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 as I work to increase my writing output and sales! As always, your comments are welcome!
Without further ado, short story observations by – with a few from myself…
My wife and I saw the movie “Arrival”, so I found that the movie had come from a short story by a writer I’d never heard of before, Ted Chiang. The main reason I’d never heard of him is because I rarely read SF or F anthologies. He did have a story in ASIMOV’S and two in F&SF, but I didn’t hit the right issue.
At any rate, when I tracked down the story in STORIES OF YOUR LIFE AND OTHERS, I read it and promptly had no idea how the movie “Arrival” could have come from “Story of Your Life”.
According to Wikipedia: “Heisserer [screenwriter] read the story and started work on a screen adaptation. Villeneuve I eventually discovered that “Cohen [producer] and Levine [journalist and filmmaker] and Levy [director, producer, actor (“Stranger Things”), however, introduced Villeneuve to the novella, which the director immediately took to, Heisserer completed a first draft, which Cohen, Levine, Levy, and Villeneuve and reworked into the final script. Villeneuve changed the title, as he felt the original sounded like a romantic comedy and that the script had become very different from the short story.”
Well…DUH! You got five people working off of a science fiction novella – what’d you expect but “a script…very different from the short story.”
That movie and story though, introduced me to the rest of Chiang’s work – which turned out to be almost entirely short stories. So, I though he might have something to say about writing!
I read the story “Hell Is the Absence of God”, when I read the collection. I was surprised now to find out how HONEST Chiang is: “To write this retelling of the Book of Job, in which one might predict an angel’s movements using a kind of meteorology, Chiang immersed himself in the literature of angels and the problem of innocent suffering; he read C. S. Lewis and the evangelical author Joni Eareckson Tada.” I’ve experienced authors who have dismissed my own beliefs without reading to find out WHAT I believe. They just know I’m a Christian. Chiang notes, “I’m curious about what you might call discredited world views. It can be tempting to dismiss people from the past—to say, ‘Weren’t they foolish for thinking things worked that way?’ But they weren’t dummies. They came up with theories as to how the universe worked based on the observations available to them at the time. They thought about the implications of things in the ways that we do now. Sometimes I think, What if further observation had confirmed their initial theories instead of disproving them? What if the universe had really worked that way?”
The more I read, the more I think Chiang might be one of the most honest SF writers I’ve ever read. But HOW does he write?
First of all, though others might consider him a “pro writer” (I’ve always given the definition of “pro writer” as someone who has been PAID for their writing. Chiang sees it differently: “…I started submitting stories for publication when I was about 15, [I started when I was 13!]) but it was many years before I sold anything…Writing for publication was always my goal…”
So, to do THAT, what did he do?
He wrote. When questioned about his “writing style”, he said, “In general, if there's an idea I'm interested in, I usually think about that for a long time and write down my speculations or just ideas about how it could become a story, but I don't actually start writing the story itself until I know how the story ends.
Me: I recently read this in an evaluation of what “form responses” mean for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction: “Template 2 is the ‘didn’t work for me’ template. It means something like, ‘Your story was good, I read it all the way through, but some big thing didn’t work for me, usually the ending. I know, endings are hard. But the emotional payoff, what you remember most about a story, is how it makes you feel at the end.’ You have to be an Olympic gymnast and nail that dismount.”
Chiang continues, “Once I have the destination in mind then I can build the rest of the story around that or build the rest of the story in such a way as to lead up to that.”
I do it the opposite – while I DO know where the story is going, I write the opening. Sometimes over, and over, and over again, until it sets the hook in a reader’s “mouth”, and they charge on into the story, flying to the end. However, I never considered the fact that instead of the BEGINNINGS, I remember how the story ENDED much more clearly. Once I reflected on it, I saw clearly what he was saying.
Ted Chiang doesn’t think of himself as an expert or a famous writer or even as particularly gifted. He just thinks about things, then does what every science fiction writer does: he asks the question, “What if?”
He’s very much a humble person: “…he has published fourteen short stories and a novella. He has won twenty-seven major sci-fi awards; he might have won a twenty-eighth if, a few years ago, he hadn’t declined a nomination because he felt that the nominated story…was unfinished...[Based on THIS], he has become one of the most influential science-fiction writers of his generation.”
When he wins awards: “His story…was included in last year’s edition of ‘The Best American Short Stories,’ and Junot Díaz, who edited that volume, has said that Chiang’s ‘Stories of Your Life and Others’ is ‘as perfect a collection of stories as I’ve ever read.’ Chiang himself seems to find this kind of praise bewildering.”
To summarize then: start with the ending; ask philosophical questions; consider your opinion one of many and not particularly noteworthy AND actively consider other points of view when crafting a story. Then write! Seems pretty straightforward to me.
References: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/ted-chiangs-soulful-science-fiction, https://boingboing.net/2010/07/22/ted-chiang-interview.html
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