Ten Steps to Becoming a Science Fiction Writer

 
 

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Copyright © 2003 by Shane Tourtellotte

Introduction

On August 8th, 2003, I was the guest speaker at the monthly meeting of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society. The speech I gave there was on how to develop oneself into a SF writer, using my own progress as a writer for examples of what to do, and occasionally what not to do. The speech was quite well received, and several attendees suggested that I should publish it. I decided the speech was too specifically tailored to my audience for it to succeed in, for example, a writers' magazine like SFWA Bulletin. Primarily, it carried more personal detail than would be appropriate in such venues, and editing out such content would empty the essay of much of its strength.

Instead, I have decided to post it here on my website, where people who are already interested in my writing, and thus not disposed against some personal detail, can read and appreciate it. I have edited the original speech, taking out details specific to that night and audience, and cleaning it up in a few other places. I hope it is interesting, educational, and perhaps inspirational.


Giving a speech before science fiction enthusiasts is a bit of a daunting prospect, a responsibility I don't feel I've quite grown into yet. I've only been a published writer for five years, with about twenty stories in Analog and a few more scattered elsewhere. I don't have a single novel to my name -- though I may be close to correcting that deficiency in my resume. I haven't gathered a dazzling array of anecdotes to amuse and enlighten an audience, and I'm not a good enough liar to make them up. (Okay, there was that one time with Harlan Ellison and me in the elevator, but it's nothing like what you've heard.) I am simply a modestly successful science fiction writer, still not too far from the beginning of his writing career.

Perhaps, though, that gives me an advantage. Many SF fans have ambitions, overt or latent or perhaps still hidden from themselves, to write. The learning process of becoming a writer is fresher with me than it would be for a best-selling author with twenty books to his name. If I am ever to pass on that knowledge, to start paying forward, now may be the best time.

I won't pretend that I can make anybody an award winner inside of an hour. I've been at it for nearly ten years, and I haven't made an award winner of myself. I can, though, give a few common-sense suggestions, a few personal observations on how I developed as a writer, and a few of my more interesting experiences along the way.

That will be my talk tonight, and because I'm used to giving the things I compose a title, this one is:

If I Can Do It ...: Ten Steps to Becoming a Science Fiction Writer.

I picked ten because it's a good, familiar number. I could have added a couple more, but that would make this a twelve-step program, and that isn't the impression I wanted to give.

So, how did it begin?

For much of my life, I had no idea that I was going to become a writer. For most of my life, though, science fiction was a part of my world. I can dimly recall seeing my first Star Trek episode back in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, when I was seven or eight years old. It was "Arena," the one with Captain Kirk fighting the lizard-like Gorn to save the Enterprise. The episode was based on the classic short story of the same name by Fredric Brown. One could say that was a foreshadowing of what was to come, but I had no idea at the time: I was a little kid.

About a year later, the family moved to Auburn, Maine. I was watching more Star Trek episodes, and starting to understand more of what was going on. One day, though, my father had other plans for me. He said he was going to take me to see a movie, a really popular one. I was just becoming cognizant of the broader popular culture by that time, and my first thought was, "He's taking me to see "Rocky." He wasn't. It was some other movie I hadn't heard of before, called ... can anyone guess?

So I got to see Star Wars. Or most of it. Dad was late getting back from work that evening, and by the time we got to the theater, it was fifteen or twenty minutes into the movie. Yes, I missed perhaps the most famous opening scene in motion picture history, and because I didn't see the movie again during its two year run, it wasn't until the re-release in 1997 that I was able to see it, in the theater, big as life, as God and George Lucas intended it.

Back when I was still eight, though, even most of Star Wars still blew me away. I was now officially hooked on science fiction. For me, sadly, this meant I spent the next few years with TV series like Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Being a kid, I still ate the stuff up. This proves one of two things: A, even bright kids can still be pretty dim; B, science fiction fans will take whatever they can get.

Peculiarly, even though I was a science fiction fan, and even though I read quite a lot as a child and then as a teenager, I didn't become a serious science fiction reader. I perversely resisted it. I read Omni, but mainly for the science, not the science fiction. When a friend in high school lent me his copy of Foundation, I returned it virtually untouched. I did a little better over time, but I was not a 'fan', at least not of written SF.

What I did discover, slowly, was that I had an urge to write. It was not very organized, and I didn't go too far with it. But I would get ideas for stories, and I would pursue them, to greater or lesser extents. Much of this tended toward science fiction, and when Star Trek: The Next Generation came on the air, I started fiddling with ideas for scripts. Nothing progressed past Act Two or so, but I was becoming a bit of a fan writer, without any awareness that such a thing existed.

Time passed. I went to Cornell for a couple of years, with an eye to becoming an engineer, but for various reasons it didn't pan out. My interest waned; I hadn't developed the diligence I needed for such a career. My discarded writing projects were probably an extension of that.

I had a few aimless years, the less said of which, the better. All this time, though, my occasional hobby was getting a firmer grip on me. I started finishing those Next Generation stories. I started writing parodies. I even wrote a novel, and not a Star Trek one, for fun. I wouldn't want to see the thing published, but I wrote it.

It dawned on me that I might be able to do this for real. And with the confidence that can only come when you don't know how long the odds are against you, I decided to do it.

Fortunately, I knew enough to realize how little I knew about what I was getting into. I had to get serious about science fiction, and my first step was ...

Tip number one: Know the science fiction field. Know what's been written; know what's being written; know why certain things aren't being written any more.

Here, you are all, whether you now write or aspire to write or not, ahead of the game. Virtually every one of you is further advanced in knowledge of the SF field than I was when I first decided to become a science fiction writer. As I said, if I can do it ...

I took a fairly methodical approach to surveying the field, with the help of local libraries. It began with Hugo anthologies from the 70's, then working its way forward and back.  I was able to add some Nebula anthologies later on, and once I found SFWA's Science Fiction Hall of Fame volume, I was definitely on my way. And of course, there were the novels. I finally got back to the Foundation series, and this time I actually read it. And I kept building on that.

An even greater influence came from a friend, and a little luck. G.G. Heitman knew me back at Cornell, and happened to live close by: she in Rutherford, New Jersey, I in Westfield. She thought I could make a go of SF writing, and so she revealed to me … the Attic. Her father, recently deceased, had been an engineer, and an "Analog" subscriber. There were about ten years worth of back issues boxed away in their attic.

I can't help wondering what would have become of me had those been copies of Asimov's, or F&SF. Personally, I think Analog was just the right magazine for me. I ended up staying at G.G.'s house, to help care for her infirm mother, while she went back to college to get a second degree. I had lots of time to study those back issues. I could scarcely have been luckier.

As for G.G., she ended up going into special effects work in movies. She worked on X-Men, and a couple other films of lesser repute, and she's spent the last three years in New Zealand working on the visual effects team for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. And before you ask, she could tell me all the secrets from the production, but then she'd have to kill me. I'm not that curious.

Back in 1994, though, it looked like I was set to begin a brilliant career. I hesitated to jump straight into writing, though. I still had much to learn, beyond reading old Analogs and older novels.

Tip number two: Know writing, both as a craft and as a business.

The craft part is fairly obvious. There are plenty of books that will teach you writing skills, some of them written by people who actually have writing skills. You can start with mainstream guides and work your way to the genre guides, and you probably should. The basics of writing aren't different in science fiction: only the subject matter is. Dictionaries, thesauruses, and The Elements of Style should be first on your bookshelf, just like any other writer. It's what else you have on that shelf that will set you apart.

As for genre guides, I can suggest a couple. Twelve years ago, the editors of Analog and Asimov's put together an anthology of essays called Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy It skims a broad range, from plot, characters, and dialog, to some elementary world-building, to the mechanics of submission. Parts of it have fallen out of date, but it's still very useful. One of the best sections is where Stanley Schmidt lists some of the hoariest SF cliches you would be well-advised to avoid. I like to think I had enough sense to avoid most of them already, but better safe than sorry.

I also benefited from a guide written by Orson Scott Card, titled How To Write Science Fiction and Fantasy. (No, these people aren't wasting vital creativity on their titles.) Some different perspectives, some more personal examples, and if he goes out of his way once or twice to slight Analog, well, I'll address that later.

Manuscript format is also important. The Analog/Asimov's book has good advice on that, and you can find guidance in plenty of other places. I'll mention sfwa.org, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America's website, as an excellent resource. Take this seriously. Format is your first introduction to an editor. You want to leave the right impression, that of a professional. There are things you must take seriously as a writer ... and some things you should not, like yourself. I'll be expanding that point later, but remember it now. In fact, let me give you ...

Tip number two and a half: Just because I give these suggestions in order, do not take them in strict order. Teaching yourself to write is more of a pointillist painting than it is connecting the dots.

Some people wonder whether editors have any interest in new writers, when they have so many good established writers to choose from.  They do; at least, the smart editors do. They know that their pool of writers can dry up, through death or retirement or short-story writers moving on to novels. They will work to fill in the gaps with new talent. There is a slight hump to get over, because an unknown writer has to climb his way out of the slush pile, overcoming one more hurdle. If your story is good enough, though, you will sell it.

On the road to that, you may need to learn the nuances of the responses you get from editors. This is part of the business, and ignorance of it can cost you.

Lowest on the pyramid is the form rejection letter. This is as discouraging as it sounds ... but only for that one story. Typed rejection letters from the editor, even if only a couple of lines, are a distinct step up. You've made an impression. It was worth an editor's time to write this note. With luck, your name is noted down somewhere, and your next submission goes, not to the slush pile, but to a smaller one. You will have escaped one level of the winnowing process. If you've published a couple of stories, other editors will note who you are, and keep your submissions out of their slush piles. Success can feed upon itself that way.

Now that you have an editor's attention, mark what he says even, or especially, when rejecting your story. If he gives pointers on where your story went wrong, odds are he means you to correct those errors. In other words, he wants a rewrite. Unless there is some final dismissal in the letter, along the lines of "Good luck selling this story elsewhere," you're being given a second chance. Take it! I've heard of prospective writers who have gotten a letter like this, interpreted it as just another rejection, and abandoned that story. They regret it as bitterly as you would imagine. Fortunately, I'm not one of them, but if that kind of letter had come at the wrong psychological moment, I could have been.

Also keep in mind how long a response to your submission is likely to take. Two to three months is typical, with variation in that range. Analog tends to the short end, Asimov's to the long end. Gordon van Gelder, at F&SF, is a prodigious exception. I've never known him to take even a month. In fact, his personal record in shooting me down is four days. If they had mail delivery on Sunday, it would've been three.

(Incidentally, there is apparently great speculation among writers about what it signifies when a rejection letter from van Gelder contains the word "alas". I haven't nailed it down yet, and if any of you know, please tell me: I've got "alas" coming out of my ... ears.)

There's one other way to learn writing that I haven't mentioned: the workshop. I'm a self-made writer, but many of the leading names in the field came from the SF workshops, especially Clarion. Whether a workshop is good for you probably depends on your character. The heavy time pressure to produce work, and the strength of criticism one could expect from expert instructors, would have worked against me. If you flourish under a deadline, if your ego can stand a direct assault or four, and -- maybe even more important -- if you have the money and time, a workshop may do wonders for you. It's a good road to professional writing, but not the only one. You can succeed either way.

That advice takes care of half the name of the genre, "fiction", but there's also the other half.

Tip number three: Know your science, whatever it is in your story. In fact, whatever unusual or unfamiliar aspects your story has, know enough about them to write accurately and convincingly about them.

To some, this will seem elementary. How could you write something you don't know about? Just about any editor will tell you, plenty of people try. The slush piles are full of such attempts.

(In part, this may explain the long-term popularity of stories about faster-than light ships and time machines. Nobody really knows how such things can work, so you can fudge, or entirely ignore, the details. I've written about both, and I've fudged or ignored the physics.)

It isn't necessarily that you can't write a good story with questionable, or just erroneous, details. Plot, character, pacing can survive gaffes like that. The attention of your reader, though, may not.

This is the well-known suspension of disbelief, and that suspension is fragile. Mundane things can ruin it. I recently ended up abandoning a story in one of the bigger SF magazines for a misspelled name. The story was set in the early 1960's, when JFK Airport in New York was still known as Idlewild Airport: Idle as in lazy. This author spelled it I-D-Y-L-L-wild. If you presume to set your story forty years in the past, yet you expose ignorance or apathy about a commonplace fact in that era, you destroy the illusion you're trying to create.

(Of course, heaven help this author if it was the editor who imposed that 'correction.')

Likewise, someone who has objects falling on the Moon as though they were under Earth gravity, or who puts Alpha Centauri forty billion kilometers from the Sun, is committing the same act, even if the mis-stated fact is not central to the story. It comes down to an author having respect for the reader's intelligence ... and in a sense, for his own, because he shouldn't want to prove that his readers are smarter than he is.

Some will say this is the stereotypical response of an "Analog" writer, someone who's supposed to care more about machines and equations than plots or people. Mr. Card would agree. I disagree. Facts are the framework of science fiction. They are the framework of all fiction, whether the facts stem from physics or biology or sociology or basic human nature. You mistreat those facts at your peril. If you don't want to include science in science fiction, it's not the genre for you.

There is a parallel here between knowing what you write and knowing how to write. Writing teachers often say you must learn the rules of grammar and composition before you can break them. They mean that you have to know why the rules exist, so that you can create the proper effect when you violate them. The science in science fiction is the same. You need to know how the universe is put together so that you know how to do something different, and what effects it will have.

Again, I can suggest books. The Science Fiction Writing Series from Writer's Digest Books is a strong start, especially the first three volumes. Aliens and Alien Societies by Stanley Schmidt -- yes, a pattern is emerging -- has provided me with more than one story that got into print, including one that answered a challenge he made concerning locomotion in aquatic species. Stephen Gillett's World-Building runs the gamut from astronomy and orbital mechanics through to geology, meteorology, tectonics, and more. Space Travel by Ben Bova and Anthony Lewis covers propulsion, space environments, space industry, space law, space sex ... well, it is Ben Bova. There's a fourth series entry on time travel, but it's much more specialized and abstrusely theoretical.

So, for months, I did my homework. I boned up on the genre; I learned how to produce a professional manuscript; I researched what I needed to know for the story ideas I had. I wrote, and finished what I started. And finally, with full confidence in myself, I submitted.

This confidence was not immediately justified. I got my first rejection letter ... and my second, and third ... and twenty-seventh, and twenty-eighth, spread across five different magazines, without striking gold. If it sounds discouraging, it was. That's why it's vital to learn ...

Tip number four: Be determined. Be persistent. Be stubborn. Ideally, the writer's archetype should be the Minotaur: bull-headed ... and trapped in the middle of a labyrinth not of his own making.

(Of course, the original legend of the Minotaur also involved having fourteen youths sacrificed to him every year. There are a couple of writers for whom we can imagine this happening ... and wouldn't you love to have their agents? But as much of an ego-boost as this would be for you, resist the temptation: we need to preserve our young readers!)

This advice covers the injunction I've already mentioned: finish what you start! You're never going to be able to sell half a story ... with the exception of some multi-novel series writers. And those books tend to be bug-crushing, 200,000-word titans anyway. If you can finish writing one of those, you've managed something, even if you haven't managed to conclude any plot threads. I will say, though, that even the authors of those ever-expanding series started off writing shorter, and complete, stories. As I said before, you have to learn the rules before you can learn how it's profitable to break them. Profitable, in more ways than one.

Back in my early, fiddling-around days, I would leave most of my projects incomplete, mainly because I had no motivation to finish them. My audience was, essentially, myself, and that wasn't a good enough reason. When I gained my friend with the Analog attic as a potential reader, this changed. I started applying myself to stories, and so I started finishing them. This began to snowball, so within a couple of years, when I set out to make myself a writer, I wasn't going to take no for an answer.

Even when all I got for an answer was no.

For more than two years, and twenty-eight separate rejection letters.

I read once the advice Mark Twain gave to an aspiring writer who asked him how to break into print. Twain's advice was simple: write solidly for three years. If, by that time, no one has bought any of your work, it is a divine sign that you were meant to chop wood for a living.

I went some months into that third year, with my Minotaur's head, if not broken, showing some serious bruises. I could scarcely stand to open the return envelopes that kept coming back from editors (because I kept sending them manuscripts). I had gotten one personal note from Stan Schmidt, but otherwise it was form rejection after form rejection. When they arrived in the mail, I would delay looking at them for hours and hours.

That is how it came to be late evening, rather than early afternoon, when I winced, pulled out the letter from the latest return envelope ... and found that Stan wanted to buy a story called "Mortal Instruments," if I would just make a few changes.

I was agreeable to those changes. So much so that I actually did hit the ceiling when I jumped for joy.

No one said stubbornness is easy ... but it can pay.

It also pays to have a couple of years in which to improve your writing. One of the lessons in better writing that "Mortal Instruments" taught me is ...

Tip number five: One idea is never enough. Short-short stories are the exception. I've published four of those, one of them a rewrite of a regular short story I penned back when everything I wrote got rejected. That one got rejected because it was a one-idea story stretched too far.  At 5,000 words, it didn't work. At 900, it did.

But anything intended as more than a punch-line story needs the intersection of two or more ideas to work. They don't both have to be science fiction ideas, and, in the case of "Mortal Instruments," they weren't.

The first idea sprang from a newspaper article on advances in electronics and prosthetics that would, within ten years they said, lead to implants that could restore sight to blind people. A pretty neat idea, and it's actually coming true ahead of schedule. The first experimental implants have been performed, and though they give monochrome vision with low resolution, they are quite functional. A colleague and friend, Joe Lazzaro, who has appeared occasionally in Analog, may be getting his own implant within months, though he may hold off a while. The field is advancing fast enough that implant function may be much better in a year or two. You who buy new computers every two years need no further explanation.

The second idea, I didn't have to dig for at all. It was developing within me during those two dry years of rejection. I had thought I would break through almost immediately. Having that stack of rejection slips build and build battered my ego. I thought I was good enough, but I wasn't.

I didn't stop trying, but I did start wondering, soul-searching, berating my own inadequacies. At one point I wondered, in almost a Faustian way, what I would give to make my talent match my ambitions.

And suddenly, I had two ideas come together and make a story.

The visual implants transposed into hearing implants. My main character became a concert violinist, hard-working but with just an ordinary ear for music, limited to the second rank of his profession. The implants, he learns, would give him perfect pitch, and expand his natural talents enough, he hopes, to vault him to the top of the musical world. Will he make such a radical alteration in his life? Will it do what he hopes?

There's a story. At least I thought so, and so did Stan Schmidt.

This example involved input from my own personal experiences, and I will speak to that four tips from now. What it demonstrates, though, is the effect of meshing ideas. A story just about visual implants would be a dead end: somebody gets his sight back, and he lives happily ever after. A story just about my moments of doubt would be self-indulgent tripe. Together, they became something much better.

It's also possible to produce your two or more ideas in a different way. Isaac Asimov's Nightfall began as one idea, but the story he wrote acted as a prism, refracting a spectrum of new ideas out of that one. How does a world with near perpetual day affect the psychology, religion, science, and more, of its inhabitants?

You have to know a fair amount about many things to write that kind of story, or a lot of other kinds. Asimov was a famous polymath, but any writer can achieve a good fraction of his breadth of knowledge. All you need to do is follow ...

Tip number six: Read. Don't just read the non-fiction you need for your research; don't just read science fiction to keep up with the field. Read as far as the reach of your interests will take you ... and then stretch those interests a bit. I could extend this to mean, stay open to all kinds of knowledge from all sources, and the advice would be just as valid. Being a writer, however, I can be excused just a pinch of bias toward reading.

I've never done this experiment, but I should. I ought to save every lending slip I get from my public library when I take out books, stick them in a drawer, and at the end of a year take a look at everything I've read. Of course, I'd also have to keep track of all the books I bought, which might double the list. (Since most of the SF I read, I buy, the library list would be more varied.)

You can never know when a particular kernel of information will be the inspiration for a story, so gather as many kernels as you can. Fortunately, SF-oriented people need less encouragement to this than most. Curiosity seems to be part of what draws us to science fiction in the first place. I will thus stop preaching to the choir, with a parting reminder: read everything.

So, now I had my first sale, after twenty-eight months. My second sale took another eight months. My next came in less than five months; then one month; then four days. It looked like I was going to stick. I was part of the science fiction community now ... except that I was still apart from it. Aside from meeting Stan Schmidt once or twice, I had no personal contact with writers, editors, and fans. It was time to take the next step, which was ...

Tip number seven: Make yourself more than a name on the page. This means marketing yourself, or what I'll call in my case "Shameless Promotion for the Congenitally Bashful."

In my case, it meant going to my first science fiction convention. I looked up where the World Science Fiction Convention was that year -- it was in Baltimore -- found its website, and joined the convention. I didn't presume to try getting myself on programming: the thought petrified me. I would be content to see and be seen.

A little while after this, I was reading the handbook SFWA sends to all its members, with advice on a variety of professional matters. One of the articles was by Susan Shwartz, about attending conventions. The first, and apparently most crucial, piece of advice she gave was this: never make a Worldcon your first convention.

I could not help but admire her advice. Especially its timeliness. I made sure to read it again and again, as I rode the train down to Baltimore that August. I had it with me in the check-in line at the hotel ... and guess who was not so far ahead of me in that line? I got to introduce myself to Susan Shwartz, my first authorial acquaintance, and tell her how flagrantly I was violating her advice.

I did get through that convention without permanent and fatal embarrassment to myself. I even got dragooned into the Analog Mafia panel the last day, the newest of a couple dozen writers there. It wasn't as bad as I had imagined, but remember my profession: my imagination is pretty vivid.

It was not bad enough, though, to make this my last convention. My stubbornness from Tip Four was still in force, and I made myself go to more. I made myself appear on panels, and I made myself speak on them. They're still a little rough on me, but it's no longer stage fright as much as a generalized anxiety. My remedy for it is preparation. I know people who can show up for a panel, ask "What's this about?", and then participate for an hour without skipping a beat. That's not me. I'll work on what I intend to say. I will distill hours of thought into, hopefully, fifty minutes of competence.

And I ought to do this. My appearance on a panel, or something else, is for the fans: they deserve my best effort. It's also for me: I want to be seen in the best light. I am, after all, promoting myself, shamelessly or otherwise.

Returning to conventions, my first Worldcon was my introduction not only to fandom, but to many fellow writers, including some of whom have been friends for five years now. This is ...

Tip number eight: Make professional connections, because you never know what opportunities can grow out of them.

Some of my time at the Baltimore Worldcon I spent in the dealer's room, working at the table for the Artemis Project. This is where I met Ian Randal Strock. A one sentence overview: The Artemis Project is a plan for a privately funded commercial Moonbase. If you want more details, go talk to Ian: he's much better at giving them than I am.

Ian would eventually become the editor of Artemis magazine, as part of the project: something to produce cash flow. (This Moonbase is intended to turn a profit, you see.) Ian and I have become pretty good friends over the years. I've sold two stories to Artemis, and whenever he sees me, he asks "When am I going to see your next story?" But, nice as this is, it isn't the point of this anecdote.

Early in the convention, someone came up to Ian at the table and struck up a conversation. The two were apparently friends. It took me a moment to recognize this person, or at least recognize his nametag. Michael Burstein. I knew the name. He was an Analog writer. He had gotten a Hugo nomination for his very first story, "TeleAbsence." He had won the Campbell Award for Best New Writer just the previous year. I had adopted his swift success as something to aspire to myself.

I was just about to introduce myself when he noticed me. "You're Shane Tourtellotte," he said. "I wanted you to know, I really enjoyed 'Mortal Instruments'."

Yes, I think we hit it off very well.

I was able to use Michael as a one-man support group of sorts, to help get me through that convention and the next few I attended, before I felt capable of facing it all myself. Any of you who know Michael won't be surprised by this. He's very outgoing, very friendly, ready to take a young writer under his wing -- even if that young writer is more than a year older than he was.

He's the type of outgoing person who can suggest that Analog has to run an issue featuring just the two of you, and it can sound like he's joking and dead serious at the same time. When he tossed off the much more modest suggestion, at Boskone in 2000, that the two of us had to collaborate on a story sometime -- that time I took him seriously.

It so happened he was going to Lunacon alone that year, without his wife, so I offered to share a room with him. I also told him that, by the convention, I would have an idea for a collaboration worked out, that we could go over.

I could have done a little better with my preparation. I whipped up the star system where the story would take place pretty well: I happen to like crunching numbers. The plot was another matter. I had a viable opening premise: a human base on the moon of a planet with an alien civilization, observing their development in perfect secrecy ... until one day, the aliens launch a rocket.

I had barely gotten beyond this, just to the point where most of the humans intended to get away undetected, while some wanted to stay and make First Contact. When Lunacon came around, and it was time to work on the idea, I rather haltingly told Michael what I had in mind ... and he started running with it. He had ideas for characters, and those triggered my own ideas, and soon we were debating the physiology and sociology of the alien race and what we were going to name our main rebel character.

Michael and I are very different. He's extroverted; I'm reserved. He's an observant Jew; I'm a barely-nominal Protestant. Even our writing styles vary markedly. I'm a linear writer: work out an outline, fill in the details, do the actual writing to file straight ahead, first scene to last. Michael's more flexible: if he has a sudden inspiration for a scene two-thirds in, he'll skip ahead and write that scene. There was every possibility of contention and conflict.

But it went smoothly. The face-to-face discussions we had, with ideas flying across the room, were the best experiences I've had as a writer. We did the same idea-trading by telephone and e-mail, but it didn't have the same spark. E-mail did let us reconcile our writing styles, though. Once we had our final outline, we divided the scenes, taking them mostly in alternating order. I got my linearity, as we worked ahead scene by scene. He got his flexibility, because he could skip ahead whenever he liked, if he was inspired. Something I wrote for an earlier scene might end up clashing, but we'd straighten it out when it came up. If we had to collaborate by mailing manuscript, paper pages to each other, or work in the same room, we might have driven each other nuts. Modern technology can be a wonder sometimes.

The Nebula Awards were in New York that year, 2000, and we both attended. Just at that time, the summer double issue of Analog had come out, headlined by a collaboration by Jerry Oltion and Adam-Troy Castro that got a Bob Eggleton cover illustration. So Michael walks up to Stan Schmidt, with me in tow. I knew what was going to happen, but I stood by faithfully even as I wore my best "Please don't do this" face. And Michael said, "Stan, Shane and I are writing a novella together, and you're going to buy it for the July/August issue next year, and you're going to give us a Bob Eggleton cover.

Stan blinked, and said, "Oh. Am I?"

A few months later, when Stan bought "Bug Out!" from us, he wrote back to Michael, saying, "Well, I guess you were right." We got the lead spot, and not only did Bob Eggleton illustrate the story, I have the painting at home.

Of course ... Michael also said the story was going to win the Hugo and Nebula awards. He had to be wrong sooner or later.

In any case, you see what I would have missed if I had slid into the background, and let Michael and Ian have their chat to themselves. I never did manage to match Michael's career track. I got nominated for the Campbell, but lost. He's taken such a big lead in Hugo nominations that I've given up hope of catching him. He even got to buy a Bob Eggleton cover illustration for one of his stories before I did. It'd be easy to hate him ... if he weren't Michael.

So I was making my connections. Collaborating with Michael; discussing story ideas with Stan. (He's helped me on more than one; one story of mine sprang from an editorial of his; another spun off from a particular idea I pitched at him in a Vietnamese restaurant. Both stories from the restaurant sold.)

In the end, it comes back to me, and the words I put on the screen. I depend on my own resources, and that means everything. In particular, it means ...

Tip number nine: Use your own experiences in your writing. This does not mean write yourself into stories as a character. If you have such a phase, get it out of your system as fast as possible. I had a stretch like that, back when I was writing just to amuse myself, and it is best forgotten, trust me. Neither does this mean write thinly-veiled accounts of incidents in your life. For most of us, this does not make for adequate science fiction.

What it means is, take things that you've done or seen first-hand, take the actions, reactions, emotions you observed in yourself and others, and apply them to characters and circumstances in your stories. Understand how people behave, including yourself, and use that understanding. I used this self-observation to put together my main character in "Mortal Instruments," and it worked.

A later example was a story published in mid-2000, called "The Hanoi Tree." In it, a human boy befriends an alien counterpart on a world that the two species share uneasily. This tension is paralleled by the boy's parents, whose marriage is close to falling apart, and who, perhaps not incidentally, have opposing attitudes toward those aliens.

My parents divorced when I was ten years old, so there is my experience. What I did with it was not to recreate moments of that dissolution, but to fill in the background with elements of it: my protagonist's helpless anxiety at overhearing arguments and not being able to shut them out; his parents' attempts to pull him in different directions, seemingly indifferent to the way they are tearing him in two, using him for their ends. You don't have to go through a divorce to portray these things accurately, but it's no hindrance.

That was, admittedly, a secondary component of that story. I've dealt more directly with family calamity since then.

Back in 1997, when I made my first sale, I called my grandfather soon after to tell him the good news. He was pleased, but he didn't entirely grasp what this meant for me. He seemed confused. It was my first direct confirmation of what was happening to him.

The specific medical term is 'vascular dementia'. One by one, blood vessels in the brain burst, depriving sections of oxygen, and the brain falls apart piece by piece. It's the second most common cause of what I'll bluntly call senility. Alzheimer's disease is first.

Some months later, I returned to Westfield, where he lived. I was going to live with him as a caretaker. The attempt lasted only a few days. He had managed to break his hip even before I got there, functioning on it for a couple of days, fooling everyone, before it left him in helpless agony. He had to go into a medical facility to recuperate. I was going to be no help to him.

Eventually he went to a nursing center in northern New York, and I went back to Rutherford, to someone I could help. I only got to see him again in the last few days of 1999. The tenacious wisps of hair on his crown were gone, the fringes almost completely white, and his face ... was nearly skeletal. I could scarcely recognize him.

He couldn't recognize me at all. His eyes would settle on me for a second or two, then slide away. He could no longer speak, so even if he had known me, he couldn't have said so. All I could do was stand there, saying a few words of comfort, wishing I had come earlier, when he might still have known his grandson. A few hours later, all I could do was stand there, and watch him die.

If I couldn't make something of that in my writing, I wouldn't be much of a writer. If I wouldn't desire to give myself some kind of catharsis through my writing, I wouldn't be much of a person. So began the story of an old man coming home from the hospital, after an experimental treatment has cured him of Alzheimer's disease. That story became "The Return of Spring."

It was no simplistic wish fulfillment. Alzheimer's doesn't allow for that. The cure restores nothing that's been lost; his memory of decades past is shot to pieces. He doesn't understand what his long illness has done to the family who cared for him -- or didn't. He doesn't even know if there can be a purpose to his second chance at life.

And most ironically for me, a cure for Alzheimer's would have done nothing for my grandfather's vascular dementia. Some wish fulfillment ... but as a catharsis, it sufficed, and as a story ...

As a story, it got the single most negative review of my entire career: too upbeat an ending. To that I can only say, if a cure for Alzheimer's is incapable of bringing hope, what would be the point of having it?

But the story also got the best responses a story of mine had ever received, responses from readers who had been affected by it, who thought it was my best work, who came up to me to thank me.

That story, you may know was published in November 2001, and in April of 2002, it garnered a Hugo nomination as Best Novelette of the year. I guess I did something right.

Such a high point in my career is the perfect place to inject a note of caution and for me, that is ...

Tip number ten: Find a secure middle ground between the confidence, even the arrogance, necessary to being a writer, and the humility that being a writer will inevitably inflict on you. As I mentioned before, take the work seriously, not yourself.

"The Return of Spring's" Hugo nomination both fortified and, not so subtly, mocked my writer's ego. How could a Hugo nomination knock down a writer's conceits, months before the award would be given away to somebody else? One can find the answer in the world of soccer.

No, really.

Any of you here who follow the World Cup when it comes around have probably heard of what's called The Group of Death. Qualifying teams are semi-randomly assigned to divisions for the first round, and it always seems that one group ends up filled with powerhouse teams. They can't all advance to the next round, so one or two very good teams are going to be left broken and humiliated on the field.

The 2001 Best Novelette category quickly gained a reputation as the Group of Death. You had James Patrick Kelly, who had won Best Novelette twice before, with an outrageously inventive story. You had Allen Steele, with two Best Novella Hugos, stepping down a weight class with a nightmare character study. You had Ted Chiang, who averages about one major award nomination, Hugo or Nebula, for each story he has ever published ... and who was overdue for a Hugo. You had Charles Stross, the hottest emerging writer out of Britain, apparently intent on reinventing the cyberpunk and Singularily sub-genres at the same time.

And then ... the Luxembourg of this Group of Death … yours truly.

This isn't soccer, of course. I wasn't put there randomly. I was voted there. Enough people thought my story belonged in such potent company to put it there. That was heady stuff, enough to swell almost any ego. And right there to bring it back down to size was the knowledge that I didn't have a prayer of winning.

This may have been the healthiest thing for me. Two years before, I was up for the Campbell for Best New Writer, and lost that to Cory Doctorow. That hurt, more than I expected. I still had shreds of my vision of sweeping the SF field before me, and losing the Campbell finally did away with that illusion.

(Not that this meant any ill will toward Cory: just the opposite. In fact, he and I made a wager the day after he won the Campbell, five dollars on which of us would be first to get a Hugo or Nebula. I bet on him; he bet on me. The night of the Hugos in San Jose, I made sure to have a five-dollar bill in my wallet. This may have been the only way I could have won that Hugo, through the perversity of the Universe: yes, I got the rocket, but I'm out five bucks.)

In any case, I had found my golden mean: honored just to be a nominee, yet fully expecting that I would just be a nominee. I've found the perfect way to remind myself of this balance.

At just about every convention or related event I attend, I will have at least one person come up to me and inquire about my orientation. They are referring to the tiepin I'm wearing. (Shame on you.) They'll ask what it is; I'll tell them it's a Hugo pin, for my nomination. They'll ask why it's pointing down; I'll tell them it's crashing and burning, much as I did.

I have the same dreams of towering success as any writer, but I'll be blasted if I develop a towering ego in the process. Fortunately, I've given a hostage to fortune in that regard: a little thing called Grudge Match.

The Grudge Match website was started eight years ago by two grad students at Cornell, whose late-night bull session about who would win a fight between Gary Coleman and Webster got way out of hand. They laid out the fight, argued over who would win, and let readers vote for the winner and submit respones explaining why. They started putting up more matches -- pitting the Enterprise against the Death Star was an early high point for them -- and soon developed a serious following. I ended up part of that following, writing responses that won the occasional award from them as best of the match. My inaugural response was to hash out who would win an Olympic basketball game between the casts of Welcome Back, Kotter and WKRP in Cincinnati. Don't ask.

In 1998, Grudge Match's founders were ready to quit, but its fans weren't. Eight of us banded together, with blessings from on high, to continue the site. We were now the writers, creating these crazy matches and fighting for our champions.

We kept the site humming for two years, until its original founders felt the itch again and joined us. Grudge Match has had an eight-year run, an eternity on the Internet, and recently it's done a bit of expanding. At the last two Boskones, and at Worldcon in San Jose last year, Paul and I helped to present Live Grudge Match, an on-stage adaptation of the website, complete with live commentators, deranged Powerpoint slides, and expert panelists ranging from Bob Eggleton to Esther Friesner to good ol' Michael Burstein.

That congenital bashfulness I mentioned a while back seems to have gone into remission.

The point of all this(I haven't forgotten) is that no matter how famous or well respected I become, it can never go entirely to my head. I can't be too self important when anyone can come along and recall the days when I was arguing over whether King Kong could whip Godzilla, or Anakin Skywalker could outduel Harry Potter. (Okay, I admit, I threw the Anakin match, when my opponent reminded me that he had saved Jar Jar Binks's life. A Cruciatus Curse is too good for that little creep.)

That brings me more or less to where I stand today. I'm in a respectable spot right now ... but I'm still aiming for a great deal more. Old ambitions don't die: they merely slumber. I have a lot of work ahead of me, a lot of development. That leads me, in my list of ten tips, to ...

Tip number eleven: You're never finished learning. No matter how far you get, no matter what goals you achieve, there is always room for improvement, and lots of it. Homer nods; Shakespeare wrote some mediocre plays; and Asimov could drop the worst verbal clangers you ever saw. If you don't believe me, re-read the first page of Nightfall some time.

No author has ever written the perfect story. One could argue that such perfection is impossible, but I'd rather not believe that. The goal is there, and some people have come awfully close -- so why not me? Or you?

The best you can do is keep working on your skills; keep filling your brain, and a few writing notebooks, with knowledge; and keep writing. Even if you can't be perfect, you can be better.

So those are my ten tips -- okay, eleven -- oh wait, there was number two and a half. Well, it turned out to be a twelve-step program after all, and far from having kicked the habit myself, I may have tempted one or two of you into it as well. So why don't I end this talk the way I should have begun it?

Hi. My name is Shane, and I'm a science fiction writer.

Thank you.


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