Write What You Love

by Shannon Fay

The one piece of advice I would give new writers is to not just to write what you know but to write what you love. Maybe you love astronomy and have a head full of constellations, or you have a gift for languages, or you’re an expert in some field or hobby. These things that interest you, that take up your idle time, use these things in your stories. Your knowledge on the subject will give your story more credibility and your passion will give it life.

And the things you love don’t always have to be so specific. Maybe you love unconventional narratives and finding new ways to tell a story. Maybe you love rousing adventures that make the reader forget their troubles here on the ground. Or maybe you think often about how men and women relate to one another, or how parents and children relate to each other, or how people in general relate to each other. Figure out what interests you and cultivate it.

There have been times when I’ve grown stuck while writing, working myself deeper and deeper into a rut the like a wheel spinning in the mud. The most frustrating thing was that there was nothing technically wrong with the stories I was working on: the plotting was sound, the words at the very least in the right order, but there was something missing. I didn’t care. And why didn’t I care? Because I just didn’t care. There was nothing I loved in the story. Usually this happens because I’m so focused on writing something technically good that I stop writing about things I care about. Instead of following my passions I end up following trends, tapping into the popular consciousness rather than my own. And that’s when I get stuck.

There are stories only you can write. They might end up being very weird and/or personal stories, and they’ll probably be rejected a lot. But that just means that when they do connect with someone, the connection is all the stronger.

Write what you love sounds like obvious advice, and it is. In fact, new writers usually have a better handle on it than writers further along the path (in which case maybe this post should be about advice I’d give to ‘old writers’ instead of advice I’d give to new writers, not that I feel overly qualified giving advice to anyone). But it’s something that’s easy to lose sight of. So, even after you’ve written thousands upon ten thousands of words, remember what you love.

Shannon Fay is a freelance writer/assistant bookstore manager living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She has recently won the James White Award and has had several short stories published in a variety of genres.

Learn more about Shannon Fay on her website.

Bolts of Lightning

by Chris Pavesic

Speculative fiction has been a favorite genre of mine for years. I like the ideas in the fiction; I like the short story length. It gives a writer a chance to work on his/her craft; in essence, it gives a writer a chance to be a wordsmith.

Writing comes down to creating connections—making that momentary bridge between the writer and the readers—and those connections are made through words. In its basic sense, writing is a means of transmitting the thoughts and images that reside in a writer’s brain to a reader in the most effective and accurate fashion. In a letter to George Bainton in 1888, one of my favorite authors, Mark Twain, described the desire for this accuracy in the following way: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter--it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

This is what I look for in speculative fiction—words or phrases that can make that connection between the reader and the writer with the force of a bolt of lightning. This is what I search for as a reader and this is what I strive for as a writer—the amount of impact that will make a story memorable.

Recently I had that “lightning bolt” reaction when reading Ken Liu’s speculative fiction story, “The Paper Menagerie.” A friend of mine had a similar reaction when reading Brian Grigg’s “Wendell, Custodian of the Galaxy,” published in the March, 2013 issue of Penumbra (a story that I really enjoyed as well!). What causes that “lightning bolt” reaction with a reader? I know when it happens to me as a reader, but it is something I continue to work on each time I put a metaphoric pen to paper.

Many of my short stories start out a great deal longer than their finished versions. I pare them down, looking for those essential words or phrases that will connote as much meaning to a reader as an entire paragraph. This is not an easy task; changing one paragraph can alter the entire meaning of the story. This is where multiple drafts come in, and why I am grateful for the technology we have today. I can save one version of a story, make changes, and go back to the first version if I prefer it with a mere click of a mouse button. (I almost cannot imagine writing and revising with pen and paper the way that Twain did!)

If all this goes well, I will create a connection to my readers with my words. They will interiorize the thoughts and images from my writing. They will see the characters, experience the emotions, and wander in the storyscape I create. We will have that momentary bridge of understanding, complete with a lightning bolt or two.

Chris Pavesic lives in the Midwestern United States and loves Kona coffee, fairy tales, and all types of speculative fiction. Her story, “Going Home,” is the featured story in the June, 2013 issue of Penumbra. Between writing projects, Chris can most often be found reading, gaming, gardening, working on an endless list of DIY household projects, or hanging out with friends.

Stay in touch with Chris on her blog.

P.M. GRIFFIN GOES LIVE!

Romance novelist Bernadette Walsh interviews science fiction and fantasy writer P.M. Griffin Sunday May 26 at 7:30 p.m. EST on Nice Girls Reading Naughty Books. Please stop in to cheer P.M. on.

To watch the interview live please click HERE or go to: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/bernadettewalsh/2013/05/26/nice-girls-reading-naughty-books--pm-griffin

Pauline (P.M.) Griffin's Irish love of story telling coupled with her passion for history, the natural world, and research have resulted in seventeen novels and ten short stories, two Muse Medallion Award winners among them, all in the challenging realms of science fiction and fantasy.

She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her cats Jinx, Katie, and Nickolette and three tropical fish aquariums and devotes just about every 'spare' moment to writing, research, and reading.

To read excerpts from P.M. Griffin's books released by Musa Publishing, please click HERE.

Are You a Science Fiction Writer?

by John Deakins

Never mind what you write: what do you read? Scientists and technologists who never write SF themselves, read it continually. They may not always recognize bad writing, but they’ll immediately spot a scientific or logical blunder. Science fiction has a better educated readership than that of bodice ripper romances. Listen as your SF-reading friends rip into some recently released SF film. Want more readers? Your current readers can make your book by word of mouth, but those readers can kill your book the same way. The Ignore It approach to scientific road-blocks may not be enough.

Live With It

Science is cold, hard, and unyielding, but it won’t let you down on consistency. If you’re stymied by missing FTL drives, write a story with slower-than-light interstellar transport. If it’s too dangerous to land on an alien planet, create a way to make contact without landing. If you can’t use your time machine for time travel, use it for space travel. Real science happens all the time. Most of what happens within our solar system follows fairly simple Newtonian physics, never mind Einstein. That’s a huge canvas on which to paint your word pictures.

You have before you enormous possibilities within Science. Mars doesn’t have multiply armed green Martians, but what it does have is fascinating, even if it is hard, cold, and unyielding.

Unexplained Science.

You don’t have to explain how your SF technology works; you only have to name it. In fact, the more you explain it, the sillier your explanations will sound to anyone who actually knows science. Some stories need controlled time travel, faster-than-light speed, and the ability to smooze with aliens, but the smart author will tiptoe around hard-science details of exactly how those things are accomplished.

The biggest danger of unexplained science lies inside the writer. We know our science. “Unexplained” makes us itch. It’ll be hard not to yield to the pressure to throw in “subspace” devices or “tachyon pulses.” Hollywood pimps are eager for more “drama” in their SF. They know no science, but they’re full of hackneyed “science fiction” ideas. (Well . . . they’re full of something.) Their “science” explanations stink up the genre; flawed logic flows from mainstream media as from a ruptured sewer line. How easily unexplained science crosses over into partially explained fantasy! On the west coast, that’s a mighty thin line. Nevertheless, it’s a line that we shouldn’t cross.

It’s time now to take on the behemoths of science fiction. We’ll beat them into submission, and then harness them to pull our stories. The blogs that follow are full of story “hooks.” If one snags you, go with it If you get that literary gestalt, when a story leaps full-blown into your mind, quit reading this and write that story. When you do, you’ve made this work a success.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

On Writing Advice

by Michael Hodges

Writing advice all tends to blend into wallpaper. And soon it becomes like that old peeling stuff in your kitchen you pretend isn’t there as you glance back down at your coffee cup. I could write about using too many “ly” adverbs, or not to use “and” too often in one sentence (Mr. McCarthy would disagree), or even suggest copies of On Writing or The Elements of Style. I could say “find your voice”…something I think is more about writing a lot and consuming stimulants than performing Jedi mind tricks. These are all fine things. But you probably know them.

Discussing one aspect of writing will almost certainly segue to others. There’s an ecosystem here, an unavoidable connection. We void these connections at our own peril.

In our daily paths, we try to make that separation. We are closer to the plump raccoon that sneaks onto our porch at night than we like to think. There are things out there—living, breathing things that share our space in this world. The raccoons, the bats, the geese, the frogs, this frenetic symphony amongst the soggy parks and brown rivers that we pass on our way to Costco or whatever the next big box store is. If we are holding coffee, perhaps we can avert our gaze once more.

We are slaves to the sun. We are forced to wake and sleep, wake and sleep in the rhythms that have brushed this planet for billions of years. But today, and maybe just today, you are free. The world is more than credit and bills and our paths amongst the strip malls.

What is real? What is important?

Writing is one of them. You know this or you wouldn’t be here. And I guess this leads me to pluck a single focal point for this piece:

Awareness.

It’s the writer’s best friend. Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, in their classic song “Do You Realize” asked, Do you realize, we’re floating in space?

No shit. We’re floating in space. Once you are aware of this truism, you are already ahead of the game. The writer, at his or her desk is at that moment, floating in space. Your mind is the sun, your hands the rain, your writing software the caked plains of Northern Africa.

What is important? What moves you? Can you feel all of this about you? The violence and the love and the dying and birthing? There are few things we have control over. Writing is one of them.

So go. Create your own universes within universes. Today, you are the creator, and the characters in your stories will wake and rest to the sun of your mind.

Michael Hodges resides in Chicagoland, but often dreams of the Northern Rockies. His work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. He is represented by FinePrint literary, and hard at work on a new novel. You can find out more on his website.

Is Truth Stranger than Fiction?

by Elizabeth Porter Birdsall

It's been said often enough to become cliché: truth is stranger than fiction. But when we write about aliens and magic and strange creatures from beyond the abyss, it's sometimes easy to doubt that. Of course, fiction has to follow an internal story-logic in a way real life doesn't, but surely the real world – this boring, everyday world where we go to school and pay our bills and trudge along the same streets day in and day out – doesn't have a patch on what we can come up with in our flights of imagination.

The human imagination is a wonderful, expansive, glorious thing. I mean no insult to it at all when I say that I respectfully disagree with the notion that we can come up with things stranger than the universe already has. What is imagination, after all, but another way to look at the world around us? A way to reshape the world, to draw one thing out of focus so we can get a different, better view on something else? And that world is full of bizarre marvels.

When I'm looking for ideas for a story, one of the first things I do is look to nature. It's probably obvious that I did that for my story "Convergent Motion," which takes place among sea slugs at the bottom of the sea. (And all the weirdest bits, except the starting conceit of bodiless spirits, come straight from fact.) But a story doesn't have to be set among hydrothermal vents to draw on the strangeness of the world. Speculative fiction explores the corners of the universe, and the what-ifs that might live there. That can mean the edges of the galaxy, or your own backyard; it can mean the crushing depths of the sea, or the overlooked cracks in the sidewalk. Writers and artists are among the people who stop, and look closer, and look again. We study, and we dream, and then we transform what we've studied into what we've dreamed about.

Of course, that doesn't mean that the job of speculative fiction (or any fiction) is simply to talk about the strange bits of the world exactly as they are. That wouldn't be much speculation, for one thing, but more importantly it wouldn't be much fiction. One of the important jobs of fiction, in my opinion, is to take something outside the reader – whether it's the bottom of the sea or the thoughts in their next-door neighbor's head – and make that something seem close and comprehensible and important. Speculative fiction tries to look to farther shores and wider vistas, but the principle is the same.

Truth is stranger than fiction? All right, sure. But that's the beauty of it. Because fiction arises from truth, and opens a window onto it; that's the whole point of speculation.

IMPOSSIBILITIES

by John Deakins

We’re going to take on some Science Fiction favorites: Time travel, Faster-Than-Light, alien planet landings. It’s not that those haven’t happened yet; they can’t happen. Think how bleak Science Fiction would be if those mechanisms were missing. We’ll beat them mercilessly, proving that they absolutely cannot work scientifically. Then, we’re going to rescue each concept. They’re too important to Science Fiction to let ugly Science kill them. We’ll nurture them before they depart down bright new pathways.

Erk! Touchy-feely exposition isn’t the answer here. Gritty, bottom-line repair work is There are three ways to get around a real-science roadblock. Here’s the first one - Ignore It.

Pretend the gorilla isn’t in the room. Throw an afghan over him, and call him an armchair. Stick to your plot’s logical development. Sweep your readers along so beautifully that they’ll suspend disbelief in that flawed area. Hollywood SF runs on the “Queen of Hearts Principle.” Viewers are expected to believe six impossible things before breakfast. Since Star Wars, some studios believe that with enough special effects no one will notice how scientifically ridiculous and logically impossible their plots are. The Core and 2012 are first-line examples. Anyone who knew science or logic ran from the theater screaming. Their science was ludicrous, their logic was M.I.A., but they had great special effects. Each also probably made enough money to pay for itself, which is all that Hollywood wanted anyway. Science fiction is expected to have higher standards.

Each of us is often expecting our readership to fork over more than a $10 “ticket.” Readers have no “Now Showing“ deadlines. They don’t have to either open your creation when the lights go down or close it when the credits roll. They have plenty of time to catch you with your scientific knickers around your knees. Each additional scientific impossibility means that suspension of disbelief has to jump a higher hurdle. Once a movie hits disk, the same rule applies. That audience has all the time they need to autopsy that film.

Can you get away with ignoring science anyway? Yes: You just have to be a terrific creative liar. Remember those first three seasons of Star Trek? Seasons two and three were written by Hollywood hacks. They almost got away with swiss-cheese science (more holes than curds) and lousy logic, because the series was ground-breaking in so many other ways. Trekkies are still a force, but some of those later episodes were pure twaddle.

Perhaps you’ll get lucky. Perhaps many of your audience will be unaware of the particular science that you’re violating. You and they can skip along together, blissfully pretending. Some will always be carried along by the spectacle, whether written or cinematic. I wouldn’t count on that, though. Remember how Star Trek’s five-year mission fizzled out after three years? Even for SF fans, bad writing and spotty logic begin to smell funny after a while.

There has to be a better way, and we need to find it.

John Deakins, B.A., M.S.T. is a four-decade veteran of the science classroom and author of his own fantasy series Barrow.

To read an excerpt from Barrow book one, please click HERE.

Challenge Yourself

by Rie Sheridan Rose

There are plenty of answers I could give to the question “What is the most important piece of advice you can give an aspiring author and why?” Do your research. Read in your field. Write every day.

But above all of these, I would put “challenge yourself.” This is my new mantra, and it is what I would put at the top of the list.

It’s easy to say, but what does it mean?

When it comes down to it, any one with the will to do so can write a book—look at all the self-published authors on Amazon if you don’t believe me. It may not be a good book, but it can be a complete novel, just like you’ve always wanted. And, however good you are when you start out, with practice, you can get better. These things are given.

But just writing a novel or short fiction and staying in your comfort zone (writing what you know, for example) isn’t nearly as much fun as going outside that familiar world. Give yourself a stretch goal. Something that you never in your wildest dreams expected to do.

Are you a short story writer? Challenge yourself to write a novel.

Are you a novelist? Challenge yourself to write a collection of poetry.

Do you submit to the same markets over and over? Send a piece to the biggest publication or press you can think of. For example, I sent a poem to The New Yorker this year. It was rejected, but that doesn’t negate the challenge.

I’ve just set myself a new challenge. I have started Book Two in a series for the first time. This provides its own exciting roadblocks to surmount.


Exciting roadblocks?
Yes.

Any job can get dull and routine if it doesn’t include challenges. The more you stretch yourself, the stronger your “writing muscles” will become.


Challenge yourself to write something requiring research if you haven’t ever written anything but contemporary fiction.

Challenge yourself to write a science fiction story if you only write romance.

Challenge yourself to write Steampunk, or Urban Fantasy, or a Young Adult.

The broader your abilities, the more likely you are to find your niche, your audience, and your “bliss” as a writer.

Once you have found what suits you best then you can specialize, but if you don’t challenge yourself to try new things, you may miss out on the one thing that makes you happy and successful.

I invite you to join me in a challenge that I have been set. My husband—wanting to jump start my career to the next phase—has challenged me to get three hundred rejections this year. That isn’t submit three hundred pieces, that is submit as many as it takes to get that many rejections despite acceptances. So far, I am standing at about thirty rejections to ten acceptances. That’s more acceptances than I even had submittals last year, I think.

Now, it is already May, so I wouldn’t expect someone starting now to get that many rejections, but I challenge you to shoot for one hundred. If you are a new or aspiring author and start with that goal in mind, just think what you can do!

Never stop challenging yourself.

Rie Sheridan Rose has pursued the dream of being a professional writer for the last ten years. She has had five novels, three short story collections, five poetry collections, and several stand-alone pieces published by over a dozen small presses in that decade.

Learn more about Rie Sheridan Rose on her website and blog. Stay connected with Facebook and Twitter.

Living in the Moment

by Laura Hardgrave

I don’t care what anyone says—writing awesome, short speculative fiction stories is hard. Writing short fiction is a challenge in itself, but when you add in that lonesome planet out in the middle of nowhere, that new tech that needs thorough descriptions, or that cool fantasy race that popped into your dreams one night that’s when the real fun begins. Every word in a short story must be carefully crafted and have a purpose. If there’s no purpose for a line of dialog or that interesting description, both are best left on the chopping block. That’s tough when you’re describing things no one’s ever read about.

That’s also one of the reasons why science fiction and fantasy short stories are so fun to write (and read!). That challenge kind of calls to us and chants an eerie tune, daring us to fully flesh out new worlds, characters, plots, conflicts, emotions, and deeper, resonating meanings that shine in as little words as possible. We have to be extremely delicate when choosing what we say and how we say it. It’s all in the details. When readers are able to read a paragraph and get a true sense of where the main character is, what he/she is feeling, and where the risks of the story lie, that’s more than just great storytelling—that’s magic.

I think that’s why I tend to write my short fiction in what I call moments. We all have our own methods, of course, but I like to guide my short fiction using character snapshots that are made of emotions. One scene may be driven by my main character’s intense curiosity. I’ll allow that character to have a moment with his/her sense of curiosity, then I’ll take the emotion one step further and move the plot forward while keeping my character’s frame of mind as the driving force. If a word, description, or line of dialog doesn’t make sense for that emotional snapshot, it will generally get omitted or saved for another moment.

Once the plot’s moved forward enough to force a change in the emotional snapshot, I’ll shift gears and form a new moment in my mind. These moments usually surface as full-scale images that will also provide the details of what imagery and scenery I describe. Since speculative fiction short story descriptions need to especially be tight, I find this method also helps keep my tendency to go overboard with descriptions down (what can I say—I like the shinies).

I may want to describe how gorgeous that duo-moon sunrise looks, but my main character? Oh, no. She’s far too busy running from a herd of police droids. She may notice the way a single ray of sun reflects off her shuttle in the distance, but that’s about it. And that’ll be the line of description that gets mentioned. If I’m ever in doubt of what to say, I stare into the eyes of my character’s emotional moment and instantly find my answer. It works well. When my characters cooperate, that is. Some characters are prone to harebrained ideas more than others. Gotta keep an eye on those!

Laura Hardgrave is an MMORPG video game journalist by day and a LGBT speculative fiction author by night. She kind of frantically dives back and forth between writing short stories and novel-length fiction. She’s currently working on a series of fantasy novels with a huge host of characters and a bit of inter-dimensional travel.

Learn more about Laura on her blog or follow her on Twitter.

Here's a Secret

by Lane Robbins

I may like writing about people more than I like writing about science fiction and fantasy.

Don't get me wrong; magic is magical, science is super, and the real world is often too damn dull to be borne.

But the thing that gets me to the keyboard, the thing that takes an airy imagining into something that must be explored is a character interacting with another character.

I'm fascinated by people. Why not? We're a fascinating subject! Shakespeare says so, "What a piece of work is a man!"* Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett have their say: "And just when you'd think they [people] were more malignant than ever Hell could be, they could occasionally show more grace than Heaven ever dreamed of. Often the same individual was involved."**

I've written a handful of books, a handful of stories, and no matter how excited I am about my SF/F premise, the very first scene I write is a people-oriented one. A story just isn't real to me until the people pop onto the page. Let me start with lovers' reunions, personal betrayals, an argument at work, strangers meeting, a bad man being kind, a good woman committing a wrong, anything and everything. Often my starting point isn't even overtly related to the SF/F elements. Tangentially, sure, but overtly? Nope. Every fantasy piece I write starts with the people doing people-type things.

Creating a character is so much more fun than creating magic; writing about people is biology and psychology and criminology and anthropology and archaeology and faith and mythology and everything delightful. Every person is a collection of puzzle pieces that ends up a different picture.

You put a dozen people in the same situation, and you get a dozen different results. Even the people who make the same choices might do so out of different motives. Any mystery reader can tell you that there are a dozen reasons or more to commit murder, good, bad, or indifferent.

People who are reluctant witnesses to a bank robbery might feel fear, rage, envy, despair, or excitement. They might fight back, faint, cry, or take advantage of the situation in some bizarre way—the clerk in the back who takes the time to burgle her co-worker's purse before she hides; the manager who starts dreaming of the raise she'll get for this if no one gets shot. Pretty much anything you can imagine, someone can conceivably do. People are amazing and awful in endless combinations. And that realization is more exciting than almost any magic trick. It's a form of magic all its own--people's ability to be surprising and affecting and just plain fascinating.

So I write SF & Fantasy—life is so much more interesting with magic after all--but primarily it's all a way to explore the amazing things people think and the amazing ways people behave.

Humans, can you believe it? Aren't we amazing?

*Hamlet. Act II, scene ii.

**Good Omens. p 26

Lane Robins was born in Miami, Florida, the daughter of two scientists, and grew up as the first human member of their menagerie. As Lyn Benedict, she writes the urban fantasy Shadows Inquiries series: Sins & Shadows, Ghosts & Echoes, Gods & Monsters, and Lies & Omens.

Learn more about Lane on her website.