Collaborations

Collaborations are works writers create when they either feel they need to learn something new or just wish to provide a richer narraritive that would otherwise be possible should they do it alone.. It simuiltaneously exposes your working methods yet opens you to new possiblities.

 My first collaboration did not turn out very well, as Jeff Kooistra and I began battling over characters, plots, and scenes by trading drafts over eMail.   After a while, and 90,000 words later, we decided the plot had become so convoluted that it couldn’t be resolved.   We abandoned the effort with no hard feelings since our objective was for me to learn to write better dialogue and Jeff to improve his exposition. 

My second collaboration, with Sarah Zettel, produced a story that got on the final Nebula ballot even though she dropped out of the work soon after the work began, but after we had developed the characters in some detail.

Cat Ranbo and I are now are working on a fusion piece titled "Haunted," which looks as though it might turn out to be a novella or novel, given the amount of material in hand and the depth of the story we've outlined.  

 We’ve been working on a Scrivener project in DropBox.  We first sketched out an outline, changed that into a semi-narrative Story Line, modified that with a few more ideas, and then turned each micro-scene  into corkboard cards* and began inserting words on our chosen cards/scenes.  Currently I am driving Cat batshit with my endless tinkering with the meta-story, structure, metaphoric parallelism, and chronology**. When I get back from Readercon it will be her turn to drive me crazy. 

 I tend to plot a story in fair detail and then try to write scenes in sequence while Cat more or less writes in huge, messy, and random blobs that she can later mold into smooth text. Currently neither one of us is looking carefully*** at what the other is doing since we want to get as many ideas written down as we can.  In addition, both of us are trying to match the other’s process to achieve some measure of synchronicity and, as far as I'm concerned, working outside of the structure seems to be working for me.  At the moment we have a mess of roughly sixteen thousand words and have only half the cards filled out!  Both of us also have stuff written off-line that will eventually get pasted into the cards.  

At some point a few weeks down the road we will call quits to this first round pre-draft foreplay and begin arranging the material in a sensible order (we’ve laid out the cards in chronological order, but that may/might/will change when we start pounding out a first draft.  

After that we’ll really start writing the story.

* We color the cards to show who did what.
**I’ll admit I’m a bit anal, controlling, and impatient, but that’s no reason to think I’m hard to work with.

***This probably seems insane unless you know us.


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Convention Boobs

I have deliberately restricted my posts on this blog to the agony and ecstasy of writing as a way of life and steered clear of the swirling controversy surrounding the science fiction "community."

Today, I read a post by Mahenia Delvenni that seemed to conflate SFWA with offensive convention behaviors and obliquely reflected on several parallel discussions with the SFWA community.  I am not defending any point of view but I think the air needs to be cleared a bit for those new to the writing community and/or conventions.

Let's be perfectly clear:  The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) holds only one (1) convention per year and that is the annual Nebula weekend during which we honor the best and brightest writing in our genre.  The Nebula Weekend is the ONLY SFWA-sponsored event that fans can attend.

All, and I repeat ALL other science fiction conventions held around the world are organized, managed, and conducted by groups of dedicated fans.  SFWA members may attend these as guest panelists, to sign autographs, or just schmooz with their fans.  This may give the appearance to the uninformed that SFWA as an organization is somehow involved in the convention. In actuality, SFWA has nothing to do with the way any convention, up to and including WorldCon, is run nor does the organization have any authority over the bad behavior of attendees at these conventions.

Do not distain SFWA for the behavior of a few ignorant boobs.

Those wanting to have a career in the genre would be doing themselves a disservice should they choose not to join SFWA and avail themselves of the many relationships that can be forged there.  The community has a long history of paying-forward by veterans to new writers.  They will also learn that the organization is not an "old-boys club" as some have inaccurately termed it; we have four women and one senior citizen on the SFWA Board of Directors, the Nebula ballot this year was packed with female writers as well as those in non-traditional relationships, of different national origin, and religious dispositions.   SFWA members are a multihued and varied group who are expanding the boundaries of the genre with every word they write. As an often contentious group the members nevertheless talk out their issues, ask the Board to make a decision when they can't, and abide by the results.  SFWA sometimes makes mistakes but when it does, more often than not, we work hard to repair the damage.

That's what a professional organization does.

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Composing/Composting

Sometimes an opening scene arises fully formed in my mind, the words so crystalline clear that it takes but seconds to get them onto the page. That done, the logic of that opening leads to another scene, one that might require backstory, which is fleshed out with little thought so I can continue with the fascinating story unfolding before my eyes.  Oh, here is a flash of insight that turns the scene, that illuminates the character, a bit of technical detail that improves the verisimilitude of the setting. Each word seems golden, each sentence a gem, and the necklaces of paragraphs are priceless jewelry.  The words come so easily, slide onto the page with so little effort that only exhaustion can take me from the keyboard. 

Almost without effort I’m a couple thousand words into a story filled with brilliant repartee, interesting character backstory, and an engaging dynamic.   I have just been cruising along without paying too much attention to my destination while I talk about the scenery.  That's when I abruptly realize that I have no idea of where this is going.  Better, I think, to sleep on it and revisit it with fresh eyes and a clear mind.  

I should have known better.  Revisiting the brilliant output of the previous day finds it less than pleasing.  It is with growing horror that I now see the mistakes, the misspellings, the bad grammar, the stark woodenness of the dialogue, not to mention the rambling narrative that goes nowhere in particular save to end a sequence of events.  How could I have been so entranced by the unfolding story in my head that I didn't see the many, many flaws, the imperfections, and the illogic of the piece?  What had I been thinking?  Had the shit fairies visited the manuscript during the night and changed my brilliant prose to this dreck?

I realize that I had been doing nothing more than composing and settle down to do the REAL writer’s work of correcting the errors and polishing the text word by word, scene by scene, and all the while hoping that those damn fairies won't visit me again.

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Being True

At a recent lecture to a bunch of aspiring writers I was asked what you do when a character "hijacks" a story. She questioned me on what she should do when a minor character, who incidentally had a fabulous moniker that immediately grabbed my attention, began taking over the plot and leading the story in an unintended direction.  Her real complaint, I discovered after a little probing, was that she had been trying to write a SHORT story and this new character was causing it to become longer and, possibly, a novelette*.

I've had other writers tell me of this happening in their own work.  An otherwise insignificant spear carrier steps out of the chorus and begins dominating the stage, stealing the limelight from the lead protagonists.  It should be noted that the character who does this does not have an independent existence but is, in fact, a creation of the writer's mind.  Each writer has dealt with this happenstance in their own way; some going with the flow to see where it would go, others enlarging the story to give the character a place, while still more administer the writer's axe and excise the nasty bastard before he ruins everything!

It's always a danger when a writer tries to shoehorn a story to fit and predetermined plot when the  brain is telling you to change directions. Perhaps the lead characters weren't interesting enough or their relationship was flawed. Whatever the reason an emerging character is always a sign that the story needs to go in a different direction.  Nobody knows from where the stream of consciousness flows to fill the writer's well of ideas and it is only to their peril that they ignore it.  Forcing a story into a strait jacket of defined plot and scrupulously tailored characters will usually kill anything interesting that might occur.

A writer should always let the story tell itself by listening to their inner voice.  Writing a compelling story is an art and not something you can  "engineer."  The good writers are those who speak from the heart, listen to their instincts, and write in an authentic voice.

*For the uninitiated a short story, according to SFWA guidelines, is any story with word count under 7,500.  A novelette is any story with more than 7,500 but less that 17,500 words.  Many magazine editors want short stories to be around 5,000 words or less, for formatting and layout reasons.

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"Dressing" Characters

Why do some writers "dress" the viewpoint figure, the protagonist, the antagonist, or other characters in  their stories, in various garb, as if fashion and style were important when it clearly is not?   More to the point, just why do they choose to inflict racial identity, gender, religion, or ethnicity upon their characters when there is no necessity to do so?  Is it just to promote the word count?

Costumes might be relevant should the characters have to adapt to the situation e.g. a time traveller  in a different era, or where there is, later in the story, a bodice to be ripped.  There are other situations but please, dear author, let  us have relevance.

So many times I will see a short story where a description of a character serves no other purpose than to frame the character in the  reader's mind. While such stereotyping might be entertaining to many and amusing to some, if it is not relevant to the character's personality, behavior, or actions, such descriptive passages are meaningless ormolu.  Who gives a damn how character A was dressed, what religion they followed, or their racial identity when the scene involves a lab experiment, rocket ship, or werewolf in the freaking forest?

In the same way "dressing" the character in ethnic or gender identification is meaningless unless it informs the reader of the character's thoughts or actions*. Otherwise it is just an attempt to be "inclusive," which is all very well and good, but only when it has some point in the story. I try not to describe most of my human characters** in my stories so the reader can form their own mental images:  I want an Asian to picture an Asian hero, not some blue-eyed European.

Descriptions of size, shape, and form are acceptable if there is a point. A character can be muscular, tall, or foreboding where such features are pertinent to some point in the story.  You cannot write a romance without getting into such description, but does it matter if the protagonist is black, white, or purple when the sweaty parts start?  I think not.  A good writer needs the reader's imagination to do half the work while describing the activities.

 *I do use gender identifications simply because it's easier to use "he" or "she" instead of some fumbling obfuscation that could take the reader out of the story.  

**As an example, in 1994 I wrote PERSISTENCE without identifying the gender of the narrator.  I've since had readers tell me in no uncertain words that the narrator was "obviously" female, or perhaps "male," depending on their imagining of the story.  I've taken their interpretations as complements.

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Why I Write Short

Short stories are the  first thing I read in a magazine.  Always have.  Loved Brown's shorts as a kid but lukewarm otherwise.  Today I prefer a fat anthology of short stories over a long novel, although truthfully, I read both with the same enthusiasm.   This is probably why I've remained focused on the short form for most of my writing "career" - as if that meant more than dogged persistence and efficient use of spare time from working and family.

Economically speaking, writing short stories doesn't make a lot of sense.  The amount of work to conceptualize an idea, devise a credible plot, envision an environment --hell, a Universe!-- and then sweat each paragraph, sentence, and phrase down to its most elegant and economic form, takes a lot of work.  A good 5,000 work short story might be the result of over 30,000 words of draft, and many of those words repeated erasures, changes, and adjustments to an earlier draft. This repeated editing is necessary to get the prose just right, because in a short story every word has weight, every sentence is fraught with meaning, and every phrase has to move the story along.

A novelist, one of those garrulous bastards that churn out successive one hundred thousand word tomes, might deviate from the story to discuss some bit of ephemera, describe an object with exquisite prose, or characterize the protagonist with extensive backstory, each of these consuming pages and pages of words, words, words!  Such luxurious wasting of resources are denied the short story writer who must beat down anything that detracts from the momentum of the plot, that let's the reader's thoughts stray afield. No, the short story writer has to lash the reader ever forward lest they lose focus on the goal, a goal that much be achieved relatively quickly.  An editor once told me that the ideal story starts one microsecond before the epiphany and compresses that as much as possible.  Everything else, she said, is merely giving the reader enough information to understand the conclusion.

So what is the reward for churning out short stories? It certainly isn't the compensation: word rates haven't significantly changed in thirty years and, compared to inflation, have fallen to fractional increments of a penny. But there are other non-economic rewards for writing short. First and foremost,  believe that short stories are the yeast in the science fiction loaf, the little thoughtful bits that move the field forward by introducing modest ideas, variations on a theme, or even ploughing new stylistic or technologic ground.  Those writers who do this consistently and well gain prestige among other writers and fans, even if they never become the GoH at a con.

Truth to tell is that I can't NOT write short stories, not when there are so many fascinating ideas to write about!

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Vacation?

My God, I thought I'd be able to stop thinking abut writing for a few weeks as I travelled from the Nebula bash and up the California and Oregon coasts to Portland for a week's visit with family.  Maybe, I hoped, a break from writing would give me a rest from that vague thing that continued to tease me for a time.  Yes sir, a full week of non-creativity would do my mind wonders, said I.  Of course there was SFWA work to be done which left little time for writing anything!

So, at the Nebula banquet a quiet conversation resulted in a promise of a collaboration, quite innocently I assure you.  I suddenly fell back into full creative mode, my brain filled with plot lines, scenes, back stories, etc etc, etc.  instead of mindless vacation thoughts.  Damn!  I couldn't even admire the breathtaking scenery of Oregon's southern coast without generating scenes for my protagonist.

I found myself stealing time to knock an idea out on my iPad, sending a quick message to another writer, and thinking about the new story and the collaboration, the unfinished novel, and the list of unfinished drafts awaiting me at home.  Then I get an acceptance (which is quite nice thank you by much) and following that, a rewrite request. 

I'm going to have to take more vacations.

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