FutureTense

My favorite: ignore everybody. Number 4 is the one to pay attention to. Don’t wait around for a silver bullet story that will break you into national attention. [matociquala]

A resource for the next time your characters slink around in the sewers.

Originally dated Jan. 29, 2004, this one got lost in the “Draft” box.

Sometimes things rise to the surface and disappear without a trace when they really should stir a groundswell of comment.

“Name withheld upon request” uses the law of supply and demand to justify retiring SF/F workshops.

Why are we SF pros helping Clarion, Odyssey etc. crank out new writers? All I see in Locus are unfamiliar names, crowding out the old, established pros, many of whom are not ready to retire.

There are many reasons for new names crowding out the old, established ones. Take economics for example. An established mid-list writer should expect about four times the per word rate for a novel than for a short story.

I’m not at all certain this was a serious proposal: it’s not a thorough or serious consideration of the issues facing the field. What bothers me is how these inflamatory statements reveal a subtle bias in the field.

It is we pros ourselves who are destroying our own livelihoods by HELPING the workshops crank out new writers who then flood the market with tales, like dollar-a-bushel corn.

I don’t have any sense the intent of this proposal is to produce better work. What screams out to me is the suppresion of new talent in order to maintain a monopoly. Let’s make the pool smaller, more controlled, so that writers appear in print based on age and monopoly, not talent.

Shut down the workshops and what will you have? Less competition? No. Poorer competition? Quite likely. Will that restore old favorites to ascendency? They aren’t writing short fiction right now. (When they do, they’re get the lion’s share of the limelight. An established name is a strong draw.) Who really looses under this proposal?

The readers.

Who might be satisfied to see the return of old favorites? Old readers. Maybe. Who do we need to satisfy in order to keep the genre growing? Young readers. Who is more likely to appeal to a young reader: an older writer or a younger writer? Toss up: each has their strengths. Truth be told, we need both but we already have a lot of the former.

What might happen to short fiction in the long run, with insuficiently trained writers? Your guess is as good as mine—might even be better–but I can’t imagine that it will good for the overall health of the short fiction field.

As much as I deeply appreciate the writers who have provided me with countless hours of entertainment through the years, somewhere along the line some writers have slipped over to think that this business is about the writer. This kind of proposal carries with it a deep, almost unconscious thread of privelege where the writer has no repsonsibility to the reading public. The author is entitled to write what they want to write, get published, get paid. The needs of the reader are secondary when considered at all.

I thin what distressed me was not the proposal itself–I expect people to look out for their own interests to a certain extent–but that no one seemed to have thought through the implications far enough to measure the ultimate effect on the readers.

That galls me a bit.

Alas, this silent proponent of archaic writers is getting at least part of his or her dream. The number of applicants and, in some cases, attendees, at the Clarion workshops is dropping. Part of it is the time committment. People are arriving at that point in their writing careers later in life, when they are already committed to family and jobs. They can’t afford the six weeks so they’ve moved to shorter format workshops like Viable Paradise. That alone will tell you something that disturbs me: short fiction has become a hobby. If it were a real job, people would pursue it as an employment opportunity instead of taking some other job first to pay the bills.

But another reality of the face of science fiction is the change in career building. Twenty five years ago, you made your name in short fiction. Having honed your craft and gathered an audience, you moved over to novels.

With the modern short SF market so small and competitive, a beginning writer would be foolish to expect to start out this way. It’s just as hard to “break in” through novels but you get paid better.

Clarion doesn’t teach novels. “Name withheld upon request” will get his or her hearts desire if the workshops gradually fade. Those Clarion trained grads will no longer be out there contributing to writing groups across the globe. That won’t stop writing groups or new writers. They’ll just be on their own, honing their craft to the best of their ability. In the end, who suffers the most? I say its the reader.

If the reader can’t find what they want, how long can we realistically expect them to hang around?

Best regards,

Alan

The Third Alternative Spring 2004 review posted at TangentOnline. Perhaps overly harsh. Still, of all of the magazines I’ve reviewed since February, TTA is the one I would suggest you try. If you like slipstream, it’s a must.

Louis McMaster Bujold on what really happens to a book in the distribution pipeline, why you can never find anything you want to read and why your comments in chat rooms, websites and Amazon.com are important.

I’m curious about what gives one thing dramatic weight but not another. Now I’m lost in the bewildering array of texts on drama. I can certainly recommend David Mamet’s essays Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama. But the passage that I want to bring to your atention is from Peter Brook’s The Empty Space:

The condition of the Deadly Theatre at least is fairly obvious. All through the world theatre audiences are dwindling. There are occasional new movements, good new writers and so on, but as a whole the theater not only fails to elevate or instruct, it hardly even entertains. The theater has often been called a whore, meaning its art is impure, but today this is true n another sense–whores take the money and then go short on the pleasure. … [W]e do not need the ticket agents to tell us that the theatre has become a dealy business and the public is smelling it out. In fact, were the public ever really to demand the true entertainment it talks about so often, we would almost all be hard put to know where to begin. A true theater of joy is non-existent and it is not just the trivial comedy and the bad musical that fail to give us our money’s worth–the Deadly Theatre finds its way into grand opera and tragedy, into the plays of Moliere and the plays of Brecht. Of course, no where does the Deadly Theatre install itself so securely, so comfortably and so slyly as in the works of William Shakespeare. The Deadly Theatre takes easily to Shakespeare. We see his plays done by good actors in what seems like the proper way–they look lively, and colourful, ther is music and everyone is dressed up, just as they are supposed to be in the best of classical theatres. Yet secrely we find it excruciatingly boring–and in our hearts we either blames Shakespeare , or theatre as such, or even ourselves. To make matters worse, there is always a deadly spectator, who for special reasons enjoys a lack of intensity and even a lack of entertainment, such as the scholar who emerges from routine performances of the classics smiling because nothing has distracted him from trying over and confirming his pet theories to himself, whilst reciting his favorite lines under his breath. In his heart he sincerely wants a theatre that is nobler-that-life and he confuses a sort of intellectual satisfaction with the true experience for which he craves. Unfortunately, he lends the weight of his authority to dullness and so the Deadly Theatre goes on its way.

Peter Brook, “The Empty Space,” p. 10

Replace “theatre” with either SF or fantasy and perhaps even horror. Substitute “classic genre themes” for Shakespeare. Do we not have a fairly clear description of the field as it stands?

Anyone who watches the real successes as they appear each year, will see a very curious phenomena. We expect the hits to be livelier, faster, brighter than the flop–but this is not always the case. Almost every season in most theatre -loving towns, there is one great success that defies these rules; one play succeeds not despite but becausee of dullness. After all, one associates culture with a certain sense of duty, historical costumes and long speeches witht he sensation of being bored: so, conversely, just the right degree of boringness is a reassuring guarantee of a worthwhile event. Of course, the dosage is so subtle that it is impossible fo establish the exact formula–too much and the audience is driven from their seats, to little and it may the theme too disagreeably intense. However, mediocre authors seem to feel their way unerringly to the perfect mixture–and they perpetuate the Deadly Theater with dull successes, universally praised.

Ibidem, p. 11.

I’ve always been curious about BFF (Big Fat Fantasy). Not why it exists: the desire to leave this existence for another, exciting, one–preferably for as long as possible–is easy to understand. It’s the quality. The couple of Weiss and Hickman’s that I’ve looked at–but more so their emulators–are hard to read. The text is often choppy and confusing; the dialog painful, repetitious, and appears designed to prolong rather than reveal. I don’t think I need to go into depth about character and characterization.

I’ve heard genre snobs sneer at those who devour these books. Not me. The text itself is such an obstacle to the reader’s enjoyment and participation, these books require a dedicated reader to make it through to the end.

In theory few men are as free as a playwright. He can bring the whole world onto his stage. But in fact he is strangely timid. He looks at the whole of life, and like all of us, he only sees a tiny fragment: a fragment, one aspect of which catches his fancy. Unfortunately, he rarely searches to relate his detail to any larger structure–it s as though he accepts without question his intuition as complete, he reality as all of reality. It is a though his belief in his subjectivity as his instrument and his strength precludes him from any dialectic between what he sees and what he apprehends. So there is either the author who explores his inner experience in depth and darkness, or else the uahtor who shuns these areas, exploring the outside world–each one thinks his world is complete. If Shakespeare had never existed we would quite understandably theorize that the two can never combine. The Elizabethan Theatre did exist, though–and awkwardly enough we have this example constantly hanging over our heads.

Ibidem, p. 35

I don’t think the rote combination of the formal with the internal–the plot with the emotional arc–solves the problem. The archetypal SF short story requires both these days. You can’t set your work in front of a jury of your critique group peers without having both diligently double checked. The result–the product–is frequently competent yet surprisingly devoid of vitality or lasting interest and the genre becomes a marketplace of novelty, of talking dogs and barking monks.

Farewell, New Wave. Until we meet again.

Best regards,

Alan

Jena Snyder steps down from On Spec–Canada’s premier magazine of the fantastic–after 16 years. Her “stick a fork in me” essay is a cautionary tale about writers who take on the role of editor.

It was from Heinlein initally, later his peers, that I learned tolerance, learned to question authority, came to think deeply about the individual’s place in society, about man’s [sic] place in the universe.

Science fiction, it seemed to me then, was forever on the barricades, taking nothing for granted, plowing up everyday life for richer soils beneath, challenging all our assumptions and exploring radical ideas, causing us to think in different categories. And while I couldn’t be sure about man’s place in the universe, I knew my place had to be on those same barricades.

James Sallis, “Books,” Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 2004

That’s the kind of science fiction I can believe in. Tell me where to find it and I’m there.

Best regards,

Alan

Forum discussion on whether you would like to see fiction at FutureTense and how that might happen.

Forum discussion on using free electronic distribution of stories to bootstrap a writing career.

Forum discussion on what makes a work YA.

I missed this when it first appeared: “Shibuya no Love”
by Hannu Rajaniemi at Futurismic