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 by Connie Willis – with a few from myself…
I love well-written time travel stories. To be clear: for me time travel has to be for a very specific REASON. Vengeance doesn’t do it for me. Joy-riding doesn’t do it for me. “Exploring time” doesn’t do it for me…Accidents are OK. Righting a wrong is REALLY OK with me. So, what science fiction time travel stories do I fall for?
Obviously, BACK TO THE FUTURE is one of my favorite series of movies and I watch the whole thing twice a year.
But what about WRITTEN time travel – and I’m going to include alternate history as well, but only the ones that left a “mark on me”. THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, by Philip K. Dick, is of course on that list. The entire TIME QUINTET by Madeleine L’Engle and Heinlein’s DOOR INTO SUMMER (together, they helped usher the adolescent me into the entirety of science fiction!). The ineffable Octavia Butler gave me KINDRED. The classic, HG Well’s THE TIME MACHINE; with humor, A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR’S COURT by Mark Twain; of course, the countless time-travel adventures of DOCTOR WHO…there are many influences here, but let me come down to the two most influential.
STAR TREK: The Original Series, “City on the Edge of Forever” and the heart-stopping moment when Edith Keeler must either die, and the Allies defeat Adolf Hitler; or she lives and creates a peace movement that never leads to the United Federation of Planets.
The other? DOOMSDAY BOOK, by Connie Willis: “…draw[ing] upon her understanding of the universalities of human nature to explore the ageless issues of evil, suffering, and the indomitable will of the human spirit.
“For Kivrin, preparing an on-site study of one of the deadliest eras in humanity's history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received.
“But a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her. In a time of superstition and fear, Kivrin—barely of age herself—finds she has become an unlikely angel of hope during one of history's darkest hours.”
After I read this book and watched “City on the Edge of Forever”, my time travel reading and writing HAD to deal with significant issues. So, without further ado, what can I learn from Connie Willis about writing SHORT stories?
Willis says, “My process is similar to that of seat-of-the-pants writers. They just get an idea and go with it. I do that too…before I start the writing. By the time I have begun the story, I basically have my whole plot in place, or at least the beginning and the end, with a blurry idea of the middle…I usually outline the plot…I jot down whatever occurs to me at the time. With the piece I am working on right now…I know what happens but I don’t know the mechanism I will use to make it all happen. A mystery has two stories; there is the story about what really happened, and then the story that appeared to happen. Of course, the detective’s job is to figure out how to get past the latter.”
I start with a sheet of paper and small sticky notes, outlining by writing down the main purpose of a scene. Once they story is written out, I put it away for a day. Usually I write the opening paragraph after thinking of a sharp hook to get the reader to want to follow along.
Character building is a tough one for me; especially because when I write a story, I want it to BE about something; I want to “say something”. Willis has this to say, “Getting people to care is the only way to show them the truth…Emotions…show us what’s right. We don’t only think it’s right, we feel that it’s right. Mostly in stories…there are messages in it, there are certainly messages in Huckleberry Finn, but they’re not messages that can be encapsulated as a slogan or moral. The reason the message gets through is because you love Jim, and that’s why you believe that message.”
The stories I’ve written that have been published are ones in which the message is intrinsic rather than baldly stated. Even CS Lewis had something to say about such writing: “What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects – with their Christianity latent.” (Christian Apologetics”, GOD IN THE DOCK).
So, how long does it take me to write a story? That depends – on the subject, what I’m trying to say, and by how good I am by the time I start writing it. I’ve written stories LONG before I should have tried to write them. They’ve been underthought or WAY TOO complicated for the form I was trying to use for them. Willis notes, “Every story basically takes your whole career to write, both in the skills you acquire and where the stuff comes from that the stories are about.”
Wow! That discovery has made me want to go back and try to rewrite a story I just didn’t do a good enough job writing the first time. I’ve found THAT very hard. I find that I do the same with my newer work, more and more. For example, I’m writing a kidnapping mystery that takes place in the early part of the 22nd Century. The United States has fractured into thirteen separate countries. As I reach different incidents and plot changes that deviate from my original outline, I have to go back and place the characters or precursor incidents I need to get to the end of the story. Willis apparently, does something similar and refers to one of my FAVORITE movies: “I love the scene in Stranger than Fiction where Dustin Hoffman tells Emma Thompson, ‘You realize that now your ending doesn’t match the rest of the story?’ Emma says, ‘Yes, so now all I have to do is rewrite the book to match the ending.’ That’s pretty much how it is with me. After I write the ending, I have to go back and make the whole thing match.”
Amazing. Maybe I AM approaching a point where I’m a better writer than I ever imagined I could be! I’ll keep you posted!
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