Getting Started Writing Science Fiction
Filed Under: SF Business, Speculative Fiction, Top Post, Writing Advice
Today, we move back to discussing writing, specifically, the beginning of a writing career. Considering I’m barely out of that phase, it’s really the only phase I feel confident in discussing. So:
Read Bilal wrote last week:
I have been reading science fiction and fantasy for a long time. Given that I am a science grad student I also have some scientific background. I come up with ideas to write a sci-fi story or novel. Then I think on them and develop a general direction however, time limitations, English being my second language and generally poor writing skills (I don’t think people like stories that sound like academic papers) prevent me from doing anything with them. Are there any options out there to collaborate or a way to start writing? Thanks.
Whenever anyone brings up this subject, I am reminded of an incident from my childhood when I was first showing interest in science fiction. In about 8th Grade or so, the three junior highs held a joint writing conference for kids like myself. They put us into seminars with authors based on the genres that we were interested in. I got to meet some great writers and get some feedback. And I met James Gunn, and I’ll never forget it.
James Gunn was not like the other writers. He came in swinging for the fences. “Most of you here will never publish a single thing,” was pretty much the first thing he said to us. He proceeded to explain, in detail, why it was difficult or impossible to sell stories at our age. Why, if we could, we should give up writing all together and find something better to do. He went on in this fashion for an hour, and I have a memory, perhaps false, of some of the kids crying. Me, I was excited. Because I could see exactly what he was doing. He was testing us to see how serious we were.
At the end of the class, he gave us his mailing address and said if we were still interested, he would critique a story for us. I took Mr. Gunn up on that. I expected at the time to receive a Mamatas-style savaging of the story. Instead, I got back a very kind and thoughtful set of line comments for what was probably a truly awful, awful bit of juvenelia.
So when people ask me about writing, I think of James Gunn, and I think that perhaps I should do everything I can in my power to dissuade you from taking up writing, especially writing science fiction short fiction. Reasons why you shouldn’t:
- The pay is crap. The pro rate is 5 cents a word, but can sometimes go higher. What was the pro rate in the 1950s? 3-5 cents a word. You will not get rich, or even pay the bills, writing SF short fiction.
- It’s hard, and it takes a long time to get good at. I’m a relatively fast learner, and it still took me 5 years of writing every week before I started to consistently write well enough to sell the work. And it’s hard work, so it’s easy to fall out of habit. It’s not like riding a bicycle. You can forget, or at least get a little rusty.
- It will isolate you from everyone you know. Because it won’t be your job, but a side gig, you’ll be doing it in your spare time. Spare time means you sacrifice things, like time with your family, or time with your friends. You might give up TV like Jay Lake.
- You’ll read a lot less than you used to. That time can be spent writing! Ironically, one good way to get better at writing is to read a lot.
- Rejection sucks. You’ll get rejections. A lot of them. I think I heard once that Michael Swanwick has never been rejected, but the rest of us have hundreds of them. Sometimes, they’re kind, and sometimes they’re nasty and make you want to never write again. See, even the editors will test you.
- Nobody reads science fiction anyway. Like, what, 4% of books sold are SF? And short fiction, the biggest market has 25,000 subscribers last I checked, and probably fewer now. They’ve been shrinking consistently for years. It’s a niche pursuit at best.
Still with me? The prospect of dying alone, penniless, in the gutters doesn’t frighten you? Well, then you have the infection, and the only thing I can do is try to give you some advice to help you progress through the stages of your illness.
First of all, don’t worry about the language issue. If you can learn to tell a story, it doesn’t matter what language you write it in, and editors will look past some somewhat clumsy writing for a great story. You could write in your native language, and find someone who knows English better to translate.
Starting out, I do not recommend you try to collaborate (except maybe with a translator). You need to master plotting, characterization, theme, world building, and a dozen other skills, and you’re not going to do that if you’re sharing your writing duties with someone else, in my opinion. These are things you will learn on your own.
Being a science graduate student is an advantage. Editors are hungry for hard science fiction stories. If you can write them, you are practically guaranteed a career. But remember, they have to be good stories first. If you write a bad story with cool science, it doesn’t do you any good. It’s going to be rejected.
As far as starting? Open a word processing program and type words together to form sentences, and sentences to form paragraphs. You will probably be terrible at first. 99% of writers are. But the truth of it is, you get better through the act of writing. Jay Lake likes to say that writing is a muscle and it needs to be exercised. I agree with this notion. The beginning of any writing career is going to be about stamina training and building up some bulk. You’re not going to be competing in the Olympics for a very long time (to strain the metaphor).
Ideas. You’ll hear this from everybody, so I might as well break the news to you. Ideas for stories are a dime a dozen. Ideas can help put a story over the top, but they are not a good foundation for a story. The foundation for a story is, well, story. The compelling events of a problem and the people that attempt to solve it. That problem could be built around a great idea, but without the people and their attempts and failures to deal with it, it’s just an essay or a science fact article.
I thought when I was starting out that I was hot shit when it came to ideas. I thought I had the best ideas of any new writers I knew, and that it was all I needed. I wish I could go back and start over again, realizing that the ideas should have taken a back seat to learning storycraft.
Read and absorb everything. Because once you become a writer, your brain becomes a black hole with a voracious appetitite for ideas and information. When I go to the doctor’s office, I don’t read SF magazines. I pick up the magazine dealing with a topic I know the least about, say, Woodworking Monthly, because I never know if I’m going to want to write a story about a woodworker. A guy who builds cabinets for a living doesn’t at first seem a likely candidate for a protagonist, but you’ll learn how to do it. You’re going to use every bit of knowledge you ever obtain. Your entire life becomes one giant research effort.
After all of that and you’re still interested in writing? Okay then. Go, you have my blessing, whatever that’s worth. Do it. Put your butt in a chair and start typing, or writing with a pen, or whatever method you prefer. Do it, and do it consistently for several years. Read everything you can–not just SF, but the classics.
I look forward to reading your first published story. Drop me a line when it comes out!
So how about you all? Do you have any interesting stories to share about when you were just starting out with writing, or whatever career you pursue? Any tips to add to mine here?
How to Communicate the Importance of a Modern Web Strategy to Skeptical Clients
Filed Under: Web Design
My college pal, artist, and teacher Ed asked last week:
I belong to a professional organization of teachers that has been slow to embrace internet technologies. I am interested in proposing improvements to their website but I am unsure how to communicate the ideas. What formatting do you suggest for a written proposal to an organization?
I’m going to broaden the topic a bit, because the answer to your last question is, I don’t know, and I wouldn’t try to convince an organization with a written proposal. In my work, which is primarily done for individuals and not organizations, I only write proposals to make it clear what we’re going to do after we’ve discussed it. I do the convincing before I write word one of a proposal.
In my experience, you’re not going to get very far with a prospective client, or very far with convincing your organization to update their website, if you haven’t sold them on the benefits. The easiest way to do this, in my experience, is to start with having them identify and acknowledge a problem.
For example, “we’re not getting any leads from the website.” Or, “I keep getting email about how hard our website is to navigate.” Management or the client can deal with concrete specifics. They have goals, sometimes ones that they don’t even know about, so your task in early meetings is to identify what those goals are and then explain how an updated technology can solve those problems.
Problems and solutions may be a good format for a written proposal as well, if you’re still determined to go down that route. Provide the problem, and describe the solution. Relate these solutions to the overall goals of the company. We should improve X because it will cause Y, which is good for the bottom line. Or whatever.
Explaining why certain technology is better than others, or why a website shouldn’t look like it was built in 1997 can be more specific and difficult. One thing I try to explain early on is that websites are about projecting an image. Your website should reflect the image that you wish to convey to your clients, customers, whatever. If your website’s image is that of an old man yelling at the kids to get off his lawn, that might not be in line with your organization’s overall strategies.
There’s a lot of resistance to change in the world in general. Change is costly, it’s hard, and it doesn’t always result in improvements. I can understand completely why some people might become resistant to change because of that. How you convince them otherwise is no different a task than convincing a person of anything. Listen to their objections, consider them, and describe how you will overcome them.
Hopefully some of these basic strategies will help you, Ed. If worse comes to worse, find a competing website that does it better, and pull up the two sites side by side, and let them stare at it for five minutes. Then ask, “any questions?” I’ve never tried that before, but I wanted to at my last day job. Let me know how that goes if you try it.
How about the rest of you? How would you approach a skeptical boss or client that a website or other technology needs to be updated? Do you have any success stories or horror stories?
Michael Bishop and Starship Sofa
Filed Under: SF Podcasting, Speculative Fiction
Tony has put together a really special episode of Starship Sofa this week, with a reading of Michael Bishop’s story, written in memory of his son who was one of the victims of the Virginia Tech shooting.
From Tony over at Starship Sofa:
StarShipSofa narrates Vinegar Peace, a SF story wrote by Michael Bishop for his son Jamie Bishop who died two years ago at the Virginia Tech shooting.
Michael Bishop says:
I wrote “Vinegar Peace” — in August of 2007 — because I had to. Our 35-year-old son, Jamie, died on the morning of April 16, 2007, as one of thirty-two victims of a disturbed shooter on the campus of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.
Jamie, an accomplished digital artist who did lovely covers for four or five of my books, was holding forth in Room 2007 of Norris Hall in his German class more than two hours after his eventual murderer had slain two students in a dormitory on another part of campus. The administration failed to issue a warning — a warning that might well have saved many lives — in a timely fashion. However, some of its members secured their own offices and notified their own family members of this initial event; and so the worst school shooting in the history of the United States claimed our son, four other faculty members (including a man, Dr Librescu, who had survived the Holocaust and who held a table against his classroom door until all own students could escape), four of Jamie’s students, and twenty-one other young people in Norris Hall, not to mention the first two victims in West Ambler-Johnston dorm. Another twenty-eight students were wounded by bullets or injured leaping from upper-story windows. Some of these young people will live with their injuries the rest of their lives
All of the administrators, with the exception of a woman who later died of a stroke or a heart attack (a death that my wife and I can’t help but attribute partially to the stress of living with the mistakes of the President and the other Policy Group members), remain in their positions. So much for accountability, and so much for justice.
In any case, “Vinegar Peace” grew from this disaster and from a grief that I can’t imagine ever laying totally aside. Jeri and I mourn Jamie’s loss every day in some private way, and we think continually of all the other parents and loved ones of the slain and injured who will carry a similar burden with them until they die. We think, too, of the parents and loved ones of the dead and wounded from the United States’s optional war in Iraq, who long for their dead and who pray for their injured with an intensity not a whit different from our own. How ironic that our son died on American soil. How sad the wasted potential and disfigured lives resulting from violence everywhere. And forgive me the inadequacy of these remarks. Clearly, I wrote a story because I could not address either my outrage or my grief in any other way.
Mike Bishop
StarShipSofa is very honoured and humbled to be allowed to bring this story to a wider audience. I know I speak for the SF community when I say our hearts and prayers go out to Mike and Jeri and all the families who have to live with this grief every day.
StarShipSofa Show No 82: Vinegar Peace, or, The Wrong-Way Used-Adult Orphanage
As Ever,
Tony
Crucial Freelancer Skill: Estimating Your Time
Filed Under: Graphic Design, Web Design
In my business as a web designer, the first thing a client often wants from me, after we discuss their project, is an estimate. For me, this is purely a matter of estimating how much time a proposed project will take. But that’s not as easy as it sounds.
As I advance in skill, some projects tend to take longer. They look nicer, but they cost more. And that’s something I failed to take into consideration on my most recent project. I’m going to eat quite a bit of time because I overstretched myself in the design and coding phase. It took me quite a few hours longer than I had estimated with the client, and I still have a couple of promised components to go too. My mistake, certainly not the client’s.
Another mistake I made was not doing my site proposal process. In my site proposal, I outline the different aspects of the process and how many hours I think it will take for each area. I named a single figure for this rush job, and didn’t put enough time into evaluating the job.
Every mistake is a learning opportunity. Here’s what I’ve learned from this project:
- Always do a site proposal document first. Setting the scope out in paper makes it clear when, if the client requests something that isn’t in the proposal document, it will cost more.
- Take into consideration that you will take more time as you become a better designer, spending that time on little details that make a design go pop.
- Research the technical feasibility of features before you offer them and include them in your designs. (oops) Otherwise you can end up burning hours of your own time trying to figure out if something is even possible.
It’s been a long couple of days this week, but this project is nearly done. I’ll do some training tomorrow and figure out that last bit of technology when the company I contacted writes me back. I’m looking forward to adding the project to my portfolio.
Now, to take a break for a couple of hours and rest, before diving back into another project.
