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...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 Larry Niven – with a few from myself…
Larry Niven is known for a number of stories and novels that created settings and civilizations NO ONE had ever of thought of before. Perhaps his most fascinating creation was Ringworld: “…a gigantic artificial ring, to see if it poses any threat. The Ringworld is about one million miles (1.6 million km) wide and approximately the diameter of Earth's orbit (which makes it about 584.3 million miles or 940.4 million km in circumference), encircling a sunlike star. It rotates to provide artificial gravity 99.2% as strong as Earth's from centrifugal force. The Ringworld has a habitable, flat inner surface (equivalent in area to approximately three million Earths), a breathable atmosphere and a temperature optimal for humans. Night is provided by an inner ring of shadow squares which are connected to each other by thin, ultra-strong wire.”
However, he’s written dozens of short stories and once said, “You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money’s in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed.”
Well…I’ve been writing short stories pretty much since I started writing a half-century ago. While I’ve absolutely had success (since 1990, I’ve submitted my short works about 1100 times. Of those subs, 109 manuscripts have been published, giving me a pub rate of 9.3%. (HOWEVER: I just realized that that isn’t a realistic reflection of my STORY publication rate. To do that, I’d have to go back and count the STORIES themselves and calculate how many time each STORY was submitted and when it was finally published…*whew*! That could take some work…I’ll let you know when I figure that one out.))
My apprenticeship has been long, though to be perfectly honest, while my early submissions were certainly written by an adult “me”, they were NOT the me who had read countless books and articles on writing, taken a few classes, and PRACTICED for a half century…
As I’ve read my stories before submitting them in recent years, I’ve had to sit back and honestly say, “That was a DANG good story!”
So what else does Niven have to teach me? In the article referenced below, he says, “You want to write a story, and be paid for it, and know that it will be read? You want that now, no waiting? Tell me a story. Tell your brother/wife/cousin/uncle a story: tell anyone you can persuade to listen. Persuading is good practice: you need skill with narrative hooks. Watch for the moments where you lose your listener; watch for where you have to back up and explain a point. Your audience will tell you how to write it. Then you write it.”
That goes counter to what I do, and counter to OTHER advice I’ve heard that says to channel your energy into writing the story, not in endlessly telling others about it. OTOH, that’s what I used to do with my blog – I’d write a story in installments and post it. Though, I confess, up until now I’ve only lifted two stories from my blog and polished them for publication – one was published at one time and I have hopes that it will be again; the other I’m working on right now. I’m about half-way done with MARTIAN HOLIDAY, and HEIRS OF THE SHATTERED SPHERES: EMERALD OF EARTH, is just awaiting the editorial go-ahead and an OK to start a serialization of the first half of the novel.
So, I suppose that counts, as Niven suggested sharing the story at cocktail parties and I’ve never been to a cocktail party in my life…
“If the story you’re telling is a complex one—if the reader must understand the characters or the locale or some technical point to understand what’s going on—then you must use the simplest language. Your reader has his rights. Tell him a story and make him understand it, or you’re fired. This is never more true than in hard science fiction, but it never stops being true.”
Good point. This should NOT be hard for me to do. I was a science teacher for 40 years – middle school, elementary school, and high school – and was required to DAILY explain difficult science concepts to (frankly) many young people who could think of thousands of better things to do with their time. But…over the years, my effort to present and their effort to understand paid off. There a several PhDs, MDs, and research scientists who passed through my classroom over those years – some passed through my counseling office, where they’d come for help with difficult concepts.
Have I applied it to my stories? Hmmm…not necessarily evenly. In a piece of flash fiction I JUST submitted, I had to not only explain “achromatopsia” and the “Borra-Trottier Stars”, I had to take on (extremely briefly) what a radio carrier wave is and what that might have to do with the signals coming from the aforementioned stars…I think I pulled it off, but we’ll see.
Lastly, “Start with a story. Tell yourself a story. Are you in this to show off your stylistic skills? They’ll show best if you use them to shape the story.” I’ve done this many times – and sometimes people look at you weird. I’ve gotten used to it! In fact, my family still rolls their eyes when I say, “Hang on a second, I have to write down this idea!”
I have hundreds of scraps of paper (and now notes I’ve spoken into my cellphone) that are bits and pieces of ideas. For example, while driving with my son back to his Army station out east, we passed a house that had a full-sized fire truck sitting on a side lot rusting, surrounded by knee-high weeds. OK – I wrote that down. But it’s not a story. This past trip, not far from where the fire truck was, we passed a huge, ultramodern installation sitting in the middle of a large field of sorghum. Now suddenly I have the stirring of a story. Not QUITE a whole story, but it feels like there’s something alive there now. It’ll require some work and research still, but for some reason, there’s a heartbeat there…
At any rate, Larry Niven is a fabulous writer. If you haven’t read anything by him, you could start with RINGWORLD. If you want something more digestible, the short story collection TALES FROM THE DRACO TAVERN is entertaining and an easy, bite-sized read.
References: https://www.writersofthefuture.com/tell-me-a-story-by-larry-niven/, https://www.amazon.com/Draco-Tavern-Larry-Niven/dp/0765347717/ref=tmm_mmp_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Niven
Image: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/9f/22/3b/9f223b1e57a36e14db3eb13715fbe3f9.jpg
Well…I’ve been writing short stories pretty much since I started writing a half-century ago. While I’ve absolutely had success (since 1990, I’ve submitted my short works about 1100 times. Of those subs, 109 manuscripts have been published, giving me a pub rate of 9.3%. (HOWEVER: I just realized that that isn’t a realistic reflection of my STORY publication rate. To do that, I’d have to go back and count the STORIES themselves and calculate how many time each STORY was submitted and when it was finally published…*whew*! That could take some work…I’ll let you know when I figure that one out.))
My apprenticeship has been long, though to be perfectly honest, while my early submissions were certainly written by an adult “me”, they were NOT the me who had read countless books and articles on writing, taken a few classes, and PRACTICED for a half century…
As I’ve read my stories before submitting them in recent years, I’ve had to sit back and honestly say, “That was a DANG good story!”
So what else does Niven have to teach me? In the article referenced below, he says, “You want to write a story, and be paid for it, and know that it will be read? You want that now, no waiting? Tell me a story. Tell your brother/wife/cousin/uncle a story: tell anyone you can persuade to listen. Persuading is good practice: you need skill with narrative hooks. Watch for the moments where you lose your listener; watch for where you have to back up and explain a point. Your audience will tell you how to write it. Then you write it.”
That goes counter to what I do, and counter to OTHER advice I’ve heard that says to channel your energy into writing the story, not in endlessly telling others about it. OTOH, that’s what I used to do with my blog – I’d write a story in installments and post it. Though, I confess, up until now I’ve only lifted two stories from my blog and polished them for publication – one was published at one time and I have hopes that it will be again; the other I’m working on right now. I’m about half-way done with MARTIAN HOLIDAY, and HEIRS OF THE SHATTERED SPHERES: EMERALD OF EARTH, is just awaiting the editorial go-ahead and an OK to start a serialization of the first half of the novel.
So, I suppose that counts, as Niven suggested sharing the story at cocktail parties and I’ve never been to a cocktail party in my life…
“If the story you’re telling is a complex one—if the reader must understand the characters or the locale or some technical point to understand what’s going on—then you must use the simplest language. Your reader has his rights. Tell him a story and make him understand it, or you’re fired. This is never more true than in hard science fiction, but it never stops being true.”
Good point. This should NOT be hard for me to do. I was a science teacher for 40 years – middle school, elementary school, and high school – and was required to DAILY explain difficult science concepts to (frankly) many young people who could think of thousands of better things to do with their time. But…over the years, my effort to present and their effort to understand paid off. There a several PhDs, MDs, and research scientists who passed through my classroom over those years – some passed through my counseling office, where they’d come for help with difficult concepts.
Have I applied it to my stories? Hmmm…not necessarily evenly. In a piece of flash fiction I JUST submitted, I had to not only explain “achromatopsia” and the “Borra-Trottier Stars”, I had to take on (extremely briefly) what a radio carrier wave is and what that might have to do with the signals coming from the aforementioned stars…I think I pulled it off, but we’ll see.
Lastly, “Start with a story. Tell yourself a story. Are you in this to show off your stylistic skills? They’ll show best if you use them to shape the story.” I’ve done this many times – and sometimes people look at you weird. I’ve gotten used to it! In fact, my family still rolls their eyes when I say, “Hang on a second, I have to write down this idea!”
I have hundreds of scraps of paper (and now notes I’ve spoken into my cellphone) that are bits and pieces of ideas. For example, while driving with my son back to his Army station out east, we passed a house that had a full-sized fire truck sitting on a side lot rusting, surrounded by knee-high weeds. OK – I wrote that down. But it’s not a story. This past trip, not far from where the fire truck was, we passed a huge, ultramodern installation sitting in the middle of a large field of sorghum. Now suddenly I have the stirring of a story. Not QUITE a whole story, but it feels like there’s something alive there now. It’ll require some work and research still, but for some reason, there’s a heartbeat there…
At any rate, Larry Niven is a fabulous writer. If you haven’t read anything by him, you could start with RINGWORLD. If you want something more digestible, the short story collection TALES FROM THE DRACO TAVERN is entertaining and an easy, bite-sized read.
References: https://www.writersofthefuture.com/tell-me-a-story-by-larry-niven/, https://www.amazon.com/Draco-Tavern-Larry-Niven/dp/0765347717/ref=tmm_mmp_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Niven
Image: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/9f/22/3b/9f223b1e57a36e14db3eb13715fbe3f9.jpg
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