Year before last or so, as I may have mentioned to a few of you heads, I tried my hand at writing a short SF story. It was called “The Inheritance,” and, speaking broadly, it sucked. So I have a real operational sense of just how difficult it is to balance worldbuilding, character, dialogue, and plot in any literature of the fantastic, and my already-significant admiration for those who do it even halfway competently has only grown.
@adamgreenfield My one time completing NaNoWriMo was the same experience. Totally worth it but even I was bored with the storyline and characters half way through, could tell the arc pacing was way off, and that the end was just a "lets wrap this up at all costs" feel akin to the last season of Game of Thrones but more disppointing. I do want to do it again, practice makes perfect, but damn! Also, a great reminder that if you think you don't need an independent editor you are wrong. Take a look at George Lucas's original cut of Star Wars versus the final if you think there are exceptions to this rule. If the greatest story tellers need editors so do you.
I say all this by way of preamble to expressing my profound and lasting disappointment in the fact that far and away the best work of short speculative fiction I’ve read in the past two decades was literally unpublished at the request of its author, who’d been hounded virtually to the point of suicide by a pack of sociopaths acting in all the ignorant certainty and self-righteousness that typifies the discourse of our times. She has evidently left the industry, though no one can blame
@adamgreenfield Would you be talking about “I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter”? I haven’t read it yet but with that endorsement, tracking it down might have to rise in my priority list…
her for doing so after a welcome like that. But I weep for all the work we’ll now never see from this talent: all the craft and care with language, all the familiar concepts turned inside out so we can consider them in a new and unfamiliar light, all the passion and energy. I was reminded of this all again last week, in conversation with another extraordinary talent for whom writing doesn’t seem worth the effort any more, whatever reward it may bring. I’m not sure I much care for who were are
or seem to be becoming, collectively, but I will tell you it sure as fuck doesn’t bode well when the most talented among us are either hounded out of their own craft or forced to step aside from sheer exhaustion with the bullshit calculus they face. I used to joke about the way of “silence, exile, cunning,” but it is increasingly coming to seem like the wise choice for those who want to preserve any shred of love for life.
@acousticmirror I know it sucked because I know what greatness looks like and I know also how very far short of greatness it fell. I can shoot you a copy, though, if you promise to douse it in kerosene after reading and take a spark to it.
@adamgreenfield I was speaking in jest. What I really meant was, of course your first story is going to be shite. It's like baduk: you need to write a few hundred until you get someplace. :)
@acousticmirror Oh, I know. Only someone as egotistical as me could possibly think the first draft of their first short story would turn out to be even marginally readable. It was a humbling experience.
@adamgreenfield Yeah, I have to admit I had "a go" at a story once, too. It involved a group of elderly ladies in a Spanish village sabotaging the nearby wing turbine farm by feeding a particular kind of rodent, a rather bizarre gay UFO cult represented by two men who commit suicide by getting stoned and lying down on the rail tracks, leaving behind a note saying that planet Jupiter is calling upon them (the latter is actual historical fact, still unexplained)... And, yeah, I tried to tell it all from the vantage point of a field mouse.
Needless to say, the thing was so shite, I wasn't even able to finish it. It just never held together. Maybe if I try writing another 2-3 hundred...
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