In September of 2007, I started this blog
with a bit of writing advice. A little over a year later, I discovered how
little I knew about writing after hearing children’s writer, Lin Oliver speak
at a convention hosted by the Minnesota Society of Children’s Book Writers and
Illustrators. Since then, I have shared (with their permission) and applied the
writing wisdom of Lin Oliver, Jack McDevitt, Nathan Bransford, Mike Duran,
Kristine Kathryn Rusch, SL Veihl, Bruce Bethke, and Julie Czerneda. Together
they write in genres broad and deep, and have acted as agents, editors,
publishers, columnists, and teachers. Since then, I figured I’ve got enough
publications now that I can share some of the things I did “right” and I’m busy
sharing that with you.
While I don’t write full-time, nor do I make
enough money with my writing to live off of it...neither do all of the
professional writers above...someone pays for and publishes ten percent of what
I write. When I started this blog, that was NOT true, so I may have reached a
point where my own advice is reasonably good. We shall see! Hemingway’s quote
above will now remain unchanged as I work to increase my writing output and
sales! As always, your comments are welcome!
This story
started out as a story about me and where I live. So the first thing I did
right was start with something familiar; to use the proper writer’s vernacular,
I “wrote what I knew”.
Of course, I’d
also been told never to write a story claiming “it’s true! I only changed the
names!”…well, that doesn’t cut the cheese.
“…simply jotting
down a transcript of a real event and inserting it into a novel may not work
particularly well; all too often, a purely factual account will not provide the
reader accustomed to fiction’s standards of world-depiction with sufficient
information to be able to picture what the writer experienced…There’s a reason
that perennial cry of the realistic writer — ‘But it really happened that way!’
— doesn’t particularly impress agents, editors, or contest judges, you know.
With apologies to Aunt Virginia, no matter how true the facts, it’s the
writer’s responsibility to make them seem true to the reader.” (Anne Mini)
Besides, there
are no fairies in the marsh near my house. Cranes, fox, coyote, wood ducks,
pheasant, bald eagles, red-tailed hawks – absolutely yes! Also, there’s no
retirement community right next to the park reserve. At least not yet. But the
rest of it? The weather, the owls and their pellets, the grandson (mine is only
eight years old right now), and the science of checking meals of owls to ascertain
the health of the populations of both
the predator and prey – though there are no stick pads to reconstruct skeletons
on (who would bother?) – those are all real.
Combined, they
created something I wrote about last week. They made a story that communicated
a sense of wonder. There are LOTS of definitions of what constitutes a sense of
wonder. Distilled down from a FEW sources I found:
“While science or
fantasy or horror can be the vehicle, this is entirely a FEELING that comes
from inside a READER [from stories that]…have something unreal about them…a
feeling of awakening or awe triggered by an expansion of one’s awareness of
what is possible or by confrontation with the vastness of space and time…‘conceptual
breakthrough’ or ‘paradigm shift’…achieved through the recasting of…previous
narrative experiences in a larger context…speculation rooted in reality…Any[0ne]
who has looked up at the stars at night and thought about how far away they
are, how there is no end or outer edge to this place, this universe—any[one]
who has felt the thrill of fear and excitement at such thoughts…some widening
of the mind’s horizons, not matter what direction…any new sensory experience,
impossible to the reader in his own person, is…what the activity of science
fiction is writing about…a position from which they can glimpse for themselves,
with no further auctorial aid, a scheme of things where mankind is seen in a
new perspective…”
Given this as a
starting ground, both of my stories unconsciously did this. In the first, I had
a group of Human teenagers spend several days with a group of WheeAh teenagers isolated
on a sailboat in the middle of the ocean. Something bad happens and the group
pulls together and “saves the day”.
In “Fairy Bones”,
a cranky teenager shuffled between divorced parents ends up cooling his jets
with grandmaw: a sentence to boredom, without a doubt. She isn’t any more
thrilled about spending time with a moody adolescent, but just figures she’s
got a job to do. He’s the one then who discovers what appears to be the skeleton
that is NOT a mouse or anything else, but a HUMANOID. Together, grandmother and
grandson begin to unravel what appears to be something the government even
knows about! They draw together and end up appreciating each other – expanding
both their knowledge of the UNIVERSE and of each other.
It may not have
impressed editors whose usual markets diminish the importance of anyone younger
than (say) 35 or 60…but COW bought it after suggesting a few things that sharpened
both the focus of the story and the interaction between the boy and his
grandmother. After incorporating the editor’s suggestions, the story was much
stronger and they published it.
Takeaway: the
sense of wonder is something I need to incorporate not only for COW stories,
but also for all of my work. It is, after all, what science fiction is supposed
to be about. I aimed it at this market and the wrote to editorial request.
This was a fun
story and I have an idea for a sort of “sequel”. Working title is “Fairy Tones”
about communicating with the fairies…
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