{"id":247,"date":"2001-12-28T10:16:36","date_gmt":"2001-12-28T18:16:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2001\/12\/28\/247.html"},"modified":"2001-12-28T10:16:36","modified_gmt":"2001-12-28T18:16:36","slug":"waldrop-on-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2001\/12\/28\/waldrop-on-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"Waldrop on writing!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Okay, so it's really <a href=\"http:\/\/www.electricstory.com\/reviews\/cry_me_a_9.asp\">Waldrop on applying to Clarion<\/a>, but much of what he says is equally applicable to writing in general.<\/p>\n<p>He starts by pointing to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sfwa.org\/writing\/turkeycity.html\">Turkey City Lexicon<\/a>, which is required reading for all aspiring authors.  It's been some years since I last read that, and there's a bunch of stuff there I hadn't remembered; makes me want to include a link to that page in many of our rejection letters.  I've never been fond of most of the actual terminology in the Lexicon, but I do like the codification of a lot of the concepts; a good checklist of things not to do.  I'm surprised, though, to see \"Slipstream Story\" among the insulting terms, defined as \"Non-SF story which is so ontologically distorted or related in such a bizarrely non-realist fashion that it cannot pass muster as commercial mainstream fiction and therefore seeks shelter in the SF or fantasy genre.\"<\/p>\n<p>(Another time I'll talk about the differences between 'commercial mainstream fiction' and 'literary fiction'; a distinction I glossed over in my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.strangehorizons.com\/2001\/20011203\/editorial.shtml\">slipstream\/genre editorial<\/a>, but I think it's an important one to make, particularly because sf people seem generally to regard anything sans sfnal elements as \"mainstream.\")<\/p>\n<p>All of Howard's advice is good advice (though I'm not totally sure I understand the part about the dead deer), but the item that pleases me most is something he got from Damon Knight: \"if you have a great opening line, your story starts on page 3.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. You have spent the first two pages not on what happens in the story, but on justifying your opening line.\"  I can't tell you how refreshing it is to hear someone advocating <em>not<\/em> starting a story with a punchy hook.  (To mix metaphors.)  I get particularly annoyed by punchy hooks that turn out not to be true: \"Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to find himself transformed into a gigantic insect.  Well, actually, he wasn't really an insect, he just kind of felt sort of insect-like, y'know?  Because the world around him was so oppressive and stuff.  So anyway, really he just woke up feeling bad.\"<\/p>\n<p>I also particularly like Howard's quote from James Blish: \"Most sf isn't <em>about<\/em> anything: the sf that is <em>about<\/em> something is usually about other sf.\"<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Okay, so it&#8217;s really Waldrop on applying to Clarion, but much of what he says is equally applicable to writing&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}