kelly link

The following is an expansion of a piece I wrote for a Book Smugglers roundtable.

Recently — or perhaps not so recently — much has been made of women writing science fiction. Often it’s coupled with a complaint about “PC” behavior stifles creativity or how leftist writing “has no new ideas.”

Hmm. Speaking as an unabashed leftist and someone lacking a penis, which may bias me somewhat, in my experience the opposite is true. I find much more interesting stuff in those who are willing to question the status quo, rather than simply write fiction using the same old stories, but this time with lasers! or infinity drives! or whatever. As Patty Jansen put it recently in her blog post, “There are girl cooties on my spaceship — on women writing hard SF,” “There are many younger readers out there who do not want their SF with sauce of sexist golden age nostalgia.”

To talk about this, though, I need to mention a book I’ve been recently reading, David Zindell’s Neverness. It’s a terrific book with some amazing writing in it. Here, for example, is a passage from page 23, which I love for its ability to seed in information about societal structures while describing a crowd:

“We received our pilot’s rings late in the afternoon of the next day. At the center of Resa, surrounded by the stone dormitories, apartments, and other buildings of the college, the immense Hall of the Ancient Pilots overflowed with the men and women of our Order. From the great arched doorway to the dais where we journeymen knelt, the brightly colored robes of the academicians and high professionals rippled like a sea of rainbow silk. Because the masters of the various professions tended to cleave to their peers, the rainbow sea was patchy: near the far pillars at the north end of the Hall stood orange-robed cetics, and next to them, a group of akashics covered from neck to ankle in yellow silk. There were cliques of scryers berobed in dazzling white, and green-robed mechanics standing close to each other, no doubt arguing as to the ultimate (and paradoxical) composition and nature of the spacetime continuum, or some other arcanum. Just below the dais was the black wavefront of the pilots and master pilots. I saw Lionel, Tomoth and his brothers, Stephen Caraghar and others that I knew. At the very front stood my mother and Justine, looking at us — I thought — proudly.”

Great stuff, yeah? And at the same time, I find the book puts me, as a female reader, in an odd position. The women in the book so far are either relatives or love interest, and their defining characteristics seem somewhat odd: the male protagonist’s mother’s defining characteristic is that she’s chubby from eating too many chocolate candies, while much is made of his aunt’s sexual rapacity.

In a novel, often the main point of view is our lens for the book. If the book were a first-person shooter game, this is the character one maneuvers through the game. Women are used to having this male perspective imposed on them; we’ve been reading those narratives ever since we started reading.

I’ve been scarce of late for two reasons:

1) My hard drive failed and so did the drive I’d been backing it up to, so the last three weeks I’ve been working on assorted laptops, an ipad, and actual, retro PEN AND PAPER. Which I actually use a lot, so that wasn’t too bad. But thanks entirely to Wayne, I’m back up on the main machine and now backing up to three locations, including off-site. Whee. Yet again I learn a life lesson in my forties that I should have absorbed two decades or more earlier.
2) Clarion West. I’ve been helping out in the classroom and coordinating some of the volunteers, which has occupied a chunk of time. A number of old friends have swung through town, including the ever wonderful Blounts and a rare Rachel Swirsky manifestation, which is always welcome. It’s also six weeks with two events each week, the reading and the subsequent party. Not that I’m complaining – last night’s was swell, and it was great to see so many people, including the passle of students, still valiantly producing stories and critting each other’s work. Next week Kelly Link and Gavin Grant will be reading, which should be FABULOUS, so I hope to see a lot of you locals there.

I am plugging away at the Clarion West Write-a-thon and got at least 2k per day done this week, which feels great! I have been very bad about mailing my sponsors so I am going to send two stories to everyone who donates in my name before the write-a-thon ends. There’s still time, and a sum as small as a dollar will net you close to 10,000 words of new Rambo wordage. 😉 Stretch goal, a la Kickstarter: If I get 20 sponsors, I will make that 15k.

Plus! ArmadilloCon at the end of this month. Yahoo!

(Saturday class – you haven’t had this session yet, don’t worry, we will this weekend!)

Week Three deals with the world of the story: both the setting (the world as the characters know it) and the world of the narrative (the world as the readers, who have the benefit of additional information like title, tone, and style, know it).

We looked at the beginnings of several pieces, including one of my all-time favorite books, Matt Ruff’s SET THIS HOUSE IN ORDER and Sara Genge’s short story, “No Jubjub Birds Tonight” from the anthology DESTINATION FUTURE.

Looking at the punctuation of the beginning of Stephen King’s THE STAND helped talk about how a world gets set up by style and narrative methods. Tone was compared to the emotion conveyed by a human voice and I mentioned that if you have two strong emotions working in a story, the best effect is gained if they are contradictory in some way.

We also talked about some of the things involved in style and the strategies for looking at your own work in order to figure out what’s characteristic of your style. I mentioned that often in writing one returns to the stories that shaped and fascinated us and pointed to “Magnificent Pigs” (CHARLOTTE’S WEB), “The Mermaids Singing Each To Each” (THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA), and “Long Enough and Just So Long” (“The Menace from Earth” and PODKAYNE OF MARS) as places where I’d done that in my own work.

In talking about metafiction as a particular style, we looked at the beginning of Kelly Link’s “Travels With The Snow Queen,” from STRANGER THINGS HAPPEN.

In the area of world-building, we meandered freely, talking about how much detail to include, the advantages of writing in a persistant world, using sensory detail to make a world feel real, the RPG approach and how it can lead to cat-vacuuming.

Next week’s assignment is the expository lump exercise, taken from Ursula K. LeGuin’s excellent book, STEERING THE CRAFT, which will start us off talking about delivering information, using description, and literary devices.

Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.

1. Engage the senses. You don’t have to hit every sensory stop – but it sure helps. Vivid visuals are great, but they are even better when backed up with visceral, precise taste or touch or sound.

2. Hint at the conflict. The majority of great stories provide the reader with some clue to the conflict driving the story within the first three paragraphs. Here, for example, is the first paragraph of Kelly Link’s marvelous “Travels with the Snow Queen”: