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

At Poynter you’ll find fifty ideas to improve your writing skills. Though the site is directed at journalists, these writings lessons are useful for any writer looking to build on their craft.

I particularly like the one on ‘X-RayReading’. It’s so useful to learn from other writers who have walked the path before and created ‘models’ for forms of writing.

Enjoy!

Visit Fifty Writing Tools at this link: http://web.archive.org/web/20060426003003/www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=61811/

You know, I’m not actually sure exactly what this site is about. What I do know is that within five minutes of reading through it, I found lots of nifty things to help me learn. I’d put this in the ‘rouse your curiosity and learning’ basket. A good site to visit for some quick stimulation when we need to get something new or kickstart our writing.

Visit Dumb Little Man http://www.dumblittleman.com/

About TierneyLab:

John Tierney always wanted to be a scientist but went into journalism because its peer-review process was a great deal easier to sneak through. Now a columnist for the Science Times section, Tierney previously wrote columns for the Op-Ed page, the Metro section and the Times Magazine. Before that he covered science for magazines like Discover, Hippocrates and Science 86.

With your help, he’s using TierneyLab to check out new research and rethink conventional wisdom about science and society.

Visit TierneyLab at this link: http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/

I’m all for reading hard copy books. In this age though, everyone has an iPod, and there are often times when reading the printed page isn’t possible (like when I’m walking to the train station every morning). Audible.com is a partner of Apple and licenses Audio Books for download. They have a pretty good range of books too and their monthly membership plans give you a certain amount of credits each month to download your favorite books. To take a look visit www.audible.com. At first, I thought it was kind of expensive, but each books costs about $10 t0 $15 (depending what plan you’re on) and it gives me something great to listen to when I’m walking.

What does it take to become a writer? What does it take to do anything new, learn a new field, practice a new discipline? I often think about this. I started writing about 5 years ago. At least, in a serious way. I always loved literature and English at school, but it’s only in the last five years that I’ve started to apply myself - do the courses, read the stories, think about writing as though it’s a wicked science problem that I’m constantly tackling. So what does it take?

Well, it’s refreshing that people can always learn new things. They say that it takes about 10,000 hours to learn any new discipline. Which, in itself, requires discipline.

When I was studying one of my earlier years of uni, I became very interested in the idea of neuroplasticity - the idea that we can literally reshape the sructure of the brain through new patterns of behaviour. This is in effect what we do through the process of writing every day.

So, working on a story this morning, I took a break and read through some quotes i’d written down from several years ago:

“The experiences of our lives leave footprints in the sands of our brain like Friday’s on Robinson Crusoe’s island: physically real but impermanent, subject to vanishing with the next tide or to being overwritten by the next walk along the shore. Our habits, skills, and knowledge are expressions of something physical…And because that physical foundation can change, so, too, we can acquire new habits, new skills, new knowledge.”
Schwartz, J and Begley S (2002), “The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and The Power of Mental Force

This is from a book on a book on neuroplasticity. When I attended a workshop three years ago the tutor passed on a fantastic article called ‘Journey With A Little Man’. Cute name and I’ve continually referred back to this gem of advice by Richard McKenna several times a year ever since.

“Learning creative writing is a process of training the unconscious. We all have in us a living something independent of that which thinks it says, “I” for the whole man. It is not enough to know it intellectually; one must also learn it through lived experience, which is quite a different way of knowing.”
Journey with a Little Man’ by Richard McKenna (published in Confessions)

Write in the mornings. Attend the workshops. Meet other writers. Speak it and write it and live it because in every single one of those acts you’re training your unconscious in the language of writing and every single story you write will make you a better writer.

There is an enormous amount of information on the Australian Speculative Fiction Industry on this site. As my friend Jasoni at Clarion South says, ‘gold dust’.

The site has many forums providing readers with candid insights into the worlds of Australian publishers, reviewers, writers, editors and critics. With some of the biggest names in Australian SpecFic commenting regularly on the site - including Lee Battersby, Chris Lawson, Robert Hood, and Paul Haines, to name a few - it’s a great source of info.

http://www.asif.dreamhosters.com/forum/index.php

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?’

The Age Of Spiritual Machines is a book by futurist Ray Kurzweil about the future course of humanity, particularly relating to the development of artificial intelligence and its impact on human consciousness. It is also a study on the concept of ’singularity’.

Originally published in 1999, the book predicts that machines with human-like intelligence will be available from affordable computing devices within a couple of decades, revolutionising most aspects of life, and that eventually humanity and its machinery will become one and the same.

Not exactly Sunday bedtime reading, but if you want something to stretch your mindscape before seeing films like ‘IRobot’, this may be the one.

This is a great short story collection from one of Australia’s best known short story writers - Cate Kennedy. Cate’s a real master of the craft and Dark Roots is a fantastic read of well crafted tales. I thoroughly recommend it.

Cate Kennedy Bio: Cate Kennedy is an award-winning short-story writer who has twice won The Age short story competition. ‘Cold Snap’, one of Cate’s stories in Dark Roots, was published in The New Yorker on 11 September 2006. Cate is also the author of the travel memoir Sing and Don’t Cry: A Mexican Journal and the poetry collections Joyflight and Signs of Other Fires. She is now at work on her first novel.

To read more about Dark Roots visit the Scribe Publication’s website.

I stumbled across this resources page on Critters.org when checking out the service they provide.

Resources Page on Critters.org
http://www.critters.org/resources.html

The page provides a comprehensive set of links to articles on Critiquing, many of which are written by science fiction authors, for emerging and established writters. There’s a great deal of information that they’ve gone to the trouble to collate.