if you're looking to find some of my recent work, I have a novelette, All the Pretty Little Mermaids, in the March 2014 issue of Asimov's. I've also got a non-fiction interview with Bud Webster in Analog.This came up in the advanced workshop – how does one grab a reader and have an impact on them? Because surely this sort of emotional identification that makes a reader experience a story as though it were a blow aimed directly at their heart is crucial to the best storytelling. The student pointed at an interview with Yoon Ha Lee in Clarkeworld magazine where she says:
The whole point of a short story is to assassinate the reader. You don’t have the time or the space to go to war or do large maneuvers, you can’t do chapters of elaborate setup, there’s much less room for character development””a good writer can get more character development in, but that isn’t my particular strength. Anyway, everything in the short story has to drive toward a short sharp point, whatever it is you’re trying to leave the reader with at the end of the story.
I say “assassinate” and it sounds hostile, because it is. I work better when I can think in terms of opponents. The thing is that I don’t want the reader to see the short sharp point clearly from the beginning, but I want it to make sense afterward as the angle of attack. Tactical sense, I guess, in the context of the story’s setup.
Most of the time I write didactically, as if a short story were a proof. There is some object lesson, or ethical question, I want to leave the reader with. “Ghostweight” is a good example of this; it doesn’t pretend not to be didactic. So when I build the character and their strengths and weaknesses and motivations, when I build the setting, the majority of it needs to be in support of that point. With a proof, you want to include all the necessary axioms and arguments, but leave out the extraneous. A short story is very similar. I am not sure my math professors would approve of the use I am making of my college education, but there it is.
To me this is connected to something Michael Swanwick told my Clarion West class: in a short story, pick your antelope out of the herd and chase it whole-heartedly. If you change course midstream because that other antelope is limping or that other one comes with a garnish, you are likely to have no antelope at all.
So you must determine your antelope, by which I mean, you must figure out what’s the emotional core of the story, what’s its heart? What does it say about the state of existence? And once you know that, you can construct a narrative that grabs the reader through devices like sensory engagement, identification with the main character, and other beguilements until you have them trapped, at which point you force them to confront some fact of existence that may be normally unseen or even actively avoided.
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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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Writers and Natural Talent: More About that MFA essay
Either you have a propensity for creative expression or you don’t. Some people have more talent than others. That’s not to say that someone with minimal talent can’t work her ass off and maximize it and write something great, or that a writer born with great talent can’t squander it. It’s simply that writers are not all born equal. The MFA student who is the Real Deal is exceedingly rare, and nothing excites a faculty adviser more than discovering one. I can count my Real Deal students on one hand, with fingers to spare.
This is, in my opinion, wrong-headed, elitist, and insulting. Other people have replied eloquently. Chuck Wendig said:
This is one of the worst, most toxic memes that exists when it comes to writers. That somehow, we slide out of the womb with a fountain pen in our mucus-slick hands, a bestseller gleam in our rheumy eyes. We like to believe in talent, as if it’s a definable thing “” as if, like with the retconned Jedi, we can just take a blood test and look for literary Midichlorians to chart your authorial potential. Is talent real? Some genetic quirk that makes us good at one thing, bad at another? Don’t know, don’t care.
What I know is this: your desire matters. If you desire something bad enough, if you really want it, you will be driven to reach for it. No promises you’ll find success, but a persistent, almost psychopathic urge forward will allow you to clamber up over those muddy humps of failure and into the eventual fresh green grass of actual accomplishment.
Writers are not born. They are made. Made through willpower and work. Made by iteration, ideation, reiteration. Made through learning “” learning that comes from practicing, reading, and through teachers who help shepherd you through those things in order to give your efforts context.
(As with all of Chuck’s posts, worth clicking through to read in its entirety)
and Russell Davis said:
Write what you want, read what you want… but don’t look down your nose at anyone else for what they write or read. The truth is there’s no such thing as a sellout, and if you think there is, you’re wrong. We’re writers. We tell stories and if you want to claim the writing moral high ground because you’re “literary,” have I got news for you: Twain was a genre writer. Poe was a genre writer. So was Dickens. And Hemingway. Steinbeck. Hawthorne. Melville. I could go on and on, but let’s end with this: so are you. Dress it up how you want, literary fiction is a genre, too.
(Also worth clicking through to read.)
And my reaction is much the same as theirs.
A Small Confession
I will confess now. I have one of those literary degrees. Mine’s fairly highfalutin’; I got it from the Writing Seminars of the Johns Hopkins University, where the people I studied with included John Barth, Steve Dixon, Jean McGarry, and Madison Smartt Bell. Post-degree, I stuck around on fellowship for a while.
And I think what Boudinot is mistaking for talent is more the result of working with students who have both been hampered by the educational system and also just not having done enough of the three things you must do in order to be a good writer. (Will I reveal them? Sure. Keep reading.)
Writing is hard. Think of what happens with words, how a reader interprets them, how they may bring meanings with them that the writer never anticipated. How a scene is constructed from the trail of words on the page by means of evoking certain things in the reader’s head.
That’s magic. That’s amazing. That’s… an act so profoundly unlikely and amazing that it humbles me every time I set out to do it.
I am speaking as one of the people who has been told they are talented. I know I have a facility with language. But I think it says more about my education and reading as a child/teen than anything else, because I read and read and read, and did it all over the place, including one summer where I steadily worked my way through the folklore and mythology section of the children’s library, because I’d exhausted all the fiction.
Writing 1,000,000 Words
There is an axiom in some circles: to get good, genuinely good, at writing, you must write 1,000,000 words. This is not an exact science, but as a rule of thumb, it is not a terrible one.
But it is not entirely true. To become a good writer, you must perform a combination of three things.
You must write. You must write and write and write. At first it will be hard to know how to get a character across the room. Later you will learn more complicated things. Writing will always get more complicated, in my experience, but we learn to trust ourselves to sit down with a blank page and know that we will emerge with a story.
You must read. You must read good stuff, and try to figure out what makes it good. You must read appealing stuff, and try to understand how its draw is created. You must read amazing stuff that makes you weep because you will never be that good, and then you must go and try to be that good nonetheless.
You must think. You must notice the world around you and try to understand it. You must exercise empathy and try to pry into some of the secrets of the human heart and psyche, even if it means admitting some things about yourself in the process.
This is something I tell my class, because I know it is true. I have been seeing it in action for almost three decades now. If you write and think about writing, you will get better, even if people are actively trying to hamper you. That is the secret of teaching writing. I can help you get better more quickly in a class, but the degree to which is entirely up to you and how much effort you are willing to put in.
There are Mozarts, natural geniuses. I think they are far fewer and farther in between than people are willing to admit. There are writers who read deeply as children. I was one and it gave me a head start. There are writers who started writing and sending out early. There are writers who set out to imitate their heroes and worked doggedly to do so. That is the norm.
Are there terrible writers who will never get better? Well. There are some getting better a lot slower than others, and I would suspect often it’s a case of a lack of number three. But better? If you do something often enough, you will get better at it eventually. And that’s what is, to my mind, important.
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.
Tell a familiar story from the point of view of a character who usually doesn't get to speak, like the mother bear in Goldilocks and the Three Bears.I talked yesterday about flash fiction, what it is and why writers might want to write some. I mentioned that it’s a great place to try out new techniques. So here’s five possible things to focus on in a flash piece, with five more coming on Monday. Pick one and sit down and write the story. How long should it be? That’s entirely your call.
Write a story in future tense. Tell the reader what’s going to happen, an anticipation of the story to come.
Write a haiku about a place. Now take it and expand it with an important meeting or goodbye taking place there.
Write a piece that is a conversation and that only uses one syllable words.
Write a piece that is the conversation’s setting, in which at least half the words are three syllables or more, and in which no sentence is shorter than ten words. Optional: Make it a description from the pov of one of the participants in the conversation, who has a secret they desperately want to keep from the other character.
Write a piece telling a familiar story from the POV of a character who doesn’t usually get to speak, like the mother bear in Goldilocks and the Three Bears, or the superhero nobody’s ever heard of.
Go into your kitchen and take out two spices. Mix a couple of pinches and sniff them. Now write about what the smell reminds you of.
What is a present you’ve never gotten but always wanted? Write a flash about it being given to someone else.
Who is the saddest superhero and what was their last adventure?
The game never ended but went on for decades. Write a story that tells the reader why.
Go for a walk or ride and look at things until you notice something you’ve never noticed before. Now write about it.
P.S. Want to read some flash fiction being written before anyone knew to call it that? Try James Thurber’s Fables for Our Time. Or for something more contemporary, Michael Swanwick’s Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures.
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.
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