Keep an eye on the world around you and see what stories present themselves.As I said in class, I’ll be posting notes after each Wednesday session, which all three classes can use to ask questions about or comment on what we covered. I encourage the students to hop into the discussion here, but it’s also open to the public.
We started by talking about what makes a story and the idea of character(s) involved in a conflict with rising tension that moves to a resolution at the end. It’s a pretty classic model and Vonnegut says some useful things about it here. Everyone brought a two line description of the story they’d like to write, and we listened to those and talked about which would work as is for stories and which need some narrowing down.
In discussing how we know when a story will be good, we looked at the first few paragraphs of stories by Carol Emshwiller, Joe Hill, and Kurt Vonnegut. I asked you to, in the coming week, look particularly at how people begin stories, and for Week 2, people will be bringing in a story beginning by someone else that knocks their socks. I mentioned that there’s plenty of online magazines to find speculative fiction in and here’s a brief starter list for you (feel free to add recommendations in the comments): Abyss & Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, Daily Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Tor.com. One of the things I mentioned is that reading other people’s short fiction, particularly good stuff, is important: you’ll find more story ideas coming to you, you’ll learn new tricks from them, and you’ll become familiar with the markets you hope to sell to.
We also spent some time on writing process and the idea of timed writings, as taken from Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones and did some in class. Feel free to post yours here if you like it. I urged you to spend some time this week thinking about your writing process and perhaps trying to change it up a little: writing by hand instead of the keyboard, or in a place you don’t normally write.
>>I mentioned that there’s plenty of online magazines to find speculative fiction in and here’s a brief starter list for you (feel free to add recommendations in the comments):
One thing I found pretty helpful are the Hugo nominated stories featured in audio over at Escapepod.org. Save the .mp3’s to your player of choice and listen on your way to work / school / date / etc. Another great audio fiction site is of course is The Drabblecast at http://www.drabblecast.org. They have some fantastic features.
If you want to be mega-cool, try transcribing some of your favorite stories to screen or paper. Peace & love.
I absolutely agree with that – one of the things I keep is a notebook where I copy out passages from stories and novels that I really love. It’s part of how I try to figure out how the author’s achieving the effect (and how I might use it.)
Timed writing was great. I can’t believe I haven’t tried that before. I went through one of my collections last night and read the first three paragraphs of each story and was surprised to see how well they fit the pattern you discussed. I’ll do a few line edits on one of my short stories tonight and get it sent over to you. I’m really enjoying the class!
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
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Books of Mars
Hey, if you’re a fellow Kindle-r, I found out today while looking that the five first five of the Mars books (aka Burroughs’ Barsoom novels) available for free in e-form, including the one the movie John Carter of Mars is based on, The Warlord of Mars.
The Versimilitoad Escapes the Pendulum of Doom in the 2010 Clarion West classroom.This is from the BFFT (Big Fat Fantasy Trilogy) that is my current work-in-progress. I have the first book completely blocked out now, so I’m going to fill in all the blank spots, then block the next and do it and so forth. Anyway, this is from early in the book and is the first appearance of Teo, who is a major character. I’m actually switching my Clarion West writeathon goals over to novel chunks to make them a bit more in alignment with my highest priority, which is finishing this trilogy.
He’d been born with a Shadow Twin. Teo was the only person in the whole village who could say that, and he was the only person who’d had a Twin that almost all of them (except Teracit, who claimed to be old enough to have once shook hands with the original Duke) had ever encountered.
He was sitting in the cliff face that overlooked the river, in an icicle-choked crevice. The sun was rising. He’d crept out early, saying he was going to check snares, but truth was, he liked sitting and watching the world go pale grey, then violet, then gold and lavender, sumptuous as silk embroidery.
Often he wondered what his life would have been like if his Twin had drawn breath after the womb. History said that men and women with living Shadow Twins to assist there went on to do marvelous things. Verranzo and his Shadow Twin had each done a marvelous thing: Verranzo had founded Verranzo’s New City, far to the east on the coast, and his Shadow Twin (female, as Teo’s had been, for a Shadow Twin always took the opposite gender of its sibling) had gone south, with the Duke of Tabat, and founded a city in his name.
Teo’s would not found cities, would not draw on any of a Twin’s reputed powers: toe extend life or augment magical abilities. Verranzo’s Twin had been able to tame creatures with her voice alone.
Snow swans flew across the river far below in a glitter and beating of wings. He’d snared one of them last year and his father had beaten him, because you never knew when a creature like that, a swan or eagle or wolf, might be a fellow Shifter or Beast, and exempt from being hunted or trapped accordingly.
His swan had not been intelligent, but it had been lively when he’d freed it as Da had ordered. It beat at him with clublike wings as strong as Da’s fist, and its head darted at his face and hands like a snake, hissing and clacking its bill. He cut it loose and it waddled away, then leap up against the moons, its wings driving it upward, frosted with starlight. It honked derisively at Teo, poor bruised Teo who couldn’t shift, and therefore couldn’t tell what was or wasn’t a fellow Beast.
If he’d been Human, he would have been famous, might have been taken to Tabat to serve the latest generation of Dukes. But he was a Shifter, even if a failed one, and Humans hated Shifters, even more than the Beasts they habitually enslaved. So he and the other villagers must keep quiet, passing themselves off as unremarkable in the eyes of explorers and priests, here in the frontier territory that belonged to neither city.
Sunlight glinted on the river’s frozen mirrors, far below, dazzling him. Despite the worry that rode his shoulders “” why, just today, were others avoiding his eyes? And what had happened in the night to his youngest sister, little Bea, who’d been struck with fever the last four days. Fever didn’t come often to the villagers, but when it did, it could kill.
Teo and his sister were all the children his parents had. No wonder they had haunted Bea’s bedside day and night.
Someone was crossing the river; his uncle Pioyrt, in Beast form, an immense, slope-shouldered cougar, with two grouse gripped tight in his jaws, his whiskers drawn back to avoid their feathers. This time of tear hunting was bad and they’d eaten porridge and baked roots too often lately. At least one bird would be reserved for broth for Bea, but the rest might be fried with roots for something more appetizing than usual, crisp bits of meat and perhaps even a trip into the spice sack for a couple of peppercorns to grind or a pinch of dried orange peel. His mouth watered.
He raised his knees, wedging them against the rock’s cold, slick bite, to lift himself upwards, grainy snow crunching under his gloves and boots as he scrambled onto the top of the cliff. He paused to look once more out over the world. The clouds shawled the mountain that rose of the valley’s opposite side, its flanks white with snow, slicks of purple and cobalt streaking their sides. The river was a gray and blue snakeskin, laced over with the black skeletons of trees.
6 Responses
>>I mentioned that there’s plenty of online magazines to find speculative fiction in and here’s a brief starter list for you (feel free to add recommendations in the comments):
One thing I found pretty helpful are the Hugo nominated stories featured in audio over at Escapepod.org. Save the .mp3’s to your player of choice and listen on your way to work / school / date / etc. Another great audio fiction site is of course is The Drabblecast at http://www.drabblecast.org. They have some fantastic features.
If you want to be mega-cool, try transcribing some of your favorite stories to screen or paper. Peace & love.
I absolutely agree with that – one of the things I keep is a notebook where I copy out passages from stories and novels that I really love. It’s part of how I try to figure out how the author’s achieving the effect (and how I might use it.)
Timed writing was great. I can’t believe I haven’t tried that before. I went through one of my collections last night and read the first three paragraphs of each story and was surprised to see how well they fit the pattern you discussed. I’ll do a few line edits on one of my short stories tonight and get it sent over to you. I’m really enjoying the class!
Awesome! Thank you for volunteering for the first workshop.
And yeah, once you catch onto that first three paragraph thing, you realize how much the good stories are packing in there.
I just e-mailed you my story for the workshop.
I really enjoyed the class last night! The timed writing was fantastic.
Thanks! I missed the part where you talked about the first three paragraphs and what they do. Is there any way I can get caught up to speed on that?