always there remains that act of ‘isolated work’.
• Allowing writing space to breathe: be careful not to over-edit. Often the writing we do today, will read far more impressively to us if we leave it a few days and come back to it. It’s worth giving writing time to breathe, before taking to it with a red pen
• Writing & Joy: many writers don’t get joy from the actual writing process. They find it tough, painstaking work. But the joy, for some, comes in having it completed, knowing they’ve worked through the artistic act of creating fiction. The discipline is pushing to continue the writing, even when it’s blocked, and pushing through to its completion.
• Natural Length: The natural word length for a Science Fiction short story is a novella (or 7500 to 15000 words). Because it’s at this length that the author is able to build credibility in the world and socio-cultural factors required by the reader to believe in the story and tease out its implications
• First & Last Sentences: short stories can be helped if you start with a first and/or last sentence. These make the writing easier. The middle is usually the toughest because that’s where all the linkages need to be drawn.
• Characters: sometimes it doesn’t matter if plot is weak, though that’s not ideal. A good character, with whom the reader enjoys to spend their time, can carry a story to a satisfactory conclusion. So, building credible, well-rounded and unique characters is essential.
• Threads: it doesn’t matter how many open questions you raise in a short story or a novel, as long as the reader feels that they are answered by the story’s end. Sometimes, answering these can be to suggest answers that keep the reader thinking about further questions. Sounds like a paradox, and it’s difficult to explain, yet it’s still true!
• Editing & The Drafting Process: One process of drafting stories is to do as follows: the first step is to write the story out; the second step is to print it out, then work through a ’structural edit’, looking for any scene or character inconsistencies; the third step is to do a ‘line edit’, paying particular attention to any issues at the level of the sentence. Thanks to Simon Brown for sharing this technique with us this week, which is one he uses.
• 3 Magical Ingredients: Plot, Dialogue and Character are the essential ingredients of a great story
• Story Blocks: run, jump, type…bash your head against the story until you break through the problem
• Pace Troubles: if a story has pace troubles, try reading it out loud and recording it. Then, play it back and ask yourself ‘are the places that I paused in the reading, the same ones that are represented in the structure of sentences and scene ends in the written manuscript?’

It’s sad to be leaving Clarion South after six weeks of building such great new friendships. I’m sure the group will all stay in touch, hoping to continue some of the fine work that we’ve started here. And this week I’ve been thinking over the many things I’ll miss, which we’ve grown used to during our time here, like:

• Playing mafia with 17 great people and the tutors and conveners
• Going down to Avid Reader every Thursday to hear the tutors read one of their short stories, sometimes read myself, then go for the ritual that is curry at Punjabi Palace, where there’s always the same Bollywood DVD (a classic!)
• Meeting 6 amazing tutors who brought us a wealth of experience, were able to pinpoint areas where we each need work, and were unbelievably generous with their encouragement and advice. Thanks to Robert Hood, Lee Battersby, Kelly Link, Margo Lanagan, Gardner Dozois, and Simon Brown. Thank you to them also for being honest and brutal with us when we needed it.
• Critiquing stories at 1am in the living room of our apartment as we all get bleary eyed and the page starts to blur (amazing how much fun this was)
• Pushing through barriers with my own stories just to hit a deadline
• Feeling that there are 17 other students here who are committed to writing, want to improve their craft, want to help others and who I’ve felt that I could always ask for advice or support
  The feeling of sadness every week as we say goodbye to that week’s tutor and the feeling of anticipation and nervousness as we say hello to the next week’s tutor on Sunday night
• Walking down to any of the other two apartments, swiping my security card and walking into a living room other than my own to just say ‘hi’ and see what crazy things and stories they’re up to
  Listening to other people’s story ideas and having that ‘ah ha’ moment when we realise we’ve all unconsciously been channeling each other
• The privilege of seeing writers develop over the course of six weeks (the change from week 1 to week 6 stories is incredible)
• The time and space to focus purely on writing and really ‘live in it’. I don’t thing I’ll ever get the same opportunity, certainly not with the benefit of being in this hot-house environment with so many other writers. The energy is infectious!
• Learning to write in the mess that is my bedroom and not think I need to procrastinate by arranging pens!
• Dipping into short stories at leisure for inspiration

So tomorrow night we’ll have one last bash at the Griffith Uni Club House. And then on Saturday I return to Melbourne, very much looking forward to seeing my girlfriend, family and friends, who I’ve missed dearly. I’ll say goodbye to the ants in the kitchen (we won the battle, but concede the war) and the luxurious student accommodation and hopefully, just hopefully, will be writing again this Monday morning.

Thanks to everyone involved in Clarion South (conveners , tutors and students) for such a breakthrough experience and to everyone back in Melbourne for supporting and encouraging me to be here.

Ok, as this is the last week of Clarion South, I thought it a good time to take stock with my writing and make a few notes on the pieces that I’ve worked on while I was here.

The Boy Who Slept (Week 1 story)
Submission story, 3000 words

Money For Time (Week 2 story)
Development piece for larger work, 4500 words

The Unfolding (Week 3 story)
Development piece for larger work, 4500 words

Forget (Week 4 story)
4500 words

Emergency Visit (Week 5 story)
4500 words

I-Mother-In-Law (Week 6 story)
Flash piece, 900 words

The Forgetting Room
Flash Piece, 900 words

The Man Who Laughed
Development piece for larger work, 2000 words

10 O’clock Rule
Flash Piece, 900 words

Home Wars
6000 words presently (likely to go to 10,000)

The same applies as I wrote in the Clarion South: Week 1 Learnings:

Ok, so these are some of the general learnings I took away from all of our sessions with this week. Though this doesn’t include the handouts, these are the observations I made during the crit sessions which resulted from some of the general discussions. I wrote these in my notebook as things I would try to reference in my own writing:

• Info-Dump: An info-dump is where the author intervenes to tell the reader something that is important to the story (eg. the history of the world that led to the story’s conflict), but for one reason or another it comes across as a contrivance. After four to five weeks of critting, it’s easy to become way too eager and see any back-story or back-flash as an ‘info-dump’. So, this week we spoke about this a bit. The rule we came to is, as long as the ‘info-dumpish text’ is of reasonable length, is relevant to the character’s current action (ie. the info-dump might be expressed as a character’s thoughts) and is in some way is important to moving the plot forward or building tension, it’s okay. I know, I know, this doesn’t give absolutely clear guidance, but it’s as resolved as our discussion got. For more info on info-dumps (sorry about the phrasing), see the Turkey City Lexicon Page on the SFWA website.
• Banned Words: this week we focused on getting our words to work for us. At the line level, authors can’t be sloppy or choose words that are convenient or cliched or hackneyed. Writers have to make words work. We began the week (and continued) with Margo highlighting the words (derived from readings of this week’s work) that we were not to use in our story’s. They included: heft, cacophony, munch (and variants), appraise (unless we were referring to professional appraisers), jasmine, ran a hand over (to give sense of texture or feel), maw, akimbo, skittering, rictus, eat with relish. Of course, there were others, but the general idea is to think about words and push them hard to do their job. A Google Search will reveal that getting writers to think about their words is a fav for Margo. And, with us this week, we certainly all came away pushing ourselves to be more rigorous with our writing and to great benefit, I think.
• Metaphor: when using a character’s Point-Of-View, author’s should use metaphors that are relevant to that character’s outlook. It might sound self-explanatory, but I had one of those ‘Ah-Ha’ moments this week when we looked at this. Metaphors tell us about a character. So, if we’re re writing from the perspective of girl looking at the sky, are we better to use: i) she looked at the stars which sparkled like city lights; or ii) she looked at the stars which sparkled like doll’s eyes in a moonlit window. A bit clumsy, as an example, but I think it illustrates how metaphors help tell the reader learn about a character.
• Emotional Hammers: beware of using ‘emotional hammers’ in stories. Things that scream to the reader ‘hey you, look at this, take sympathy for my character!’. For example, starting a story with ‘Johnny was an orphan. All, all alone. No mother and no father and he was always hungry. And he didn’t have a friend in the world. Did I mention his only pair of shoes were mangled by a dog and it just started raining’. As authors we need to work more subtly.
• Clichés & First Thoughts: in first drafts it’s okay to use clichés as placeholders in a story. One technique to signal to yourself to revisit something that you want to work on is to put it in square brackets, so you know to revisit it. Eventually, the aim should be to reach beyond the cliché, maybe to the third or forth thing (whether at a line, paragraph, or character level) that is truly unique and represents the heart of what the story’s trying to say.
• Common Figures: as authors we need to be careful when using fictional elements that are common. Werewolves, angels, vampires and so on. The reader brings to such things their own preconceptions, pushed into them through many years of reading and movies. If the story is to do something different with these things, the writer has to stretch these figures in ways that make them unique and interesting
• Character Description: there’s no need to provide a full description of a character as soon as they enter the stage of the story. Sometimes only the smallest of details is required or, where a character is important, small details may be worked into the story’s pages progressively, over paragraphs. Often, the best details are those which are specific but give a vague impression. Sounds contradictory, I know. For example, when trying to draw a creepy nurse, rather than say ‘the nurse is white and ghost-like and when she’s near, the walls grow thick with slime’, a description might be ‘the nurse’s face is all made up, making it difficult to know where the makeup stops and her skin starts, and her cheeks shine in the light like wax’
• Smirk: avoid the word ’smirk’ for a characters with which we want our reader to sympathise. ‘Smirk’ is for the baddies only.

I’ve just finished (well to first draft) another story which is due in today. I’ve been working on it this last week. For a first draft I quite like it. It’s about a boy that goes to hospital (think I mentioned it in another post) and meets a nurse who never wants him to leave. The opening line is - “You’re going to be happy here, William,” says the nurse. It’s speculative fiction, but not science fiction like my other pieces.

When Kelly Link was here she asked us to individually write opening lines for stories in a space of ten minutes. As many as we could with the intent of generating ideas. The line above was on my list so I followed it. My story will be critiqued tomorrow, we’ll see how it goes.

A fellow student yesterday asked me what I’ve picked up so far. It’s hard to put your finger on because there’s so much that you’re exposed to and it’s tricky to know exactly how it’s all working on you, at a subconscious level.

For me though, I’ve definitely become aware and am now approaching the following elements differently in my stories:

• Backstory / Info-Dump: when and how to integrate backstory
• Authorial Intervention: when the character says something, but the voice is really the author, trying to drive the plot forward. This is obvious to the reader and really stops the flow
• Opening: using strong opening lines to engage the reader. If the ’slush’ reader at publications isn’t taken by the first page, you’ve lost them
• Ideas: I’ve been thinking a lot about when to start writing a story. Usually, I have an idea and then get cracking. I’m trying to teach myself to really think through the idea before I start. It’s taking some work and this will be an area of development for me over the next year. I’ve been reading lots of short stories up here (outside of the ones the class puts forward) and the most powerful are those that use words economically to mesh in many themes.
• Economy of Writing: using words that convey the best meanings, but aren’t complicated and suit the voice and flow of the story. Words like iridescent, luminescent, miasma, maw, cacophony, etc are to be avoided unless they really suit the line I wish to write
• Endings: working with endings that give the reader a resolution either by: i) suggesting questions/plot that happen as soon as the reader finishes the last line, ii) giving the reader a final resolution that ties up the other questions raised during the story
• The Overall Story Structure: making sure there’s the right elements in the story to give it its best shot with the reader (eg. strong setting, character description, enough dialogue, etc)
• Conflict/Tension: making sure there’s conflict/tension present to drive the story forward
• Character: thinking about characters and always having at least two present but not a crowd. Above two is a great number for conflict/dialogue. Crowds become difficult to manage (because you have to detail so many people).

That feels better! I have the critique session in an hour, so better finish off my notes.

Sunday afternoon and I’m back from the city. We went to see Pan’s Labyrinth (fantasy). An excellent film, way scarier than I expected! Full of imaginative wanderings to give us writers some more fuel for our work. Definitely recommended viewing, but not one to take the niece/nephew to.

The weeks seem to go in bursts. Incredible activity, writing to a deadline, you get a story in, and then have a lull. After a few days you start the cycle over again.

It’s Sunday and I’m spending the afternoon working on a new story. It’s about A’ Boy At The Hospital’ who gets more than surgery. A high speculative fiction element. I’m enjoying it and just letting it take me where it will.

Like I wrote in Week 2, I’m starting a lot of stories at Clarion South. I still seem to be struggling most with completing pieces to a point I’m happy with. So, I find what I’m doing is working on a single story to submit to each week’s workshop. I’ll write a few hours on this and then, when I grow tired of it, I’ll try writing something else (usually short) to get my energy going. As long as I do between one and three hours on my workshop story each week I make progress.

Part of life after Clarion will be revisiting all the story ideas from the workshop. It’s a great chance to think of new things, while we’re in this intensive environment, even if we don’t finish them. It will be a long time until I get a similar opportunity, I’m sure.

On the last day of Week 4 of Clarion South, Gardner Dozois presented some thoughts on life after the workshop to the class of 17 students. Below I’ve included my summary of the learnings. Most of these fantastic lessons are relevant to all writers, not just the people who’ve attended Clarion, which is why I’ve included them here.

Please note, these learnings are not verbatim and represent my interpretations of the discussion. In no circumstances should this content be treated as direct quotes.

• Persistence: Two or three of you will become professional writers. Two or three of you will pop in and out of the writing field from time to time. The rest of you will likely disappear as writers, choosing to do something else entirely. What makes the difference, often more than talent, is persistence. Many of you will decide that it’s too much effort or find something else.
• Be confident: At times, the world may seem as if it’s doing what it can to discourage you. If you decide your stories are bad because other people don’t like them, you’ll lose. You have to be confident in your writing, otherwise no-one else will be.
• Enjoy yourself: Write what you enjoy reading. That’s where you’ll find your energy.
• Ask yourself: Ask yourself why you want to write? If it’s to become rich or famous, think long and hard. You’re probably not going to become rich or famous through writing (though now there are more opportunities than there were before to make a living at it). If being rich and famous is what you want, you need to rethink things.
• Invest yourself in your stories: Many of you are writing other people’s stories. You’ve not invested yourself in them. The only reason I care to read is to learn from someone else’s perspective. In the entire history of the universe there’ll never be another person that sees the world as you do. If you don’t bring your viewpoint to this, what’s the point? Let’s see what the world looks like to you, otherwise why bother? If people can see how the world looks to you, that’s a good legacy. I can pick up an author’s work from the 1950s and see exactly how they looked at the world.
• Read everything: If you want to write Science Fiction or Fantasy, read a lot of it. If you don’t like to read, why are you trying to become a writer? Read everything. Read journalism, plays, poetry, non-fiction.
• Write first, market later: Don’t write to the market. Write your story first, then look around to see which markets it may be suited to. Otherwise, you’re writing will end up homogeneous. You have to use two brains: your creative brain to write; another brain to market your work.
• A note about success: Success and failure in the Clarion workshop will not determine your success in the field. Sometimes Clarion kicks in for people years after they have completed it. The best writers at the workshop are not necessarily the ones that will become professional writers.
• Keep learning: It’s all ladders. After the Clarion ladder, there’ll be another, and when you’ve climbed that, you’ll find another. You’ll never run out of ladders to climb because there’s always something to learn as a writer to improve your craft. The day you say you’ve learnt enough and stop climbing the next ladder your work will turn to crap. Never stop learning.

You wake up at 6:30am, bleary eyed. It’s hot outside and already your room feels like a sauna. You pull yourself out of bed, have a shower, start to clock over what will happen during the day. Last night you met one of the best (if not the best) science fiction editors in the world. He read your class the second worst sex scene he ever read in a novel manuscript. With 16 other students you laughed til your gut hurt. Not a bad start to the week.

For today you only had two stories to crit. But you were up til 1am anyway writing your story. You think, great, two stories, at least we’ll have a quiet day. Maybe you can catch up on sleep from the week before?

The crit sessions go well and quickly. You learn the biggest pitfalls in short story writing from your new tutor. The types of things that will make the difference between your story getting published and the slush pile. You take lots of notes.

Before you leave tthe crit at noon you pick up four new stories. You have to read them by tomorrow. There’s 25,000 words there. And your story is due tomorrow too. You’re feeling the last three weeks. They’re catching up with you - those late nights, a little too much junk food. When you look for words you sift through the haze or, worse, you come up blank. You start reading and your eyes are tired. You try to sleep in the afternoon, but it’s hot in your room, the Brisbane sun’s a flaming red ball in the sky, and sleep doesn’t come.

You have dinner with the gang in your apartment. Thank god someone else cooked! You talk about stories over pasta, the last weeks’ tutors and who’s coming up. I’m gonna miss this, you think.

That evening one of your class mates invite you and everyone else for a walk. The sun’s down. There’s a cool breeze as you do a lap of Ring Road on Nathan Campus. It feels good to do exercise, to clear your head. You’re going to do this more often, you think.

By 1:30am you’ve finished your story and your crits for the following day. You figure you’ll get up at 7am. Maybe you’ll get a chance to sleep tomorrow afternoon. You’re having the time of your life and want it to keep going but are feeling tired too. So you fight the fatigue so you can enjoy yourself and give it your best shot. Before you go to bed, you figure you’ll write your blog.

Welcome to Clarion, week 4.

The same applies as I wrote in the Clarion South: Week 1 Learnings:

Ok, so these are some of the general learnings I took away from all of our sessions with this week. Though this doesn’t include the handouts, these are the observations I made during the crit sessions which resulted from some of the general discussions. I wrote these in my notebook as things I would try to reference in my own writing:

• Dialogue: don’t make dialogue too ‘on the nose’. In other words, adults usually never say what they’re thinking. So don’t have your main characters be so transparent that they: i) say exactly what they mean, or ii) say things so obviously that are really the narrator wanting to move the plot forward.

• Scene: if you start to write scenes that you feel are tedious to you as a writer, they’ll probably be tedious for the reader to. Sometimes the fact that they’re tedious to you as a good reason to take them out.
• Editors: keep in mind that editors are very interested in: i) finding a great piece of work from an unknown author, ii) finding out very quickly if a piece is good enough to continue reading (editors have so much to read, they use the first few pages of a story to gauge if it’s worth reading on). Also, keep in mind that though editors might really enjoy your story, they may not choose it because of their specific taste or the style and audience of the magazine they’re editing. Be prepared to send your story out widely to get it into print.
• Sentences & Conveying Info: every sentence has to work to move your story forward. Sentences which are transitional only can usually be cut and replaced with something that conveys information to the reader. For example, ‘Jane snapped out of her reverie when she got to the front door’ (transitional) could be replaced with ‘When Jane got home there was no car in the driveway’ (transitional/information). The latter sentence tells us that someone in her family is not home.
• Endings: there are two types of story endings. In the first, endings are open and leave questions for the reader. In the second, endings are neatly tied up and self-contained. In the first, the actions of the story before the ending have to have been used effectively enough to convey to the reader several logical steps that the story may take following its conclusion.
• World setting/building: in science fiction and fantasy story editors look for ‘world building’. One of the best methods of world building is to show the style of work that the characters do in their daily lives. Work can be a fantastic way to create believable characters and editors.
• Power shifts: it’s great to show ‘power shifts’ between characters. It shows us that they live in complex worlds, are complex themselves and that the world of the story mirrors what we expect in life (as nothing is ever straight forward). Stories with power shifts are often the most enjoyable for people to read. For example: i) James meets cool boy Richard at bus stop when he has no friends (power is with Richard, as he’s the cool one); ii) James tells Richard that he has access to his dad’s car (power shifts to James because he has something of value); iii) Richard buys a car (no longer needs James, who is a little nerdy); and so on. Power shifts create narrative tension which enthrals the reader.
• Reversals: like with ‘Power Shifts’, narrative tension comes from ‘reversals’ too. For example, if you have a car that has a mind of its own and wants to destroy things, it’s far more interesting if your main character loves the car and doesn’t want to sell it. Maybe the car was given to him by his father, for example, and has sentimental value.
• Making scary: (I know, ‘making scary’ doesn’t make sense, but it sounds so cool) sometimes the most scary aspects of a horror story are the things which are subtly said. Rather than describing something gruesome in amazing detail (eg. his face looked like a skeleton and his face dripped with blood), say other things that imply that the character is odd/weird. This is much more scary. When things are specifically describe as gory, they become like pantomimes, and like Hollywood horror films pantomimes are not scary.
• Frames: Frames are those paragraphs at the start of a story that provide readers with an additional beginning. They may be quotes from outside the story or refer to something that happens inside in the story (sometimes exact text from further on) . Frames can work but they have to be used extremely well. Most of the time, they indicate a weakness in the story, in that the writer has had to use a ‘frame’ because the story is not complete in itself. Definitely worth thinking about this if you’re planning to use a ‘frame’.

It’s been an intense couple of days. I have my crit tomorrow on ‘The Unfolding’ (which had the working title ‘The Workers’). Should be interesting. I’ve also developed a draft of a Flash Fiction piece called ‘I-Mother-in-Law’. It’s as the title suggests. And I’ve just started a new story about a young boy in a hospital that encounters a malicious nurse with powers beyond this world. It’s proving rather bizarre. My focus now is on ‘Forget’ which is the story for next week’s crit session. I’m excited about it. A few plot issues I need to resolve, but it’s a true science fiction piece, with proper twists and turns and a dramatic ending. So, we’ll see how I go!