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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On Writing: When A Story Clicks
While perseverance matters, breaks are important too. Yesterday we went to Manuel Antonio Park and spent a fabulous day, culminating with coming home and going walking in wonderful, warm rain for a delicious dinner. You can give yourself the day off - just make sure you do something that nourishes you in some way and that you don't make every day a break day,One of the things I stress to students is that you cannot wait for the muse. And, in fact, the more you wait for her, the less likely she is to arrive.
For example. The last few days I’ve been working at getting back into the flow of writing daily. I held myself accountable and post daily word counts here or on Twitter. And lemme tell you, some of those words were difficult to wrestle out of my skull and onto the page. One way I can tell things are going in difficult fits and spurts is that I’ll hop around a lot from story to story.
One of those projects is “Prairiedog Town” (which is definitely getting a different title). I started jotting down mental notes for it while traveling through Kansas, but only had a thousand words or so on it before last week. It was slow writing, partially because I wasn’t sure how I was getting from one point to another in the story. I knew it was a piece about a woman reclaiming her humanity and I had a good idea of what the penultimate scene would look like.
So I kept jotting words down in sporadic clumps of a few hundred at a time, yerking the story along in an awkward and impatient way. It helped when I incorporated a prompt from Sandra M. Odell, a woman finding an abandoned teddy bear by the road. But it still was slow slogging. Yesterday I took a break from it.
And then, this morning, while working on it, things began to fall into place. A secondary character had popped up, and I understood how to bring her back into the story — and why. A piece that was supposed to take three days suddenly shortened into a single night, and with that, the ultimate scene came clear. I went through, pulling the threads into place as close to a thousand words came spilling out and into the story.
It’s not done yet — maybe another thousand words to go, but I’ve got a map of it, and comments where I need to go back and insert things. Here, for example, is what a section of today’s work looks like:
They end up chatting. Talia asks after father. Relates that he’s died. Talia asks if she’s going to the funeral.
No
It’s what you’d say either way, isn’t it.
That’s true
I’ll be there. On the outskirts.
She freezes again. It’s an old code word they used to use, back in the days when they worked together. It’s someplace close but (some distance) to the (direction).
And most importantly at all, things have come together to a point where I’m excited about the story, feel that some clever stuff has been worked in or has had places made for it. It’ll end up being around 4-5 thousand words, and I know I’ll finish it by the end of this month, because it’s designated as the next story to go out in the Patreon campaign.
And if I hadn’t done that picking away at it — scraping those words out of my skull, even though it felt painful and awkward and uninspired — I would have never gotten to that point at all.
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.
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.
And so we hit passages like this, a quote from the fictional A Requiem for Homo Sapiens, by Horthy Hosthoh, before Chapter Four begins:
In the beginning, of course, there was God. And from God arose the Elder Ieldra, beings of pure light who were like God except that there was a time before their existence, and a time would come when they would exist no more. And from the Elder Ieldra arose the Ieldra, who were like the elder race except they had substance and flesh. The Ieldra seeded the galaxy, and perhaps many galaxies, with their DNA. On Old Earth, from this Godspeed evolved the primitive algae and bacteria, the plankton, slime molds, worms, fishes, and so on until ape-Man stood away from the trees of the mother continent. And ape-Man gave birth to cave-Men, who were like Men except that they did not have the power to end their own existence.
And from cave-Men at last arose Man, and Man, who was at once clever and stupid took to bed four wives: The Bomb; The Computer; The Test Tube; and Woman.
That passage makes my mind explode a little, and not in a good way. Certainly one can argue that Zindell is simply replicating the structure of other creation myths from human history. But others have pointed out why things like using “Man” to refer to the human race overall is problematic (for an excellent overview of that and related issues, see Dale Spender’s Man-made Language) and those problems exist in this passage and are totally unquestioned.
Which is odd, because in many ways Zindell’s book is less obtrusive about this sort of thing than many examples. A few years ago, I read an Asimov story where the spacemen did various important things — and then returned to their white-picket surrounded houses on the moon, where their Stepford wives were waiting. That seemed like a crappy future to me. It still does. Other examples abound.
Why do we read? To escape, perhaps. To put ourselves in a different head for a while. To compare our experiences with that of others. To learn what it is to be human. And if those different heads, those experiences are narrowed down to only male ones, it seems…problematic at best.
My first “real” science fiction novel was a book my father brought back from a trip, Samuel R. Delany’s The Fall of the Towers. I must have read that twenty or thirty times. In that book, there’s a female character I can identify with, Alter. There’s plenty of women, doing all sorts of things, including being a villain. It feels, if I might dare to use the word when talking about speculative fiction, more “realistic” than the Zindell world.
I’m reminded of a passage from Kelly Link‘s “Travels With the Snow Queen,” one that I often use in class. Here it is:
“Your destination is North. The map that you are using is a mirror. You are always pulling the bits out of your bare feet, the pieces of the map that broke off and fell on the ground as the Snow Queen flew overhead in her sleigh. Where you are, where you are coming from, it is impossible to read a map made of paper. If it were that easy then everyone would be a traveler. You have heard of other travelers whose maps are breadcrumbs, whose maps are stones, whose maps are the four winds, whose maps are yellow bricks laid one after the other. You read your map with your foot, and behind you somewhere there must be another traveler whose map is the bloody footprints that you are leaving behind you.
There is a map of fine white scars on the soles of your feet that tells you where you have been. When you are pulling the shards of the Snow Queen’s looking-glass out of your feet, you remind yourself, you tell yourself to imagine how it felt when Kay’s eyes, Kay’s heart were pierced by shards of the same mirror. Sometimes it is safer to read maps with your feet.
Ladies. Has it ever occurred to you that fairy tales aren’t easy on the feet?”
That last line is brilliant. Because suddenly Link turns around and with that salutation, “Ladies,” directly calls out the fact that so many narratives presume a male reader. That line turns the convention on its head and puts male readers in a situation female readers are well acquainted it: provided a point of identification with the story that doesn’t “fit” the reader in terms of gender.
An interesting aspect of this discussion is the insistence that men don’t read books by women – which may or may not be true, depending on the factors you’re looking at. Is it that men are by nature unsuited to this demand that one put oneself in a skin that cannot, by its nature, actually belong to you? Surely that cannot be true of all male readers.
Women are not a monolithic group, any more than men are. You cannot pick out one individual and insist that they represent all human experience. This is in part the appeal of reading – that we are experiencing something other than ourself, that we are putting on a costume and seeing what it looks like to strut around inside that skin for while. Perhaps this is a second possible reason why some men refuse to read fiction by women — they find that particular costume so demeaning or one that they feel they have so little in common with that it’s not worth the investment of reading time.
Let me confess a guilty secret: when I was a pre-teen I read all the Destroyer books, a men’s adventure series written by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir. You could find them easily in used bookstores, and by my estimate, I read over a hundred of the 145 in the series. They were awesome. They had great banter and interesting adventures, and their approach to sex was (and now that I think about it much later as a writer, this is actually a really interesting narrative choice) that Remo, a white practitioner of the ancient art of Sinanju, could drive women to absolute ecstasy with the equivalent of a touch to the elbow, a process that seemed to become increasingly boring to Remo over the course of the series. Due to the powers given to him by Sinanju Remo could, by my recollection, scale sheer walls, fake death, act as a human lie-detector, run silently (and faster than most humans) and, of course, kick utter total absolute ass in a fight. He was also rendered helpless by ingesting a hamburger, because his body had been purified by the brown rice and water diet of Sinanju to the point where it couldn’t deal with any other foods.
Much of the book’s pleasure was the dialogue, particularly the banter between Remo’s instructor in Sinanju, an ancient Asian man named Chiun, and Remo, who didn’t particularly appreciate things like not eating hamburgers or enjoying sex. Another was the crazy plots, which were as pulpy as they come. (I also read a great deal of Doc Savage, but will save the Man of Bronze for some other essay).
The point, now I have maundered fondly about the books for a bit is this: those books would seem to be the equivalent of a preteen boy enjoying Regency romances, which is something that, at least when I was growing up, would have gotten him heartily mocked by most of my fellow Midwestern teens. But that never bothered me, and I don’t remember ever feeling like I should feel embarrassed for reading them.
It seems to me there’s an odd thing that happens to male readers. We (all children) begin with a mix of viewpoints in the form of fairy tales. It’d be interesting to see what the gender breakdown is, reading level by reading level (think about Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys for an example later on), because it seems to me that it skews more male when we hit what has been defined as the classics (See Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing for some reasons why this happens).
At the same time, there’s an age point — for me it was around thirteen — where there’s a lot of pressure to act (if not think, perhaps) as the “right” gender. A lot of that’s coming from mainstream media but there’s plenty of other sources and to my perception men get just as much pressure, if not more, in a way that denies them a lot of emotional structures while giving them a number of advantages.
From an early age, women read protagonists with a male skin. Actually, we live in a world where the assumption of a male skin is pretty unrelentingly forced upon us: by electronic media like movies, television, and radio, by the Internet, by advertising, by education. And when we experience things aimed at us as women, often they seem to be there to force us into a particular definition of femininity.
Certainly men lose out on this social structure as well. Look at Raj in the Big Bang Theory to see what is marked as aberrant in a male: not just skin color, interestingly enough, but enjoyment/appreciation of fine cuisine, emotional sensitivity, and an non-sexualized appreciation of female company. The patriarchy is a structure that does advantage men, but it is a double-edged sword (Freudian overtones intentional) in that it denies them many things allowed to women: a greater freedom to express emotions (although that comes with implications that it’s a sign of weakness); appreciation of some of the sense-based aspects of life; the ability to be colorful in dress and wear make-up (though that seems to be eroding). And we’re all seeing body images that don’t match our own, particularly in a culture that teaches us bad dietary habits and offers plenty of cheap fast-food. Instances of young men with eating disorders have risen dramatically, for example.
Science fiction is the literature of “what if?” It seems bizarre not to realize that different viewpoints are going to have new and interesting what ifs that may have been overlooked in the past. I have hopes for speculative fiction: that it will continue to diversify, to expose us to new and interesting viewpoints in a way that makes them “us” rather than “other.”
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