I’m going to use advice from people who, in addition to writing novels, have also spent plenty of time “interning” with short stories. While most of them are speculative fiction writers, I’ll also be looking at plain, old, effective short story writers. 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 John Griffith Chaney – with a few from myself…
John Griffith Chaney was one of the most prolific and most-read authors of the late 1800s and early 1900s. He was given his well-known name after his mother re-married John London and then renamed her son…(“Jack is a common diminutive of John “Jack is a derivative of John that originated in medieval England. The name went from John to Johnkin to Jankin to Jackin to Jack. The name was so common in the Middle Ages that Jack became a generic term for a man.”)
Jack London wrote 205 stories and 15 novels about life – life in the late years of the 19th Century and the early years of the 20th Century. The life he lived was “primitive” by 21st Century standards and at the time, there were still frontiers then. Certainly, few people were familiar with the Amazon; the North Pole; or Arabia. Japan was a “recent discovery” (“In 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry and the ‘Black Ships’ of the United States Navy forced the opening of Japan to the outside world with the Convention of Kanagawa. Subsequent similar treaties with other Western countries brought economic and political crises. The resignation of the shōgun led to the Boshin War and the establishment of a centralized state nominally unified the Meiji Restoration”). China and Africa were wholly mysterious.)
In particular, Alaska (not the ice cream bar....); Indigenous peoples were the original settlers of what the Russians used to refer to the Alaska Peninsula. “Derived from an Aleut-language idiom, which figuratively refers to the mainland. Literally, it means object to which the action of the sea is directed.” The Russians, Spanish, Polish, and Finnish eventually entered into an agreement with the American government and sold it to them in 1867.
From that place, London produced some of his most popular works. He only wrote for twenty-two years, dying at the age of 40 in 1916. He never wrote extensively about writing, he did leave nuggets of advice that I’m going to craft into a few pieces of writing advice he DID give and then see if I follow them. The original quotes are listed below.
1) “London's books had been lived. They were not autobiographical, yet based upon his close observations and notes.”
Hopefully, ALL of my writing comes from my life – not that I’ve ever met a sapient plantimal. Not that I’ve ever crash-landed on the Moon. Not that I’ve ever become friends with a genetically engineered woman. Not that I’ve ever lived on Mars…but I’ve been able to IMAGINE it; and even when I’ve got aliens in my stories, I have to make them understandable. I have to give them some recognizable Human emotion or response. I think I’ve done that part well, because a part of ME is in every character I build – even a veterinarian who was born piebald.
2) “You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
I’ve NEVER waited for inspiration; like “writer’s block”, I think it was invented by writers who wanted to BE writers rather than become writers by writing something – anything – and polishing it and sending it out. London never waited – he just wrote what he’d experienced and despite the implication, there were times that Jack London used the bathroom, slept, ate meals, got sick, and did any of the mundane things we all do. Even the TV series 24 doesn’t include people using the bathroom. So, in all of our writing, even the most realistic – like London’s – we leave out stuff. We get inspired by the “exciting parts.
3) “Avoid the unhappy ending, the harsh, the brutal, the tragic, the horrible -- if you care to see in print things you write.”
I hate unhappy endings myself. Of course, London didn’t follow his own rule, but that’s all right because in general, the endings of his stories are UNDERSTANDABLE. I’m OK if the main characters dies because they made dumb choices. I’m NOT OK when a character steps out to cross the street and gets hit by a car. Of course, I wasn’t particularly OK with it when that happened to an old friend of mine.
4) “Don't write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen.”
I think he might have meant, “…at a time.” I can’t write “too much”; I write what I want and that never seems like “too much”.
5) “And who knows what Romance, what Adventure, what Love, is lurking around the next turn of the road?”
For me, it’s something I just learned recently: every story, whether SF, F, Mystery, Horror, or contemporary YA…needs to have a mystery at its core. Not that the character has to SOLVE a mystery, but that there is something they don’t know; something that has to reach some kind of resolution so that the main character(s) can move on in life.
6) “Read voraciously.”
This one doesn’t need explanation. ON my “to read” list, I currently have FREAKONOMICS (Dubner/Levitt), RESURGENCE (Cherryh)…I could go on, but I read widely. THE THORN BIRDS and PRIDE AND PREJUDICE and BLINK and VOYAGE OF THE DAWN TREADER and DON’T CALL THE WOLF…It comes from a master storyteller. It MUST be right!
7) “It’s sometimes a dreary thing to sit and watch the game played in the small and petty way.”
I get tired of the small game. I live it now; worked in it as a high school teacher and counselor (“He said…” vs “She said…”); the small issues of life that we live every day. And yet…there are BIGGER games to play. Some people are caught up in MASSIVELY HUGE GAMES, like finding a solution to anthropogenic global warming or the conflict between Israel and the rest of the Middle East (do they realize that it’s a conflict that has been ongoing for some THOUSANDS of years?).
There is a middle ground: walking to cure cancer or Alzheimer’s; teaching; maybe even being a writer. Which is what London was, bringing the issues of the time to his short stories and novels, which tens of thousands of people read. He worked to create influence. (I guess they actually call them “influencers” today…)
8) “WORK. WORK all the time.”
Like most serious writers, I do this already. Not as much as I’d like; but more than I should.
9) “Success is just this — retaining the substance and transmuting the potential into the kinetic.”
WOW! A science metaphor! What it means to me is that everyone has the potential to be (in this case) a writer. We all have story. It lives in every Human. That’s the potential. There is no one on Earth who has led a solely boring life. Things have happened to all of us. The challenge to the writer, which London managed to do to spectacular effect, is to take the potential and change it into a story people can read; with the right balance of action and talk, talk, talk – that creates in them a desire to move out and do something similar. That’s kinetic energy.
10) “Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain.”
I did this when I was in Africa and when I went to South Korea to visit my son, daughter-in-law, and my two grandchildren. I’ve started to turn the experience in South Korea into story, but my African life hasn’t made it there yet. OTOH, I just realized that my time in Africa (including being in a country in which the military overthrew the civilian government and formed a junta which still rules today…) was incredibly intense and not only have the feelings faded some, they are hard to write about. I need to look at that again and see if I can bring the emotions out and set them down in story.
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“As Conrad observed, London's books had been lived. They were not autobiographical, yet based upon his close observations and notes. Whether nonfiction reportage or fiction, the sense of realism is present. For this reason it helps to understand how his other activities in life influenced his writing: his socialism, his farming, his travels, his family. One weaves into the other.”
“You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
“Avoid the unhappy ending, the harsh, the brutal, the tragic, the horrible -- if you care to see in print things you write. (In this connection don't do as I do, but do as I say).”
“Don't write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen.”
“And who knows what Romance, what Adventure, what Love, is lurking around the next turn of the road, ready to leap out on us if we’ll only travel that far?”
“London also read voraciously, immersed himself in a thorough autodidactic education, taught himself how to write, and became a bestselling author — writing classics like Call of the Wild and White Fang, alongside 20 other books, 200 short stories, and 400 non-fiction pieces.”
“It’s sometimes a dreary thing to sit and watch the game played in the small and petty way. One who not only takes a hand in the game, but calmly sits outside as well and watches, usually sees the small and petty way, and is content to face immediate losses, knowing that the ultimate gain is his. It is so small, so pitifully small, that at worst it can produce only a passing glow of anger, and after that, pity only remains, and remains, and tolerance without confidence. — Oh, why can’t the men and women of this world learn that playing the game in the small way is the losing way? They are always doomed to failure when they play against the one who plays in the large way.”
“Spell it in capital letters, WORK. WORK all the time.” (“Getting Into Print,” The Editor, March 1903)
“Success is just this — retaining the substance and transmuting the potential into the kinetic.” –“The Question of a Name,” The Writer, December 1900
“Find out about this earth, this universe; this force and matter, and the spirit that glimmers up through force and matter from the magnet to Godhead. And by all this I mean WORK for a philosophy of life.” –“Getting Into Print,” The Editor, March 1903
“Most people don’t realize it, but Jack London pioneered science fiction. He wrote about germ warfare in one story, about an energy weapon in another, and about men encountering a prehistoric Mammoth in another. His story, “The Shadow and the Flash” was about achieving invisibility. [His scifi stories] were written in the early 1900s. The lesson for writers today is that they should not be stuck in one genre. There is no question that London fictionalized his experiences for the most successful portion of his career, but he later branched out.”
“Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain.”
References: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_London, https://london.sonoma.edu/writings, https://nameberry.com/babyname/Jack,
https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/jack-london-quotes/, (A complete list of London’s works: https://www.prosperosisle.org/spip.php?article229#Stories “205 stories, 15 novels…”), https://velocitywriting.com/jack-london/#:~:text=of%20his%20life.-,%E2%80%9CDon't%20write%20too%20much.,wrote%20in%20his%20short%20career. (DL Hughes says differently: “23 novels, three autobiographical memoirs, 125 short stories, 22 nonfiction pieces and essays, about 40 published poems, and three plays”)
Image: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41JNnybcihL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg
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