Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Wells Tower’s collection of short works probably best defines the modern short story. With elegant prose he illustrates a menagerie of rich characters who through their own trials and trivialities draw the reader’s attention inward. A great collection of work probably worth rereading.
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Last Wednesday I returned to DFWWW. DFWWW has a great reputation in my local area as a workshop that helps aspiring writers achieve publication. They have a rather odd system of evaluating work for critique, in my opinion. They use a read and critique system, which a lot of people will poo-poo as a less efficient method than the standard system of handing in printed work ahead of time for prior evaluation [this is known as the Milford Method and is used in most workshops].
However, I’ve seen the read and critique method help quite a few writers discover their flaws. I personally think it just helps reading your work aloud. Something about reading in front of an audience makes those flaws really stick out. The system isn’t perfect, but then I’ve seen works critiqued to death using the Milford Method, to the point that you get a manuscript so marked up that it’s unusable.
There is a trick though to learning with this system. You have to build specific filters for those who critique your work. You start by listening carefully to the other writers’ works. Find their strengths and their weaknesses. Chances are good that they will critique based on their weaknesses. These are points they are generally working on as a writer, so they’re going to see these flaws in your work. Don’t worry that the person who couldn’t write description to save their life is hounding on your lack of believable atmosphere. They probably know what they’re talking about, despite the fact they haven’t managed to conquer that particular battle themselves—and hey, you’re probably helping them discover their own flaws. There will be writers though who are clueless. They might be the scifi geek who has never read a romance or mystery in their life, and they probably can’t tell you anything about your genre, but they can hone in on your lack of scene logic. You the writer must learn how to take what you need from a critique.
Ah, but there’s the catch. How do you know what to take from a critique when you’re brand new and just starting out? How do you know what to filter out and what to keep? Well, here’s a good beginner’s check list of things to look for in a read and critique workshop environment.
What to toss:
1) Mean and hateful things about your genre: If the listener begins by stating that they hate your particular genre, but they want to give you genre advice, just filter that out. Granted, a lot of people will preface with the fact that they don’t normally read your genre, but that’s categorically different from disliking your genre.
2) Mean and hateful things about you: if you’re in a workshop where other writers are attacking you as a writer, get out! No, seriously, this is a writing club and not a workshop and you aren’t the type of writer they want to grace their sacred halls. If you find your personal religious or political beliefs attacked, then the workshop isn’t about writing, it’s about fitting in. These are likely the kind of writers who just pat each other on the back anyway, so you won’t get anything from this sort of workshop.
3) The completely irrelevant critique. I’ve seen these. It’s like the person didn’t even hear what you wrote. Now, if you get one of these from more than one person you might have a real communication problem, but chances are there’s that one crackpot who is always a few critiques behind. You’re likely getting the critique for the story before yours or one from last week. It doesn’t matter, because you’re just going to ignore this one.
4) The one who hijacks your story and turns it into something completely different: you’re writing about an Italian family who moved to Oklahoma from New York during the 1930s and through a lot of pain and hardship learned to build a new life. The listener thinks you should set it on Mars in the far future and make the family robots. This person is hijacking your story. They are not helping you improve what you have. If the suggestion requires a major character change, a major plot change, or a major setting change, you can probably ignore it. Sometimes a story does need this. If it’s a short story and you think that setting it on Mars really would make it a better story, then go for it. However, for most longer works, it’s just not worth your time to rewrite the thing to make such a fundamental change. Every story is flawed. Every novel, every short story, every play, and every screenplay. You can go over it a million times with revisions and what you’ll end up with is one short story that’s been reworked a million times. It was probably just fine after the second or third draft—I would say it was probably fine after the first draft with a few word changes. Endless revisions are not your friend.
What to keep?
1) The grammar police officer is your friend. Every workshop has one, the person who can pick out weird sentence structure, misplaced modifiers, and weak verbs. Take notes when this person talks. If you can get a printed copy of your manuscript into this person’s hands, and they don’t mind the additional work, see if they can give you a line edit. If you like what they’ve suggested, use it. In fiction, grammar is a little more fluid than in most writing, especially when it comes to dialogue or capturing a particular character’s voice. Use what sounds right to you.
2) The published author is your friend (sometimes). Writing is an interesting profession. Writers are in competition with each other, but like many craftspeople, they are generally eager to help aspiring writers. If you have one of these kind souls in your workshop, I would suggest listening to them. When a published author isn’t your friend is when he’s looking for sycophantic little worshipers. I’ve seen authors fall into this trap. They follow some established author around eating the breadcrumbs of promises only to discover that the author hasn’t been much help to their writing. A good sign: the author is free with advice about your writing, but doesn’t expect anything in return but that you pay it forward to other writers. A bad sign: they want you over at their house with a bunch of other newbie writers listening as they read chapter after chapter of their next epic literary tomb called something pretentious like “Zeus Turned”.
3) The consensus can be your friend. If more than one person is telling you that they would like to see less description in the beginning and more dialogue over a particular plot point, it might be worth taking that advice. Again, this is subjective, but as a beginner you’re looking for signs of what you need to use for your revisions and multiple people agreeing that a story has a problems in a particular place is as good a sign as any.
4) It just feels right. Occasionally, a listener gets your story. This is rare, but you’ll know it when you hear the critique that just resonates. You’ll want to pack your stuff and head home to start the rewrite, because what they say is just so right you wonder how you ever missed the obvious. This is a person to mark down in your book of good listeners. This person will likely get your other stories. Try to get this person to hear your reads.
What really helps you as a beginner?
1) Listening and critiquing. Seriously, you’ll learn more from other people’s work than you will from your own.
2) Revising and sending your work out. This means that you revise once and then send the story out for publication. Don’t rewrite the thing a million times. If you’re a beginner, the best thing you can do is write new material. Write a lot of it. Write a short story a week. Do minimal revisions. Because you’ll get better at writing with time and time alone. You’re going to get lots of rejections. There’s nothing you can do about that, unless you’re a natural and everyone loves everything you write. Rare, but it happens. Don’t be jealous of these people. Writing is filled with all sorts of hardships, so even they will suffer (mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha). Sorry, couldn’t resist.
3) Reading! Dear god, I’m amazed how many people who want to be writers never read. Read and read often. Read everything you can in your genre. Read outside your genre. Read short works, read long works, and yes listening to audio books does count to a certain extent, but as a writer you need to pay attention to words on paper. You need to see how those words work together to form sentences, paragraphs, scenes, chapters, stories, and series. Read damn it!
Okay, just as a disclaimer this post isn’t directed at any particular person. You’ll find these workshop archetypes all over the place. I’m sure I probably left a few out. Just remember that workshopping your work should be a positive experience. If you leave a workshop with nothing but negative feelings, it’s best to stop going. You won’t be helpful and no one will be able to help you. Keep it positive and have fun.
Additional links that might be of interest to those finding this post:
Finding or Creating a Writers’ Workshop Group
Fun with Your New Head by Thomas M. Disch
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This collection is nothing near the quality of Camp Concentration, but does show some of the budding promise of this New Wave speculative writer. Overall, none of the stories in this collection really stand out in comparison to today’s speculative fiction envelope pushers, but for their time the stories were likely a little more edgy. At least Disch manages to deal with more inner-space than outer-space, exploring the psychological aspects of speculative fiction more than the technobable popular in the decade before this book’s publication. I’ve been looking for anthologies that fit into the category of ‘science fiction and fantasy for people who don’t like science fiction and fantasy’ and I don’t believe this quite qualifies. It’s a good collection if considered within the domain of its contemporaries, but Disch is not quite Harlan Ellison. This is worth the read if you’re interested in the big change in speculative fiction that hit in the sixties, but won’t do much for the casual reader. For better works of his from this time period, see Camp Concentration and The Prisoner.
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I’m always glad to see the new reading list come out, but have to admit I haven’t read much of anything on it. It’s not that I haven’t been reading… well, actually, in comparison to my normal reading level, I haven’t. Really too much of my time has gone into watching the stupid TV. Bravo is my Achilles’s heel. Well, anyway, here’s the list for your enjoyment:
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The Sparrow is told from the primary point of view a Jesuit priest and translator, Father Emilio Sandoz, and covers the time periods of both Sandoz’s expedition to the inhabited planet Rakhat and the aftermath of the disastrous journey.
The novel begins with the discovery of music broadcasted from Alpha Centauri and continues with the build up to the first expedition to the broadcasting planet. The middle deals primarily with Sandoz’s coming to grips with the aftermath of the events on the planet, the loss of his crewmates, and the apparent loss of his faith, while flashbacks to the planet deal with the crews’ initial run in with the planet’s natives and their attempts to survive and understand this alien culture. The ending solves the mystery of the crews’ fates and sheds light on Sandoz’s torture in the hands of an alien culture.
I believe this story is about how a good man can attempt to do what he believes is right and still meet with catastrophic consequences. Other reviews have attempted to say this novel is classified incorrectly, that it is not Science Fiction, but a philosophical text exploring right and wrong and the laws of unintended consequences. I’ll brush that off now and just say that this is indeed Science Fiction. It’s just really good Science Fiction. Far too many critics are ignorant of how great speculative fiction truly attempts to explore the human condition.
This is a thought provoking novel, even for someone who doesn’t believe in God. It’s difficult enough to have faith in your own actions when the lives of your loved ones are on the line, but it must be even more trying when your belief system surrenders certain portions of your will to a power you believe to exist outside your self. And I believe that this is the heart of The Sparrow. To what degree are we accountable for our own actions when the intentions of everyone involved were nothing but morally good?
The Sparrow is a thinking person’s Science Fiction novel. It will appeal to the reader who wants to explore morality and what it can mean when coming into contact with other cultures. It’s also an exploration into the meaning of faith and what it means to follow the will of God. Overall, I enjoyed The Sparrow. Russell did an excellent job of creating a believable alien culture not too different from our own, but balanced in such a way that adding human influence had planet changing consequences. Her primary characters are sympathetic and dimensional. Her critique of faith and church are challenging, but fair and compassionate.
This isn’t a five star book because I did find it a little slow and I’m not sure the structure of the plotting really worked as well as Russell probably hoped. I had a difficult time allowing myself to build to great an attachment to characters who I knew would be dead at some point in the story. Additionally, I wasn’t entirely convinced that the actual expedition would be built of this coincidental gathering of characters, but I do believe that was required to show how this must have been the will of God. I don’t believe these coincidences took too much away from the story, but I did find myself many times saying that it was quite convenient that a particular character had just the trait necessary to accomplish these particular goals—in other words, I thought Russell was too easy on the characters in some respects, and yet when it came time to meeting with their death’s, the characters where helpless in a way that was less than satisfying.
Overall though, I found The Sparrow to be an enjoyable read and mentally stimulating. It was definitely the type of novel I will remember long after I’ve read it. It also goes on my list of Science Fiction novels for people who claim to not like Science Fiction.
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Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
A hospital noir thriller about a hit man turned doctor who faces down his past. Lots of drugs, sex, and violence. What’s not to love? Josh writes in an intimate first person point of view jumping from the present to the past between each chapter and revealing a little more about the protagonist and his dire situation. This isn’t the type of story that expects you to get close to the characters or to even take their over-the-top circumstances seriously, but if you’re a fan of the pulp storytelling tradition and like a fast read, I’d recommend _Beat the Reaper_.
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It appears you can read issue #19 for free. This is an excellent chance to get a taste for the type of fiction M-BRANE SF publishes. I’m excited to be in this issue with so many other talented writers.
Here’s the Table of Contents:
Shawn Scarber: “Burnt Benediction”
Bart Leib: “Flip the Switch”
Ian Sales: “Through the Eye of a Needle”
Jacques Barbéri (tr. Michael Shreve): “Isanve”
Jason S. Ridler: “4×40 Killers”
Regan Wolfrom: “A Step Beyond the Rain”
Signed the contract tonight, so I’m happy to officially announce that my weird science fiction short story “Burnt Benediction” will appear in the August edition of M-Brane SF. I feel this story has found an exceptionally fitting home with M-Brane SF and encourage everyone to subscribe and give the magazine a read.
Here’s a small sampling from “Burnt Benediction”:
Fr. Marcias lifted his shotgun and pumped it. A pumped shotgun had a nice beat to it. A song of violence was a tune that Fr. Marcias liked rather well.
He charged down the hall where the boy’s gaze had lingered. After a few steps, he jumped and kicked the old wooden door, riding it to the ground he then went down on one knee with the shotgun to his shoulder. He would have just started blasting, but a familiar smell hit his nostrils; the smell of late nights covered in a thin layer of sweat.
When the dust cleared, the only person in the room was a woman who sat cross-legged on the edge of an oak desk. The furniture looked as though it had been built for the same time period as the building, but the woman looked like something out of a movie from the nineteen forties with a tight skirt, frilly blouse, and high heels. Fr. Marcias regretted the moment he recognized her. It wouldn’t have mattered how she disguised herself, either. He would have still known her.
“Darling,” she said. “When I heard Papa was sending one of his bad boys out this way, I so hoped it was you. It’s so good to see you again, and again, and again.”
Not a heck of a lot to report right now. I have three stories out right now looking for publication; one sort of dark post-apocalyptic science fiction, another very short horror story, and another very short Gothic fantasy. I really haven’t been writing a lot lately. July is always a slow month for me anyway, because I typically keep my daughter for that month, and we’re normally doing stuff.
I have been watching a lot of Doctor Who lately. Generally, I’m not that big on television shows. I’d really rather write than watch TV, but there’s something about the world and characters of Doctor Who that’s kind of captured my fascination. So I’m watching all the new episodes and a few of the older ones. I did watch a few of these when I was a kid, but I don’t have the sort of diehard fan commitment that a lot of sci-fi folks seem to have toward the good Doctor.
I saw Avatar: The Last Airbender with the kiddo the other night. It’s terrible. I just don’t see how someone could screw up the movie that bad. I mean, did he even watch the cartoon? Why didn’t he just hire the original writers to work on the script? I believe this is what working in a vacuum can do to your creativity.
I am stocked about seeing Inception though. It looks fantastic. Very exciting stuff.
So I am working on cleaning up a few of my older works to get them out there door. It’s a little slow going, but I’m ok with that. I have another old novel I was working on about seven years ago that I’ve pulled out of the folder and started rethinking. I think I can start committing more time to my writing after July. So hopefully you’ll see more work come out of me.
Publications however, are beyond my control. I’m doing my best to get more work polished and out the door, but there’s not much I can do about not getting acceptances, accept try to write better.
