Against all odds, despite the many-tentacled beast of cynicism that dwells somewhere deep beneath the darkest chambers of my muse’s labyrinthine dungeon, lurking ever presently and always gluttonous, I am managing to remain extremely positive about the future, for the most part.
The world I’ve submerged myself into, the life of the aspiring writer, has proven to be one of the most challenging, and one of the most richly rewarding, fulfilling experiences of my entire life.
It’s only been nine months, but already I’ve learned so much about fiction writing, the publishing industry, and storytelling in general — and most of what I’ve learned is that I’ve still got a lot to learn. And it’s going to take years of hard work, practice, and discipline to attain the level of success I’m aiming for. But the payoff will be worth it.
For now, I’ll go ahead and share some of the wisdom I’ve managed to gather over the past year during my quest toward publication. There’s a lot of disagreement on certain issues, but I’ll share my beliefs on the manner out of my own sheer, unabashed bias.
Most importantly: there is no ‘secret handshake.’ No one knows the path to success, generally, once they’ve gotten there. All they know is that they’ve done a lot of hard work, finished what they’ve started, and — though the thought may cross their minds — never gave up, never quit. Never surrendered to what they saw as failure looming like a scythe above their heads. Those that succeed are not the chosen ones, not the bearers of divine genius (except Dick, maybe — Dick was a god), but rather the ones that just wouldn’t stop writing and submitting.
Everything in the story has to matter. You can’t just go tossing everything in the story just because it’s amusing and you think you’re a genius and everyone’s going to be so damn impressed by all the ideas you’ve got and what you have to say about character X or Y. People need to care first, and that requires good characters. Characters need to be alive– to breath, sweat, love and bleed. And they have to react logically within the world around them — in speculative fiction, your created dream, shared through the collective art of worldbuilding and the telepathy that follows via reader/author communication.
A story is, essentially, a dream. And like dreams, the reader wants to feel like the whole experience is real — which makes the craft of storytelling something that the author has to take seriously, has to practice at, and has to continue growing at. There is, again, no secret handshake, no sacred talisman that will open the gates to literary immortality. It’s about understanding what makes for good stories, cultivating original — and exceptional — ideas, and effectively communicating such stories to the reader.
Stephen King, in his modest manifesto On Writing, proposes the theory that each story is a fossil, the fruit of some tiny seedling of an idea, that must carefully be recovered; storytelling, he claims, is like the excavation of a discovery by a skilled paleontologist. You may not recover all of it, particularly on the first draft through, and you might break some of it off out of carelessness or haste, but the goal of writing a successful draft is best achieved by employing careful craft, learning and discovering the story — and the characters; hell, the very art of storytelling itself — along the way. The journey never ends. Not until it’s been published.
So what makes for a good story? That’s the million-dollar question, certainly. But there are a few secrets I’ve stumbled across. The biggest, in terms of writing a successful speculative fiction story, is even backed by statistics researched and analyzed by Critters “Captain” Andrew Burt. One thing he noticed, in his search for a higher truth, is that the one distinguishing feature of nearly all Hugo- and Nebula-winning works of fiction is that they all had, at their very center, relationships. It wasn’t the science, or even all the futuristic techno-awesomeness, but the characters and their entwined relationships that separated the good stories from the great ones.
So, naturally, I’ve taken this bit of advice to heart, and started writing stories about human beings, not just about nifty ideas. Ideas, some argue, are cheap as dirt and easy to come across — I’d argue that that’s probably true — but crafting a fully realized, complex, quality story from that initial seedling of an idea isn’t quite so easy. In fact, it’s damn hard at times. But when the story fits together, as a logical, well-conceived work of art, the extra work pays off.
When the setting, the tone, the atmosphere, reinforces the larger dream — the all-encompassing plot and scope of the tale — then you’ve got yourself a total package. When the characters whose actions (always active, always striving and battling their way toward the ultimate, inevitable climax) drive the story are living, breathing specimens of the larger, familiar humanity, there’s virtually no limit to what a story can communicate. And what a story should communicate, above all, is the absolute, naked truth of what it means to be human. However difficult, for either author or reader, that truth may be to reach.
