The dated entries below are my original e-mails. I wrote the 'Retrospective' entries after the workshop was over, to record events of note that didn't make it into the e-mails, and to try to give some kind of overall perspective on each week.
Journal Index:
Week One: Paul Park
I Made It (Saturday, June 22, 2002)
No Sleep 'Till Betelgeuse (Monday, June 24, 2002)
Saturday Night's All Right for Writing (Sunday, June 30, 2002, early morning)
Week One Retrospective
Week Two: Kathleen Alcala
Turning Coffee Into Prose (Tuesday, July 2, 2002)
Fables and Reflections (Thursday, July 4, 2002)
Week Two Retrospective
Week Three: Pat Cadigan
Pat Cadigan (Sunday, July 7, 2002)
Working the Woo Woo (Wednesday, July 10, 2002)
Halfway Point (Saturday, July 13, 2002)
Week Three Retrospective
Week Four: Gardner Dozois
Owen Glendower and Me (Tuesday, July 16, 2002)
Meeting Gardner Dozois (Wednesday, July 17, 2002)
Week Four Retrospective
Week Five: Joe and Gay Haldeman
Bears and Limericks (Monday, July 22, 2002)
Ballad of the Flying Squid (Wednesday, July 24, 2002)
Weekend Infodump (Saturday, July 27, 2002)
Week Five Retrospective
Week Six: John Crowley
Ghosties and Toasties (Monday, July 29, 2002)
Partially Successful (Wednesday, July 31, 2002)
Last Day (Friday, August 2, 2002)
Week Six Retrospective
Here I am in Seattle, with my laptop plugged into the dorm Ethernet, reading my e-mail. So far everything's going great - flight up was uneventful. Managed to meet up with a couple of my classmates at the airport. Checked into the dorm. Our rooms are quite nice, as dorm rooms go. I have a wonderful view of the city (we're on the 12th floor), good lighting, and a sufficiency of storage space.
I went out and had lunch with six or so of my classmates, and then we stopped by the drug store to pick up miscellaneous supplies. (If the weather stays like this, I'm going to have to go pick up a fan -- it's really hot out today.)
No Sleep 'Till Betelgeuse (Monday, June 24, 2002)
Words written so far: 954
So, I spent Sunday morning chatting with my classmates, running out to the grocery store, getting my printer set up and working, and so on. My classmates are fascinating people--we're a pretty diverse bunch. I'm looking forward to getting to know them better.
In the afternoon, we had our orientation meeting. Neile and Leslie, the workshop administrators, reminded us to be nice to each other and to get enough sleep. (That latter is proving unusually challenging. Many of us, myself included, are suffering from insomnia, brought on by a combination of excitement and the early rising/late setting Seattle sun. Presumably it will sort itself out.)
Then we got to meet Paul Park, our instructor for the first week of the workshop. He said that he'd read our submission stories, and he thought that one of the more common deficits in them was a lack of sense of place or real evocation of setting. So he wanted us to write a 2 page story, due Monday morning, that concentrated on evoking a sense of place. To give us an example of a really good evocation of place, he read us a short story from Italo Calvino's _Cosmicomics_. (I forget the title, but it's the one about the moon.) It really does have a wonderful use of setting, and Park reads really well. I don't know about my classmates, but by the end of the story I was feeling a bit intimidated.
Paul read us a few other things, and talked a little bit about using specific detail to convey a sense of place. And then he smiled at us, and said, "Well, I guess you'd better get to work."
He is an evil man. I like him.
So, immediately after the meeting, most of us wandered aimlessly up and down the hall for a bit, making incoherent noises of sheer terror. (I have to write a story in a single night? Paul Park is going to read this story out loud to the entire class?) After a bit, I settled down in my room, and started brainstorming. I decided that feeding time in an alien zoo would be a suitably colorful setting, and jotted down some ideas for what kinds of details I could work into my story. I scrawled out about two pages, and went to bed, setting my alarm for a suitably ungodly hour so I could get up and finish in the morning.
I woke up at an even more ungodly hour, and couldn't get back to sleep, so I got up and kept writing. When I got to about 6 handwritten pages, and estimated that I was still 4-5 pages from the ending I had in mind, I figured that maybe I'd bitten off a bit more than I could chew, narratively speaking. I decided to just try to bring the scene to some kind of conclusion, and declare it done. So I did. And then I put on my headphones, and listened to Joe Satriani while I watched the sun rise over Seattle, and typed the story into Microsoft Word. It came to 4.5 pages typed, and I'm not really sure how evocative of setting it is, but there are some bits that I quite like.
Anyway, I haven't had anything remotely approaching enough sleep, but I'm having a blast and I just had to tell you guys all about it!
A rainy Friday in Seattle (Friday, June 28, 2002)
Hi folks! We're at the end of our first week of instruction here, so I thought I'd take the time to send out a little update on what I've been doing.
First off, yes, I have been sleeping better, though I've watched more than one Seattle sunrise.
Class this week has been great. Paul asked us to do three things this week: write a short piece focusing on setting for Monday, a short piece focusing on character for Wednesday, and two plot outlines for two different kinds of short stories for Friday. On Monday and Tuesday, Paul read the setting sketches aloud in class, and we discussed them. Wednesday, Thursday, and a good part of today were spent reading the character sketches and discussing them. Then we discussed some people's plot outlines and did some general discussion of plot and how to handle plotting problems.
My setting sketch of the alien zoo went over well. People also liked my character sketch, but mostly for reasons that didn't have to do with the characters -- it was a more ambitious piece than the setting sketch, and in trying to work in more backstory and more plot, I occasionally lost focus on the characters. That was true of many people's character sketches. It was a little odd, really -- our first assignments, which were written under intense pressure in just a few hours, were more successful overall at fulfilling the demands of the assignment than the second, where we had two whole days to think things over. Either we're all much better at setting than character, or something else is going on.
Class has been great. Somebody described Paul's teaching method as Socratic, and it is. He asks a lot of questions: "What in this story works for you? What didn't work? What are the moments that were particularly effective or memorable? How would you fix this? What would be the effect if you did it this way instead? What do you gain and what do you give up by using this particular technique?" It's intensely thought provoking.
I've learned so much that it's difficult to make any kind of summary. One of the biggest things Paul has been trying to get us to do is to write with a sense of specific detail, to avoid falling back on cliches or stock rhetorical devices ("fear gripped her throat"), or general intellectualized descriptions of characters emotions or states of mind. To try to use close observation to convey an impression of a real thing to a reader, rather than, as is all too easy, an impression of other stories that the reader has read.
On Tuesday, Paul gave a reading at Elliot Bay Bookstore. He read the title story from his short story collection If Lions Could Speak. It was an amazing performance. I remember one point in the reading where I was leaning forward in my chair, and my hands were clenched tight and I was practically afraid to breathe because the tension in the story was so strong. And this is a story about a science fiction writer writing an essay on the problems of depicting alien intelligence, and then having an argument with his wife. Not obviously white-knuckle material, but he made it work that way.
Yesterday, I had my one on one conference with Paul. He had some very good suggestions on the story I submitted with my application to the workshop. He has a great way of really crystallizing the problems in a story -- I would say that I felt a particular scene was weak, but I didn't know why, and he would come up with a description that suddenly made it very clear what was going on. We also talked generally about what he thought I should be working on. He made several suggestions, among them that I'm actually quite good at physical description and sense of place, and so I should probably try writing stories that don't make use of that, just to stretch myself a little. It gave me a lot to think about.
I could probably go on for pages, but I think I'd better stop for now. We have a party to go to tonight, and I have some story ideas I want to work on before then.
Oh, if anyone is interested in another perspective on the Clarion West experience, my classmate Blunt Jackson (a.k.a. Bluejack) is keeping an on-line journal at http://www.bluejack.com.
Saturday Night's All Right for Writing (Sunday, June 30, 2002, early morning)
Just wanted to send out another quickish update, since I have a feeling I'll be busy the next few days. (I signed up to turn in a new story on Tuesday.)
During the Clarion West workshop period, local Seattle folks throw parties every Friday night to which the workshop students and that week's instructor are invited. Assorted local science fiction types and Clarion West alumni turn up as well. Last night's party was quite fun. It was nice to get out of the dorm and see the inside of a real house again. The stereotype of Clarion West student behavior at these parties is that we clump together in our little group mind and forget to talk to anyone else, so I made an effort to mingle and introduce myself to strangers.
Of course, you have to be prepared for unexpectedly introducing yourself to famous science fiction writers. I walked up to a little gaggle of people, and an affable grey bearded fellow stuck out his hand and said, "Hi, I'm Greg." My classmate Diana, standing to one side, helpfully pointed and mouthed, "He's Greg Bear! He's Greg Bear!" I said something really witty and intelligent along the lines of, "Wow. Nice to meet you." I felt a bit stupid, because I wanted to tell him that I'd enjoyed something of his that I'd read relatively recently, and I couldn't remember the title. And I was afraid that maybe I'd mixed it up with something by one of the other Gregs (Egan, Benford, or whoever.) But it's all right -- I remembered later, and he'll be at the next party. I did chat with him a bit -- he seems remarkably gregarious for a science fiction writer.
It's also traditional at the Friday night party to present a gift from the class to the departing instructor. We had wanted to get Paul a toy unicorn (it's a long story -- class in-joke) but we couldn't find a suitable one, so we gave him a bottle of San Pellegrino mineral water (he consumed one each day in class), a large package of throat lozenges (because he wore out his throat every day reading to us in class), and some Earl Grey tea (which he drank in massive quantities during student conferences.) But the really great part of the gift was the card accompanying it - Liz, our resident artist, drew it, with input from most of us. Taking Paul's dictum that "A sense of reality in fiction comes from an accumulation of specific detail," we tried to capture the details that convey the reality of Paul Park to us. I don't think I can adequately describe it, but you can see a picture of it here. (There are also other images of the party there.) (A lot of the stuff on the card is probably incomprehensible to anyone who wasn't in class with us over the last week, but if you want an explanation of any particular thingie, just ask.)
By the end of the party, our class did end up pretty much clumped together, though it wasn't so much each other's attraction that did it as the tremendous gravitational pull that professional science fiction writers exert on us little wanna-be writer planetesimals. We had a tendency to orbit Paul Park and Greg Bear in fascinated clusters, though I did try to adopt a kind of cometary trajectory, swinging out to the other end of the room occasionally to interact with folks in the outer solar system. (The possibilities inherent in the metaphor of Greg Bear and Paul Park considered as an eccentric binary star system are endless, but I think I'll quit there.)
Today was pretty low key -- I spent it alternately chatting with assorted people and working on my next story. I didn't get quite as much written as I'd hoped, but I have an idea, and the general shape of the story. I think I'm going to work on it a bit more now, and then get some sleep. After all, tomorrow is a new day, a new instructor (Kathleen Alcala), and the start of a new week. Oh, yeah, and Octavia Butler is dropping by. Wheeee!
I'll always remember the thrill of arriving in Seattle. In spite of all the planning, the preparations, in spite of having managed to meet four of my future classmates in the flesh prior to the workshop, some part of me didn't really believe that it was real until I walked out of the gate area of Sea-Tac airport and spotted a tall fellow with long grey hair holding up a sign that read "Wendy". (Said tall fellow being my classmate Blunt Jackson.) Through the whole process of collecting my baggage, collecting a couple more classmates, and riding in the car through Seattle to the dorm, I kept thinking to myself, "Wow, I'm actually here. It's really happening." This was a refrain I was to hear many times from the mouths of my classmates that day.
For nearly all of us, coming to Clarion West was the culmination of a long-held dream. I'd first heard about the Clarion/Clarion West workshops back in '98 or so, when I'd joined a writing group in the Bay Area that contained quite a few workshop alums in its membership. I'd immediately thought, "I have to do that someday." It took me another couple of years for me to convince myself that I could hold up to the demands of the workshop without choking under the pressure or withering under critique, and another couple of years to figure out how to make the time and space in my life to attend. (The secret, for any Clarion hopefuls out there: I just decided to apply, and worry about getting the time off and so forth if I got in. When I got in, I had a tense couple of days where I wasn't sure if I'd actually be able to go, but it all worked out.)
I talked a lot about Paul Park's teaching in the entries above, but I'm still not sure if I managed to convey what an impact he had on me as a writer. First, he completely sold me on the value of reading one's work aloud, or, even better, getting someone else to read it to you. (Best of all, get Paul to read it to you.) Paul read every single damn thing we wrote that week aloud to us, and it was a revelation. Of course, it helps one spot mechanical things--words that clang, typos and grammar glitches that the eye passes over but the ear doesn't. But there were also more subtle things: when Paul read my character sketch in class, he really made me feel the emotional tone of the story. I kept that in mind when I revised and expanded the sketch into a full blown story during Pat Cadigan's week, and I think it helped tremendously.
Second, Paul really inspired me to aim high in my writing: To write with the highest level of craft I could manage, to try to put real experience onto the page, to try to evoke an emotional response in my readers. All of our instructors encouraged us to do this in various ways. They told us to take risks, to write the stories that only we could write, to write from our hearts. Paul really got me off to a good start.
Somebody once said that a writer is a machine for turning coffee into prose. Were they ever right! What I don't know is whether higher quality coffee turns into higher quality prose. I sure hope so, because the coffee here is fabulous.
My current favorite purveyor of coffee is Caffe Vita, conveniently located between our dorm and our classroom at Seattle Central Community College. Great coffee, good atmosphere; they actually play music that I enjoy. (For some reason, Bob Marley's Legend is the unofficial soundtrack album of Clarion West 2002. I hear it everywhere I go.)
On Sunday morning, I was at Caffe Vita with fellow Clarionite Blunt. The Seattle Gay Pride Parade was gearing up, and there were all sorts of people milling around outside on Pike Street. I was in the middle of making some rambling philosophical point when I looked out the window, gaped, and said, "Oh my gosh, is that GWAR?!" And it was. (I know that a few of y'all know who Gwar are -- Stephanie will certainly remember them -- but for those who don't: Gwar is a heavy metal band whose shtick is that they are aliens from outer space. They perform in elaborate costumes with weird alien masks and giant weapons and stuff. I used to watch them on MTV when I was a kid.) So they were all out there in the street in full costume. A couple of them came into the cafe to use the bathroom. It was seriously cool.
Even more seriously cool was Octavia Butler. She came by on Sunday to talk to us about writing and about her experience at the original Clarion workshop. She gave us a lot of great advice. It's great that someone who is now so successful and critically acclaimed is so willing to share her early struggles with a bunch of aspiring writers. I do kind of wish that I could have had her as one of my teachers. (She teaches at Clarion West from time to time.) But then again, we have such a fabulous instructor line-up this year that it seems churlish to complain.
So, speaking of our instructor line-up, Sunday was also when we met Kathleen Alcala (pronounced al*cah*LAH -- it's a Spanish name of Arabic origin), our instructor for this week. She was a bit of an unknown quantity to most of us -- many of us had never heard of her before we applied to Clarion West, and much of her work is published as magical realism rather than genre fantasy. She's very friendly and personable, and she went to Clarion West in the mid-eighties, so she really understands the process we're all going through here. We all had dinner together and watch a building catch on fire somewhere out in northwest Seattle. (This is a flammable city. I've watched two buildings catch fire since I've been here. What gives?)
This week in class, we're following more of the typical Clarion workshop process, where people sign up to turn in stories on a particular day. We all get copies, read them overnight, and then critique the stories the next day. I signed up to turn mine in Tuesday.
Kathleen had asked us to write something in the form of a traditional tale, with a framing story and so on. (Think Arabian Nights, or the Decameron, or the Martian Chronicles.) By the end of Saturday, I'd come up with a rough idea for mine. By the end of Sunday, I had ~400 words written. Monday, after class, I had a quick lunch and then went to Caffe Vita for a latte. I sat there and wrote for about 3 hours. Then I went back to the dorm, and wrote straight through until midnight, taking breaks to make dinner, to drink cups of blackberry sage tea, and to phone Daniel. Then I had to type my longhand first draft into the computer and polish it a bit, and help fellow Clarionite Liz print her story, which was also due Tuesday morning. I finished at 1:15 a.m., with what I think is a pretty solid 2400 word story, but I hadn't even looked at the four stories that we were critiquing today. I set my alarm for 5 a.m. and crashed for a few hours. I got up, and went to the International House of Pancakes and ate breakfast while I read the stories. Then I went around the corner to Caffe Vita for a much needed cup of _real_ coffee and wrote my critiques. They weren't exactly masterpieces of critical perspicacity, but I think I managed to say something helpful for each story.
Generally, the level of critiquing seems to be pretty high. We're still a bit in the love-fest stage where we all think each other's writing is brilliant, but people also don't seem to be shy about saying what doesn't work for them in a piece. Many of us have participated in "Clarion style" writers' groups, which probably helps. Kathleen's been making great comments -- the tale is a form that she loves and works in, and she's got a lot of good thoughts.
I don't know what people will make of my story. I went for a kind of Fritz Leiber meets A.S. Byatt feel, and I did a lot of playing around with language. I also tried for a certain vividness of characterization -- I decided that this tale wasn't necessarily the place for complex or well-rounded characters, but that I could try to make them vivid. I'm very proud of some of the things I tried to do, but I can't really tell if I pulled it all off. We'll see.
So, now I've had a nice nap, and I'm going to go read the other two stories for tomorrow before I go off to Kathleen's reading at Elliot Bay tonight.
Fables and Reflections (Thursday, July 4, 2002)
So, on Tuesday night, a bunch of us went down to Kathleen's reading at Elliott Bay. She read a section from her novel, Treasures in Heaven, and an as-yet unpublished short story called "Tiny Town." Both were a great deal of fun. I particularly recommend her work to any of you who are fond of magical realist works -- she incorporates a lot of fascinating family history into her work, including a lot of stuff about the branch of her family who were hidden Jews in northern Mexico.
A classmate and I were talking to one of the Clarion West volunteers who help keep things running, and she told us something that one of the administrators also said to us earlier in the week: That Paul Park was talking about our class at last Friday's party, and she was impressed at how smart and psychologically perceptive he was, and that he knew so much about all of us and what was going on in our heads. And of course, we were all going "What? What did he say?" All she would tell us is that he said our class was very mature. Flattering, I suppose, but there must have been more to it. I mean, if I came up to you and said, "Hey, so-and-so is very mature," you wouldn't think "Oh, Wendy's so psychologically perceptive."
Wednesday morning, my story was the first to be critiqued. It went pretty well, overall. There was a certain amount of consensus on some of the positives (people liked the language, the mixture of humor and seriousness, the vividness of the characters) and on some of the negatives (the ending felt rushed, one of the characters needed his motivations fleshed out, another was a trifle too passive.) On other things there was more of a spread: I had a sort of twist ending, and some people loved it and others felt that it was a cheat. Some people disliked the fact that I wrote a story entitled "Three Came to Kill the Wizard Fenric" in which the killing of Fenric actually happens off-stage; other people liked it. (That latter was very deliberate on my part -- everybody's read fantasy stories in which a brave hero goes to kill a wizard, and it's become really boring and cliche, so I decided just to skip it.)
Kathleen made some interesting comments on how I used themes of gender roles in the story, and noted that I subverted traditional depictions of magically powerful women as wantonly sexual. Yeah. Um. I meant to do that. Really. I'm all about subversion. (Actually, I didn't intend any deeper themes when I started the story, but they came in rather naturally as I tried to tell this story about thwarted love, power, and vengeance. And I think that's one of the things that makes tales and fables of this kind powerful -- they tap into universal ideas about human nature.)
After class, I had my one on one meeting with Kathleen. She startled me by telling me that she really liked my submission piece (the story I submitted as part of my application to the workshop), and startled me further by suggesting that I might try to market it as a mainstream "literary" piece rather than as genre fantasy. She made the further surprising suggestion that I think about writing a set of thematically linked stories that I could publish as a short story collection. I don't know -- it seems that in the mainstream literary world, a short story collection is almost an obligatory step that young writers take to prove themselves worthy to write novels, whereas in genre fiction, you sell your short fiction to the magazines, and you typically only get to publish a collection after you've had some success and written novels and built an audience. I don't know how I feel about this -- it's not that I have any objections to being literary, but where does that leave the part of me that likes to write about elves and spaceships and alien zoos?
We talked a bit about markets. She was pleased to hear that I have been trying to sell some of my fiction to editors -- about half our class have never submitted a manuscript anywhere, which surprised me. We kicked around the story idea that I'm working on right now -- she made some good suggestions. It was a good session.
Today's been a quiet day. We had class in the morning, and critted 4 more stories. I had some lunch and took a nap. My plan for the day is to write until dinner time, have some dinner, read the stories for tomorrow and then watch some fireworks.
Happy fourth of July, everyone!
Week two was where we really started getting into the Clarion West swing of things, since during Paul's week we had eschewed the typical submit-and-crit cycle in favor of reading works aloud in class and discussing them. Kathleen had asked each of us to write a 'tale' for our week two story. I was impressed by how varied in tone, style, and subject matter the tales my classmates produced were. I went for something fairly traditional: a frame story of three travellers coming together, and each telling a small story of their own. Many of my classmates were a lot more daring in what they did with the form.
Week two was also the week of Viking!. At the dorm we had a box of edifying reading matter, donated over the years by various workshop students. Of particular note was a romance novel entitled Viking!. We (well, it was mostly the women of the workshop) spent far too much time in the lounge during week two reading parts of it aloud. Diana and Liz gave particularly effective dramatic readings. I don't quite know how to describe the writing in this book. Overwrought and anatomically improbable is a good start.
I learned a lot from Kathleen. Most notable about her critiquing were her insights on deploying the fantastical elements of a story to most effectively to reinforce theme and emotional impact. She was also a great person to talk over story ideas with. I spent a bit of my conference with her talking over the story that I wrote for Pat Cadigan's week, and it really helped me in writing the actual story.
I notice in going over my e-mail entries that I seem to have universally described all of my stories being critted as "having gone pretty well." This is an accurate description of how I felt at the time (I tend to feel quite pleased after a critique if I've gotten any indication that at least something about the story is working), but it doesn't indicate much in the way of which stories were more successful. In retrospect, I'd say that "Three Came to Kill the Wizard Fenric" was one of my less successful pieces. I'm still proud of a lot of the stuff in it, though, and I think that with some work I can turn it into something worth sending out.
So, we had our first meeting with Pat Cadigan, our instructor for the upcoming week. I can tell that Pat is going to be an experience. Picture the following scene:
We're all sitting in the lounge, and she walks in. A woman with a mass of red curly hair, wearing a T-shirt that reads: DON'T TAKE THIS ASS-WHIPPIN' PERSONALLY. She starts in like a pro-wrestler calling us out for a fight: "I am Pat Cadigan, and I'm here to wreck your reality."
What follows is a thirty-minute free association on writing, what she wants us to get out of the workshop experience, and what she wants us to do during the next week. The first thing she tells us is: "Show me what you wish you had. Write like the writer you want to be, without worrying about whether you can be."
Some of the other high points:
*Don't worry about whether or not you're talented. All of you are talented. If you absolutely must have a crisis of confidence, do it in some other instructor's week.
*Don't sleep with each other. (So far, I have seen no signs of incipient love affairs among my classmates. From the way we get questioned at the Friday parties, I gather we are expected to produce some kind of romantic melodrama before the workshop is out.)
*Read good mystery writers to learn about plotting.
She brought us a cheap Polaroid camera, and some film. We're supposed to pass it around and take odd snapshots over the course of the week -- the odder the better. My best contribution so far was to point the camera downward out of the lounge window -- I got a shot of the building wall receding down into blackness.
The pro-wrestler persona faded over the course of the evening, particularly after orientation proper was over and we served up the dinner we had cooked. The sternest instructor will soften when confronted with baked rigatoni, garlic bread, salad dressed with balsamic-dijon vinaigrette, and fresh fruit topped with whipped cream. (Hats off to the Clarion West class of 2001, who impressed upon us the value of cooking meals for instructor orientation nights.) Slightly prickly exterior aside, Pat is a funny, witty woman, with a great desire to pack as much writerly wisdom into our heads as it is possible to do in a week.
I think it's going to be a good week. I'm off to do a little more writing before I go to bed.
Working the Woo Woo (Wednesday, July 10, 2002)
Well, I turned in my story for the week this morning, so it seems like a good time to put together a little update on how things are going.
Pat Cadigan is a blast. We were led to believe that she might be harsh with us, but that hasn't been the case. She made it clear early on that she wouldn't take any crap: she would be hard on anybody who didn't do their best in either writing or critiquing. But conversely, if someone's doing their best, then she's right there cheering them on. She's an extremely perceptive critiquer -- she's very good at bringing out what a story is doing well. Her critiques often begin, "What will make this story work in the next draft is..." What's incredible is that she seems to be able to do this equally well for any kind of story - regardless of genre, subject matter, tone, style, whatever. When you have a writer who has the distinctive writing voice that Pat does, you might worry that she'd try to turn us all into little Pat Cadigans. That's not happening here.
The other interesting side effect of Pat's somewhat abrasive personal style is that when she doles out praise, you really feel that it means something. Yesterday, at the end of class, she said to us: "I'm not saying this to be nice, because I'm not a nice person. You guys are good." We all left there thinking, "Yeah. I'm good."
This is just about the perfect thing to be thinking when you're trying to finish your next story. This one was a bit of a struggle - not because I ever felt blocked, but quite the opposite - I kept coming up with ideas, and I'm not sure that they all had room to breathe in the finished first draft. The initial idea was one that I'd been kicking around prior to coming to Clarion - it involved a group of humans and a group of aliens, and the central concept was the way humans project their own cultural assumptions onto an image of an alien that has a completely different meaning to the aliens themselves. I got some more ideas from Paul Park about portraying aliens, and got some good input from Kathleen Alcala on portraying the culture clash (one of the things we ended up discussing is that it works both ways -- the aliens must have an equally wacked out set of ideas about humans.)
But in a lot of ways, the story ended up being about memory: both the idea that memories can be unreliable, and the idea that sometimes you have to forget things in order to move on. And it's kind of got an unreliable narrator. It's got a lot of stuff for a story only 4500 words long.
We've also been doing an interesting exercise this week. On Monday, Pat handed each of us a Tarot card, and told us to sit down, think about what the card meant to us (ignoring, if possible, anything we actually knew about conventional Tarot interpretation) and then write a bit of a story (a sentence, a paragraph, a couple of pages) based on that. On each subsequent day, we've gotten another card, and we've had to incorporate that into our ongoing story. We've been reading the bits out loud, and some people have been coming up with fascinating stuff.
This exercise was supposed to address something that Pat told us to try to do in our fiction: Work with your woo-woo. Like many Cadigan pronouncements, this one is open to different interpretations, but roughly, it seems to mean: use your irrationalities, your obsessions, the weird stuff that is floating around in the junk drawer of your subconscious. It's a good idea. It's also really fun to say "woo-woo" a lot.
Well, I have three goals for tonight: make dinner, read all the stories for tomorrow, and do laundry. Oh, yeah, and to write some more Tarot-inspired woo-woo. (See what I mean about it being fun to say?)
Halfway Point (Saturday, July 13, 2002)
Well, we've finished week three.
On Thursday, my story was critiqued. It went well, overall. Again there was a general consensus as to some positive things and some negative things. The negative things were mostly requests that particular characters be fleshed out, that their motivations be made clearer. Nobody found the story excessively talky, and apparently I handwaved the neuroscience just right: I gave just enough detail to sound like I knew what I was talking about.
That afternoon, I had my one on one meeting with Pat. We talked about all kinds of stuff. At one point she suggested that I try writing a story starting with the ending and working backwards (sort of like the structure of the movie Memento). I may try that, if I get a suitable idea. She left me with the parting command: "Go forth and conquer!" I'll do my best.
Friday in class, we had another good round of critting. Pat gave us something to complete our Tarot card excercise with: since we'd run out of cards, she cast the I Ching for each of us. She wants us to finish up those stories and e-mail them to her next week so that she can see what we all come up with.
After class, nine or so of us went out for lunch with Pat. We got some good dirt on magazine contracts from her. After lunch, Ysa and Blunt and I walked up to Hot Topic to find the traditional instructor gift. We got Pat a Magic Flying Monkey (it has a mask and a cape, and bungee cords in its arms so it can be launched up to 30 feet. When you shake it, it makes little monkey screaming sounds. We all signed our names on the monkey's cape.), and a pair of pink and black striped socks with skulls on them. Liz did the card, which depicts Pat as a pro wrestler (in a T-shirt that reads "Woo Woo").
We presented this to Pat at the Friday evening party. The party was fun -- there is a conference of Pacific Northwest writers going on this weekend, so a fair number of out of town people were in Seattle to attend that, and also came to the party. I wandered up to a group of people and introduced myself, and then managed to completely mis-hear everyone else's name. Because of this, it took me nearly 15 minutes to work out that the pleasant fellow I was chatting with was literary agent Donald Maass. (For some reason, I thought he would look older.) One of my classmates told me later that she'd been too intimidated to speak to him -- clearly, I have discovered the secret of schmoozing -- be completely unaware of who it is you're talking to.
There were a couple of Clarion West grads from previous years at the party who had recently sent novels to Maass that he had declined to represent. I was impressed that he took the time to speak to each of them, to encourage them to keep marketing their work, and to ask them what they were working on next. I can see why he's the first choice agent for many aspiring writers in the genre -- he seems to be genuinely interested in mentoring young writers.
Lots of other fun people at the party. Bruce Holland Rogers was there, and, of course, Greg Bear was there. I told Greg that I hadn't read his Darwin's Radio yet, but that I was looking forward to reading it. He told me to let him know if he messed up any of the science.
So, it's been a great week. We're all holding up pretty well -- we are starting to show signs of fatigue from the intense pace, but the group dynamic is still good, and nobody seems ready to have a nervous breakdown. Pat was very inspiring, and we're all revved up to go into Gardner's week.
My goal for today is to figure out what I'm going to write for Gardner's week. My tarot card inspired story is chugging along pretty well, but I've set it up structurally so that it needs to come together to some kind of big revelation at the end, and I don't know what the big revelation is. Ooops. So, I think I'll go out and do a little brainstorming.
Have a great weekend, folks!
Well, the great memorable moment from Week Three that didn't make it into the above entries was the Friday night post-party "rave." Sometime early on, our class developed the tradition of throwing a rave party in Liz's room after the regular Friday night party. The third week one was our most elaborate, complete with disco ball, laser pointers for making pretty patterns on the wall, and a smoke machine. Pat Cadigan and her friend Maggie joined us.
A great time was being had by all until the smoke machine set off the smoke alarm in Liz's room. Somebody removed the alarm from the wall, and the party continued, though with the smoke machine turned off. Then campus security and, I think, the Seattle police showed up, and made "What's going on here?" noises. Maggie handled the fuzz with admirable cool, while security tried to get the smoke alarm back on the wall. Every time they put it back, it went off again, even though we'd long ago cleared out the smoke. Finally, they swapped it for the one in the neighboring unoccupied room.
I think I've talked a lot about Pat's critting and teaching style in the above. She was quite an inspiration to me, and to my fellow students. She had an energy that was completely infectious: I left class every day feeling ready to do great things. I wrote "Show me what you wish you had" on a large piece of paper so I could look at it while I wrote. And we all talked about woo-woo constantly: our own, other people's, where to find it, what to do with it when you've got it. (And it's still fun to say!)
Well, I've just printed out my new story that I'm turning in today. (Don't worry. I did get some sleep last night, I just got up and the crack of dawn to apply a final polish and print out. And finish reading the stories to be critiqued today.)
"So, I thought I knew where the story was going, but that was before the dirigible and the shipwrecked alchemist showed up." --me, to one of my classmates at about 2:00 this afternoon. (Yes, my story really does have a dirigible and shipwrecked alchemist. Also, a merman who can't swim, a mystical tower in the shape of milk bottle, and raspberry Jell-O. Yes, it's a _science fiction_ story (as in, not fantasy.) Really. Well, sort of.)
It's all Gardner's fault. In class yesterday, he told us, "Don't be afraid to be flamboyant." And I thought, "Oh, I know what my story needs: airships!" Oh, I think it safely qualifies as flamboyant. That may not save it during critique. One must remember the root of flamboyant means "flames," possibly as in "going down in." My dirigible may go over like the Hindenburg, but at least I'll have had fun.
I stuck the following quotation from Henry IV, Part I at the head of my story:
Glendower. I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur. Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?
This is something of an epigrammatic Dischism (for those not up on critiquing jargon, a Dischism is something in a story that actually describes the author more than it describes the characters in the story. Classic examples are characters who are forever lighting up cigarettes because the author chainsmoked while they wrote the story, or characters who complain that they are confused and don't know what to do next, when this is actually the author's problem.) I can call things from the vasty deep, but will anything come when I call? And more importantly, what will it be?
Airships, apparently.
Anyway, I have more to tell you about Gardner, but it'll have to wait until later. Have a wonderful day.
Meeting Gardner Dozois (Wednesday, July 17, 2002)
So, I haven't really told you guys anything about Gardner yet. First, for those not intimately involved with the SF short fiction world: Gardner is a writer of excellent short fiction, but what he's most famous for is his editing. He edits Asimov's, perhaps the best (certainly the most award-winning) of the SF short fiction magazines, and also compiles an annual Year's Best Science Fiction anthology.
There are two things that one hears repeatedly about Gardner in Clarion circles: first, that he's a tough and insightful critiquer, truly a wonder to behold in class. Second, be prepared for an unending stream of lewd jokes, delivered with a kind of boyish innocence that somehow makes it impossible to be offended by them.
My first meeting with Gardner may be illustrative. On Saturday, I was coming back from a nice session of writing at Caffe Vita, and bumped into Leslie (one of our intrepid administrators, without whom this whole workshop would not run.) She was waiting for Gardner at one of the picnic tables outside the dorm, so that she could take him off to have dinner with Pat Cadigan and the two of them could gossip about all of us. So, Gardner came out, and we shook hands, and did the usual pleased-to-meet-you/how's-Clarion/etc. thing. Then Gardner picks up some scrap of cloth from underneath the picnic table, holds it up like a trophy, and beams. "Oh, look, underwear!"
Being prepared for Gardner, I don't miss a beat. "Well, you know, since this is a Jesuit school, they don't allow people to cohabit in the rooms, so they must use the lawn for that purpose." There followed some speculation on which clumps of bushes were most suited to that purpose.
I've come to the conclusion that Gardner's occasionally silly behavior is a very carefully constructed act, designed to short circuit the behavior of most wannabe writers around editors of his stature, which is to moon around emitting desperate "Buy me! Buy me!" vibes. It works -- just try emitting any kind of vibes when you're laughing hysterically.
Gardner is also a terrific critiquer. He's very focused on issues of what makes a satisfying narrative: having conflict, having characters make interesting choices, having a satisfying ending. He's also willing to discuss what will make a story salable, which is not always the same thing as making it good. (Let me clarify: anything that increases salability will rarely make a story worse, but there are some good stories which nonetheless are not very salable for one reason or another.)
My story was up for critique today. It went very well -- the strongest consensus was that the ending needs some work, and that I needed to sort of tweak some of the thematic elements to make the message of the story clearer. Gardner thinks that I can probably sell the story if I rework it. He said that the biggest trick is going to be incorporating everyone's good suggestions without making the story longer or ruining the lighthearted feel.
We're well into the dreaded Fourth Week here. This is generally the week where the accumulated stresses start to get to people, either mentally or physically. We are all getting very tired -- one person stayed home from class today with a migraine, and two left class early because they didn't feel well. But we're still holding up pretty well. We had a potentially emotionally explosive situation come up yesterday in class -- somebody turned in a story that managed to offend nearly everyone else here. Everybody managed to express their discomfort with the story without getting into an argument or sliding into a personal attack on the author. Leslie and Neile told us later that they had come to class fully prepared to break up a screaming match or even a fistfight. I'm really impressed with my classmates -- these people not only know how to write, they know how to behave like professionals.
Anyway, I should wrap this up. Things to do, people to see, sleep to catch up on -- you know how it is. Have a great day, all.
Total Insanity Triumphs (Friday, July 19, 2002)
Sometimes, I'm way too easily manipulated. But this can be a good thing:
We all came to class Thursday morning looking totally dead. Two more people stayed out sick (one of them a different person from the ones who were sick on Wednesday.) There were only two people signed up to turn in stories Friday morning, which would mean that we would be likely to have a lot of extra class time to fill on Monday, which will be Joe Haldeman's first class with us.
Gardner gives us one of those Serious Editor Looks. "I know you guys are tired," he says, "but I hope you pull yourselves together and produce more fiction for Joe. You'll be wasting your time and his if you don't."
Uneasy looks pass between us. We're all thinking pretty much the same thing: Gardner thinks we're slacking. We're all so tired we're ready to die, and Gardner thinks we're slacking. Damn.
Then Neile hits us with the good cop routine: "I don't want to put any more pressure on you guys, because I know you're already putting a lot of pressure on yourselves, but it would be really nice if we could get one or two more stories turned in tomorrow, so that Joe doesn't have to lecture all day Monday."
"I'll write a story," I say. I blink. Did I really just say that? Adrian volunteers to try to write one, too. Neile chalks our names up on the board under Friday.
I've just volunteered to turn in a story in less than 24 hours, and I don't have a *clue* what I'm going to write about.
So, I left class, got a good lunch and a very large cup of coffee. Came back to the dorm, and sat down to try to think up a story idea. I come up with several, actually, but they're all too complex and sprawling for me to get a handle on in a single evening. I've got to come up with something that I can get down in about 3000 words or less. Of course, the longer I spend dithering about it, the less time I have to actually write. Despite the very large cup of coffee, I crash out and take a 2 hour nap.
And when I wake up, I have my story idea. It's all there. I start writing.
So, I finished the first draft around 1:30 in the morning. Got some sleep, and then polished the story up a bit. 2700 words. Pretty good words, too. This is not going to be one of my great masterpieces, but it's a fun comic SF story, with a dash of quasi-plausible science thrown in (Gardner has been urging me to use more of my biochemistry knowledge in my stories), and I think the ending may actually work. (Endings are hard.)
And Daniel's flying up from Berkeley this evening, and I am taking the weekend off with a clear conscience!
Have a great Friday!
So, the dreaded Week Four was...not too dreadful. Actually, it was great. It was definitely the week where the physical and intellectual demands of the workshop started to take an obvious toll on people. I spent an incredible amount of Tuesday and Wednesday of that week asleep. I felt yucky about it at the time, but it was probably the right thing to do. Certainly, I was feeling ready to take over the world by Friday morning, riding high on the energy of having written an entire story in a night.
Gardner was another terrific instructor. In critiques, he was very sharp on issues of plot and story structure, which I consider to be a particular weakness of mine. He was also very accessible to all the students. He told us we were always welcome to drop in and ask questions when his door was open, and he spent a lot of time hanging out with us in the lounge in the evenings. (On nights when I was writing stories, I'd take a break every now and then to sit out in the lounge and join in the ongoing conversation. It's a bit of a wonder any of us got any work done.)
Another Week Four event of note was our visit Friday afternoon from Lucius Shepard. It was very cool to meet him. He gave us lots of good advice on finding your niche as a writer, and on good sources of income that will let you pay the rent while leaving you time to write what you want (journalism and screenplays, primarily.) Good stuff. Unfortunately, I had to slip out of his talk early to rescue Daniel from the clutches of a cab driver who inexplicably couldn't find the Campion Tower dorm.
I felt that the story I wrote for this week was possibly the strongest I did at the workshop. It certainly contained some of the most vivid imagery I've ever produced. Chalk it all up to woo-woo and not being afraid to be flamboyant.
At the orientation for Week Four, Leslie read us something that Paul Park had sent us, just in case we needed a little encouragement going into Week Four. It's by W.B. Yeats:
Indignant at the fumbling wits, the obscure spite
Of our old Paudeen in his shop, I stumbled blind
Among the stones and thorn trees, under morning light
Until a curlew cried and in the luminous wind
A curlew answered; and suddenly thereupon I thought
That on the lonely height where all are in God's eye,
There cannot be, confusion of our sound forgot,
A single soul that lacks a sweet crystaline cry.
Yeah.
So, I had an extremely pleasant weekend. I got to take Daniel off to some of my favorite Seattle haunts, and introduce him to my classmates. He and they hit it off as well as I suspected they would. (People keep coming up to me and saying, "Wendy, your husband is so cool!" Yeah.)
Saturday was the party at Greg Bear's house. He has a beautiful house out on a lake. It was a wonderful way to unwind from the stresses of week four. Greg and Astrid let us bask in the sun on their deck, swim in their lake, and ogle their amazing library. They invited interesting people for us to talk to -- there were a whole slew of virtual reality researchers there, including some people from Microsoft, and Jaron Lanier, who explained to me that he didn't have the faintest idea what any of us were talking about because he hadn't read any science fiction in twenty years. I told him he should start, but I'm not sure I convinced him.
Towards the end of the evening, Greg gathered us all around and gave us a spiel on novel writing. It was a fun talk -- more inspirational speech than nuts and bolts advice, but good nonetheless. Greg believes very strongly in the power of a writer's subconscious mind -- an interesting take for a writer of "hard" science fiction, whom you might think of as an extreme rationalist.
On Sunday, Daniel and I walked down to the waterfront, and ate fish, and strolled through the Pike Place Market. We window-shopped around downtown. (Downtown Seattle is nice -- it's kind of Downtown San Francisco Lite -- cleaner, quieter, less crowded, but architecturally and commercially similar in many ways. Except that there is a Starbucks every 100 feet. Seriously. Daniel and I must have counted 8 or 9 of them.)
Of course, Sunday evening was new instructor evening. The instructor list says 'Joe Haldeman', but we got a bonus along with Joe, because his wife Gay came along, too. Gay isn't a writer, but she handles a lot of Joe's business affairs, and she's spent the better part of her life in the company of writers. She's great fun. Joe is soft-spoken, and a bit shy, but he's a wonderful writer and teacher. Again, he has a completely different take on things from all of our previous instructors. I don't know quite how to describe it, yet, but I have a feeling I'm going to learn a lot this week. (I'm really excited about this week, because Joe's novel The Forever War is one of my favorite science fiction novels of all time.)
Joe had a little assignment for us. We each got a random poetry form, and a random science fiction topic. And we have to write a poem combining these. I got a Limerick sequence, with the topic 'Vanished Civilizations'. Other people are writing sonnets about cyberspace, sestinas about alien first contact, or tercets about cryonics. Should be fun. We're going to have a little poetry reading later.
This morning, my story was critted. The general consensus was that the ending didn't quite work (so much for what I said last Friday about the ending maybe working), and there were a few logic problems in the plot (which, actually, I think that I can fix by combining various suggestions people made.) People thought the science was convincing, and I got some praise for portraying a convincingly multi-ethnic future California (I worked hard at that, because there's nothing more irritating than reading a story set in California in the future where everyone is white. Where do the writers think that everyone else is going to go?)
Joe told me that he once wrote a story overnight for a workshop deadline, and then later Twilight Zone paid him $7500 (that's 1960's dollars) to make a TV episode from it.
Anyway, I've got to run, because I have my conference with Joe now. Talk to all you folks later!
Ballad of the Flying Squid (Wednesday, July 24, 2002)
It's hot here. Way too hot. It's not supposed to get this hot in Seattle. I'm missing the cloudy foggy weather we had when we first got here.
Been learning a lot in class this week. Joe is a terrific critiquer. Yesterday, he gave a crit of somebody's story which consisted almost entirely of a simple summary of the story's plot -- but the summary was delivered in such a way as to make every logic hole and dodgy plot trick evident. Gay gave us a little talk on the business end of writing -- everything from what you can deduct on your taxes to how you should behave at conventions (tip: do not get drunk and insult an entire roomful of editors.)
Joe and Gay are just about the sweetest people on earth. All of our instructors have been very generous with their time and attention, but Joe and Gay have just sort of adopted us.
This evening, we staged a performance and videotaping of "The Flying Squids of Zondor," a science fiction satire in the form of a screenplay that my fellow Clarionite Droog wrote a week or two ago. I was cast in a starring role as Prince (female) Galina of the vast Tandori Empire. I turned in a sensitive performance as the megalomaniacal Prince, imbuing such lines as "Get off my squid! Zondor is mine!" with subtle undercurrents of emotion (well, repressed giggles.) Droog has promised to use this to blackmail us all when we are famous science fiction writers.
To cap off our performance, Ysa prepared for us a feast of Frito pie, Ding Dongs, and margaritas. Then Dario brought out a guitar, and Joe played some songs for us. Yes, in addition to his many other talents, Joe is a songwriter and guitarist. Apparently, he sometimes plays at cons -- if you are ever get a chance to hear him sing "The SF Editor's Lament", or "The Locked Up in a Spaceship for a Year Without No Women Blues" or his song about the history of science fiction, take it. A wonderful time was had by all.
Tomorrow night, we're doing a poetry reading, which I suspect will engender nearly as much hilarity as the flying squids. I've got my Limerick sequence about a vanished civilization ready to go.
Anyway, I'm going to run now -- I want to get a little more done on the story I'm working on before I go to bed.
Weekend Infodump (Saturday, July 27, 2002)
As usual, we've had an action packed end of the week, leaving me with lots to update on.
Friday was our last day of class with Joe and Gay Haldeman. It went well. People are getting very good in their critiques -- particularly, we're all getting better in dealing with stories that are okay, but which could be better. After class, we had lunch with Joe and Gay at the Elysian brewpub.
After lunch, I set off on a quest to find a stuffed plush squid to serve as part of our class gift to the instructors. I found an absolutely gorgeous one at the Seattle Aquarium gift shop. It was blue and purple, and made gurgling noises when you squeezed its nose. That in hand, I went off to the Friday night party. In the car on the way to the party, I composed a limerick for Joe and Gay:
The students of Clarion West
Greet each new instructor with zest.
Pat was real cool,
And Gardner's no fool,
But we think Joe and Gay are the best.
I read this when we presented the gifts. The squid went to Gay (we didn't know this when we bought it, but it turns out that Gay collects stuffed animals - she was very pleased by the squid.) We gave Joe a bound notebook, which Simran and Lyn had covered with decorative paper. We all signed the inside of the notebook, so that Joe can think of all of us as he writes his next novel. You can see some nice party pictures here.
Also at the party was Karen Anderson. I had an absolutely marvelous time talking to her. She's been involved in science fiction for ages, and seems to have known practically everybody. She was telling us stories about John W. Campbell, and Robert Heinlein, and a bunch of lesser known writers who were active in the 40's and 50's. It's really neat to hear about the history of the field from someone who was really there. She was really cool. She actually lives in Berkeley, so, who knows, maybe I'll bump into her again sometime.
It seems to have become our class custom, post Friday party, to go back to the dorm...and have another party. I usually hang around for 20-30 minutes or so, and then go to sleep. This time somebody brought a bottle of single malt scotch (Talisker, for anyone who knows scotch.) I had a bit. I'm not sure if it's really my thing, but I can see why people like it. It's like a time lapse photograph going off in your mouth -- the evolution of flavors was really interesting. First there's a buttery, almost sweet flavor; then the warm alcohol burn; then a sharper phenolic tang that scrapes across your palate and up into your sinuses, and then suddenly fades into the flavor of peat smoke. (The phenolic taste was really the most perturbing, because it made me feel like I was drinking a chemistry experiment.)
This morning, I got up around 10, and went out to have some coffee and work on the story that I'm turning in on Tuesday. I made three pages of notes. The setting and characters are starting to gel, but I still have a few fairly big holes to fill in. Like, oh, the plot. I'll probably just wing it, and see what happens -- or at least write a few pages, and then pause and take stock.
I, and many of my classmates, are having intermittent anxieties about our upcoming stories for this week. We're all a bit tired, and maybe a bit burned out. Well, no, not really burned out. I'm still feeling great about writing, but I find myself wanting to slow down, to try to integrate some of the things that I'm learning and really work with them, instead of blazing away in a mad rush. And I'll have time to do that...after this coming Tuesday.
Then there's the fact that our final instructor is John Crowley. I mean, I've heard two different people in the last two days describe John Crowley as one of the finest prose stylists in the entire English language, and I'm inclined to agree. So, you know, you start to write something, and then you think, "Eeek! John Crowley is going to read this! Aigh!" It's okay, I'll get over it. (I had a similar problem with my story for Joe's week. I really desperately wanted to write something that Joe would like, and it was kind of shutting me down on actually writing the piece. Then I told myself that even a lousy story would be more impressive than being a doofus and missing my deadline, and I wrote the thing. No problem.)
Anyway, when I was done with my coffee, I stopped by the grocery store to pick up some food for China Mieville's visit. (The PR person who's shepherding China around the US on his book tour was very anxious to make sure that we would feed him when he came by to see us, because he was going straight to a reading after talking to us, and wouldn't have any time to eat. So we put together quite a spread.)
This was really a treat for me, because I've been a big fan of Mieville's work ever since his first novel, King Rat. He read a couple of passages from his new novel, The Scar, and spent about two hours answering questions and just chatting with us. He's a cool guy -- not quite what you might expect. On the one hand, he has quite specific and well developed ideas about what fantasy is and what it should do, and he can talk about them very articulately, even eruditely. (His dislike of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, which is kind of the Ur-text for so much modern fantasy, has been getting some press lately. It was interesting talking to him about it -- I think I understand what his point is now, better than I did from reading his interview in Locus. I can't quite agree with him--because, after all, I love The Lord of the Rings, but he's on to something.) But on the other hand, he's a guy who just loves monsters. Any kind of monsters. He was telling us how much he loves Pokemon. When he's writing a novel, he comes up with the monsters before he comes up with character or plot. We had a lot of good discussion -- it was an enjoyable afternoon.
I've spent the evening sort of noodling around on my story, and doing a little research online. I should probably get back to it now.
Week five just flew by. It was a blur of activity: Daniel's visit and the party at the Bear's on one end, a terrific Friday party and China Mieville on the other end, and poetry readings, flying squids, filking, and a whole lotta fun in between. We spent a lot of nice long chatty lunches with Joe and Gay at the Elysian brewpub that week -- good food, good ginger beer, wonderful conversation. Having gotten my story in early that week, I had a little time to relax.
I don't really know how to try to summarize what I learned during week five. It was a week of many, many insights: on prose craft, on story structure, on selling one's work, on behaving professionally, on enjoying the creative life and on appreciating the people you share it with.
This will be a quick one, because it's late and I've still got stuff to do. But, I just wanted to exult, because I just finished the story I'll be turning in tomorrow. Yay!
It's sort of a weird little ghost story. A bit like "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" meets "Swordspoint". I kind of tried to avoid the boring and cliched bits of typical ghost stories by having them all happen offstage in this one. I fear that this may have resulted in a story with an oddly disjointed feel--also in one where a surprising amount of the action takes place in coffeehouses. John has been urging us to experiment with narrative, to not feel tied to linear, sequential, tight third person narrative. So I can always call this one an experiment.
I'll save a fuller description of John Crowley and his teaching/workshopping style for later. For now, I'll just say that he's once again very different from all of our previous instructors. I like him, and find him less intimidating than I'd expected. One of my classmates says he looks like a big Yorkshire terrier. I don't know that I'd go that far.
Well, I've got reading to do before I sleep. Talk to you folks later!
Partially Successful (Wednesday, July 31, 2002)
Well, the crits on the story were a decidedly mixed bag. On the plus side: people liked the atmosphere, the characters, the setting, the dialogue. (I'd worked hard on these, so I'm happy.) On the other hand, the ending was just about universally displeasing. Some people thought it happened to soon, some people felt it was too ambiguous, and other people felt that it wasn't an ending at all. Some perceptive folks pointed out that the ambiguous ending was an unsuccessful attempt to disguise the fact that I had no idea what was going on with the plot. (Or rather, I had several different mutually exclusive ideas, and I tried to run with them all.)
John Crowley began his critique as follows: "Don't take this personally, but there's a quote from Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare's Cymbeline: There is no point in wasting criticism upon unresisting imbecility."
That's not as harsh as it sounds. John went on to say that it was obvious that the story was a first draft, and that I had made up a great deal of it as I went along, and that he was quite certain that I was well aware of all of the problems in the first draft, and that I would fix them in a second draft. (It's a fair cop.)
In spite of having declared it pointless, he actually then gave me a very good critique of my story. Basically, he said that I have a series of vivid, well-drawn scenes, and nothing connecting them. He made some suggestions for ways to connect things up. I think I'm going to have to let this story sit for a while, and then go back to it and figure out which of the many possible stories here I really want to tell.
John came to talk to me during the break to make sure that he hadn't hurt my feelings. He really hadn't. After all, it's not every day that John Crowley tells you that your work has something in common with Shakespeare's.
Also had my one on one conference with John this afternoon. That went very well--it was both encouraging and helpful. John commented that I've got a very clean and direct prose style, suited to drawing the reader into a story. So the real question is, what do I do with them once I've got them there? We talked a lot about plotting and pacing, and about creating satisfying endings. John suggested that my "plotting problem" is actually not a plotting problem in the sense of figuring out a sequence of events, but that it's a problem of properly handling story rhythm and manipulating reader expectations. He gave me a really simple exercise to try: He told me a joke, and asked me to retell it in a story. If I can give it to a suitable group of readers and they laugh at the end, then I've handled pacing and reader expectation properly.
John is really amazing. Everybody is finding their one on one conferences with him to be inspiring and informative. He's a terrific instructor to have this final week. He's come back to a lot of the technical issues that Paul discussed with us in week one, and it seems like everything that we've learned in the intervening time has given us a new perspective on these things, and allowed us to really take things up another level.
Last night John did a reading at Elliott Bay Bookstore. My classmate Droog and I drove down to the bookstore early and had dinner in the cafe there. Unfortunately, Droog started feeling like he was going to have a seizure. (Droog has a bizarre form of epilepsy. One of the things that tends to trigger his seizures is socializing with large groups of people. It's sort of surprising that Clarion West hasn't killed him. Though we are all very glad that it hasn't.) So, I drove him back to the dorm, and then jogged back to Elliott Bay and arrived just in time for the reading. (Droog offered to let me borrow his car for the evening, but I didn't want to deal with parking. Besides, it's only about a mile to Elliott Bay.)
The reading was great. John read from his most recently published book, The Translator. The portion he read was alternately funny and touching, and did a great job of capturing a complex relationship between two characters. Really great stuff. I want to be able to write like that some day.
At the reading, they also announced the lineup of instructors for next year's workshop: Elizabeth Hand, Nancy Kress, China Mieville, Samuel R. Delany, Kathleen Ann Goonan, and Patrick Neilsen Hayden. (I'd suspected that they were trying to get China as an instructor when they brought him in to visit us.) Not a bad lineup.
Well, I've got a busy evening up ahead. Talk to all you folks later.
Last Day (Friday, August 2, 2002)
So, today was our last day of class. We had a good crit session, and a nice little graduation ceremony at the end. We received a diploma, a "secret decoder ring", and ate chocolate cake.
Tonight we have our final party, and tomorrow most of us are heading out.
I think all you folks who've been following along with my Clarion West adventures deserve a nice long retrospective installment about what I've learned from the experience and how I feel about it all. But you won't get it today--I need to take a nap, and pack, and get ready for the party. But the short version: It was a blast; I learned more than I thought possible, and I wish I could take all my classmates home with me.
I may be out of touch for a little while--I plan to do a lot of sleeping and basking in the sun over the next few days, and not much else.
John began his orientation session with us by saying that, in some ways, the experience of the Clarion West workshop is similar to the experience of an entire writing career: you start with lots of ideas and enthusiasm and excitement about what you're going to accomplish, and as time goes on you become a better writer, but it can be hard to hang on to that initial excitement. What you have to do is go back and find what it is in your heart that really makes you want to write. Write from your heart. That was the consistent message of week six.
John's other consistent message from week six: set yourselves free as writers. Don't worry about rules. You can get away with anything you can get away with. He particularly encouraged us to experiment with all the narrative tools at our disposal, to realize that there are other options than linear, tightly plotted narratives in tight third or first person viewpoint. I want to do more experimenting along those lines.
I struggled a lot with my final story for this week. Maybe it was burnout: I got started on it nice and early, Wednesday of Joe's week, but it refused to come together and make sense. Struggling with the plot, I retreated into something that I'm good at -- or at least something I enjoy -- setting and world building, leaving me with a pile of pretty fragments that I had to somehow arrange into a story. Considering the time constraints I was under, I think I did the best job I could. I'm looking forward to tackling a second draft of this story.
Many of my classmates wrestled with their stories this week, as well. Many wrote very personal stories, some nearly autobiographical. Many of them made stunning breakthroughs, daring to write stories that didn't necessarily exploit their natural strengths, and succeeding brilliantly. Way to go, guys!
The hardest part of week six is suppressing your awareness that everything is hurtling towards its end. You can't think about it too much, or it will get you down. You have to push it to the back of your mind, and try to live in the moment. Mostly, I was successful -- I was pretty darn cheerful up until Saturday morning.
When I had my conference with John on Wednesday, one of the first things he asked me was, "Whose writing career would you like to have?" I had a really hard time answering that one. I eventually stammered out something like, "Well, I'd love to be able to make a living writing," and then immediately felt stupid for giving that answer. I mean, it's honest enough: I would love it, but is it really the thing I most want? I amended my answer: "I'd still do this even if I'd never make a living at it. In fact, I'd still do it even if I'd never get published."
That's also an honest enough answer. Over the course of the past couple of years, I've come to the conclusion that writing (or possibly some other equivalently absorbing creative activity) is a necessary activity to me. I feel better when I'm writing regularly, in much the same way I feel better when I exercise regularly.
But then again, I must want something more. If I were only writing for my personal satisfaction, would I work so hard to get my stories right? Would I send them to editors? Clearly I do these things because I want to have a career of some kind. So what kind of career do I want?
It seems a fitting question to end my workshop experience with.
There's still much that I could add to this account: more amusing anecdotes, more thoughts on the stories I wrote, more musings on what I learned from each instructor. At some point, I'd like to put together a little page of practical advice for future workshop students. And at some more distant time, when my workshop experiences have had time to really sink in, I'd like to do another retrospective or two on what I feel the long term impact of Clarion West on my writing has been.
But for now, this is it.
This page last updated: August 10, 2002
Return to Wendy's Home Page.