1. I want to be a great writer. Which is a real bummer, because being a great writer takes real work and dedication and sacrifice. I was hoping at some point I would sell out and write a fifteen volume fantasy saga and get filthy rich. But it’s looking less and less likely. This is the problem with having great teachers…you have to live up to the standard they set.
2. Your writing has as much depth as you do. It’s not possible to reach beyond the emotional range of your own experience. You have to live fully and explore your humanity before you stand a chance of writing stories that help others do the same. That doesn’t mean exploring unknown continents necessarily, it does mean exploring the unknown hidden in your everyday experience.
3. Stop wasting time. Clarion is bootcamp for writers, because life afterwards is like going to war. The intensity of the experience is designed to show you the kind of intensity great writing requires. So much of life is wasted on things which, in the final analysis, have no meaning or value. Decide what is really important to you and focus on it to the selfish exclusion of all else. Throw away your TV and game console. These things have no place in your life anymore.
4. Be with other writers. If you want to be great at anything, surround yourself with other people who are better than you. The real value of Clarion is being in the community of your peers. Join a good critique group or build your own. Go where other writers are. Make them your friends. And take joy in their success. Only bad writers hold on to jealousy over other writers achievements, because the only real person you are up against in this game is yourself (if that sounds like a platitude please know that I 100% mean it)
5. Find your voice. There are many opportunities, especially in genre fiction, to imitate other writers. Don’t take them. If Star Trek franchise novels are truly how you express yourself then go ahead and write them, otherwise ignore anyone offering to pay you to write unless you can be sure you can find your own voice in that work. finding your voice isn’t a step on the path, it is the destination. If you accept anything less you are missing the whole point of the journey.

I haven’t written up my Clarion experience. I have often tried to but in the final reckoning I don’t think I can and I don’t think I’m going to now. There was too much, and attempting to express it has always seemed to limit it somehow. I’ve expressed parts of the experience in different contexts, but as the two year anniversary has approached and I’ve been flooded with memories of that six weeks, I want to try and say something about what it meant to me, in the hope that will mean something to the other people who have been and are going there.

Clarion was a very intense experience for me. It was my first trip to America, and to California, which in itself was a wonderfully rich and powerful journey. I find California overwhelming and intoxicating, and have returned twice and will again.

(I would love to live and work there for a time, so if anyone reading this happens to want to offer me a year of work, please do.)

And it marked a separation from the life I had been living up to that point. I went to Clarion with a job to come back to, but knowing I was not going to come back to it. What I did not know was that the very close relationship I was leaving behind was also going to end with Clarion. If you had asked me why I wanted to go to Clarion while I was sitting in the departure lounge at Heathrow airport, I could not have told you. But looking back, I can see that I had for some time had a growing yearning for adventure, and for a space to grow and develop as a person. Clarion became a catalyst that brought those things into my life, and for that reason it will always have tremendous personal significance for me.

But Clarion was and is an intense experience for everyone who attends, whether they bring along the kind of personal drives that I did (many do I think) or whether they are just attending a six week writers workshop. I’m going to try and explain where that universal intensity stems from, and I’d be interested to know if other people who have been there agree.

Speculative Fiction writer is, and I mean this respectfully, a weird career ambition to hold. Like a lot of people, my relationship with SF started with a parent. My mum LOVED science fiction. Arthur C Clarke and C.S. Lewis particularly, and also Lord of the Rings which was almost a bible in our home. And she also wanted to write. So in one way or another, I have been on a journey into the world of SF pretty much since birth.

But the SF world can be difficult to find. It is almost a secret world, invisible even to some of its biggest fans. Millions of people read Hugo and Nebula award winning novels, but only a fraction of them even know about WorldCon or the Science Fiction Writers of America. There are new bestselling SF novels every week, but the short story markets where SF was born and around which much of the community turns are barely known. It took me, and it takes most writers, years of work and effort to find my way into the SF world.

And then, at Clarion, you are not just in SF world, you are at its heart. A world that until then had been built out of books, and internet forums, and weekend conventions and maybe a few real life friendships or a writing group, is suddenly made of eighteen passionate, committed, ambitious, aspiring SF writers who all share much the same vision. A world that had been subjective, ghostly and intangible is now solid and real, and you are in it twenty-four hours a day with no work or other distractions.

The feeling of being at the heart of the SF world at Clarion is incredibly strong. I have had heart-to-heart conversations with Clarion graduates from different years that I had never met before but felt instant friendship with, simply because we had the shared experience of being at the centre of a place that few people get to enter. In contrast, I’ve met professional, published SF novelists who feel much less a part of that world than completely unpublished Clarion graduates.

More than anything else, it is that sense of belonging and community in the SF world that is Clarion’s real gift. Leaving Clarion is very difficult because of it (and because you are leaving behind very real and very true friendships). After those six weeks end you are back in the big bad world, and that can be very hard. But that feeling of belonging never really goes away. In fact it can get stronger. As Kelly Link said to our Clarion group in week one, some of us would go away from Clarion and start reshaping our lives so we could be part of the SF world permanently, whether as writers or editors or committed fans. Its been a pleasure to watch all of my friends from Clarion do that in their own ways, as I’ve been doing it in mine.

I titled this blog post after a short story by Philip K Dick, A Little Something for Us Tempunauts. It’s a story about time travel, but also about leaving home and coming back, and about belonging. Clarion graduates are commonly called Clarionites, like citizens of the state of Clarion. But I think of us as Clarionauts, travellers into the strange and weird and ever so slightly odd world of SF. If we come back from our travels a little strange and weird and ever so slightly odd please forgive us, it’s the nature of the journey itself.

(I want to know all about Clarion 2010! If you are there now and reading this or know someone who is please give me blog / Twitter / Facebook links below or at http://twitter.com/damiengwalter )

(And look, I’ve done a whole Clarion post without mentioning Neil Gaiman once! Oh…darn-it…)

Perhaps because of the writers conference, my mind has been filled with meta-debates about writing in recent weeks. Are we facing the end of the Print Age? Does publishing still need its gatekeepers? Is serial fiction due a serious revival? Has podcast fiction died on the vine? These are useful debates to have, but ultimately I always arrive back at the same answer.

One of the issues that came up again and again at Clarion was the difference between being good, and being great. Kelly Link, in her week one introduction, told us the challenge we all (the 18 of us attending Clarion) faced was taking the step up from writing a good story to writing a great story. In week three Mary Anne Mohanraj broke down the Strange Horizons slush pile into 70% bad or average, 29% good and 1% great. And in truth I think 1% is being generous. I’d guess that about 0.01% of all the stories written are great.

Thats 1 in 10,000. Seems about right.

I’m not going to try and define great. Or even give examples. You all know what I mean. These are the stories (of any length and in any medium) that make us love stories, and that make us want to tell stories.

The one and only goal of any writer is to tell one of those 1 in 10,000 stories. (Preferably more than one, but one is a good starting point) Nobody knows what makes a great story or what makes a writer of great stories, and anybody who says they do is lying. Some writers struggle through an entire career and never tell a great story. A rare and gifted few tell only great stories. The rest of us sit on the spectrum between, searching for the great story we dream of telling. Just one great story can make a writer beloved for generations, whereas a thousand good ones are forgotten every day.

So every meta-debate about writing always comes down to the same answer. Write something great. Great is the rarest commodity in fiction. People fight for the right to publish great stories. Readers go crazy for them and literally beg the authors for more. As long as there are great stories to be read, people will find a way to read them whether it’s from a printed page or an iPad screen. The world needs more great stories, the reason why the bookshops are filled with so many good, average or even bad stories is because there are so few great ones. Write a great story, and the rest will fall in to place around it.

Elsewhere…

StarShipSofa needs to win a Hugo this year, because it is great.

Paul M. Berger bring some Clarion greatness to the digital pages of Strange Horizons. Go forth and read.

But I refuse to be sad. Instead this weekend I am having a WorldCon of my own. My own micro-convention, to which I am inviting all my favourite authors (in their paper and print incarnations) and you. If you to are missing the party, then feel free to join me on Twitter @damiengwalter or #notworldcon and we can form our very own virtual con.

A few random links:

I say a bit about the Hugo’s for SF Signal

I argue for Neuromancer as the book that should have won the 1984 Booker prize. Others disagree. (perhaps more on this subject to come)

Television
2008 was the the year of HBO for me. Rome, Deadwood, Soprano’s, The Wire and Band of Brothers have all been on my ‘too watch’ list and this year I watched them all. HBO are busily proving that television can match novels and theatre for sophisticated, character driven storytelling. On the other hand, I was increasingly disappointed by the sci-fi shows like Lost, Heroes and Battlestar Galactica. They aren’t bad, just not as good as they could be. Its an ever growing shame that mediocre shows go into multiple seasons while the best shows (think Firefly and Farscape) are cacelled at a whim.

Reading
E-books have been at the heart of my reading journey in 2008. Both the iPod Touch and iPhone make excellent e-readers, and the addition of Stanza turns them into truly amazing portals into the world of reading. Stanza connects with dozens of sources of e-books on the internet including Project Gutenberg, Feedbooks and Fictionwise. Between them you have access to a vast selection of classic and contemporary literature at a tap of the finger. Fictionwise also carries e-editions of Asimov’s, Interzone and other short fiction magazines, so is an essential source for anyone following that area as I do.

My big find of 2008 has been Ted Chiang. His collection ‘Stories of Your Life and Others’ completely floored me. Short fiction has been taking up a lot of my reading attention, with Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld and Fantasy leading the field for the online zines, and Weird Tales, Realms of Fantasy, Electric Velocipede and Interzone being consistently strong.

I’ve been endeavouring to read more mainstream fiction, especially novels with some spec.fic elemets, but have been underwhelmed by much of it. Chabon’s Hugo and Nebula award winning ‘The Yiddish Policeman’s Union’ failed to capture my imagination. My top reads have both been solidly in genre, Neil Gaiman’s ‘Anansi Boy’s’ got me through the worst of my post-Clarion blue, and Stephen King’s classic ‘The Stand’ has barely left my hands over the holiday period. What can I say, I’m just a genre fanboy at heart.

Listening
Podcasts have completely displaced TV as my diversion of choice when I just want to chill out and switch my mind of for a time. Leo Laporte plays a far more important role in my life than any one should, but when it comes to tech news the TWIT network is unparalleled. Escape Pod continues to deliver wonderful audio fiction and everyone is eternaly grateful to Steve Eley for his efforts to keep it coming too us every week. But the stand out podcast of the year for me is Starship Sofa, which in its new Aural Delights format has become the absolute hub of all that is good in the SFsphere. If you don’t already, get onto iTunes and get listening.

Life
2008 has been a year of change for me. The absolute highlight was my six weeks in California for the Clarion workshop. As a writer, Clarion helped me find a much deeper understanding of fiction that has been slowly percolating through my creative process ever since. As a person it helped me face up to some changes that needed to happen in my life. As I write this I’m coming to the otherside of many of those changes, but it would not be an overstatement to say that the second half of 2008 has been a maelstrom of emotion, and who knows what may be yet to come?

As a writer my resolution for 2009 is simple. I aim to finish what I start. I have a batch of very promising short stories I badly want to nurse to completion, and I have the bones of a real novel just waiting for more flesh. I also have some very exciting opportunities for more critical writing about the spec.fic genre, all of which feeds back to this blog. 2008 is was all about change, fingers crossed 2009 will bring the stability and focus to fulfill all these projects.

Happy new year to regular readers and occaisional visitors alike!

Clarion is now in its last week. It feels slightly unreal, as the differential between Clarion and real world time means I feel like I’ve been here for about eighteen months. As happy as I am to be seeing home again, I’m very, very sad about leaving my Clarion friends behind. I can’t imagine getting to know such a brilliant group of people in such an intense way again any time soon. I’ve made friends here that I know I will see again, but more than likely there are a few faces I will miss. Now at least I have additional motivation to be a bestselling author, so I can come back to the US on book tour and catch up with everyone! And in the unlikely circumstance that doesn’t happen this year I’m resolved to attend at least one major con in the states so I can see other Clarionites in person.

But Clarion isn’t over yet. I still have one more story to finish, and a dozen or more to read and critique. So…back to the word mines!

D

This is a barely manageable schedule on a good day. Add in any of the following variables (jet-lag, desire to talk / socialise with fellow Clarionites, critique rage, collapse of internet connection to girlfriend, symptons of cold and flu, laziness or general lack of self-discipline (all of which I have been afflicted with)) and the Clarion schedule becomes a punishing one. Today is the first day I have managed to write anything meaning ful…and I have so much more ahead of me!

But the there is reason behind this madness. Clarion is all about challenging your assumptions about writing and about genre, and expanding your experiece of writing short fiction. If there are fundamental problems with a story – as there were with my first critiqued story – the workshop process will nail them. Reading in detail 3-4 stories an evening makes you really examine the approaches other writers in your peer group are using. Discussions in crit group and elsewhere dig down into some of the issues that animate fiction writing. Most of all going through this experience with other writers who are all absolutely committed takes the act of writing, which can seem mad and obscure amongst the hurly burly of everyday life, and puts it at the absolute centre of your experience. Two days in I’ve already found it inspiring, infuriating, intimidating and intellectualy challenging beyond my expectations. What the hell happens in the next six weeks I have no idea, but I am determined to find out.

Its an odd almost capital. Twelve thousands residents, seven thousands students. Some tourists and caravan parks. More than a few hippies and a sprinkling of writers, if you can seperate the two. I like it. I want to move.

My second trip to Aber and I wanted to get some reading done. Its a town that suits fantasy. High cliffs. Long grey beaches. Sea gulls the size of labradors. I took some books with me but was also lured in by the Waterstones 3 for 2. A mistake.

The Merlin Codex is one of those sophisticated fantasy novels I’ve been meaning to read. I keep picking it up off the book shelf the putting it back. I’ve read the prologue six or seven times so this week I read the rest. Its very evocative. Intense prose. Packed with dark imigiary. But where are the characters? Merlin, Jason, Medea and other figures from the Greek / Celtic mythic melange author Robert Holdstock mixes are there, but in name only. Perhaps its the fantasy iotself that overweighs the chracters, but facinating as the book was I couldn’t really get absorbed into it. Maybe it was just me.

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss wasn’t me. This book seems to fulfill all the worst accusations levelled at fantasy blockbusters. Perhaps that isn’t entirely fair. Rothfuss is trying to write the kid of gritty, low fantasy that George R R Martin has popularised. Writers like Steven Erikson, Joe Abercrombie, Scott Lynch and many more have followed down this path, none very successfully IMHO. These books are very, very ambitious. Dozens of lead characters with hundreds more in support. Numerous intertwining plotlines. Massive themes unfolding accross a vast imagined world. It takes a massive amounts of skill and craft to write this kind of books, and with the exception of Martin, few of the writers attempting it are good enough. The Name of the Wind typifies this for me. It has grand ambition but the basics of good storytelling and character bulding are’t there.Thats a great disappointment because I really want a book to get lost in, but The Name of the Winde surely is not it.

My Clarion reading continued with Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman and Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link. Interesting to read these two short story collections intertwined with each other. there are a lot of commonalities. Gaiman’s writing is more diverse, whilst links has the edge in intensity. I could sit and read the Gaiman collection straight through, but Link’s is more a thing to read over time.  I also read through some more James Patrick Kelly, which reminded me that I wat to catch up with some more hard-SF. Its two weeks to Clarion now. I’m excited in ways I can’t express.

Because of the few days delay I’m a bit calmer than I was so here is a recreation of what I would have posted…

I GOT IN! I GOT IN! I GOT IN! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!…

I’m pretty damn excited about the whole thing.  I’m going to spend six weeks this summer with only the writing to think about, workshopping with some of the worlds best authors and in the company of people who share the same passion for the craft. I’m still so excited that the standard rejection slip from Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine for ‘The Great Western Pile’ which turned up in my mailbox yesterday barely even registered.

I’m going to be blogging my Clarion preparation and keeping a journal of the workshop itself here. My first task is to track down books by all the tutors and get them read.

Ironically all the nervousness waiting for the result and then the excitement of getting a place mean I haven’t used my writing time productively this week, so I’ll be redoubling my efforts as of today. I have a Guardian article to finish today, a review for the Fix tommorow and then I want to get the second draft of The Black Bull done this week. Back to the word mines!