Copyright © 1998 by Robert A. Metzger. First published in the Summer 1998 issue of the Bulletin of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

Interstellar space travel. We dream about it. We write about it. Science fiction writers have come up with all manners of interstellar travel, ranging from multigenerational arks, to wormhole generating warp drives that can spit you across the galaxy in a blink of an eye. As wondrous and amazing as all these approaches may be, most suffer from a very fundamental problem.

Traveling for long distances, over long periods of time, can be a colossal pain in the butt. You can never pack all your stuff. You always forget something. Did you lock the door? Did you turn off the iron? You forgot to say good-bye to Aunt Mildred, who will be dead by some 12,000 years when you return due to relativistic effects. And then there is that library book you forgot to return.

What to do?

The answer should be obvious. Just take it all with you.

I’ve got a solution, one that I consider very practical. My method does not require any magic physics – the ability to go faster than the speed of light, or jump about the galaxy by way of Star Gates. No. I am going to use good old fashion basic rocket science. Metzger’s Rocket Science Law #1 says that momentum must be conserved (some of you with a historical fetish and knowledge of obscure ancient scientists might recognize this as Newton’s Third Law of Motion – for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction). If you throw something out of the back of your rocket ship with mass m1 at a velocity v₁, then the momentum of this exhaust is just the product of these two components – m₁v₁. As a result, your rocket ship will be propelled in the opposite direction of the exhaust, and with the exact same momentum. This means that if your rocket ship weighs m₂, then the velocity of your rocket will be v₂ = m₁v₁/m₂. It’s as simple as that. If the mass of what you threw out is the same as your rocket, then you will move at the same speed as the rocket fuel (but in the opposite direction). The heavier the rocket, the slower you go.

You now know everything you need to know about rocket science.

Now back to my discussion about taking it all with you.

Forget all this business about building really big spaceships, or hallowing out asteroids and strapping on big fusion engines. No. The ideal solution is to simply move the entire planet. If you want to travel the 4 light years to Alpha Centauri, then just move the Earth those 4 light years. That way you don’t have to pack your bags.

It all goes with you.

Now there is one little problem with this plan. We depend on the Sun to keep everything running on this planet. Without the Sun we’d all be popsicles by the time we moved Earth out past the orbit of Mars. Well, the answer to that problem is obvious. We’ll need to take the Sun with us.

What the heck, let’s just move the entire solar system.

And here is the really beautiful part of this plan. You don’t have to do a single thing to planet Earth. Unlike the case in which you try to move the Earth, you don’t have to drain the oceans to get enough hydrogen to run the big fusion reactors needed to move the planet (which would probably occupy all of Australia and a sizable chunk of Europe). If you move the Sun, the Earth, along with all the other planets, just come along for the ride by way of gravitational attraction.

So all we have to do is move the Sun.

First, we need some sort of engine, something to heat up our fuel so it is moving really fast when we blow it out of the back of the engine (remember Metzger’s First Law). Well, we are in luck. The sun is the perfect engine. In fact that’s all it is. It’s one big fusion reactor. And the really amazing part is that it is almost all fuel. There is very little overhead. If and when we ever build a fusion reactor on Earth, the thing will probably weigh in at several thousand tons and be able to fuse a few micrograms of hydrogen. Not a very efficient use of mass. The sun is 78% hydrogen by weight, all of which can be used for fusion to generate energy.

What else does the sun have? It is in possession of some really intense magnetic fields. And that is a good thing, because we can take advantage of those fields. Here is where I wave my future technology wand. I will speculate that in the not too distant future (100 to 1000 years) that we can perturb the magnetic fields in the sun. And why would we want to do that? The reason is that if you take a hydrogen atom (which consists of a proton and an electron) and ionize it (remove the electron from the proton), what you are left with is a positively charged proton and a negatively charged electron. Forget about the electron (it weighs some 1835 times less than the proton), and use the proton as the mass which you are going to shoot out of the Sun. It will be no problem. If you shape those magnetic fields right, the positively charged proton can be shot out of the Sun moving at nearly the speed of light. It’s just like a particle accelerator.

Proton propulsion.

We’ll need a lot of protons.

The sun weighs 2×10³⁰ kilograms (a 2 followed by thirty zeros), while a single proton weighs in at 0.167×10^-26 kilograms (that is 26 zeros before the decimal place). However, that is for a proton which is sitting still. If you get it going near the speed of light (3×10⁸ meter/sec) then its mass increases (special relativity). For this little example, let’s assume that we can use those magnetic fields to push the proton up to 99.9% of the speed of light. In that case, the proton’s mass has increased by a factor of 22 and now weighs in at 3.74×10^-26 kg. Well, shooting one relativistic proton out of the sun is not going to move the sun very fast by Metzger’s First Law. In fact, its velocity is going to be 5.61×10^-48 meter/sec. This is definitely not very fast. In fact, at this speed, if you wait 10 billion years, the sun would have moved some 10^-30 meters, or roughly one-billion-millionth of the width of an atom.

This is not what I would exactly call interstellar travel distances.

Obviously, what we need are more protons being shot out of our proton propulsion system. Let’s make it easy on ourselves, and say that we would like to get the Sun moving at 20% of the speed or light – .20c (that’s a good value – fast, but not so fast that the Sun’s mass increases very much due to relativistic effects). So by Metzger’s First Law, to get the Sun moving at .20c we would need to shoot out a mass moving at the speed of light which weighs .20 times the weight of the sun. That sounds bad. If we threw away 20% of the sun’s mass some bad things might happen on Earth. The gravitational tug on Earth would lessen, and our orbit would slip further out. Also, the energy output of the sun would lessen (it’s now got less fuel burning). Both these effects would really cool down the planet (perhaps that would be a good thing if we hadn’t yet addressed global warming). But fortunately, since our protons are now so heavy (because they’re moving at 99.9% c, and their mass has increased by a factor of 22), we need to roughly throw out only 1% of the Sun’s mass as long as it is in the form of these heavy protons.

Not so bad.

So here is the plan.

We turn on our proton rocket engine, and keep the exhaust pointed in the opposite direction from Alpha Centauri (you need to remember that the sun is rotating on its axis once every 25 days at the equator, so we need to keep shifting the location of our proton exhaust to take this into account). Let’s accelerate at a very gentle 0.01 g – that is only 1/100 of the gravitational force that we feel on Earth (by contrast astronauts may pull any where from 3 to 10 gees when launching from Earth). After one day of accelerating at that low rate, the Sun is already moving at 18,000 miles per hour. What we need to do is keep accelerating until we cover 2 light years distance (the half way point), and then turn the direction of our proton exhaust by 180°, so that we can then decelerate back to zero velocity over the next 2 light years (quite some braking distance). So the question is, how long does it take to cover those 2 light years, and what is your velocity when you reach that point? The equations are really easy:

D = .5AT²
V = AT

Where D is the distance covered (in this case 2 light years which is 1.86×1016 meters), V is the velocity of the sun when you reach 2 light year mark, A is the acceleration (which for 1/100 of a g is 0.098 m/s²) and T is the time in seconds. Performing those calculations (I will leave that as an exercise for the reader), it turns out that the 2 light year distance is covered in 19.5 years, at which point the velocity of the solar system will be just .2c. Isn’t that handy, since I have already showed you that by Metzger’s First Law we can get the solar system moving to .2c by throwing out 1% of the sun’s mass, just as long as the proton exhaust is moving at 99.9% of c. During our 19.5 year outbound acceleration we are tossing protons out of the sun at a rate of 6.6×10²⁰ kg/sec. That is a lot of protons (actually 1.77×10⁴⁶ protons/sec). Once we reach the halfway point and turn the direction of the proton engine, it takes another 19.5 years to bring the sun to a stop right in the neighborhood of Alpha Ceauri. Total trip time is 39 years, and you’ve used up 2% of the Sun’s mass.

39 years is nothing – half of a human lifetime. And remember that you never even had to leave home. Once you get to Alpha Centauri you can explore, take pictures, visit the locals, colonize, do whatever you’d like. You can refuel the sun by gobbling up whatever gas giants you might find there, or by siphoning off a bit of the local Sun’s mass. And then you can be on your way to the next solar system that you’d like to explore.

Make it a 3 million year trip – the scale of time during which proto-humans evolved into us. If you arrive at a new solar system every 50 years, then the human race will have explored some 60,000 solar systems and traveled 240,000 light years during those scant 3 million years.

240,000 light years!

The diameter of our galaxy is only 100,000 light years. During those 3 million years you could travel from one end of the galaxy and back again. And after all that exploring, perhaps the human race would be ready to make the big jump to neighboring galaxies. Andromeda is only 2.2 million light years away. So what if it takes us some 11 million years to get there. That is just a blink in geological time.

And what does it matter, because we will have never left home.

And think about this. Why stop at merely moving the Sun. The same approach could be used to move entire galaxies. We all know that the universe about us is expanding, all these distant galaxies hurtling away from us, all this motion an artifact of the Big Bang. Perhaps not an artifact of the Big Bang. Maybe the resident big brains of our universe have converted the galaxies into massive spacecraft, and they are just going on a little outing to visit the neighbors.

NEWS YOU CAN USE

Fuse This

Fusion reactors in science fiction are as common place as Star Trek novelizations – all pretty much the same thing, based on the same premise, using the same old tired technology. Fusion reactors come in two flavors – get a big plasma chamber, add monster superconducting magnets to hold that plasma in, and then push the temperatures and pressures high enough (trying to build a little sun) and atoms fuse together, throwing off some energy. The other approach is to bombard a small pellet of fuel with some mighty laser/ion beams, and as the pellet implodes due to the shockwave generated, the atoms in the pellet fuse together, throwing off some energy.

That’s how it’s typically done in science fiction.

And that’s also how it’s typically done in the real world. No, at the moment there are no actual fusion reactors producing more energy than they consume, but things are getting close. In the next ten years a monster called ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) which will cost $10 billion may be built, and may just produce more energy than it consumes. ITER follows the old tried and true approach of building a little sun by getting a plasma as hot and dense as possible. Other folks at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory are about to break ground on the NIF (National Ignition Facility) and will give the laser implosion approach a go around.

Those are the two politically correct approaches.

Those are the two which fill our science fiction futures.

But those futures may not come to pass. A few new things are on the fusion horizon. I’m not talking about cold fusion in test tubes, or someone selling snake oil and fusion reactors from the back of a van. This is real.
The Z Machine (1). Forget all those liquid helium cooled superconducting magnets to hold your plasma in. There are other ways to generate a magnetic field. Any time electric current flows through a wire, it generates a magnetic field. What researchers have done at Sandia National Laboratories is to send an enormous blast of electricity through an array of parallel wires – enough electricity to vaporize the wires, transforming them into a plasma, which in turn gets compressed by the magnetic fields generated by the current flow. Compressed plasma gets hot – in this case 1.5 million degrees. Right now the experimental Z machine can produce about 20% of the energy, 40% of the power, and 33 to 50% of the temperature required for nuclear fusion to produce more energy than it consumes. As a bonus, this machine produces X-rays in the 200 terrawatt range (that is million-million watt), more than enough to X-ray every set of teeth on the planet.

Xenon droplets (2). You might think that 1.5 million degrees is hot, but compared to what physicists at Imperial College in London have heated up, the Z-machine might as well be spitting out ice-cubes. By hitting a microscopic droplet of xenon atoms (with about 2500 atoms) with a laser beam, the electrons are torn from the xenon atoms forming an electron cloud which then absorbs energy from the laser. This energy is then transferred to the xenon ions (a xenon atom which is missing some electrons), heating them up to temperatures as high as a reported 940 million degrees, which is 30 times hotter than the core of the sun.
There is more than one way to fuse a cat. Let’s see some creative fusion reactors.

Strange Sightings

A strange sighting which I’ve recently heard about is that of flying frogs (3). These frogs are not flying about by way of some mutant flapping wings. It’s nothing that complicated. These frogs use diamagnetism to perform this feat. When a diamagnetic material is placed in a magnetic field, the electrons orbiting the atoms within the material have a tendency to line up, generating a magnetic field which opposes the field that it’s been placed in. And just what materials are diamagnetic? Almost anything if a large enough external magnetic field is applied.

This includes frogs.

A consortium of researchers from such prestigious institutions as The University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands, the University of Sao Carlos in Brazil, and the University of Nottingham in England used a powerful solenoid magnet (think wires wrapped around a pipe), and placed a frog inside the center of the magnet.

The magnet turns on, and the frog floats.

They’ve also reported success with grasshoppers, plants and water droplets.

The race has begun. I’m certain that it is only a matter of time before monstrous solenoid magnets are installed in Disneyland or Las Vegas (the line between those two continues to blur) so guests may float about. If those two locations are a bit too alien for you, then consider some distant planet with a magnetic field so powerful that the resident aliens can float within it.

Another strange sighting has been reported by Marcus Chown (one of our fellow SFWA members) in a piece he wrote about the trouble when animals come into contact with the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab (4). As expected, there are any number of roasted raccoons, rodents and reptiles which squirmed their way into the facility in search of warmth and then get toasted on megavoltage equipment. Nothing all that weird there. The real weirdness has to do with the 40 buffalo which live at Fermilab. They scamper about the grounds. Some of the locals believe that the buffaloes are very sensitive to radiation and that the labcoats at Fermilab use them as an early warning system. Other rumors deal with a mutant 4 meter tall buffalo which has taken a few too many protons to the chromosomes.

Hello, let me talk to Chris Carter of X-Files.

Look Ma, No Engine

Getting a person, or a piece of equipment into orbit is mighty inefficient. You either need to strap on some huge solid rocket boosters and fuel tanks onto the spacecraft, or put the payload on top hundreds of feet of fuel and engines which will be jettisoned on the way to orbit.

What you need to be really efficient is a rocket without an engine or fuel. Just make the whole thing payload. Well, a group of scientists at the USAF Research Laboratory’s Propulsion Directorate at Edwards AFB, and at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center at Huntsville, have succeeded in launching a vehicle which has no engine or fuel.

You haven’t heard about this breakthrough?

The craft weighs 50 grams and it has reached altitudes as high as 14 feet.

Well, the technology is not quite at the point where you can line up and buy a ticket to launch yourself into Earth orbit, but this still represents a breakthrough. How this little spacecraft works is that a 10 kW pulsed laser is aimed at an annular chamber at the bottom of the craft, where the laser beam is focused, and then bursts the air in that region into a plasma, which in turns explodes away from the rocket, creating thrust. Plans call for the laser-based projectile to reach an altitude in excess of 3000 feet in 18 months. Eventually, an orbital concept would use a ground based laser to heat air while the craft is still in the atmosphere, and then onboard gas when in space.

No engine required. (5)

Turbolution

Turbolution is my word, so please be sure to mention my name when you pick up your Hugo for the story which features this little technology gem. Evolution is a drag. It works so, so slow. Yes, if a species gets the crap knocked out of it for a few million years, and manages not to go extinct in the process, then said species may grow 25% larger and sport a new set of fangs to defend itself.

What we need is turbolution – something to allow a species to evolve in an afternoon. Well, thanks to group working at the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at the University of Sussex, they may have opened the door to turbolution. Consider a typical species which can reproduce itself in five years. In one million years that means you’re looking at 200,000 generations. Not too bad – hopefully something new can evolve in that amount of time.

Now, consider if you are not operating in the organic world, but instead, in the inorganic world – in this case a world dominated by Silicon. These researchers are using a special type of Silicon chip to study turbolution – a field programmable gate array (FPGA). This is a piece of Silicon hardware which can be rewired by software into a nearly infinite number of different types of circuits. One moment the circuit is a modem, and the next it is an amplifier.

As an example, suppose you want to build a circuit in which its output is run into to a speaker, and you want the speaker to say “Hello Dave, this is Hal”. How would you design such a circuit? I don’t know, and with an FPGA and turbolution you don’t need to know. Just start off with a few thousand transistors randomly wired together, and use an audio comparator to check its output to your desired one. Try it 100 times. The ten which come closest you keep, and the other 90 you toss out. You then take the 10 close ones and have the computer randomly rewire some of the transistors. You try another 100 times and again pick out the ten best. You run this process as many times as needed until your circuit tells you what you want to hear.

How long would it take to run those 200,000 generations? The chip can be reconfigured in a matter of milliseconds. The real time is consumed with each version of the chip being allowed to babble for the 2 seconds it needs in its attempt to say “Hello Dave, this is Hal”. So if it takes 2 seconds for an attempt, how long does it take for 200,000 attempts (remember that for the organic it took 1 million years). I’ll do the math for you. It would take 4 days and 15 hours! This improves on organic evolution by a factor of nearly 80 million.

Think about what this means. Build a brain in hardware that can direct its own evolution, and you will find that if it was able to burp and recite Nursery rhymes on Monday morning, that come Friday afternoon, it will have ignited its own Big Bang and become the God of its own universe. (6)

Tabletop Black Holes

Here is a bit of Physics 101 for you. The word power is used all the time, and quite often used incorrectly. Power is defined as the time rate at which work is done, or the amount of energy consumed in a unit of time. A 100 Watt light bulb delivers 100 Watt of power, and in the process it burns up energy at a rate of 100 joules per second (that is how one defines the unit of energy measurement – joules). So who cares? If you burn this energy at twice the rate, then you would have a 200 Watt light bulb, but of course, if you had a fixed amount of energy, it would only burn for half as long before that energy was used up. The faster you use it, the greater the power, but of course that power lasts for a shorter amount of time. Energy is conserved.

Again, so what?

If you take a modest amount of energy, but use it up extremely fast, then for that brief moment, you can generate some fantastically large powers. This is how a new generation of extremely high power lasers are being built, lasers which fire their pulse of energy in times which are measured in femtoseconds (which is one million-billionth of a second – 10-15 seconds). These lasers are now capable of producing power of 1015 Watt, which is a fantastic power level, even though the total energy dissipated is comparable to that burned by a 1 Watt light bulb in 1 second. But in this case that modest amount of energy was burned so incredibly fast. Again, and for the last time, so what? Well, during that femtosecond time interval, so much energy is packed into so short a time and in such a small volume of space, that any charged particles trapped in that region would experience the accelerations, and the electric/magnetic fields that, a particle would experience close to the horizon of a black hole.

Think about that the next time you flip on a light bulb.

Remember to turn off the black hole when you leave the room. (7)

BITS AND PIECES

• Still outlining that 27 volume Mars epic, and want to make sure that you have the latest data before you start terraforming? Then I suggest you check out a special issue of Science which has every detail of the recent Pathfinder mission. (8)
• The University of Tokyo has developed the first biomechatronic robot, by interfacing a cockroach with a robot, in such a manner that the cockroach’s nerve impulses run the robot. Great – a robot which tries to burrow under the refrigerator when the kitchen lights come on (9).
• Another vermin tale. Having trouble routing the latest high speed cable through your business or home? No problem, just call up Rattie. Wearing a harness to pull a nylon string and computer cable behind her, this rat can get the job done. She doesn’t even mind working around asbestos. (10)
• How many elements are there? In the prenuclear days the periodic table ended at element 92 – uranium. Today, atom smashers have pushed the number of elements up to 112. But most of these superheavy atoms are extremely unstable, decaying into lighter weight elements within a few milliseconds. However, theory predicts that element 114 may be quite stable. And what might one make with a stable superheavy element which has never before existed? How should I know? You guys are members of the SFWA – you figure it out. Oh yes, element 126 might be even more stable than 114. (11)
  1. Ivars Peterson, “The Z Machine,” Science News, Vol 153, January 17, 1998, pg. 46.
  2. Jeffrey Winters, “Cluster Bombs,” Discover, January 1998, pg. 52.
  3. Corinna Wu, “Floating Frogs,” Science News, Vol 152, December 6, 1997, pg. 362.
  4. Marcus Chown, “Reckless Raccoon’s Big Day,” New Scientist, December 20/27, 1997, pg. 56.
  5. Paul Proctor, “Laser Thrust Flies,” Aviation Week and Space Technology, September 29, 1997, pg. 15, and Aviation Week and Space Technology, November 3, 1997, pg. 19.
  6. Clive Davidson, “Creatures from Primordial Silicon,” New Scientist, 15 November 1997, pg. 30.
  7. Gerard A. Mourou et al, “Ultrahigh-Intensity Lasers: Physics of the Extreme on a Tabletop,” Physics Today, January 1998, pg. 22.
  8. M.P. Golombek et al, “Overview of the Mars Pathfinder Mission and Assessment of Landing Site Predictions,” Science, Vol. 278, 5 December 1997, pg. 1743.
  9. Philip Yam, “Roaches at the Wheel,” Scientific American, January 1998, pg. 45.
  10. Toni Feder, “Rat Wires Schools for the Internet,” Physics Today, January 1998, pg. 51.
  11. Richard Stone, “An Element of Stability,” Science, Vol 278, 24 October 1997, pg. 571.

Bob Metzger received his PhD in electrical engineering from UCLA in 1983. He spent 10 years at the Hughes Research Labs in Malibu, California, building high-speed electronic devices and trying to beat obnoxious atoms into submission. He is currently on the faculty of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta GA, where he now attempts to beat both obnoxious atoms and students into submission. He writes a science column for Aboriginal SF, and his fiction has appeared in Aboriginal, Weird Tales, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Amazing, and Science Fiction Age. His novel Quad World was published in 1991 by Roc. His e-mail address is rametzger@aol.com.

photo by Beth Gwinn

by James Patrick Kelly

© 1995 by James Patrick Kelly, First published in Writer’s Digest, July 1995

What follows is not for the squeamish.

It’s the nature of writers to fall in love with words, particularly their own. Clever turns of phrase excite us; we beam like proud parents when our protagonists take on lives of their own; a shapely plot twist can turn our heads. There is nothing wrong with indulging in the occasional fling-as long as it stops in draft. When time comes to make that final revision, however, you must harden your heart, sharpen the ax and murder your darlings.

Well, maybe not all of them. Just the shiftless ones, those precious freeloaders who are too busy looking good to do any work. Once you learn how to spot them, you’ll see them everywhere, in unpublishable manuscripts and in award-winning stories, in my work and hers and yours. There are no exceptions; even Shakespeare can be profitably trimmed.

Some writers like to fix problems by addition rather than subtraction. First they layer in just a little more complexity to develop a rounder Aunt Penelope. And then they expand the garage scene, so it will foreshadow the car chase. Last they have Biff’s lawyer explain the rules of evidence to his secretary after the trial so that slow readers will get the end. If these writers worry about wordiness at all, they might tighten a few lines here and there. Drop a “he said,” on page two. Major surgery is for beginners, right?

What they don’t realize is that muscular prose alone can’t lift a narrative. Any sentence, no matter how powerful, that serves no story purpose is just so many wasted words. Obviously, adjective pileups and unnecessary clauses and clunky diction must go. However, effective cutting involves more than line editing. You can also strike whole paragraphs — pages, even! For example, toss out that extra twist and the plot might come clear. Too much costume jewelry weighs characters down so they can hardly move. Rather than reconstruct the pyramids in five paragraphs (despite that week you spent cruising the Nile last summer), pick the two best and invite readers to supply some of their own building materials.

Although I can offer some specific suggestions for what to excise, please don’t memorize my list. These skills are most useful when stored in intuition, not consciousness. The best way to prevent verbosity is to develop an instinct for cutting, which means you should practice every day. I know enough writers to realize there’s no universal technique for getting words on paper. But here’s the routine that works for me.

I write at the computer, the greatest advance in literary technology since the eraser. I spend the first hour or so paring and revising the previous day’s work. This not only promotes the proper mindset but it also helps me re-enter the world of the story. I’m rarely stuck because I always begin with these editorial warm-ups — much easier than first draft, in my opinion. In the middle part of the day I try to compose as carefully as I can. Later on, however, I may let standards slip in order to fill out the daily complement of screens. This admittedly sloppier work will either be cleaned up or pruned first thing the next morning, as the process begins again.

Although I edit daily, I rarely attempt major cuts until I finish a working draft. I like to split production of a finished manuscript into two stages, revision and deletion. In the revision stage I make sure I’ve given my readers enough of everything: plot, character, setting, theme. I search for logic flaws and continuity breaks; I run my spell checker. Revision ends once I’m satisfied that the manuscript is complete and as coherent as I can make it. Only then do I go through it one last time with an itchy finger on the delete key.

How much to trim at this point? Based on extensive reading, I estimate that the current rate of literary inflation is about 10%. I try to do my best to fight it; so should you. Thus, if the revision draft is twenty pages, the submission should be eighteen.

Two pages! How can you carve two pages of living prose from a story without killing it? Here are some things to look for.

Adjectival and adverbial leeches. Start at the sentence level, hunting for the unnecessary modifiers which drain the life out of prose. Strong verbs are the key to taut writing. Rather than, “The ungainly triceratops walked slowly away,” try “The triceratops lumbered away.”

Clumsy entrances and exits. Don’t waste time moving people around; too many doors open and close in fiction. If you want the UPS man to deliver a mysterious parcel, he doesn’t need to knock, come in, and ask Reggie to sign for it. When Janet screams at Bob that she’s sick of his catting around and wants a divorce, why must she also stalk from the house to her car and peel out of the driveway? Some writers try to punctuate emotional scenes with histrionic exits. If the scene isn’t angry enough, fix it. Don’t slam the door.

Unnecessary scene or time switches. Aristotle was wrong about physics but he was right to recommend unity of time and place. Before you board a cruise ship or skip ahead three weeks, always ask: is this trip necessary? When you change venues or let time fly, you take on an extra narrative burden. You must describe the new setting, explain what happened in the interim. Compressing these story elements can save words while shifting the focus back onto character and action.

Overpopulation. In the attempt to recreate the sweep and richness of life, some writers keep cramming characters into a story until it resembles the Marx Brothers’ stateroom in A Night At The Opera. The people you want readers to care about will be lost in a mob scene, so keep the cast to a minimum. Name as few characters as you can, describe even fewer. If you can combine two characters into one, you probably ought to.

Overdramatization. “Show, don’t tell,” can be a dangerous policy. Prolix writers think they must dramatize everything. But a story isn’t a game of charades; you’re allowed to come right out and tell the reader what’s what. Do you really need a rhapsodic paragraph about Amanda’s aquiline nose and alabaster skin and piercing blue eyes and tawny mane when all you wanted to say was that George was attracted to her? When necessary tell, don’t show.

Arriving early; staying late. Not all stories start on page one — only the good ones. If you’re the first at the party, there’s usually nothing to do until the other guests arrive except to stand around and admire the furniture. Writers who start their stories too early have the same problem. They waste time describing the china on the breakfast table, the daisies nodding in the garden. Or else they deliver a weather report. Yet the same people who chuckle at the classic howler, “It was a dark and stormy night,” don’t hesitate to play meteorologist in opening paragraphs of their own fiction. Similarly, when the story is over, stop writing. There’s no need to explain exactly what became of everyone and how they all felt and what it all meant. Memorable fiction rarely ends with the last line. By leaving some things unwritten, you empower the reader to imagine what happens next.

It is one skill to recognize potential cuts, another to make the right ones. A strategy I’ve developed is to read my work aloud in draft; it forces a fresh approach. Try it sometime and listen carefully to the expression in your voice. You may actually hear your interest level peaking and dipping.

For those who just can’t bring themselves to operate on their own fiction, I offer this advice: get a second opinion. Almost anyone can help, even your mom. In fact, if you’re dissatisfied with the criticism she’s been giving you lately, don’t ask for it next time. Instead, just hand her the manuscript and a blue pencil and tell her to prune 10%. While Mom may not have been an English major, she’ll know when she’s bored. Easier for her to remove the slow bits than to critique your subtext.

Unfortunately, the craft of cutting is undervalued in a world where writers are paid by the word. And it shows; you don’t have to look very hard to find padded work in print. Yet clearly it is precision which separates the journeyman from the master. Perhaps the way to grow as a writer is to shrink your manuscripts. Or, as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch so memorably put it, “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it — whole-heartedly — and delete it before sending your manuscripts to press. Murder your darlings.“

When I was teaching short workshops, I found that some beginning writers want business information in the curriculum and others hate it. One critique sheet complained bitterly that I spent a couple of hours on the business end (out of eight) and was “too commercial”. Needless to say, the only people who have ended up published after these workshops have been the ones who weren’t afraid to be commercial.

Novice writers have to take some responsibility for their own careers. The good information is NOT that hard to find. The novices who don’t find it–and don’t find it repeatedly–are resisting the truth.

Example: at a Dragoncon, I heard Anne McCaffrey talk on a 2-hour panel aimed at new writers. She talked, she answered questions, she put out a lot of good information on Copyright issues, agents, editors, contracts, and so on. Patient, firm, clear, all the above.

On her way out of the room, a young man who had been in the audience ambushed her, and asked again, the very basic-stupid question he had asked the panel twice. He was convinced that she had said what she said only because she “had” to say that in public, but in private she could give him the Magic Button to Getting Published.

There is no Magic Button. There is no such thing as a free lunch (not even when it’s charged to the editor’s plastic.)

This kind of novice will claim, to his deathbed, that no one ever told him the real secret to getting published … because, of course, he never listened. No writers’ group, SFWA or any other, can be held responsible for this kind of novice. We are not their fairy godmother, and we have too many other claims on our time to spend much effort trying to break through their fantasy.

How do I know? I was once a hopeful hobby writer myself, who had a wistful vague dream that someday a shaft of light would beam down from above, trumpets would sound, little drifts of glittering gold would land on my shoulders, and I’d be anointed Real Writer. I would know it. My mother would know it. My friends and their friends would know it. And of course editors and publishers would know it instantly. Fame and fortune awaited me; I had only to wait until the right moment.

While in this hazy dream, I didn’t seek out any practical knowledge whatsoever. I didn’t go to the library and find writers’ magazines or books on how to write. I didn’t take courses. I didn’t join a writers’ group. No: if I had the talent, someday the light would come. I wrote bits of stories and sent them to a friend who was in a graduate English program; she trashed them and sent them back. Then I’d go into a decline (mentally wailing and worry about my talent) before before trying again. (The one thing I did right, was write. At least I was working on the salable skill, if not the skill to sell it.)

The turnaround for me came when something (I now forget what) shook me out of this idiotic daze and I realized that if I wanted to be anything other than a science fictional Emily Dickinson, I would have to know some practical stuff. The “getting published” side of writing was more like “getting a driver’s license” or “getting to Europe” than having a religious experience.

I had gone from “it sure would be nice to hike along mountain trails” to reading, researching, renting equipment for short hikes, buying equipment, and finally hiking along mountain trails pretty competently. I had gone from “it sure would be nice to be able to ride horses over fences” to reading, researching, taking lessons on the flat and over fences, leasing a horse, buying a horse, and riding my own horse over fences.

So … what was this silly nonsense about a spotlight from on high when it came to getting published?

From that revelation came an immediate burst of research–which did not take long to put me in touch with perfectly good sources of information. The information is out there. It is available. You can tell the good stuff from the scams just as easily as you can in any other field. All it takes is applying the same business attitude you would if buying a car, a house, a horse. While any writers’ organization (including SFWA) may provide general information on the business of writing and the realities of a writer’s life, you don’t have to find it here–it’s in every library.

Genre-specific info is another thing entirely. By the time I went to a half-day SF workshop, I already knew about manuscript preparation, why I shouldn’t be looking for an agent yet, which publishers handled SF, and so on. I had finished three books and quite a few stories; I had been submitting stories for over a year. But I had no idea what a science fiction convention was, or why anyone would go. I knew no writers (SF or other, except for reporters at the county newspaper), no editors, nothing.

The workshop presenter mentioned SFWA and handed around a copy of the Bulletin. I had read about SFWA (briefly) in Writer’s Market; the presenter, and the Bulletin, convinced me it was an organization with something to offer. In other words, I was ready to hear what SFWA had to say.

He also explained conventions (sort of … ) and I decided to get a one-day membership to the NASFiC in Austin that year. While I did not meet any science fiction writers then (I had two sales, but nothing out in print; I felt suspended between novice and neo-pro) I had the chance to see them, watch them, and start figuring out the tribal customs. The workshop also gave me an immediately useful bit of advice (“Send your stories to an editor whose choices you already like — he’s most likely to like yours”) which was responsible for my first hard-SF sale, about three months later.

But there were over thirty people at that workshop. Many were where I had been a few years before — drifting along day-dreaming of being writers by annointment. They had never finished a story; some had never started a story. They wanted to hear that they were talented — they wanted the beam of light to come down and mark them as Instant Real Writers. They couldn’t hear the practical advice being given, and they have never sold a thing, even if they kept writing. Another group were almost ready to hear it — close enough that they formed a support group, and most of those later achieved at least one professional sale.

I’m coming on strong here, because I just spent another half-hour writing back to a newbie with a fantasy novel who is desperate to find an agent, and has gotten a nibble from someone who wants a reading fee. I spent an hour yesterday combing my files and essentially re-writing several articles for him. He came back with a bunch of “yes, but … ” sorts of things. If he writes me again, still misty-eyed because someone is willing to read his work, I’ll give up. He’ll have proved himself determined to be fooled. I have mail waiting from someone who wants me to read her work and tell her she’s talented enough to keep going — although I’ve told her before to workshop her stories in her own area (which has writers’ groups.) I’ve spent hours and hours with promising beginners (some of them now thoroughly published) when I felt they were taking in the info I could give, but I do not have the time to waste on people who want the Magic Button or the Free Lunch or the Secret Decoder Ring to the Publishing Empire.

The Basics

For Beginning Writers

by Melisa Michaels

As a writter, these sentences look odd to me.
This essay will be of interest to many writer’s and literary type’s.
I use to think things like this were a waist of time if you just want to write fiction.
Now I know that writers half to know there basics.

If you cannot find at least two errors in each of the above lines, this article is for you.

Those lines should read:

As a writer, I find that these sentences look odd.
This article will be of interest to many writers and literary types.
I used to think things like this were a waste of time if you just want to write fiction.
Now I know that writers have to know their basics.

We aren’t concerned here with flowing prose, glowing phrases, or any stylistic questions; before you worry about those things you need to know how to spell the words you want, how to choose from among similar words with different meanings, how to punctuate, and how to put the parts of a sentence together in such a way that the result makes sense.

Without this basic knowledge, not only will you have difficulty communicating, but you may produce unintentionally hilarious results. There are reasons for all the seemingly arbitrary rules of grammar and punctuation. Some of them can be dismissed once you know what they are; others cannot. To communicate what you really mean, you must know which rules can be safely broken; and to know that, you must know the rules.

The easiest way to learn them is (this is the good part) by reading the sort of fiction you want to write. But you have to (this is the hard part) pay attention to what you read. For best results you need to read a wide range of works by a number of authors, carefully noticing their spelling, punctuation, and grammar. And you need some way of determining which one is right when you find two or more of them in opposition on a given usage.

A copy of Strunk’s The Elements of Style, read carefully and its lessons taken to heart, will help you avoid the most common errors. Between that and a few dozen of your favorite novels you’ll have the beginning of a good education in accepted usage. Later you may choose to disagree with Strunk on certain points: but until you understand what he instructs and why, any deviation from his rules stands a good chance of getting you in trouble.

There are, of course, other works on usage and style that you might choose instead of Strunk. I suggest this one because it is not only available free on the web, but very small and inexpensive in paperback form, relatively easy to find, and as uncontroversial as an authoritative work on a sometimes ambiguous topic can be.

As you may already know, even the experts don’t agree on some usages. This may sound as though it provides a ready excuse for any, er, let us say original usages you may introduce in your prose, but it does not. You will realize when you’ve learned the rules yourself that the astute reader can tell the difference between rules broken by choice and those broken in ignorance. The former sort may be innovative, imaginative, even brilliant, or only a careful rendition of some common oral tradition. The latter sort will seldom be anything but illiterate or amusing (or both).

Even to successfully render the careless speech of the streets into printed words that will “sound” to the eye the way the oral version would sound to the ear, the author must know precisely what rules are used and what rules are broken.

This is not to say that all this knowledge must be available on a conscious level, that you must memorize parts of speech and rules of usage and punctuation as children used to do in grade school. That might or might not be valuable. What is invaluable, possibly indispensible, is that you should pay attention to these matters, know what you’re doing, and deviate from the accepted norm only by intention.

If the only way you can be certain of that is by learning remedial English by rote, then do so. If you already have a sufficient understanding of the parts of speech (whether or not you know them by name) that you can grasp the purpose of the rules laid down in Strunk, then you probably have no need of remedial English.

In any case and no matter what you wish to achieve with your use of words, language is your only real tool as a writer. You would not expect to successfully construct a wooden house without first learning how to use hammers, nails, saws, screws, and other woodworking tools (and quite probably practicing with them on smaller projects before embarking on the house). You should not expect to successfully construct a work of fiction without first learning the written language that will be your tool.

Of course, we all speak at least one language, and it is perhaps not amazing that so many people imagine that qualifies them to write in their native tongue. After all, they’ve been speaking it since babyhood. They are surely intimate with it by now.

What this does not take into account is the many differences between a spoken and a written language. You have no need, for example, to understand spelling and the rules of punctuation in order to accomplish oral communication. When you say, “the bare bear threw the ball through the wall,” the person to whom you say it will very probably be surprised, but she should have no trouble understanding your meaning.

If you were to write, “the bear bare through the ball threw the wall,” however, your reader would have to do strong mental contortions to get any sense out of it at all. Perhaps you can see from this alone that intimacy with a spoken language is not sufficient for the writer.

Punctuation presents some of the same problems. In speech you know when to hesitate for a comma and when to come to a full stop for a period. You’ve no need to know when spoken words should contain an apostrophe and when not. The person to whom you’re speaking will determine your meaning from context.

If, however, you, don’t. Know where’ to put; punc’tuation, in your” writing: you’ll run into some serious difficulties right quickly; and while many’s the writer who can’t spell worth a darn, we almost all of us know that “spelling” is not spelled “speling” and that “writer” is not spelled “writter.” I am dismayed to have to tell you that a great many hopeful writers do not. Very likely they are able to pronounce these words correctly and so do not, in their everyday activities, reveal their illiteracy: but they are probably not competent to write marketable prose. They have not acquired even a cursory familiarity with their tools.

Written language is the tool of the trade. With skilled use of it you can work wonders, build universes, create gods if you like, and entertain thousands. Without sufficient understanding to enable skill, you will more likely amuse by accident than by design.

Melisa Michaels is the author of the science fiction novels Skirmish, First Battle, Last War, Pirate Prince, Floater Factor, and Far Harbor, the fantasy novel Cold Iron,and the mystery novel Through the Eyes of the Dead.

• Ideas–Where to find them?
• Credibility and consistency
• Explaining your ideas
• Advancing the plot

Ideas–Where to find them?

“Where do you get those ideas?”

That is the number one question I get as a writer of science fiction. The next question is, how do you make science ideas into a story? Most important, how do you extrapolate from known science to make it convincing and intriguing?

First it’s important to realize that there are various kinds of science fiction today, in which science functions differently. Michael Crichton builds a thriller around technical details, even tables of data; character and “art” are less emphasized. Ursula Le Guin writes anthropological science fiction, emphasizing the social sciences and subtleties of character. A recent trend is the “future historical” novel such as Maureen McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang, in which scientific extrapolation provides details of a vivid future setting for everyday people. My own work explores the interactions between science and society, and the human beings caught between them–even when, as in A Door into Ocean, we are not sure at first who is “human.”

As a writer, you need to decide what role (if any) science extrapolation can play in your work. In fact, much of what is labeled “science fiction” today could as easily be labeled fantasy; and if your own style is distinctive enough, that may be the route for you. On the other hand, to take science seriously requires special attention. I can suggest some approaches which work for me.

The freshest ideas come straight from experience in an actual scientific laboratory. In my own lab and those of my colleagues, I regularly experience natural phenomena stranger than the strangest of science fiction: a superconducting magnet that suspends paper clips in the room next door; a dish of bacteria that generate thousands of mutations overnight; a flask of chemicals that “magically” turns color every few seconds. As a research scientist, and a teacher needing to range widely, I have an advantage. But any writer can telephone a research lab and even request a visit; most scientists love to talk about their work. Internet bulletin boards are another good source of expertise.

Next to the lab itself, the best source of ideas is research journals such as Science and Nature. These sources provide primary research reports of the latest discoveries, those of interest to a wide range of scientists. While the reading is a challenge, even for a veteran scientist, most of the exciting finds reported here will never reach the popular science magazines. For example, I came across a report in Science of a bacterium that actually eats uranium. This fit right into the plot of my novel, which required an organism to eat something no other creature would touch!

For readable reviews of emerging fields, use periodicals aimed at the scientifically literate readership such as Scientific American and Sigma Xi’s American Scientist. Be wary of newspapers and the less sophisticated popular science magazines, whose accounts are likely to be superficial and contain errors.

Once you have a good idea, it’s worth checking out with experts, just as you might check out any other aspect of setting. Thus you can avoid obvious bloopers, as well as ideas considered total cliches by experts who would otherwise be sympathetic to your work. For example, physicists told me that an anti-gravity device would be written off as a cliche, but the use of a white hole as an energy source might be taken seriously.

In the end, you can take heart from the fact that “mistakes” may not be fatal, as far as popular success is concerned. Frank Herbert’s bestseller Dune showed settlers on a desert planet distilling water from the air. This would work in an Earth desert only because Earth’s atmosphere carries water from the oceans. Even if your science is “right” when the book is written, some aspects are bound to get outdated soon enough. A Door into Ocean depicted women who generate children by fusion of ova. Even before the proofs came out, research had shown this to be impossible because paternal chromosomes carry essential modifications.

Credibility and consistency.

What makes an idea “credible,” then, is hard to define. Getting the facts exactly “right” and up-to-date is helpful; yet if none of your assumptions or extrapolations could be challenged, your work would not be science fiction.

Interestingly, the more common complaint I hear from inexperienced writers is that the “real science” they have carefully researched is declared false or unbelievable by readers or editors. What do we do when truth is stranger than fiction?

One way to make your ideas credible is to tie each invention to some easily verifiable event or fact on Earth. This can be done more or less subtly as a sort of in-text footnote. When Crichton shows his dinosaurs chomping through steel bars, “like hyenas,” he offers a fact that I could verify. We can be sure that some hyena enthusiast out there will complain loudly if he gets it wrong! Similarly, when I created an alien organism with infrared vision in The Wall around Eden, I noted that known animals such as rattlesnakes possess infrared sensor organs. The focussing lens of the alien “eyes” was of sodium chloride, an infrared-focussing substance that living creatures commonly contain in their bodies.

Another source of credibility is consistency: Make sure that your facts and extrapolations, however reasonable on their own, make sense together in the story. If your imagined planet has twice the mass of earth, what is its gravity? The composition of its atmosphere? How close is it to its sun, and how long does it take to complete a year? Do the native animals on such a planet have thick, ponderous limbs, or delicate long ones? If voracious monsters descend upon your space visitors, what fauna do they normally prey upon?

The biological questions are frequently overlooked. In Door into Ocean, I created an entire ecosystem complete with microbial plants to photosynthesize, small phosphorescent grazers, both aerial and marine predators of a range of sizes, and scavengers, “legfish” that crawl up upon floating vegetation.

It may seem exhausting and frustrating to get all the parts to work together, but this extra craft is what distinguishes stories like Dune from more forgettable attempts. In my own work, I have come to rely upon a layered approach, in which I start at the beginning, write in a chapter or two until inconsistencies build up, then start all over from the beginning and try to get a couple of chapters farther. Inevitably the first chapter gets rewritten twenty times; but the reward is that my last one virtually writes itself.

A writer who develops a particularly complex world view, or “universe,” may choose to write several books within the same universe, exploring different aspects of its setting or theme. Just as Doris Lessing wrote a series of novels about Martha Quest in Africa, Ursula Le Guin wrote several books including Left Hand of Darkness within one imagined universe, where humanity’s far-flung colonial worlds are linked by the “ansible” communication device. One must however take care to come up with enough fresh material to justify each new story in its own right.

Explaining your ideas in the story.

The biggest mistake is to lecture your readers, however intriguing an idea may be. The writer must blend science ideas seamlessly amongst all other aspects of experience that form the story. As always, “show, not tell” is the rule.

Try to let science ideas lead into character development, and vice versa. An example of this process occurred as I wrote Door into Ocean, in which a population of women called Sharers inhabit a planet covered entirely by ocean. One day a researcher in my laboratory excitedly showed me a flask of purple protein he had just isolated from photosynthetic bacteria. When light shined upon the protein, it bleached clear, as it absorbed the light energy. This demonstration gave me the idea that my aquatic women characters would carry purple bacteria as symbionts in their skin, providing extra oxygen underwater. When their oxygen ran low, the Sharers’ skin would bleach white dramatically. This ability to “bleach white” later developed a spiritual significance as well; the Sharers can enter a special kind of trance, called “whitetrance,” which enables them to endure extreme physical stress while upholding their religious beliefs.

Another example from Door into Ocean works in the opposite direction, of character development leading to science. The Sharers use Gandhian pacifist resistance to repel an armed invasion of their planet. I sought a metaphor from science to help describe the unexpected success of their resistance, which from the invaders’ limited perspective seemed doomed to fail. The metaphor had to fit into the perspective of the Sharers, who have advanced biological technology. I hit upon the idea of “electron tunneling,” a phenomenon in which electrons can penetrate a seemingly impenetrable energy barrier. Electron tunneling occurs in the hemoglobin molecule as it collects oxygen in the blood, so the Sharers would know about it.

Some explanation is always necessary; the trick is, how much. It helps to weave necessary explication into dialogue, a sentence at a time, at a point where events demand it. For example, in Daughter of Elysium, a visiting scientist (new to the planet) discovers that his discarded culture dishes have come alive and are trying to gobble up his two year-old son. A student comes to the rescue, and explains that the “intelligent” culture-dish material (composed of billions of microscopic robots) has malfunctioned; it is designed to enclose tissue cultures, not children.

This example by the way also illustrates the time-honored gimmick for explaining any new setting: the naive “visitor,” who needs everything explained. It works, if you don’t make the lecture too obvious, and do keep the plot moving. Jurassic Park essentially consists of a long lecture on cloning dinosaurs, kept moving by a fast-paced, and blood-thirsty, series of events.

One approach to the problem of explanation is to include all that the story seems to need in the first draft, even though you know it’s too much for the reader to take. In later drafts, cut it drastically. Omit terms known only to experts, or redefine in simple language. (Oogenesis is “making eggs.”) A typical science course introduces more new words than a first year of language. So try to use scientific terminology as you would use words from a foreign language — sparingly, for effect.

An occasional phrase of jargon may be worth keeping if it takes on a life of its own in the story. In Daughter of Elysium, I did keep one phrase of fetal development about the “primordial germ cells” which undergo a lengthy migration to reach the developing gonads before the fetus is born. The phrase set up a distinctive metaphor for the life journey of my central characters. But countless similar phrases were cut or redefined before my final draft.

Advancing the plot.

Complex technical information is best fed to the reader a little at a time, and in such a way that it feels “inevitable” where it comes up. This task is a challenge, but if done skillfully the development of ideas can advance your plot, heightening dramatic tension, much more so than if you had revealed all the implications at the start.

Daughter of Elysium depicts research connecting fetal development and aging, a field of daunting complexity. My opening chapter shows how the fetal heart tube forms and begins to pulse; later chapters depict more subtle processes of cells and tissues, and much later the critical molecular events that determine whether the embryo will live or die–or live without aging. In between, various subplots incidental to research take up the scientist’s time, much as they would in real life. Often the subplots make an ironic contrast to his work; for instance, when he faces his dying relatives back home, who will never benefit from his research on aging.

Another role for science in your plot can be to show how various characters react to change, and are themselves changed (or not). In A Door into Ocean, the invaders of the ocean world respond to the Sharers’ life science in diverse ways. Some simply try to destroy it, and none of the bizarre setbacks they face change their outlook. Others become intrigued by the new science, with its implications for their own medicine and agriculture. A few even take up the symbiotic purple microbes into their own skin.

The points I’ve made about finding ideas and using them have served me well in my own novels, and have worked for other writers too. At the same time, it is important not to get lost in the science. Remember that what makes a science fiction novel “work” in the long run is what makes any good novel work: connection, consistency, and characters that make us care.

This article was originally published in The Writer. It is Copyright: reproduction and distribution specifically prohibited. All rights reserved. Republished here with permission of the author.

There’s a lot of advice floating around as to how best to achieve those first sales. Some say you should write short stories to break in. Some say better yet, write short-shorts since they take less time. Some say forget the short stuff: the real market is novels.

The answer that is right for you depends on your ultimate goal. If you just want to see your name in print, the quickest way might be to rob a bank. If you want to see your work in print, the quickest way might be to write for fanzines or other small magazines that pay in contributors’ copies. If you want to build a career, forget quick ways. There are none.

That’s the bad news. The good news is, you can probably do it if you try hard enough. With a modicum of talent and a whole lot of work, you can learn your craft and begin to make those first sales.

But What Length Will Sell?

The answer to this question is simple: what will sell to the real paying markets is the best work their editors can find that matches their editorial guidelines. Yes, they may more often have room for one more short-short than for another novella. Yes, you might therefore be able to sell three good short-shorts while remaining unable to sell one good novella.

Unfortunately that does not mean it’s a good idea to concentrate on short-shorts to the exclusion of novellas (or short stories, or novels), if what you want to do is build a career. You can’t learn as much writing short-shorts as you can writing short stories: there just isn’t room in a short-short for the kind of world-building, character development, plotting, etc. that are essential in longer works.

If you have a brilliant idea for a great short-short, by all means write it. Study the markets and get it in the mail to an editor who might like it. Then write something else. If you mean eventually to write longer works, start now.

But don’t start with the first book of an endless series in which the individual novels don’t stand alone: that will be no more useful to you than short-shorts. Works at either end of the length spectrum will teach you the least. Settle somewhere in the middle if you can, where you have room to develop all the skills you need as a writer, but where you also have some boundaries.

Short stories are adequate to develop basic plotting skills, and they will teach you word-management: you won’t have room to waste any. Novellas and novelettes will help you hone your plotting skills, world-building, and character development. Novels will give you room for more complex plotting, sub-plots, and all the skills required for the shorter works. Any length will give you practice in pacing.

Yes, But Which Length Should I Write?

I’ve been avoiding the real answer because it will almost certainly disappoint.

You must write your story just the length it needs to be.

In the final analysis, the best length to write is always the length the idea requires. Begin at the beginning and write until you reach the end. If you really want to be a good writer, don’t worry about markets until after the work is written. And don’t worry about wasting time writing some “wrong” length: no time spent writing is wasted. Not if you are writing to the best of your ability, working at it, and learning. In that case every hour spent writing is an hour spent honing your craft.

Okay, Then What’s the Secret to Making Sales?

Hard work. That’s it. That’s the secret.

The learning and honing process is unending. There will never come a day when you can say, “That’s it: I know all there is to know about writing and can sell my work from now on.” Very likely the best you’ll be able to say is that you’ve done your best, that the current work is finished, and that you think it may be marketable in its present state. (You’ll also know at that point how long the work is.) Good. Study the markets again, send it out, and start another.

Unfortunately when you’ve finished the next piece you may have learned enough to realize that the previous piece was not quite as good as you imagined at the time. Get used to it: if you’re good and work hard at this business, that will become a familiar sensation. It means you’re doing something right. You’re learning.

I Still Don’t Know Whether to Write Short Stories or Novels

One of the things you will learn to judge as you go along is how much room an idea is going to require to be told the way you want to tell it. You will learn to know the idea for a short story from that for a novel before either is written; and the idea for a short-short from either of the others. Novellas and novelettes are more difficult to tell from novels in the raw idea form, but you’ll know the idea for either from that for a short story or a short-short once you’ve had some practice.

Even then it should be your need, not the market, that determines which you choose to write. If you have an idea that is going to require a six hundred thousand word manuscript to do it justice, it would probably be best to put that one aside till you’ve made a name for yourself since really long novels are a greater risk for the publisher and therefore harder to sell; and if you happen to have an idea that’s going to come out just the length needed by one of the better-paying markets it would do no harm to give that idea priority. But for the most part, if your goal is to build a career by becoming the best writer you can be, it is wiser to concentrate on what you need to write than on what you think will sell.

But You Haven’t Told Me How to Break Into Print

Yes I have. There are five steps to the process, and each is crucial:

1. Write.
2. Study the markets.
3. Send out your work.
4. Write.
5. Write.

Copy and pass “Writerisms and other Sins” around to your heart’s content, but always post my Copyright notice at the top, correctly, thank you, as both a courtesy and a legal necessity to protect any writer.

Writerisms: overused and misused language. In more direct words: find ‘em, root ‘em out, and look at your prose without the underbrush.

1. am, is, are, was, were, being, be, been … combined with “by” or with “by … someone” implied but not stated. Such structures are passives. In general, limit passive verb use to one or two per book. The word “by” followed by a person is an easy flag for passives.
2. am, is, are, was, were, being, be, been … combined with an adjective. “He was sad as he walked about the apartment.” “He moped about the apartment.” A single colorful verb is stronger than any was + adjective; but don’t slide to the polar opposite and overuse colorful verbs. There are writers that vastly overuse the “be” verb; if you are one, fix it. If you aren’t one—don’t, because overfixing it will commit the next error.
3. florid verbs. “The car grumbled its way to the curb” is on the verge of being so colorful it’s distracting. {Florid fr. Lat. floreo, to flower.}If a manuscript looks as if it’s sprouted leaves and branches, if every verb is “unusual,” if the vocabulary is more interesting than the story … fix it by going to more ordinary verbs. There are vocabulary-addicts who will praise your prose for this but not many who can simultaneously admire your verbs as verbs and follow your story, especially if it has content. The car is not a main actor and not one you necessarily need to make into a character. If its action should be more ordinary and transparent, don’t use an odd expression. This is prose.This statement also goes for unusual descriptions and odd adjectives, nouns, and adverbs.
4. odd connectives. Some writers overuse “as” and “then” in an attempt to avoid “and” or “but,” which themselves can become a tic. But “as” is only for truly simultaneous action. The common deck of conjunctions available is:
   • when (temporal)
   • if (conditional)
   • since (ambiguous between temporal and causal)
   • although (concessive)
   • because (causal)
   • and (connective)
   • but (contrasting)
   • as (contemporaneous action or sub for “because”) while (roughly equal to “as”)

   These are the ones I can think of. If you use some too much and others practically never, be more even-handed. Then, BTW, is originally more of an adverb than a proper conjunction, although it seems to be drifting toward use as a conjunction. However is really a peculiar conjunction, demanding in most finicky usage to be placed *after* the subject of the clause.

   Don’t forget the correlatives, either … or, neither … nor, and “not only … but also.”

   And “so that,” “in order that,” and the far shorter and occasionally merciful infinitive: “to … {verb}something.”

5. Descriptive writerisms. Things that have become “conventions of prose” that personally stop me cold in text.
   • “framed by” followed by hair, tresses, curls, or most anything cute.
   • “swelling bosom”
   • “heart-shaped face”
   • “set off by”: see “framed by”
   • “revealed” or “revealed by”: see “framed by.” Too precious for words when followed by a fashion statement.
   • Mirrors … avoid mirrors, as a basic rule of your life. You get to use them once during your writing career. Save them for more experience. But it doesn’t count if they don’t reflect … by which I mean see the list above. If you haven’t read enough unpublished fiction to have met the infamous mirror scenes in which Our Hero admires his steely blue eyes and manly chin, you can scarcely imagine how bad they can get.
   • limpid pools and farm ponds: I don’t care what it is, if it reflects your hero and occasions a description of his manly dimple, it’s a mirror.As a general rule … your viewpoint characters should have less, rather than more, description than anyone else: a reader of different skin or hair color ought to be able to sink into this persona without being continually jolted by contrary information.Stick to what your observer can observe. One’s own blushes can be felt, but not seen, unless one is facing … .a mirror. See above.
   • “as he turned, then stepped aside from the descending blow … ” First of all, it takes longer to read than to happen: pacing fault. Second, the “then” places action #2 sequentially after #1, which makes the whole evasion sequence a 1-2 which won’t work. This guy is dead or the opponent was telegraphing his moves in a panel-by-panel comic book style which won’t do for regular prose. Clunky. Slow. Fatally slow.
   • “Again” or worse “once again.” Established writers don’t tend to overuse this one: it seems like a neo fault, possibly a mental writerly stammer—lacking a next thing to do, our hero does it “again” or “once again” or “even yet.” Toss “still” and “yet” onto the pile and use them sparingly.
6. Dead verbs. Colorless verbs.
   • walked
   • turned
   • crossed
   • run, ran
   • go, went, gone
   • leave, left
   • have, had
   • get, got

   You can add your own often used colorless verbs: these are verbs that convey an action but don’t add any other information. A verb you’ve had to modify (change) with an adverb is likely inadequate to the job you assigned it to do.

7. Colorless verb with inadequate adverb: “He walked slowly across the room.”More informative verb with no adverb: “He trudged across the room,” “He paced across the room,” “He stalked across the room,” each one a different meaning, different situation. But please see problem 3, above, and don’t go overboard.
8. Themely English With apologies to hard-working English teachers, school English is not fiction English.Understand that the meticulous English style you labored over in school, including the use of complete sentences and the structure of classic theme-sentence paragraphs, was directed toward the production of non-fiction reports, resumes, and other non-fiction applications.The first thing you have to do to write fiction? Suspect all the English style you learned in school and violate rules at need. Many of those rules will turn out to apply; many won’t.{Be ready to defend your choices. If you are lucky, you will be copyedited. Occasionally the copyeditor will be technically right but fictionally wrong and you will have to tell your editor why you want that particular expression left alone.}
9. Scaffolding and spaghetti. Words the sole function of which is to hold up other words. For application only if you are floundering in too many “which” clauses. Do not carry this or any other advice to extremes.”What it was upon close examination was a mass the center of which was suffused with a glow which appeared rubescent to the observers who were amazed and confounded by this untoward manifestation.” Flowery and overstructured. “What they found was a mass, the center of which glowed faintly red. They’d never seen anything like it.” The second isn’t great lit, but it gets the job done: the first drowns in “which” and “who” clauses.In other words—be suspicious any time you have to support one needed word (rubescent) with a creaking framework of “which” and “what” and “who.” Dump the “which-what-who” and take the single descriptive word. Plant it as an adjective in the main sentence.
10. A short cut to “who” and “whom.”
    • Nominative: who
    • Possessive: whose
    • Objective: whom

    The rule:

    1. treat the “who-clause” as a mini-sentence.If you could substitute “he” for the who-whom, it’s a “who.” If you could substitute “him” for the who-whom it’s a “whom.”The trick is where ellipsis has occurred … or where parentheticals have been inserted … and the number of people in important and memorable places who get it wrong. “Who … do I see?” Wrong: I see he? No. I see “him.” Whom do I see?
    2. “Who” never changes case to match an antecedent. (word to which it refers)
       • I blame them who made the unjust law. CORRECT.
       • It is she whom they blame. CORRECT: The who-clause is WHOM THEY BLAME.
       • They blame HER=him, =whom.
       • I am the one WHO is at fault. CORRECT.
       • I am the one WHOM they blame. CORRECT.
       • They took him WHOM they blamed. CORRECT—but not because WHOM matches HIM: that doesn’t matter: correct because “they” is the subject of “blamed” and “whom” is the object.
       • I am he WHOM THEY BLAME. CORRECT. Whom is the “object” of “they blame.”

       Back to rule one: “who” clauses are completely independent in case from the rest of the sentence. The case of “who” in its clause changes by the internal logic of the clause and by NO influence outside the clause. Repeat to yourself: there is no connection, there is no connection 3 x and you will never mistake for whom the bell tolls.

    The examples above probably grate over your nerves. That’s why “that” is gaining in popularity in the vernacular and why a lot of copyeditors will correct you incorrectly on this point. I’m beginning to believe that nine tenths of the English-speaking universe can’t handle these little clauses.

11. -ing.
    

    “Shouldering his pack and setting forth, he crossed the river … “

    No, he didn’t. Not unless his pack was in the river. Implies simultaneity. The participles are just like any other verbal form. They aren’t a substitute legal everywhere, or a quick fix for a complex sequence of motions. Write them on the fly if you like, but once imbedded in text they’re hard to search out when you want to get rid of their repetitive cadence, because -ing is part of so many fully constructed verbs {am going, etc.}

12. -ness A substitute for thinking of the right word. “Darkness,” “unhappiness,” and such come of tacking -ness (or occasionally – ion) onto words. There’s often a better answer. Use it as needed.As a general rule, use a major or stand-out vocabulary word only once a paragraph, maybe twice a page, and if truly outre, only once per book. Parallels are clear and proper exceptions to this, and don’t vary your word choice to the point of silliness: see error 3.

CHERRYH’S LAW: NO RULE SHOULD BE FOLLOWED OFF A CLIFF.