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 observations by Paolo Bacigalupi – with a few from myself…
“Short fiction seems
more targeted - hand grenades of ideas, if you will. When they work, they hit,
they explode, and you never forget them. Long fiction feels more like atmosphere:
it's a lot smokier and less defined.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi
I first ran across his work when a YA novel came in the mail. I was on the SFWA Norton Award Committee, and in those days, seven or so of us read as many YA speculative fiction novels that came to us in the mail, then discussed them in an online forum, then agreed finally to a recommended list which the SFWA membership was SUPPOSED to vote on. That committee no longer exists because the membership mostly ignored our recommendations and voted for super star writers rather than writers who were creating superior works.
At any rate, I got a copy of his first novel, THE WINDUP GIRL (Nightshade Press, September 2009) for the Norton and while I didn’t recommend it for the award, the group did. Even I found it intriguing…
But this advice isn’t about writing novels! It’s about writing short stories, and Bacigalupi tested the waters, so to speak, with two shorter stories. The first, “The Calorie Man” was a novelette that appeared in the September 2005 issue of F&SF followed a year later by “Yellow Card Man” in the December 2006 issue of ASIMOV’S.
During an interview with Allan Vorda in 2010 for the online journal, Rain Taxi, Bacigalupi said this about how these stories were created out of an idea for the novel: “[The stories] are precursors for characters and themes in TWG. When did these the ideas coalesce into the larger work? (PB) Actually, the novel's seed came first. I created a short story that just refused to work. When I showed it to a friend of mine, she commented that it felt like a dwarf star, with too many characters and too many plotlines all jammed against one another. It was more like a novel, compressed, and needed to be a novel, uncompressed…I went back to [it] and started harvesting interesting bits. ‘The Calorie Man’ [explored] the GMOs and peak-oil world—without anything else getting in the way. ‘Yellow Card Man’…[was] a character study, and fill in the back-story of one of the characters…It looked like there were at least a dozen other possible stories just waiting to be mined [from that story]…from the initial story idea to…the book…it was something like five or six years.”
He contends that these two stories were “…hand grenades of ideas…” that, in his case, exploded into a novel that catapulted him into SF “stardom”.
Whew! “hand grenades of ideas” is a tall order for your average short story!
Oops…we’re not talking about average stories here, though. We’re talking earthshaking stories. Paradigm-shifting stories.
Stories like “The Tides of Kithrup” (ANALOG May 1981), in which a Dolphin-Human crew intentionally strands their starship at the bottom of an ocean that has deadly metallic components that will kill the crew in the long-term. They have to repair their ship while powerful aliens orbiting the planets fight over the chance to take Humans, Dolphins, Chimpanzees, Gorillas, and Dogs and genetically “finish” them…
Stories like “Weyr Search” (ANALOG October 1967) where a story that begins like a medieval fantasy with dragons and castles turns out to be story about teleporting, genetically engineered fire-breathing intelligences battling to keep a Human colony safe from a space-borne mycorrhizoid.
Stories like “Diving Into the Wreck” (ASIMOV’S December 2005) in which a wreck diver (like scuba divers who do this into sunken ships) “dives” into derelict star ships, researches them, then takes other “divers” into them. She finds “an enormous, incredibly old, Earth-made ship built before Faster Than Light technology this far from Earth. She hires a group of divers to explore the wreck with her; but the ship won’t give up its treasures without a steep cost…” Old idea, new paradigm.
So – my challenge has always been personifying the “hand grenade”. I have ideas – Humans vs Plantimals; drastically genetically engineered Humans in the clouds of a puffy Jupiter gas giant; interstellar union of aliens whose entrance into the union is based on how “giving” a civilization is; but I haven’t been consistently able to take that grenade and load it with a situation that illustrates the foundational problem of the story.
My goal then is to reframe “May They Rest” and cast it (in light of the current political environment”) into a lost graveyard in Vietnam. Another goal will be to create a “brother story” in the skies of River. Also, I’ve got the background of a story that deals with someone who is accidentally injured and is unable to be an effective member of an advanced alien society – and a Human who suggests that while he may be handicapped in the main culture and about to be terminated; he might have the mind of a king in a parallel society of animals closely related to them…
Anyway, as always, I’ll keep you posted.
References: https://shortform.livejournal.com/33840.html, https://www.raintaxi.com/the-author-with-the-unpronounceable-name-an-interview-with-paolo-bacigalupi/Image: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/9f/22/3b/9f223b1e57a36e14db3eb13715fbe3f9.jpg
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