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 and life observations by Spider Robinson – with a few from myself…
I first met Spider Robinson…well…I didn’t exactly meet him, but I did read my first CALLAHAN’S story in the February 1973 issue of ANALOG Science Fiction and Fact. (I was fifteen and had only recently discovered ANALOG. I WON’T mention the reason I devoured that issue is because of Poul Anderson’s amazingly fantastic Ythrians (pictured on the cover), but WILL mention that once I read “The Guy With The Eyes”, I was a new Spider Robinson fan.
I actually tried my hand at writing a piece similar to the adventures of the group of men, women, werewolves, aliens, and Other who went into Callahan’s Place with deep troubles and who came out sometimes with new problems, sometimes with new friends, but most often they came out with new insight. My people went into a Christian fellowship that met in the basement of the large, mostly unused church of indeterminant origin…I think it was called “The Dragon in the Vestibule”, I’ll have to check…But that’s probably another story.
Not so much another story, but a forgotten chapter. Apparently, in 1993 (I would have been 36), some thirty years ago, I actually wrote a paper letter to Spider Robinson. I have no idea where the original letter went, but his extremely kind, thoughtful, and slightly humorous responses indicated that I was asking to use Doc in one of my own stories. I’ve unearthed the actual paper file, so I’ll be reading the story again and see if there’s anything I can do to bring it back to life – or failing that, use whatever seed of an idea occurs to me.
For now, I want to examine not so much WHAT Spider Robinson wrote, but HOW, and how I have – or have NOT – applied the advice absorbed from decades of reading and rereading his stories.
In November of 1995, Patrick O'Leary wrote: “It’s…not what he writes, but what he leaves out. Pettiness. Smirking. The unlikable person without hope. Pain for pain's sake. Easy love. Miserable sex. Evil that doesn't cost anything. Suffering that only makes you squirm. Individuals so stuck in their own heads that the real world is just another POV…Robinson's chief speculative leap is to imagine a place where community is possible. And the task he has taken upon himself is to embody the spectrum of Happiness…what Robinson is up to is nothing less than a participatory utopia that a reader enrolls in by reading…His Callahan books are about the experience he creates, not just portrays.”
Spider Robinson said in a Locus interview in February of 2004, “…Callahan is about, and I keep coming back to tolerance…of the weird, the strange…no matter how bent you are, as long as there is no malice in you, you’re welcome. All my life I’ve been weird.”
I also tend to be a positive person; I absolutely have no desire to cause anyone any pain. And yet…I am also a Christian, active in my faith and profession, but emphatically not rude. As witness, I’ll share an incident that occurred several years ago when I was a science teacher. The father of one of the other teachers passed away suddenly. The event was traumatic as well. She and I could NOT have been more different – from gender to our views on religion. But we LOVED talking and making each other laugh and we were in fact, good friends. When her father’s funeral approached, she asked if I would be willing to stand beside her as she read her father’s eulogy, and if I would take over if it proved too difficult for her. I proved FAR too difficult and I ended up reading it – and accepting one of his many, many “crazy ties”. It hangs right now in my closet.
I think that Robinson’s imagination to “embody the spectrum of happiness” is one I’ve adopted as well. I also think that I have always been “weird” – not just “wah-wah-poor-me” weird, but REALLY weird. I’ve shared countless times in this blog about my adolescent sense that I was in the “wrong family”. I didn’t fit, most obviously as an athlete; but I was the first person in my family to accept Christ into my heart and then act out that acceptance in a way that didn’t conform to our family norms. That’s an evasive answer, but that’s all I’ll say here!
At en.academic.com, they point out that, “Frequently in his writing, the conflicts center around a science fiction issue with a Human solution…”
Without a doubt, this is something I try to do – HOWEVER, because I know I haven’t done this consistently, I see now that what I’ve done often by accident I can do intentionally. In fact, when I “channel” my human side rather than my “superhuman side”, I’m a far better writer. This is something I need to do far more consciously than I do now. In fact, this essay is the direct result of a great deal of struggle I’ve had writing my current story that was originally named, “At the KAPITIAM On Olympus Mons”.
Without further ado, short story and life observations by Spider Robinson – with a few from myself…
I first met Spider Robinson…well…I didn’t exactly meet him, but I did read my first CALLAHAN’S story in the February 1973 issue of ANALOG Science Fiction and Fact. (I was fifteen and had only recently discovered ANALOG. I WON’T mention the reason I devoured that issue is because of Poul Anderson’s amazingly fantastic Ythrians (pictured on the cover), but WILL mention that once I read “The Guy With The Eyes”, I was a new Spider Robinson fan.
I actually tried my hand at writing a piece similar to the adventures of the group of men, women, werewolves, aliens, and Other who went into Callahan’s Place with deep troubles and who came out sometimes with new problems, sometimes with new friends, but most often they came out with new insight. My people went into a Christian fellowship that met in the basement of the large, mostly unused church of indeterminant origin…I think it was called “The Dragon in the Vestibule”, I’ll have to check…But that’s probably another story.
Not so much another story, but a forgotten chapter. Apparently, in 1993 (I would have been 36), some thirty years ago, I actually wrote a paper letter to Spider Robinson. I have no idea where the original letter went, but his extremely kind, thoughtful, and slightly humorous responses indicated that I was asking to use Doc in one of my own stories. I’ve unearthed the actual paper file, so I’ll be reading the story again and see if there’s anything I can do to bring it back to life – or failing that, use whatever seed of an idea occurs to me.
For now, I want to examine not so much WHAT Spider Robinson wrote, but HOW, and how I have – or have NOT – applied the advice absorbed from decades of reading and rereading his stories.
In November of 1995, Patrick O'Leary wrote: “It’s…not what he writes, but what he leaves out. Pettiness. Smirking. The unlikable person without hope. Pain for pain's sake. Easy love. Miserable sex. Evil that doesn't cost anything. Suffering that only makes you squirm. Individuals so stuck in their own heads that the real world is just another POV…Robinson's chief speculative leap is to imagine a place where community is possible. And the task he has taken upon himself is to embody the spectrum of Happiness…what Robinson is up to is nothing less than a participatory utopia that a reader enrolls in by reading…His Callahan books are about the experience he creates, not just portrays.”
Spider Robinson said in a Locus interview in February of 2004, “…Callahan is about, and I keep coming back to tolerance…of the weird, the strange…no matter how bent you are, as long as there is no malice in you, you’re welcome. All my life I’ve been weird.”
I also tend to be a positive person; I absolutely have no desire to cause anyone any pain. And yet…I am also a Christian, active in my faith and profession, but emphatically not rude. As witness, I’ll share an incident that occurred several years ago when I was a science teacher. The father of one of the other teachers passed away suddenly. The event was traumatic as well. She and I could NOT have been more different – from gender to our views on religion. But we LOVED talking and making each other laugh and we were in fact, good friends. When her father’s funeral approached, she asked if I would be willing to stand beside her as she read her father’s eulogy, and if I would take over if it proved too difficult for her. I proved FAR too difficult and I ended up reading it – and accepting one of his many, many “crazy ties”. It hangs right now in my closet.
I think that Robinson’s imagination to “embody the spectrum of happiness” is one I’ve adopted as well. I also think that I have always been “weird” – not just “wah-wah-poor-me” weird, but REALLY weird. I’ve shared countless times in this blog about my adolescent sense that I was in the “wrong family”. I didn’t fit, most obviously as an athlete; but I was the first person in my family to accept Christ into my heart and then act out that acceptance in a way that didn’t conform to our family norms. That’s an evasive answer, but that’s all I’ll say here!
At en.academic.com, they point out that, “Frequently in his writing, the conflicts center around a science fiction issue with a Human solution…”
Without a doubt, this is something I try to do – HOWEVER, because I know I haven’t done this consistently, I see now that what I’ve done often by accident I can do intentionally. In fact, when I “channel” my human side rather than my “superhuman side”, I’m a far better writer. This is something I need to do far more consciously than I do now. In fact, this essay is the direct result of a great deal of struggle I’ve had writing my current story that was originally named, “At the KAPITIAM On Olympus Mons”.
In an interview on Ideacity, he said, “If you’re struggling to write a story, then you’re afraid of something.”
I’m not sure he meant it in the way I’ve taken it, but to ME it’s saying that in this story, I’m trying to dig into something that, on a deeper level, I don’t want to touch. Thus far, it seems like a story about pirates who make off with a shipment of virtually priceless green coffee beans on Mars and the three people (with four minds!) who go after it and take it back. The story comes out of a world I’ve created in which there is only one acceptable faith – the United Faith in Humanity. All others have been (they thought) eliminated because “faith in anything but ourselves is misplaced and a waste of effort, resources, and mind”. It SEEMS like that’s what is happening now. The “christianity” of the radical Right is NOT what I embrace. And that is exactly what I’m exploring in the story. Maybe I don’t want to expose my own faith quite so publicly.
“…I’ve noticed in the last five or ten years I’m reading less science fiction and more mystery, and as a writer I’m trying to gracefully segue into mystery, crime, detective -- whatever you want to call it.”
Me, too! Me, too! My current ANALOG submission, “Misisipi Crossing” is a mystery set in an apocalyptic Earth. I don’t focus on the event, rather on the aftermath and how it’s affected the main characters.
For a January Magazine interview, when asked where the Callahan stories came from, Spider Robinson said, “… in order to keep myself from going insane with boredom [as a security guard at a construction site that was nothing but a large hole] -- I pecked out a story about where I'd rather be: a bar where they let you smash your glasses…an extraordinary bar. The bartender would have to be a special human being and his customers would have to be rather unusual folks. The kind of folks you could trust to fling glassware around while drunk. And it sort of all grew from there.”
That one I can’t empathize with. My first story was written in pencil and was an adolescent rip off of John Christopher’s (aka Sam Youd) THE TRIPOD books. I wanted to read more stories in those worlds, found out my writing was truly horrible, then set out to figure out how to do it RIGHT. There’s a reasonable chance that I will have a novel coming out some time in the next year that is my legitimate answer to my initiation into science fiction!
I’m not sure he meant it in the way I’ve taken it, but to ME it’s saying that in this story, I’m trying to dig into something that, on a deeper level, I don’t want to touch. Thus far, it seems like a story about pirates who make off with a shipment of virtually priceless green coffee beans on Mars and the three people (with four minds!) who go after it and take it back. The story comes out of a world I’ve created in which there is only one acceptable faith – the United Faith in Humanity. All others have been (they thought) eliminated because “faith in anything but ourselves is misplaced and a waste of effort, resources, and mind”. It SEEMS like that’s what is happening now. The “christianity” of the radical Right is NOT what I embrace. And that is exactly what I’m exploring in the story. Maybe I don’t want to expose my own faith quite so publicly.
“…I’ve noticed in the last five or ten years I’m reading less science fiction and more mystery, and as a writer I’m trying to gracefully segue into mystery, crime, detective -- whatever you want to call it.”
Me, too! Me, too! My current ANALOG submission, “Misisipi Crossing” is a mystery set in an apocalyptic Earth. I don’t focus on the event, rather on the aftermath and how it’s affected the main characters.
For a January Magazine interview, when asked where the Callahan stories came from, Spider Robinson said, “… in order to keep myself from going insane with boredom [as a security guard at a construction site that was nothing but a large hole] -- I pecked out a story about where I'd rather be: a bar where they let you smash your glasses…an extraordinary bar. The bartender would have to be a special human being and his customers would have to be rather unusual folks. The kind of folks you could trust to fling glassware around while drunk. And it sort of all grew from there.”
That one I can’t empathize with. My first story was written in pencil and was an adolescent rip off of John Christopher’s (aka Sam Youd) THE TRIPOD books. I wanted to read more stories in those worlds, found out my writing was truly horrible, then set out to figure out how to do it RIGHT. There’s a reasonable chance that I will have a novel coming out some time in the next year that is my legitimate answer to my initiation into science fiction!
That was where I “met” Spider Robinson (it’s rumored his birth name was Paul…). It would seem that his career was set on “full-steam-ahead” with that first story in ANALOG. But it wasn’t that simple: “…I proceeded to write a whole bunch more stories and mail them off…a year or two went by and I didn't sell a word to Ben or anybody, but Ben would…scribble one sentence on the bottom of it…I'd always look at this and think: He's out of his mind! And then send the story to every other market in the world…[They were always rejected]…then I tried it his way and it was a better story and I sent it out and somebody bought it. So I went to the next one in the pile…and eventually every one of those stories sold to somebody because I followed Ben's advice.”
Fact is that I got very little of this feedback from anyone, actually. Until Stan Schmidt took over Ben Bova’s editorship at ANALOG. As hard as it is to imagine, I too ignored Stan’s comments on my work. I’d give up and start something new. I finally realized how few people an editor actually takes time with; how rare real comments are to get. When I DID take Stan Schmidt’s advice, he bought my first ANALOG story and fulfilled a lifelong dream of seeing my story in the magazine. When Trevor Quachri took the helm, I had a new editor to approach – and I confess it was with much trepidation – and hope to win over with my writing. My worry was well-placed! Trevor Quachri took over in September of 2012, and after submitting three different stories, he bought a really odd little Probability Zero that was based on a favorite story of mine from Clifford D. Simak (WAYSTATION, 1963). My story was called “Whey Station”. It was supposed to be a pun, but I had several people write (which Trevor Quachri forwarded to me!) who didn’t understand it. So, there you go, my first experience with making a pun (as Spider Robinson did consistently and without mercy! In his CALLAHAN stories.)
“Robinson says that he and Jake, ‘share many characteristics in many ways. In part Jake is me as I might have turned out if I hadn't met Jeanne.’”
I honestly haven’t examined my work in that light, though I don’t have a long series of stories with the same character. But my new story at ANALOG is, in fact, the second story of Javier Quinn Xiong Zaman, DVM and Corporal Thatcher, a genetic experiment with a price on her head…which, oddly, gave me a new idea for another story to add to the pair…
I’ve learned quite a bit from diving into the writing mind of Spider Robinson, but more than anything, I was forced to examine myself. I suppose I can’t ask anything more of an author than to invite me to see myself in a new way…
References: https://www.januarymagazine.com/profiles/spiderrobinson2.html , http://www.spiderrobinson.com/oleary.html , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nth0ugxbkdE , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_Robinson, https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/134021 , https://www.locusmag.com/2004/Issues/02Robinson.html
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