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 Nnedi Okorafor – with a few from myself…
I first came across Nnedi Okorofor’s writing when I was on the Andre Norton Award committee for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). That was the year her YA novel THE SHADOW SPEAKER. It was a strong year. I nominated THE TRUE MEANING OF SMEKDAY by Adam Rex, though the group put forth SHADOW SPEAKER…the SFWA membership overwhelmingly voted for HPAT DEATHLY HALLOWS (of course…and JK Rowling didn’t even CARE if she got it or if she hadn’t. She actually didn’t even notice…)
At any rate, Nnedi Okorafor said, “I wrote for eight years without even thinking of getting published. It wasn’t about an audience, I just wanted to write my stories. I enjoyed it. It was very gradual. I wrote about five novels before a professor told me I should try to get something published. I shrugged and said, “I guess” and submitted a short story to a journal. And that was the beginning. No novel that I’ve had published ever went through the normal route, however. I understood from the start that my path was not going to be typical. I knew the usual routes wouldn’t work for me because I was writing things that were...very unusual.”
My goal, as a 12-going-on-13-year-old, was to write more stories like John Christopher’s THE WHITE MOUNTAIN trilogy. I’d just finished them in the fall of my seventh grade year (I’d be 12 years old for eight more months…). I wanted to write my own story so it could go on forever. That first story, in longhand using a pencil was called (unsurprisingly) THE WHITE VINES and it was about alien vines growing out of a cornfield an taking over city sewers. That’s all I remember, and that was my motivation for writing – to be somewhere ELSE. I’d discovered science fiction in sixth grade with SPACESHIP UNDER THE APPLE TREE (by Louis Slbodkin) and THE WONDERFUL FLIGHT TO THE MUSCHROOM PLANET (by Eleanor Cameron). Junior High School offered an abundance of new books which I devoured – and which prompted me to write my oldest surviving story, a rip off of Andre Norton’s science fiction novels that included cats. (If you dare, here’s a link to it – not in the original pencil, I typed it up: http://theworkandworksheetsofguystewart.blogspot.com/2014/05/where-my-writing-beganmy-first.html)
“…a lot of people are told to stifle their imaginations, just in order to get by. Science fiction does the exact opposite. People who are missing that expression in their lives are fulfilled when they read a science-fiction narrative.”
That’s what I was told the whole time I was growing up…sure, my dad and I watched STAR TREK; he read some science fiction, too. But to WRITE the stuff? It was absurd! I can’t say my parents actively discouraged me – my mom got me my first Underwood-style manual typewriter, then she bought a MASSIVE electric one when the school district she worked for were selling them off to get new ones. But it was subtly implied.
Unlike Nnedi Okorafor, I grew up loathing sports. A brief sojourn into baseball when I was eight or nine and spending a season in the outfield because I could neither catch, throw, hit, or run left me with my current indifference to all things professional sports. She was a tennis and track star in her youth. So was everyone in my family: Dad played softball and bowled (after football and basketball all the way through high school), my brothers both played football and hockey (my next youngest brother going to college on a scholarship), then diverged while one did track and field, the other baseball. Both of them played for traveling hockey teams; my sister did softball and volleyball…Mom? Girls Athletic Association all three years of high school, and FENCING in college at the University of Minnesota.
Me? Tried out for the swim team my senior year – because of my dislocating shoulder, I became the team manager. After training and running all summer long and being coached by my best friend – and with ZERO support from my family, who thought I was crazy – I tried out for the junior college football team, sprained my ankle, and became the assistant trainer for two years, as well as becoming the team statistician and learning ow to keep those books…
I had turned to reading to escape; I continued in writing to escape…and maybe get published.
“Nearly a decade passed before I realized the lesson in this experience. Just as in sports, when writing creatively, if you don’t love the craft and art of it, you’ll never experience this pure form of success. Yet when you do have this love, you realize that pure success does not come from fame or fortune, it grows from that love.”
Unlike Nnedi Okorafor, I grew up loathing sports. A brief sojourn into baseball when I was eight or nine and spending a season in the outfield because I could neither catch, throw, hit, or run left me with my current indifference to all things professional sports. She was a tennis and track star in her youth. So was everyone in my family: Dad played softball and bowled (after football and basketball all the way through high school), my brothers both played football and hockey (my next youngest brother going to college on a scholarship), then diverged while one did track and field, the other baseball. Both of them played for traveling hockey teams; my sister did softball and volleyball…Mom? Girls Athletic Association all three years of high school, and FENCING in college at the University of Minnesota.
Me? Tried out for the swim team my senior year – because of my dislocating shoulder, I became the team manager. After training and running all summer long and being coached by my best friend – and with ZERO support from my family, who thought I was crazy – I tried out for the junior college football team, sprained my ankle, and became the assistant trainer for two years, as well as becoming the team statistician and learning ow to keep those books…
I had turned to reading to escape; I continued in writing to escape…and maybe get published.
“Nearly a decade passed before I realized the lesson in this experience. Just as in sports, when writing creatively, if you don’t love the craft and art of it, you’ll never experience this pure form of success. Yet when you do have this love, you realize that pure success does not come from fame or fortune, it grows from that love.”
This one I fully understand – I love writing. My mantra became as still is something Isaac Asimov once wrote: 
https://cdn.boldomatic.com/content/post/9gjTZg/I-write-for-the-same-reason-I-breathe-because-if?size=800
Nnedi Okorafor expresses a similar concept when she said, “‘When a story comes to me, I have to write it or it won't let me rest,’ Okorafor said. ‘The characters are real to me. I hear their voices. Their actions affect me. The places I write about exist. I've felt the sting of their sand storms and smelled their forests. The creatures really do bite, snarl, sing, spit, sting, etc. When I'm writing, I'm there and I enjoy being there.’”
It’s almost like being possessed or filled with the Holy Spirit. When it happens, it’s virtually impossible to stay still; it’s virtually impossible to get away from the story. I’ve two stories that has dogged me for decades. The title’s remained the same as well, but I think that I’ve only recently reached a point where I MIGHT be skilled enough to write them. For now, just two titles, the first I will attempt to write soon: “Of the Galeborne”; the second “Salvation Writ in Stainless Steel”. I have the images in my mind, but the entire, coherent story isn’t there yet. I’m currently on Mars with several characters as Mars teeters on the bring of either a revolution or a reformation. Both are profound; one stands a better chance of leaving buildings standing than the other.
“It's interesting because a lot of my stories are often based on several things, but their foundation is in the stories of the women and girls around me and also within myself. And Binti comes from a very insular family - a cultural family that's very close. And she ends up picking up and going and leaving her family and going just so that she can go to a university that is on another planet.” Nnedi Okorafor had done precisely this when she answered the call to become a college professor far from her family. The EMOTIONS she was experiencing drove the work of fiction.
So, what IS the source of my stories? When I look at my published work – which I view as a successful expression of something that is really in me; something I struggle with; something I’m working through. Two of my most recent stories, “Kamsahamnida, America” and “Road Veterinarian”, I deal with the issue of alienation (fortunately neither one has aliens in it!) – the separation of the main character from his world. The first one is literally separated from Earth when he goes to the Moon; in the second story, he’s self-isolating because he was born with PBT (PieBald Trait) aka piebaldism and has issues with people seeing him outside the framework of his work as a veterinary geneticist, where he is an acknowledged world expert. In another story, “Cockroach, Wasp, Gecko, Tiger”, the main character is living in a political internment camp in North Korea; “The Last Mayan Aristocrat”…well, it’s self-explanatory isn’t it?
So, the discovery here is the importance of knowing WHERE you’re writing from.
An unsold story of mine may be unsold because the sense of isolation I feel sometimes wasn’t clearly expressed. “May They Rest” (revised and renamed “By Law and Custom”) is also an isolation story where the sole survivor of a massacre of a Human colony on a world claimed by the intelligent plant WheetAh returns to…hmm…I don’t remember specifically WHY he returns, though his motivation is not altruistic in any way. Which might be part of the problem of the story…
So, there you go. What I’ve learned from Nnedi Okorfor in the time I spent in her universes. I hope that no matter how old I get, I continue to learn!
References: https://www.flossmoor.org/464/Nnedi-Okorafor---The-Writer, https://ideas.ted.com/write-your-story-and-dont-be-afraid-to-write-it-a-sci-fi-writer-talks-about-finding-her-voice-and-being-a-superhero/, https://www.writersofthefuture.com/nnedi-okorafor/, http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/okorafor_interview/, https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/25/15610998/nnedi-okorafor-binti-home-night-masquerade-cover-interview-read, https://www.npr.org/2016/08/20/490771640/hugo-nominee-nnedi-okorafor-breaks-down-her-sci-fi-writing
Image: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/9f/22/3b/9f223b1e57a36e14db3eb13715fbe3f9.jpg
https://cdn.boldomatic.com/content/post/9gjTZg/I-write-for-the-same-reason-I-breathe-because-if?size=800
Nnedi Okorafor expresses a similar concept when she said, “‘When a story comes to me, I have to write it or it won't let me rest,’ Okorafor said. ‘The characters are real to me. I hear their voices. Their actions affect me. The places I write about exist. I've felt the sting of their sand storms and smelled their forests. The creatures really do bite, snarl, sing, spit, sting, etc. When I'm writing, I'm there and I enjoy being there.’”
It’s almost like being possessed or filled with the Holy Spirit. When it happens, it’s virtually impossible to stay still; it’s virtually impossible to get away from the story. I’ve two stories that has dogged me for decades. The title’s remained the same as well, but I think that I’ve only recently reached a point where I MIGHT be skilled enough to write them. For now, just two titles, the first I will attempt to write soon: “Of the Galeborne”; the second “Salvation Writ in Stainless Steel”. I have the images in my mind, but the entire, coherent story isn’t there yet. I’m currently on Mars with several characters as Mars teeters on the bring of either a revolution or a reformation. Both are profound; one stands a better chance of leaving buildings standing than the other.
“It's interesting because a lot of my stories are often based on several things, but their foundation is in the stories of the women and girls around me and also within myself. And Binti comes from a very insular family - a cultural family that's very close. And she ends up picking up and going and leaving her family and going just so that she can go to a university that is on another planet.” Nnedi Okorafor had done precisely this when she answered the call to become a college professor far from her family. The EMOTIONS she was experiencing drove the work of fiction.
So, what IS the source of my stories? When I look at my published work – which I view as a successful expression of something that is really in me; something I struggle with; something I’m working through. Two of my most recent stories, “Kamsahamnida, America” and “Road Veterinarian”, I deal with the issue of alienation (fortunately neither one has aliens in it!) – the separation of the main character from his world. The first one is literally separated from Earth when he goes to the Moon; in the second story, he’s self-isolating because he was born with PBT (PieBald Trait) aka piebaldism and has issues with people seeing him outside the framework of his work as a veterinary geneticist, where he is an acknowledged world expert. In another story, “Cockroach, Wasp, Gecko, Tiger”, the main character is living in a political internment camp in North Korea; “The Last Mayan Aristocrat”…well, it’s self-explanatory isn’t it?
So, the discovery here is the importance of knowing WHERE you’re writing from.
An unsold story of mine may be unsold because the sense of isolation I feel sometimes wasn’t clearly expressed. “May They Rest” (revised and renamed “By Law and Custom”) is also an isolation story where the sole survivor of a massacre of a Human colony on a world claimed by the intelligent plant WheetAh returns to…hmm…I don’t remember specifically WHY he returns, though his motivation is not altruistic in any way. Which might be part of the problem of the story…
So, there you go. What I’ve learned from Nnedi Okorfor in the time I spent in her universes. I hope that no matter how old I get, I continue to learn!
References: https://www.flossmoor.org/464/Nnedi-Okorafor---The-Writer, https://ideas.ted.com/write-your-story-and-dont-be-afraid-to-write-it-a-sci-fi-writer-talks-about-finding-her-voice-and-being-a-superhero/, https://www.writersofthefuture.com/nnedi-okorafor/, http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/okorafor_interview/, https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/25/15610998/nnedi-okorafor-binti-home-night-masquerade-cover-interview-read, https://www.npr.org/2016/08/20/490771640/hugo-nominee-nnedi-okorafor-breaks-down-her-sci-fi-writing
Image: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/9f/22/3b/9f223b1e57a36e14db3eb13715fbe3f9.jpg
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