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.
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
to the left will now remain unchanged as I work to increase my writing output
and sales! As always, your comments are welcome!
I have a saying regarding “literary fiction”: “[It’s] about powerless
people living their lives in excruciating detail. The main character is the
author in thin disguise making educated, satirical, wise, obscure, or erudite
commentary in a way no real person in that life could possibly be able to
duplicate.” This was from my personal journal after reading Hemingway’s FOR
WHOM THE BELL TOLLS, Edwidge Danticat’s KRIK KRAK!, and several years later,
Gregory David Robert’s SHANTARAM.
There is a powerful movement in science fiction to writer “literarily”
as well as in the more traditional style of most SF – space operas –
exemplified by the works of Ursula K. LeGuin, Octavia Butler, Philip K. Dick, Samuel
R. Delaney, Mary Doria Russell, Stanislaw Lem, and others including JG Ballard,
who was my very first exposure to literary SF.
There is a certain kind of literary SF that I like, which delves deeply
into character while maintaining the edifice of science fiction adventure. After
reading Danticat’s THE FARMING OF BONES, I wanted to try my hand at the style
and wrote this story.
I thought it was deep, interesting, and powerful – exactly what
literary fiction was supposed to be.
It was summarily and anonymously rejected a dozen times, so I submitted
it to an on-line writer’s group I was part of. It was summarily executed with
many comments. The most succinct were:
“Something could come of this, in such a way that although
Celianne fails to overcome her fear of starships, she finds a way to help her
family and perhaps even pay off her debts. Perhaps they've even scavenged
enough parts of derelict ships to build their own and need a pilot, who knows?
Well, you do. So do consider doing more with this aspect of the story.”
“As a story, this one starts out quite slowly. A conflict
doesn't become apparent to me until Bill's status is explained on page 10, and
then the Company man threatens Celianne on page 11. The tension mostly
evaporates while she's rescued by the grumpah, to return only on page 21 when
Mamun demands his payment.
“Initially, we're presented with Celianne's internal
conflict which is that she misses flight but is terrified of it because of
being kidnapped and tortured by pirates. However, I'm not sure-at least in the
beginning-what she wants. She misses flying, but does she want it again? In the
first few pages, there is no strong desire driving her forward. She's simply
going through her daily routine until she learns of her husband's injuries and
creditors begin to harass her. Because of this, I did not feel truly engaged in
the story until the damaged harvester came in…As I mentioned earlier, I like
that Celianne overcomes her fear. However, when the _grumpah_ says he's taught
a lot of female humans to fly, it seems that success will come easily to
Celianne, and it does. This makes the ending inevitable but not surprising.
Celianne never seems to be in any danger from flight.”
All of these people – as helpful as they were trying to be – were
READING the story as if it were a standard SF story; in which case, she would
overcome her fear of going back into the weirdness of interstellar flight, save
her family, and leave Enstad’s Planet behind.
But that wasn’t what I was trying for in the story! I wanted to
communicate that no matter where we go, we are ALWAYS going to be dissatisfied.
We can live on worlds far from Earth, far from everything we know and evolved/were
created for, and still we will whine and cry about our lives. We will be
bored...that’s the thing I will never forgive STAR TREK for: no one on the show
is ever bored. Apparently, along with being free from want, they “…don't
succumb to revenge…have a more evolved sensibility”, and all the rest of the
wonder that makes STAR TREK fun, but ultimately doomed, no one’s ever becomes
bored whilst trekking between the stars.
I don’t hold that hope up for Humanity and I think the literary SF
writers don’t either. But there are few who can write it and maintain the
balance between the exploration of the “normalness” of space travel and
forward-moving action/adventure.
Most people think I missed the boat here.
Until I sent it to Bruce Bethke.
He was the first person to understand the story. It could be that his
writing tends to be in this vein – it would explain why he won the PKD Award in
1995. He has fascinating thoughts about the life, the universe and everything
and he has become a good friend of mine. He “gets me” where others don’t.
I’ve written a few other stories with a literary bent – and one person that
the list below doesn’t include but SHOULD, is Michael F. Flynn. If you want to
read literary science fiction wrapped in a hard science fiction shell, try THE
WRECK OF THE RIVER OF STARS.
At any rate, I’m going to continue to try and mine this vein despite my
negative assessment at the top of this essay. While my intent is to counteract
the rosy perfection of STAR TREK’s future, I also refuse to fall into the grim
darkness of THE HUNGER GAME’s future.
There has to be a middle ground and I am more than willing to keep
hammering away at what I could call in my head, “realistic future science fiction”...
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