While I don’t write full-time, nor do I make enough money with my writing to live off of it...neither do all 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!
It's been a while since I decided to add something different to my blog rotation.
Today, I’m going to be looking at “advice” for writing short stories – not from me, but from other short story writers. In speculative fiction, “short” has very carefully delineated categories:
“The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America specifies word lengths for each category of its Nebula award categories by word count; Novel 40,000 words or over; Novella 17,500 to 39,999 words; Novelette 7,500 to 17,499 words; Short story under 7,500 words.”
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 a single quote off of which I’ll jump and connect it with my own writing experience.
Without further ado, let’s start with Ray Bradbury, a master storyteller in multiple genre, though perhaps best remembered for his speculative writing. Upon his death, The New York Times noted: “[Bradbury is] the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream”.
I started reading Bradbury’s short stories in THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES shortly after I graduated from John Christopher’s WHITE MOUNTAIN novels, Andre Norton’s entire body of work, and Heinlein’s juveniles. I found them weird and almost incomprehensible, but took from them a startling vision of Mars. Contemporary writer Kim Stanley Robinson evoked a similar sense for me in his epic, multiple-award-winning MARS trilogy (RED MARS, BLUE MARS, and GREEN MARS).
But we’re here to look at what Bradbury said about short stories – he wrote over six HUNDRED of them after all (he “only” wrote 27 novels…), so advice from him is perhaps wonted by anyone who wants to write short speculative fiction. We’ll start with a few quotes from him:
“Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.”
“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
“Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You must simply do things.”
“Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves.”
“There’s no one way to be creative. Any old way will work.”
“The answer to all writing, to any career for that matter, is love.”
Wow! A lot to mine here, so I’ll focus on the one with which I have the most experience. In this case, I’m going to comment on two: “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
This is a part of the “who I am” of writing. As a science teacher and school counselor (since 1981 and while that continued; I’ve been in the second since 2010), I’ve seen grief. If I dare count, three or four of my students – ones I knew well – have been murdered or have taken their own lives. There are few things as sad as the death of a child. In this, I don’t mean “child” in a derogatory sense. I mean it in the sense that even though life has dealt them misery, they are completely unequipped to deal with it the way an adult is. They have either been drawn into a life where their time intersected with bullets; or they have given up entirely and saw no reason to continue on Earth.
At the school I work at, we have had an influx in recent years of students from countries torn by civil and declared war. They have personally witnessed atrocities. Others have lost parents to death, murder, or incarceration. Of those, some have dealt with the crushing load of life in a self-destructive manner. Others have risen so far above their past that I am convinced they look down on the rest of us with sad resignation.
All of that to point out that if I were to completely immerse myself in the lives of these students, I would soon find myself lost in a dark, grim place. My writing – and you’ll see that I tend toward the hopeful and the silly – is my way of dealing with that darkness.
The second Bradbury quote, “I know you’ve heard it a thousand times before, but it’s true — hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don’t love something, then don’t do it.
This is one that anyone who knows me – in particular my wife – will roll their eyes in mock (I hope!) frustration when asked what I do in my “spare” time. I DON’T HAVE spare time – I am either living life to the fullest or I’m writing. I was going to say there’s nothing else, but that’s not being completely honest. I DO use the bathroom; I DO sleep; I DO spend time with my lovely wife; kids; kids-in-law; foster kids; grandkids; and less-frequently, my brothers, sister, and nephews and nieces…
At any rate, I LOVE writing and I spend an inordinate amount of time writing. I’m currently organizing my files (after thirty or more years of writing, filing, and carting the files around.) I’ve written A LOT of stuff. By last count, I’ve submitted manuscripts to markets 1139 times since 1990. 107 of them have been accepted and published somewhere. But to tell you the truth, I don’t know how MANY manuscripts I’ve written that never reached to submission stage; and of the ones I’ve submitted, I don’t know exactly how MANY manuscripts there are there.
So, with that in mind, I think I qualify for the idea of working hard and loving what I’m doing! Seeing my name in print those 107 times STILL thrills me – and I page through the magazines and websites to find them every once in a while. It’s fun!
In conclusion, the advice of Bradbury is sound and I will continue to apply it to my own writing. How about you?
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