Jeremiah Tolbert

In the spirit of other posts this week, I thought I would share with you five books that I keep handy still when I’m try­ing to write fic­tion. Some of these books have imparted their lessons already, and some still have a lot to teach me. Each one of them has been use­ful for dif­fer­ent rea­sons, but I rec­om­mend all of them if you’re seri­ous about fic­tion. Some of them I rec­om­mend even to estab­lished writ­ers. Read on for the details.

Creating Short Fiction by Damon Knight

Strong sto­ries are made from things inside you want­ing to get out.

This was one of the very first books on writ­ing sci­ence fic­tion that was rec­om­mended to me. Damon Knight and his wife founded the Clarion Workshop. If any­one knows about cri­tiquing writ­ers sto­ries and teach­ing peo­ple to write, it’s this man.

I love the tone of this book. It’s encour­ag­ing while being real­is­tic. It’s writ­ten in a very relaxed style. One notion from this book that I found par­tic­u­larly valu­able was the con­cept of “Fred.” Fred is where Damon Knight’s ideas come from. What he means is the sub­con­cious. I’ve found that writ­ing for me is very much about the strug­gle and coop­er­a­tion between my con­cious and sub­con­cious minds. Damon puts it in sim­ple terms that made it clear to me that the lit­tle back-​​of-​​the-​​mind feel­ings were impor­tant to the process, and how impor­tant it is to lis­ten to Fred, to feed Fred, and gen­er­ally keep him entertained.

I’ve had prob­lems with my Fred lately, and I think that’s because I let my Fred become pre­oc­cu­pied with other mat­ters. But I’m work­ing on get­ting him fed up again, and lis­ten­ing to his whispers.

Another area that really helped me was the sec­tion on struc­ture. Damon explains some dia­gram­ming tech­niques that can be very help­ful. But there’s some­thing great on nearly every page, and I found it incred­i­bly help­ful early on.

Science Fiction: 101 edited by Robert Silverberg

Mastery of craft is a mat­ter of process, not of a sin­gle blind­ing moment of attain­ment: you go on work­ing toward it all your life.

I am not one to advo­cate that new writ­ers have to read the clas­sics of the genre before they get started. Frankly, I find a lot of the so called “Golden Age” to be bor­ing and very out­dated. However, There is some­thing to be said for read­ing the great sto­ries of the past, and this book does a pretty good job of find­ing gen­er­ally good sto­ries, but also sto­ries that teach a par­tic­u­lar les­son. Through it all you also get to learn about Robert Silverberg’s early career. It doesn’t work like that any­more, but it’s still inter­est­ing if you like sci­ence fiction.

The book’s an anthol­ogy, a how-​​to, and a mem­oir rolled into one tome. And if you think the rejec­tion let­ters you get today are bad, wait until you read the notes that Horace Gold sent Silverberg. Silverberg’s dis­sec­tion of the sto­ries con­tained within are quite fan­tas­tic to me, and that he was able to find a tech­ni­cal flaw in Bester’s “Fondly Fahrenheit” is damned impres­sive. It’s a minor one, but he uses it to illus­trate an impor­tant notion about para­graphs being con­nected to one another.

The Science of Science-​​Fiction Writing by James Gunn

Honore de Balzac dis­cov­ered that a char­ac­ter did not exist in fic­tion until that char­ac­ter had inter­acted with another char­ac­ter, and Gustave Flaubert dis­cov­ered that noth­ing exists in fic­tion until it has been located in time and place with an appeal to at least three senses.

I spoke about James Gunn as a teacher ear­lier this week. He’s not nearly as faux-​​discouraging in this text, and it’s quite nice. There’s a bit of an old-​​fashioned feel to this book, and I even dis­agree with some of the things that Gunn says, such as the notion that main­stream fic­tion dis­counts Darwin entirely. I think this may have been true in the past, but maybe not so much these days. A lot of the notions of SF have been coopted by the main­stream since he wrote the book, I think.

This is a good middle-​​level text, I think. He approaches con­cepts like char­ac­ter and plot in a very sen­si­cal way, and some of the his­tory of sci­ence fic­tion is very inter­est­ing from an enthusiast’s stand­point, even if it won’t tell you how to write a bet­ter story.

Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maas

A great fic­tional world is a sum of details that to most read­ers are unknown.

This is an odd one for me to include because I haven’t fin­ished the book yet, but Even half-​​way through, and it’s already had an impact on the way I am think­ing about my novel projects. I don’t feel that this book will help that much if you’re just start­ing out, because it paints a fairly broad brush. I think Maas assumes a cer­tain level of expe­ri­ence here, even talk­ing about his book in terms of estab­lished nov­el­ists look­ing to take their work up to the next level.

It’s really his dis­cus­sion of rais­ing the stakes that has sunk its teeth into me. He even says that if there’s one thing that will make a story more pow­er­ful, it’s to raise the stakes. Now in sci­ence fic­tion, I think it’s eas­ier to take this too far. You can put the entire planet or uni­verse at stake in the right sit­u­a­tions, and it’s hard t dra­ma­tize those very well in my expe­ri­ence. But through the sim­ple act of con­tem­plat­ing the stakes, I’ve pushed sev­eral recent bits of writ­ing into a much more inter­est­ing place. I’ll report back on more of this one when I’ve man­aged to fin­ish it.

Story by Robert McKee

In life, expe­ri­ences become mean­ing­ful with reflec­tion in time. In art, they are mean­ing­ful now, at the instant they hap­pen.

For under­stand­ing sto­rycraft, and the struc­ture of sto­ries and plot, there’s no bet­ter book than this. I return to this book time and tmie again. It is so rich with under­stand­ing of the nature of story that my mind can­not con­tain its full impli­ca­tions in a sin­gle read. I pick this up from time to time and flip to ran­dom pages, always learn­ing some new les­son. Robert McKee uses a lot of screen­writ­ing exam­ples here, and osten­si­bly it’s ori­ented towards that, but don’t let that dis­uade you from pur­chas­ing this one. It’s beyond fan­tas­tic. I don’t use this term often, but if you are just start­ing out with writ­ing, this is a must-​​read.

Buy The Books

So those are the books that I have sit­ting next to me as we speak. I have to buy a copy of the If any of these sound inter­est­ing to you, and you’re not boy­cotting Amazon, please con­sider buy­ing the books through the links I’ve pro­vided here. It will help sup­port me writ­ing more posts like this one (although less obvi­ously com­mer­cially crass). I’ve applied for an Indie Books affil­i­ate but haven’t been approved yet, and will use that affil­i­ate in the future for this kind of thing in addi­tion to Amazon.