The Semester Approaches, Part Two

(more notes toward more stuff I’ve been thinking about sf and teaching and maybe even living)

I’m never satisfied that I’m teaching what my students need, but at least at times I feel like I’m making an effort at it.

Science fiction is a moving target a.) because it is moving, and b.) because it’s a target, has been a target, remains a target (in spite of many assurances that our work has become “respectable,” whatever that means), and may always be a target – perhaps because no matter what we do, someone who knows better thinks we should be doing otherwise.

There are times when a syllabus looks like a death certificate. The good news is that the patient isn’t dead, just the syllabus. We leave it in the rearview and the class goes where it needs to go.

The syllabus doesn’t teach the class – the teacher (for lack of a better word) teaches, or leads, the class. Or at times the teacher runs just fast enough to keep from being rolled over – by the students, the subject, or by the teacher’s own expectations for what the class should or can accomplish.

The thing I want most from my class – the thing I set out as my highest goal – is that they leave by the end of the semester thinking like science fiction writers. What they write is their own business. What they do is their own business. But if they can think like science fiction writers (and it occurs to me that many people who write science fiction can’t) they will at least have the equipment not only to write in the form, but to think of the world around them in ways they wouldn’t have before.

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I have no trouble calling what I write science fiction. I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about what it’s called. I’ve noticed a lot students I encounter do worry. “I’m working on this story. I’m not sure if it’s sci-fi or something else.”

“Are you finished with it?”

“No.”

“Don’t worry, then, until it’s done. We’ll figure out what it is when you’ve got something.”

As much I love science fiction, and as much as I believe that science fiction will save our planet, our universe, our culture, and maybe even our lunch, what I love more is story. A good story means more to me than all the categories you can come up with.

Back to the student:

“I’m working on something. I don’t know if it’s a story or not.”

Oh dear. Here we go again.

“Keep working. When it’s ready, and if you’re paying attention, you’ll find out what it is. You won’t tell if it’s a story. I won’t tell. The thing you’re working on will tell you if it’s a story or if it’s something else. Keep working.”

I know that answer may strike many here as unsatisfactory. It is unsatisfactory. Here you are, a roomful of writers who want to write all the great things you know you can, and will, write, and I’m telling you that a pile of scribbled letters is going to tell you what it is.

Remember, that pile of scribbled letters is yours.

I’m not trying to be “literary” or “aesthetic” about this. I am, I believe, being practical. My employers at Columbia College Chicago hired me, I suspect, because they wanted someone to teach what they believe is a “commercial” form of writing – i.e. something that someone will pay you to write as compared to something that no one will pay you to write but will exist for – well, for some reason. My employers seem to make some distinction between what they think they want their students to do and what they think I want my students to do. It’s a misapprehension. We both want them to write the best possible work they’re capable of producing.

Besides, I don’t think they know what writers of science fiction really get paid. If they ever find out, my butt is on the street. We’re paid crap compared to what writers in other fields receive.

What it means is that a good story goes beyond the boundaries of the teachable. I have colleagues who go on about three- and six-act structure; they’ll go on about narrative “arcs”; they’ll talk about having an “A” story and a “B” story; they’ll talk about character and motivation and conflict and complication (hell, even I do that).

They can show you how to build the statue that is Galatea – perfectly life-like, but without life.

How do you make Galatea live and breathe and speak and laugh, and even cry?

The question is big. The answers are many – or the same answer worded many ways.

I came upon this wonderful quote from the great screenwriter Emeric Pressburger, who worked with Michael Powell on such classics as The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus. He is talking about films, but what he says applies to any kind of writing:

I think that a film should have a good story, a clear story, and it should have, if possible, something which is probably the most difficult thing – it should have a little bit of magic. Magic being untouchable and very difficult to cast, you can’t deal with it at all. You can only try to prepare some nests, hoping that a little bit of magic will slide into them.

Yes, even a science fiction story needs a little bit of magic.

Where does it come from?

I don’t know. Like most of the universe, it remains a mystery.

But very often, most often, the magic comes from you. You give to every story a little piece of yourself that no other writer can give to that story. It may come easy or may come with unbearable agony, but it comes from you.

Let me throw in some words from smart people, so that you don't just have to take the word of a stupid teacher-guy:

“ . . . The mature science fiction writer doesn’t merely tell a story about Brick Malloy vs. The Giant Yeastmen from Gethsemane. He makes a statement through his story. What is the statement? Himself, the dimension and depth of the man. His statement is seeing what everybody else sees but thinking what no one else has thought, and having the courage to say it. The hell of it is that only time will tell whether it was worth saying.” – Alfred Bester, “My Affair With Science Fiction” (1975)

“It was 1956, and the beginning of a conscious realization that to limit science fiction to outer space was just that – a limitation, and that science fiction has and should have as limitless a character as poetry; further, that it has a real function in inner space. This in turn led me to a redefinition of science itself, and to an increasing preoccupation with humanity not only as the subject of science, but as its source. It has become my joy to find out what makes it tick, especially when it ticks unevenly.” — Theodore Sturgeon, in his introduction to “And Now the News . . .” in the collection, The Golden Helix

“The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader reading it makes it live: a live thing, a story.” — Ursula K. Le Guin

“Any bad fiction, no matter the genre, is a wild exercise of the imagination which explodes in the night of our minds, makes garish pyrotechnics, then dies, leaving the night blacker than before. But good fiction is a steady light even if sometimes a small one. By it we walk without stumbling and we may return at any time to see under its flare other topographical features we did not understand the first trip.” – Philip Jose Farmer

I know – if I’m teaching a “genre” class, is that what I’m supposed to be talking about? Aren’t I supposed to be talking about tropes and arcs and structure? Isn’t it all about the “Three Rs”: Rockets, Robots and Rayguns?

No.

No. No. No.

Not necessarily so.

It can be, but it doesn’t have to be.

The thing that probably most infuriates my colleagues who have no interest in science fiction – or any forms of “popular” literature – is their belief that it doesn’t have to be good writing, by their standards, to be “successful” – by their standards. What those standards are is an argument for another time, but let’s say we can agree on what constitutes the basics of good writing. They have a point. All you have to do is review the quality of prose in most bestsellers to see that a lot of bad writing makes a lot of money for someone. They will also see that bad writing is not the exclusive domain of science fiction – in fact, our standards are much higher than they are in many other forms. And yet the belief persists that science fiction depends mostly on “ideas” illustrated through cheap dramatic conventions, which makes none of it “real” or “serious” literature.

And very often, to be honest, they’re right.

This isn’t to say the work has no value, but that it engages in a currency they do not recognize.

I believe it’s possible and even necessary, to write to the higher goal, i.e. it takes as many sheets of paper (or equivalent electrons) and as much ink to write a good book as a bad or mediocre one. A box of good books weighs as much as a box of bad ones. Why not fill that box with the best work possible?

The coolest thing about science fiction is that, so long as we keep “story” somewhere in the upper corner of our imaginations, we can invent the form as we go along. And we can imbue it with a finesse and nuance it never had before. Why I maintain such prominence for “story” is a subject for another time.

We are situated on the corner of Popular Street and Personal Avenue, and the cross traffic comes from both ways. In a culture that is changing in so many ways, it’s not a bad place to be.

The Semester Approaches

(notes toward more stuff I’ve been thinking about sf and teaching and maybe even living)

One should write fiction carefully and consciously to someone, as one writes a letter; and the selection of that someone is the single most important skill that a writer can develop.

— Theodore Sturgeon

Everybody writes to somebody.

Or they should.

I know a few carloads of writers who say they write only for themselves, and I would never doubt them. But I didn’t say anything about who they write for – I said “write to.”

Writing, so I have been told, is a form of communication. Communication implies that there’s a sender and a receiver. “Rhetoric must be a bridge, a road,” Borges wrote; “too often it is a wall, an obstacle.”

Who is receiving what we write?

If we’re writing science fiction, is there a science fiction reader to whom we’re writing? Who is that person? What is that person like? Are they like us? Should they be?

I believe these questions may be at the heart with what is going on in the field these days. Many people have many assumptions about what’s good, what’s bad; things ain’t like they used to be; a candy bar used to be twenty-five cents; you shouldn’t be eating candy bars anyway; if it’s sci-fi, why are there no robots?; why are there only robots?; I ordered a halibut and you brought me beef jerky; if I go to Mars who’s going to mow my lawn?; why is everybody else always wrong and only I am right? Huh? How about that?

I had an argument – no, let’s call it a disagreement – with the late and much-missed David G. Hartwell. He used to say, most directly in his book, Age of Wonders, that readers have to learn how to read science fiction, which was one of the expressed intentions of that volume. Reading science fiction is different from reading other kinds of fiction. Many readers don’t know how to do it – like going from automatic to stick shift. “Written science fiction, like cooking, mathematics, or rock ’n’ roll, is a whole bunch of things that some people can understand or do and some not … Just because someone can read does not mean that he necessarily can read SF, just as the ability to write arabic numerals and add and subtract doesn’t mean you necessarily can or want to perform long division.”

Me? I insisted that every book teaches its reader how to read it. Some do so better than others, but each novel or collection has to work its own specific magic. If I read a book about how to read regency romances, I doubt if it would do me any good. Same with westerns, or private eye novels, or police procedurals. One kind of story may appeal to a reader more than another, but every book has to teach its readers how it should be read.

Were it otherwise, that strange and alluring abyss known as fandom would have the greatest sway over what is written and what is sold as science fiction. And yet there are a number of books that have sold far and wide beyond fandom’s fuzzy corridors and are recognized by all but the most adamant protesters as science fiction.

How can that be?

I am one of those writers who often hears from readers, “I usually don’t like science fiction, but I like your stories.”

On the other hand, I’ve heard this from fans: “You wrote some kind of thing, didn’t you?”

So it goes.

I don’t know why this is. Obviously, there are many voices speaking to many readers. Some are more readily received by the more vocal members of the sf community. Others, not so much. And the differences between the “some” and the “others” are not always reflected in book sales. Readers of science fiction outnumber science fiction “fans.”

Science fiction media is pervasive. We are constantly told we now live in a science fiction universe. Terms from popular science fiction media have entered everyday vernacular. For those of us who create science fiction to be read or listened to, this may not always be a blessing, but it seems that at least in some respects a wider audience has already met us half way. It is no longer 1984 (when Hartwell’s book came out).

Who is our audience? Who are we writing to?

In a world (as the movie trailers tell us) of growing diversity, even in the midst of devastating setbacks, cultures are communicating with other cultures with greater facility. Or at least they can – we can, if we choose. We don’t have to presume our readers all come from similar backgrounds.

I used to get grief from my short story writing students all the time whenever I asked them to give me more detail and description. Now, we’re not necessarily talking about science fiction stories, or fantasy stories, or historical fiction. “Why do I have to put all that stuff in? Everybody knows what I’m talking about.” In a classroom, on a high school or junior college campus, with a roomful of students who live within a few miles of each other, that may be so – may be so. Even within what seems to be a fairly homogenous culture, there are degrees of variance that will make voices and points of view unique.

Some writers seem to communicate to an inner circle of the initiated. Perhaps Joyce was the best example of that with Finnegan’s Wake. You have to know the territory, so to speak, or you’re lost in a stormy sea of references. Other writers try to reach outside the circle and draw you in. “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” The reading does not require a preliminary initiation but is the initiation itself. I would think that we now live in a time where we, as both readers and writers, require the latter more than the former, which is not to exclude the former, but if we intend to increase diversity, the inner circle must necessarily expand.

Every writer gives us a new world to explore. Even when they write about a place we know, they give us a new picture of the place, or they make the place anew. Be aware that every reader comes to your book a stranger, and it is only common courtesy to make a stranger welcome.

We don’t need to explain everything – explain nothing, in fact. But give us enough of a picture to distinguish your worlds and your characters from all the others. That’s partly done by craft, and partly done by voice. But it’s also partly accomplished by address – not what you are writing but to whom you are writing; not writing to an audience, but to an individual.

When you write a story, science-fictional or otherwise, give a thought to whom you would most like to tell this story: in a letter, or an email, or face to face, sharing a couple of coffees in the same café where you sit and type away at your device. Choose a person and tell your story to that person.

When you first discovered reading and books, what kind of stuff were you looking for? What kind of reader were you?

Were you looking for yourself in the books you chose? Or were you looking for the self you wanted to be?

Or, perhaps, you were looking for anyone but yourself, and anywhere but the “here” you occupied at the time.

Who was that person  who searched so diligently, maybe even so desperately, for whatever it was they were looking for?

Maybe that’s the person you need to write to.

As the person you are now, write to that person you were, the one who so loved stories and poems and books about rockets and dinosaurs and zeppelins or whatever it is you loved. Write to them as if they are still searching, still waiting.

          Because they are still waiting.