speaking of points in fiction
Lucy Kemnitzer
misunderstand what a point is?
I'm not arguing with the rejection slip, though of course they are
totally wrong, but I'm wondering why a person would be wondering
what the point of a story is. I'm not much of a short story
writer, anyway, but I wonder if I understood this thing, I might
be better at it, though sometimes I think I should just stick with
novels anyway, Or maybe take up something else.
Lucy Kemnitzer
Ian A. York
Lucy Kemnitzer <rit...@cruzio.com> wrote:
>Is a short story supposed to have a point? Or maybe I
>misunderstand what a point is?
Why, of course it must have a point. A short story is nothing if it can't
be boiled down into a single Powerpoint slide! Shakespeare would have
been much more excellent if, instead of writing some long-winded confusing
thing, he'd just sent out a memo.
Dear All,
Be decisive.
Yrs.,
Bill
Isn't that much better?
Next slide,
Ian
--
Ian York (iay...@panix.com) <http://www.panix.com/~iayork/>
"-but as he was a York, I am rather inclined to suppose him a
very respectable Man." -Jane Austen, The History of England
John Kensmark
wrote:
I know not what course others may take, but as for me, the only
"point" I look for in a story is this: when I'm reading it, I like to
want to *keep* reading it, and when I'm done, I like to feel like my
time was well spent.
And as to how the author can stir in me the appropriate feelings . . .
well, you know--there are zillions of ways, many of them very unlike
many of the others.
So, in the vernacular, no.
In the film, "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles", Steve Martin memorably
says, "Here's an idea: when you tell a story, have a *point*!" And I
know what he means, but he's really referring to stories where the
journey is tedious and one is disappointed when there's no
destination. A joke needs a punchline, but a funny story doesn't
necessarily have to have one.
--
John Kensmark kensmark#hotmail.com
Simpson's-in-the-Strand, the world famous restaurant in London,
Eng., where such notables as Charles Dickens, Sir Winston
Churchill and many monarchs died, has come to Toronto.
-- Halifax "Mail-Star", 2/21/79
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
> On Mon, 04 Jun 2001 02:31:28 GMT, rit...@cruzio.com (Lucy Kemnitzer)
> wrote:
>
> > Is a short story supposed to have a point? Or maybe I
> > misunderstand what a point is?
> >
> > I'm not arguing with the rejection slip, though of course they are
> > totally wrong, but I'm wondering why a person would be wondering
> > what the point of a story is. I'm not much of a short story
> > writer, anyway, but I wonder if I understood this thing, I might
> > be better at it, though sometimes I think I should just stick with
> > novels anyway, Or maybe take up something else.
>
> I know not what course others may take, but as for me, the only
> "point" I look for in a story is this: when I'm reading it, I like to
> want to *keep* reading it, and when I'm done, I like to feel like my
> time was well spent.
Would "closure" give a better idea than "point"?
--
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
substitute tin to nit to mail me
http://www.fantascienza.net/sfpeople/elethiomel
Jo Walton
rit...@cruzio.com "Lucy Kemnitzer" writes:
> Is a short story supposed to have a point? Or maybe I
> misunderstand what a point is?
It depends what they mean by point. Probably not a moral, probably
that it not be aimless, that it be _about_ something.
> I'm not arguing with the rejection slip, though of course they are
> totally wrong, but I'm wondering why a person would be wondering
> what the point of a story is. I'm not much of a short story
> writer, anyway, but I wonder if I understood this thing, I might
> be better at it, though sometimes I think I should just stick with
> novels anyway,
I have decided I'm better at sticking to novels, mostly, because the
main reason I want to write short stories is because they take less
time, not because I want to write them for their own sake.
What I very often start with is people in a situation, and in a novel
I can go on with that. In a short story there isn't room, something
has to happen, and sometimes I even have to make up something to happen.
And sometimes all I have is a voice, and I can write a lovely little
bit in that voice, but to be a story it has to be something more than
just that, it needs stuff to happen, it needs a shape in the same way
a novel does, but there isn't room for it to do itself, and that's where
I go wrong.
I have a number of stories which are just lovely up to the point where
they stop being start-up and incluing and require plot, whereupon they
fall over and require oxygen. My favourite one of these is about a
kleptomaniac who was born on a space station who comes to Earth to
steal squirrels, excuse me, proto-sentients. (It started off as a one
paragraph example here of how to do description as characterisation)
It has a voice, it has a universe, it has great description as
characterisation and... that not enough to prop up the events, because
it doesn't really have events except that I made some up because stories
need them.
I don't know if this is useful to you at all, but if you look at your
story and ask what would be different if it were the beginning of a novel,
it might help, if your problem is anything like this, if you are naturally
a novelist.
I think sometimes it's possible to write something that just is the
voice and situation -- my pulling wings off fairy story is that -- but
not at any length. And the only short story of mine that I'm entirely
happy with has an entire novel worth of backstory implied and no
actual plot, and it would ruin it to attempt to give it one. (This is
quite interesting to think about on this angle, actually, I hadn't
quite realised that before, but it doesn't.) And part of the point of
it is that it doesn't -- it's about some adults who saved a fantasy
world fifteen years ago and nothing has happened since -- and it's
also just like the first chapter of a novel that isn't going to happen.
And it was rejected by one editor who likes my writing but on the grounds
that it doesn't quite have the short story nature.
> Or maybe take up something else.
Don't be silly.
You do realise that anything other than "this does not meet our needs
at this time" is a positive rejection and a sign that you are good and
getting better, yes?
(I say this as someone who reads rejections sideways at arm's length
inside the envelope. And email ones with my eyes half closed. It makes
me feel so... rejected. It's right up there with telling someone you
love them and waiting and then them saying a very polite "ugh, go away,"
as fun experiences go. But even so.)
--
Jo J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk
I kissed a kif at Kefk
Locus Recommended First Novel: *THE KING'S PEACE* out now from Tor.
Sample Chapters, Map, Poems, & stuff at http://www.bluejo.demon.co.uk
Brenda W. Clough
that everything is directed towards the 'gag' or the 'point.' They are
like Nascar race cars, one seaters with huge engines. Novels are more
comfortable vehicles, with enough space for your bags and a cupholder or
two.
Put it another way: short stories are diamonds. Novels are the
mountain range from which the diamonds are mined.
Brenda
Lucy Kemnitzer wrote:
--
What do you do with a secret?
Whisper it in a desert at high noon.
Lock it up and bury the key.
Tell the nation on prime-time TV.
Choose a door . . .
Doors of Death and Life
by Brenda W. Clough
http://www.sff.net/people/Brenda
Tor Books
ISBN 0-312-87064-7
Simon Morden
> Put it another way: short stories are diamonds. Novels are the
> mountain range from which the diamonds are mined.
Oooh. That's *good*.
Simon Morden
--
________________________________________________________
Moving in a mysterious way ...
Visit the Book of Morden at http://www.bookofmorden.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk
*'Taiga Taiga Burning Bright' in Extremes2 from Lone Wolf *
* From Jan 2001! http://www.dm.net/~bahwolf/extremes2.htm *
Lucy Kemnitzer
<clo...@erols.com> wrote:
>When I think of short stories, they are like jokes. They are so short
>that everything is directed towards the 'gag' or the 'point.' They are
>like Nascar race cars, one seaters with huge engines. Novels are more
>comfortable vehicles, with enough space for your bags and a cupholder or
>two.
>
>Put it another way: short stories are diamonds. Novels are the
>mountain range from which the diamonds are mined.
>
I'm not sure I can get any help from that. I mean, I thought that
story was a shiny little diamond: I thought it had a beautiful
little crystalline structure, and a concentrated little world of
light in it, and just the right number of polished little facets.
I _thought_ it was a story, too: problem, resolution (only the
resolution was "we don't get a reolution," but it was, I thought,
a clearly derived resolution that they don't get one): character,
setting, voice (most especially voice), the whole thing, compact
and pretty.
Only they thought the writing was flat and they were wondering
what the point was. So I'm trying to get over myself and figure
out what happened there.
Actually, I'm pretending that that's what I'm doing, kind of
hoping I'll switch over to doing that instead of what I am doing,
which is sulking.
Lucy Kemnitzer
Patricia C. Wrede
Kemnitzer) writes:
>Only they thought the writing was flat and they were wondering
>what the point was. So I'm trying to get over myself and figure
>out what happened there.
What happened was, you sent it to the wrong editor. The right editor will see
exactly what you were getting at, and buy the story.
This is not a problem, unless you hold up on sending the story out again in
order to su...er... "fix" it. This is just something that happens. It happens
to everybody; the only difference between you and me is that because I've sold
a lot of stuff, *some* editors will tell me in a bit more detail *why* they
rejected the story. (This is very much a mixed blessing...)
And getting any sort of personalized rejection note is an indicator that the
story was one of the tough calls -- the editor *almost* bought it. So send it
to somebody else. Maybe they will.
Patricia C. Wrede
Dan Schauer
"Simon Morden" <simon....@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote in message
news:3B1B9E22...@blueyonder.co.uk...
> "Brenda W. Clough" wrote:
>
> > Put it another way: short stories are diamonds. Novels are the
> > mountain range from which the diamonds are mined.
>
> Oooh. That's *good*.
>
And I also suspect it is very much a YMMV thing as well. I imagine
people who naturally write short stories don't view it this way.
Dan Schauer
Jaquandor
>mountain range from which the diamonds are mined.
Hmmmm. In the foreword to his first story collection (I think it was _Daughter
of Regals_), Stephen R. Donaldson likens short stories to fine wine whilst
novels are beer. Short stories have to make their "point" much more concisely
and with more carefully chosen words than novels, which (in Donaldson's words)
involve the author throwing words at the reader and seeing what sticks.
--
-Jaquandor
"Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The
water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up." -Stephen King
Beth Bernobich
>
<snip>
>
> Only they thought the writing was flat and they were wondering
> what the point was. So I'm trying to get over myself and figure
> out what happened there.
YMMV, but when I get a rejection like that, I consider first if the
comments resonate with me -- did the editor point out something that
produces an "oh, that's right" reaction? If not, and if the story still
holds up under another read-through, I send it out again. Editors have
different tastes, and a story that leaves one editor confused will often
speak clearly to another.
Beth
--
newsgroup sff.people.beth-bernobich
http://www.sff.net/people/beth-bernobich
Beth Bernobich
>
> Hmmmm. In the foreword to his first story collection (I think it was _Daughter
> of Regals_), Stephen R. Donaldson likens short stories to fine wine whilst
> novels are beer. Short stories have to make their "point" much more concisely
> and with more carefully chosen words than novels, which (in Donaldson's words)
> involve the author throwing words at the reader and seeing what sticks.
Interesting image, but not precisely the one I would have chosen. Yes,
it's true that short stories have to make their point more concisely,
but with a novel, I'm just as concerned about choosing the right words,
and using the right number. For me, it's not so much that I throw more
words at the reader -- a sloppy, loosely written scene doesn't fit into
a novel any better than it does into a short story -- but I do throw
more threads and arcs and character interaction. Even so, the elements
have to all work together.
Beth Bernobich
>
> When I think of short stories, they are like jokes. They are so short
> that everything is directed towards the 'gag' or the 'point.' They are
> like Nascar race cars, one seaters with huge engines. Novels are more
> comfortable vehicles, with enough space for your bags and a cupholder or
> two.
With coffee makers, refrigerators, and several bins in the back for the
kids' toys. No, wait, that's a series.
>
> Put it another way: short stories are diamonds. Novels are the
> mountain range from which the diamonds are mined.
I love this image. Works for me.
Brenda W. Clough
Jaquandor wrote:
>
> Hmmmm. In the foreword to his first story collection (I think it was _Daughter
> of Regals_), Stephen R. Donaldson likens short stories to fine wine whilst
> novels are beer. Short stories have to make their "point" much more concisely
> and with more carefully chosen words than novels, which (in Donaldson's words)
> involve the author throwing words at the reader and seeing what sticks.
Tch! Never.
Brenda <has spent a year honing this novel like a razor blade>
Sylvia Li
>
> >Put it another way: short stories are diamonds. Novels are the
> >mountain range from which the diamonds are mined.
>
> Hmmmm. In the foreword to his first story collection (I think it was _Daughter
> of Regals_), Stephen R. Donaldson likens short stories to fine wine whilst
> novels are beer. Short stories have to make their "point" much more concisely
> and with more carefully chosen words than novels, which (in Donaldson's words)
> involve the author throwing words at the reader and seeing what sticks.
--
Sylvia Li
Lucy Kemnitzer
<beth-be...@snet.net> wrote:
>Lucy Kemnitzer wrote:
>>
><snip>
>>
>> Only they thought the writing was flat and they were wondering
>> what the point was. So I'm trying to get over myself and figure
>> out what happened there.
>
>YMMV, but when I get a rejection like that, I consider first if the
>comments resonate with me -- did the editor point out something that
>produces an "oh, that's right" reaction? If not, and if the story still
>holds up under another read-through, I send it out again. Editors have
>different tastes, and a story that leaves one editor confused will often
>speak clearly to another.
My problem is that I really can't tell. Such is my lack of
perspective that I'm easily prone to believe that every word I
ever wrote is trash, trash, trash, anyway.
Fortunately, I do have other things to think about, I keep
reminding myself. I did figure out today that I want to open with
a panorama of the camp.
Lucy Kemnitzer
Jaquandor
>
>>
>> Hmmmm. In the foreword to his first story collection (I think it was
>_Daughter
>> of Regals_), Stephen R. Donaldson likens short stories to fine wine whilst
>> novels are beer. Short stories have to make their "point" much more
>concisely
>> and with more carefully chosen words than novels, which (in Donaldson's
>words)
>> involve the author throwing words at the reader and seeing what sticks.
>
>Tch! Never.
>
>Brenda <has spent a year honing this novel like a razor blade>
Maybe that's my problem. I've been flogging my novel with an antique
rug-beater!
Brooks Moses
> Hmmmm. In the foreword to his first story collection (I think it was _Daughter
> of Regals_), Stephen R. Donaldson likens short stories to fine wine whilst
> novels are beer. Short stories have to make their "point" much more concisely
> and with more carefully chosen words than novels, which (in Donaldson's words)
> involve the author throwing words at the reader and seeing what sticks.
*ponders* Wonder if this is related to why the one of his novels that
I've read simply didn't work for me at all?
- Brooks
Patricia C. Wrede
jaqu...@aol.comphneh (Jaquandor) writes:
>Hmmmm. In the foreword to his first story collection (I think it was
>_Daughter
>of Regals_), Stephen R. Donaldson likens short stories to fine wine whilst
>novels are beer. Short stories have to make their "point" much more concisely
>and with more carefully chosen words than novels, which (in Donaldson's
>words)
>involve the author throwing words at the reader and seeing what sticks.
The trouble with that analogy is the associations -- *fine* wine as opposed to
mere plebian beer. If I were going to take a crack at it, I'd call short
stories fine brandy and novels fine wine -- the fine brandy being the more
concentrated stuff that (unless one is a confirmed tippler) one really doesn't
want a whole lot of all at one go, while the fine wine being something one can
have several glasses of all through dinner.
Or better yet, short stories are fine wine and novels are BMWs, or short
stories are diamonds and novels are designer clothes. Because the real trouble
with those kinds of analogies is that they almost inevitably imply the
superiority of one form over the other. And neither is better; they're just
different, that's all.
Patricia C. Wrede
John Kensmark
Dan) wrote:
> John Kensmark <kens...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 04 Jun 2001 02:31:28 GMT, rit...@cruzio.com (Lucy Kemnitzer)
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Is a short story supposed to have a point? Or maybe I
>>> misunderstand what a point is?
>>>
>>> I'm not arguing with the rejection slip, though of course they are
>>> totally wrong, but I'm wondering why a person would be wondering
>>> what the point of a story is. I'm not much of a short story
>>> writer, anyway, but I wonder if I understood this thing, I might
>>> be better at it, though sometimes I think I should just stick with
>>> novels anyway, Or maybe take up something else.
>>
>> I know not what course others may take, but as for me, the only
>> "point" I look for in a story is this: when I'm reading it, I like
>> to want to *keep* reading it, and when I'm done, I like to feel
>> like my time was well spent.
>
> Would "closure" give a better idea than "point"?
Well . . . it depends on what we're actually debating. For me, yeah,
a story should probably go somewhere, do or say something.
Stories--especially short stories--that don't rarely have much appeal
for me.
I certainly wouldn't say it's an prima facie condition, though. I
don't think I'd reject a story on that basis, either, myself.
--
John Kensmark kensmark#hotmail.com
12 on their way to cruise among dead in plane crash
-- headline, "Dallas Morning News", 4/3/77
Brenda W. Clough
Jaquandor wrote:
> >Jaquandor wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> Hmmmm. In the foreword to his first story collection (I think it was
> >_Daughter
> >> of Regals_), Stephen R. Donaldson likens short stories to fine wine whilst
> >> novels are beer. Short stories have to make their "point" much more
> >concisely
> >> and with more carefully chosen words than novels, which (in Donaldson's
> >words)
> >> involve the author throwing words at the reader and seeing what sticks.
> >
> >Tch! Never.
> >
> >Brenda <has spent a year honing this novel like a razor blade>
>
> Maybe that's my problem. I've been flogging my novel with an antique
> rug-beater!
>
A good novel is not written -- it's rewritten. I have beaten mine too, pounding
about 20,000 words out of it. Then I added 50,000 more new ones. But that is in
the earlier stages. In the latter stages it's more like grooming a horse. You've
finished shampooing and brushing and scrubbing, and now you're concentrating on
braiding the mane and tail, and rubbing the hooves with black shiny stuff.
Brenda
Brenda W. Clough
Beth Bernobich wrote:
> "Brenda W. Clough" wrote:
> >
> > When I think of short stories, they are like jokes. They are so short
> > that everything is directed towards the 'gag' or the 'point.' They are
> > like Nascar race cars, one seaters with huge engines. Novels are more
> > comfortable vehicles, with enough space for your bags and a cupholder or
> > two.
>
> With coffee makers, refrigerators, and several bins in the back for the
> kids' toys. No, wait, that's a series
This is not a bad analogy, because it is certainly possible to overload your
novel the way it's possible to overaccessorize your car. Sometimes fuzzy dice
hanging from the rearview mirror is a -bad- idea. The trick is to know when
to stop.
Brenda
Erin Denton
"Brenda W. Clough" <clo...@erols.com> wrote in message
news:3B1C640A...@erols.com...
> A good novel is not written -- it's rewritten. I have beaten mine too,
pounding
> about 20,000 words out of it. Then I added 50,000 more new ones. But
that is in
> the earlier stages. In the latter stages it's more like grooming a horse.
You've
> finished shampooing and brushing and scrubbing, and now you're
concentrating on
> braiding the mane and tail, and rubbing the hooves with black shiny stuff.
>
> Brenda
>
>
> by Brenda W. Clough
> http://www.sff.net/people/Brenda
> Tor Books
> ISBN 0-312-87064-7
They've got sparkly horse nail polish now. For when the black stuff
tires you ;). (I'm not kidding. It comes in bigger nail polishy bottles with
like a glue applicator.) It's what all the best horses are wearing this
season ;)
Erin Cashier Denton
http://www.worldcontrol.org/theri
It's no better to be safe than sorry.
Dan Goodman
<clo...@erols.com> wrote:
>A good novel is not written -- it's rewritten.
Mileage WILL vary -- this depends on the writer.
----------
Dan Goodman
dsg...@visi.com
Whatever you wish for me, may you have twice as much.
Simon Morden
I do both. Gems are pretty and shiny and you can hold them in hte palm
of your hand. Mountains have a majestic grandeur all of their own, and
it takes some serious hiking to get up to the summit. But, oh the view!
Are we stretching this metaphor too far?
Jaquandor
>And neither is better; they're just
>different, that's all.
I'll second that, as I write both. (Or, am attempting to write both!) The best
analogy I've seen yet is, I think, Graydon's in the difference between musical
forms. A motet versus a sonata-allegro form symphonic movement, perhaps.
Neither is superior.
Of course, I'm not sure I've ever actually written a real "short story"; the
shortest thing I've written still falls into "novelet" length. And then there's
the story that I was convinced would be a real short story, only it is now
possibly a novella. Arrgghhhh.
Patricia C. Wrede
jaqu...@aol.comphneh (Jaquandor) writes:
>Of course, I'm not sure I've ever actually written a real "short story"; the
>shortest thing I've written still falls into "novelet" length. And then
>there's
>the story that I was convinced would be a real short story, only it is now
>possibly a novella. Arrgghhhh.
You're a natural novelist, that's all. It'll take a while. It took me five
novels to *begin* to figure out how to write short stories, and even then my
first publishable "short story" was 16,000 words. And it was another six or
eight years before I really felt as if I had the hang of it (or at least, it
took me that long to really be able to tell when what I had hold of was a short
story idea and when it was a novel, and to stop wasting time trying to make the
latter be the former).
If you want to figure out how to write short...well, what worked for me was a
combination of getting the general skills up (that was the writing-five-novels
part), working on the specific skills (writing a bunch of unpublishable "short
stories" that weren't short stories, but that taught me some things about what
didn't work), and reading nothing but short stories (and especially a whole lot
of folk tales) all in a row for hours at a time, for about a week straight. I
don't know if any of that will be of use to you, and there are probably other
things that have worked for other people, but if any of it sounds as if it
would help, go for it.
Patricia C. Wrede
Brenda W. Clough
Dan Goodman wrote:
> On Tue, 05 Jun 2001 00:46:02 -0400, "Brenda W. Clough"
> <clo...@erols.com> wrote:
>
> >A good novel is not written -- it's rewritten.
>
> Mileage WILL vary -- this depends on the writer.
> ----------
I agree that improving the work on every rewrite is a learned skill, and
that if you are making the work -worse- on every pass then you might as
well cut your throat at once. It behooves every writer to learn it,
however, because it is very very rare indeed for a writer to grind out a
perfect work the first time around.
Lucy Kemnitzer
<clo...@erols.com> wrote:
>
>
>Jaquandor wrote:
>
>> >Jaquandor wrote:
>> >
>> >>
>> >> Hmmmm. In the foreword to his first story collection (I think it was
>> >_Daughter
>> >> of Regals_), Stephen R. Donaldson likens short stories to fine wine whilst
>> >> novels are beer. Short stories have to make their "point" much more
>> >concisely
>> >> and with more carefully chosen words than novels, which (in Donaldson's
>> >words)
>> >> involve the author throwing words at the reader and seeing what sticks.
>> >
>> >Tch! Never.
>> >
>> >Brenda <has spent a year honing this novel like a razor blade>
>>
>> Maybe that's my problem. I've been flogging my novel with an antique
>> rug-beater!
>>
>
>A good novel is not written -- it's rewritten. I have beaten mine too, pounding
>about 20,000 words out of it. Then I added 50,000 more new ones. But that is in
>the earlier stages. In the latter stages it's more like grooming a horse. You've
>finished shampooing and brushing and scrubbing, and now you're concentrating on
>braiding the mane and tail, and rubbing the hooves with black shiny stuff.
>
All these metaphors. But I think one of the reasons I'm more of a
novelist than a short story writer is that in rewriting things get
longer for me, deeper, and thicker, and richer: _more_ in every
dimension as I come to realize more and more about the people and
their world and the events in it. Rewriting is, up to a point, the
finest thing of all, for me. Though there's a point when it
becomes scary -- I worry that I'm never going to get it right (I
have _realized_ two important things about the last book, but I'm
sitting on them for now: I think I will _realize_ several more
things, and I don't want to keep going back over and over, so I'm
exercising a different discipline right now, letting those
_realizations_ ferment while I try to get started on the next
thing), that I will be like that guy at the beginning of _The
Plague_ (or is it _Nausea?_) who has been writing the first
sentence of his novel for twenty years. Ick, this isn't what I
meant to do: I meant to agree about the rewriting part.
I keep reading advice that the first draft of a short story ought
to be written in a single sitting. Which I wonder, sometimes, if
it's a clue that some of the ideas that I have and I think are
short-story ideas, aren't.
Lucy Kemnitzer
Dan Goodman
wrote:
>All these metaphors. But I think one of the reasons I'm more of a
>novelist than a short story writer is that in rewriting things get
>longer for me, deeper, and thicker, and richer: _more_ in every
>dimension as I come to realize more and more about the people and
>their world and the events in it.
But does that mean you have to put it all into the piece of writing?
For my current work in progress (or regress -- it needs an ending
transplant), I know what the Elfland equivalents of New Age stores
sell and why it differs from what New Age bookstores here sell. But
that doesn't fit into the story, and would distract from it.
Dan Goodman
<clo...@erols.com> wrote:
>
>
>Dan Goodman wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 05 Jun 2001 00:46:02 -0400, "Brenda W. Clough"
>> <clo...@erols.com> wrote:
>>
>> >A good novel is not written -- it's rewritten.
>>
>> Mileage WILL vary -- this depends on the writer.
>> ----------
>
>I agree that improving the work on every rewrite is a learned skill,
No, that is not what I'm saying.
Let me clarify: there are some writers who _cannot_ rewrite. There
are others who can't rewrite even slightly without making things
worse.
Heinlein was toward that end of the scale.
Just as there are mystery writers who can't write if they have any
idea of who dunnit, or what's going to happen. While there's been at
least one whose preliminary notes added up to more wordage than the
story itself. (That's notes, not outline or first draft.) For more
on this see Lawrence Block, _Writing the Novel_.
>and
>that if you are making the work -worse- on every pass then you might as
>well cut your throat at once.
> It behooves every writer to learn it,
>however, because it is very very rare indeed for a writer to grind out a
>perfect work the first time around.
Some writers _can't_ learn it. (Or, you might say that they do their
revising in their heads.)
sdti...@newsreader.com
> >Put it another way: short stories are diamonds. Novels are the
> >mountain range from which the diamonds are mined.
>
> Hmmmm. In the foreword to his first story collection (I think it was
> _Daughter of Regals_), Stephen R. Donaldson likens short stories to fine
> wine whilst novels are beer. Short stories have to make their "point"
> much more concisely and with more carefully chosen words than novels,
> which (in Donaldson's words) involve the author throwing words at the
> reader and seeing what sticks.
That would explain some of the prose in the Gap Cycle.
Steve Tilson
--
-------------------- http://NewsReader.Com/ --------------------
Usenet for the Web
Lucy Kemnitzer
<clo...@erols.com> wrote:
>
>
>Dan Goodman wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 05 Jun 2001 00:46:02 -0400, "Brenda W. Clough"
>> <clo...@erols.com> wrote:
>>
>> >A good novel is not written -- it's rewritten.
>>
>> Mileage WILL vary -- this depends on the writer.
>> ----------
>
>I agree that improving the work on every rewrite is a learned skill, and
>that if you are making the work -worse- on every pass then you might as
>well cut your throat at once. It behooves every writer to learn it,
>however, because it is very very rare indeed for a writer to grind out a
>perfect work the first time around.
And I think writers who claim to do so are actually doing a lot of
rewriting before they ever put the words down.
Lucy Kemnitzer
Jo Walton
rit...@cruzio.com "Lucy Kemnitzer" writes:
I don't think I do. At least, what takes time isn't to do with _words_.
(More another time when I feel more coherent -- the blood behind my
forehead is attempting to escape forwards at velocity. Incidentally,
bathing one's temples with cold water, as people in novels often do,
and which feels as if it ought to be a relief, does nothing. Cold
stones are much better.)
--
Jo J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk
I kissed a kif at Kefk
Locus Recommended First Novel: *THE KING'S PEACE* out now from Tor.
Sample Chapters, Map, Poems, & stuff at http://www.bluejo.demon.co.uk
Lucy Kemnitzer
wrote:
>On Tue, 05 Jun 2001 13:33:45 GMT, rit...@cruzio.com (Lucy Kemnitzer)
>wrote:
>
>>All these metaphors. But I think one of the reasons I'm more of a
>>novelist than a short story writer is that in rewriting things get
>>longer for me, deeper, and thicker, and richer: _more_ in every
>>dimension as I come to realize more and more about the people and
>>their world and the events in it.
>
>But does that mean you have to put it all into the piece of writing?
>
>For my current work in progress (or regress -- it needs an ending
>transplant), I know what the Elfland equivalents of New Age stores
>sell and why it differs from what New Age bookstores here sell. But
>that doesn't fit into the story, and would distract from it.
>
Well,of course, that happens too. But most of the things I
_realize_ are these things which connect in all these compelling
ways and make the story more of a story, and not those wonderful
little bits that don't fit. It can be heartbreaking when
something seems like it's a definite requirement for the story,
and you work and work at it and it just doesn't go. Like I had
this sudden vision of the 1st order foil for Chuy walking on the
shore, just as I was, and this whole construct about what the kelp
forestation project was about, and the tide engines, and it didn't
go in, nor did the conversations the 2nd order foil had with his
ex-girlfriend-more-or-less.
But the place name from that first bit did go in, and some of the
things that were going to happen in those bits found their way
into other bits. And the time I spent writing and rewriting those
bits cleared up some other questions I had about other things.
Lucy Kemnitzer
Dan Goodman
wrote:
>On Tue, 05 Jun 2001 09:56:17 -0400, "Brenda W. Clough"
><clo...@erols.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>>Dan Goodman wrote:
>>
>>> On Tue, 05 Jun 2001 00:46:02 -0400, "Brenda W. Clough"
>>> <clo...@erols.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> >A good novel is not written -- it's rewritten.
>>>
>>> Mileage WILL vary -- this depends on the writer.
>>> ----------
>>
>>I agree that improving the work on every rewrite is a learned skill, and
>>that if you are making the work -worse- on every pass then you might as
>>well cut your throat at once. It behooves every writer to learn it,
>>however, because it is very very rare indeed for a writer to grind out a
>>perfect work the first time around.
>
>And I think writers who claim to do so are actually doing a lot of
>rewriting before they ever put the words down.
Well, yes. But _revising after the first draft to go down on paper
can be worse than useless for them_. And if they're not aware how
much they rewrite in their heads, then advising them to revise is
steering them wrong.
Patricia C. Wrede
writes:
>On Tue, 05 Jun 2001 09:56:17 -0400, "Brenda W. Clough"
>> It behooves every writer to learn it,
>>however, because it is very very rare indeed for a writer to grind out a
>>perfect work the first time around.
>
>Some writers _can't_ learn it. (Or, you might say that they do their
>revising in their heads.)
Or in advance, except it's kind of hard to call that "rewriting." But Dan's
right -- while there aren't very *many* writers who can't rewrite, there are
some. To clarify: there are some writers for whom their prose sets up like
concrete once it's in any kind of readable form. That's why I say they do
their rewriting "in advance" -- the one example of this that I can think of
goes to considerable lengths in order to not actually write up a scene in final
form until all the bits and pieces of it are "right." This involves elaborate
note-taking and writing bits of stuff out of order on purpose.
I expect there's also somebody out there who does it all in their head, and
just sort of dumps it onto the page once it's finished. Come to think of it, I
also know someone who works like this, but she's a short story writer. She can
recite entire scenes that she hasn't written down yet, and she rewrites them
and massages them in her head until they're as good as she can get them, and
then she writes them down and they don't change. I'm not sure anyone's brain
is big enough to do that for a novel, but I'm not positive that nobody's is,
either.
Nine-and-sixty-ways...
Besides, "rewriting" means something different to different writers. By many
people's standards, I don't rewrite. (*I* think I do, but they don't think
so.) Because I don't rip up large sections of plot, insert or remove or
combine characters or subplots, move scenes around, or any other such major
surgery. What I do, I am told, is called "polishing." I call it rewriting,
because it's my second time through the manuscript; what other people
apparently call rewriting is stuff I do at my first-draft stage, and apparently
I skip entirely whatever it is that they do at their first-draft stage because
there isn't anything else in between the five-page outline and the written out
story that I could call a first draft.
Patricia C. Wrede
Patricia C. Wrede
writes:
>(More another time when I feel more coherent -- the blood behind my
>forehead is attempting to escape forwards at velocity. Incidentally,
>bathing one's temples with cold water, as people in novels often do,
>and which feels as if it ought to be a relief, does nothing. Cold
>stones are much better.)
Ice packs on the head and temples work well for many people. So, oddly, does
putting one's feet in a bucket of warm-to-hot water, or one's hands into a
sinkful of warm-to-hot water.
Staring at a computer screen is highly dis-recommended...
Patricia C. Wrede
(speaking from experience...)
Helen Kenyon
<J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk> writes
>
>I think sometimes it's possible to write something that just is the
>voice and situation -- my pulling wings off fairy story is that -- but
>not at any length. And the only short story of mine that I'm entirely
>happy with has an entire novel worth of backstory implied and no
>actual plot, and it would ruin it to attempt to give it one. (This is
>quite interesting to think about on this angle, actually, I hadn't
>quite realised that before, but it doesn't.) And part of the point of
>it is that it doesn't -- it's about some adults who saved a fantasy
>world fifteen years ago and nothing has happened since -- and it's
>also just like the first chapter of a novel that isn't going to happen.
>And it was rejected by one editor who likes my writing but on the grounds
>that it doesn't quite have the short story nature.
>
No, no! Novels have to have plot, short stories -- especially short
short stories -- don't. Or not what I'd call a plot, anyway. Novels
have to have something happen, then something else happen, which leads
to something else. (Even if it's all told out of order or inside out.)
A short story has to have *something*, but it's not plot, which is why
your one about the kids who once saved the world and are now grown up is
so brilliant. It does have *change*, even if it's only a change of
attitude, and therefore it has a sense of closure. In fact, you managed
to cram into that short story more or less exactly the point that Philip
Pullman took three long novels to say.
Helen
--
Helen, Gwynedd, Wales *** http://www.baradel.demon.co.uk
Or try http://blaenau.members.beeb.net and follow the town trail
to see Blaenau Ffestiniog in glorious sunshine.
**Please delete the extra bit from e-mail address if replying by mail**
Dorothy J Heydt
Patricia C. Wrede <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>I expect there's also somebody out there who does it all in their head, and
>just sort of dumps it onto the page once it's finished. Come to think of it, I
>also know someone who works like this, but she's a short story writer.
I come reasonably near to doing that when it's a short story. I
think about it for months or years, finally grudgingly and under
deadline sit down and put it on the computer, and then tweak a
word here, a word there for the next couple weeks and it's done.
I used to anyway. Now that Marion's dead I may never write a
short story again. She was the only one who would buy them.
Novels, OTOH, I do in slow painful chunks with serious
reconstructive surgery going on all along for a couple of years.
Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djh...@kithrup.com
http://www.kithrup.com/~djheydt
Jaquandor
>don't know if any of that will be of use to you, and there are probably other
>things that have worked for other people, but if any of it sounds as if it
>would help, go for it.
Excellent suggestions, but for now I think I'm going with the "learn to stop
worrying and love the novelet" approach. It involves less worryin' and more
writin', and more writin' is precisely what I need. Well, that and more
readin'.
Marilee J. Layman
wrote:
>In article <3b1d0232...@cnews.newsguy.com>
> rit...@cruzio.com "Lucy Kemnitzer" writes:
>
>> On Tue, 05 Jun 2001 09:56:17 -0400, "Brenda W. Clough"
>> <clo...@erols.com> wrote:
>>
>> >Dan Goodman wrote:
>> >
>> >> On Tue, 05 Jun 2001 00:46:02 -0400, "Brenda W. Clough"
>> >> <clo...@erols.com> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> >A good novel is not written -- it's rewritten.
>> >>
>> >> Mileage WILL vary -- this depends on the writer.
>> >> ----------
>> >
>> >I agree that improving the work on every rewrite is a learned skill, and
>> >that if you are making the work -worse- on every pass then you might as
>> >well cut your throat at once. It behooves every writer to learn it,
>> >however, because it is very very rare indeed for a writer to grind out a
>> >perfect work the first time around.
>>
>> And I think writers who claim to do so are actually doing a lot of
>> rewriting before they ever put the words down.
>
>I don't think I do. At least, what takes time isn't to do with _words_.
Jo, we know that words preen in your brain, waiting for the moment
they are let out onto paper or electrons. Most people's brains don't
work that way.
>(More another time when I feel more coherent -- the blood behind my
>forehead is attempting to escape forwards at velocity. Incidentally,
>bathing one's temples with cold water, as people in novels often do,
>and which feels as if it ought to be a relief, does nothing. Cold
>stones are much better.)
Try ice in a plastic bag, covered by a washcloth.
--
Marilee J. Layman
Bali Sterling Beads at Wholesale
http://www.basicbali.com
Marilee J. Layman
<clo...@erols.com> wrote:
>
>
>Beth Bernobich wrote:
>
>> "Brenda W. Clough" wrote:
>> >
>> > When I think of short stories, they are like jokes. They are so short
>> > that everything is directed towards the 'gag' or the 'point.' They are
>> > like Nascar race cars, one seaters with huge engines. Novels are more
>> > comfortable vehicles, with enough space for your bags and a cupholder or
>> > two.
>>
>> With coffee makers, refrigerators, and several bins in the back for the
>> kids' toys. No, wait, that's a series
>
>This is not a bad analogy, because it is certainly possible to overload your
>novel the way it's possible to overaccessorize your car. Sometimes fuzzy dice
>hanging from the rearview mirror is a -bad- idea. The trick is to know when
>to stop.
Uhhuh, and what does the handicapped tag mean?
Phideaux
wrote:
>In article <3b1d0638...@news.visi.com>, dsg...@visi.com (Dan Goodman)
>writes:
>
>>On Tue, 05 Jun 2001 09:56:17 -0400, "Brenda W. Clough"
>
>>> It behooves every writer to learn it,
>>>however, because it is very very rare indeed for a writer to grind out a
>>>perfect work the first time around.
>>
>>Some writers _can't_ learn it. (Or, you might say that they do their
>>revising in their heads.)
>
>Or in advance, except it's kind of hard to call that "rewriting." But Dan's
>right -- while there aren't very *many* writers who can't rewrite, there are
>some. To clarify: there are some writers for whom their prose sets up like
>concrete once it's in any kind of readable form.
That's me. I 'rewrite' as I go, finishing one paragraph before the
next starts. Sometimes I'll get sidetracked and have to go back a bit,
but nothing really ever gets reworked or changed, it's deleted and
started over.
>Nine-and-sixty-ways...
Conservative . . .
>
>Besides, "rewriting" means something different to different writers. By many
>people's standards, I don't rewrite. (*I* think I do, but they don't think
>so.) Because I don't rip up large sections of plot, insert or remove or
>combine characters or subplots, move scenes around, or any other such major
>surgery. What I do, I am told, is called "polishing."
Just last night I dug out an old story and was 'rewriting' it --
correcting verb tenses, changing pronouns, deleting adjectives -- my
kind of rewriting, that some call polishing. Although I didn't
remember the story totally, I felt uncomfortable after about 5000
words because the tenor changed. I went on a bit more, becoming more
uncomfortable, and then reached the end of the file at 6500 words --
but not the end of the story, which I knew I had finished.
A little more digging revealed a story with the same name in a
different folder. That turned out to be the finished work -- I had
started a new file, copied over the first 5000 words, and went on from
there, totally ignoring the last 1500 words I'd previously written.
Some of the spirit and plot were there, but none of the sentences.
Strange sidetrack -- I'd done 23 changes in the first 5000 words of
the file I originally opened, and dithered about making two others. In
the edition that I finished, I had made 22 of those changes, one of
the ditherings, and only one instance of a change that I didn't make
this time through.
IOW -- of the first 5116 words of my 'rough draft', 5068 survived in
this final draft of 5113 words, of which 5102 were exactly the same as
when I did a final draft 6 years ago.
If that isn't 'cast in concrete', I don't know what is!
Phideaux
___________
This tagline is added for your protection. Do not read
this post if the tagline is missing or incomple
Brenda W. Clough
"Marilee J. Layman" wrote:
> >
> >This is not a bad analogy, because it is certainly possible to overload your
> >novel the way it's possible to overaccessorize your car. Sometimes fuzzy dice
> >hanging from the rearview mirror is a -bad- idea. The trick is to know when
> >to stop.
>
> Uhhuh, and what does the handicapped tag mean?
>
Heh. It means your novel is self-published, and you're hoping to bypass all the
traffic at the slush pile.
Dan Goodman
wrote:
>In article <20010605144125...@nso-fa.aol.com>,
>Patricia C. Wrede <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>>
>>I expect there's also somebody out there who does it all in their head, and
>>just sort of dumps it onto the page once it's finished. Come to think of it, I
>>also know someone who works like this, but she's a short story writer.
>
>I come reasonably near to doing that when it's a short story. I
>think about it for months or years, finally grudgingly and under
>deadline sit down and put it on the computer, and then tweak a
>word here, a word there for the next couple weeks and it's done.
>
>I used to anyway. Now that Marion's dead I may never write a
>short story again. She was the only one who would buy them.
Have you looked into ezines? While most pay less than professional
rates, one pays 20 cents a word. And the ones which take email
submissions save submittors' mailing costs.
>Novels, OTOH, I do in slow painful chunks with serious
>reconstructive surgery going on all along for a couple of years.
>
>Dorothy J. Heydt
>Albany, California
>djh...@kithrup.com
> http://www.kithrup.com/~djheydt
----------
Brenda W. Clough
repainting or overpainting of errors is possible; one swish of paint and it's done.
You have to be quite good at painting to do this, and confident, because the paints dry
rapidly and are transparent -- even the pencil sketch lines show through. Short
stories are like this
On the other hand oil paints are much more forgiving. You can paint, scrape it off,
and repaint. You can paint over and under, increasing the depth and effect of color,
adding shadows and taking them away, putting in new figures and objects and then
painting over them, tinkering with glazes and colors. The paint takes days to dry, so
you have plenty of time to think it over, and even when it's dried hard you can still
paint right over it. It can become impossible to know when you're done -- so like
novels!
Brenda <inveterate novel writer -- underpaint! overpaint! add tones!>
Lucy Kemnitzer wrote:
>
> All these metaphors. But I think one of the reasons I'm more of a
> novelist than a short story writer is that in rewriting things get
> longer for me, deeper, and thicker, and richer: _more_ in every
> dimension as I come to realize more and more about the people and
> their world and the events in it. Rewriting is, up to a point, the
> finest thing of all, for me. Though there's a point when it
> becomes scary -- I worry that I'm never going to get it right (I
> have _realized_ two important things about the last book, but I'm
> sitting on them for now: I think I will _realize_ several more
> things, and I don't want to keep going back over and over, so I'm
> exercising a different discipline right now, letting those
> _realizations_ ferment while I try to get started on the next
> thing), that I will be like that guy at the beginning of _The
> Plague_ (or is it _Nausea?_) who has been writing the first
> sentence of his novel for twenty years. Ick, this isn't what I
> meant to do: I meant to agree about the rewriting part.
>
> I keep reading advice that the first draft of a short story ought
> to be written in a single sitting. Which I wonder, sometimes, if
> it's a clue that some of the ideas that I have and I think are
> short-story ideas, aren't.
>
> Lucy Kemnitzer
--
Dorothy J Heydt
Dan Goodman <dsg...@visi.com> wrote:
>>
>>I used to anyway. Now that Marion's dead I may never write a
>>short story again. She was the only one who would buy them.
>
>Have you looked into ezines? While most pay less than professional
>rates, one pays 20 cents a word. And the ones which take email
>submissions save submittors' mailing costs.
Let us roughly divide ezines into two categories. One kind pays,
and not unnaturally has some standards by which it judges what
it's going to pay for. The other kind doesn't.
Considering that no other professional editor would take my stuff
(let's face it, Marion's standards were low, and I knew how to
push her buttons), I see no reason to expect the electronic ones
to be any different.
As for the other kind, I see publishing that way as an admission
of failure. The work is so *bad* that it will never sell for
money and there's no point in worrying about hosing its first
rights. Anything that's that bad, I don't want people to see it
at all.
Beth Bernobich
>
> "Marilee J. Layman" wrote:
> > Uhhuh, and what does the handicapped tag mean?
>
> Heh. It means your novel is self-published, and you're hoping to bypass all the
> traffic at the slush pile.
Oh dear, it's a *very* good thing I had already swallowed my coffee.
Beth
--
newsgroup sff.people.beth-bernobich
http://www.sff.net/people/beth-bernobich
Dan Goodman
wrote:
>In article <3b1d735d...@news.visi.com>,
On payment, I would divide them into more than just two categories.
There's scifi.com, which pays the 20 cents per word -- more than any
of the professional print ones. There are the ones which pay pro
rates. Then come the small-payment ones; they range from just below
pro rates to a quarter cent a word or $5 flat payment.
Then come the ones which don't make even token payments.
There seem to be more small-payment ezines than paper zines in the
same range.
David Goldfarb
Lucy Kemnitzer <rit...@cruzio.com> wrote:
>that I will be like that guy at the beginning of _The
>Plague_ (or is it _Nausea?_) who has been writing the first
>sentence of his novel for twenty years.
It's _The Plague_.
--
David Goldfarb <*>|"This, friends, is a threat about as imposing as
gold...@ocf.berkeley.edu | telling a man who has just crawled on hands and
aste...@slip.net | knees out of the Sahara Desert that he cannot have
gold...@csua.berkeley.edu | a peanut butter sandwich." -- Harlan Ellison
Simon Morden
Frozen peas :) But you might not want to constrict the blood vessels by cooling
them. I had a bout of migraine a decade ago and got some prescription pills that
were vaso-dilators. They knocked me unconscious as a side-effect, so they
weren't that useful... but I found that *hot* flannel (just cool enough not to
deliver burns) draped over the forehead down as far but not occluding the nose,
did provide rapid relief.
Simon Morden
--
________________________________________________________
Moving in a mysterious way ...
Visit the Book of Morden at http://www.bookofmorden.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk
*'Taiga Taiga Burning Bright' in Extremes2 from Lone Wolf *
* From Jan 2001! http://www.dm.net/~bahwolf/extremes2.htm *
Marcus Winberg
<ken...@baradel.demon.co.uk.please.delete.this>) opened your mouth in
rec.arts.sf.composition and said....:
[ snip ]
>No, no! Novels have to have plot, short stories -- especially short
>short stories -- don't. Or not what I'd call a plot, anyway. Novels
>have to have something happen, then something else happen, which leads
>to something else. (Even if it's all told out of order or inside out.)
I've been taugh that it's the other way around. A short story needs to
bang, while a novel can fizzle until the whole marsh is on fire. :c)
To produce that bang, the short story must be plotted carefully. It
tends to have only one plot *point*, but it's still plotted. At least,
that's what I think.
Cheers,
Marcus
Patricia C. Wrede
<marcus....@mailandnews.com> writes:
>To produce that bang, the short story must be plotted carefully.
If you happen to be doing the sort of short story that has a plot, and you
happen to be the sort of writer who has to plan ahead carefully, this is true.
But that's two major "ifs." I put a lot more work in on planning/plotting two
chapters of a novel than I do on planning/plotting a short story of the same
length, and looking back at my relatively limited collection of short fiction,
the stories that work the best are the ones that I did the *least* planning and
plotting work on, while the ones that were utter failures are the ones I spent
hours working out carefully. This happens to be how my short-story process
works; it says nothing whatever about how anyone else works, or how they should
work, or about the nature of short stories.
> It
>tends to have only one plot *point*, but it's still plotted. At least,
>that's what I think.
For the sort of short story that has a plot, this is, again, true. I
personally tend to regard the plotless sort of thing that Helen was talking
about as "experimental fiction," and to not like it very much, but that doesn't
mean it doesn't exist, that it's bad writing, or that it won't sell. It
certainly doesn't mean that nobody can or should write plotless short stories.
(Which, to be fair, is not what you said; I'm just getting in a preemptive
strike here, because I'm betting that *somebody* was thinking about saying
it...)
Patricia C. Wrede
Jo Walton
pwred...@aol.com "Patricia C. Wrede" writes:
> In article <991762...@bluejo.demon.co.uk>, J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk (Jo Walton)
> writes:
>
> >(More another time when I feel more coherent -- the blood behind my
> >forehead is attempting to escape forwards at velocity. Incidentally,
> >bathing one's temples with cold water, as people in novels often do,
> >and which feels as if it ought to be a relief, does nothing. Cold
> >stones are much better.)
>
> Ice packs on the head and temples work well for many people. So, oddly, does
> putting one's feet in a bucket of warm-to-hot water, or one's hands into a
> sinkful of warm-to-hot water.
Stones that had been in the freezer proved quite soothing.
It wasn't a migraine, it was just a low-pressure thunder headache about
a zillion times worse than usual, because the pressure was doing really
weird things.
> Staring at a computer screen is highly dis-recommended...
Thanks. Yeah, I stopped right after that.
Julian Flood
> It wasn't a migraine, it was just a low-pressure thunder headache about
> a zillion times worse than usual, because the pressure was doing really
> weird things.
Feverfew. Pretty as well. A few (hah!) leaves, chew and grimace, headache
does away.
--
Julian Flood
Life, the Universe and Climbing Plants at www.argonet.co.uk/users/julesf.
Julian Flood
> I
> personally tend to regard the plotless sort of thing that Helen was
> talking
> about as "experimental fiction," and to not like it very much, but that
> doesn't
> mean it doesn't exist, that it's bad writing, or that it won't sell.
But what is a plot?
(Somewhere on the web is 'Children of a Greater God.' A slice of life or a
plot?)
<gloomily> The novel is available...</>
Brian M. Scott
<marcus....@mailandnews.com> wrote:
[...]
>I've been taugh that it's the other way around. A short story needs to
>bang, while a novel can fizzle until the whole marsh is on fire. :c)
What about short stories whose main point seems to be to get the
reader drunk on words? It's been a long time since I read him, but
Clark Ashton Smith comes to mind.
[...]
Brian
Zeborah
> I keep reading advice that the first draft of a short story ought
> to be written in a single sitting. Which I wonder, sometimes, if
> it's a clue that some of the ideas that I have and I think are
> short-story ideas, aren't.
Ick, no. Well, not that I'm a great short-story writer, but
nevertheless I *can't* usually write a short in a single sitting; I
don't write fast enough. I once spent, must have been eight hours in
writing a short story; must be the only decent one I've done in one
sitting, but it was only about 2K words. (And only kind of one sitting.
I wrote the first two thirds, got stuck, went to bed, had a revelation
and got up again.)
Anything longer than that and it's no good, utterly impossible. Another
short story, which may turn out to be good once I figure out exactly how
to fix the end, I wrote in several different sittings, one sitting for
each scene; that's closer to 5K IIRC. There's no way I'd have been able
to get the right end even if I'd sat at my computer for 20hours to do
the whole thing in one sitting.
Zeborah
--
Semper ad eventum festinet. -- Horace
"Always party hard at social events." <eg>
http://www.crosswinds.net/~zeborahnz
John F. Eldredge
Hash: SHA1
On Wed, 06 Jun 2001 10:32:19 GMT, J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk (Jo Walton)
wrote:
>It wasn't a migraine, it was just a low-pressure thunder headache
>about a zillion times worse than usual, because the pressure was
>doing really weird things.
12 years ago, I tripped and fell, and broke my left little finger
when I tried to catch myself. For the first two or three months
afterwards, it was acutely sensitive to reductions in air pressure.
Driving over a hill, or going up several floors in an elevator, were
enough to make it hurt. Increases in pressure, on the other hand,
didn't seem to cause pain. Fortunately, this decreased with time,
and now only a severe storm will cause discomfort.
The explanation that the doctor gave me was that most people's joints
contain both fluid and air bubbles. When the outside air pressure
goes down, the bubbles in the joints swell up. This is not usually a
problem, unless the joint is already sore (such as from my
combination broken bone/sprained joint).
Your "low-pressure headache" may be caused by trapped air, such as in
a swollen-shut sinus cavity. Does taking a decongestant ease the
headache?
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--
John F. Eldredge -- eldr...@earthlink.net, eldr...@poboxes.com
PGP key available from http://home.earthlink.net/~eldredge/
"There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power;
not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace."
Woodrow Wilson
Zeborah
[revising and rewriting]
> I expect there's also somebody out there who does it all in their head,
> and just sort of dumps it onto the page once it's finished. Come to think
> of it, I also know someone who works like this, but she's a short story
> writer. She can recite entire scenes that she hasn't written down yet,
> and she rewrites them and massages them in her head until they're as good
> as she can get them, and then she writes them down and they don't change.
> I'm not sure anyone's brain is big enough to do that for a novel, but I'm
> not positive that nobody's is, either.
I read an interview in the local tv guide/current events magazine a
couple of years ago with an author of a then-new book (see how specific
I'm being?) who apparently wrote it while I-think-being a housewife
and/or raising lots of kids; she'd be washing the dishes while rotating
a sentence in her mind, and she wouldn't write it down until she had the
next word or sentence or paragraph utterly correct.
I don't think this would necessarily work for someone for whom structure
has to be thought about consciously, or someone who finds themselves
deleting or moving entire scenes, in which cases the sentences might
continue to be perfect even though they need to be moved elsewhere.
Possibly it was the sort of structure that was quite transparent, or she
was the sort of author for whom it sorts itself out without being
thought about, or some other thing like that. But obviously it worked
well enough for her for that book.
Patricia C. Wrede
(Zeborah) writes:
>Lucy Kemnitzer <rit...@cruzio.com> wrote:
>
>> I keep reading advice that the first draft of a short story ought
>> to be written in a single sitting.
'Scuse me, but this is one of those nine-and-sixty things.
I don't think I've *ever* written *anything* at one sitting, not even "Rikiki
and the Wizard," which is the shortest thing I've done. And the ones that have
sold work just fine. And I don't see how doing a draft at one sitting would
have done anything whatever to improve the ones that didn't sell.
>>Which I wonder, sometimes, if
>> it's a clue that some of the ideas that I have and I think are
>> short-story ideas, aren't.
While I *am* a natural novelist, I really don't think that's the reason I write
my short stories in several chunks instead of all at one sitting. It is just
the way I do it. The fact that you have short story ideas that you can't write
in a single sitting isn't a clue that they're really novel ideas; it's a clue
that you don't write the way all those other folks are saying people have to
write. Which, in turn, ought to be an extremely strong hint that they're
wrong.
Not that some of your "short story ideas" mightn't be novel ideas after all.
But if they are, it's not for this kind of reason. I don't quite know how to
explain the difference -- it took me *years* to get the hang of figuring out
when I had hold of a short story, when it was a novel, and when it could be
either depending on which way I went with it. But whatever the difference is,
it's not that.
Patricia C. Wrede
Patricia C. Wrede
zeb...@altavista.com (Zeborah) writes:
>I read an interview in the local tv guide/current events magazine a
>couple of years ago with an author of a then-new book (see how specific
>I'm being?) who apparently wrote it while I-think-being a housewife
>and/or raising lots of kids; she'd be washing the dishes while rotating
>a sentence in her mind, and she wouldn't write it down until she had the
>next word or sentence or paragraph utterly correct.
Lois tells me that she developed a vaguely similar working method when she had
toddlers and no time to write -- but rather than trying to keep it all in her
head, she'd write down scraps of dialog and things that needed to go into the
scene and bits of description and stuff. And while she was adding scraps,
she'd move all the rest of it around in her head until it was all in the right
order. Then she'd stick her husband with the kids for an hour, go off to the
library with the stack of notes, and write the scene. (This is my
interpretation; she'd probably tell it differently.)
She still works more-or-less this way, although she doesn't have toddlers or
need to run to the library for peace and quiet any more. And she does even
less revising than I do. I didn't use her as an example the first time around
because you *could* argue that all the notes are really the first draft (though
honestly, they don't look coherent enough for that to me).
Patricia C. Wrede
TLambs1138
ice (especially if I hold a piece of ice up to the top of the back of my mouth
with my tongue as I'm doing it) helps.
Jean Lamb, tlamb...@cs.com
"Fun will now commence!" - Seven of Nine
Ian A. York
>zeb...@altavista.com (Zeborah) writes:
>
>>and/or raising lots of kids; she'd be washing the dishes while rotating
>>a sentence in her mind, and she wouldn't write it down until she had the
>>next word or sentence or paragraph utterly correct.
>
>Lois tells me that she developed a vaguely similar working method when she had
>toddlers and no time to write -- but rather than trying to keep it all in her
>head, she'd write down scraps of dialog and things that needed to go into the
I've heard that Glenn Cook wrote many of his books in his head while
performing a mindless day job in an auto factory, going home and writing
them down in the evening; and that when he was promoted to a more mentally
involving job, his production went down.
Ian
--
Ian York (iay...@panix.com) <http://www.panix.com/~iayork/>
"-but as he was a York, I am rather inclined to suppose him a
very respectable Man." -Jane Austen, The History of England
Jo Walton
ken...@baradel.demon.co.uk.please.delete.this "Helen Kenyon" writes:
> In article <991650...@bluejo.demon.co.uk>, Jo Walton
> <J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk> writes
> >
> >I think sometimes it's possible to write something that just is the
> >voice and situation -- my pulling wings off fairy story is that -- but
> >not at any length. And the only short story of mine that I'm entirely
> >happy with has an entire novel worth of backstory implied and no
> >actual plot, and it would ruin it to attempt to give it one. (This is
> >quite interesting to think about on this angle, actually, I hadn't
> >quite realised that before, but it doesn't.) And part of the point of
> >it is that it doesn't -- it's about some adults who saved a fantasy
> >world fifteen years ago and nothing has happened since -- and it's
> >also just like the first chapter of a novel that isn't going to happen.
> >And it was rejected by one editor who likes my writing but on the grounds
> >that it doesn't quite have the short story nature.
> >
> No, no! Novels have to have plot, short stories -- especially short
> short stories -- don't. Or not what I'd call a plot, anyway. Novels
> have to have something happen, then something else happen, which leads
> to something else. (Even if it's all told out of order or inside out.)
What? Serious question. Novels get the chance to generate their own plot,
but short stories don't have the time, so I end up having to make something
up which is unsatisfactory and which I'm not very good at. (I know there
are people who make everything up, and I am in awe.)
> A short story has to have *something*, but it's not plot, which is why
> your one about the kids who once saved the world and are now grown up is
> so brilliant. It does have *change*, even if it's only a change of
> attitude, and therefore it has a sense of closure. In fact, you managed
> to cram into that short story more or less exactly the point that Philip
> Pullman took three long novels to say.
I'm glad you like it.
I get some very odd email about it arguing about whether it's a positive
ending or not.
I wasn't saying it didn't have a point -- I think it does -- but whether
it has any action, which it essentially doesn't.
Jo Walton
eldr...@earthlink.net "John F. Eldredge" writes:
> Your "low-pressure headache" may be caused by trapped air, such as in
> a swollen-shut sinus cavity. Does taking a decongestant ease the
> headache?
I don't do decongestants because they turn me into a zombie. But I'm
fairly sure it's something like that -- not because my sinuses are
blocked, but because they're sinuses. In different places I've lived
it's been caused by different weather, but always associated with low
pressure.
Thanks for all the concern, everyone.
Marcus Winberg
Walton)) opened your mouth in rec.arts.sf.composition and said....:
[ snip ]
>What? Serious question. Novels get the chance to generate their own plot,
>but short stories don't have the time, so I end up having to make something
>up which is unsatisfactory and which I'm not very good at. (I know there
>are people who make everything up, and I am in awe.)
I have this problem too, at least as it is described here. I'm poor at
writing short stories because I strain in its harness. I tend to write
too much, and get blind about what's really needed. So, I become a
poor self-editor because I feel the extra stuff I put in is necessary
to the story...
With novels I can take it easy, and it doesn't become a chore.
[ snip ]
Cheers,
Marcus
Pamela Dean Dyer-Bennet
>In article <1eul1ck.y8y67hzqx84yN%zeb...@altavista.com>, zeb...@altavista.com
>(Zeborah) writes:
>>Lucy Kemnitzer <rit...@cruzio.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I keep reading advice that the first draft of a short story ought
>>> to be written in a single sitting.
>'Scuse me, but this is one of those nine-and-sixty things.
>I don't think I've *ever* written *anything* at one sitting, not even "Rikiki
>and the Wizard," which is the shortest thing I've done. And the ones that have
>sold work just fine. And I don't see how doing a draft at one sitting would
>have done anything whatever to improve the ones that didn't sell.
I've written one thing at one sitting, well, I guess I have; it
depends on what you mean by one sitting. I wrote it in a day and I
didn't work on anything else. I did eat and walk around some.
That was "Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary," and it eventually got
expanded into a novel. Whether it was a short-story idea or a novel
idea is completely unobvious to me.
I do wish people wouldn't give advice like that.
--
Pamela Dean Dyer-Bennet (pd...@demesne.com)
"I will open my heart to a blank page
and interview the witnesses." John M. Ford, "Shared World"
Helen Kenyon
<J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk> writes
others in this thread mean when they use the word. To me, plot implies
events and things happening as a result of them. Lots of cause and
effect and further cause and effect, in other words. However, I've read
and enjoyed many short stories (especially short short ones) which were
more in the nature of a vignette. There was certainly no action, you
couldn't really say anything much happened, yet they were satisfying in
themselves and had a point. So, not what I would call a plot. As I
can't see this kind of thing being effective if you try to extend it to
novel length[1], this was what I meant when I said that (IMHO) novels
more or less have to have something you could loosely call a "plot", but
for short stories, while many *do* have plots, (again IMHO) it's
optional.
Also, I tend to use "action" to mean "scenes in which events of a
primarily physical nature occur". So, a train crash, a duel, a dance or
a chase would be action. The thought processes of the detective as he
sits reflectively over a pint down at his local and sees the cigarette
stub in the aspidistra pot which gives him the flash of insight which
enables him to put all the clues together to guess the identity of the
killer, would not be action. But both kinds of scene may or may not
advance the plot, assuming there is one.
Helen
[1] Though I'm sure people could give me examples of plotless novels
which have worked, I don't think it's the sort of thing beginning
writers who aren't completely sure about what they're doing should
attempt.
--
Helen, Gwynedd, Wales *** http://www.baradel.demon.co.uk
Or try http://blaenau.members.beeb.net and follow the town trail
to see Blaenau Ffestiniog in glorious sunshine.
**Please delete the extra bit from e-mail address if replying by mail**
Pamela Dean Dyer-Bennet
[snip]
>[1] Though I'm sure people could give me examples of plotless novels
>which have worked, I don't think it's the sort of thing beginning
>writers who aren't completely sure about what they're doing should
>attempt.
This seems to presuppose that writing plots is easy and elementary and
comes naturally, whereas writing a plotless novel is difficult and
advanced and must be worked for. For a specific writer it may
definitely be the other way around.
By your definition, which I snipped too hastily, I think a certain
number of Barbara Pym's novels would be categorizable as plotless or
largely so -- QUARTET IN AUTUMN, for example.
Lucy Kemnitzer
Dyer-Bennet) wrote:
>Helen Kenyon <ken...@baradel.demon.co.uk.please.delete.this> writes:
>
>[snip]
>
>>[1] Though I'm sure people could give me examples of plotless novels
>>which have worked, I don't think it's the sort of thing beginning
>>writers who aren't completely sure about what they're doing should
>>attempt.
>
>This seems to presuppose that writing plots is easy and elementary and
>comes naturally, whereas writing a plotless novel is difficult and
>advanced and must be worked for. For a specific writer it may
>definitely be the other way around.
>
>By your definition, which I snipped too hastily, I think a certain
>number of Barbara Pym's novels would be categorizable as plotless or
>largely so -- QUARTET IN AUTUMN, for example.
>
>
The nice fellow has a way of characterizing certain books and
movies -- "it's really nice, though nothing happens." I've
learned that this does not mean what it looks like it means on the
surface: he characterizes works that I consider to be quite
eventful this way: but there are no chases, no explosions, no
acrobatics or special effects in them. He has come to acknowledge
that he means this, and that he doesn't mean to derogate these
works -- he means the "really nice" part. But on a very basic
level, for him, a _plot_ is a comic book, pulp novel or adventure
movie plot: other works he might enjoy just as much have something
else.
Understanding this has made talking about art and entertainment
much easier for us.
Lucy Kemnitzer
Princess Adora
"Ian A. York" <iay...@panix.com> wrote in message
news:9ff09v$j77$1...@news.panix.com...
> In article <3b1af200...@cnews.newsguy.com>,
> Lucy Kemnitzer <rit...@cruzio.com> wrote:
> >Is a short story supposed to have a point? Or maybe I
> >misunderstand what a point is?
>
> Why, of course it must have a point. A short story is nothing if it can't
> be boiled down into a single Powerpoint slide! Shakespeare would have
> been much more excellent if, instead of writing some long-winded confusing
> thing, he'd just sent out a memo.
>
> Dear All,
>
> Be decisive.
>
> Yrs.,
>
> Bill
>
> Isn't that much better?
>
Well, it certainly saves time, but it wasn't much fun. Will could turn a
phrase... I believe *that* is the point of it all.
> Next slide,
Pamela Dean Dyer-Bennet
It's unfortunate for me that most of the people I've run up against
who say "nothing happens" mean "nothing I find interesting or
signficant," with a rather nasty loading of moral value on top of
that.
>Understanding this has made talking about art and entertainment
>much easier for us.
I can imagine.
I'd like to radically reform the whole system of discussion that can
use "plotless" to mean "has no special effects or large physical
motions." These people are using "plot" in the Aristotelean sense of
"spectacle" and it bothers me tremendously.
(I don't specifically mean Helen here since I think she included "lots
of cause and effect" in her definition; but most of the "it
has no plot" people don't seem to. "Nothing happens" people aren't
quite so readily categorizable and don't generally mean to use
technical terms at all.)
Dan Goodman
>I'd like to radically reform the whole system of discussion that can
>use "plotless" to mean "has no special effects or large physical
>motions." These people are using "plot" in the Aristotelean sense of
>"spectacle" and it bothers me tremendously.
What "plotless" means _to me_ includes books with a whole lot of
Exciting Incidents -- battles, disasters, sex scenes, car crashes,
spaceships crashing into each other, etc. There are things happening,
but there's no real _change_.
Examples: Any recent series by Harry Turtledove. _The Wheel of
Time_, after somewhere in the first book. The most recent book in
Cherryh's series which begins with _Foreigner_ -- a bunch of murder,
treachery, and other exciting stuff, but it doesn't advance the series
at all.
Mary K. Kuhner
Helen Kenyon <ken...@baradel.demon.co.uk.please.delete.this> wrote:
>It may be that I'm using "plot" to mean something different to what
>others in this thread mean when they use the word. To me, plot implies
>events and things happening as a result of them. Lots of cause and
>effect and further cause and effect, in other words. However, I've read
>and enjoyed many short stories (especially short short ones) which were
>more in the nature of a vignette. There was certainly no action, you
>couldn't really say anything much happened, yet they were satisfying in
>themselves and had a point. So, not what I would call a plot.
"comp.basilisk FAQ", which I mentioned in another thread, would stand
as a really strong example of this.
It actually is a FAQ, a series of questions and answers about a topic.
It's very cleverly arranged so that the reader is given increasingly
sharp glimpses of the difference between its world and ours, but that's
the only movement in it.
Another story of this kind, and a favorite of mine, is Le Guin's
"The Author of the Acacia Seeds". I've usually thought of that
one as a kind of poem, whereas "FAQ" is definitely not a poem,
but they are otherwise the same kind of thing.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Helen Kenyon
<pd...@gw.dd-b.net> writes
>
>I'd like to radically reform the whole system of discussion that can
>use "plotless" to mean "has no special effects or large physical
>motions." These people are using "plot" in the Aristotelean sense of
>"spectacle" and it bothers me tremendously.
>
>(I don't specifically mean Helen here since I think she included "lots
>of cause and effect" in her definition; but most of the "it
>has no plot" people don't seem to. "Nothing happens" people aren't
>quite so readily categorizable and don't generally mean to use
>technical terms at all.)
>
totally plotless (the way *I* mean plotless). :-)
Helen
Helen Kenyon
>This seems to presuppose that writing plots is easy and elementary and
>comes naturally, whereas writing a plotless novel is difficult and
>advanced and must be worked for. For a specific writer it may
>definitely be the other way around.
>
Um... OK, I didn't put that very well, did I? Because a) you're right,
some may find the plotless novel more amenable to their talents and b)
though I'd say all my novels and novel ideas have plots, getting the
plot sorted out is one of the hardest parts of writing (for me). So
though it certainly isn't easy, it's the kind of hard I can cope with,
whereas to write something plotless is the kind of hard that I think I'd
find impossible to carry off well.
>By your definition, which I snipped too hastily, I think a certain
>number of Barbara Pym's novels would be categorizable as plotless or
>largely so -- QUARTET IN AUTUMN, for example.
>
Sadly, I haven't read these, so can't confirm either way whether I'd
think of them as plotless.
Helen
Randy Money
>
> In article <pddb.99...@gw.dd-b.net>, Pamela Dean Dyer-Bennet
> <pd...@gw.dd-b.net> writes
> >
> >I'd like to radically reform the whole system of discussion that can
> >use "plotless" to mean "has no special effects or large physical
> >motions." These people are using "plot" in the Aristotelean sense of
> >"spectacle" and it bothers me tremendously.
> >
> >(I don't specifically mean Helen here since I think she included "lots
> >of cause and effect" in her definition; but most of the "it
> >has no plot" people don't seem to. "Nothing happens" people aren't
> >quite so readily categorizable and don't generally mean to use
> >technical terms at all.)
> >
> I can perfectly well imagine something that was all action and also
> totally plotless (the way *I* mean plotless). :-)
>
> Helen
A number of years ago I read a story in an on-line writing group about a
woman turning the mattress of her bed. I'm not sure how the author did
it, but she wrote well enough to keep me reading, offering a detailed --
though not oppressively so -- description of the physical contortions
her character made, the way the mattress bowed and fought against her
manipulations, and some of her character's feelings of annoyance at
this. It was just when I was starting to wonder what the story was all
about that the author sprang her main character's final thought as she
settled her mattress in place: "So this is what it's like to be
divorced."
I have no idea whether that story ever got published; I hope so. It's
since become a touchstone for me of how effective a plotless story can
be when done well.
Randy Money
Randy Money
>
> Dan Schauer wrote:
>
> > "Simon Morden" <simon....@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote in message
> > news:3B1B9E22...@blueyonder.co.uk...
> > > "Brenda W. Clough" wrote:
> > >
> > > > Put it another way: short stories are diamonds. Novels are the
> > > > mountain range from which the diamonds are mined.
> > >
> > > Oooh. That's *good*.
> > >
> >
> > And I also suspect it is very much a YMMV thing as well. I imagine
> > people who naturally write short stories don't view it this way.
>
> I do both. Gems are pretty and shiny and you can hold them in hte palm
> of your hand. Mountains have a majestic grandeur all of their own, and
> it takes some serious hiking to get up to the summit. But, oh the view!
>
> Are we stretching this metaphor too far?
>
> Simon Morden
No. I don't think so. I gave up on writing a novel in part because it
was too big to keep in view. I can keep all of a short story in my head
where I can gage the movement and pace of it and recall all the events.
What Brenda describes in her original post is a sort of literary
claustrophobia -- some folks don't feel comfortable in the confines of
the short story. What I feel is more agoraphobic, insofar as agoraphobia
is the opposite of claustrophobia.
Another analogy that strikes me as accurate is the difference between
landscapes and murals, and miniatures. It takes just as much craft to
make one as the other, but the crafts do differ.
Disclaimer: I've published a couple of stories in places so out of the
way that I cannot possibly be called expert or professional. In short,
YMMV.
Randy Money
Geoff Wedig
> For the sort of short story that has a plot, this is, again, true. I
> personally tend to regard the plotless sort of thing that Helen was talking
> about as "experimental fiction," and to not like it very much, but that doesn't
> mean it doesn't exist, that it's bad writing, or that it won't sell. It
> certainly doesn't mean that nobody can or should write plotless short stories.
> (Which, to be fair, is not what you said; I'm just getting in a preemptive
> strike here, because I'm betting that *somebody* was thinking about saying
> it...)
When I was in college, I did a lot of experimental things like this. One
story, which I dearly love, but could never sell, was the one where I wrote
a story without plot. In three thousand words the number of events that
took more than a sentence can be numbered on a single finger. The story
takes place over more than a decade, from the viewpoint character turning 6
to her graduating from high school. After revising quite a bit, there ended
up being a pseudoplot in the movement of time, but it wasn't event driven.
It was changes to the characters and their relationships.
This was very hard to do. The story was something that might have been
written in a journal, many ruminations, a flow of consciousness style, etc.
There was no dialogue except at the single event, and there it's sparse.
Mostly, things are told indirectly. There were artistic reasons for this.
Much of the story has to do with how the world looks when you're in the rain
and happy, and both the language (the language is chosen to evoke the sounds
and motions of the rain as it's being described) and the style (the
indirect, slightly blurred style of looking through the rain at a distant
object) were carefully chosen for this. Since I don't write poetry or
really tight, well-crafted prose (I tend to be workmanlike in my prose), it
was a lot of work for me.
I think the biggest lesson I got out of this is that if you are going to
remove plot, you'd better replace it with something else. That something
else has to provide movement that'd otherwise be supplied by the plot. I
imagine this can be supplied by any other element from the writer's tool
box. In my case it was something that's akin to mood, but not quite. There
is a feeling of getting somewhere without anything ever, actually happening.
The singular event that is described in detail is the climax of the story,
when the character changes what, up until then, seemed immutable, and loses
something in the process.
I really wish this would sell. It is the one piece of fiction that I've
ever written that I am, without equivocation, proud of even after several
years (written in 93 or 94 originally)
Geoff
Dorothy J Heydt
suppose I can call it that) I read in the New Yorker at least
several decades ago. No plot whatever and the characterization
was all indirect, as follows.
The text described a house and the things in it. The back door
opened on a mudroom with a bench and some pegs with coats hanging
on them (descriptions) and some boots (description). The other
door led to a hall .....
It went through the entire house, written in the present tense,
describing the house (sparsely) and everything in it (in lavish
detail), giving an indication of how many people lived there, how
old and what their interests were. That was all. It was interesting;
the writer brought it off; OTOH I would not care to read a second
story like that.
Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djh...@kithrup.com
http://www.kithrup.com/~djheydt
Lori Selke
Lucy Kemnitzer <rit...@cruzio.com> wrote:
>I'm not sure I can get any help from that. I mean, I thought that
>story was a shiny little diamond: I thought it had a beautiful
>little crystalline structure, and a concentrated little world of
>light in it, and just the right number of polished little facets.
>I _thought_ it was a story, too: problem, resolution (only the
>resolution was "we don't get a reolution," but it was, I thought,
>a clearly derived resolution that they don't get one): character,
>setting, voice (most especially voice), the whole thing, compact
>and pretty.
>
>Only they thought the writing was flat and they were wondering
>what the point was. So I'm trying to get over myself and figure
>out what happened there.
There's always the possibility that they were wrong.
Maybe they're nearsighted, and all your beautiful cut
facets were a blur. Or maybe they wanted a wind-up toy
rather than an inert crystal.
This is just one rejection slip, right? Send it out again.
Lori
--
se...@io.com, se...@sirius.com, http://www.io.com/~selk
"But this isn't a dance! It's upright delirium!" -- The Desert Peach
Lori Selke
Zeborah <zeb...@altavista.com> wrote:
>Lucy Kemnitzer <rit...@cruzio.com> wrote:
>
>> I keep reading advice that the first draft of a short story ought
>> to be written in a single sitting. Which I wonder, sometimes, if
>> it's a clue that some of the ideas that I have and I think are
>> short-story ideas, aren't.
>
>Ick, no. Well, not that I'm a great short-story writer, but
>nevertheless I *can't* usually write a short in a single sitting; I
>don't write fast enough. I once spent, must have been eight hours in
>writing a short story; must be the only decent one I've done in one
>sitting, but it was only about 2K words. (And only kind of one sitting.
>I wrote the first two thirds, got stuck, went to bed, had a revelation
>and got up again.)
Let me second this. Strongly.
I think I've written exactly one short story draft in one sitting.
It was about 1500 words long, a *short* story. If I'm working
steadily on a project, it can take from a week to a month or three
to get a complete first draft of a story.
Usually, the rewrite goes much faster. Fortunately.
Where on earth did you hear this advice, Lucy? To me, it
sounds like a corruption of Edgar Allen Poe, who once
said that a short story should be *readable* in one sitting.
(And I still don't entirely agree.)
Lucy Kemnitzer
wrote:
>In article <3b1babf0...@cnews.newsguy.com>,
>Lucy Kemnitzer <rit...@cruzio.com> wrote:
>
>>I'm not sure I can get any help from that. I mean, I thought that
>>story was a shiny little diamond: I thought it had a beautiful
>>little crystalline structure, and a concentrated little world of
>>light in it, and just the right number of polished little facets.
>>I _thought_ it was a story, too: problem, resolution (only the
>>resolution was "we don't get a reolution," but it was, I thought,
>>a clearly derived resolution that they don't get one): character,
>>setting, voice (most especially voice), the whole thing, compact
>>and pretty.
>>
>>Only they thought the writing was flat and they were wondering
>>what the point was. So I'm trying to get over myself and figure
>>out what happened there.
>
>There's always the possibility that they were wrong.
>
>Maybe they're nearsighted, and all your beautiful cut
>facets were a blur. Or maybe they wanted a wind-up toy
>rather than an inert crystal.
>
>This is just one rejection slip, right? Send it out again.
>
I have gotten a second opinion: I'm inclined to think that the
story is a failure. The second opinion, more detailed and
personal and friendly than the first, agreed with the first, and
also got almost entirely opposite impressions from the story from
what I thought I had put into it.
I believe that I misunderstand how compression is done, and
information that I think I have invested in small packages I have
left out entirely. Or something.
Lucy Kemnitzer
Brooks Moses
> What I very often start with is people in a situation, and in a novel
> I can go on with that. In a short story there isn't room, something
> has to happen, and sometimes I even have to make up something to happen.
> And sometimes all I have is a voice, and I can write a lovely little
> bit in that voice, but to be a story it has to be something more than
> just that, it needs stuff to happen, it needs a shape in the same way
> a novel does, but there isn't room for it to do itself, and that's where
> I go wrong.
>
> I have a number of stories which are just lovely up to the point where
> they stop being start-up and incluing and require plot, whereupon they
> fall over and require oxygen.
That's a problem that I seem to have, although perhaps more so. (Or
perhaps less so, considering how little progress I've made on my
lifetime million words of dreck.) A particular example comes to mind;
I've got a character who's fairly well-formed and multi-dimensional, and
a bit of a world in which she lives, and all of this sort of start-up
and incluing stuff, and it seems to have presently fallen over on lack
of any events in it that fit into the story.
The thing is, though, this isn't supposed to be a short story. Well, at
least, I don't think so; I didn't have any preset intentions for it, but
it seems more novel-sized. So, apparently, the fact that it's emulating
what you describe is not necessarily a shortfall; novels can have a lot
of space for situations to grow.
My problem is, though, that now that I've got the character and the
world, to some extent, I'm not sure where to go from there. The
situation seems to be fairly definitely not resolving into any
significant events, and I'm not sure where to go to get to some
eventually.
Do you (or anyone else here, of course) run into this sort of problem?
How does it end up resolving for you? Is it something that, if you keep
adding pieces to the world and the characters and the situation,
eventually some event comes out of it, and things fall into place? Or
is it something that requires intentionally slanting the situation
towards creating events, or specifically asking what sort of events
could come out of the situation?
- Brooks, who really needs to get back into actually _writing_.
Brenda W. Clough
Brooks Moses wrote:
> >
>
> My problem is, though, that now that I've got the character and the
> world, to some extent, I'm not sure where to go from there. The
> situation seems to be fairly definitely not resolving into any
> significant events, and I'm not sure where to go to get to some
> eventually.
>
> Do you (or anyone else here, of course) run into this sort of problem?
> How does it end up resolving for you? Is it something that, if you keep
> adding pieces to the world and the characters and the situation,
> eventually some event comes out of it, and things fall into place? Or
> is it something that requires intentionally slanting the situation
> towards creating events, or specifically asking what sort of events
> could come out of the situation?
In my experience (FWIW) such situations never improve of their own accord, any
more than bank balances magically become bigger or love handles grow smaller.
Desirable effects always call for intention and will. If you generate enough
puzzle pieces, eventually of course you have enough that a story -ought- to
become plain. But you must look for it, poke it, prod it out of hiding, grab
it by the tail the moment you see a hair of it and pull it slowly out into the
light.
It is worth contemplating a setup and thinking, who would be made unhappy by
this? What problems would this cause, for whom? What inherent weaknesses in
this situation might lead to mayhem and aggravation?
Brenda
--
What do you do with a secret?
Whisper it in a desert at high noon.
Lock it up and bury the key.
Tell the nation on prime-time TV.
Choose a door . . .
Doors of Death and Life
by Brenda W. Clough
http://www.sff.net/people/Brenda
Tor Books
ISBN 0-312-87064-7
Jo Walton
bmo...@stanford.edu "Brooks Moses" writes:
> That's a problem that I seem to have, although perhaps more so. (Or
> perhaps less so, considering how little progress I've made on my
> lifetime million words of dreck.) A particular example comes to mind;
> I've got a character who's fairly well-formed and multi-dimensional, and
> a bit of a world in which she lives, and all of this sort of start-up
> and incluing stuff, and it seems to have presently fallen over on lack
> of any events in it that fit into the story.
>
> The thing is, though, this isn't supposed to be a short story. Well, at
> least, I don't think so; I didn't have any preset intentions for it, but
> it seems more novel-sized. So, apparently, the fact that it's emulating
> what you describe is not necessarily a shortfall; novels can have a lot
> of space for situations to grow.
Oh, don't worry, I have plenty of starts of novels that do this as well.
I have one where someone is sitting in a spaceport bar watching plastic
oranges revolving on top of the juice in a juice dispenser and being
reminded of a gas giant in her home system, which just stops, because
I have no idea where it's going. (It's not a short story -- what the heck
is the difference between a novel and a short story when you only have
a thousand words of the thing? Breathing space? The likelihood of getting
to the point?)
> My problem is, though, that now that I've got the character and the
> world, to some extent, I'm not sure where to go from there. The
> situation seems to be fairly definitely not resolving into any
> significant events, and I'm not sure where to go to get to some
> eventually.
>
> Do you (or anyone else here, of course) run into this sort of problem?
> How does it end up resolving for you? Is it something that, if you keep
> adding pieces to the world and the characters and the situation,
> eventually some event comes out of it, and things fall into place? Or
> is it something that requires intentionally slanting the situation
> towards creating events, or specifically asking what sort of events
> could come out of the situation?
What I would do in this situation would be to work on the world, work
on what's interesting about the world and what I want to get inclued
about it. Then I'd work on the other people in the world, first the
people who connect to the character and then the big important people
who affect how things happen. This all connects up to world again, and
working on this generally gets me a pile of other characters -- there's
a world like this and people could react to this in a bunch of ways, so
there'll be a whole lot of them come out of the dark wanting names at
that point. Doing this sort of thing around the outside of the story
sort of defines the space where the story can happen, and the events
really come out of bringing people together in a world and having them
react to each other. I don't think about events, events generate
themselves out of world and people (plot simulation...) and so I think
about those.
I usually do the working on the world stuff either in my head (which
sometimes works really well but is sloooooow) or in email or in
conversation, which goes much faster. The characters, whether they're
going to be characters in my story or historical characters who shaped
the world or whatever, are initially suggested by the shapes the world
has for moulding people, and then come real, just like the person I'm
starting with. Where I have problems is where there are holes in the
world because I haven't looked at them enough or I've made wrong
assumptions or patched with generics. But looking at the world, thinking
how the politics and economics and science and magic and evolution work
and what everyone's attitudes are to all those sorts of things is a better
way of generating events for me than thinking about plot. Once I have a
good idea about plot, it's different, usually by the time I'm really
writing something I have an idea about the shape of it and how the people
are going to hook into each other at different points, so I can ask
questions about where the next interesting event is and so on. But when
I just have a start like that, that's what I do.
Caveat 1: You may well work one of the other sixty-eight ways, which is
fine.
Caveat 2: I think this is something I learned from roleplaying.
Patricia C. Wrede
writes:
>My problem is, though, that now that I've got the character and the
>world, to some extent, I'm not sure where to go from there. The
>situation seems to be fairly definitely not resolving into any
>significant events, and I'm not sure where to go to get to some
>eventually.
>
>Do you (or anyone else here, of course) run into this sort of problem?
>How does it end up resolving for you?
Oh, sure. Your problem is that you don't have critical mass yet.
Getting a story rolling is like getting a nuclear reactor started: you have to
have a critical mass of Stuff to get enough interaction to get things moving.
The difference is that with a nuclear reactor, you can calculate how much
uranium you need, but how much story-Stuff you need depends on the idea and the
story and the author. What was plenty enough Stuff for the last story isn't
anything like enough Stuff for the next one and is way more than you need for
the one after that. For one story, you get one lone character and you're off
and running; for the next one, you have to work out a twenty-page plot outline
and a *bunch* of characters and six really nifty plot twists before it comes
alive on you. Like that. And Stuff can be anything -- a character, a setting,
a scene, a situation, a plot twist, etc....or several of those combined.
Whereas for a nuclear reactor, I believe you need plutonium or uranium and
nothing else will do.
Anyway, when you've got hold of a piece of something that has a bunch of Stuff
about it, but not *quite* enough to get the story-reaction going, you can do
one of a couple of things. The first is to put it back in the compost in the
dark backbrain, and pull it out in a couple of months to see if it's grown
anything new. If it hasn't, you put it back and wait another couple of months
and look at it again. This is what I usually do if I've got other stuff to
work on in the meantime. I have, in fact, got at least three ideas that are
currently working their way through this part of the process. Some people may
find that this works better if they don't keep pulling the idea out to check
(sort of like pulling seeds up to see how their roots are coming); I find that
if I keep looking at it, my backbrain finally gets fed up and says "All
*right*, I *get* it, you want me to do something with this idea -- Here, now go
away and quit bugging me!" But that's my backbrain, which is at least as
perverse as the rest of me.
The second possibility is to poke at the Stuff you've got -- do plot noodling
or worldbuilding or the Twenty Questions character game -- in order to *make*
the Stuff you have grow enough to reach critical mass. There are a bunch of
different directions you can poke from, and different ways of poking, and which
one you pick depends on you and on what seems to be missing from the Stuff that
you're poking at. This is what I usually do when I'm committed to something
that isn't quite there yet.
And the third is to throw other bits of apparently unconnected Stuff at it, and
see if any of them suddenly combine. You take some of your other
not-quite-critical-mass ideas out of the backbrain compost (or the story-ideas
file, or wherever you keep them) and kind of squoodge them around to see if
they fit the one you're working on anywhere, sort of like putting the sky bits
of a jigsaw puzzle together. (If they do, you know: they sort of fizz and
fuse together suddenly and you can't get them back apart). This tends mostly
to just happen to me unexpectedly, but every once in a while I can deliberately
work through a batch of idea-Stuff and get two or three of them to suddenly
come together. I also find that doing this in combination with judicious
poking works pretty well.
Patricia C. Wrede
Lori Selke
>>How does it end up resolving for you?
>
>Oh, sure. Your problem is that you don't have critical mass yet.
>
>Getting a story rolling is like getting a nuclear reactor started: you have to
>have a critical mass of Stuff to get enough interaction to get things moving.
For me, it seems more like a furnace -- I have to *keep* feeding it
fuel or it runs down. And it takes a while to get up to blazing, too.
I have stacks of research books that I consider, more or less,
kindling, because they'll give me a little tidbit that'll inspire
me to write the next chapter or two.
Lori
--
se...@io.com, se...@mindspring.com, http://www.io.com/~selk
Brooks Moses
[snipped]
I just wanted to make sure to thank all the people that posted
suggestions to my dilemma, before this all expires off the board. I've
saved them so I can refer to them again later, and as soon as I get some
time to write (sigh, not for a few weeks at the least), I'm pretty
confident that this will get me going again.
Thanks!
- Brooks