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/

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.

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?’

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.

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.

Science fiction writer Robert Heinlan conceived six rules for writing. These were introduced to the students at the Clarion South workshop during Week 4.

Rule One: You Must Write
Rule Two: Finish What Your Start
Rule Three: You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial Order
Rule Four: You Must Put Your Story on the Market
Rule Five: You Must Keep it on the Market until it has Sold
Rule Six: Start Working on Something Else

The source of the above is the article by Robert Sawyer - On Writing: Heinlan’s Rules - available at this link http://www.sfwriter.com/ow05.htm

I’m reading this fantastic collection of bizarre and fabulous short stories by Ray Vukcevich. Some of them are flash fiction pieces, and they’re just perfect to dip into to stimulate ideas.

The book is published by Small Beer press and more information is available at this link.

If you’re stuck in your writing and looking for a way to come up with new ideas, give this a try.

Within ten minutes write as many opening sentences to different stories as you can. Don’t get too hung up on them, the idea is to ‘free write’ and get down as many as possible. Say, for example, you write 50. Then go through for another ten or twenty minutes and continue each sentence until you have a series of first paragraphs. Hopefully, you’ll end up with about 20 to 25, which is a great hit rate.

This is a great idea. I’ve heard of it through various workshops, but it was Kelly Link who brought this to my attention again.

Here’s a first paragraph that came to me when I did the exercise.

Trent wiped sleep from his eyes, stretched and looked out the window. The world was gone. In its place was the darkness of space. A planet rolled by. That’s impossible, he thought. Just then he heard the glass in the window crack. He ran to it and checked the lock.