Using the panel discussions of the most
recent World Science Fiction Convention in Spokane, August 2015, I will jump
off, jump on, rail against, and shamelessly agree with the BRIEF DESCRIPTION
given in the pdf copy of the Program Guide. This is event #3219 . The link is
provided below…
Certainly Not For the Money: Why We Write
Short Fiction – Why do we put ourselves through the angst of writing short fiction?
It certainly isn’t the money. Why else would we do it? Mark J. Ferrari (m), Mur
Lafferty, Sarah Pinsker, Stefan Rudnicki, Rick Wilber
I have a strange
philosophy that springs out of being a teacher and guidance counselor for the
past thirty-five years...
I need to lay
some groundwork first. I live in a large suburb of Minneapolis, not so large
that I can safely have nothing to do with how things are done in the city. If I
choose, my voice can be heard at school board meetings, city council meetings,
and in the “local” paper – which is a version of a larger corporate paper that
prints a sort of template of news with stories for the different communities
rearranged to bring “our” local news to the headlines.
Twenty years
ago, I wrote these words for that paper: “At the very bottom of this criticizable
heap are the schools. Because schools don’t produce tangible products, it’s
easy to criticize and hard to defend them.”
While that’s
certainly true today, the sense that as a teacher I have never produced a
single, tangible student who is “educated” or “helped”. A person who works for
Microsoft can point to a program or a piece of hardware and say, “I worked on…part
of the project!”
My brother can
point to our local Target store and say, “I supervised the remodel of that
store!”
My sister can
say, “We helped these people walk again at our clinic!”
All I can say is
“I’m a guidance counselor; or I taught
ninth grade physical science for eleven years…” Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got
some first rate friends who were once students of mine; some of them produce
tangible products even! But because the nature of education is to “produce” a graduate,
and the team that takes part in that education consists of first and foremost, the
student, then in huge part, the parents; followed by relatives, and a bewildering
host of teachers from pre-school through 12th grade; there is
nothing for me to show off or say, “I did this for this student…”
To combat this
in my life, I mow the lawn and snow blow the driveway. These two acts are
important to me because when I’m done mowing the lawn, I can turn around and
say, “The lawn is mowed. See!” When I’m doing snow blowing the driveway, I can
turn around and say, “See! The driveway is now clear!”
When I write a
short story, I can say, “See, the story is done. I can send it out.” It’s a
product that has been completed in a relatively short time and I can point to
it if it gets published and say, “There it is. Read it if you’d like.”
Novels are NOT
like that! I have one out right now that took well over a decade to write and
sell. I have a second one coming out at the end of next month that took EIGHT YEARS
to sell and after a year invested writing it.
Because of my
day job, I desperately need to be able to produce something that doesn’t
require so much time to become a tangible object that I grow old waiting to see
it! I need to produce something that IS tangible.
And so I write
short stories; and I enjoy writing them as well. I like the freedom to focus on
a single moment that defines the life of my character – and that’s because I am
rarely present at the defining moment in the lives of the students I work with.
Image: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/KbNUiOpysmee5gpTBHvUKYiDvt6I46CIXDKv64IjbWeR6Z
K0jnFVVTh6enZoV9UBNw=h900
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