{"id":1479,"date":"2009-07-27T07:46:15","date_gmt":"2009-07-27T15:46:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=1479"},"modified":"2009-08-09T15:10:40","modified_gmt":"2009-08-09T23:10:40","slug":"how-to-write","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2009\/07\/27\/how-to-write\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Write (Clarion West, 2009)"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week (July 27 – July 31, 2009<\/em>) I’ve been teaching some emerging writers here in Seattle at the Clarion West<\/a> workshop in Seattle. It\u2019s a full schedule, with all the group workshopping of stories, one-on-one conferences, and reading the stories to be workshopped the next day. Many thanks, by the way, to the organizers, Leslie Howle and Neile Graham.<\/p>\n

It’s been interesting for me to read so many different types of stories, and to hear the students’ concerns and ideas. It reminds me of my original sense of SF as vast and dreamy. As the days go by, my head swims more and more.<\/p>\n

<\/a>
\n[Rudy and the 2009 Clarion West class on graduation day. Photo by Leslie Howle. Click picture for larger image<\/a>. Here are the names of the people in the picture listed left to right, from first to last rows: First row: Joel Walsh, Miranda Shevertalov, Kris Millering, LaShenda Vavra, Rudy Rucker. Second row: Siobhan Carroll a.k.a. Von Carr, Julia Sidorova, Lucas Johnson, Elizabeth Wasden, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Steven Ellmore. Third & Fourth Rows: Emily C. Skaftun, Randy Henderson, William T. Vandemark (photo obscured), Tom Rodgers, Vicki Saunders, Nate Parkes, Derek Muir (photo obscured), Jordan Lapp.]<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019d imagined that, while I\u2019m here, I might write a transreal story about teaching writing, but I feel a little too scattered for that. The temperature’s been in the 100s, which doesn’t help. But I do want to write something\u2014my way of getting my head together.<\/p>\n

So what I\u2019ll do is to work up some Q & A here, adding to this one post as the week goes by. This is by way of amplification to the \u201cWriter\u2019s Toolkit\u201d\u009d document<\/a> that I use when I talk about writing, (in fact some of these notes may end up in there).<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll order the entry additions in blog style, that is, with the more recent ones first.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

July 31, 2009<\/em><\/p>\n

A few final points:<\/p>\n

Write what you love. Let the market follow you instead of the other way around. Use your whole self. Don\u2019t hold back, don\u2019t be embarrassed to write wild. Push for publication. If you can\u2019t sell, enjoy it anyway…and consider starting a webzine with some friends. Writing is self discovery. Believe in the Muse.<\/p>\n

Graduation day!<\/p>\n

Today I led my class into the basement of the sorority house on the U.W. campus where I\u2019m lodged, into a room which serves as a little temple or meeting place for the sorors, a room complete with an oil lamp, the Aladdin-kind that you see used in graphics to symbolize WISDOM.<\/p>\n

In the same rhythm as that golden oldie chant, \u201cOm Mane Padme Hum,\u201d\u009d we chanted these lines over and over—and enlightenment descended. The Eleusinian Mysteries of F & SF!<\/p>\n

Time, saucers, sex and goo
\nElves, mutants, robots too
\nMuse of strangeness old and new
\nMy blank pages call to you. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We really got into the sing-song, doing it mantra style, Gregorian style, and, at the end, as a sweet chorus. It was one of those experiences that sticks in my mind, a milepost. I think it\u2019ll stay with some of the students, too. I wanted them to understand about the Muse. In the end that\u2019s what you have to count on. In a way, that\u2019s the most important thing I could teach them.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

July 30, 2009<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019m still having trouble finding good endings for my stories. What more can I do?<\/b><\/p>\n

Don\u2019t settle for a trailing off ending. In high literature, this is fairly acceptable\u2014to have a story where, at the end, the characters are in for more of the same boring and depressing life as usual. Sometimes younger writers think this kind of ending presents a fresh insight about life. But, it\u2019s very well known among adults that life is hard and boring, often unexciting, and filled with ultimately irresolvable problems.<\/p>\n

People who read science fiction and fantasy stories are generally looking for a relief from life\u2019s dreariness. They would prefer, I think, to see a happy ending or at least a tight and exciting ending. An ending where something happens, a moment when life seems to make sense, an instant when a higher order shines through the dull machinations of fate.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Thinking of a nice ending can be hard. You want to jump out of the system of your story a little bit, to reach out for a greater synthesis. How?<\/p>\n

First of all, it helps to understand what your story is really about. Think about the transreal aspects of your story\u2014the very fact that you picked its topics indicates that these themes and situations have some special meaning for you. What does your story stand for in terms of your personal and emotional life? How might some resolution be found to the problems here suggested?<\/p>\n

You have to put your whole heart and soul into the story in order to really get it off the ground. That means you want to think about it all the time\u2014or at least a lot of the time\u2014for days and maybe even weeks on end. Look for clues to the story in the debris on the street, in the faces of the people you meet, and in the flow of media that cascades over your head.<\/p>\n

Most of all, you\u2019re waiting for the Muse. If you sincerely seek her, the Muse will come. Sometimes you won\u2019t realize that she\u2019s speaking to you. You\u2019ll think you\u2019re just having a crazy, impractical idea. Stay alert, and notice what you are given. Before long, the proper ending for your story will come.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

July 28, 2009<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019m trying to get the students to write some transreal stories, but it\u2019s a little hard to redirect the flowing stream of the workshop. This is the last week of six, so a lot of momentum has built up. They\u2019re into rewriting some of the stories from earlier weeks—which is what last week’s teacher, David Hartwell, set them to doing. That\u2019s okay, too. It\u2019s all F & SF. <\/p>\n

How do you write a transreal story?<\/b><\/p>\n

A transreal story is strongly based on some real situation in the author\u2019s own life. The idea is to build up the characters on the basis of yourself and the other people you know\u2014possibly merging people or reassembling parts of personalities. Take some issue that concerns you and think of some classic SF or fantasy riff that in some way represents this concern. Dial it up and put in a twist at the end if possible. Imagine that your fictional character finds his or her way through the problem that\u2019s bothering you. Note that the story needn\u2019t look especially different from any other SF story, that is, we\u2019re not looking for a deeply emotional True Confessions tale. In other words, don\u2019t let the \u201creal\u201d\u009d overwhelm the \u201ctrans.\u201d\u009d You\u2019re still writing SF. But you\u2019re using the \u201creal\u201d\u009d to keep the characters from being flat or plastic.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I feel like my stories are quite well-written, but that I need just another step to make them commercially publishable. What can I do?<\/b><\/p>\n

The stories might already be good enough, be sure to try a lot of markets. Also keep in mind that, in general, you\u2019ll get a little better with each story that you write. But here\u2019s a few basic things you might try to kick the story up a level.<\/p>\n

Make sure that your characters aren\u2019t too flat and generic. You don\u2019t want your hero or heroine to be totally good and right and courageous. They need to have some edges, some quirks. This is why I often recommend thinking of some actual people you know when designing your characters. In the same vein, try not have the dialog be too smooth and scripted. Pay attention to the way people actually talk\u2014they blurt, they argue, they lose the thread, they go off on tangents.<\/p>\n

Another useful principle is to give the reader some gnarly and interesting things to contemplate. In a movie, special effects add millions to the budget, but in a story it only takes a few hundred words. It\u2019s always good to describe some specific science-fictional objects to about\u2014little devices or creatures or knots in space. This is an instance of the old \u201cshow don\u2019t tell\u201d\u009d principle. Rather than having two people discussing some theory, have one of them pull out, like, an egg with a claw sticking out, and the claw blossoms into a flower…that kind of thing.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also good to bring in your special fantastic or science-fiction miracles early in the tale. Don\u2019t make the reader wade through most of the story before something exciting happens. Hit them with a wild new development quite early on, and then you can play with the consequences, maybe piling on some extra quirks as you move towards the conclusion.<\/p>\n

July 27, 2009<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

What is a story, as opposed to a novel?
\n<\/b>
\nI see a story as being something like a paperweight\u2014a blown lump of glass with some kind of crack or pattern in it. You can hold it in your hands, you can see the whole thing at once, it\u2019s transparent. But there\u2019s this weird flaw or fault-surface line inside that makes it interesting. Flaw and fault in the geologic or materials science sense\u2014not in the sense of there being something wrong\u2014although, in a way, the interesting parts of a story are when something goes \u201cwrong\u201d\u009d for the characters.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

What about ending a story?
\n<\/b>
\nIt\u2019s best if the ending is a twist or a \u201creveal\u201d\u009d\u2014some unexpected consequence of the assumptions in the story. Let me back up on that. I like to refer to the standard fantasy and SF tropes or scenarios as being \u201cpower chords.\u201d\u009d For a story, you generally select two power chords and work with them, jamming them up against each other, extending them, trying to think of a new way that a given power chord (like telepathy or time travel) might be actualized in a fictional world. And if you think about the situation enough, you can, with luck and inspiration, come up with a twist.<\/p>\n

If you can\u2019t think of a twist, you can always go for spiritual uplift. The main character achieves insight into their big problem and rises above it. Or a couple finally declares their love for each other. Or someone gets out of jail (which is, come to think of it, an objective correlative for spiritual uplift). But you do need something.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

How do you know when a story is done?
\n<\/b><\/p>\n

It sometems takes me six or seven to finish a story\u2014including the preliminary passes when the story isn\u2019t written through to the end yet. After each pass, I print it out and go outside, or to a coffee shop, and read the new version, marking it up, and trying to figure out where it\u2019s going and how I\u2019m going to end it. At some point, I feel like the story is done\u2014that is, I\u2019m not seeing more things to mark up and change.<\/p>\n

But some stories come out whole, really in one pass, with maybe a few small tweaks afterwards. These are more like pieces of calligraphic paintings, single gestures that cohere into an attractive, gnarly shape. When I’m fortunate enough to come up with a story like this, I try not to overwork it.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

How do you sell a story?
\n<\/b><\/p>\n

When It\u2019s done, I email or snailmail it to an editor\u2014some magazines only take snailmail\u2014and if it comes back, I send it back out again right away, like the very same day. I used to work my way down to lower-and-lower status publishers, but now, if I can\u2019t sell the story to, like Asimov\u2019s <\/em>or Tor.com <\/em>or maybe Interzone<\/em> or some kind of original-story anthology, I just short-circuit the process and put the story in my own webzine, Flurb<\/em><\/a>. <\/p>\n

Sometimes, if the story seems non-commercial, I just earmark it for Flurb <\/em>right away. It\u2019s good to have your own webzine. With some promo and help from other authors, you might be able to get a lot of people to read it. Obviously it\u2019s important to cajole others into your zine so it doesn\u2019t look like a total vanity project. At this point, I publish two stories a year in Flurb<\/em>, although sometimes my pieces aren\u2019t really stories, they\u2019re chapters of novels in progress.<\/p>\n

Thanks to having the Flurb <\/em>outlet, I\u2019ve given up on sending stories to certain editors\u2014who\u2019ve turned down two or three stories by me. The SF world is small enough that usually these editors are friends. But there\u2019s something about my fiction that doesn\u2019t appeal to them, and there\u2019s no point going through the same rejection over and over again. For any given writer, some markets just aren’t going to work.<\/p>\n

This said, when I was a beginning writer, I had a much higher threshold for rejection pain, and would indeed try the same editors over and over and over again. Not that it usually worked. Three Noes tends to mean No forever. It’s nice that the Web has come along to give us another way out. Let a thousand Flurbs <\/em>bloom!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week (July 27 – July 31, 2009) I’ve been teaching some emerging writers here in Seattle at the Clarion West workshop in Seattle. It\u2019s a full schedule, with all the group workshopping of stories, one-on-one conferences, and reading the stories to be workshopped the next day. Many thanks, by the way, to the organizers, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1479"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1514,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1479\/revisions\/1514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}