It's been a while since I decided to add something
different to my blog rotation. Today I’ll start looking at “advice” for writing
short stories – not from me, but from other short story writers. In speculative
fiction, “short” has very carefully delineated categories: “The Science Fiction
and Fantasy Writers of America specifies word lengths for each category of its
Nebula award categories by word count; Novel 40,000 words or over; Novella 17,500
to 39,999 words; Novelette 7,500 to 17,499 words; Short story under 7,500 words.”
I’m going to use advice from people who, in addition to
writing novels, have also spent plenty of time “interning” with short stories. The
advice will be in the form of one or several quotes off of which I’ll jump and
connect it with my own writing experience. While I don’t write full-time,
nor do I make enough money with my writing to live off of it...neither do most 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!
Without further ado, short story advice from NK
Jemisin and how I’m working to improve my own short stories:
Oddly enough, Jemisin was, “[A former] counseling psychologist
and educator, specializing in career counseling of late adolescents and young
adults…[at] a number of universities as an administrator and faculty member…volunteering
with community service organizations and some private career coaching… helping
real people in real time and working with marginalized kids.” (https://www.orbitbooks.net/interview/n-k-jemisin/)
It so happens that I had a similar job until I retired
three months ago – except for the “private career coaching”, though I’ve done
that since then for former students who have graduated, I’ve never been paid
for it and it wasn’t an “official job”.
At any rate, while I’ve written novels, none of them have
been published (two of them were published for a short period of time with a
company that did only ebooks and handled
so many that after a brief promotion when it first came out, languished. They
also refused to add either book to a new program aimed at putting their ebooks
into school libraries…which actually made no sense to me. I figured as a teacher
in a school district, I’d be able to personally promote the books. They didn’t
see…me. At all. Ever. I withdrew the books and reverted the copyrights back to
me.
The vast majority of my published writing has been short
stories – the opposite of N K Jemisin’s experience.
But, her publisher recently collected and released a
majority of her short stories. I mined several articles to get some insight
into how she writes them and then pondered how I can apply her wisdom to my own
writing.
She pointed out that, “Back at the beginning of my
career, I didn’t think I was capable of writing short fiction, let alone publishing
it!”
But apparently, the allure of the short form won her
over. “She began writing short stories as a way to tap into her creativity back
when publishers didn’t know what to do with books like hers about black
characters.”
She’s not a single-genre writer, though she’s found her
sweet spot in the fantasy genre. The collection, “How Long ’Til Black Future
Month? spans almost the entirety of her career as a published author.
It’s a collection of short stories that dazzles in the ease with which it winds
across genre and tone.” I confess, I’m not a huge fan of fantasy; I take my
recommendations from my daughter, who is far more experienced in choosing what
might interest me. Besides the “entry level’ fantasy – LOTR and CON – at her
recommendation, I’ve read Jonathan Stroud’s BARTIMEUS series and JONATHAN
STRANGE AND MR. NORRELL by Susanna Clarke.
I managed to discover a few others on my own, like Stephen
R. Donaldson’s THOMAS COVENANT series; Rebecca Roanhorse’ the first of her Sixth
World series, TRAIL OF LIGHTNING; China Miéville’s PERDIDO STREET STATION.
I’ll be able to expand my experience when I read the
collection of Jemisin’s short stories above. I’m on the waiting list at the
library, where I’m something like #zillion…
At any rate, based on the interviews listed below, I’ve
gleaned the following:
She uses “…cities —but not in the meticulous,
infrastructure fetishist manner of most speculative fiction writers. Jemisin is
an author who conjures place by building a people. What they value, what they
believe, what threatens to tear them apart from within.”
Interestingly, she uses short stories to “test” worlds
and settings: “If you read ‘Stone Hunger,’ [from How Long ‘til Black Future
Month] and then read the Broken Earth series, you would see where I did not
like the way that ‘Stone Hunger’ depicted the magical form orogeny. In that
short story, it was very ‘sense specific.’ The character thought of everything
in terms of the taste of food, and that wasn't going to work, because I wanted
it to be effectively a science that had gone wrong.”
As well, “On the best piece of writing advice she got
before becoming a published writer: ‘Persist.’ That is, if you continue to work
on your craft and continue to improve and continue to submit, you will
eventually break through. I’ve found this to be true.”
This is something I also discovered – when I started
writing my own stories at the tender age of 12, after I finished reading the
Tripod trilogy by John Christopher. That was 51 years ago. Since then, I’ve had
stories published in many magazines and on several online venues. I’d never had
come this far if I hadn’t just stuck with it and kept writing! The stories on
the sidebar are the end result of some 1100 submissions since 1990…There was a
time when I read SF just because I liked it – purely for entertainment. Lately,
I’ve started reading for deeper meaning.
Don’t get me wrong, I still like to be entertained, but I
also want to be challenged. I read BINTI by Nnedi Okorafor and while it was
incredibly entertaining and she introduced me to a fascinating alien people,
she also challenged my thinking by subtly and repeatedly saying, “What we think
is happening isn’t necessarily what is REALLY happening.” This is what the best
science fiction writers lead me to – Ted Chiang’s aliens in “Story of Your Life”
which became the movie “Arrival”; even the STAR TREK: TNG episode by Joe
Menosky and Phillip LaZebnik, “Darmok”.
While I’m not sure that I’m ready to “change society”, I
DO try to write stories that challenge us to think beyond what’s going on
today. NK Jemisin said, “I didn't used to think [that speculative fiction has
the power to change society], and then I started to realize, first off that I
was underestimating it, and then second of all that other people had already
done that calculation and were using it for evil. It sounds kind of corny, but
I started to realize it when right-wingers tried to take over fandom. When you
started trying to take over every bit of media, and you suddenly see Nazis in
video games and comic books trying their damnedest to squish out people who are
different from young, straight, white boys, and harassing and trying to dox them,
there's a reason for that.”
As I write, I continue to work to include marginalized
people in my stories. My main POV character is “me” because it’s impossible for
me to imagine something so alien to me as being, for example, a black man born before
the passage of the Civil Rights Amendment – and becoming aware of race and prejudice
as I entered adolescence; or as the interviewer said in one article, “On what a
‘white, cisgender man who is well-off and generally has a good life’ can do to ‘advocate
for people who are not like [him]’”
I agree that “…people who are not like you are generally
doing a good job of advocating for themselves. Might help to just signal-boost
them wherever you see them. Do keep in mind that one of the problems
marginalized writers face is visibility, in some cases because they’re drowned
out by more privileged writers. So if you’ve got a platform, share it!” and
though I have no platform yet, I’d like make a commitment to doing that if I
ever DO get a platform that attracts more than a couple dozen people each post.
Last of all, she makes sure that in her short stories “…that
all of my main characters have a rich internal life—that is, that they have
families, beliefs and motivations of their own outside of the plot, hobbies and
habits, weird quirks, and so on. All the things that make a character complex
and not just a placeholder. If you do it right, the character basically writes
herself.”
I have lots more to learn and I can’t wait to read
through “How Long ‘til Black Future Month” – and take copious notes!
