My initial education as a writer came in the early 2000’s when I read a number of sci-fi writing guides. I recall books by Isaac Asimov, Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm, Ray Bradbury, and Orson Scott Card, but there were surely others that I read as well.
These guides were extremely oriented to the science fiction magazine ecosystem, so they were largely about writing short stories, and they were about publishing the sort of short story that might be accepted by these journals. At the time when I was reading these books, Asimov's was probably the most prestigious of the sci-fi journals, but Asimov's is not that old (I think it was founded in the 70’s). Analog and The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy are much older, and these books assumed you'd want to publish in these journals and in others like them.
I’m not naming or linking to the specific books, because they weren’t necessarily special. Whenever you opened these books, the advice was always the same. They advised you how to tell a good story and how to tell it plainly.
Yes, you could deviate from that, but these books wouldn't really tell you how to do that.
In retrospect, I now see that there was a strong suspicion of style, voice, innovation in these books. Yes, it's somewhat ironic because it's sci-fi, so it's a literature that ostensibly celebrates innovation. But there was a reason for this distrust of style. And I think it's because when you read stories by aspiring science-fiction writers, it can often be very hard to tell what's actually happening!
Unless you've read these unpublishable stories—the kinds of stories the writers of these how-to books were used to seeing (while wearing their other hats as editors and teachers)—then you probably have no idea what I'm talking about.
But sometimes in workshops of science fiction stories, the practice will be for the workshop participants to just state what exactly they think is happening in the story that’s under discussion. You say, “My understanding is that this story is about mermaids who've been transplanted to new Martian seas.”
And you do this because oftentimes the story is actually about something different. It’s about sentient plants. But the writer wasn’t necessarily able to communicate that to you, and they need to understand that what they wrote was unintentionally confusing.
You literally will give a whole critique thinking the story is about mermaids. And then the writer will say, “No it’s about plants.” And you will genuinely be flabbergasted. You had no idea.
In the mind of the aspiring writer, there is often some underlying conception of the tale that they want to convey to the reader, but it can be quite difficult to do that in a way that doesn't break point of view, because sci-fi stories are generally not told in a point of view that's capable of simply saying, "This is a story that’s about sentient plants."
There's a whole technology, a whole range of writing techniques, for accomplishing that basic task of informing the reader of what they're actually reading.
And when writing is self-consciously literary, those techniques break down. Like, if you say, "The sands shimmered vermilion under the red sun" then the reader is gonna think we’re in a different solar system where the sun is red! And then everything they read subsequently will be interpreted under that assumption that we’re in a different solar system. For instance if you then start writing about a haveli, the reader will think, “Oh, this is an alien word—the people of this world are called havelis.” There’s an anecdote that you’ll hear in sci-fi workshops that is meant to illustrate this point.
There is a science fiction workshop, Clarion, which generally retails this kind of writing advice (write clearly, tell a good story that holds the reader’s interests). I attended that workshop in 2006, when I was twenty.
When I sold my first novel, in 2014, it was a realist contemporary YA. My break with the science fiction world mostly happened because I started writing realist stuff, not because I thought science fiction was inherently lower or worse.
It can be very hard to explain to science fiction people what the mainstream literary world is like. You know...to the mainstream literary world, science fiction essentially doesn't exist. Like, a literary person might read Ursula Le Guin or Philip Dick or something, but when it comes to science fiction as a living field with its own practices and traditions, they're just completely uninterested.
Science fiction people cannot understand how insignificant their community is in the mental landscape of literary people. Sci-fi people like to imagine that literary writers hate or despise them—it’s not true. It’d be more accurate to say that most literary writers simply do not imagine that sci-fi, as a field, might aspire to some kind of literary quality. That there might be some canon of taste in the sci-fi world. And certainly not that this canon of taste might be different from (or even superior to) the taste by which a literary story is evaluated.
It goes both ways—for people in the literary world, it's hard for them to understand that people actually read science fiction short stories. Not many people, yes, but the level of interest is much more deep and genuine than for literary short stories. Many of the top literary journals are funded by universities, whereas something like Lightspeed doesn't have that. Its editor, John Joseph Adams, lives in a very remote town in California that I imagine is not very expensive. He has various editing gigs that bring in extra money. But he does somehow earn a living as an editor of short fiction. Not to mention, Lightspeed pays its contributors extremely promptly. It is a real business concern! It is so much more honest than, say, Ploughshares.
Anyway, that is the world that really formed me as a writer. The sci-fi world has genuine advice on how to write. It has norms. You can violate those norms, sure, but then maybe your work won’t get published! Or maybe it will. In sci-fi the ideal is that you produce something that’s genuinely exciting and new. But it has to be legible as exciting and has to hold people’s interest, and usually people are able to articulate the way that something is good and why it’s good. When people talk about a science fiction writer they love, there’s a wellspring of genuine enthusiasm that is quite different from how people discuss contemporary literary writers.1
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