Clarion Call
This is a little skit I wrote for Jeff Vandermeer, to give out to his 2007 class at the Clarion workshop, on their last day. I'd like to think that beneath the jokes there is a faint smear of useful advice...
Five things to Remember.
I can't really claim much authority for advising aspiring SF writers how to proceed – it's not like my route to success was picked out with any conscious care. After a long, stubborn time in the unpublished wilderness, I just got lucky (and even luckier, got a film deal). But here are five things to bear in mind:
1) Don't spend fourteen years ignoring the advice given to you by magazine editors, publishers, and literary agents (and Jeff). You'll spend the same fourteen years not getting published – just like me.
2) Don't write about a Startling New Technological Innovation – write about the people this S.N.T.I. affects instead. Good stories are human stories, and it's the impact of technology on human beings that's fascinating, not the technology itself. This is a subtle distinction, which a lot of aspiring SF writers miss. (Come to that, so do a distressing number of successfully published SF writers – I still don't really understand how those guys get away with it. But you wouldn't want to be like them. Would you?)
3) Don't spend your time trying to cram novel-length ideas into short story format, in the hope that you'll "learn your craft" or that it'll "get you noticed". First of all, the two forms are not really comparable, and getting good at one does not guarantee getting good at the other. Secondly, the market has changed radically, and gone are the days when you could make any kind of interim living from writing short SF, or guarantee that some enterprising editor will read one of your stories and offer you a book deal. Such enterprising editors are more likely to be leafing through their slush pile of novel manuscripts in the hope of discovering the Next Big Thing. If you have a novel in you, get on and write it – you stand just as good a chance of placing it with a publisher as you do of placing your first short story with a paying magazine. The only difference is that you're risking a bigger investment of your time and effort, and deferring your gratification for longer. Then again, if you succeed, the pay-off will be massively more rewarding.
And if what you have inside you really just damn well is a science fiction or fantasy short story? Well, then my honest advice would be to see if you can't turn it into a comic-book narrative – there's far more money in that line if you succeed, and the work, once learnt, is technically far easier. Remember - prose short story writers starve. However, if you really can't (or don't want) to explore that alternative then, well, go for it, write your short stuff and prepare to spend some time starving. Don't worry – apparently it's character building.
4) Don't expect to be able to combine being an aspiring writer with having any kind of personal life. Writing will eat all the free time you give it, and it probably still won't seem like enough. It helps not to have (a) a career, (b) children, (c) a partner who wants to spend much time with you. (d) friends who expect to see you on a regular basis. It helps not to need sleep. It helps to be obsessive. If you aren't, or already have one or more of the impediments listed above, you have my sympathies – it's going to be hell.
5) Don't expect success any time soon, or in any great quantity. Eighty percent of published authors never make enough to quit their day job. Those who do, usually take many years and several books to get there. If these statistics don't bother you, it probably means you really were born to be a writer (or you're clinically insane – there are days when those two don't seem that far apart, believe me).
Oh yeah, and:
6) Don't let anyone put you off.