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 Eleanor Arnason – with a few from myself…
While I’ve never met Eleanor Arnason face-to-face, I both live in the same city that she does and I saw her speak at MiniCon 23 in 1988, a science fiction convention held over Easter weekend every year for the past 55 years.
“First off, is that I also love writing short, as does Arneson: “…[I] like the shortness of short fiction, and the fact that—written well—it can have a density and tightness that’s hard to get in a novel. It’s hard to write a flawless novel, (though Jane Austen managed in Pride and Prejudice.) But you can write a close to flawless short story.” She continues this theme elsewhere: “[I]switched over to writing short stories, novelettes and novellas [and] I wrote in series…So was I right to switch to short fiction? Maybe not [but] I really like the novelette and novella lengths. They are long enough to have richness and complexity, but not so long that I get tired of writing.”
I’ve found that more and more often, my SF falls into the “longer short story length” what’s called “novelettes” (7500-19,000 words), and “novellas”(10,000 to 40,000 words). In particular, the novelette. The reason? I’m not sure, but it seems like I need that many words to make my characters live. I’ve managed with short shorts, or flash fiction. I’ve even managed Nanofiction (https://nanoism.net/stories/736/), but it’s most comfortable for me around nine thousand words. MY problem is that I’m not consistent enough to push that on a magazine very often. ANALOG is good with it, but I need something SHORTER to break into ASIMOV’S, F&SF, and CLARKESWORLD. So, that SHOULD be my goal.
What does Arneson write ABOUT? The shorter the story, the more important getting this right is, “A lot of my fiction is about social stereotypes and characters who don’t fit into the roles they are assigned by society…My characters want to be something they can’t be in their society, because of their gender…I give them tolerable lives. There is enough suffering in the world. [Other stories]are about people who get in difficult situations which are often supernatural and struggle to get out of the situations and get on with their lives…[both kinds of stories are about] the struggle to have one’s own life…trying to make a decent life in spite the rules of one’s society and the weight of the past…”
Oddly, I just stumbled across a post I made here in 2021 where I was forced to answer a question a friend of mine asked, “Just what are most passionate about?” That led me to a few themes I find in my writing: I’m passionate about what I spent most of my adult career doing: teaching science; FUN! I usually can’t write “funny” science fiction, but my characters can have a sense of humor; I work to write about equity. I will be the first to admit that I’m a big, old, fat, white guy; inheritor of every privilege known to Humanity. But I typically don’t write from that perspective. Those are things I hope people find in my stories.
In a very recent interview with Lyda Morehouse, Arneson said, “Maybe we need to talk about why one writes…I have always told stories. I told stories to my kid brother before I could read and write. Back then, I think I was motivated simply by my love of stories. Over time, I learned more and more about the techniques of writing, and a lot of fiction I used to enjoy became painful to read, because it was badly written. And I became more and more aware of how difficult writing can be. Not always. Sometimes I write stories that rush out and are a pleasure all the way.”
I’m in a tough position because things I believe about the spiritual world aren’t acceptable to many writers, in particular science fiction writers. As a science teacher for 40 years, I understand that science is all about “proving”. But there are some sciences that have become respectable WITHOUT being able to prove anything – exobiology is one. It’s the study of life that’s not on Earth. The problem there should be obvious. We haven’t FOUND any life off Earth. They’ve solved the problem! They’ve changed the degree to ASTRObiology; they dodge the definition by giving it thus: “[We can’t yet point to the exact time, conditions and mechanisms when organic matter first went from nonliving to living…basic questions remain unanswered about the long-term adaptation of living organisms to other environments. For example, we do not know what the effect will be of living for years on Mars…Astrobiology addresses all these compelling mysteries by embracing the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe…addressing three fundamental questions: How does life begin and evolve? Is there life beyond Earth and, if so, how can we detect it? What is the future of life on Earth and in the universe…Politics, science, personalities and serendipity all contributed to the creation and success of what is now called astrobiology as a field of inquiry.”
I’ve read about and written about and even TAUGHT about aliens for decades! I have a huge desire to BELIEVE in life off Earth. But there is ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE THAT LIFE EXISTS ANYWHERE BUT ON EARTH. Despite Hollywood prattling on about how if we were all there is, it would a terrible waste of space – that’s just aesthetics, not science.
“Science fiction and fantasy have the appeal of strangeness, and of course science and technology are enormously important in science fiction.” In an interview with Lyda Morehouse, on February 20, 2023, Arneson said, “One of the deep defects in science fiction -- you see this with hard science fiction writers all the time -- is that someone will set a story five hundred years in the future, and their science is absolutely the science of the moment. Well, if you go back five hundred years in our culture, that takes you to 1500. You've missed Newton…Science evolves much too rapidly, at least in technological society…The basic premise in that story is that a) aliens are not going to formulate science the same way we do, and b) in two hundred years we're going to have very different science. It's one of these things that drive me crazy about hard SF. These guys take great pride in the fact that their science is absolutely true right now even though their story is set five hundred or a thousand years in the future. I just don't buy it. They're wrong.”
Strong words from a strong woman! I hope I can write science fiction as well as she does someday!
References: https://eleanorarnason.com/2021/11/writing/
https://locusmag.com/2016/09/eleanor-arnason-unfolding/
https://eleanorarnason.com/2018/05/this-website-3/
https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/interview-eleanor-arnason/
http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/interview-eleanor-arnason/
https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/search?q=What+am+I+most+passionate+about – What am I most passionate about?
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