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From the Preface to "Even the Queen" by Connie Willis in Nebula Awards 28 - Invited to account for "Even the Queen." Willis replied: Clarion instructors are always telling people to do their research. I did a lot of research for this story. Literature professors are always telling people that their stories should express their darkest fears and fondest wishes. This story does."
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In her book, Practical Tips for Writing Popular
Fiction, Robyn Carr talks about writing - "It takes
enormous talent, incredible commitment, an awesome amount
of hard work and concentration. ...Writing is, of course,
an art form. It is, naturally, born out of imagination,
instinctive creativity, visionary fantasy and lots of other hocus-pocus inner talents. ...You can develop artistic
instincts, creative imagination and visionary thinking. You develop it by doing it."
Here's the immortal words of Orson Scott Card, from How
to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, "If you write
competently and if your story has any spark of life, you
will sell it. ...When your story is finished, let it go do
its work. Don't wait for it to gather dust on your shelf.
Sure, if you let it sit there for a year and pull it down
and look at it again, you'll find all kinds of dumb
mistakes that you'd never make today because you're so much better now."
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Excerpt from the Preface to Blood Child and other stories by Octavia E. Butler, "The truth is, I hate short story writing. Trying to do it has taught me much more about frustration and despair than I ever wanted to know.
Yet, there is something so seductive about writing short stories. It looks so easy. You come up with an idea, then ten, twenty, perhaps thirty pages later, you've got a finished story. Well, maybe.
My earliest collections of pages weren't stories at all. They were fragments of longer works -- of stalled, unfinished novels. Or they were brief summaries of unwritten novels. Or they were isolated incidents that could not stand alone. All that, and poorly written, too. It didn't help that my college writing teachers said only polite, lukewarm things about them. They couldn't help me much with the science fiction and fantasy I kept turning out. In fact, they didn't have a very high opinion of anything that could be called science fiction.
Editors regularly rejected my stories, returning them with the familiar, unsigned, printed rejection slips. This, of course, was the writer's rite of passage. I knew it, but that didn't make it easier. And as for short stories, I used to give up writing them the way some people give up smoking cigarettes -- over and over again. I couldn't escape my story ideas and I couldn't make them work as short stories. After a long struggle, I made some of them work as novels. Which is what they should have been all along. I am essentially a novelist. The ideas that most interest me tend to be big. Exploring them takes more time and space than a short story can contain...."
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This page Copyright © 1998 Lida E. Quillen. All rights reserved.
This page last updated 5-24-98.
"English teachers are always telling people to write about what they know. I did.
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