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 Adam-Troy Castro – with a few from myself…
You write both short and novel-length fiction. Do you have a favorite? Are the tools required different for each? Depending on its length, a short story can be just a feeling, an idea, a place invoked with evocative prose; a novel has to start somewhere, travel somewhere, and arrive somewhere, and I’ve learned from terrible personal experience that it’s dreadful to get over a hundred thousand words into an epic and then realize you have nowhere for the characters to go. Putting it another way, in science fiction a short story can be a diagnosis. A novel has to be the course of treatment, whether or not the patient is fated to live.
I’ve learned this through (as he wrote) “from terrible personal experience”. The first time I tried to write a novel (a long, long, long time ago. It was called PLANET OF STORMS). I shudder to remember what I wrote. It’s absolutely true that writing long HAS to bring the reader to the denouement – a satisfying conclusion to the problem that you started with.
A short story can look at a problem that the writer sees. I just started a short story (currently) called “The Miscreated School of Trade and Technology”. I started to wonder what would happen once genetic engineering reached for its full potential by creating Humans for specific purposes. It sounds interesting – but it would also be fraught with problems and challenges. In the story, Canada (along with most countries) has started engineering soldiers. The US has done the same thing. Then the collective Canadian conscience objects – the practice is abolished and becomes illegal.
But what do they do with the individuals who are already living with their enhancements? The government has declared them non-persons (similar to what the Federal government and California’s Governor Culbert Olson (D) did to Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor). At the time of the story, many are marked for disposal. Two characters cross over into the US. BUT – the story doesn’t offer a solution. It’s just about particular characters in a particular situation.
“As for being discouraged: I agree with Theodore Sturgeon that if you can be discouraged, you should be discouraged. This needs to be something you MUST do. But if the passion ebbs for short periods, that’s a different animal. That’s normal. Go jump in a swimming pool or go out and meet people. See a movie. You need fuel.”
I confess I go through periods of discouragement. I don’t get published as often as I’d like to, and as of the end of the 2023 (though my records vanished with the death of my ROM – which I had stubbornly NOT saved to the web), I had been pretty consistently getting about 10% of my work published. Since 1997, when I started keeping records. So I think I have the “discouragement” thing under control!
“My career has been a series of light bulbs going on, some brighter than others. I still remember the thunderbolt, the absolute thunderbolt, that stories couldn’t be just clever ideas, but had to be about something. I knew this intellectually but had not internalized it. I also recall the thunderbolt that surprise endings were usually not worth the trouble and that I should give up the effort I was putting into concocting them. (Sometimes, they arrive naturally.) The light bulbs will go on in varying order, depending on the order in which your own skills develop.”
It may seem strange, but I only REALLY figured this out about two years ago. Before that, I’d just write the story and send it out. When I reviewed what was ACTUALLY PUBLISHED (look over on the right and scroll to the bottom – you can follow links to my on-line stories. If you read the oldest and newest, you can best see what he’d writing about here.
My CURRENT struggle is to better integrate a story that’s entertaining with my “message”. That’s a hard change to make – how can I integrate message and be entertaining at the same time? Someone who HAS done it is my “teacher” up above. His “message”, if anything, stems from something he said in an online interview with Emily Hockaday at ANALOG. It’s a place he calls, “‘AIsource Infection’ future history”. Now, coming into the computer age from the back door (I graduated from high school in 1975. We DID get to play with computers, indicating I have to lay off my grandkids, as they spend an inordinate amount of time playing games on their phones – I spent my ONLY time on a computer when we had to “call” a mainframe computer in downtown Minneapolis; there was no “computer screen”; and we “shot cannon balls at a target by adjusting the angle of fire” – and the end result PRINTED OUT on a very long sheet of off-white tractor-feed paper…like this only WAY less fancy:
I have no idea what an AIsource infection is, though this is Adam-Troy Castro’s explanation: “a substantial alteration in the nature of humanity”.
“I have written three novels and three novellas about far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort, whodunnits on space habitats and the like, and they cannot be even begun unless I already know the nature of the crime, what clues exist for Andrea to find, how she will follow these clues to the eventual solution, and so on. There are similar planted clues, involving the mysteries of the character’s world, in each volume and in the mega-story of the series, within the GUSTAV GLOOM middle-grade books. I have to know these things going in. The destination is always clear; it’s just the path there designed to invite discoveries in the telling.”
After almost completing my 250,000 word novel, MARTIAN HOLIDAY, I have discovered what NOT to do next time. It involves extensive plotting BEFORE writing (though in my defense, the book was written as a series of blog entries over several years…)
“My favorite advice to writers is to wring the emotional reaction from yourself, first. When writing humor, you need to barely stand how witty you’re being; when you’re writing tragedy, you need to weep; when writing horror, you need to be appalled that this monstrous stuff is coming out of you. Hell, if you’re writing a thriller, you need to fear for your characters. Honestly, if you don’t react yourself, if it’s just a technical exercise, no one else is going to care either.”
This is also a fairly recent discovery! I put a story away and move on to my next. I quickly forget the specifics of that story. When I return, if my reaction is to snicker, feel horrified, appalled, or SOMETHING, I know I’ve been successful. When I don’t feel anything, I computer trunk the story and figure I can come back to it at a later time and figure out what I DIDN’T do. I recently did that to another piece, “The Suicide of AutoTech #35469” and saw the problems right away. I repaired them and the story is awaiting one final read to see if it hangs together.
And THAT is that for today!
References: https://www.adamtroycastro.com/about/ Who he is and where his website is: Adam-Troy Castro made his first non-fiction sale to SPY magazine in 1987. His 26 books to date include among others four Spider-Man novels, 3 novels about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort, and 6 middle-grade novels about the dimension-spanning adventures of that very strange but very heroic young boy Gustav Gloom. Adam’s darker short fiction for grownups is highlighted by his most recent collection, Her Husband’s Hands And Other Stories (Prime Books). Adam’s works have won many awards.
https://odysseyworkshop.wordpress.com/2013/03/10/interview-adam-troy-castro/; https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/nonfiction/author-spotlight-adam-troy-castro-24/ ; https://theastoundinganalogcompanion.com/2019/08/28/qa-with-adam-troy-castro-3/ ;
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