How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (19 page)

There may be exceptions. There may be reading-fee agencies that actually give you some value for your money. I don’t believe it, but I admit that it’s possible. The trouble is, you have no way of knowing which is which until you’ve spent your money.

It’s sad how many new writers waste time and hope trying to get an agent at a point in their careers when an agent won’t do them any good and the kind of agent they’re likely to get can do them serious harm.

Believe in yourself. You don’t need some magic trick to sell your stories-you just need to do your best work on a terrific tale. “Having an agent” isn’t the secret to selling your fiction-it’s the secret to having better contracts and better income after you’ve already proven you can sell. It starts with you.

4. Classes and Workshops

Writing is lonely. It starts lonely and it only gets lonelier. And at the beginning you don’t know if you’re any good. You need an audience. You need advice from somebody who knows what he’s doing. Heck, you need somebody to look at your work, nod his head, and say, “Yup, you’re a writer.”

So you look in your local college catalog and find a writing course. Or you get together with a bunch of friends who are also closet writers and you start reading each other’s work. Or you hear about some terrific writing

workshop that offers professional writers and you apply. Or you take a mail-order writing course.

And, depending on what you need and who you are, any of these could be wonderful-or a disaster.

Writing Workshops

You and a bunch of friends get together once a month to read each other’s stories. You run up a huge photocopying bill, and when you’re through with each session, you can’t help wondering whether it’s doing any good. After all, the other participants aren’t published yet, either. Maybe they trash every story you bring-but does that mean your stories are no good or that they don’t know how to recognize a good story when they see it?

Every workshop, whether it’s composed of rank amateurs or experienced professionals, will give you three valuable things:

Company.
Sometimes what you need most is to hear other people talking about writing with the same passion and anguish that you feel. After coworkers and family members have teased you for months about how you waste so much time writing made-up stories, meeting with fellow writers can be a great relief.

Deadlines.
If you’re writing part-time, it’s often hard to get the sense of urgency necessary to make yourself sit down and
write.
And even when you do, you may keep fiddling with a story forever, never considering it to be finished. Knowing that you have to turn in something on Thursday helps you to get some kind of ending on the story, run off a bunch of copies, and put it into somebody else’s hands.

Audience.
Just having another human being read your story and respond to it can be gratifying. From a rejection slip you don’t know whether a living human being ever looked at your tale. But in a workshop, you know they read it. You had a respectful audience that actually tried to pay attention to what you wrote.
Writing Classes

Writing classes at every level are usually taught by people who don’t really know how to write. Precious few of them are taught by people who know how to
teach
writing.

Writing is very hard to teach, but it becomes almost impossible when the teacher, schooled in American college literature courses, believes that the critical approach he learned there has something to do with how his students should write.

That makes as much sense as trying to learn how to make wine by listening to a second-hand account of a wine critic.

“Nice bouquet,” says the critic of a good wine.

The wine-making teacher listens, and then tells his students, “You’ve got to make sure your wine has a nice bouquet.”
“How?” asks the student.
“I’m not sure, but this wine of yours certainly doesn’t have it.”
“Does the bouquet have something to do with using the right grapes?”

“I don’t know about grapes,” says the wine-making teacher disdainfully. “That’s for grape-growers. I teach wine.”

That’s the problem with writing teachers trained solely in literature courses-they’ve studied only finished products that have already been judged to be “great.” They’ve been taught to read them by decoding symbology and analyzing style. But great stories are not made by stringing together a bunch of symbols and deliberately creating a style.

The winemaker harvests the best grapes he can, crushes them, purifies the juice, and ages it in the way that seems right to him-and then trusts in natural processes to ferment the wine and transform the flavor. Likewise, the writer harvests the best and truest ideas he can, fits them together into a structure that makes sense to him, writes it with clarity, and trusts in his own natural voice and story-sense to bring forth all those marvelous things that critics look for. True symbols are as much a surprise to the author as to the reader; true style comes from the natural voice of the author, recorded in print. If you don’t write symbols and style, they happen anyway. But well-created worlds, effective structures, and clarity don’t just happen-they must be created consciously, and they can be learned.

There are writing teachers who actually know something that is useful to new writers-there are moments when I think I’m one of them. Even so, none of us can teach a student writer anything that he or she isn’t ready to learn; and there isn’t a thing we teach that a writer can’t learn for himself.

So I think you should take classes from time to time. You just shouldn’t expect that class to “teach you how to write.”

If you have appropriate expectations, you won’t be disappointed. Most

writing classes are conducted like workshops; if so, they’ll deliver at least the minimum that every workshop delivers. And if by some great fluke you end up with a teacher who actually knows how to teach writing, be glad and learn all you can.

But if you intend to write speculative fiction, talk to the teacher before you ever sign up for the class. Tell him frankly that you intend to write science fiction or fantasy and ask him if that’s acceptable. If the teacher reacts with amusement or scorn (“I teach students who aspire to create literature”/, the class will almost certainly be a painful or frustrating experience. If the teacher has no objection, but warns you that he really doesn’t know anything about speculative fiction, you might still take the classbut remember that half the time he probably won’t even understand what you’re trying to do. However, if the teacher reacts with some enthusiasm, go for it. Even if he doesn’t know that much about sf, at least your stories will have a sympathetic audience.

If there is no class or workshop in your neighborhood-or none that will treat speculative fiction with respect-you might want to try joiningor starting-a class or workshop by mail. For several years, Kathleen Woodbury of Salt Lake City has run an excellent co-op writing workshop by mail, in which manuscripts are evaluated by several professional writers. Writer’s Digest School is offering a speculative fiction writing course you can take by correspondence. If you have a computer with a modem, you can certainly find writing workshops conducted on-line. And there are doubtless other long-distance classes and workshops available if you look for them.

The Dangers of Workshops and Classes

Here’s a short list of things that can go wrong and what to do about them.

We’re a family.
You hang out with the same people so long that you become dear friends. You love these guys. The trouble is, the better you like each other, the more sympathetic you become to each other’s stories. You like Writer X so well you like her stories even when they’re lousy. You’re so familiar with Writer Y’s quirks that you hardly notice anymore that his stories are almost unintelligible. You may have the greatest friendships of your life-but you don’t have a workshop anymore.

Solution: Keep going to the parties, but find a new workshop for your stories.

Rapiers and scalpels. One or more workshop members specialize in being clever and witty at other writers’ expense. They make personal attacks on the writer (“Only a fascist pig could write a character like this”) or ridicule the story (“Even a paper shredder would be ashamed to swallow this”) without saying anything that their victim can actually learn from.

Solution: Put a stop to ridicule or personal abuse. If they won’t stop, kick out the offenders. And if the group won’t kick them out, quit. This kind of viciousness is the enemy of art.

Is it Thursday again?
In a burst of enthusiasm, the group agrees to meet weekly. You find that reading other writers’ stories and attending the workshop uses up most of your writing time.

Solution: Cut back the schedule. If the group won’t change, you start showing up less often. Or quit.

Lope de Vega syndrome. Lope de Vega was a great Spanish playwright who wrote something like a thousand plays in his lifetime. One wonders when he ate or slept. Sometimes one writer in a workshop produces so much that you end up reading his work every week, and yet he never seems to get any better. He’s taking all the fun out of the workshop.

Solution: Limit each writer to no more than one submission a month (for instance). Or ask Lope de Vega to leave the group. Or quit.

I liked the old version better.
You brought your first draft of the story to the workshop or class, and they gave you many helpful suggestions. You rewrote it and brought it back, and they still don’t like it; or they like it fine, but it’s still getting rejected by editors.

Solution: Never bring the same story back to the same workshop. They can’t give it an honest reading a second time. If you made the changes they suggested, how can they now find fault with it? And if you didn’t make those changes, how can you expect them to like it any better this time? By and large, a workshop will only help a story the first time it’s real.

You’re
mismatched with the group.
You find that nobody in the group is terribly interested in your stories; people tend to be kind to you, but it seems that their stories all work much better than yours and you can’t figure out why. Or your stories are always so much better than anybody

else’s that they never have anything helpful to say, while they hang on every word you say about
their
stories as if you were the teacher.

Solution:
Quit. You don’t belong in this group.
Conferences

Where classes and workshops usually meet on a weekly or monthly schedule over a long period of time, conferences meet all day for only a few days or weeks in a row-and then they’re done. You often pay a lot for a conference, including travel costs and the amount of time away from your job or your family. And you don’t know until you have committed all that time and money whether it’ll be any good or not. Is it worth going?

Conferences range from a series of lectures arid readings by professionals, in which
your
stories are never read, to an extremely intense workshop in which you’re expected to write and critique new stories throughout the conference. Some lecture conferences do give you a chance (usually for an additional fee) to have one of the professional writers or editors read your manuscript and consult with you about it. Some workshop conferences also offer readings and lectures. Before you give any conference a dime, find out exactly what it offers.

Lecture conferences.
To be blunt, I think lecture conferences are valuable only for the friendships you make with fellow novices. Maybe one of the lecturers will tell you something valuable; maybe not. But they certainly can’t tell you which ideas they teach apply directly to your own manuscript. And even if you pay for a private consultation, you’re getting only the least dependable aspect of a writing class-the comments of the teacher. Just because you loved Writer X’s latest novel doesn’t mean that he’ll have any notion what you should do to improve your story.

Clarion and Clarion West.
Workshop conferences, however, can be powerful-or devastating. Within the field of speculative fiction, there are two workshops that, to certain writers, are well worth their tremendous cost in time and money. Each summer, about twenty writers who have passed the screening process and forked over a tidy sum-which barely covers costs-arrive in West Lansing, Michigan, for Clarion, while another twenty or so arrive in Seattle for Clarion West. (Despite the similarity in name, the two workshops are completely separate and must be applied for

separately; but since Clarion West is modeled on Clarion, most of what I say about either applies to both.)

For six weeks these writers live together, read each other’s stories, and write their brains out. The experience is intense, and many participants undergo major personality changes-usually temporary. Most years one or two burn out completely; they never write again. And those few who come to Clarion expecting to receive validation (“Yes, Agnes, you really are a fine writer!”) are usually disappointed.