Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America

Archive for June, 2009

Links to Writers’ Workshops

Friday, June 19th, 2009

Online Workshops

• Critique Circle is an online writing workshop for writers of all genres. It has both free and paid memberships and is populated by aspiring writers. (Note: SFWA does not endorse paid writer services.)

• Critters Workshop is an on-line workshop/critique group for serious Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror writers. Several thousand members, from aspiring to award-winning pro, with a friendly atmosphere and in-depth critiquing. Conducted by email and/or web. Free, open to anyone willing to critique (you critique work to earn the right to be critiqued). Instant critiques for Active members of SFWA/HWA.

• Hatrack River Writers Group Founded by Orson Scott Card, run by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury. Also home to the Hatrack Young Writers Groups for those under 18.

• Holly Lisle’s Forward Motion Community for Writers and Readers: “We’re a group of often insanely dedicated writers, and a smaller group of obsessive readers; we challenge each other to write better, to reach higher, to never give up on our dreams. The community’s motto is Write here — write now, which defines us well; the writers in the community talk about writing, but more importantly, we write. “

• Other Worlds Writers’ Workshop is an online workshop. Our members are invited to join based on their love of and understanding of the requirements of good speculative fiction. We have programs geared to varying skill levels.

• SFNovelist writing workshop Focus workshop for writers of hard science SF novels. “We don’t do short stories or fantasies. Just believable science SF novels.”

• Young Writers: Speculative Fiction Forum A discussion forum for young writers.

• Zoetrope Studios is Francis Ford Coppola’s company, and is home to a writers’ workshop — though it’s
  harder to find than it used to be. Register as a member, then look for ”The Writing Building” in the member’s area. The workshop is not specific to speculative fiction but to any kind of fiction. (Don’t be misled by the link to the in-person workshop in Belize; there is indeed an on-line workshop hidden in here.)

Workshop by Snail Mail

• Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop is conducted through street mail.

Annual Workshops

• Alpha, the SF/F/H Workshop forYoung Writers: Held in conjunction with Confluence, Pittsburgh’s SF con (in July). For writers aged 14 to 19. The writing workshop lasts ten days.

• ArmadilloCon (August,Austin, TX) has been holding a one-day workshop annually since 1998. Several SFWA members read, critique, and teach at it. In 2004 it had 12 instructors and about 40 students. Submission of manuscripts is typically between April and July.

• Clarion, an intensive six-week workshop for writers preparing for professional careers in science fiction and fantasy, held annually at Michigan State University, in East Lansing, MI, USA. “Clarion Ex Machina” is a nifty guide to things Clarion.

• Clarion West, an intensive six-week workshop for writers preparing for professional careers in science fiction and fantasy, held annually in Seattle, Washington, USA

• Conjecture (October, San Diego) has added a writer’s workshop which will be coordinated by Joy Oestreicher. Membership in the convention is required, plus a $10 materials fee.

• David Alexander Smith organizes private writers’ workshops for Boskone and ReaderCon, where the works of 3-5 amateur writers are critiqued by the participants and by 2-3 professional writers who are members of the Cambridge SF workshop. For more information, email David A. Smith, Dsmith@recapadvisors.com.

• Odyssey Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers Workshop is a demanding six-week workshop for writers of fantasy, science fiction, and horror held annually at Southern New Hampshire University. Director Jeanne Cavelos is a former senior editor at Bantam Doubleday Dell and winner of the World Fantasy Award. Guest lecturers include some of the top writers in the field.

• VIABLE PARADISE: SF on Martha’s Vineyard–Annual, in the fall: The Viable Paradise Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop is a one-week intensive immersion in the craft and business of writing science fiction and fantasy. Instructors are Patrick & Teresa Nielsen Hayden, James D. Macdonald & Debra Doyle, Steven Gould, and James Patrick Kelly. See the workshop’s website at http://www.sff.net/paradise/, or write to mvsfa@mail.com for further details. Enrollment is limited to 20.

Local Opportunities

• The CritFinder — help you locate or announce a local, in-person workshop (operated y Prof. Andrew Burt of Critters).

• “Apogee” is primarily a SF and Fantasy novel writing group in Utah County, Utah, and we are looking for more serious writers to join. By “serious” we mean people who are submitting regularly (more than once a year) to paying markets. Email Mette Ivie Harrison

• From Mountain View, California: Hi! We meet once a month. Our group includes award-winning writers, Clarion grads, and the publisher and editor of Speculations, the speculative fiction market guide. E-mail susan@speculations.com with your background info and two stories.

• Northern Colorado Writers’ Workshop: The NCWW is one of the oldest SF workshops, founded by Ed Bryant after he attended the first Clarion. It has been home to the likes of Connie Willis, Dan Simmons and numerous other award-winning authors. Meets monthly (3rd Saturday, all day). Members are either professional SF writers or nearly so; apply to the current president via the web site or visit the public session held at MileHiCon in Denver in October.

• Pittsburgh Worldwrights is a science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers’ workshop run by Mary Soon Lee, conducted in person.

• The San Diego Workshop is always on the lookout for new members. The current membership consists of sf and dark fantasy writers. We meet every month or so. Contact Mitch Wagner.

• The Slugtribe is an historic and long-lived SF/F/H writers group in Austin, Texas.

• Sorrento Circle is a very small critique group in the San Diego area with an emphasis on publishing. Email Christy.

• Wordspinners–Meets monthly, SF Bay Area. Serious group of professional and semi-pro F/SF/H writers. There is a screening process for new members. If you are interested, contact Kevin Murphy at: Kevin.A.Murphy@sff.net

• Write or Die (WorD) is a SF/F/H writing/critiquing group operating out of the Monroeville Public Library outside of Pittsburgh, PA, USA. It is free and open to the public.

• Writeshop is based in Columbus, Ohio, and has been running for several years. The group includes some Clarion graduates and some writing instructors.

• Wrought Iron Jellyfish is comprised of writers who have been around the block a time or two. We have made a long-term commitment to our writing, and we are looking for others who have done the same. We meet in downtown Toronto on alternate Saturday afternoons. For further details about the workshop, please contact us at boilyl@rogers.com

Resources for Critiquing

• The Critters Library has many articles on how to critique (how to start, what to say, how to say it politely, etc.) and other general resources for writers.

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Writers’ Workshops

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

by James Patrick Kelly

© 1988 by James Patrick Kelly, First published in The Bulletin of The Science Fiction Writers of America

You don’t believe in writers’ workshops — never have. Maybe you had a bad experience in college. Some reedy creative writing type sneered at sci-fi and said you probably ought to think about a career in plumbing. Or perhaps it was that incestuous little workshop in your home town, one of those adult education courses filled with achingly sincere poets and would-be Joyces who responded to criticism by saying silly things like “I only write for myself.”

You swear by writers’ workshops. You went to Clarion — lots of us did — and it changed your life. Or maybe you were one of the lucky ones, because you lived in Boston or Austin or Minneapolis or Denver or Eugene — someplace where there was an established professional workshop. Somehow you wangled an invitation and, mirabile dictu, they took your work seriously. After a while, you did too. And the rest is literary history.

There are probably thousands of writers’ workshops in the United States. The vast majority live down to their reputation, noisily proving the cliche that you can’t teach writing. About the only good they do is to provide an incentive for the neophyte to write regularly. There are a precious few, however, that work. What you learn in a good workshop is not how to write, but rather what your audience makes of what you’ve written. Forget about silver-haired authority figures handing down the ten commandments of good writing. There’s no shock quite so instructive as listening to a roomful of astute readers misconstrue your intentions, no pleasure quite so memorable as hearing a stranger speak of your work with understanding and appreciation.

How to recognize the good workshop? Almost all of the sf variety are based on the Milford model, for which the legends credit Damon Knight. This was the way Milford worked when it was the national workshop (and works today; a scaled-down Milford continues as one of the most outstanding of our many regional workshops.) This is the way Clarion works — with a few minor variations. This is the format of Sycamore Hill, the current national workshop. The problem is that most of the Milford-format workshops are either too far away or else are filled and have waiting lists. If you’re really interested, what you may need to do is start your own.

Here’s how.

The Milford model works best with between five and seventeen members. Too few and the workshop loses its necessary diversity, too many and the critique of each story drags on to excruciating lengths. The group usually gathers together in one place for some length of time: a single day or maybe a weekend for the smaller, regional workshops, five days to a week for a national workshop like the old Milford or Sycamore Hill. Clarion takes six weeks. Both Sycamore Hill and Clarion are annual events, while many of the regional workshops meet on a monthly or bimonthly schedule. Only writers with manuscripts in the workshop take part in the critique; no audience is allowed. While the furnishing of the workshop room is a matter of circumstance and taste, the optimal arrangement is for the group to sit around a large table or otherwise gather the wagons into a circle. The stories are read beforehand; the more conscientious critics read more than once. Each critic holds forth in turn, most referring to notes they’ve taken. The custom is to pass these notes to the writer at the end of the session. During critiques the writer may not respond to comments unless asked a direct “yes or no” question. No one is supposed interrupt another’s critique, although there’s often some — usually trifling — cross talk. Repetition is inevitable, although wistful sighs and vacant stares can sometimes prod repeaters to pass when they have nothing new to add. After everyone else has spoken, the writer gets the opportunity to give thanks, explain, rebut or say nothing. A free-form discussion occasionally ensues; otherwise it’s on to the next story. Some workshops enforce these simple rules as a group or the organizers may act as semi-official referees.

Describing the model doesn’t really give the sense of what a workshop is like. There’s a misapprehension that the criticism is unremittingly harsh, that the critiques are subject to personal feud and ideological debate, that some people recklessly rewrite perfectly good stories, while others offer conflicting opinions which can reduce the poor writer to total confusion. You’ve probably heard some of the horror stories, tales of crushed egos and burnt manuscripts. Well, there are no guarantees. Once in a great while, workshops stray. Nevertheless, two points need to be made.

The first is that the workshop provides the writer with a range of opinion. Unanimity is rare; it’s a big genre, folks. The reality is that some people simply hate elves, others resent metafiction, many think vampires are silly and hardware puts more than a few to sleep. It’s hardly surprising that the critics around the table tend to respond most intelligently to stories which are like the ones they themselves enjoy. While the feminist might legitimately comment that she never reads sword and sorcery and would not have finished the story under consideration had it not been in the workshop, the cyberpunk might confess a secret love of heroic fantasy and offer a connoisseur’s insight. Yet even allowing for a diversity of tastes, a consensus usually emerges. This consensus may not always solve a story’s problems or fully appreciate masterwork, but it will not settle for cliched situations, cardboard characters, off-the-shelf concepts and stale emotion, and it can easily recognize narrative drive, believable dialogue, fresh ideas and deft characterization.

The second point is that there’s no criticism quite as blunt as a fistful of rejection slips. Workshopping offers a more humane way to receive bad news — if indeed the news is bad. Not only that, but the process can give writers a new perspective on how decisions to reject or accept are made. For in a sense writers play at being editors during a workshop. They get to read for the mythical Adequate Science Fiction Magazine or the anthology Wicked New Visions, edited by (your name here). They are not, however, allowed to hide their opinions behind the cryptic “This material is not suitable for us at the present time.” They must face the writer and explain specifically and at length why the story does not suit. They must justify their readings, rationalize their aesthetic prejudices. It’s a difficult role to play, but it can be invaluable both for the writer and the editor-for-a-day. Admittedly, some people do get carried away. Sweeping rewrite syndrome is an example. Yet even this excess is much more likely to spring from enthusiasm than malice; people want more than just publishable stories, they want the writer to do his very best, every time, and no excuses, please. What’s the harm in this? The writer is free to ignore meddlesome advice, and in almost every session some particularly sympathetic critic will make at least one suggestion which can help focus or improve the story.

It’s clear, however, that some writers are uncomfortable with this notion of colleagues helping to write their stories. (Some writers are also uncomfortable with the notion of editing.) Whose story is it if you use that killer ending Kate Wilhelm suggested? Will peer pressure homogenize your work? These are fair questions, to which there are no universal answers.

Which brings us to an important caveat: workshops are not for everyone. They are definitely not for the thin-skinned; people who have difficulty separating criticism of the work from personal criticism are well advised to stay away. Nor are workshops for followers of Heinlein’s Third Rule for Success in Writing: “You must refrain from rewriting except to editorial order.” There’s no point in workshopping non-negotiable stories. Of course, what you expect is a standing “O” from your colleagues, immediate sale to a top market followed by a raft of award nominations and multiple Best of the Year appearances. That’s only natural. But it’s dishonest to decide beforehand that no matter what transpires during the critique, your story is perfectly salable and you’re not changing a goddamned word. Beware as well if you have a truly idiosyncratic writing voice; the process seems to work best for stories in the mainstream of the genre — so to speak. It’s also difficult, although not impossible, to get a satisfactory critique of a novel. Especially at national workshops like Sycamore Hill, where even the strong stagger under the reading burden, there are limits placed on manuscript length. No one has time to read an entire novel. Fragments, unfortunately, tend to get fragmentary criticism. Novels-in-progress are better suited to the more frequent regional workshops where over time, chapter by chapter, the book at least has a chance to considered in its entirety. To restate: workshops are not for everyone. Some of our most gifted writers abstain for reasons of temperament and practicality. It’s simply a matter of what works for you. Some of us write in longhand, others compose at the keyboard. Some are morning people, others can’t count to three before lunch.

One workshop secret — admittedly not very well kept — is that the critiques are not, in and of themselves, sufficient justification for shelling out plane fare from San Francisco to Raleigh, North Carolina, or for leaving home and your paying job for six weeks at Clarion. There are other benefits, intangible and yet undeniable, to the attending a writers’ workshop.

Validation, for example. One bane of the beginning writers’ life is fluctuating confidence. Workshops have helped resolve many, many more confidence problems than they have caused. You know you have some talent, otherwise they wouldn’t have accepted you at Clarion. And even though you haven’t had a sale since Labor Day, the other writers in the workshop still read your latest manuscript with care and enthusiasm. A multiple award winner sits next to you; across the room is a writer who sold her first story when you were still struggling with The Cat in the Hat. They believe in you, therefore you are a writer, even if all the editors haven’t tumbled to it yet.

Community. It’s a lonely business, okay? Most people you meet have no idea what you do. You try to tell a neighbor about the magazines and he asks if you know Stephen King. At the workshop, everyone understands. When you’re making a point in casual conversation, you don’t have to explain about relativity or narrative lumps or royalties. Your colleagues have the same problems and maybe even some solutions. It’s comforting to know that you’re not necessarily crazy for writing this stuff, or at least if you are, then there are other lunatics loose too.

Influence. Sometimes you learn things at a workshop that have nothing to do with the story you brought. Since writers tend to get prickly about this, perhaps the less said the better. Nevertheless, it’s impossible to critique a manuscript without discovering both clever solutions and poor decisions. The careful writer can emulate the former and eschew the latter without violating his artistic integrity. All of us learn from our reading or we ought to. Moreover, some writers attend workshops with the announced intention of influencing their colleagues. Which leads us to …

Controversy. The genre keeps changing and people keep arguing about it at workshops — oh, how they argue! It’s fascinating to watch ideologies and styles contend in real time, as opposed to the maddeningly slow pace of publishing and the USPS. What is surprising about this clash of ideas is not that arguments occasionally get out of hand; it’s how often they remain civil and useful. People who talk to each other find common ground. Or they come to understand exactly why they disagree instead of relying on what he said she said she thought she read in a fanzine somewhere. Even for those who are not direct parties to the debate, workshop controversies provide an incentive to self-examination. The great controversialist Plato used to argue that the unexamined life is not worth living.

Ultimately, what sends writers off to workshops is ambition. It’s easier to stay home and keep plugging away, certainly cheaper. But you want something more. You want to get better. Maybe a workshop will help, maybe not. Lots of people say it’s worth a try.

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Turkey City Lexicon – A Primer for SF Workshops

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

Edited by Lewis Shiner
Second Edition by Bruce Sterling

NOT COPYRIGHTED

Introduction by Lewis Shiner

This manual is intended to focus on the special needs of the science fiction workshop. Having an accurate and descriptive critical term for a common SF problem makes it easier to recognize and discuss. This guide is intended to save workshop participants from having to “reinvent the wheel” (see section 3) at every session.

The terms here were generally developed over a period of many years in many workshops. Those identified with a particular writer are acknowledged in parentheses at the end of the entry. Particular help for this project was provided by Bruce Sterling and the other regulars of the Turkey City Workshop in Austin, Texas.

Introduction (II) by Bruce Sterling

People often ask where science fiction writers get their ideas. They rarely ask where society gets its science fiction writers. In many cases the answer is science fiction workshops.

Workshops come in many varieties — regional and national, amateur and professional, formal and frazzled. In science fiction’s best-known workshop, Clarion, would-be writers are wrenched from home and hearth and pitilessly blitzed for six weeks by professional SF writers, who serve as creative-writing gurus. Thanks to the seminal efforts of Robin Wilson, would-be sf writers can receive actual academic credit for this experience.

But the workshopping experience does not require any shepherding by experts. Like a bad rock band, an SF-writer’s workshop can be set up in any vacant garage by any group of spotty enthusiasts with nothing
better to occupy their time. No one has a Copyright on talent, desire, or enthusiasm.

The general course of action in the modern SF workshop (known as the “Milford system”) goes as follows. Attendees bring short manuscripts, with enough copies for everyone present. No one can attend or comment who does not bring a story. The contributors read and annotate all the stories. When that’s done, everyone forms a circle, a story is picked at random, and the person to the writer’s right begins the critique. (Large groups may require deliberate scheduling.)

Following the circle in order, with a minimum of cross-talk or interruptions, each person emits his/her considered opinions of the story’s merits and/or demerits. The author is strictly required, by rigid law and custom, to make no outcries, no matter how he or she may squirm. When the circle is done and the last reader has vented his or her opinion, the silently suffering author is allowed an extended reply, which, it is hoped, will not exceed half an hour or so, and will avoid gratuitously personal ripostes. This harrowing process continues, with possible breaks for food, until all the stories are done, whereupon everyone tries to repair ruptured relationships in an orgy of drink and gossip.

No doubt a very interesting book could be written about science fiction in which the writing itself played no part. This phantom history could detail the social demimonde of workshops and their associated cliques: Milford, the Futurians, Milwaukee Fictioneers, Turkey City, New Wave, Hydra Club, Jules Verne’s Eleven Without Women, and year after year after year of Clarion — a thousand SF groups around the world, known and unknown.

Anyone can play. I’ve noticed that workshops have a particularly crucial role in non-Anglophone societies, where fans, writers, and publishers are often closely united in the same handful of zealots.

This kind of fellow-feeling may be the true hearts-blood of the genre.

We now come to the core of this piece, the SF Workshop Lexicon. This lexicon was compiled by Mr Lewis Shiner and myself from the work of many writers and critics over many years of genre history, and it contains buzzwords, notions and critical terms of direct use to SF workshops.

The first version, known as the “Turkey City Lexicon” after the Austin, Texas writers’ workshop that was a cradle of cyberpunk, appeared in 1988. In proper ideologically-correct cyberpunk fashion, the Turkey City Lexicon was distributed unCopyrighted and free-of-charge: a decommodified, photocopied chunk of free literary software. Lewis Shiner still thinks that this was the best deployment of an effort of this sort, and thinks I should stop fooling around with this fait accompli. After all, the original Lexicon remains unCopyrighted, and it has been floating around in fanzines, prozines and computer networks for seven years now. I respect Lew’s opinion, and in fact I kind of agree with him. But I’m an ideologue, congenitally unable to leave well-enough alone.

In September 1990 I re-wrote the Lexicon as an installment in my critical column for the British magazine INTERZONE. When Robin Wilson asked me to refurbish the Lexicon yet again for PARAGONS, I couldn’t resist the temptation. I’m always open to improvements and amendments for the Lexicon. It seems to me that if a document of this sort fails to grow it will surely become a literary monument, and, well, heaven forbid. For what it’s worth, I plan to re-release this latest edition to the Internet at the first opportunity. You can email me about it: I’m “mailto:bruces@well.com”.

Some Lexicon terms are attributed to their originators, when I could find them; others are not, and I apologize for my ignorance.

Science fiction boasts many specialized critical terms. You can find a passel of these in Gary K Wolfe’s CRITICAL TERMS FOR SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY: A GLOSSARY AND GUIDE TO SCHOLARSHIP (Greenwood Press, 1986). But you won’t find them in here. This lexicon is not a guide to scholarship. The Workshop Lexicon is a guide (of sorts) for down-and-dirty hairy-knuckled sci-fi writers, the kind of ambitious subliterate guttersnipes who actually write and sell professional genre material. It’s rough, rollicking, rule-of-thumb stuff suitable for shouting aloud while pounding the table.

Part One: Words and Sentences

• Brenda Starr dialogue

Long sections of talk with no physical background or description of the characters. Such dialogue, detached from the story’s setting, tends to echo hollowly, as if suspended in mid-air. Named for the American comic-strip in which dialogue balloons were often seen emerging from the Manhattan skyline.

• “Burly Detective” Syndrome

This useful term is taken from SF’s cousin-genre, the detective-pulp. The hack writers of the Mike Shayne series showed an odd reluctance to use Shayne’s proper name, preferring such euphemisms as “the burly detective” or “the red-headed sleuth.” This syndrome arises from a wrong-headed conviction that the same word should not be used twice in close succession. This is only true of particularly strong and visible words, such as “vertiginous.” Better to re-use a simple tag or phrase than to contrive cumbersome methods of avoiding it.

• Brand Name Fever

Use of brand name alone, without accompanying visual detail, to create false verisimilitude. You can stock a future with Hondas and Sonys and IBM’s and still have no idea with it looks like.

• “Call a Rabbit a Smeerp“

A cheap technique for false exoticism, in which common elements of the real world are re-named for a fantastic milieu without any real alteration in their basic nature or behavior. “Smeerps” are especially common in fantasy worlds, where people often ride exotic steeds that look and act just like horses. (Attributed to James Blish.)

• Gingerbread

Useless ornament in prose, such as fancy sesquipedalian Latinate words where short clear English ones will do. Novice authors sometimes use “gingerbread” in the hope of disguising faults and conveying an air of refinement. (Attr. Damon Knight)

• Not Simultaneous

The mis-use of the present participle is a common structural sentence-fault for beginning writers. “Putting his key in the door, he leapt up the stairs and got his revolver out of the bureau.” Alas, our hero couldn’t do this even if his arms were forty feet long. This fault shades into “Ing Disease,” the tendency to pepper sentences with words ending in “-ing,” a grammatical construction which tends to confuse the proper sequence of events. (Attr. Damon Knight)

• Pushbutton Words

Words used to evoke a cheap emotional response without engaging the intellect or the critical faculties. Commonly found in story titles, they include such bits of bogus lyricism as “star,” “dance,” “dream,” “song,” “tears” and “poet,” cliches calculated to render the SF audience misty-eyed and tender-hearted.

• Roget’s Disease

The ludicrous overuse of far-fetched adjectives, piled into a festering, fungal, tenebrous, troglodytic, ichorous, leprous, synonymic heap. (Attr. John W. Campbell)

• “Said” Bookism

An artificial verb used to avoid the word “said.” “Said” is one of the few invisible words in the English language and is almost impossible to overuse. It is much less distracting than “he retorted,” “she inquired,” “he ejaculated,” and other oddities. The term “said-book” comes from certain pamphlets, containing hundreds of purple-prose synonyms for the word “said,” which were sold to aspiring authors from tiny ads in American magazines of the pre-WWII era.

• Tom Swifty

An unseemly compulsion to follow the word “said” with a colorful adverb, as in “‘We’d better hurry,’ Tom said swiftly.” This was a standard mannerism of the old Tom Swift adventure dime-novels. Good dialogue can stand on its own without a clutter of adverbial props.

Part Two: Paragraphs and Prose Structure

• Bathos

A sudden, alarming change in the level of diction. “There will be bloody riots and savage insurrections leading to a violent popular uprising unless the regime starts being lots nicer about stuff.”

• Countersinking

A form of expositional redundancy in which the action clearly implied in dialogue is made explicit. “‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said, urging her to leave.”

• Dischism

The unwitting intrusion of the author’s physical surroundings, or the author’s own mental state, into the text of the story. Authors who smoke or drink while writing often drown or choke their characters with an endless supply of booze and cigs. In subtler forms of the Dischism, the characters complain of their confusion and indecision — when this is actually the author’s condition at the moment of writing, not theirs within the story. “Dischism” is named after the critic who diagnosed this syndrome. (Attr. Thomas M. Disch)

• False Humanity

An ailment endemic to genre writing, in which soap-opera elements of purported human interest are stuffed into the story willy-nilly, whether or not they advance the plot or contribute to the point of the story. The actions of such characters convey an itchy sense of irrelevance, for the author has invented their problems out of whole cloth, so as to have something to emote about.

• False Interiorization

A cheap labor-saving technique in which the author, too lazy to describe the surroundings, afflicts the viewpoint-character with a blindfold, an attack of space-sickness, the urge to play marathon whist-games in the smoking-room, etc.

• Fuzz

An element of motivation the author was too lazy to supply. The word “somehow” is a useful tip-off to fuzzy areas of a story. “Somehow she had forgotten to bring her gun.”

• Hand Waving

An attempt to distract the reader with dazzling prose or other verbal fireworks, so as to divert attention from a severe logical flaw. (Attr. Stewart Brand)

• Laughtrack

Characters grandstand and tug the reader’s sleeve in an effort to force a specific emotional reaction. They laugh wildly at their own jokes, cry loudly at their own pain, and rob the reader of any real chance of attaining genuine emotion.

• Show, not Tell

A cardinal principle of effective writing. The reader should be allowed to react naturally to the evidence presented in the story, not instructed in how to react by the author. Specific incidents and carefully observed details will render auctorial lectures unnecessary. For instance, instead of telling the reader “She had a bad childhood, an unhappy childhood,” a specific incident — involving, say, a locked closet and two jars of honey — should be shown.

Rigid adherence to show-don’t-tell can become absurd. Minor matters are sometimes best gotten out of the way in a swift, straightforward fashion.

• Signal from Fred

A comic form of the “Dischism” in which the author’s subconscious, alarmed by the poor quality of the work, makes unwitting critical comments: “This doesn’t make sense.” “This is really boring.” “This sounds like a bad movie.” (Attr. Damon Knight)

• Squid in the Mouth

The failure of an author to realize that his/her own weird assumptions and personal in-jokes are simply not shared by the world-at-large. Instead of applauding the wit or insight of the author’s remarks, the world-at-large will stare in vague shock and alarm at such a writer, as if he or she had a live squid in the mouth.

Since SF writers as a breed are generally quite loony, and in fact make this a stock in trade, “squid in the mouth” doubles as a term of grudging praise, describing the essential, irreducible, divinely unpredictable lunacy of the true SF writer. (Attr. James P Blaylock)

• Squid on the Mantelpiece

Chekhov said that if there are dueling pistols over the mantelpiece in the first act, they should be fired in the third. In other words, a plot element should be deployed in a timely fashion and with proper dramatic emphasis. However, in SF plotting the MacGuffins are often so overwhelming that they cause conventional plot structures to collapse. It’s hard to properly dramatize, say, the domestic effects of Dad’s bank overdraft when a giant writhing kraken is levelling the city. This mismatch between the conventional dramatic proprieties and SF’s extreme, grotesque, or visionary thematics is known as the “squid on the mantelpiece.”

• White Room Syndrome

A clear and common sign of the failure of the author’s imagination, most often seen at the beginning of a story, before the setting, background, or characters have gelled. “She awoke in a white room.” The ‘white room’ is a featureless set for which details have yet to be invented — a failure of invention by the author. The character’wakes’ in order to begin a fresh train of thought — again, just like the author. This ‘white room’ opening is generally followed by much earnest pondering of circumstances and useless exposition; all of which can be cut, painlessly.

It remains to be seen whether the “white room” cliche’ will fade from use now that most authors confront glowing screens rather than blank white paper.

• Wiring Diagram Fiction

A genre ailment related to “False Humanity,” “Wiring Diagram Fiction” involves “characters” who show no convincing emotional reactions at all, since they are overwhelmed by the author’s fascination with gadgetry or didactic lectures.

• You Can’t Fire Me, I Quit

An attempt to defuse the reader’s incredulity with a pre-emptive strike — as if by anticipating the reader’s objections, the author had somehow answered them. “I would never have believed it, if I hadn’t seen it myself!” “It was one of those amazing coincidences that can only take place in real life!” “It’s a one-in-a-million chance, but it’s so crazy it just might work!” Surprisingly common, especially in SF. (Attr. John Kessel)

Part Three: Common Workshop Story Types

• Adam and Eve Story

Nauseatingly common subset of the “Shaggy God Story” in which a terrible apocalypse, spaceship crash, etc., leaves two survivors, man and woman, who turn out to be Adam and Eve, parents of the human race!!

• The Cozy Catastrophe

Story in which horrific events are overwhelming the entirety of human civilization, but the action concentrates on a small group of tidy, middle-class, white Anglo- Saxon protagonists. The essence of the cozy catastrophe is that the hero should have a pretty good time (a girl, free suites at the Savoy, automobiles for the taking) while everyone else is dying off. (Attr. Brian Aldiss)

• Dennis Hopper Syndrome

A story based on some arcane bit of science or folklore, which noodles around producing random weirdness. Then a loony character-actor (usually best played by Dennis Hopper) barges into the story and baldly tells the protagonist what’s going on by explaining the underlying mystery in a long bug-eyed rant. (Attr. Howard Waldrop)

• Deus ex Machina or “God in the Box”

Story featuring a miraculous solution to the story’s conflict, which comes out of nowhere and renders the plot struggles irelevant. H G Wells warned against SF’s love for the deus ex machina when he coined the famous dictum that “If anything is possible, then nothing is interesting.” Science fiction, which specializes in making the impossible seem plausible, is always deeply intrigued by godlike powers in the handy pocket size. Artificial Intelligence, virtual realities and nanotechnology are three contemporary SF MacGuffins that are cheap portable sources of limitless miracle.

• The Grubby Apartment Story

Similar to the “poor me” story, this autobiographical effort features a miserably quasi-bohemian writer, living in urban angst in a grubby apartment. The story commonly stars the author’s friends in thin disguises — friends who may also be the author’s workshop companions, to their considerable alarm.

• The Jar of Tang

“For you see, we are all living in a jar of Tang!” or “For you see, I am a dog!” A story contrived so that the author can spring a silly surprise about its setting. Mainstay of the old Twilight Zone TV show. An entire pointless story contrived so the author can cry “Fooled you!” For instance, the story takes place in a desert of coarse orange sand surrounded by an impenetrable vitrine barrier; surprise! our heroes are microbes in a jar of Tang powdered orange drink.

This is a classic case of the difference between a conceit and an idea. “What if we all lived in a jar of Tang?” is an example of the former; “What if the revolutionaries from the sixties had been allowed to set up their own society?” is an example of the latter. Good SF requires ideas, not conceits. (Attr. Stephen P. Brown)

When done with serious intent rather than as a passing conceit, this type of story can be dignified by the term “Concealed Environment.” (Attr. Christopher Priest)

• Just-Like Fallacy

SF story which thinly adapts the trappings of a standard pulp adventure setting. The spaceship is “just like” an Atlantic steamer, down to the Scottish engineer in the hold. A colony planet is “just like” Arizona except for two moons in the sky. “Space Westerns” and futuristic hard-boiled detective stories have been especially common versions.

• The Kitchen-Sink Story

A story overwhelmed by the inclusion of any and every new idea that occurs to the author in the process of writing it. (Attr. Damon Knight)

• The Motherhood Statement

SF story which posits some profoundly unsettling threat to the human condition, explores the implications briefly, then hastily retreats to affirm the conventional social and humanistic pieties, ie apple pie and motherhood. Greg Egan once stated that the secret of truly effective SF was to deliberately “burn the motherhood statement.” (Attr. Greg Egan)

• The “Poor Me” Story

Autobiographical piece in which the male viewpoint character complains that he is ugly and can’t get laid. (Attr. Kate Wilhelm)

• Re-Inventing the Wheel

A novice author goes to enormous lengths to create a science-fictional situation already tiresomely familiar to the experienced reader. Reinventing the Wheel was traditionally typical of mainstream writers venturing into SF. It is now often seen in writers who lack experience in genre history because they were attracted to written SF via SF movies, SF television series, SF role-playing games, SF comics or SF computer gaming.

• The Rembrandt Comic Book

A story in which incredible craftsmanship has been lavished on a theme or idea which is basically trivial or subliterary, and which simply cannot bear the weight of such deadly-serious artistic portent.

• The Shaggy God Story

A piece which mechanically adopts a Biblical or other mythological tale and provides flat science-fictional “explanations” for the theological events. (Brian Aldiss)

• The Slipstream Story

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. Postmodern critique and technique are particularly fruitful in creating slipstream stories.

• The Steam-Grommet Factory

Didactic SF story which consists entirely of a guided tour of a large and elaborate gimmick. A common technique of SF utopias and dystopias. (Attr. Gardner Dozois)

• The Tabloid Weird

Story produced by a confusion of SF and Fantasy tropes — or rather, by a confusion of basic world-views. Tabloid Weird is usually produced by the author’s own inability to distinguish between a rational, Newtonian-Einsteinian, cause-and- effect universe and an irrational, supernatural, fantastic universe. Either the FBI is hunting the escaped mutant from the genetics lab, or the drill-bit has bored straight into Hell — but not both at once in the very same piece of fiction. Even fantasy worlds need an internal consistency of sorts, so that a Sasquatch Deal-with-the-Devil story is also “Tabloid Weird.” Sasquatch crypto-zoology and Christian folk superstition simply don’t mix well, even for comic effect. (Attr. Howard Waldrop)

• The Whistling Dog

A story related in such an elaborate, arcane, or convoluted manner that it impresses by its sheer narrative ingenuity, but which, as a story, is basically not worth the candle. Like the whistling dog, it’s astonishing that the thing can whistle — but it doesn’t actually whistle very well. (Attr. Harlan Ellison)

Part Four: Plots

• Abbess Phone Home

Takes its name from a mainstream story about a medieval cloister which was sold as SF because of the serendipitous arrival of a UFO at the end. By extension, any mainstream story with a gratuitous SF or fantasy element tacked on so it could be sold.

• And plot

Picaresque plot in which this happens, and then that happens, and then something else happens, and it all adds up to nothing in particular.

• Bogus Alternatives

List of actions a character could have taken, but didn’t. Frequently includes all the reasons why. In this nervous mannerism, the author stops the action dead to work out complicated plot problems at the reader’s expense. “If I’d gone along with the cops they would have found the gun in my purse. And anyway, I didn’t want to spend the night in jail. I suppose I could have just run instead of stealing their car, but then … ” etc. Best dispensed with entirely.

• Card Tricks in the Dark

Elaborately contrived plot which arrives at (a) the punchline of a private joke no reader will get or (b) the display of some bit of learned trivia relevant only to the author. This stunt may be intensely ingenious, and very gratifying to the author, but it serves no visible fictional purpose. (Attr. Tim Powers)

• Idiot Plot

A plot which functions only because all the characters involved are idiots. They behave in a way that suits the author’s convenience, rather than through any rational motivation of their own. (Attr. James Blish)

• Kudzu plot

Plot which weaves and curls and writhes in weedy organic profusion, smothering everything in its path.

• Plot Coupons

The basic building blocks of the quest-type fantasy plot. The “hero” collects sufficient plot coupons (magic sword, magic book, magic cat) to send off to the author for the ending. Note that “the author” can be substituted for “the Gods” in such a work: “The Gods decreed he would pursue this quest.” Right, mate. The author decreed he would pursue this quest until sufficient pages were filled to procure an advance. (Nick Lowe)

• Second-order Idiot Plot

A plot involving an entire invented SF society which functions only because every single person in it is necessarily an idiot. (Attr. Damon Knight)

Part Five: Background

• “As You Know Bob”

A pernicious form of info-dump through dialogue, in which characters tell each other things they already know, for the sake of getting the reader up-to-speed. This very common technique is also known as “Rod
and Don dialogue” (attr. Damon Knight) or “maid and butler dialogue” (attr Algis Budrys).

• The Edges of Ideas

The solution to the “Info-Dump” problem (how to fill in the background). The theory is that, as above, the mechanics of an interstellar drive (the center of the idea) is not important: all that matters is the impact on your characters: they can get to other planets in a few months, and, oh yeah, it gives them hallucinations about past lives. Or, more radically: the physics of TV transmission is the center of an idea; on the edges of it we find people turning into couch potatoes because they no longer have to leave home for entertainment. Or, more bluntly: we don’t need info dump at all. We just need a clear picture of how people’s lives have been affected by their background. This is also known as “carrying extrapolation into the fabric of daily life.”

• Eyeball Kick

Vivid, telling details that create a kaleidoscopic effect of swarming visual imagery against a baroquely elaborate SF background. One ideal of cyberpunk SF was to create a “crammed prose” full of “eyeball kicks.” (Attr. Rudy Rucker)

• Frontloading

Piling too much exposition into the beginning of the story, so that it becomes so dense and dry that it is almost impossible to read. (Attr. Connie Willis)

• Infodump

Large chunk of indigestible expository matter intended to explain the background situation. Info-dumps can be covert, as in fake newspaper or “Encyclopedia Galactica” articles, or overt, in which all action stops as the author assumes center stage and lectures. Info-dumps are also known as “expository lumps.” The use of brief, deft, inoffensive info-dumps is known as “kuttnering,” after Henry Kuttner. When information is worked unobtrusively into the story’s basic structure, this is known as “heinleining.”

• “I’ve suffered for my Art” (and now it’s your turn)

A form of info-dump in which the author inflicts upon the reader hard-won, but irrelevant bits of data acquired while researching the story. As Algis Budrys once pointed out, homework exists to make the difficult look easy.

• Nowhere Nowhen Story

Putting too little exposition into the story’s beginning, so that the story, while physically readable, seems to take place in a vacuum and fails to engage any readerly interest. (Attr. L. Sprague de Camp)

• Ontological riff

Passage in an SF story which suggests that our deepest and most basic convictions about the nature of reality, space-time, or consciousness have been violated, technologically transformed, or at least rendered thoroughly dubious. The works of H. P. Lovecraft, Barrington Bayley, and Philip K Dick abound in “ontological riffs.”

• Space Western

The most pernicious suite of “Used Furniture”. The grizzled space captain swaggering into the spacer bar and slugging down a Jovian brandy, then laying down a few credits for a space hooker to give him a Galactic Rim Job.

• Stapeldon

Name assigned to the voice which takes center stage to lecture. Actually a common noun, as: “You have a Stapledon come on to answer this problem instead of showing the characters resolve it.”

• Used Furniture

Use of a background out of Central Casting. Rather than invent a background and have to explain it, or risk re-inventing the wheel, let’s just steal one. We’ll set it in the Star Trek Universe, only we’ll call it the Empire instead of the Federation.

Part Six: Character and Viewpoint

• Funny-hat characterization

A character distinguished by a single identifying tag, such as odd headgear, a limp, a lisp, a parrot on his shoulder, etc.

• Mrs. Brown

The small, downtrodden, eminently common, everyday little person who nevertheless encapsulates something vital and important about the human condition. “Mrs. Brown” is a rare personage in the SF genre, being generally overshadowed by swaggering submyth types made of the finest gold-plated cardboard. In a famous essay, “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown,” Ursula K. Le Guin decried Mrs. Brown’s absence from the SF field. (Attr: Virginia Woolf)

• Submyth

Classic character-types in SF which aspire to the condition of archetype but don’t quite make it, such as the mad scientist, the crazed supercomputer, the emotionless super-rational alien, the vindictive mutant child, etc. (Attr. Ursula K. Le Guin)

• Viewpoint glitch

The author loses track of point-of-view, switches point-of-view for no good reason, or relates something that the viewpoint character could not possibly know.

Part Seven: Miscellaneous

• AM/FM

Engineer’s term distinguishing the inevitable clunky real-world faultiness of “Actual Machines” from the power-fantasy techno-dreams of “Fucking Magic.”

• Consensus Reality

Useful term for the purported world in which the majority of modern sane people generally agree that they live — as opposed to the worlds of, say, Forteans, semioticians or quantum physicists.

• Intellectual sexiness

The intoxicating glamor of a novel scientific idea, as distinguished from any actual intellectual merit that it may someday prove to possess.

• The Ol’ Baloney Factory

“Science Fiction” as a publishing and promotional entity in the world of commerce.

Tags: bruce sterling, critique, lewis shiner, terms, workshop
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Tutorial for allowing cookies from the SFWA website

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

For the best experience with the SFWA website, your browser must allow the use of two third-party cookies. (What’s a cookie?) To set your browser to allow cookies for SFWA but not from other sites, follow these instructions:

Internet Explorer 6

1. Click Internet Options in the Tools menu, then click the Privacy tab.
2. Click on the Sites… button. If the button is not clickable, then look at the vertical slider bar. If that slider bar is selected to Allow All Cookies, then the SFWA site should run fine. If it is set to Block All Cookies, then you must move the slide to the next setting (High) otherwise you will not be able to allow the SFWA site to use cookies.
3. After clicking the Sites… button, type wildapricot.com into the Address of Web site: box. Click on the Allow button. Then, type sfwa-news.com into the Address of Web site: box, and click on the Allow button again.
4. Click on the OK button, then the OK button on the next window.
5. You’re configured!

Internet Explorer 7 and 8

1. Click Internet Options in the Tools menu, then click the Privacy tab.
2. Click on the Sites button. If the button is not clickable, then look at the vertical slider bar. If that slider bar is selected to Allow All Cookies, then the SFWA site should run fine. If it is set to Block All Cookies, then you must move the slide to the next setting (High) otherwise you will not be able to allow the SFWA site to use cookies.
3. After clicking the Sites button, type wildapricot.com into the Address of website: box. Click on the Allow button. Then, type sfwa-news.com into the Address of website: box, and click on the Allow button again.
4. Click on the OK button, then the OK button on the next window.
5. You’re configured!

Firefox 3

1. Click Options in the Tools menu, then click the Privacy tab.
2. In the Cookies section of the window, click on the Exceptions… button. Type wildapricot.com into the Address of web site: box. Click on the Allow button. Then, type sfwa-news.com into the Address of web site: box, and click on the Allow button again.
3. Click on the Close button, then the OK button.

You’re configured!

Firefox 3 with NoScript Add-on

1. Select Add-ons from the Tools menu. Select the NoScript add-on by clicking on it. Three buttons will appear – click on the Options button. Select the Whitelist tab.
2. Type wildapricot.com into the Address of web site: box. Click on the Allow button. Then, type sfwa-news.com into the Address of web site: box, and click on the Allow button again.
3. Click on OK, then close the Add-ons window.
4. You’re configured!

Netscape 7.2

1. Select Preferences from the Edit menu. On the left side of the Preferences Window, find and double-click on Privacy and Security. Below that now is a list of sub-items – pick Cookies and the settings for cookies will appear on the right. Click on the Cookie Manager button, then the Cookie Sites tab.
2. Next, type wildapricot.com in the text box, and click the Allow button. Then, type sfwa-news.com in the text box, and click the Allow button again.
3. Now click Close, then OK.
4. You’re configured!

Tags: FAQ
Posted in FAQ | 8 Comments »

A Checklist for Critiquing Science Fiction

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

by David Alexander Smith

1. Theme and meaning. Does the story move us? So we emerge from our fictional journey emotionally engaged, or wiser than we went in? Do we remember the story after we’re done? Along the way, does the story force us to think? Do we re-examine, or see afresh, things we take for granted in our mundane universe? (If not, why is the story in an sf setting?) Does the story have a theme? Is the theme integrated with the events?
2. Literature. “Literature is worth reading even when you know how the story comes out?” By that standard, is the story literature? When we read it, are we conscious of the author’s artifice or awkwardness, or is the experience so strong that we are lost in the action and forget even that there’s an author talking to us?

Creating the Universe

3. Imaginativeness. Are we taken to a strange, new, exotic or interesting place? Are the new creations — aliens, technology, societies, all the microchips of life — fascinating? Are their rules of engagement consistent and credible? Are they integral to the new world we are visiting, or just arbitrarily stuck on? Do they fire out imagination?
4. Premise. How well does the fictional universe come across? Is the reader truly transported into another place, a place he could imagine living in? Is the fictional universe vivid? Is it complex? If we could go there, would we want to?
5. Internal Consistency. Does the fictional universe hang together? Are its institutions, governments, cultural mores, technology, history, and other large-scale actions credible? Do you believe that the society shown could really exist as it’s portrayed? Can you slam its doors without worrying that the knobs will fall off?

Peopling the Universe

6. Characters. Do we care about the characters we meet? Do we cheer when they succeed, cry when they fail, boo and hiss when they’re evil, applaud when they overcome their weaknesses? Do they have depth and complexity? Do we find the peripheral, ficelle, and one-scene characters entertaining in their own right?
7. Motivation. Do the characters care? Do they act according to their motives (rather than being pushed around authorially like chessmen)? Do they struggle? When they oppose one another, are their conflicts logical from each one’s point of view? Do they make sensible choices given who they are and what they know?
8. Believability. Do we see ourselves in these characters? Where they differ from us, do we understand how they came to be who they are? Do we say, “there but for the grace of God, go I”?

Storytelling

9. Plotting. Does each action follow naturally from its predecessors? Is it a natural outgrowth of the personalities of the people who create it? Are the storyline mysteries natural (rather than manipulative)? Are the characters whacked around by powerful large forces that we know and appreciate? Are big things at stake? Are the characters locked in to their problem?
10. Pacing, tension, and drama. Does the story hook us? Does it hook us quickly? Are we intrigued by the end of the first page? Are we drawn forward by events, always wanting to know more? Does tension swell and contract like a muscle, building to a powerful climax? Does the climax resonate with the theme? Are we on the edge of our seats?
11. Dramatic economy. Do the things in which we readers invest at the story’s beginning pay off by its end? Does the story reward the careful reader with cookies of sparkling scenes, characters, insights, and dialog? Does it punish the careless one by peppering the text with information vital to the story? If we skip any twenty pages, have we missed something that we have to go back and re-read?
12. Language. Is the language striking? Are we hit with eyeball kick images that make us stop and gasp? Do the sentences flow? Do they create mind pictures? Does dialog bring characters to life? Can you tell who is speaking even without attribution? Is description maintained throughout the action so that we never feel blinded or muffled/ Is the imagery rich? Is the language worth reading aloud?

Tags: critique, david alexander smith
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Some Notes on Critiquing Method and the CSFW Critiquing Manifesto

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

by David Alexander Smith

Those of us who’ve been in the Cambridge SF Workshop for some time have developed an approach to critiquing that we find serves us well. These principles — our Critiquing Manifesto — help us work together to create the best fiction we can.

1. Why Are We Here?

Often workshops founder because the people have different reasons for attending. Everyone in CSFW subscribes to a basic principle:

We’re here to help one another produce our best fiction.

All other goals are subordinate to that. If you want to work out personal issues in your fiction, that’s fine, but if the results are bad fiction, you can’t defend yourself by saying your life happened that way.

2. How Do We Critique?

We subscribe to a two-edged commitment to criticism: (A) Tell the truth, and (B) Criticize the prose, not the writer.

As a critiquer, not a reviewer, comment on anything that moves you. Line edit if you want. Argue with character motivation. Question the rubber science. Suggest alternate plot lines. Identify clearly what you think needs improvement.

At the same time, you must respect the author’s right to tell his own story. To be sure that the critics understand the objective of a work critiqued in pieces (such as a novel), the author often submits an overview of the story’s objectives. Without this, critics sometimes misinterpret the author’s intent, and thus suggest improvements that run counter to what the author’s trying to achieve.

Critics have a duty to help the author achieve his or her objectives — not yours. You may not like heroic fantasy, but if you’re critiquing an author who does, you have to provide suggestions for making it more fantastic or more heroic. You’re not here to demand that an author change his agenda. You can suggest other agendas, but if the author declines them, you must help the author go his way, not yours. Several points follow from this.

A. You must do the work.

It’s unacceptable to say, “I never read military action stories, so I’m not going to comment on this.” Wrong. You’re not here reading for pleasure. You’re here because other people have agreed to work on your material. And they won’t do that unless you work on theirs. Put in the hours, even if you’re struggling to find things to say.

B. Be general first.

If something bothers you over and over, state the general issue first. The other participants — who didn’t write the material but read it, just as the critiquer did — can evaluate the general issue and think about it.

C. Then be specific.

It’s not enough to say, “the characters are wooden and the plot is slow.” Which characters? When don’t they react appropriately? Where does the action flag? Why do you feel it’s slow? Identifying chapter and verse as an illustration helps everybody examine the issue.

D. Then be constructive

Once you’ve identified the problem, suggest an answer. “She shouldn’t just sit there when he threatens her, she should tear his face off.” Show us how you’d do better what you think the author did inadequately.

The author, of course, doesn’t have to take your suggestion, but the act of examining an alternate story line is enormously helpful. All too often, writers see their stories as having no options — they must occur a particular way. The eye-opening experience of examining a whole different road will often jog someone’s thinking process so that the author will create a third solution, neither his original choice nor the critic’s alternate, that’s better than both.

3. How Do We Listen?

As an author, you must absorb what is said to you. That doesn’t mean you accept it or reject it, it means you listen to it. You take it seriously as being motivated for your benefit. Perhaps you say back to your critic, “I was trying to do this, but it didn’t come across. How could I have gotten that idea (feeling, theme, view) to work for you?”

Being critiqued in a roundtable workshop is no fun. You sit there, naked and exposed, as someone goes over your flaws with a microscope. Ouch! A bunch of other people who’ve also read your material agree with the critic. Double ouch! Emotionally you’re in turmoil, but intellectually you’re realizing that a good chunk of what’s being said is dead right. So you don’t even have the normal defense of rationalizing that your critic is full of beans.

How do we get through this and come back for more? Because the prose gets better. Just like exercise, which hurts at the time but produces results, workshopping reveals all the flaws and lets you correct them. And, when you come right down to it, wouldn’t you rather hear the problems from a few folks in private, than have editor after editor recognize them, reject your story, and never tell you? Or worse, have your story published with the flaws there for all eternity, for hundreds of people to notice and cluck over?

That’s why in our workshops:

A. No outsiders

You can’t be vulnerable with other people if there’s somebody who can take free shots. What goes around must come around, otherwise the temptation to cheap-shot a helpless victim is too great.

B. Everyone must submit periodically.

A person who stays in the workshop for a long time without submitting becomes effectively an outsider.

C. You have to build trust.

You have to come to believe that people really are trying to help you, otherwise you’ll close up to the comments.

D. Things are written down.

You can react to them later, after the pummeled feeling subsides.

E. Over time, we become very respectful of one another.

We hold nothing back in terms of identifying and pounding problems … but we’re all extremely solicitous of each other’s intentions.

4. What About Giving Away Ideas?

We’ve had people get very upset when given ideas or when asked for ideas. “I’m not going to write your story for you!” Is that a valid fear?

If you write something and I suggest an idea to improve it, you don’t have to accept it. That act of acceptance or rejection — that artistic and literary choice — means you’re still the author, all the way across the board.

Now how about me? I came up with this neat idea and gave it to you. My cleverness is going to show up in print under your name. Aren’t I shortchanged by that?

In 19 years of critiquing, I’ve never felt that way. To begin with, I’ve always received lots and lots of neat ideas from the workshop. My work is peppered with them. They make my books stronger. Second, my idea that shows up in your story would never have occurred to me, but for the fact that you created an environment where it popped into my head. I’ve given you the benefits of an hour or two’s thought, and received in return ideas that I’d never have developed in ten hours’ thought. We’re both better off.

As long as things are reasonably reciprocal, everybody wins.

If you stick with it, sooner or later everybody gets published. Everybody progresses. Everybody achieves. When that happens, each person in the workshop can share in that wonderful feeling, because everyone contributed to making it happen.

Tags: critique, david alexander smith, workshop
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Being a Glossary of Terms Useful in Critiquing Science Fiction

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

by David Smith

This is only a partial list of the terms we have found most useful in critiquing sf. The glossary is issued now and then … but it is a living document. Amendments are welcome. If you use additional terms, or have better examples than those listed here, please suggest them.

• Action outline presents the plot and conflicts with little regard for staging. The author is describing a world idea, not telling the story. An action outline is a synopsis of a book not yet written; it is a precursor to a scene outline. See Scene Outline.

• At stake. Drama is powerful if something is at stake: that is, if the characters involved have something to gain and something to lose. The reader must have something at stake as well — a desire to see the outcome. Usually this is either a stake in the theme, in the characters and their aspirations, or in the resolution of the conflict. When nothing is at stake, there is no drama. (Jim Morrow)

• Author surrogate. A character whom the author, consciously or unconsciously, models after himself. Such characters (e.g. Jubal Harshaw, Stranger in a Strange Land) often dominate the story when they should not, or acquire too many positive attributes, too few faults. Author surrogates often hog the point of view to the detriment of other characters.

• Authorism. Inappropriate intrusion of the writer’s physical surroundings, mannerisms, or prejudices into the narrative. Overtly, characters pour cups of coffee whenever they’re thinking, because that’s what the author does. More subtly, characters sit around doing nothing but complaining that they don’t know what to do … because the author doesn’t know either. (Tom Disch)

• Backfill. Providing background in the storyline flow, rather than in a prolog. Many devices are available: flashback, lecture (generally static and to be avoided), dream sequence, explanation to an ignorant character. A subset of Exposition.

• Bait and switch. When an author encourages the reader to invest attention in a developing emotional or suspenseful situation (‘bait’), only to substitute (‘switch’) a high-action payoff which has nothing to do with the previous development, or a POV cut so that the expected climax is unresolved but instead left to the reader’s imagination. A bad habit because it leaves the reader feeling vaguely unfulfilled and unwilling to invest energy in future setups, because the reader doubts that paying attention will be rewarded. (CSFW: Alex Jablokov.)

• Begin fallacy. Describing action that is introduced to the reader for the first time by saying that so-and-so ‘began to’ <verb>. Eliminating the ‘began to’ almost always strengthens the text. A detail of Style.

• Big scene. A scene is big when its drama is powerful and when the drama is central to the theme. Big scenes should occur at regular intervals, neither bunched too closely together nor strung too far apart. (Jim Morrow)

• Black box scene analysis. A convenient means of evaluating how important a scene is. Think of the scene as a black box: characters go in to it and come out of it. What have they gained or lost? What irrevocable things have happened? How are they different people afterwards than before? The black-box scene analysis is a useful means of separating local dexterity (entertaining imagery) from important plot or character development. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Blood and guts. Describes an event or scene which involves characters in their fundamental, primal desires, stripped of convention, artifice, or propriety. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Bogus alternatives. Cumbersome narration of infeasible actions which a character didn’t take because it would mess up the story. Usually goes overboard and includes long-winded explanations why. If you’re going to handwave past a dumb choice, the faster you do it, the better. (Lewis Shiner)

• Bridge. A sentence or paragraph which connects two different scenes together. Often used to get into and out of flashbacks.

• Caesar’s palmtop. A handy device an author introduces, in all innocence, whose existence in this particular fictional universe implies a huge offstage infrastructure that demands so much overhead explanation that it knocks the reader out of paying attention to the story. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Card tricks in the dark. Authorial cleverness to no visible purpose. Wit without dramatic payoff. (Lewis Shiner)

• Characters. Those who people the premise, affect it and are affected by it. The best characters are complex, with good and bad points, triumphs and tragedies. They face moral choices. Over the course of the story, they evolve and their evolution mirrors the theme the author is after. They care strongly and face obstacles, and because of these the reader cares strongly for them. Examples of excellence: Herbert, The Dragon in the Sea, Sparrow, Ramsey, Bonnett; Silverberg, The Man in the Maze, Muller, Boardman, Rawlins.

• Chekhov’s gun. If you put a gun onstage in Act I, Chekhov once wrote, you must use it by Act III. A Chekhov’s gun is a fictional element (threat, character, mystery, prize, challenge) introduced early and with fanfare and in which the author expects the reader to invest. That investment must pay off with deployment later in the story even if the Chekhov’s gun then disappears offstage for a long interval. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Chewing the furniture. Characters who are over-emoting for their situations. The term is adapted from the theater, where it is used to describe poor actors who ham it up. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Chrome. From the chrome on an automobile. Scenic detail which has no plot significance but brings a place, character or period to life. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Clever-author syndrome. Where an author shows off with some literary fireworks — ten-dollar vocabulary, obscure references, overly artful constructions — which remind us how smart the author is but detract from the story. (CSFW: David Smith).

• Conflate. ‘To blow together’: to combine two similar dramatic elements (such as characters or scenes) to eliminate dramatic redundancy.

• Conflict. The opposition of forces between focus characters and their surroundings: either other focus characters or ‘natural forces’ (which include, in addition to the elements, peripheral characters). One can have conflict without drama, but it is almost impossible to have drama without conflict.

• Cookie. An element, not necessary to the plot, which rewards the reader who has been paying careful attention. Ideally, a cookie is a clever turn of phrase, an image, an allusion, or some other element of richness which the lazy reader will pass by Then the careful reader, who finds it, realizes that the author has left this small package just as a reward for paying attention … and that, in turn, encourages the reader to pay even more attention. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Countersinking. Expositional redundancy, usually performed by an author who isn’t confident of his storytelling: making the actions implied in the story explicit. “‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said, urging her to leave.” (Lewis Shiner)

• Dare to be stupid. An exhortation by a critic to an author whom the critic thinks is not stretching enough. Authors grow by daring to write bolder, more imaginative, more personal, or more emotionally powerful situations and confrontations. Since writing that stretches is by definition unpracticed, the result may be rougher than a less ambitious effort. The author must trust the critics to recognize the stretch and help the author build or expand his talents. (CSFW: Steve Popkes)

• Destage. To move offstage action which has been shown onstage. Things can be intentionally destaged (when they’re undramatic) or unintentionally (when the author’s staged the wrong things). (CSFW: Steve Popkes)

• Destination. The emotional endpoint of a story: where the author’s intent coincides and rings with the action in the story, where the experiential contract between writer and reader is fulfilled. The author sets out to create certain responses in the reader; the destination is the place where the author does so. One may have plot destinations (Frodo gets to the Crack of Doom), character destinations (Frodo masters the Ring and himself), or understanding destinations (Frodo learns he’s adult and strong enough to scour the Shire). But stories must always have destinations. In the best writing, the characters’ struggle involves multiple destinations that relate to one another (inner and outer journeys echo each other). (CSFW: Steve Popkes)

• Deus ex machina. Miraculous (often offstage) solution to an otherwise insoluble problem. Look, the Martians all caught cold and died! (Lewis Shiner)

• Disengage (to). A reader who is not paying close attention to the text is disengaged. Offstage action or a poorly-realized fictional dream disengage the reader: he skips or skims sentences, paragraphs, pages or whole chapters. The ultimate disengagement is the reader who puts down the book without bothering to finish it.

An author must use both carrot and stick with the reader. Punish a reader who disengages, by making sure that necessary material is woven throughout the book, so that nothing may be skipped. Reward a reader who engages, by making every scene alive, tight, and well-written.

• Drama. The ability to create powerful scenes, to present conflicts in a way which grips the reader, whether or not the storyline is believable. The tension of conflict forms the bedrock of drama. Example: Bester, The Demolished Man. Drama differs from conflict because drama takes place exclusively onstage, and in a manner the reader engages. Drama differs from staging to the extent that the drama is the conflict present in the situation, staging the extent to which it is realized in front of the reader. Badly staged conflict loses most of the force of its inherent drama.

• Easter egg. Adapted from computer programming, a specialized form of cookie in which the author ‘hides’ some surprise, not germane to the story (indeed, often irrelevant or irreverent), deep within the text, to be discovered only by the closest possible reading. For instance, in Quest of the Three Worlds, Cordwainer Smith encoded, as the first letters of consecutive sentences, the phrases KENNEDY SHOT and OSWALD TOO, without disrupting the flow of his narrative. Tuckerizing is a form of easter egg. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Economy. At the beginning of a story, the author invests words in introducing characters, premise, plot. The reader invests time. By the end of the story, those elements should pay off. A story is economical if all elements introduced pay off, preferably in many different ways. Stories which introduce elements that later prove largely irrelevant are uneconomical, lead the reader to disengagement. Good Varley (Millennium, Ophiuchi Hotline) is extremely economical. The epic form can sustain a certain intentional use of uneconomic structure; indeed, it may be said to be part of the epic form. Wolfe, Book of the New Sun, is lavishly and deliberately uneconomical. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Edges of Ideas. The places where technology and background should come onstage: not the mechanics of a new event, gizmo, or political structure, but rather how people’s lives are affected by their new background. Example of excellence: the opening chapters of Orwell’s 1984. (Lewis Shiner)

• Emotional Circuit Breaker. A tendency in an author to cut away from a scene when the stakes get high, just as it is reaching its emotional peak, often followed by a lower-stakes retelling or narration of the same events (but safely removed in time or space). Generally speaking, the emotional circuit breaker is a bad thing, because it deprives the reader of the tension and excitement created by the immediacy. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Emotional Disturbance. The internal corollary to the out-of-whack event, it represents a character whose inner state is fundamentally unstable and who must do something assertive to restore equilibrium. Often the out-of-whack event triggers the emotional disturbance, but sometimes a character’s emotional disturbance can be the reason the out-of-whack event occurs. (CSFW: Pete Chvany)

• Empathic Universe. A common feature of melodramatic or romantic writing, it occurs when the author customizes the environment to match the protagonist’s moods. Lightning flashes as a Gothic horror opens; fog descends when the protagonist is confused; rain falls on funerals but the sun returns when the mourner becomes hopeful. Usually overused. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Engage (to). Used intransitively, it means a reader who is paying close attention. Used transitively, it means an author or a piece of fiction that forces the reader to pay close attention. A reader who is engaged is following closely, intent on capturing everything that occurs in the story. The stronger the reader’s engagement, the stronger the fictional dream. Stories which are economical, and in which the important events occur onstage, engage the reader. Readers are also engaged when scenes are so vital, alive and well realized that the reader cannot skip past them. See Local Dexterity. Setting action offstage, or including inefficient material, causes the reader to disengage. Puzzle-oriented mysteries engage the reader, because anything and everything may be a clue. The primary objective of the first four pages of any story is to hook and engage the reader. Whatever its flaws, Dune accomplishes this by the striking visuals of its early scenes. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Exposition. Directly conveying information from author to reader. This may be done through overt description by an omniscient narrator, a mental movie camera inside the head of a point-of-view character, dialog among characters, and other ways. In exposition, normally less is more; it’s better to learn a setting as a byproduct of engaging action than through exposition.

• Expository lump. A chunk of exposition that, whether or not relevant to the plot, is insufficiently integrated into the story being told. As such, is seems to come from left field, as if a page from an encyclopedia accidentally got shuffled in. Asimov is famous for these. A subheading, known as “I’ve Suffered For My Art (And Now It’s Your Turn)” occurs when the author, having done masses of boring research, proves this by unloading them on the stunned reader.

• Eyeball kick. A perfect, telling detail that creates an instant and powerful visual image. (Rudy Rucker)

• Fast forward. The literary convention of shortcutting things the reader already knows but the characters may not. Example: Rex Stout’s Archie Goodwin: “I got home and told Wolfe everything that had happened since I stumbled over Helaine Bradford’s body in Adam Roberts’ room. He grunted occasionally and belched when I was done.”) Especially handy in mysteries. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Fat writing. A plethora of unnecessary and grandiose verbiage — too many words. A woman “saw me abandon my wagon and shovel for greener pastures and intersected me” could become a woman “across the street stopped me.” Why not be simple? Also known as verdant greenery. (CSFW: Sarah Smith)

• Ficelle character. From the French word for ‘string,’ a term used by Henry James to denote a character who exists simply to move the plot or drama from place to place. In Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” Rosencranz and Guildenstern are ficelle characters. Vladimir Nabokov called them peri characters. (CSFW: Alex Jablokov)

• Fictional dream. The illusion that there is no filter between reader and events, that the reader is actually experiencing what he is reading. The stronger the fictional dream, the more immediate the story. Disrupting the fictional dream is usually bad. Pointless digressions, expository lumps, lists, turgid prose, unrealistic characters, or a premise with holes in it, all disrupt the fictional dream. (John Gardner)

• Film it. A self-test of critiquing. To judge a scene or chapter, mentally convert it into a movie or screenplay. This effectively subtracts all narration and exposition and leaves only description, dialog, and action. Things which shrink dramatically when filmed are heavy on telling, light on showing. (CSFW: Steve Popkes)

• First-draft-itis. Various flaws which everyone, including the author, agrees immediately should be corrected. E.g.: a character who has blue eyes in Chapter 2 has brown eyes in Chapter 7; or an important feature of the society which is first manifested in Chapter 20 and implicitly contradicted in what was written before. See Retrofit.

• Focus character. A character who serves a dramatic purpose greater than simply illustrating or illuminating the world — a character about whom the reader cares even when he’s offstage. Focus characters have distinct personalities; they further the themes and interact directly with other focus characters. In Lord of the Rings, for example, Saruman is a focus character but Sauron is not (he’s a natural force). (CSFW: David Smith)

• Fog. A reader’s state of inability to imagine clearly the setting or action the author is presenting. Usually arises because the author has skimped on tactile description or otherwise shortchanged the reader of critical external clarity. Stories can (and should) sustain motivational ambiguity but they should blow away fog. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Foreground (to) (v.t.). Draw attention to for artistic effect, or make the central element in a scene or story. (CSFW: Sarah Smith)

• Frame. A structure which puts boundaries on a story about to be told — as, for example, a character announces to another character, I’m going to tell you a story. Often used in a prolog. Sometimes used to link many stories together into a novel form, as in The Canterbury Tales, where the pilgrimage is the frame, or The Bridge of San Luis Rey, where the bridge collapse is the frame. (CSFW: Steve Popkes)

• Freeze-frame. Adapted from the movies, a brief pause for description of a new person, thing, or event. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Gag detail. Unnecessarily unrealistic detail that blows the credibility of the story. “I can accept a Neanderthal going to Harvard, but a Neanderthal with a middle name? Gag.” (CSFW: Sarah Smith)

• Get-it-in-the-mail syndrome. Prose over which the author, in his eagerness to finish a work, has taken too little time or care. It implies that the author can easily fix the problems if he concentrates on them. (CSFW: Sari Boren)

• Grouper Effect. Named after the grouper, which eats by opening its capacious mouth and swallowing a huge volume of water, toothlessly capturing its prey in the resulting suction, the specialized form of get-it-in-the-mail syndrome which results when participants in a workshop feel get-it-in-the-mail pressure to submit works to the group. A pun. (CSFW: Alex Jablokov)

• Handwaving. Distracting the reader with verbal fireworks to keep him from noticing a severe logical flaw. (Stewart Brand)

• Head fake. A plot action that appears to be significant but is rapidly proved to be a net null, leaving the plot moving in exactly the same direction. Excessive head fakes undermine the reader’s engagement because the reader becomes trained that they are not real. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Here-to-there mistake. Over-describing interim stages because of a mistaken belief that the reader will not infer them. A writer whose character’s eyes are closed, for example, wants to describe something visually and feels compelled to say, ‘he opened his eyes’. Omitting this phrase usually works better — the reader can infer the eye-opening from the visual description. Similarly, ‘he got into the car, put the key in the ignition, started the engine and backed out of the driveway’ is too much description: ‘he got into the car and backed out of the driveway.’

• Homoism. Similar to Nowism, the mistake of making aliens behave in inappropriate human ways, use inappropriate humanoid gestures or facial expressions, or generally manifest their emotions in human terms. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Honorable near miss. Description of a work which aims at a worthwhile objective but fails to achieve it. (Quoted by Darrell Schweitzer)

• Hook. Making the reader engage quickly. In a novel, the reader must usually be hooked in the first chapter; in a short story, by the end of the first page.

• Imitative fallacy. The common trap of trying to make the narrative imitate the personality of the protagonist. When the novel is concerned with an unlikable or inaccessible protagonist, the narrative is also unlikable and inaccessible. Since the reader cannot figure out the protagonist, nor is the reader given any reason to care about the protagonist, the reader disengages. The prose must transcend the imitative fallacy. Two examples of excellence are Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry (hypocritical evangelist), and Babbitt (smug placid businessman). (CSFW: David Smith)

• Inappropriate metaphor. A metaphor should serve two purposes: create a tactile image and also convey an emotional or contextual subtext. A metaphor is inappropriate when the subtext is inconsistent with the author’s intentions: “The desert cowboy blew out his bearded cheeks like a startled puffer fish.” Puffer fish in the desert? (CSFW: Alex Jablokov)

• Inappropriate mystery. An author will often use mystery as a means of propelling a reader forward: characters speak of things that are opaque to the reader, a character goes offstage to do something important, or a development is referred to indirectly (“I was just heading out the door when the phone rang, with terrible news”). Mystery is inappropriate when the expected dramatic followup is lacking: the offstage action proves to be a diversion, or the suspense proves false. (CSFW: Steve Popkes)

• Info dump. Another accurate term for an expository lump.

• Instruction manuals. Unnecessary description of how futurist technology works. Best dumped entirely, because they usually signify that the author’s so proud of his device he can’t risk describing its operations. “Bob spoke into the telephone, where his sounds vibrated the compressed charcoal, producing an electric current that traveled over the wires … ” See how silly that sounds? (CSFW: David Smith)

• Laputa. Named after Gulliver’s floating aerial island, this is a fictional construction introduced without foundation. Readers will initially delight in Laputas but, the longer they float along without foundation, the more their suspension of disbelief erodes. They thus tend to work best in small doses like short stories. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Laughtrack. Emotional countersinking, where the characters’ give cues that tell the reader how to react. They laugh at their own jokes, cry crocodile tears at their own pain, and, by feeling everything themselves, eliminate the reader’s imperative to do so, so the reader disengages. (Lewis Shiner)

• Local dexterity. An authorial facility with the micro-units of fiction — lines, images, paragraphs, even scenes — so that they are a pleasure to read and are vivid to the reader. Example of excellence: anything by Ross Thomas. Local dexterity can occasionally disguise the absence of drama or conflict in a scene. A symptom of this: after reading a piece, the critic thinks, “I really enjoyed reading it but nothing happened.”

• Lock in (to). A character is locked in to a situation when he cannot escape from its conflict, usually because the stakes are high enough, and the consequences of non-participation so onerous, that trying and failing to better than doing nothing. For example, Robinson Crusoe is locked in; he must survive. Usually there is an irrevocable action, early in the story, which locks the character into his problem.

• Maid-and-butler dialog is dialog in which (probably ficelle) characters tell one another things they should already know, so that the reader can overhear them (“So sad that Madame had her cardiac arrest in the parlor and was carried out on a green stretcher last Thursday, June fifth, Nineteen Thirty-Four,” or, “Gee, Rod, here we are on Mars. It’s a good thing we were able to flee the wreckage of our burning spacecraft.”) Usually manifested by apparent simple-mindedness of the characters forced to deliver these inanities.

• Main character. The most important (sole?) focus character.

• McGuffin. An external constraint (object, fact, person) whose sole dramatic purpose is to force a character or characters into actions which serve the author’s dramatic theme. Examples: the Maltese Falcon, the One Ring (in Tolkien). (Alfred Hitchcock)

• Melodrama comes in two varieties.
  • Melodramatic Settings are when the environment too-visibly reflects, often in a pushbutton fashion, the characters’ emotional state (Bogart in the pouring rain on the Paris train platform, being stood up by Ingrid Bergman).
  • Melodramatic Actions are taken by peripheral characters for the principal purpose of making the protagonist’s life miserable and without furthering the peripheral character’s own objectives; indeed, they are often nonsensical or contrary to the peripheral characters’ interests. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Microwaving the soufflé. A tendency to rush past important setup material in the author’s haste to get to the payoff. Generally leaves the reader feeling frustrated on two counts: (1) the setup, being rushed, is uninteresting, and (2) the payoff, being insufficiently set up, is not earned. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Milepost character. A character who is absolutely unchanging throughout a story. A focus character’s different perspectives on him or him show us, in emotional parallax, how the focus character has changed. Examples include Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield and Bill Ferry in Lord of the Rings.

• Mime conversation. A dialog supposedly loaded with portentous significance to all participants – contorted facial expressions, heavy word emphasis, significant looks – completely opaque to readers because relevant facts are neither stated nor inferrable. “But when you told me that – ” “-s! And thus he couldn’t – ” “Of course, and I was such a fool, so now if — ” “not if, but-when! And — ” Such conversation infuriating to the reader and also cheat him of the genuine emotional conflict and change that are core to viable fiction. (CSFW: David Smith)

• More ink around the dogs. A colloquial exhortation to emphasize a bit of chrome, taken from an otherwise dreadful story featuring fascinating dogs, the only feature the critics found worthy in the entire tale. (CSFW: Sari Boren)

• Motif. A recurring visual objective correlative of the theme. In Catch-22, for instance, the theme is that war is insane, so the recurring motif is one character calling another character crazy, under a wide variety of circumstances, so that we continually revisit the same element, each time with a different view. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Motivation. Characters act for two reasons: (1) the author wants certain things to happen in a story, and (2) the actions further a character’s objectives. The latter is motivation; when it is bad, the reader becomes angry with the apparent stupidity or illogic of the character, and disengages. See Plot-Driven.

• Nowism. Short for ‘now-chauvinism’. The tendency to export present-day forms, conventions, technology or morality to a future setting where they are inappropriate or unlikely. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Objective correlative: the tangible manifestation of an intangible, created and used by the author to help the reader grasp the intangible concept. Most literature is about emotions or ideals — things that you cannot see or touch. So the objective correlative becomes a focus, a tangible surrogate. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, the painting becomes the objective correlative of Dorian Gray’s soul — it shows the invisible rot. In The Scarlet Letter, Hester’s child is the objective correlative of her sinful passions.

An important characteristic of objective correlatives is that they are usually vested with attributes which tilt the reader toward the emotion the author wants him to feel in relation to the intangible being staged. (T. S. Eliot)

• Offstage. Events which occur other than onstage. Examples: reminiscence, narration, indirect quotation. Events which can only be inferred are the ultimate distance offstage.

• Onstage. Events which are shown directly to the reader, who becomes a real-time observer while the action takes place. Onstage events are more dramatic and the reader weights them more important than events offstage.

• Organ music. Details which seek to countersink an emotional response in the reader even before anything happens (such as crackling lightning and rain outside a window before anyone’s murdered). (CSFW: David Smith)

• Out-of-whack event. In Aristotelian drama, the story concerns a character whose stable life is knocked out of whack by an external force. The remainder of the story concerns his attempts to put his life back into whack, and his success or failure. The out-of-whack event inaugurates the struggle.

Commonly the out-of-whack event occurs at the novel’s opening (e.g. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land, Valentine Michael Smith is brought to Earth; or Zelazny, Nine Princes in Amber, Corwin recovers his powers but not his memory). It may already be in the past (e.g. Silverberg, The Man in the Maze, the aliens tamper with Muller’s brain to broadcast evil emotions).

If the out-of-whack event is delayed too long, the story seems to move slowly. “Shoot the sheriff on page 1.” (CSFW: David Smith)

• Overhead. The amount of reality-bending in a science fiction or fantasy story which the reader must absorb as a precondition of enjoying the work and appreciating the dramatic point. Science fiction has more overhead than mainstream fiction: the author is building a world that does not exist so as to stage something which cannot be illustrated in the world that does exist. Staging overhead unobtrusively but unmistakably is always a problem; the shorter the work, the harder the problem (see Info Dump). Well-balanced stories have no more overhead than necessary to make the dramatic point; part of the difficulty in writing sf short stories, thus, is the need to provide overhead in a cramped space. This may in part contribute to the proliferation of used furniture, which (however tacky and cliched) is at least familiar and thus requires less overhead. (CSFW: Alex Jablokov)

• Pace. The timing by which the major events in the plot unfold and by which the big scenes are shown. Dramatic tension is largely a function of pace. Pace is also the process of stretching out the big scenes (slowing down time) and compressing the offstage action (speeding up time) to match the reader’s emotions.

• Packing peanuts. Elements included in a story to fill out spaces between big scenes or important events. All stories need some packing peanuts; be wary of stories which are nothing but packing peanuts. (CSFW: Alex Jablokov)

• Pay off (to). To be employed later in the furtherance of the dramatic or thematic intent of the story. Under the principle of economy, elements which fail to pay off weaken the story and cause the reader to disengage. (Jim Morrow)

• Perception fallacy. If a scene is told from a particular character’s point of view (that is, no omniscient narrator), everything shown in that scene must be perceivable by the POV character. The perception fallacy is the common mistake of assuming that, if this is so, all description must be filtered through the senses of that character, rather than being presented directly. (“I got into the cab. I saw that the steering wheel had blood on it. I looked under the seat and found the knife.” rather than “I got into the cab. The steering wheel had blood on it. The knife was under the seat.”)

The difference is whether the POV character is intrusive and disruptive or unobtrusive. This often has several unintended negative consequences:

1. Reality is filtered through an extra lens. Instead of saying “rain poured down” the author writes “I felt the rain pour down”. A story always has one filter — author telling reader — and good authors generally try to make the author as unobtrusive as possible. Adding this second filter — author telling character to tell reader — is not only uneconomical, it is also often intrusive.
2. Feeling trapped into the restriction that all information must come to the point-of-view character, with the result that characters often rush onstage to tell the point-of-view character something. This is even worse than the first problem, because now we have a third filter: character telling character telling author telling reader.
3. Confusion between the perception of the author, the narrator (if any), and the POV character. See Author Surrogate.

• Peripheral character ego. The antidote to superman syndrome, the legitimate desire of peripheral characters to be doing something even when being ignored by the protagonists and author. Every peripheral character should behave (whether onstage or off) as if he or she is the most important actor in the story, with his or her own genuine motivations and independence. Tom Stoppard, the maestro of this conceit, built it into a whole play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Phildickian. Named for Philip K. Dick, a surrealist science fiction writer, it describes situations in which reality and illusion become indistinguishable, or moments when the reader’s perception changes so that reality becomes illusion or vice versa. ‘When two people dream the same dream, it ceases to be an illusion’ — Philip K. Dick. (CSFW: Sarah Smith)

• Plot. The external motivation, the narrative melody around which the story is told. Plot is the action that dramatizes premise or makes characters come to life. Example of excellence: Heinlein, The Moon in a Harsh Mistress; Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, and many others.

• Plot-Driven is action which occurs, not because the characters are motivated to make it so, but because the author wants to yank the story in a particular direction. Usually manifests by the characters refusing to act in the way that the author has programmed them to, or by being wooden when performing the actions in question. (CSFW: Steve Popkes)

• Plot inversion. Events are meaningful to the reader when the reader understand what they signify. Thus for a scene to be meaningful, there must be (1) table-setting to establish what is at stake, and (2) the action itself. Normal plot construction puts the table-setting first, so the reader is prepared. Plot inversion reverses this order, so we have the events and only later learn what they mean. Although this can sometimes be very effective (it’s a standard device in whodunit mysteries, where deceiving the reader is part of the game), usually it’s a mistake. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Point of view and point-of-view character. The ‘hidden camera’ through which the reader perceives a scene. It may be inside a focus character (we see that character’s thoughts and reactions to events), it may move among characters, or it may remain outside of all characters as either an omniscient narrator or an active, present author-voice (e.g. John Fowles, Italo Calvino) commenting on the action.

  Point of view is a scarce resource, since it may be only one character at any one instant. Almost by definition, the reader will perceive the point-of-view character as the most important in a scene, and will be sympathetic to the point-of-view character (see Author Surrogate). Identical action will be perceived very differently by the reader if the point-of-view character is shifted (e.g. Rashomon; or Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet and The Avignon Quincunx). Granting a character point-of-view status for a scene usually signals that the character is a focus character, and is an easy way to separate focus and peripheral characters at the beginning of a story. Among the common points of view are:

  • THIRD PERSON:
    • Omniscient: The narrator knows everything, can shift in time and place at whim, from character to character, inside people’s thoughts, feelings and motives.
    • Intrusive: The narrator editorializes on the story being told (Dickens, Fielding, Dostoevsky, John Fowles).
    • Unobtrusive or impersonal: Presents the story without comment (Zola, Flaubert, Dashiell Hammett).
    • Limited: The narrator is confined to a single character, sitting on his shoulder or inside his head, observing only what is available to that character (Henry James, Raymond Chandler).
  • FIRST PERSON narrator is almost always intrusive and limited: confined to a single character who may be a witness (c.f. The Great Gatsby), a minor participant (Doctor Watson), or the central character (Chandler’s Philip Marlowe). First person narrators are frequently either reader surrogates, author surrogates, or both.

• Polysyllabism. The tendency to use a big word for effect even when a small word is better. (CSFW: David Smith)

• POV. Abbreviation for point of view.

• Powderpuff. The authorial habit of being too nice to characters about whom the author cares. Violates the basic principle, if you want your reader to care about your characters, do horrible things to them early on. Also called Pitty-Pat. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Premise. The science fiction universe. In mainstream fiction, the premise is almost exclusively the present, real world. Science fiction uses the real world as a springboard or boomerang; it changes one or more major elements, then builds from that difference, showing us the shadow-side of changing human biology, technology, sociology, or psychology. Example of excellence: LeGuin, Left Hand of Darkness, the planet Winter populated by human beings who are hermaphroditic neuters for most of their lives; Huxley, Brave New World, regulation in the guise of hedonism; Asimov, The Foundation Trilogy or I, Robot.

• Protagonist. The central character of a story. Often the protagonist is a POV character or the sole POV character, but not necessarily (Sherlock Holmes is the protagonist, but Doctor Watson has the POV throughout; same for Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin).

• Pump up (to). Expanding a scene’s staging to give it more impact on the reader: foreshadowing it, placing it onstage, stretching out time, increasing the stakes. It is the literary foreplay that allows a scene to deliver its maximum dramatic impact. (Jim Morrow)

• Punish the careless reader. An authorial device to make a reader engage: to sprinkle throughout the story information vital to understanding subsequent events; this punishes the careless reader by making him retreat and reread. Punishment works only when matched by rewarding the careful reader. See Cookie. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Pushbutton words. Words used to evoke an emotional response without engaging the reader’s intellect or critical faculties, like ‘song’, ‘poet’, ‘tears’ or ‘dreams’. They are supposed to make us misty-eyed without quite knowing why. Commonly found in romance novel titles. (Lewis Shiner)

• Reaction shot. From the movies, a cutaway shift inside a bundle of narrative action which shows us the emotional or other responses of a character, usually a reader surrogate.

• Reader cheating. Producing a result (a surprise, a deduction, an unexpected denouement) without having given the reader a fair opportunity to foresee the result. For instance, having a detective deduce the murderer based on evidence the author has willfully concealed from the reader is reader cheating. (Example: a point of view character who knows things and acts on them but lies in internal narrative so as to distract the reader.) (CSFW: James Patrick Kelly)

• Reader surrogate. A focus character who voices or experiences the thoughts, reactions and emotions which the author desires the reader to have. Usually the point-of-view character, usually observing a scene or being acted upon (e.g. being tortured or interrogated). (CSFW: David Smith)

• Rear-view mirror description. The habit of describing things only after they’ve figured in the action, never before they’re used. “She dodged behind the boulder that she’d just seen out of the corner of her eye.” The effect on the reader is that the description isn’t seen for itself, but rather as if glimpsed only in the rear-view mirror. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Red velour shirt. A character (usually a ficelle character) whose sole purpose is to die or otherwise be abused as a means of demonstrating that a situation is dangerous. Usually used in indicate that the character in question is insufficiently realized. From the old “Star Trek” television series, where the faceless crewman who beamed down with Kirk, McCoy, and Spock inevitably wore a red velour shirt and died before the opening credits. See “He’s dead, Jim.” Rosenkranz and Guildenstern wear red velour shirts. (CSFW: Steve Popkes)

• Replacement principle. The axiom that, in the future, everything we know now will be replaced with something more technological and better. Often an important means of avoiding nowism, it can sometimes be taken to absurd extremes. (Kathryn Cramer)

• Retrofit. An editing term. To rewrite a previous chapter or scene for the purpose of making a later scene work better, by setting up something that is needed later, introducing a premise, situation or character so that its presence later in the story is justified. To revise a previous chapter or scene to conform details to what is necessary later in the story. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Reward the careful reader. The counterpart of punishing the careless reader: rewarding means, in this case, providing extra bonus details, small bits of readerly pleasure. Tuckerizing (see below) is a simple example; others are eyeball images, resonant metaphors, throwaway jokes, and so on. “As for you, the writer, never forget the following: the reader is like a circus horse which has to be taught that it will be rewarded with a lump of sugar every time it acquits itself well. If that sugar is withheld, it will not perform.” — Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars. (CSFW: David Smith) See Cookie.

• Rhinoceros. Abbreviated from “there’s a rhinoceros in the room,” this is an attribute (a story element or of the author’s writing) which is shriekingly obvious to everyone except the people closest to it. (In horror movies, the idiotic willingness of characters to split up and search dark mansions is a rhinoceros.) The term is most useful in a critiquing context as a means of helping an author identify recurring tropes, tics, or fetishes in his own writing. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Rubber science. An explanation which, although probably false according to what we know of the universe, sounds technical and convincing. Rubber science is acceptable in all forms of sf except hard-core hard sf, where the main dramatic point is the complete credibility of the science shown. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Rules of engagement. An element of overhead: the definitions of permissible and impermissible contact and behavior of a fictionally-created device or being. Aliens are most real when they have consistent rules of engagement, which operate according to logic not easily visible to the reader, but which is nevertheless clear to the aliens (and, most likely, to the author). Often when designing aliens or rubber science, it is helpful to write a separate description of the rules of engagement, not to be included in the story (where it would be an info dump), but rather as a guide to the author as to what the new creation will and will not do. (CSFW: Steve Popkes)

• Runaround. Frenetic activity by characters we don’t care about, usually in search of objects or goals we’re uninterested in seeing them achieve. Usually injected into action stories when the author realizes that he’s failing his dramatic objectives. Can be recognized when, although the action is fast and furious, the reader skims along with a glazed eye. Often the more spectacular the gore — e.g., the more bodies left on the battlefield at scene’s end — the greater the runaround, and the weaker the story. A tipoff of weak characterization. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Said-bookisms. Large words that mean ‘said,’ designed to connote additional information not conveyed in dialog or description. If used to excess, they result in overwriting: “I’m climaxing!” he ejaculated. See also Tom Swifty. (CSFW: James Patrick Kelly)

• Scene is the basic dramatic sub-unit — an interaction involving one or more focus characters. Scenes are usually ended by the announcement that time has passed (‘a week later’), by a termination of the dialog (‘she left then’), a shift in point-of-view character, or an external event (‘the room exploded’). A scene which straddles a chapter break is a guaranteed tension-maintainer.

• Scene outline is a blow-by-blow description of the onstage events. It covers everything the action outline covered, but also (1) segregates background information from the narrative flow, (2) identifies point-of-view characters, (3) addresses what is shown onstage, what offstage, (4) is subdivided into scenes or chapters. A scene outline is often a useful successor to an action outline: it can help a writer avoid staging scenes which are undramatic. The following things typically go into it:
  • Expression of the theme
  • Background information, broken into convenient subheadings
  • Scene-by-scene description of the story.

Any outline should define any jargon it intends to use. Focus characters should be introduced with solid capitals so the reader-critic knows to pay attention. An outline should be edited and polished, if not for drama, at least for clear economical exposition. Often scene outlines are written in present tense. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Segue. Another term for bridge: a phrase or sentence which links two different scenes. In general, the smoother and less obtrusive the segue, the better.

• Shadow staging. Presenting a crucial event (such as an out-of- whack event) by its consequences rather than showing it directly. In Sophie’s Choice, for example, Sophie’s choice is shadow-staged throughout the whole novel. (CSFW: Steve Popkes)

• Simile of action. Metaphors or similes can be considered as a means of coining adjectives by repackaging nouns: “He was as strong as a bull, rosy-fingered dawn, it was as easy as pie.” Metaphors are relatively seldom used to convey adverbs, and especially seldom to convey intention. It can be done in a few words if you know what to look for: namely, a simile in a structure such as: “He <verb> as if he was <metaphoric verb>ing,” as in a sentence like “he regarded the outstretched hand as if it were a day-old fish.” This has the extremely desirable result of describing intention without shifting narrational point of view; the technique can be used with high frequency without becoming obtrusive. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Smart subconscious. Term used when a critic (or the author) reviews text in light of a new approach or theory and discovers, much to his or her surprise, that within the previous text are a whole series of small items or details which help express this approach or theory; the smart subconscious was planting them in hopes that they would eventually be discovered. Smart subconscious is a possible explanation for subtext. (CSFW: Paul Tumey)

• Snark rule. “I tell you once, I tell you twice, what I tell you three times is true.” Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark. When three or more critics concur on an element in a story, it is highly likely to be true. (Jennifer Jackson)

• Sorcerer’s apprentice’s mop. A device or gadget which, if introduced into a society will spread, become pervasive, and change every aspect of society (cf. the telephone or the nanobots in Greg Bear’s Blood Music). Authors who intend such devices as throwaways introduce them into their stories at great peril, because eventually the author must either abruptly chop off exploration of the gadget (frustrating the reader) or make it the focus of the entire story (frustrating the author). (CSFW: David Smith)

• Space western. A pernicious form of used furniture where every Martian or Jovian town looks and sounds like Dodge City (Lewis Shiner).

• Staging is bringing scenes to vivid life, making them so tangible and evocative that the reader is transfixed, bringing out the inherent drama or magnifying it so that it hits with great force. Example: Peake, Titus Groan, Steerpike in the kitchen with the chef Swelter; Orwell, 1984, O’Brien interrogates Winston Smith.

• Stalling. When an author, knowing a big scene or crucial event is upcoming, writes desultory here-to-there scenes as a means of deferring the more difficult (and emotionally charged) task of writing the big scene. Common in first drafts. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Stapledon. A character prone to holding forth, at length and without interruption, while various info dumps are unloaded on the helpless reader. Often surrounded by sycophantic peripheral characters whose lines are generally limited to, “Why, it certainly seems so, Socrates. No man of sense could dispute that.” (Lewis Shiner)

• Storyboard. Adapted from the movies, a visually-oriented simple description of the events in a scene. Often useful for authors wishing to structure or restructure their plots and separate these elements from dialog, narration and other details of technique. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Style. Style is using words to create an aura, an effect that permeates the story. Extreme style becomes baroque, obtrusive stylization, but when handled deftly, the words become part of the fabric of the world. Examples: Cordwainer Smith, Norstrilia; Zelazny, Lord of Light or Jack of Shadows; and Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun. Example of style run amok, disguising melodrama: late Hemingway.

• Story clock. The pace at which action is internally described. See fast forward and travel time. (CSFW: James Patrick Kelly)

• Subtext. A secondary level of action or content in a scene. Not stated overtly — that is, not perceived by the characters — and sometimes not even consciously perceived by the author.

• Superman syndrome. The habit of magnifying the good points of focus characters and either giving them no bad points whatsoever or obscuring and rationalizing the minor ones they have. Usually leads to melodrama and heavyhandedness. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Tense. The dominant verb-tense in which the main story is told. Most are told in straight past tense, although in a few cases (e.g. Tiptree, Brightness Falls from the Air; Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale) the present tense is sustained throughout. Tense is a very powerful way of distinguishing point of view or voice. Giving the present-tense solely to one character immediately makes that voice unique, whenever and wherever the reader encounters it.

• Texture encompasses both crispness of prose and efficiency of delivering images to the reader. At one level, it is word choice: at another, image choice. (E.g. when dealing with aliens in whom smell is the dominant sense, most things should be described by their aroma, and the characters should respond to aroma rather than to other attributes.) See Inappropriate Metaphor.

Texture often completes the circle by building a whole-book, macro-level vision of the premise by sustained, consistent micro-level evidence. Examples: Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, where the Russopunk vocabulary is laced throughout the book; and Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar, which intercuts storylines with news broadcasts, ads, and other vignettes of existence.

• Thematic Redundancy. Retelling essentially the same story without changing any major element.

• Theme is the underlying element which governs the author’s selection of dramatic events to show onstage. Can be a belief (e.g. Catch-22, war is insane, only lunatics fight in wars), a proposition to be proved, a moral dilemma, or an attribute of human character.

The theme of Left Hand of Darkness is sexuality; Dragon in the Sea, neurosis; and Lord of the Rings, the evil of power. Implanting the theme in every aspect of the story — setting, characters, plot, texture — often strengthens its power. In Left Hand, beings who are sexually indifferent live on a planet named Winter. Cold affects every aspect of the story just as neuter androgyny affects the personality of every character. Just as the point-of-view character — a normal human who serves as the reader surrogate — becomes physically cold, he becomes sexually neutral.

• Three-act structure. The classic plot:
  • Act 1. The protagonist’s life is knocked out of whack. He confronts an obstacle which he is locked in to solving or being vanquished by. In great literature the obstacle is tied directly into a specific theme.
  • Act 2. The protagonist investigates the obstacle, tries to solve or conquer it, and is repulsed, leaving him worse off than before. The situation is desperate.
  • Act 3. Using the knowledge gained in Act 2, the protagonist formulates a new plan and risks all. The story’s resolution may be heroic (the character succeeds and the reader is uplifted), tragic (the character is destroyed but the reader learns something about the theme from his destruction), or nihilistic (the character is destroyed and no one learns anything). (Aristotle)

• Tic. A minor mannerism — verbal, visual or otherwise — which is uniquely assigned to a particular character as a means of identifying him. One character twirls his hair; another ends many of his sentences by saying “right?” Used properly, they help the reader distinguish among characters in the early going and can, by the finish, be sufficient to identify a character even without further attribution. (Jane Yolen)

• Tom Swifty. A fetish for adverbs, usually in modifying speech. “‘We’d better hurry,’ said Tom swiftly.” As Strunk and White say, an adverb is a leech sucking the strength from a verb. Whenever the tone is clear from the context or dialog, omit the adverb. (Lewis Shiner)

• Toon. A comic relief character generally intended to be recognized as such — Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are toons (most of Shakespeare’s comic relief characters are toons). Toons have a limited place in fiction; an excess of them can render an otherwise serious work trivial. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Travel time. A component of pacing. Characters don’t reverse important decisions in their personalities overnight. The emotional distance a character travels should generally be proportionate to the amount of travel time — measured in words — the change requires.

Travel time can be increased by intercutting a different story, by filling the intervening space with straight action, or by developing other characters, description or thematic material.

• Trope. A figure of speech, usually used to describe overworked images, literary or dramatic conventions, or stale ideas borrowed from other authors. See Used Furniture.

• Tuckerizing. Named after Wilson Tucker, the practice of introducing as peripheral characters, or offstage icons, names recognizable to the reader. (For example, naming the Moon’s capital Heinlein and its main street La Rue de la Professor Bernardo de la Paz.) A subclass of rewarding the careful reader.

• Underserve. When an author gives an element less stage time than it deserves. Most often underserved are peripheral characters or those for whom the author feels little sympathy. Stories are strong in proportion to the obstacles — events or bad guys — that the good guys overcome. If you underserve your peripheral elements, you undercut your drama. (CSFW: David Smith)

• Unperceived source. An inspiration for an author’s creation which the author does not recognize until it is pointed out to him. Many authors resist acknowledging their unperceived sources. (Geoff Ryman) See smart subconscious.

• Unreliable narrator. A storyteller who is eventually revealed to have been concealing the truth, or even mis-stating it (unintentionally or deliberately). A development of twentieth-century literature (first made famous in Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd), the unreliable narrator is often used to force the reader to reinterpret events previously experienced. (CSFW: Steve Popkes)

• Unstage. To destage something intentionally. Often used as a rewrite term.

• Use it or lose it. A critiquing comment. A story or novel will introduce many elements, some of which are put onstage at an early point in the proceedings with the apparent implication that they will figure in later action. If the element is later unused, the reader feels dissatisfied, because he has not been rewarded for paying attention to it. Thus a critic will often note an element in a story with a recommendation that it either to pumped up to play in the themes or plot (use it) or that it be deleted (lose it). (CSFW: Steve Popkes)

• Used furniture. A background out of Central Casting, often chosen by an author too lazy to invent a good one. (Lewis Shiner)

• Voice. The narrational form used. Often confused with point of view, but it is distinct. The same scene, told from the point of view of the same character, will have a very different texture if done first-person-singular (“I raced down the alley”) rather than third-person-singular (“Our hero raced down the alley”). In very rare occasions (e.g. McInerny, Bright Lights/ Big City), second-person is used (“you open the door and are hit in the head; lights explode in your brain”). In a story with multiple points of view, each character may have his own tense and voice, and thus distinguish characters on a textual level.

Adjusting voice can increase or decrease the distance between author, reader and character. Using first-person, for example, brings reader and character practically into the same head. Using a narrative-reminiscence style shortens the distance between reader and author.

• Watson. A supporting character whose principal purpose is to voice the reader’s confusions and concerns, so that the protagonist is given an opportunity to answer them without resorting to expository lump. “My God, Holmes, you mean the bell-pull was a snake?” (CSFW: David Smith)

• White Room Syndrome. An authorial imagination inadequate to the situation at hand; most common in the beginning of a story. “She awoke in a white room.” The white room is obviously the white piece of paper confronting the author. (Lewis Shiner)

• Zipper story. A particular form of story involving two (or more) alternating strands, which in the story’s beginning appear completely unrelated but which over time come closer and closer together until their connection becomes the story’s climax. Fred Pohl’s novel Gateway is a zipper story. (CSFW: David Smith)

Tags: critique, david smith, definitions, glossary, terms
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Joan Marie Verba

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

Joan Marie Verba has a physics degree, wrote novels Action Alert and Countdown to Action, nonfiction books Boldly Writing and Voyager: Exploring the Outer Planets.

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Eileen Gunn

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

Eileen Gunn is a Nebula-award-winning writer and the editor/publisher of the Infinite Matrix website. She serves on the board of Clarion West.

Tags: Eileen Gunn
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Mike Allen

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

Mike Allen edits the anthology series Clockwork Phoenix and the poetry journal Mythic Delirium. His story “The Button Bin” is a 2008 Nebula Award nominee.

Tags: Mike Allen
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