Retreat, Day 20

As mentioned in the Wall Street Journal (hello new readers coming from there!) last year, I came up with a new class, “Punk U: The Whys and Wherefores of Writing -punk Fiction“, which attempted to explore some of the -punk subgenres, starting with cyberpunk and progressing through steampunk, dieselpunk, nanopunk, solarpunk, afropunk, monkpunk, mannerpunk, and a dozen others. Of all of them, the most fascinating to me — and the one that’s had the greatest influence on my recent fiction, is hopepunk.

What is hopepunk? The term was first coined by Alexandra Rowland as the antithesis of “grimdark,” a speculative genre featuring fatalistic nihilism and a tooth vs. claw environment. She wrote:

“The essence of grimdark is that everyone’s inherently sort of a bad person and does bad things, and that’s awful and disheartening and cynical. It’s looking at human nature and going, “˜The glass is half empty. “˜Hopepunk says, “˜No, I don’t accept that. Go fuck yourself: The glass is half full.’ Yeah, we’re all a messy mix of good and bad, flaws and virtues. We’ve all been mean and petty and cruel, but (and here’s the important part) we’ve also been soft and forgiving and kind. Hopepunk says that kindness and softness doesn’t equal weakness, and that in this world of brutal cynicism and nihilism, being kind is a political act. An act of rebellion.”

She wrote more about hopepunk in a follow-up essay, “One Atom of Justice, One Molecule of Mercy, and the Empire of Unsheathed Knives and expands on the idea of kindness as a political act further in this great essay:

Just the amount that I have seen people get more politically active in the last year has been amazing. I want to point out that kindness doesn’t necessarily mean softness. Kindness can mean standing up for someone who’s being bullied. If someone has a gun to your friend’s head, punching the guy with the gun is an act of kindness because you’re saving someone through that. So kindness is not always soft.

Kindness is not necessarily passive. Kindness is something that you can go out and fight for. Going to a protest, if you frame it in a particular way, is an act of kindness because you’re doing something for the future. You’re contributing to the future. You’re putting more good in the world is I think how I would define doing kindness. If you see someone being shouted at by a bigot on the subway, just standing up for them and having their back is an act of kindness.

And being kind also is something that requires so much bravery sometimes.

Others seized on the term with joyous abandon — and one of the signatures of hopepunk is, in my opinion, a sense that the writer is creating happily and full throttle. I’d call a number of the works on this year’s Nebula Award ballot hopepunk, particularly Trail of Lightning and The Calculating Stars, and I suspect there will be plenty of it on the Hugo and World Fantasy ballots this year as well.

Hopepunk is a reaction to our times, an insistence that a hollow world built of hatred and financial ambition is NOT the norm. It is stories of resistance, stories that celebrate friendship and truth and the things that make us human. In today’s world, being kind is one of the most radical things you can do, and you can see society trying to quash it by prosecuting those who offer food to the hungry, water to the thirsty, and shelter to those in need.

Claudie Arseneault spoke why she wanted hopepunk in her essay, Constructing a Kinder Future, for Strange Horizons:

The truth is, I’ve had enough of stories where your best friend or your closest family members are your most bitter enemies, where anyone you’re not in love with is an opponent to defeat, a potential traitor. Enough of stories where heroes must use each other as mere pawns, nothing more than pieces in a game, and abandon the “weak,” the naïve, the nice ones. Cruel ruthlessness is not our strength. It will not save us, and it should not be hailed as an acceptable means to an end, no matter the end. Our strength is in collaboration, in communities who link arms in the face of dangers, in perfect strangers donating to other people’s crowdfunding campaigns, and I want fiction to reflect that. I want characters who value their friends, who see perfect strangers as full-fledged human beings worthy of their help, and who fight the world with hope and kindness to be rewarded for it.

Is this desire for hope something new? No, it’s something that we’ve always celebrated in stories. Think about the moment in the Lord of the Rings when acts of kindness — first on Bilbo’s part, then on Frodo’s — lead to the moment where Gollum enables the ring’s destruction when Frodo falters and is on the brink of giving up his quest. Or go even further back, to Ovid’s Baucis and Philemon, who are rewarded for offering hospitality to strangers who turn out to be gods.

But in recent decades we’ve let other, darker stories, mocking the earnest and shredding empathy, supplant those fables. Stories written by the kleptocracy, designed to make its victims despair and give way to apathetic acceptance, stories spat out daily by the messageboard shitlords trying to convince us that meme-based mockery should be the first reaction to any appeal to the human heart. They’re there to enforce the rule that to step away from the line– to be joyous or non-conforming or outside the system in any way — is to be aberrant and wrong.

One of the things resisting that is hopepunk. The movement has caught on, with some perceiving it as vital to sowing the seeds of resistance, as with Vox describing it as “weaponized optimism”, adding “Hopepunk combines the aesthetics of choosing gentleness with the messy politics of revolution.” In an article for America, Jim McDermott went so far as to call it “quintessentially Catholic“, saying:

Death on the cross, understood not as some brutal cosmic math equation but a personal choice to continue to love and give and believe even when your life is at stake, is the beating heart of Catholic hopepunk. So is Jesus’s vision of the Kingdom of God as a banquet where all are welcome and called to kindness, and the lives of holy people like Martin Luther King, Jr., St. Francis of Assisi or Mary MacKillop, R.S.J., who refused to accept the premises of the reality in which they lived and experienced their own deaths and resurrections as a result. It’s Greg Boyle, S.J., insisting “There is no “˜them’ and “˜us,’ there is only us,” young people from all over the world traveling to Panama to create and imagine the church or Mary Oliver inviting us over and over in her poetry to consider “our one wild and precious life.”

Hopepunk is a movement that understands the importance of stories and how they can affect change, and so hopepunk often — perhaps even usually — has casts that are as diverse as the world around us, featuring characters of color, transexuals, a-romantics, differently-abled, and more, building empathy by showing that there are certain basic things any of us want, regardless of which other or others we do or don’t belong to.

In thinking about it, I find that hopepunk has crept into my life over the past few years. The Feminist Futures Storybundle I just curated holds more than one example, as did last year’s version of it. The anthology I edited last year, which appeared at the beginning of this month, If This Goes On, is full of examples of it.

Hopepunk led to me creating the class “Stories That Change Our World: Writing with Empathy, Insight, and Hope“. I spoke at length about the creation of the class in a recent essay for Clarkesworld magazine, but I could easily have titled the class, “The How-tos of Writing Hopepunk” and captured the same spirit.

One of the charms of the hopepunk definition is that it’s somewhat expandable — happy + hopeful, plus an insistence that it’s not a totally hostile universe, seems to be the base definition. In fact, it doesn’t have to be speculative fiction. Here’s Bryn Hammond talking about examples of it in historical fiction.

One of my favorite writers, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., often preached kindness in his work. He also said, “Be careful what you pretend to be, because you become it.” Try being kind, being mindful of your impact on the world and lives around you, and you may be surprised at exactly how kind you can be.

Recently hopepunk has elbowed its way into my writing as well, insisting on the importance of kindness and community. I just finished up a story where that instinct plays an important part, and I know that the next story I’m turning to, about animatronic Beatles in a post-apocalyptic landscape, will have many of the same resonances. Is this a deliberate focus or accidental? I’m not sure, but I feel hopeful about it.

HOPEPUNK READING LIST

Hopepunk novels:
Becky Chambers, The Wayfarers Series (starts with The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet)
Joyce Chng, Water Into Wine
Nicole Kimberling, Happy Snak
Mary Robinette Kowal, The Lady Astronaut series
Edward Lazelleri, The Guardians of Aandor Series
Marshall Ryan Maresca, The Way of the Shield and Shield of the People
Elizabeth McCoy, Queen of Roses
Tehlor Kay Mejia, We Set the Dark on Fire
Alexandra Rowland, A Conspiracy of Truths
R.J. Theodore, Flotsam
Carrie Vaughn, Bannerless

Hopepunk games:
Return to the Stars

Hopepunk novels coming out in 2019:
L.X. Beckett, Gamechanger
Aliette de Bodard, House of Sundering Flames
Bryan Camp, Gather the Fortunes.
A.J. Hackwith, The Library of the Unwritten
Tyler Hayes, The Imaginary Corpse
Leanna Renee Hieber, Miss Violet and the Great War
Marshall Ryan Maresca, A Parliament of Bodies
Alexandra Rowland, A Choir of Lies
Ferrett Steinmetz, Sol Majestic
Bogi Takács, The Trans Space Octopus Congregation
R.J. Theodore, Salvage
Patrick Tomlinson, Starship Repo
K.B. Wagers, Down Among the Dead

If you have suggestions for additions, please mail them to me or suggest them in the comments!

Notes and acknowledgments:
Thank you to Joyce Chng for pointing me towards the Arsenault essay.

Yesterday I taught a day-long workshop on rewriting and editing one’s work for Clarion West. I usually do this as a two hour online workshop, so it was interesting to take the class and get a chance to really flesh it out, particularly since I can use this version to create an on-demand version.

As with all writing advice, mileage will vary according to the individual. The best thing as a writer that you can do is to pay attention to your own process and make it more effective. Experiment with lots of things, identify the practices that work, and incorporate them into your process. Keep experimenting, mixing things up a little, every once in a while, writing to the sound of whale songs, or dictating while hiking, or using a pen rather than the keyboard — it doesn’t matter what as long as you keep testing things in a way that lets you grow as a writer.

The Revision Process is Not One-Size-Fits-All

In thinking about revision, one has to acknowledge that some things really affect the process in a way that makes it vary from author to author, such as:

• The length of the piece. A novel is a much different thing than a story, and one of the basic differences is that you (or at least in my experience) can hold the entirety of a story in your head in a way that you cannot with a novel. Novels are also more complicated, usually involving multiple storylines and subplots in a way stories cannot, which adds extra steps. In this piece, I’m focusing on short story, but I’ve got an additional list of considerations when working with novel length stuff that I’ll cover in the online version, which should go up in the Rambo Academy at the beginning of December.
• Whether the writer’s rewrite process focuses on subtracting or accreting. In my experience the majority of writers overwrite, and the focus of the revision process is trimming away excess. But some folks are accreters, by which I mean their process is one of adding and fleshing out. This definitely affects the revision process.
• Where you lie on the outliner vs. pantser continuum. Do you write out a 30 page outline before you begin writing or do you sit down and see where the words take you? My theory is that the amount of overall work a writer does is invariable; some writers do it beforehand and others do it afterwards while revising. The more outlining and prep work work that happens beforehand, the less will (usually) be necessary in the revision stage.
• Some stories simply need less work than others.

How to Know When You Are Done Revising

This is the question that comes up more than any other: how do I know when a piece is ready? The way I do it is by breaking down revision into a three stage process. When you finish the last step, start sending it off, and don’t revise between submissions (unless someone gives you amazing advice). Figure out 3-5 markets and as soon as it comes back from one, send it to the next.

Here are the stages of revision. Before you start them, you must a) have a first draft and b) set that draft aside to cool for a while. Stephen King suggests putting a novel aside until you no longer think about it on a daily basis. With a short story, give it at least a week, preferably two.

And that first draft can be terrible. Really. You’ll be able to fix it. The first draft is just you flailing around. That’s perfectly natural. You throw words, sentences, paragraphs and scenes onto the page, perhaps in the order that they will stay in, perhaps in a totally different assemblage. That’s okay. You have the words.

Stage I of the Revision Process: This is where you figure out your plan of attack. Read through, with a notebook handy for jotting stuff down if it occurs to you but mainly focusing on the manuscript. Keep track of holes, scenes that still need to be written, as well as major changes. I print out a copy and I write all over it; append things, scratch things out, move pages from here to there.

Focus on big ticket items, things that affect the manuscript at the top level: moving scenes around, changing POV or verb tense. Making sure that the chronology is correct, particularly when working with multiple view points. Think about the characters.

Are they likable – do the reader have some point of identification with them? It can be something very small, such as showing them taking care of something like a pet or plant. Are their motivations clear? Do you know what they want, what’s keeping them from getting it, and how they plan to change that situation? Do you have some sense of their history before they entered the piece, and how can you reflect that in the piece? Where can/should you go more deeply into their head?

What’s the overall story arc? What’s the human experience at the heart of the work; what’s it trying to say about being an intelligent self-aware entity? What promises are you making to the reader and where don’t you live up to them? Where can you make things clearer for the reader? Are there missing scenes? If so, write them now.

What’s the pacing like; are you moving the story along in a smooth flow that pulls the reader in? If not, where are you failing to do so?

What’s the world like? How can you keep it from being generic? What details does your reader need to know and where have you forgotten to supply such information? How does the world feed into the theme of your story? Where are the cool eyeball kicks and nifty things that will entertain your reader?

Don’t fix things about the style or other sentence level considerations, but keep a list of these that you’ll be able to address in a later stage.

Stage II of the Revision Process: You marked all over the printout, making changes and then incorporated them. Here I print out a fresh copy, because unfortunately my process is not particularly eco-conscious.

Now you’re looking at a finer level than the first pass. Stage I was coarse sandpaper; now you’re moving to a finer grade. This is the point where I look hard at paragraphing, splitting up overly long paragraphs, using single sentence paragraphs for an occasional punch, and making sure the first and last paragraph of every scene works, creating a transition that doesn’t allow the reader to escape the story.

I have an unfortunate propensity for scattering scene breaks through my work; this is the place where I remove a lot of them, because I know that every time one occurs, it bumps the reader out of the story and reminds them that they’re reading. I also remove a lot of unnecessary speech tags at this point. I make sure the speaker is identified every third or fourth speech act in two people dialogue so the reader never has to count back in order to figure out who is talking at any point.

I’m also looking at sentence length. Here is an exercise that may be useful: take a page of your prose and go through counting how many words are in each sentence. If they are all around the same length, it creates a sense of monotony. Split things up. Short sentences have punch; long sentences full of polysyllabic words create a languorous, dreamy feel that may be desirable to your narrative yet radically slows things down on the page. (Did you catch what I did there?)

Stage III of the Revision Process: Once again, edits are made on the computer and printed out. Time for your very finest grade of sandpaper, the last few passes. In this, I rely heavily on Ken Rand’s excellent little book The 10% Solution, which I cannot recommend heartily enough. This is the point where you pick up individual sentences and tap them to make sure they ring true.

Above all this is the stage where you read aloud. If you do not read your work out loud and you take only one thing away from this essay, please make it starting to read your stuff out loud. You will catch errors and repeated words. More importantly, you will catch infelicities and ungraceful sounds.

And this is how you know you are done. Once you have done this once, perhaps more depending on your degree of perfectionism, the story is ready to have a cover letter attached and to go out into the world. Celebrate briefly, then go work on a new piece.

Learning to Trust Yourself as an Editor

Part of being a writer is the act of writing, letting the words flow out onto the page. It’s a joyful part when the words are coming fast and quick and wonderful.

Another part is the act of rewriting, taking the results of that flow and turning them into a wonderful writing. If you know that you can do this, it helps with the act of writing, because you’re not worrying about whether what you’re writing is good or not. You know that what matters is producing the words, because you can trust yourself to make them better.

If you have a lump of words, you can always turn them into something, even if it takes resorting to outrageously and wonderfully experimental techniques like a cut-up in the mode of William S. Burroughs. With a blank page, your options are considerably more limited.

Once you learn to trust your editing skills, worrying about the writing’s quality will not impede the flow — at least as much, given that we are all a bit insecure. Think of trapeze artists – if you can trust the safety net that editing will provide you, you will be able to take the risks necessary to learn how to execute amazing aerial maneuvers in your writing.

How do you learn to trust yourself as an editor?

1. Read widely both in and out of the field, and read at least one classic for every piece of trash.
2. Read what people say about the field and writing in general. Are there writers you like? They may well have written about their process, which you can usually find via their website.
3. Look at what people do in their writing and how they do it. Here are some books I recommend: Carol Bly’s The Passionate Accurate Story, Dave Farland’s Million Dollar Outlines, Stephen King’s On Writing, Ursula K. LeGuin’s Steering the Craft, Shawl and Ward’s Writing the Other, Phyllis Whitney’s Guide to Fiction Writing, Kate Wilhelm’s Storyteller. Want to go deeper than that? Try Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction, Samuel R. Delany’s About Writing, Hoffman and Murphy’s Essentials of the Theory of Fiction, Michael Moorcock’s Wizardry and Wild Romance, Jeff Vandermeer’s Wonderbook, or Williams’ Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace.
4. Have some notion in your head of what writing is supposed to do. Teaching classes is a pretty good way to acquire this. So is thinking hard about it and writing essays. One of the best essays I know on the subject is George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.”

Your Writing Group and the Revision Process

Your writing group — or your group of beta readers — is a huge asset when working with a piece. You will want different kinds of feedback from them depending on what stage the manuscript is at, so let them know: are you looking at the big picture or is the piece about to go out and you just need copyedits and minor tweaks.

You do not have to take every piece of feedback that is given you, particularly if you don’t think the person understood what you were trying to do with the story. I have found that if everyone is pointing to the same thing about a story, it is indeed broken at that spot, but usually none of the suggested fixes will work and I will need to go off, think hard about it, and come up with something that works.

I feel that one learns more from critiquing than by being critiqued, overall, and so participating in a writing group is part of that learning to trust your internal editor.

Letting Go

Sending a story out into the world can be hard, particularly if you’re not sure that it’s ready. But you must. Sending pieces out and getting feedback, even when it’s a simple yes/no, is part of being a writer. Stories sitting on your hard drive do no one any good, particularly you. Good luck!
#sfwapro