How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (20 page)

Coming to Clarion often means quitting your job or giving up your apartment or leaving your children with a grandparent. But if you’re serious about learning to write better, it can be worth the sacrifice. First, you work with six different professional writers - one per week-who read and comment on your stories. Second, you get to know twenty other participants, and the friendships formed there can last for years, often graduating into long-term professional relationships. Third, you write at least six stories, usually more, in a white-hot creative climate. I’ve taught once at Clarion, twice at Clarion West, and I’ve seen many students learn more in a week than they have in years before.

But Clarion isn’t for fragile people. It’s a tough experience, and those who gain the most from it are often those who are already at the cusp of professionalism. If you’re just starting out and completely uncertain of your identity as a writer, Clarion can be the end, not the beginning. But if you know you’re a writer and want to put yourself through six weeks in a wringer to squeeze out every drop of talent hiding somewhere inside you, apply to Clarion.

Creating a Wise Reader

Rare is the writer who actually knows what he’s written when it first comes out on paper. A passage you think is clear won’t be. A character you think is fascinating will bore other people silly because you haven’t yet grasped what it is that makes him interesting. But you won’t know it-until someone else has read it and told you.

Who? Your workshop? A teacher?

They really can’t do the job you need. You need someone to read it now, today, the minute you finish it. Someone who is committed to your career and wants you to succeed almost as much as you do.

In other words, you need a spouse or very close friend who is a brilliant critic.

Right, you say. My husband reads my stories, but all he ever says is, “Pretty good.” If you press him, he says, “I
liked
it.” Some brilliant critic.

Here’s the good news: You can turn almost any intelligent, committed person into the Wise Reader you need. But first you have to understand that a Wise Reader is not someone to tell you what to do next-it’s
someone to tell you what you have just done.
In other words, you want your spouse or friend to report to you, in detail and accurately, on the experience of reading your story.

The audience never lies. When I was a playwright, I learned something about audiences.
After
the performance, everybody lies and tells you it was wonderful. But during the performance of a play, the audience will never lie. By the way they lean forward in their seats, eyes riveted on the stage, they tell you that they’re interested, tense, anxious-exactly what you want. Then, suddenly, a large number of them shift in their seats, glance down at their program-without meaning to, they’re telling you that something’s wrong with the play, you’ve lost their attention.

As a fiction writer, you can’t watch what they do while they’re reading your manuscript. But you can train one reader to notice his own process of reading and take notes that will help you find the weak spots in your manuscript. You want him to keep a record of symptoms-what the story
does
to him.

For this job, it’s better if your Wise Reader is
not
trained in literature he’ll be less likely to try to give you diagnoses (“The characterization was thin”) or, heaven help us, prescriptions (“You need to cut out all this description”). The Wise Reader doesn’t imagine for a moment that he can tell you how to fix your story. All he can tell you is what it feels like to read it.

Questions. How do you train him? You ask questions:

Were you ever bored? Did you find your mind wandering? Can you tell me where in the story this was happening? (Let him take his time, look back through the story, find a place where he remembers losing interest.)

What did you think about the character named Magwall? Did you like him? Hate him? Keep forgetting who he was? (If he hates your character for the right reasons, that’s good news; if he couldn’t remember who he was from one chapter to the next, that’s very
bad
news.)

Was there anything you didn’t understand? Is there any section you had to read twice? Is there any place where you got confused? (The answers to

such questions will tell you where exposition isn’t handled well, or where the action is confusing.)

Was there anything you didn’t believe? Any time when you said, “Oh, come on!” (This will help you catch cliches or places where you need to go into more detail in your world creation.)

What do you thinly will happen next? What are you still wondering about? (If what he read is a fragment, the answers to such questions will tell you what lines of tension you have succeeded in establishing; if what he read is the whole story, the answers to these questions will tell you what lines of tension you haven’t resolved.)

You won’t be asking such questions for long. Pretty soon your Wise Reader will learn to notice his own internal processes as he reads. He’ll note points of confusion, unbelievability, cliche, boredom; he’ll think about how he feels about characters and tell you afterward.

Through exactly this process of asking questions, I turned my wife, Kristine, into my Wise Reader very early in our marriage. Because of her responses and concerns, my work is many times better than it would otherwise have been. Also, she’s part of every page of every story I writeinstead of my writing being a point of conflict in our marriage, as it is for many other writers, it’s one of the places where we’re most closely involved with each other.

Of course, I had to treat her observations with respect. Even when her responses hurt my feelings, I had to thank her. Most important, I had to do something to address the issues she raised; she had to see that her observations were leading to adjustments in the manuscript. She has never prescribed-never told me what I ought to do.

But the quid pro quo is that I have never left any of the symptoms untreated. I always do
something
to address every problem she reports in her reading process. At first this was sometimes hard, because I would thinly she was “wrong.” I quickly learned, however, that she can’t possibly be wrong-the Wise Reader never is. Why? Because the Wise Reader is reporting on his or her own experience of reading. How can she be wrong about her own experience?

Maybe sometimes Kristine’s reaction to something in my story has been a private reaction-no one else would be bothered by the problem she uncovered. But I’ve always found-always-that once I started changing the problem aspect of the story, I improved it.

And now Kristine is so skilled at reading a story and so familiar with

the things I do to fix certain problems, that she knows before I do exactly what changes I’ll make. This can be disconcerting, like when a friend or spouse starts finishing your sentences for you, but it’s also comforting to know how well she knows me.

She paid a terrible price for becoming my Wise Reader, however. Now she reads
everything
the way she reads my fiction, noticing when she’s bored, when she doesn’t believe, when she’s confused, when she doesn’t care about a character, when a plot question is unresolved. It spoils an awful lot of books and stories for her. But we think it’s worth it. And when I turn in a fiction manuscript, we’re both sure that it’s ready to publish as it is.

5. Collaboration and Adaptation

At some point in your career, you’ll decide to work with another writer or group of writers on a project.

Collaboration.
When two write the same story together, it’s called collaboration. It might seem that having two writers work on the same story would divide the work in half, but many collaborators report that it’s more like twice the work. That’s because in a true collaboration, both writers have to agree on everything. It can mean endless rewrites and painful compromises; it can mean having to put your name on a story that includes things that seem hopelessly wrong to you.

Yet it can also result in some of the best work of your career, if you and your collaborator can produce, together, something beyond the ability of either of you alone. After all, the great works of film and theatre, dance and music are usually collaborations of writer/director/choreographer/ composer and many performers who together create what no one of them could possibly produce alone. Is it surprising that sometimes collaboration in fiction can have good results?

Before you enter into a collaboration, however, make sure you have agreed on certain key points. Either of you should have the right to withdraw from the collaboration at any point-but then which of you will have the right to continue alone? Money is always split 50/50 except in the most extraordinary circumstances-but whose agent will handle the sale? Do both of you have to give consent for any publication of the work? In the rush of creativity, raising these questions might feel as awkward as

handing your spouse-to-be a pre-nuptial agreement on the morning of the weddingbut it must be done, or there’s a possibility of real rancor later.

Shared worlds. Shared-world anthologies comprise stories that take place in the same milieu. Each author is generally free to use characters from the other authors’ stories, as long as the character’s originator approves of what you have him do. The result can be quite exciting-different styles and visions combined into one interlaced network of tales. The world can seem quite real to the reader, in large part because of the fact that, as in
the real world,
each character is going his own way, touching the lives of others at times but not always caught up in their stories.

The most famous and successful shared world anthology series is
Thieves’ World,
which essentially invented the formula that the others all follow- and, in the process, set up what seems to be a complicated but fair communitarian model of sharing the profits from joint creative endeavors. Other anthology series have had varying degrees of commercial success:
Liavek
was a career launcher for a group of Minnesota writers who got together in the best Andy Hardy fashion and decided to create their own books; established writers C. J. Cherryh, George R. R. Martin, and Andre Norton also started shared-world projects; and there have been many others begun and, occasionally, published.

Artistically, the technique is to begin with a simple situation that allows for endless complication.
Liavek
stories were centered around the single city of Liavek, which was thoroughly invented by a group of writers brainstorming together; they took great pains to make it a city with many different classes, guilds, religions, and other communities so that plenty of different characters could bump into each other in the course of a book.
Heroes
in
Hell
had an even simpler premise-all the dead are together in Hell, continuing to be who they were during mortality. This allowed writers to put together, say, Mark Twain and William Shakespeare, or Adolf Hitler and Albert Schweitzer, or whatever other combination of historical personages intrigued them.
Wild Cards
developed a premise for having a group of comic-bookstyle superheroes on the loose in a (relatively) plausible version of our beloved planet Earth. All these shared worlds did a good job of narrowly defining the range of the stories, so that each writer’s work would be likely to intersect with the stories of other writers - and yet having enough variety within that narrow range that writers of very different
tastes
and interests could still tell tales within it.

Each shared world has its own financial arrangements, ranging from complete communalism-all participants receive shares of all volumes of the work from the time they joined the project-to the standard anthology arrangement in which each author is paid royalties only on the book in which his story appears, and only in proportion to the length of his story relative to all others.

How do you get involved in a shared world? You usually have to be invited to get into early volumes; later, some shared-world anthologies do open up to submissions from authors outside the original group. Some new authors who would never have been invited into someone else’s shared world have developed their own shared-world anthologies together. But you should be aware that the market for shared worlds is pretty much glutted, now that the novelty has worn off. Still, there’s room for a few new ones now and then on publishers’ lists, and the success of
Thieves’ World, Wild Cards, Liavek, Heroes in Hell,
and others almost guarantees that shared worlds will be around for many years to come.

Adaptations.
“You’ve seen the movie; now read the book!” The movie came from an original screenplay, but several weeks before the movie comes out, there’s a book on the stands. Novelizations, they’re calledand the books based on
E. T., Batman,
and many other films have reached the bestseller lists.

The authors of these books are usually paid a bit more up front than the average first novel advance-but their percentage of royalties is far lower, so that a monster hit won’t mean that much more money to the novelizer than a complete failure. Also, writing a novelization can be a frustrating experience, since you almost always have to work from the screenplay, turning in your manuscript before filming has been completed. Often the whole plot of the movie will be changed in filming or editing, and there sits your book, with the old “wrong” version firmly enshrined.