Category: writing

SF/not follow-up

[Here’s a follow up to the original question from Barbara, no longer anonymous…]

P.S. I have read a good deal of your speculative fiction and was excited, moved and intrigued. I want you to know that I have read sf, horror and fantasy since I was a child, and I did not mean to imply in any way that science fiction is lesser fiction.

Barbara Sanchez

Gosh, no, I didn’t take it that way at all, and I hope my answer didn’t sound as though I did. I thought you were asking what we call in our house a “real question,” meaning one with no implied judgment or agenda. If I’d thought you were being snarky about science fiction, I would probably have answered very differently (smile), and you wouldn’t have got to see any work in progress, for sure.

It’s interesting putting up work that isn’t “finished”… A few years ago, I wouldn’t have: too much pride. That’s been pretty much hammered out of me (well, okay, not completely) by the screenwriting process, in which total strangers read work that I do in days and treat it exactly the same as work done in weeks or months. No quarter given. A real learning experience in very many ways.

When I was a beginning writer, I wanted everyone to love everything I did, because if they loved it, it must be good. And so the response became what I worked for, which is backwards and bullshit, but I didn’t have anyone to tell me that the point is to do the work so well, with such skill and focus and intention, that it will speak clearly to those who read it. And then they can judge for themselves whether it’s good for them or not.

The best thing a new writer can learn to do is open wide and take the criticism in. Learn to listen through the embarrassment, the anger and the defensiveness. Try to hear beyond what people say (because sometimes it’s badly expressed, or focused in the wrong place) and work instead to understand what they mean. Suffer and rage and bang your head against it long enough to finally learn a) how to write better and b) how to filter good criticism from crap criticism (because not everyone can actually help you make your work better, and some criticism really is crap).

Genuine, thought-out criticism is a gift, even when I decide that it’s not for me. It’s hard in this culture to criticize someone’s work. Criticism basically says that the artist has failed to achieve her goals (or to achieve the goals of the person offering the criticism, which may or may not be something I need to listen to…), and we don’t like hurting people’s feelings with the word failure. I have found this to be true even in Hollywood, where I had expected criticism delivered with little attention to the niceties… instead, I’ve found people being so careful of my feelings that I’ve started being explicit about the fact that I don’t take their comments personally unless they become personal. I will say, You can hurt my feelings by telling me I’m a crap writer. You won’t hurt my feelings by telling me that something in the script isn’t working for you.

Of course, sometimes that’s a lie. Every once in a while, I do get my feelings hurt or I do get pissed off. I do it in private and keep it to myself. Becoming defensive just doesn’t move things forward…

I am not a new writer by any stretch, but I’ve been a new screenwriter for a couple of years now, and have been crawling through this particular mud again, and so I’m very glad that I have already learned some of these lessons in fiction, where there aren’t so many people stirring the pot. If I’d gone through this screenplay thing for the first time in my 20’s, I probably would have run screaming. Now I just hang up the phone, give the entire state of California the finger if I need to, and get back to work.

And (trying now to return to some semblance of connection to the topic at hand) that’s why it’s okay now to share more of myself and my fiction at a less-than-seamless stage. I wouldn’t do it for something I was actively working on right now — but this is more a maybe-someday work, and I find that acknowledging its flaws doesn’t make me feel any less like a real writer. In fact, it makes me feel more like one.

SF/not

Congratulations on your anniversary. Twenty years is some kind of record in this age of planned obsolescence and instant gratification.

Will you ever consider writing anything besides sf?

Anonymous

Thanks very much for your good wishes, and your patience waiting for this response. I’ve been trying to answer your question, only to find that it’s a very slippery one indeed… so here we go down the slide.

I call my published work speculative fiction: I need a broad category, because the stories wander in the spaces between science fiction and fantasy and horror. I’ve had people over my career question (sometimes heatedly) that what I write is sf of any kind, at all. And I never identify myself as an “sf writer” — I call myself a writer, and when people ask What do you write?, I tell them that I write fiction and screenplays, as opposed to saying I write science fiction…

Am I trying to repudiate speculative fiction? Absolutely not. I’m proud of my work and proud to be in a field that so many extraordinary writers call home. But is it my home? I dunno, I think I’m with Nicola and William Gibson on this one. I come from sf, but am I really sf? I don’t think so. Maybe it’s only that I don’t like being categorized, but I think it’s more than that. I think it’s about my concerns as a writer.

To me, sf writers have sf-nal concerns. For science fiction writers, creating alternate realities or new technology or building worlds is part of the point, part of the jazz. For me, it’s just part of the work, and I do it only as much as I need to in service of the characters and the story that wants to be told. Speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, horror, what have you) is a wonderful shortcut — I can create whatever paradigm I want in order to turn the characters loose. I can be extreme. I can create a character whose sexuality is tied into violence (“Eye of the Storm”) without having to explain it in terms of twenty-first century psychological models; I can make a whole city fall down just because it’s right for the story (“City Life”).

But really, when I take a closer look, my work is grounded in the real, in the now — music, martial arts, how the el trains work — and, most importantly for me, in real-world human feelings and experiences. That’s where I always start and end as a writer. That’s my jazz.

I have written non-sf. I just haven’t published any. After Solitaire came out, I began work on two different mainstream novels. I wrote 17,000 words of one and 45,000 words of the other — finished words, proposal-to-my-publisher quality. I wrote detailed outlines. And I was pleased with them both.

I showed them to Nicola. She thought they were pretty good, but slow. In-dwelling, she said. Not enough narrative drive. I showed them to my agent. She thought one was pretty good and hated the other. Practically spit on it. Said my protagonist was “whiny and pathetic,” which I suspected was her version of “in-dwelling.”

I sent the non-spat-upon proposal package to my editor at HarperCollins, who liked it but thought it needed work. And she was right. And I tried to work on it, but I didn’t at that time have the absolute burning passion that I do now for work, and I had no internal compass to tell me what was wrong or where to go from there. I lost my way, and I lost my heart for both novels.

It’s been years since I put them away. And for a long time after that, in terms of writing, I just kicked a metaphorical tin can up and down the sidewalk, until I told Nicola one day that I thought maybe I wasn’t really meant to be a writer after all.

But you know what? I was wrong about that. How I reconnected with my writing soul is another topic for another day, but I am definitely a writer.

But am I definitely an sf writer? (Hah, bet you thought I’d completely lost the thread…) Nope. I’m a writer. I’ll write whatever I write, and I’m making no plans about whether that should or will be speculative fiction or not.

And so the answer to your question is not just I don’t know, it’s I don’t need to know. It’s a huge fucking triumph for me to be a writer. And I’m very clear now on what kind of writer I want to be — as I said in the recent interview at Enter the Octopus:

What are your longterm career goals?

 

To write fiction and screenplays and essays that make me and you feel bigger inside, that make us dream and burn and bring us closer to ourselves. The rest — the big money, the glam, the pretty prizes — either comes or it doesn’t. I can’t control who buys my books or my scripts, but I am totally in charge of what I write and how I feel about myself as a writer. That’s the career I want.

And if this screenwriting thing works out, I might even be a consistently-earning writer, which would be pretty cool too.

And — thinking about your question has made me look at those novels again. The one that went to my editor, nah, I think that’s a goner. It just doesn’t speak to me anymore. But the one my agent hated, well, there’s something there. Not in its current form, but… I read it and I can see the people in my head, hear them, feel their connections and their longings. If Jane feels whiny, well, that’s because I haven’t given her enough to do yet. But there’s something there that makes me sit up and pay attention, and I just might have to go find out what it is one of these days.

In the meantime, if you’d like to judge for yourself, take a look.

If I do ever take it up again, the funny thing is that at least one path could be a ghost story, in which case I would still be writing sf after all. And here I go again, with answers that only expand the questions. Ah, that’s life.

If you’d like to ask a question or start a conversation, please do what this person did — use the talk to me link (also on the sidebar) anytime.

Exploding like spiders across the stars

…because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
— Jack Kerouac from On The Road

I don’t even know where to start about this except to shake my head with wonder at words that do so well what I would like to do — that riff, that rolling rhythmic jazz that can make my heart beat every bit as hard as music sometimes with the way it makes me feel so much bigger inside. I wish all my words could do that.

This isn’t how I see my everyday self — there’s plenty about me and those I love that is commonplace, and sometimes there is nothing finer than to put my feet up with a bottle of beer and talk about the rain. That’s good. But these words go like a bolt of electricity straight into my writer’s soul, into the part of me that always burns this way even, I think, in my sleep.

All artists are a little mad. I used to think that was hyperbole at best and melodrama at worst, but these days I think it is nothing but the truth. And the madness is in the burning, in the drive to be one with the work and with all the self that is underneath, and that is stronger sometimes than anything else, especially common sense. And so we burn ourselves up.

Interview at Enter the Octopus

Matt Staggs at Enter the Octopus is running interviews with the short fiction writers mentioned in Jeff VanderMeer’s recent list of favorites.

Here’s my interview with Matt.

Enjoy. And be sure and check out the rest of the interviews, it’s a very interesting collection of responses. Matt, thanks for supporting all of us this way — I really appreciate it.

Short love

Jeff VanderMeer is kind enough to include me on this list of his favorite underappreciated (ETA: see Jeff’s comment to learn that I misread him, so much for words being my business…) short storytellers. I am certainly always open to more appreciation (grin). Be sure to check out the other writers on the list — Jeff’s got great taste, although I would say that, wouldn’t I? (now it’s a wicked grin…)

I am always delighted to get this kind of notice, not just because it’s nice for me, but because it’s nice for short stories to get some love. They are like dragonflies, these little packets of words — such beauty, such fierceness, such swooping dizzying aerobatics, and then phht, gone down to dust often before anyone has noticed. So thanks, Jeff, for noticing. Because if a novel is a long beautiful day, a fabulous short story is the moment when the moon breaks through the clouds and lights a path to somewhere mysterious and slightly shadowed and piercingly beautiful. The short story is a cliff from which we may be persuaded to willingly leap, if the view out there is enticing enough…

I like to leap.

Asimov’s SF reviews Dangerous Space

A lovely review of Dangerous Space from Paul di Filippo at Asimov’s SF, who also had many wonderful things to say about Nicola’s memoir.

In her much-anticipated debut collection, Dangerous Space, Kelley Eskridge can sound like Samuel Delany, Theodore Sturgeon, Fritz Leiber, or Joanna Russ, while still maintaining her own unique throaty, modulated voice. A non-trivial accomplishment indeed. These seven stories cover a wide territory stylistically and venue-wise, while all adhering to the same authorial POV that regards the world as a dangerous, delightful place, where extending oneself to others and opening oneself up to experience necessarily entails the possibility of suffering. “Strings” presents a future where music has been robbed of improvisation. “And Salome Danced” gives us an actor with some uncanny supernatural abilities. A “dust-devil” bag lady holds some startling secrets in “City Life.” Postmodern sword and sorcery is the motif in “Eye of the Storm,” while a cyberpunkish vision appertains to “Somewhere Down the Diamondback Road.” Original to this collection, the long title story is a mimetic rendition of the pop musician’s life. And finally, “Alien Jane” brings us inside a cruel mental asylum where the title character undergoes a lab-animal existence narrated by a fellow patient who might be her only friend. Eskridge’s output accretes only slowly–”the oldest story here dates from 1990–”but like well-aged wine, these tales decant superbly.
— Asimov’s SF, July 2008

What Stephen King says…

…goes double for me.
 

I look for stories that care about my feelings as well as my intellect, and when I find one that is all-out emotionally assaultive… I grab that baby and hold on tight. Do I want something that appeals to my critical nose? Maybe later (and, I admit it, maybe never). What I want to start with is something that comes at me full-bore, like a big hot meteor screaming down from the Kansas sky. I want the ancient pleasure that probably goes back to the cave: to be blown clean out of myself for a while, as violently as a fighter pilot who pushes the EJECT button in his F-111. I certainly don’t want some fraidy-cat’s writing school imitation of Faulkner, or some stream-of-consciousness bullshit about what Bob Dylan once called “the true meaning of a peach.”
 
— Stephen King, from the Introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2007

Where are the plumbers in SF?

Kelley,

I just wanted to say I enjoyed Solitaire. It was gripping reading. It annoyed me that I had to put it down to deal with the plumber 😉

Astrid

 

I’m glad you enjoyed it. Heck, maybe the plumber would like it too. Except she wouldn’t find herself very well represented…

Have you ever wondered why there aren’t more skilled tradespeople in science fiction? You can find a fair number of blacksmiths, etc. in fantasy if you poke around the spaces between the royal folks and the peasants, but there just aren’t that many plumbers and electricians in science fiction.

Okay, I’m being a bit disingenuous, I know — but really, science fiction is all about the übercompetent spacefaring folk, or the übercompetent computer folk, or the übercompetent military folk…. either the on-the-outside individual or someone who is part of a large system. There’s not much middle class on any level of SF these days. I suppose the Fringe or the Sprawl or the Hegemony are much more science fiction’s natural turf, at last in novels — all that irresistible world-building. Short fiction is much more of a playground for other kinds of jobs/competencies/categories…

Solitaire isn’t much of an exception, although at the time it was published there wasn’t a lot of SF out there that posited corporate expertise as the core competency of the hero. Still, Jackal is one of the übercompetent, and she goes from high to low with nary a pause in the middle. So there I am, smack in the mainstream of SF in one way, at least (grin).

The Mirrored Heavens

Congratulations to Dave Williams on the publication of his first novel, The Mirrored Heavens.

I had the pleasure of working with Dave at Clarion West last year. All the writers who attended Clarion are special to me — they were intense, interesting, passionate and committed — and I can’t wait to see what they all do next. But today is Dave’s day. Dave, I’m thrilled for you: publication days are special, and one’s first novel even more special still.

The Mirrored Heavens is already getting great buzz — and you can find out more yourself in this way-cool book trailer (and I think these trailers are a big part of the future of book publishing, highly viral and highly effective. Visuals work…).

Dave’s also got a website. So go check it out, and buy his book!

Dave, I can’t wait to read it! Congratulations!

The Talent of the Room

Several years ago, the writer Michael Ventura very graciously gave me permission to republish on my website his essay The Talent of the Room. I recommended it to someone yesterday and re-read it again myself, and thought again how marvelous and smart and true it is.

The essay is, in my opinion, a must-read for any writer, although I think it’s an ought-to-read for anyone who wants to undertake something for the long term (going walkabout, entering therapy, moving to a strange city, getting married…). It’s cogent and clear and honest about the fact that talent for a thing isn’t always enough. That kind of talent is about being — a talent for an art, medicine, understanding animals, healing plants, whatever. But Ventura’s focus is the talent of doing — what you have to be able to do in order to express your talent of being (my words, not his). I don’t know what that is for doctors, or lawyers, or architects, or anyone else, although it’s fun to imagine. But I know that Ventura is right — for writers, it’s the talent of the room.

And so I am delighted to find a follow-up of sorts, an extension of the conversation, in this 2007 essay : Creative Writing — a Caution. And this is all true, too, especially the part about being careful of feedback from people who are not better writers than you. If I had a dollar for every hopeful writer I’ve met who is in a writing group where they think they are the best writer… well, it makes me crazy. If you actually want to learn something about your work, why would you want to be in a group where no one’s better at it than you? Why would you not run desperately into the night and try to claw your way into the best group of writers you could find?

If you’re not familiar with Ventura, well, here’s your chance. To call him a writer is a bit like calling Wal-Mart a store — there’s just so much more inside than the word perhaps implies. He’s a novelist, essayist, screenwriter, culture critic, an explorer of the American psyche. If you like these two essays on writing, go read his Letters at 3AM column in the Austin Chronicle. Like these:

(and take note, the website is infernally slow to load, at least today, so you might have to walk away and make coffee or something…)

Why are you still here (grin)? Go read some Michael Ventura!