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 Anne McCaffrey – with a few from myself…
I "met" Anne McCaffrey long ago, when I was 21 and bought the 1978 paperback publication of DRAGONFLIGHT (the cover is below). I got it brand new for $1.50 at B. Dalton Booksellers at Brookdale, a now defunct and bulldozed mall a few miles from home. I was in my second year of college, had a job, and often went there to cruise for my science fiction fix. While the cover made it LOOK like a fantasy (which I usually deplored), reading the first paragraph, standing there next to the SCIENCE FICTION shelves, captured me for the next three decades:
Without further ado, short story observations by Anne McCaffrey – with a few from myself…
I "met" Anne McCaffrey long ago, when I was 21 and bought the 1978 paperback publication of DRAGONFLIGHT (the cover is below). I got it brand new for $1.50 at B. Dalton Booksellers at Brookdale, a now defunct and bulldozed mall a few miles from home. I was in my second year of college, had a job, and often went there to cruise for my science fiction fix. While the cover made it LOOK like a fantasy (which I usually deplored), reading the first paragraph, standing there next to the SCIENCE FICTION shelves, captured me for the next three decades:
“When is a legend legend? Why is a myth a myth? How old and disused must a fact be for it to be relegated to the category ‘Fairy-tale’? And why do certain facts remain incontrovertible while others lose their validity to assume a shabby, unstable character? Rukbat, in the Sagittarian sector, was a golden G-type star. It had five planets, and one stray it had attracted and held in recent millennia.”
I went on to read all of the DRAGONRIDER books – usually numerous times – and even sought out the original issues of ANALOG in which “Weyr Search” (October 1967) and “Dragonrider” (December 1967) appeared. The year they were published, I was too busy playing with Major Matt Mason in the sandbox…I was 10 years old.
She passed away after a career that covered half a century.
I’ll point out that she started her career with “The Ship Who Sang”, a novelette in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction…(ironically, the F&SF story was about a starship with a Human brain; the ANALOG story was about fire-breathing dragons). But she DID begin with short stories, and for that reason, I wanted to know what she had to say about writing them, then to look and see if I picked up anything from reading her writing.
“Once the kids are away at school – which is how I got to write a novel. In 1965 my daughter, who is the youngest, went to school full time. It was like, who pulled out the plug? I had eight hours I could plan my time in. Okay, so I put on a load of wash or I’d start something for dinner in between writing chapters, but I had the time I could devote to the concentrated work that a novel requires.”
I went on to read all of the DRAGONRIDER books – usually numerous times – and even sought out the original issues of ANALOG in which “Weyr Search” (October 1967) and “Dragonrider” (December 1967) appeared. The year they were published, I was too busy playing with Major Matt Mason in the sandbox…I was 10 years old.
She passed away after a career that covered half a century.
I’ll point out that she started her career with “The Ship Who Sang”, a novelette in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction…(ironically, the F&SF story was about a starship with a Human brain; the ANALOG story was about fire-breathing dragons). But she DID begin with short stories, and for that reason, I wanted to know what she had to say about writing them, then to look and see if I picked up anything from reading her writing.
“Once the kids are away at school – which is how I got to write a novel. In 1965 my daughter, who is the youngest, went to school full time. It was like, who pulled out the plug? I had eight hours I could plan my time in. Okay, so I put on a load of wash or I’d start something for dinner in between writing chapters, but I had the time I could devote to the concentrated work that a novel requires.”
I’ve discovered that this is truth for me as well. When the kids were infants, I wrote late into the night rather than any time when they were awake. Parenting was a full-time job in addition to my “money-making job” (I didn’t professionally sell a story until 1994, when ANALOG bought my first story. When I got the acceptance letter from Stan Schmidt, I wept.) Since retiring, I’ve written one novel, several dozen stories, and I’m editing a novel now that takes place on Mars and is as long as Kim Stanley Robinson’s GREEN MARS.
“The Milford Science Fiction Conferences that were held with all published writers. Damon Knight, Judy Merrill and Kate Wilhelm were the administrators of that. You had to submit a story to be criticized. Boy, moment of truth. Now listening to twenty-five or thirty other writers in the field criticize stories, you got an awful lot of information on how to put a story together and also how to look for flaws in your own work. So it was extremely good. Although I never put any of the stories that really meant a lot to me, like the ship stories or the Pern stories, into the conference I still learned a great deal about writing from that. So the peer group was extremely critical at that point in time.
While there is no Milford SF Conference in the US anymore, and I can’t afford events like Clarion, Odyssey, the defunct Orson Scott Card’s Literary Boot Camp, and Realm Makers – I can barely afford to sporadically attend fan conventions here in Minneapolis like MinniCon, MarsCon, and DiversiCon. So, as did Anne McCaffrey did, I rely on myself and a couple of other writer friends. I didn’t know any hard science fiction writers near me – except for Gordon R. Dickson and Clifford D. Simak. But I was a “no-one” writer, so even though I fantasized about taking the bus out to Simak’s house and knocking on his door, I never did. My parents thought I was crazy enough as it is!
“I can’t not write. So I’m busy with something most of the time. I am a story teller…That’s what writing is all about…making others see what you have put down on the page and believing that it does, or could, exist and you want to go there. Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences…Don't try to impress your reader with style or vocabulary or neatly turned phrases. Tell the story first!...I would recommend the short story form, which is a lot harder to write since you have to be so careful with words, until there is plenty of time to doodle through a novel.”
Maybe I read it from her first, but I have always felt that I can’t NOT write. I even wrote a blog post about something that happened to me while I was taking classes to get my Masters degree in school counseling and was entirely unable to write fiction because I was both working a forty-hour-a-week job and taking one or two classes a semester to get my Masters. I became physically ill – and didn’t even know it until I reflected on it some months later. So, my body requires that I write!
I do love to help people see something important. While few of my stories have what you’d call a “message”, all of them are specifically “about something”. For example, my story, “Dinosaur Veterinarian” is in the November/December issue of ANALOG Science Fiction & Fact. It takes place in South Korea and involves genetic engineering, the 625 War (what the South Koreans call the event, Americans call the Korean War, and the North Koreans calls either the “Fatherland Liberation War” or alternatively the “Chosǒn [Korean] War”), profound prejudice (which one reviewer thought was unrealistic or unbelievable…though I wondered if she’d lost a parent to a foreign power during a military conflict she would find the character’s motivation believable…)
Finding the story is often the hardest part of writing! I had to start a recent piece of work twice because I wasn’t sure WHOSE story it was. I’ve got a couple of other stories where I have to figure out whose story needs to be told.
“I have always used emotion as a writing tool. That goes back to me being on the stage…You must have occasionally read a book that annoyed you for some indefinable reason: It may be that the writer did not totally believe what he was writing. That disbelief comes across to the reader, making him/her uncomfortable indeed, and destroying any other factors the writer may have had working in his favor…One of the reasons the westerns of Louis L'Amour are so immensely popular is that he is known to have walked any area he used in one of his novels, known it so intimately that he could tell when a boulder or a pebble had been moved. This knowledge comes through to the reader and enhances his/her confidence in the author. Granted we can't all do such on-the-spot investigation, but we can research pertinent details and believe in what we're saying. It isn't so much a ‘suspension of disbelief’ as insurance that you will be believed. What is the cynical saying—‘Believe you're telling the truth, even if you're lying about it?’…We all must have those moments of high tragedy and personal frustration, anger, or hilarious humor (the latter being in very short supply in most lives), and we can translate those into the material we wish to enhance with an emotional content. But the writer has to be so immersed in those emotions, believe in them so firmly, that they reach the reader!...I have always believed in Pern. I enjoy going there: I enjoy poking holes in its complacency and seeing what happens to the people nearest the holes. I am comfortable with Pern. I know a lot more about it on an instinctive or intuitive level than even my most devoted reader. I keep lists of all kinds of things about my characters and my places…As long as you believe in them, you can convince your reader that the circumstances are valid for the course of the story. But you must deeply, sincerely, madly believe in what you are writing as you write, or the whole thing will fall flat on its face.”
This has manifested itself in an odd way as I edit through a (currently) 800,000 word story I finished writing several year ago that is both complex and has succeeded in drawing me into it – and even though I’m the one that wrote the revelation, I found I was SURPRISED by the twist in the plot. I’m pretty sure it can’t get better than surprising yourself in a story you wrote – and it was a LOGICAL surprise (if that makes any sense! HOWEVER, using emotion to rive story is something I'm not very good at. I need to sharpen that skill!
Tell us a bit about the short story "Beyond Between" in the Legends 2 Anthology from Del Rey. The story is about a very interesting facet of the Pern Universe…I don't have organized religion on Pern. I figured – since there were four holy wars going on at the time of writing – that religion was one problem Pern didn't need. However, if one listens to childhood teachings, God is everywhere so there should be no question in any mind that he is also on Pern. Thus, there is a heaven to which worthy souls go. So, without mentioning any denomination of organized religion, I figured that both Moreta and Leri deserved respite after their trials... and that's where ‘Beyond Between’ is.”
I found this amazing! I’ve always felt an indefinable sadness when not only contemplating PERN (by the way, the name of the world isn’t a real name – it’s an acronym regarding the type of planet it was labeled after it was surveyed: Parallel Earth, Resources Negligible – P E R N…), but wondering what happened to McCaffrey to lead her to lose organized religion on her imaginary world. This was a bit surprising and I’ll add it to my trove of little things I know about her – and how those things somehow combined in her mind to create the many worlds of Anne McCaffrey.
What do you hope to give readers through your work? “Mostly I'm telling people that they don't have to be victims. They can be survivors but I don't as a rule put 'messages' in my writing.”
Finally, I think I’ve started to learn this – not the specific message she weaves in her stories, rather the idea that stories should MEAN something. They should inspire, challenge, or cause us to grow. Stories can even make us angry – especially if instead of directing our anger outward to destroy as many people as we can, I direct it inwardly and use it to root out lousy ideas and attitudes in my own life; or even figure out how to use that energy to change the world around me and help people to live better, more peaceful lives.
References: https://www.writing-world.com/sf/mccaffrey.shtml, https://sfmistressworks.wordpress.com/category/anne-mccaffrey/, https://www.writinganalytics.co/quotes/21/ , https://sff.onlinewritingworkshop.com/tips/mccaffrey.shtml, https://www.azquotes.com/author/19855-Anne_McCaffrey/tag/writing, https://www.tor.com/2015/04/01/anne-mccaffrey-gave-us-all-our-own-dragons-to-ride/, https://bobneilson.org/interviews/anne-mccaffrey/, https://www.dragoncon.org/dailydragon/dc1999/be-careful-what-you-wish-for-you-may-get-it-an-interview-with-anne-mccaffrey/, https://www.locusmag.com/2004/Issues/11McCaffrey.html, http://www.kittywumpus.net/blog/2015/06/01/the-sf-that-was-isaac-asimov-introduces-anne-mccaffrey/, https://m.media-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/b4/ea/5c061363ada0f65b32d50110.L.jpg
“The Milford Science Fiction Conferences that were held with all published writers. Damon Knight, Judy Merrill and Kate Wilhelm were the administrators of that. You had to submit a story to be criticized. Boy, moment of truth. Now listening to twenty-five or thirty other writers in the field criticize stories, you got an awful lot of information on how to put a story together and also how to look for flaws in your own work. So it was extremely good. Although I never put any of the stories that really meant a lot to me, like the ship stories or the Pern stories, into the conference I still learned a great deal about writing from that. So the peer group was extremely critical at that point in time.
While there is no Milford SF Conference in the US anymore, and I can’t afford events like Clarion, Odyssey, the defunct Orson Scott Card’s Literary Boot Camp, and Realm Makers – I can barely afford to sporadically attend fan conventions here in Minneapolis like MinniCon, MarsCon, and DiversiCon. So, as did Anne McCaffrey did, I rely on myself and a couple of other writer friends. I didn’t know any hard science fiction writers near me – except for Gordon R. Dickson and Clifford D. Simak. But I was a “no-one” writer, so even though I fantasized about taking the bus out to Simak’s house and knocking on his door, I never did. My parents thought I was crazy enough as it is!
“I can’t not write. So I’m busy with something most of the time. I am a story teller…That’s what writing is all about…making others see what you have put down on the page and believing that it does, or could, exist and you want to go there. Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences…Don't try to impress your reader with style or vocabulary or neatly turned phrases. Tell the story first!...I would recommend the short story form, which is a lot harder to write since you have to be so careful with words, until there is plenty of time to doodle through a novel.”
Maybe I read it from her first, but I have always felt that I can’t NOT write. I even wrote a blog post about something that happened to me while I was taking classes to get my Masters degree in school counseling and was entirely unable to write fiction because I was both working a forty-hour-a-week job and taking one or two classes a semester to get my Masters. I became physically ill – and didn’t even know it until I reflected on it some months later. So, my body requires that I write!
I do love to help people see something important. While few of my stories have what you’d call a “message”, all of them are specifically “about something”. For example, my story, “Dinosaur Veterinarian” is in the November/December issue of ANALOG Science Fiction & Fact. It takes place in South Korea and involves genetic engineering, the 625 War (what the South Koreans call the event, Americans call the Korean War, and the North Koreans calls either the “Fatherland Liberation War” or alternatively the “Chosǒn [Korean] War”), profound prejudice (which one reviewer thought was unrealistic or unbelievable…though I wondered if she’d lost a parent to a foreign power during a military conflict she would find the character’s motivation believable…)
Finding the story is often the hardest part of writing! I had to start a recent piece of work twice because I wasn’t sure WHOSE story it was. I’ve got a couple of other stories where I have to figure out whose story needs to be told.
“I have always used emotion as a writing tool. That goes back to me being on the stage…You must have occasionally read a book that annoyed you for some indefinable reason: It may be that the writer did not totally believe what he was writing. That disbelief comes across to the reader, making him/her uncomfortable indeed, and destroying any other factors the writer may have had working in his favor…One of the reasons the westerns of Louis L'Amour are so immensely popular is that he is known to have walked any area he used in one of his novels, known it so intimately that he could tell when a boulder or a pebble had been moved. This knowledge comes through to the reader and enhances his/her confidence in the author. Granted we can't all do such on-the-spot investigation, but we can research pertinent details and believe in what we're saying. It isn't so much a ‘suspension of disbelief’ as insurance that you will be believed. What is the cynical saying—‘Believe you're telling the truth, even if you're lying about it?’…We all must have those moments of high tragedy and personal frustration, anger, or hilarious humor (the latter being in very short supply in most lives), and we can translate those into the material we wish to enhance with an emotional content. But the writer has to be so immersed in those emotions, believe in them so firmly, that they reach the reader!...I have always believed in Pern. I enjoy going there: I enjoy poking holes in its complacency and seeing what happens to the people nearest the holes. I am comfortable with Pern. I know a lot more about it on an instinctive or intuitive level than even my most devoted reader. I keep lists of all kinds of things about my characters and my places…As long as you believe in them, you can convince your reader that the circumstances are valid for the course of the story. But you must deeply, sincerely, madly believe in what you are writing as you write, or the whole thing will fall flat on its face.”
This has manifested itself in an odd way as I edit through a (currently) 800,000 word story I finished writing several year ago that is both complex and has succeeded in drawing me into it – and even though I’m the one that wrote the revelation, I found I was SURPRISED by the twist in the plot. I’m pretty sure it can’t get better than surprising yourself in a story you wrote – and it was a LOGICAL surprise (if that makes any sense! HOWEVER, using emotion to rive story is something I'm not very good at. I need to sharpen that skill!
Tell us a bit about the short story "Beyond Between" in the Legends 2 Anthology from Del Rey. The story is about a very interesting facet of the Pern Universe…I don't have organized religion on Pern. I figured – since there were four holy wars going on at the time of writing – that religion was one problem Pern didn't need. However, if one listens to childhood teachings, God is everywhere so there should be no question in any mind that he is also on Pern. Thus, there is a heaven to which worthy souls go. So, without mentioning any denomination of organized religion, I figured that both Moreta and Leri deserved respite after their trials... and that's where ‘Beyond Between’ is.”
I found this amazing! I’ve always felt an indefinable sadness when not only contemplating PERN (by the way, the name of the world isn’t a real name – it’s an acronym regarding the type of planet it was labeled after it was surveyed: Parallel Earth, Resources Negligible – P E R N…), but wondering what happened to McCaffrey to lead her to lose organized religion on her imaginary world. This was a bit surprising and I’ll add it to my trove of little things I know about her – and how those things somehow combined in her mind to create the many worlds of Anne McCaffrey.
What do you hope to give readers through your work? “Mostly I'm telling people that they don't have to be victims. They can be survivors but I don't as a rule put 'messages' in my writing.”
Finally, I think I’ve started to learn this – not the specific message she weaves in her stories, rather the idea that stories should MEAN something. They should inspire, challenge, or cause us to grow. Stories can even make us angry – especially if instead of directing our anger outward to destroy as many people as we can, I direct it inwardly and use it to root out lousy ideas and attitudes in my own life; or even figure out how to use that energy to change the world around me and help people to live better, more peaceful lives.
References: https://www.writing-world.com/sf/mccaffrey.shtml, https://sfmistressworks.wordpress.com/category/anne-mccaffrey/, https://www.writinganalytics.co/quotes/21/ , https://sff.onlinewritingworkshop.com/tips/mccaffrey.shtml, https://www.azquotes.com/author/19855-Anne_McCaffrey/tag/writing, https://www.tor.com/2015/04/01/anne-mccaffrey-gave-us-all-our-own-dragons-to-ride/, https://bobneilson.org/interviews/anne-mccaffrey/, https://www.dragoncon.org/dailydragon/dc1999/be-careful-what-you-wish-for-you-may-get-it-an-interview-with-anne-mccaffrey/, https://www.locusmag.com/2004/Issues/11McCaffrey.html, http://www.kittywumpus.net/blog/2015/06/01/the-sf-that-was-isaac-asimov-introduces-anne-mccaffrey/, https://m.media-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/b4/ea/5c061363ada0f65b32d50110.L.jpg
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