Writers Workshop of Science Fiction & Fantasy

Writers Workshop of Science Fiction & Fantasy

Copyright © 2013 Michael Knost

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be copied or transmitted in any form, electronic or otherwise, without express written consent of the publisher or author.

Cover art: Matthew Perry

Illustrations in this book copyright © 2013 Bonnie Wasson,

Matthew Perry, and Seventh Star Press, LLC.

Editor: Michael Knost

Published by Seventh Star Press, LLC.

ISBN Number 978-1-937929-62-6

Seventh Star Press

www.seventhstarpress.com

[email protected]

Printed in the United States of America

First Edition

PERMISSIONS

Editor’s Introduction © 2013 by Michael Knost.

Where Do You Get Your Ideas? © 2012 by Neil Gaiman.

Nebulous Matters, or Speculations on Subgenre © 2012 by Lou Anders.

Ursula K. Le Guin Talks about a Lifetime in the Craft © 2012 by Lucy A. Snyder.

Beginnings © 2012 by James Gunn.

Middles © 2012 by George Zebrowski.

Endings © 2012 by Joseph E. Lake, Jr., (a.k.a. Jay Lake).

Tim Powers Talks about Writing Speculative Fiction © 2012 by Nayad Monroe.

On Rhetoric and Style © 2012 by Orson Scott Card.

Talking Too Much, or Not Enough: Dialogue in Science Fiction and Fantasy © 2012 by Pamela Sargent.

How Alien the Alien: A Primer © 2012 by G. Cameron Fuller.

The Green-Skinned Zorn Laughed with Grief Character and Emotion in Science Fiction and Fantasy © 2012 by Nancy Kress.

Alternate History: The How-to of What Might Have Been © 2012 by Harry Turtledove.

Larry Niven Talks about Collaboration © 2012 by Jude-Marie Green.

Hemingway Talks about Writing © 2012 by Joe Haldeman.

Unbending Gender © 2012 by Nisi Shawl.

Reverse Engineering © 2012 by Thranx, Inc.

Kevin J. Anderson Talks about Spin-offs, Prequels, and Fan Fiction © 2012 by Alethea Kontis.

Tactics of Worldbuilding © 2012 by Elizabeth Bear.

Ann VanderMeer Talks about Weird Fiction © 2012 by Jackie Gamber.

Short Fiction: A Roundtable Discussion with Short Story Editors © 2012 by Michael Knost.

Long Fiction: A Roundtable Discussion with Novel Editors © 2012 by Max Miller.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I want to offer my sincere appreciation for those who helped make Writers Workshop of Science Fiction & Fantasy a reality:

The contributors, without whom this book would offer very little.

Stephen Zimmer and the entire crew at Seventh Star Press for not only believing in this project, but for thinking outside the box and delivering exactly what you promised… and more.

Geoff Fuller, as far as I am concerned, is the best proofreader/editor in the business. Thanks for making me look good… again.

Matt Perry for the incredible cover art and design, and for the great formatting. Thanks for making me look good, too.

Lou Anders for sage advice.

Matt Perry and Bonnie Wasson for such gorgeous art pieces.

Jackie Gamber and the talented folks of Alltrope Media. Your book trailers are nothing short of works of art!

G. Cameron Fuller, Jennifer Collins, F. Keith Davis, Brian J. Hatcher, Frank Larnerd, and hundreds of other friends who had to listen to me talk endlessly about this project.

Last, but certainly not least, everyone who participated in the Kickstarter!

HONOR ROLL FOR WRITERS WORKSHOP

Seventh Star Press would like to thank and acknowledge several wonderful individuals whose strong support of this project helped to make it a reality.

Isobel A

AT Alexander

Jarod K. and Leslie J. Anderson

James M. Barton

Karen M. Bence

AN Bengco

R. K. Bentley

Garrett Bleakley

Ryan E. Bowe, GISP

Laura Boyd

Jennifer Brozek

Alex R. Carvalho

Christopher Contorno

K+J Fulmer

Andreia Gaita

Azra (Azzypantz) Gani

Elizabeth Gaucher

Gary Greco

Mark Greenberg

Kristján Már Gunnarsson

Dimitri Halkidis

Pádraic D. Hallinan

Hectaimon

Robert Holda

J.D. Hovland

Vicki Hsu

Jochen

Eugene Johnson

Scotty & Will Johnstone

Heather Talonn Jones

John Justus

Richard K. Kim

Yvonne Law

Jessica Lay

Fred Leggett

Ryan Litwin

Rebecca McClannahan

Phillip McCollum

J. Miles

Kriss Morton of Cabin Goddess Reviews

Jussi Myllyluoma

Rikard Kro Neckarski

Shawn Polka

Linda Rendell-Hayes

Denise Ritchie

George Selembo

Joe Sergi

Caleb J Smith

Michael J. Sprague

Sean & Stephanie

Lee Eguia Elam Stone

Zbig Strycharz

John N Tobias III

Philippe Tremblay

KT Wagner

Matthew Wasiak

David G. Whaley, Jr.

Bradley G. Wherry

Janice Phelps Williams

Shan Winslow

Kaila Yee

Introduction

By Michael Knost

When I put together Writers Workshop of Horror (Woodland Press, 2009) a few years ago, my goal was to produce a writing book I wish would have been available when I began my writing journey. That’s why I included a wide variety of pieces focused on specific elements of the craft by writers I felt excelled in the elements I chose for them. The book became an instant hit and continues to sell quite well.

However, Writers Workshop of Horror did not address dozens of subjects I was still interested in exploring. By confining the project to the horror genre, I restricted myself from a broader scope of elements and ideas. Since I cut my literary teeth on science fiction and fantasy, I decided to move ahead with a similar project in these fields.

I want you to have a clear understating as to what this book is. Writers Workshop of Science Fiction & Fantasy is a collection of essays and interviews by and with many of the movers-and-shakers in the industry. You’re going to find varying perspectives and viewpoints, which is why you may find differing opinions on any particular subject.

This is, after all, a collection of advice from professional storytellers. And no two writers have made it to the stage via the same journey—each has made his or her own path to success. And that’s one of the strengths of this book, I think. The reader is afforded the luxury of discovering various approaches and then is allowed to choose what works best for him or her.

But what about the rules? How can there be different approaches when there are rules to follow? Besides, we’ve noticed that the big-name writers we love and respect are breaking the rules!

Here’s my advice: use the rules until you break them.

I know that sounds like something from an Abbot and Costello routine, but it’s the truth. Use the rules until you break them.

To be honest, there are only two rules you should never break—they just so happen to be rules regarding breaking rules—and I made them up, so take them for what they’re worth.

1. Never break a rule unless you know you are breaking a rule.

2. Always have a reason for breaking a rule.

If you know you are breaking a rule, that simply means you have studied the craft enough to understand its purpose. When you understand the rule’s purpose, yet have a good reason to ignore it, breaking the rule is possibly the best thing you can do.

There’s a difference in effect between a rule broken out of ignorance and one broken for a reason. For example, Picasso learned to do masterful realistic sketches before venturing into cubism. James Joyce wrote stunning short stories before wandering into Ulysses. Both of these artists mastered their respective craft by paying close attention to the foundational elements. Once they mastered the fundamentals, they were then ready to create art that was unique to their own talents and most celebrated.

I also want to point out that the reader needn’t be a writer of science fiction or fantasy to benefit from the advice in these pages. Writing is writing, and the guidance you’ll find here will be just as solid or sound if you apply it to the romance, western, or thriller genres. However, writers of speculative fiction will obviously glean a greater return because the contributors are masters in the same fields.

One more thing I want to point out. Style and voice may not be the only things you find unique to each writer and/or piece. You will also find structure and other little tidbits that are just as distinctive. The works of British contributors will retain British spelling, grammar, and punctuation. However, I designated a universal structure with the interviews to minimize confusion, yet allowed individual liberties in content.

You should be commended for your interest in learning more about the craft. Because you want your writing to improve—it will. Just don’t give up.

Don’t give up and write every day.

Michael Knost

January 28, 2013

Neil Gaiman

Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

Neil Gaiman writes short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theatre, and films. His notable works include the comic book series The Sandman and novels Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book. Gaiman’s writing has won numerous awards, including Hugo, Nebula, and Bram Stoker, as well as the 2009 Newbery Medal and 2010 Carnegie Medal in Literature. He is the first author to win both the Newbery and the Carnegie medals for the same work.

Every profession has its pitfalls. Doctors, for example, are always being asked for free medical advice, lawyers are asked for legal information, morticians are told how interesting a profession that must be and then people change the subject fast. And writers are asked where we get our ideas from.

In the beginning, I used to tell people the not very funny answers, the flip ones: ‘From the Idea-of-the-Month Club,’ I’d say, or ‘From a little ideas shop in Bognor Regis,’ ‘From a dusty old book full of ideas in my basement,’ or even ‘From Pete Atkins.’ (The last is slightly esoteric, and may need a little explanation. Pete Atkins is a screenwriter and novelist friend of mine, and we decided a while ago that when asked, I would say that I got them from him, and he’d say he got them from me. It seemed to make sense at the time.)

Then I got tired of the not very funny answers, and these days I tell people the truth:

‘I make them up,’ I tell them. ‘Out of my head.’

People don’t like this answer. I don’t know why not. They look unhappy, as if I’m trying to slip a fast one past them. As if there’s a huge secret, and, for reasons of my own, I’m not telling them how it’s done.

And of course I’m not. Firstly, I don’t know myself where the ideas really come from, what makes them come, or whether one day they’ll stop. Secondly, I doubt anyone who asks really wants a three-hour lecture on the creative process. And thirdly, the ideas aren’t that important. Really they aren’t. Everyone’s got an idea for a book, a movie, a story, a TV series.

Every published writer has had it—the people who come up to you and tell you that they’ve Got An Idea. And boy, is it a Doozy. It’s such a Doozy that they want to Cut You In On It. The proposal is always the same—they’ll tell you the Idea (the hard bit), you write it down and turn it into a novel (the easy bit), the two of you can split the money fifty-fifty.

I’m reasonably gracious with these people. I tell them, truly, that I have far too many ideas for things as it is, and far too little time. And I wish them the best of luck.

The Ideas aren’t the hard bit. They’re a small component of the whole. Creating believable people who do more or less what you tell them to is much harder. And hardest by far is the process of simply sitting down and putting one word after another to construct whatever it is you’re trying to build: making it interesting, making it new.

But still, it’s the question people want to know. In my case, they also want to know if I get them from my dreams. (Answer: no. Dream logic isn’t story logic. Transcribe a dream, and you’ll see. Or better yet, tell someone an important dream - ‘Well, I was in this house that was also my old school, and there was this nurse and she was really an old witch and then she went away but there was a leaf and I couldn’t look at it and I knew if I touched it then something dreadful would happen…’ - and watch their eyes glaze over.) And I don’t give straight answers. Until recently.

My daughter Holly, who was seven years of age at the time, persuaded me to come in to give a talk to her class. Her teacher was really enthusiastic (‘The children have all been making their own books recently, so perhaps you could come along and tell them about being a professional writer. And lots of little stories. They like the stories.’) and in I came.

They sat on the floor, I had a chair, fifty seven-year-old-eyes gazed up at me. ‘When I was your age, people told me not to make things up,’ I told them. ‘These days, they give me money for it.’ For twenty minutes I talked, then they asked questions.

And eventually one of them asked it.

‘Where do you get your ideas?’

And I realized I owed them an answer. They weren’t old enough to know any better. And it’s a perfectly reasonable question, if you aren’t asked it weekly.

This is what I told them:

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.

You get ideas when you ask yourself simple questions. The most important of the questions is just, What if…?

(What if you woke up with wings? What if your sister turned into a mouse? What if you all found out that your teacher was planning to eat one of you at the end of term—but you didn’t know who?)

Another important question is, If only…

(If only real life was like it is in Hollywood musicals. If only I could shrink myself small as a button. If only a ghost would do my homework.)

And then there are the others: I wonder... (‘I wonder what she does when she’s alone…’) and If This Goes On… (‘If this goes on, telephones are going to start talking to each other and cut out the middleman...’) and Wouldn’t it be interesting if… (‘Wouldn’t it be interesting if the world used to be ruled by cats?’)…

Those questions, and others like them, and the questions they, in their turn, pose (‘Well, if cats used to rule the world, why don’t they any more? And how do they feel about that?’) are one of the places ideas come from.

An idea doesn’t have to be a plot notion, just a place to begin creating. Plots often generate themselves when one begins to ask oneself questions about whatever the starting point is.

Sometimes an idea is a person (‘There’s a boy who wants to know about magic’). Sometimes it’s a place (‘There’s a castle at the end of time, which is the only place there is...’). Sometimes it’s an image (‘A woman, sifting in a dark room filled with empty faces’).

Often ideas come from two things coming together that haven’t come together before. (‘If a person bitten by a werewolf turns into a wolf what would happen if a goldfish was bitten by a werewolf? What would happen if a chair was bitten by a werewolf?’)

All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.

And when you’ve an idea—which is, after all, merely something to hold on to as you begin—what then?

Well, then you write. You put one word after another until it’s finished—whatever it is.

Sometimes it won’t work, or not in the way you first imagined. Sometimes it doesn’t work at all. Sometimes you throw it out and start again.

I remember, some years ago, coming up with a perfect idea for a Sandman story. It was about a succubus who gave writers and artists and songwriters ideas in exchange for some of their lives. I called it Sex and Violets.

It seemed a straightforward story, and it was only when I came to write it I discovered it was like trying to hold fine sand: every time I thought I’d got hold of it, it would trickle through my fingers and vanish.

I wrote at the time:

I’ve started this story twice, now, and got about halfway through it each time, only to watch it die on the screen.

Sandman is, occasionally, a horror comic. But nothing I’ve written for it has ever gotten under my skin like this story I’m now going to have to wind up abandoning (with the deadline already a thing of the past). Probably because it cuts so close to home. It’s the ideas—and the ability to put them down on paper, and turn them into stories—that make me a writer. That mean I don’t have to get up early in the morning and sit on a train with people I don’t know, going to a job I despise.

My idea of hell is a blank sheet of paper. Or a blank screen. And me, staring at it, unable to think of a single thing worth saying, a single character that people could believe in, a single story that hasn’t been told before.

Staring at a blank sheet of paper.

Forever.

I wrote my way out of it, though. I got desperate (that’s another flip and true answer I give to the where-do-you-get-your-ideas question. ‘Desperation.’ It’s up there with ‘Boredom’ and ‘Deadlines’. All these answers are true to a point.) and took my own terror, and the core idea, and crafted a story called Calliope, which explains, I think pretty definitively, where writers get their ideas from. It’s in a book called Dream Country. You can read it if you like. And, somewhere in the writing of that story, I stopped being scared of the ideas going away.

Where do I get my ideas from?

I make them up.

Out of my head.

Lou Anders

Nebulous Matters, or Speculations on Subgenre

Lou Anders is the Hugo Award-winning editorial director of the SF&F imprint Pyr, a Chesley Award-winning art director, and the editor of nine anthologies. He has also been nominated for five additional Hugos, four additional Chesleys, as well as the Philip K. Dick, Locus, Shirley Jackson, and three WFC Awards. Visit him online at www.louanders.com, on Twitter @LouAnders, and on Facebook.

Sometimes I think that subgenres were invented for no other reason than to give speculative fiction fans something to argue about. Author Damon Knight once famously said, Science fiction is what we point to when we say ‘science fiction.’ There are other definitions I prefer, but I think the larger point is that definitions aren’t definitive.

A wise person once said that genre (and by extension subgenre) definitions should be descriptive not prescriptive. It’s very easy to identify the middle of a subgenre, but very dangerous to draw fences at the borders. Or, to put it another way, it’s easy to proclaim you’re there when you stand on the top of the mountain, but when you climb down into the valley, it’s a lot harder to identify the exact point where the mountain you were on ends and the next mountain over starts.

Which is not to say that subgenres don’t serve a function beyond the rather obvious function of giving us something to argue about online and in bars. Genre categories exist for a very good reason—to allow readers who enjoy a thing to be able to find more of it. Genres and subgenres are signifiers that help readers connect with books the way different-colored flowers attract different kinds of insects. In the broadest sense, they are a way of saying, This is the sort of thing you’ll like, if you like this sort of thing.

To begin with (because I continually meet people who do not know the word), I should explain that the term genre itself is a term for a category of literature. When we speak of the speculative fiction genre,