At Clarion, Kelly Link taught us about the logic of night and dreams. Lessons learned at Clarion can take some time to sink in. This one has seemed very relevant to me this week. Read the rest of this entry »
Posts Tagged ‘kelly link’
To self publish or to not
In The Fiction Front, Uncategorized on March 23, 2009 at 2:42 pmI’ve been doing a lot of thinking about self publishing recently. I’ve been considering two projects that might be described as self publishing. And I’ve been looking at how self publishing fits into my professional life as a literature development worker. And I’ve just been following a thread incited by a Facebook status update from Mary Robinette Kowal on the brutal existence of self published authors at conventions. Basically, I think its time I put some of this into words.
Brokeback Tales
In The Fiction Front on March 16, 2009 at 1:22 amIt being late Sunday evening, I want to throw a question out into the void and see what comes back.
Geoff Ryman often rolled out the term ‘broken backed’ when he was teaching at Clarion. Geoff meant it not as a general term for a bad story, but as a specific term for a good story with something very wrong with it. Thats an interesting line to draw. A bad story is a bad story. But a good story, even with major flaws, is a thing of interest. So what to do about the broken backed story?
In my thinking a broken backed story is one where the writers imagination outstrips their skill. You are hit with inspiration for a truly original / inspiring story but your skill with the pen isn’t enough to express it in words. But that doesn’t quite work. Anyone who has sat down to write their Tolkienesque epic fantasy and failed is discovering how easy it is to imagine more than you can realise.
Another thought we all took away from Clarion, thanks to first Kelly Link then Mary Anne Mohanraj, was that there are many good stories in the world, but only a handful of great ones. Anyone can learn to produce a good story, but the thing every writer struggles with is stepping up into greatness. Stories are both complex and illogical, they are mechanisms with many moving parts, driven at their heart by a kind of magic none of us really understand. You can think you have all the parts mastered, only to find the magic is not there. Even the greatest writers only get the alchemy write some of the time.
Broken backed stories are the ones where writers are striving to get all the parts running smoothly and the magic blazing as well. They are like insane science experiments mixed with wild sorcery, Frankenstein’s monsters colliding with dancing mops to the music of Fantasia. They do not work. They are off kilter, out of joint, fucked up beyond all reason. Monsters that we keep looked in our trunks or exhiled to unused areas of hard drive.
Which leads me to my question. What should we do with them? Keep them locked away? Put them out of their misery? We might say ‘rewrite them and make them whole’. But what if we can’t? What if they can never be fixed? And what if fixing them means losing the mysterious spark that might have made them great? Isn’t a great story always a little broken backed? I think most of my favourite stories are in one way or another.
Maybe we need some kind of home for the broken backed that will never be whole. A Freakshow of Brokeback Tales. Hmmmm…I think I smell an anthology brewing!
Clarion: Graduating Class of 2008
In Clarion San Diego 08 on August 9, 2008 at 2:26 amSo today I graduated Clarion.
WWWWWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOTTTTTTTTTTTTTT!!!!!!!!!!!
It has been a long, hard six weeks. So long. So hard.
They don’t tell you how much hard work Claron is going to be when they let you in. I heard the words ‘Bootcamp for writers’ and thought..pfaff…all day every day to just read and write stories. Eeezy peezy. OMFG was I wrong. For any prospective Clarionites reading this and thinking about applying, be aware of what you are getting yourself into.
And then get into it.
Clarion has been, without a doubt, among the most intense experiences of my life. It has stretched me on every level – intellectualy, psychologicaly, artisticaly and not least nutritionaly. I’m going to make some detailed posts reflecting on the experience over the next few weeks when I have some distance to view it objectively. Until then then I just want to say a HUGE CONGRATULATIONS to the eighteen graduating students and an even BIGGER THANKS to Kelly, Jim, Mary-Anne, Neil, Geoff and Nalo who guided us through.
Kelly’s Crows
In Clarion San Diego 08 on July 14, 2008 at 5:10 amToday I finished two weeks at Clarion. It feels like much longer. There is a consensus that one week of Clarion world time is about three weeks of real world time (or should that be the other way around?). One of my fellow clarionites has observed that we are living in strange environment. The weather is the same every day. There are lizards and rabbits and crows leaping all over the UCSD campus, and eucalyptus trees everywhere with flaky bark that looks like skin. Its possible that the crows have been sent to watch over us, and conceivable that we are all living in a Kelly Link story (in which case dear reader, please don’t stop!)
Clarion is very hard work. You critique all morning. You write all day. You read all night. Sleep is scarce, but deep. Like intense, structured exercise, this kind of exertion has the effect of stretching the muscles being exercised. I can feel myself arriving at new revelations about story writing everyday. The combination of hours of writing, reading and deconstructing up to 20k words of story every day, discussing those stories, talking almost non-stop about story and being around one very skilled professional writer after another is filtering so many concepts into my head that I will still be processing all the details years after Clarion has finished.
Last weeks story, ‘Ocean Beach’ got all the experiences I’ve been absorbing from California and San Diego out of my system. Its very far from finished, but I’m really happy about the ideas I developed in the story, and its likely to be first on my list to complete when I get back. I hope I don’t lose the thread of it when Kalifornia is no longer looming all around me, being weird in ways that I think only this strange environment can be. I did a flash piece last week as well called ‘String Music’ which I will polish and submit when I have a spare few hours. This week I’m working on a high fantasy story, complete with Elves and magic rings. Its going v.well and is a good change of pace and style as the other pieces were very dense, this is much more exciting. I’m not expecting to walk away from my six weeks here with any finished drafts, but do want to generate as much material and absorb as many insights into the craft as possible.
Aber Reads
In Book Reviews, Infinite Book Pile, Writing Journal on June 15, 2008 at 12:42 amThe locals call Aberystwyth, the almost capital of Wales, simply Aber. It makes sense, its a mouthfull of constanants.
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.
