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 Shane Tourtelotte– with a few from myself…
I’ve been reading Shane since his first story was published in "Mortal Instruments" in the ANALOG February 1998 issue. He went on to write some forty-two OTHER stories, mostly for Stan Schmidt at ANALOG.
When Shane and famed SF writer, Michael A. Burstein (I'm also a fan of his!) wrote the short story “Bug Out!”, BURSTEIN NOTES: “...we needed an idea for a story. Shane brought with him the beginning of the idea for it. As soon as I heard the idea, I started to contribute more ideas to go along with it, Shane did as well, and we realized that this story would work as a collaboration.”
“But, I'm inherently a nonlinear writer. Shane, on the other hand, likes to start a story from the first word and keep writing until he reaches the end. It did turn out that we both work with outlines, we decided to write an outline for the story first, with each scene numbered. Then one of us took the odd-numbered scenes and the other one took the even-numbered scenes. That way, on a particular day. Shane could write all his scenes from beginning to end, and I could bounce around within my scenes and write whatever I wanted . Then we figured we would trade scenes and rewrite each other.”
Me: To tell you the truth, I’ve NEVER written ANYTHING with someone else. While it worked well for them, it seems like it was more than a LITTLE serendipitous! Honestly, I’ve pretty much hidden my adult SF writing from most people – except of course, my family! My daughter asked me to be a first reader for both her trilogy and her most recent gryphon fantasy; which I happily did! She’s now my publisher as I’m going to take a stab at publishing MARTIAN HOLIDAY myself... (for anyone who’s wondering: “On Mars in 2517, five million Humans live under The Five Domes. But a million others are not considered Human and live hidden lives. There have been 400 hundred years of relative peace. But the Unified Faith in Humanity and finding alien artifacts proving that Humans Are Not Alone is about to change Mars. Revolution seethes. On the brink of upheaval, three natural Humans, four Artificial Humans, and an AI might lead instead...a Reformation to save Mars.”)
Shane Tourtelotte said: “Stanley Schmidt wrote a book entitled Aliens and Alien Societies” I have this book! “…‘Engineering Organisms’…he discusses various means of locomotion in animals…One paragraph on water mobility mentions jet and rocket propulsion, used by some octopi and squids, adding, ‘it's a little hard to see how (the usual sudden and irregular squirts) could be adapted to routine, continuous, long-term transportation. Two pages before that, he also notes that ‘science fiction writers take statements like that as challenges.’”
“Well, I certainly did. My solution was peristalsis; rhythmic muscular contractions that gets your lunch where it’s going could also serve as a continuous propulsive mechanism. It would take a lot of specialization to make it work well, but hey, so did flying. The next idea arose because I imagined these alien creatures as being of whale-like size--naturally more interesting in a story than having them the size of trout.” This mental exercise resulted in the short story “Live Bait”, which appeared in ANALOG’s July/August 1999 issue.
I had a similar experience with my story, “Fairy Bones”.
I live near a park reserve, and while there are no sapient fairies who live there, there are (during certain years) abundant fireflies. That’s the foundation of the story. I add a grandmother whose grandson is “forced on her” while his parents are off planet, and he’s obviously surly and pretends disinterest in everything his grandmother is doing.
She’s doing research into a unique lifeform she’s discovered in the nearby marsh and asks him to help. Bored, he reluctantly agrees – and discovers that she’s been capturing and categorizing creatures that look remarkable like our image of fairies.
She and her grandson bond over their adventure together and end up being a tight pair – and also intent on keeping their secret…while at the same time knowing someone ELSE knows the secret, too.
There's more than ONE way real life can spill over into story life!
References: https://www.sfsite.com/01b/mb288.htm , “Fairy Bones”, November 15, 2015, CAST OF WONDERS (podcast) https://www.castofwonders.org/2015/11/episode-181-fairy-bones-by-guy-stewart/ Image: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhK6miXJMTMNyB3kzq-r6I2LVCTZJj0CDS0dPV2Qapl6e9rZPuHx2u5QKcKT1QGeDg1_tPMv-lpnuSr_eiBjwPXmex9mcgtuH2-SUtZEpGWV0_HdtJQelVt5K69NulJBUqNju5GNjHgQibXsIo4NeWpTOj4ai85jCRjMHOtwtkqshzxFvZPUSjXZNq6=s320
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