A Writer's Odyssey

1:25:03 PM EDT

It's less than a month now until TNEO (The Never-Ending Odyssey), a post-Odyssey critiquing session for Odyssey graduates.  I'm planning on attending and will be back for my fifth time in six years.  I guess that means I like the week of writing, reading, critiquing and schmoozing that is the typical TNEO.

I've submitted three stories and a novel synopsis.  This year I'll be doing a presentation on Robert McKee's _Story_, and chairing the novel synopsis groups. 

It's a special year because it's the 10th anniversary of Odyssey and we're going to celebrate with a formal dinner.  Odyssey has surely grown, as the latest article in SFWA's newsletter indicates.  Odyssey is one of the top workshops in the world in genre fiction, and it's all due to the efforts of Jeanne Cavelos, our workshop leader and driving force behind Odyssey and TNEO.  Thanks, Jeanne, for all your efforts.

I'm looking forward to returning to Manchester N. H. for another week of workshopping.

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11:17:12 AM EDT

How does a writer's education bear on his or her writing?  That was a recent topic on my alumnae list, Odfellowdiscussion. 

This was my answer:

I think that education can be a drawback when it comes to the creative side of writing.  Why?  Because it feeds the critical side of our brains. We write and then we compare what's written to Mark Twain, D. H. Lawrence, J. R. R. Tolkien, and we say, "My writing is crap.  I can't write."

 

I can't write, of course, like Mark Twain, D. H. Lawrence, or J. R. R. Tolkien.  If I hadn't read them, I would be blissfully ignorant of my inability and would go on honing my craft.  But I have, so I get discouraged.

 

It used to be that when I read something good, it inspired me.  I was more reader then than writer then. 

 

All of that changed when I decided to pick up a pen and write myself.  Now, reading something, I'm discouraged.  "That's so good," I tell myself, reading the latest William Gibson.  "There's no way I can ever write something like that."

 

Lots of people drop out of writing at this point.  It takes too much time, too much effort, and the rewards aren't instantaneous, either.  Months and even years pass before that piece gets a viewing.  Maybe you even sell some things, make money, and get a modicum of fame.

 

Still, you're not where you want to be.  Your next pieces get rejected, your flicker of fame fades fast.  You've had your fifteen minutes.

 

In Odyssey, I was shocked to hear Craig Shaw Gardner, a likeable guy and an obviously hard-working writer, say that he had been pigeon-holed as a "funny fantasy writer," and since funny fantasy was "out" at that time (2001), he couldn't write or sell anything under his name.

 

How could a successful writer be blocked like that, I wondered.  That's where I learned that to writing skill must be added the further element of saleability  (Are you writing what's "in" this season?), and a certain amount of luck. 

 

Add to this a huge source of persistence.  Craig didn't give up and kept writing things--soap operas, romances, books-for-hire--under pen names and wherever he could find the work.  It was great to see him back in print in genre this year, under his own name, with a media tie in.  Persistence matters. 

 

That's part of your education, too: recognizing that the business is a difficult one and that not all its stories end happily.  If you can live with that, you can go on writing.

 

And while your education may ultimately discourage you from writing, it also gives you the gift of recognizing when, from time to time, you do pen a good line or write a good piece.  In that moment you recognize your potential.  All of us have had that moment of recognition, or we would have long since given it all up. 

 

So while your writer's education can discourage you, and make you feel like you can never compete or write a decent line of prose that compares to the giants you read, while it shows you the harsh truth of publication, it can also give you encouragement by showing you your writing potential.  If you aren't deterred by that, you can work in satisfaction and leave the results to time.

 

 

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11:40:45 AM EDT

Another comment on the Odfellow list on the topic of whether or not there is an anti-science trend in today's science fiction was that today’s sf writers are generally pro-science and don’t pan scientists.  The same poster made the point that Generation X and Y generally embrace rather than abhor technology. 

 

I responded to both comments:

 

I agree with your statements whole-heartedly, but you are talking about a very limited group--professional sf writers, writing for a sympathetic clientele, sf fans.  Many sf writers are themselves scientists--Greg Benford, Vernor Vinge, Joan Slonczewski, et al--and you will seldom read negative comments about science or scientific progress in a magazine like _Analog_, for example, that's dedicated to the idea of scientific progress.

 

My comments are focused on the scientist as a figure of popular culture, and there the outlook is not so rosy.  Going back to "Dr. Strangelove," there is a portrait of the Ignorant Scientist that seldom reflects the reality of science researchers.  This is especially true in popular techno-thrillers like _Coma_, _The Andromeda Strain_ and _Jurassic Park_, where writers like Robin Cook and Michael Crichton make a living portraying scientists in unflatteringly simple if not venal roles.  Check out Stephen King for many more examples (I say this knowing I'll draw fire from his admirers on the list; he's a fine writer but he does pick on scientists.)

 

Hollywood is particularly guilty of using the scientist as dupe or evil--from remakes of romantic classics like "The Island of Dr. Moreau," to modern New Wave-type sf movies like _Aliens_ series, where scientists are basically robots in the service of corporate and military interests.  The SciFi Channel is notorious for mass-producing these kinds ofmade-for-tv movies--check out "Sometimes They Come Back for More," and "Reign of the Gargoyles" (featuring creations of evil Nazi scientists, a favorite plot device of this network) I understand the latest buzz film, the Korean horror movie "The Host" features a creature created by a toxic substance thrown into a river by an American scientist.  These examples show that there's an audience that accepts this stereotype, whether they believe in it fervently or not.

 

Being a progress-loving technophile myself, I'm glad to hear that the generations coming up are pro-science and technology, even though I don't see the love of science and mathematics played out in my classroom very often by my students, who love their gadgets but aren't much interested in learning how to make them.  But I'm also cynical enough to believe that you, Abby, technophile that you are, live in a part of the country and work in a business surrounded by people who are like yourself, so perhaps you don't see the opposition to science and technology that exists elsewhere by people in your generation.

 

Pirsig uses the metaphor of the pendulum swing to describe the swing in popular support for the classic-romantic points of view. I believe that there are plenty of romantic, back-to-nature types just waiting to bash science and scientists.  We're just one technological disaster, terror attack, or war away from another pendulum swing, and the seeds for it are being sown in our popular culture by the depiction of scientists as dangerous people.  Sorry to sound so pessimistic, but there it is.

 

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11:38:26 AM EDT

Is there an anti-science trend in our popular culture?  Are scientists portrayed as selfish, silly, and ignorant or uncaring of the consequences of their work in today’s techno-thrillers like Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park or Robin Cook’s Coma?  I think the answer is yes.  Science and scientists make convenient targets and have since Frankenstein.

 

We discussed this topic this week on my alumni list at Odyssey, and one response was that this kind of portrayal was part of an on-going war between Science and Religion.  This was my response:

 

I'm not sure there is a huge religious component to this issue.  The Catholic Church has supported science, post-Galileo, and many famous Jesuits were scientists.  Ditto for protestants like my ancestral Puritan ancestors, who were practical enough to think that God would shut down any experiments He didn't want made.  Where there has been conflict between science and religion, it has mostly been over the issue of evolution, and not all religions oppose that theory, anyway.  The Catholic Church and most mainstream Protestant movements support Darwin.  American fundamentalist opposition to science is an isolated phenomenon (unless you are living in the south or the heartland, of course...)

 

Rather, the anti-science trend in literature harks back to the Romantic Movement in Europe, to Jean Jacques Rousseau, who felt that natural humans and nature were superior to civilized and cultured humanity and to its artificial society.  This was in part a reaction to the rationalism of the 18th century Enlightenment, and the ornate, artificial, civilized structure of literature in the English Restoration period, reflected in the writings of people like Alexander Pope, who in turn were inspired by the classic writing of the Greeks and Romans.

 

Mary Shelley's _Frankenstein_ featuring the iconic Misguided Scientist puts her firmly in the camp of the English Romantics, with her husband Percy, her friend Lord Byron, and Coleridge.  The Romantics rejected the idea of progress and thought that too much knowledge led to folly.  A strain of Romanticism runs through fantasy in the works of Tolkien, who made an industrialist of Saruman.  Tolkien, of course, had direct experience of the evils of progress in military weapons in World Wars I and II.  His warnings were cautionary in much the same way that H.G. Wells warned of mankind's ability to destroy itself with the wrong kind of science. (Wells was famous for his statement that mankind was in a race between education and catastrophe, and he wasn't sure who would win.)

 

Later, the Golden Age of SF was quite rationalist, with scientists filling the roles of good guys and problem-solvers of a bright future.  But the Romantic counter-revolution of New Wave and Cyberpunk SF pushed back scientists to the role of dupes or villains.  Again, war (this time Vietnam) probably played a huge role in the writers' opposition to science and scientists who thought up destructive weapons systems which might just do us all in.

 

Jonathan Pirsig, in his _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_ a classic of philosophic literature, discusses this recurrent conflict between the rational (which he calls the classical) and romantic modes of the human mind.  (I highly recommend the book if you haven't read it.)

 

Anyway, today it probably depends on your personal beliefs whether you think scientists do more good or more harm.  I'm just tired of the cliché of the Ignorant Scientist, who changes things because he's an innocent or perhaps venal, and thus lets out the genie out of the bottle.  Most scientists are far more aware of the implications of their research than the rest of us, and far more concerned that their work will be misused by policymakers or entrepreneurs.

 

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1:48:18 PM EST


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1:06:57 PM EST

And here's the final part of the series:

Notes From the Odyssey Workshop (July 26, 2001)

A Blue Ear Books Special by James Hall

Terry Brooks Week


New Hampshire's fabulous fall-like weather continues, but at Odyssey we
hardly notice it, so tense are we about the visit of best-selling author
Terry Brooks. Even before he arrived, Terry put us on notice that we'd work
harder this week by increasing our weekend reading load from 3 to 15
manuscripts. He promised longer workshop sessions, and gave us just two days
to rewrite our stories after he had demolished them with a series of
penetrating questions about character, theme, beginnings, and endings.

Still, it didn't take us long to see that behind Terry's take-charge
attitude, aggressive questioning, and insistent quest for perfection was a
real desire to encourage writers to give their best efforts when telling
their stories. Terry considers himself a veteran storyteller, whose own need
to tell better stories has led to consistent improvement over time as a
writer, and an extended stay on the NY Times bestseller list.

Brooks credits his success in part to habits learned from legendary editor
Lester Del Rey, who insisted on extensive rewrites of Brooks' first novel,
_The Sword of Shannara_ (1977), the first book published under the Del Rey
imprint and a book that created the market for modern fantasy after Tolkien.
Del Rey taught Brooks to be aware of his story's theme and its central
characters, and to be ruthless in cutting out any element that doesn't
advance the story. In return, Terry urges us to compress our own story
elements, characters and settings, and even to go with a single story line to
avoid confusing the reader. Story conflict is personal and should occur
between people, not groups of people or forces of nature, and characters must
solve their own problems. The conflicts that characters engage in and
obstacles they overcome should cause them to grow throughout the story. The
story ends, according to Del Rey and Brooks, when the story question is
answered, and no further elucidation is needed.

Terry complains that many writers today don't know when and how to end their
books, and consequently leave the reader feeling dissatisfied, even when the
first two-thirds of the book is well-written. To avoid this problem, he
strongly advocates using a story outline. Brooks writes an outline that
includes a paragraph for each chapter with setting, characters, and action.
Though he often deviates from the outline when he begins to write, he
inevitably returns to it to get back on track and end the book where he wants
it to end, keeping his central conflict and story theme intact.

Del Rey also taught Terry another lesson by throwing out his second book,
insisting that it was good enough to be published but not good enough to be
successful. He taught Brooks to aim higher and work harder with each book
released. The result has been two highly popular Shannara series and their
successors, The Magic Kingdom of Landover series, and the Running With the
Demon series, as well as two books written for movies: _Hook_ and _Star Wars:
Episode One_.

Along the way, Terry has learned something about readers, too. He's seen
that many readers want more of the same book they read the last time.
Brooks' greatest successes have come from writing a series of books where the
same or related characters continue their conflicts in familiar settings.
His most difficult sales have been selling books with new characters and new
settings to those same readers.

At the end of the week, we are exhausted but also exalted with Terry's
vision, a philosophy of storytelling that unifies character, plot, and theme,
capturing and keeping the reader's attention. He's given many of us a method
we want to try; and others one to contrast with their own ways of writing.
Terry takes the group out for a pizza party, and characteristically takes all
our orders, organizes and passes out the drinks and salads and pizzas to each
of us. Whether it's writing a novel, a sequence of novels, or planning a
dinner for twenty, Terry Brooks remains in control of his material.

James Hall

 

 

 

Notes From the Odyssey Workshop (July 31, 2001)

A Blue Ear Books Special by James Hall

Luck, Persistence, and Talent


By the beginning of the sixth week of our Odyssey, we're all punchy. Energy
is at an all-time low, and often our collective response to Jeanne's
questions is a slack-jawed look of perplexity. Over the past weeks, by my
count, we've read and critiqued 90 manuscripts, written and revised six of
our own, and taken pages of notes on character, setting, theme, and the
business of publishing. Yet as we count out the days until we return to
civilization, we are at once eager to resume our lives and reluctant to see
the Odyssey workshop end.

At the end of the fifth week Terry Brooks, his literary agent Matt Bialer,
and fantasy writer R. A. (Bob) Salvatore, one of the hardest working writers
in the business, join us for a panel discussion. During that panel, Brooks
writes down a short list of qualities necessary to be a successful writer,
which the panel enthusiastically agreed were true. Quality number one was
Luck, number two Persistence, and then, leaving a large blank area, Brooks
wrote at the bottom of the chart, number 63, Talent.

That formula could be true of many of the writers we've met this summer.
Brooks himself told of the luck involved in sending his Tolkienesque _Sword
of Shannara_ manuscript to Lester Del Rey at the exact time when that editor
had begun to look for a work fantasy to inaugurate the Del Rey imprint.
Allen Steele told us of fourteen years of stories rejected by magazines until
a chance meeting with an editor at a convention finally led to a string of
his stories getting accepted.

R. A. Salvatore, who has written 43 novels in 13 years, said his first
published novel, _Chrystal Shard_ (1988) came about as a result of good
timing. A book proposal sent to games/book publisher TSR arrived at a time
when company executives were desperately seeking a writer for a new series
based on their Forgotten Realms material. Salvatore had an unpublished novel
to show and promised TSR a quick book, which he executed for them on time.
Salvatore himself says that his submission six months earlier or six month
later would likely have not been accepted.

Salvatore got his start writing novelizations for the Forgotten Realms
fantasy game and still writes several booksa year for them. He also writes
his own work for Del Rey and is one of those rare writers writing books
simultaneously for two different publishers. He's also writing the
novelization for the next Star Wars movie, Episode II, for Del Rey, a topic
about which he's been sworn to secrecy.

Salvatore considers novelizations of fantasy games, shared fantasy worlds, or
of television/movie series like Babylon 5 or Star Wars to be a good place for
a beginning writer to learn the craft and for a steady writer to make a
living. His own work in the Realms of Fantasy licensed world has been a
mixed blessing for him. He notes that payments for first-time novelists
writing licensed novelizations are generally low, and any characters and
setting developed by the writer become the property of the licensing
corporation. On the other hand, the first printing of a licensed novel is
often huge compared with a first novel (TSR printed 140,000 copies of
Salvatore's first book versus a printing of 5,000-10,000 copies for a typical
first novel) and the publisher often spends significant time, effort, and
money publicizing it, while most beginning writers outside of novelizations
get little if any publicity.

At the end of the week we have a graduation party, and meet some of the
Odyssey alums who have joined us to participate in a graduate workshop the
following week. We tell each other about our goals for the coming year and
pose for a few group pictures. After the party we walk back to our
townhouses together and talk about our past six weeks. We linger in each
other's company for hours, realizing that this may be the last time we're
together. We've all made friends here, and for many of us Odyssey has been
one of those rare life-changing experiences. With luck, persistence, and
talent we hope to join the ranks of those who have successfully written and
published genre fiction.

James Hall

 

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1:05:08 PM EST

I couldn't post the entire series in one entry, so here's the middle portion of it:

Notes from the Odyssey Workshop (June 25, 2001)

A Blue Ear Books Special by James Hall 

Genre Trapping and the Camaraderie of Writers


After two weeks, I am into the flow of the workshop. Our daily routine is
well established: we warm up with an hour of theory talk, usually by
Odyssey's Director Jeanne Cavelos on the finer points of setting, plot,
scene, or characterization. Then we workshop two or three of the stories or
novel chapters written by our fellow Odyssey writers (which includes
something of our own work weekly), then we have about twelve hours to
critique the next day's stories and work on our own. Weekends are to catch
up with the rest of the human race and do more writing. We've quickly
realized that there is never enough time for writing.

We live on the campus of Southern New Hampshire University (formerly New
Hampshire College) in student townhouses, living two or three writers to a
townhouse, all of them side by side. I share my townhouse with a horror
writer from New Mexico and a fantasy writer from Ontario. The townhouses are
spare; no television or other outside influences unless we bring them with
us. A half-dozen out of the sixteen of us have cars, and are socially
prominent since the University is far enough from civilization to make
walking anywhere ridiculous.

Each Thursday evening we hold a reception for the Odyssey guest speaker of
the week, an experienced author, agent, or editor who has come to speak on a
writing-related topic and to tell about their own relationship to the writing
life. Our first guest was fantasy writer Craig Shaw Gardner, who broke into
the writing business in the 1960s during fantasy's publishing heyday.

Craig Gardner challenged the serious fantasy writing of the time by writing
fantasy humor, penning three trilogies that included novels like _A Malady of
Magicks_, _A Difficulty with Dwarves_ and my personal favorite _Revenge of
the Fluffy Bunnies_. One of the things Gardner has learned about the
business is that publishers like to typecast authors. After nine books he
became associated with "funny fantasy" (as he calls it) and found publishers
resistant to his desire to write other kinds of works, including serious
fantasy and horror.

When the market for funny fantasy dried up, he found it necessary to apply
his writing talents elsewhere. Under the pen name Peter Garrison, he
authored serious fantasy in the Changeling War trilogy. He wrote a trilogy
based the fantasy world of _Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves_, and only
recently has he returned to write serious fantasy under his own name with the
Dragon Circle Trilogy, the latest book of which is _Dragon Burning_.

Genre trapping isn't necessarily bad when a writer really enjoys writing in a
particular genre. The writer's name becomes a brand: see a book by Arthur C.
Clarke or Larry Niven and you know you're in for good hard science fiction; a
Steven King or Dean Koonce denotes a great horror novel read; and you
approach a Terry Brooks or Andre Norton for quality fantasy. But if you're
one of those unfortunates who want to regularly cross genres, you must have
a genre-busting reputation like an Ursula LeGuin or a recognizable brand like
F. Paul Wilson's Repairman Jack, a character who gallivants back and forth
between the fantasy and horror genres at his author's whim.

Despite the difficulties of genre trapping, particularly in a moribund field
like funny fantasy, Craig Shaw Gardner has managed to remain a full-time
writer with a significant body of work. Today he writes Sherlock Holmes
stories, and even copy for the professional wrestling magazine _Rampage_, a
job he began as a favor for a friend and continues for the sheer fun of it.
He is hopeful that the success of R.J. Rowling's Harry Potter series and the
soon-to-be-released feature film version of J.R.R. Tolkien's _Lord of the
Rings_ signals a rebirth of the fantasy genre, and of funny fantasy along
with it.

Gardner was as curious of us as we were of him, and asked about our daily
practice of workshopping and living together. Oddly enough, residing with a
group of fellow writers has become one of the most interesting and satisfying
parts of Odyssey for me. I've grown accustomed to the solitariness of the
writing life, and to have other writers to share stories with, to talk about
grammar, favorite inspirations, and the frustrations of rejection slips is
nothing short of wonderful. Who else understands your fear ofclichés, your
frustration over character or plot development better than a fellow writer?

The writers here have become friends in short order. We could have just as
easily split apart into bickering groups of mutually hostile critics, but the
hard work of writing and critiquing and living together has caused the
sixteen of us to bind together in ways that would never have occurred in a
less pressure-packed environment. Undoubtedly a lot of this has to do with
Jeanne's management of us; her willingness to listen to our complaining, her
ability to spot the flaws in our work, and most all her patience with our
foolishness.

Craig Gardner spoke enthusiastically about the usefulness of the workshop
process, and confessed that he has been sharing his work with the same group
of writers for twenty-five years. He urged us to cultivate the same sort of
relationships with writers whose judgment we trust; but I think we already
realize this now, after only a short period of time here. Meanwhile, with
lots of work to do, and with people to share our thoughts about writing, we
move forward on our Odyssey.

James Hall

 

 

Notes From the Odyssey Workshop

A Blue Ear Books Special by James Hall (July 2, 2001)


Realism v. Story

In the third week of the workshop, the weather has warmed up and the heat's
increasing on us to perform as well. We've each gotten a personal assessment
from Jean, we've been knocked around several times (in the most friendly way)
by our fellow writers in workshops, and we're laboring hard to correct our
worst errors. Some of us struggle with the vagaries involved in creating
believable characters, while others wrestle with plot, or fight the bad
habits of passive construction and a repetitive sentence structure. Stories
that once seemed like thoroughbreds now appear as they really are:
swaybacked, limping candidates forthe glue factory.

One of the problems we face now is the difficulty of writing new things
without our internal editor telling us, "No, you've got it all wrong. This
will never work. This is crap." The workshopping we do daily has that
editor on full edit mode, while our creative selves have been beaten down and
only occasionally get the encouragement and praise they crave. Yet to create
new stories, we must put the editor to sleep, or on hold for a while. Our
creativity will come back to us in time, we're told, but for now the dreaded
editor rules us.

An issue we are grappling with at the workshop is what role realism ought to
play in depicting what are essentially fantastic realms in horror, fantasy,
or science fiction. How realistic should our characters be, how realistic
the dialogue or setting when we are depicting what are essentially fantastic
events?

Our workshop guest writer this week, author and medical doctor F. Paul Wilson
would seem to be a consummate realist writer. He's written a trio of medical
thrillers and some hard science fiction. Wilson, whose work also includes
the fantasy novel _The Keep_, the Repairman Jack series of dark fantasy
novels, and recent work for the Sci-Fi Channel (he co-wrote the Faster Than
Light minute reports produced during the Channel's first three years), did a
lot of basic research for his latest Repairman Jack novel, the soon-to-be
released _Hosts_. Much of the book is based in New York City, locations
around it, and within a New York subway.

Dr. Wilson (who still practices medicine two days a week while writing five),
spent a lot of time researching each scene, taking the precise subway train
(the # 9) where he organizes a pivotal scene with Jack, covering all the
neighborhoods that Jack frequents, and in the process discovering some
unintended links--like when Jack's escape route from a murder scene passed by
the Dakota, the apartment house where John Lennon was murdered in a similar
way. Realistic details like this can enrich a book's action and supplement
its theme.

On the other hand, a mistake in depicting reality can just as easily detract
from the story that a writer wants to tell. Wilson described an early book
in which he confused the characteristics of an automatic weapon with a
revolver, and received dozens of letters from readers complaining about the
mistake. Not only has he carefully researched his weapons since, but his
plot in _Hosts_ turns on the discovery of a rare but powerful small handgun,
a 45 caliber Semmerling, which Jack carries and must use to protect himself.

Based on the testimony of his research habits, you might call F. Paul Wilson
a realist, but there you would be wrong. Most writers of realistic fiction
write to show us the world as it is, selecting their details to show us
elements they believe we ought to know. Writers like Tom Wolfe, whose
_Bonfire of the Vanities_ also depicts New York, have declared that the
realistic depiction of a society ought to be at least as important as the
story in which it is situated.

Wilson, however, sees himself as a storyteller first, and the elements of
reality that he incorporates into his books go towards the telling of the
story itself, making the fantastic elements within it seem more real. The
writer must get the details right to advance the story, but the details
themselves are not the story. Other writers of fantastic fiction seem to
agree. Steven King calls writers "God's Liars," whose work reveals a truth
different from the literal truth of realism. Writer and agent Donald Maass
calls for larger-than-life characters, dramatic dialogue, and fantastic
events that become metaphors for the truth we discern in the creation of our
story and want our reader to see as well.

As for those of us here at the workshop, we'd just like to be able to tell a
simple story, any story without our internal editors going crazy. At the
midpoint of our workshop, we're still slogging uphill.

James Hall

 

 

Notes From The Odyssey Workshop  (July 9, 2001)

A Blue Ear Special by James Hall


The Business of Writing

Week four of the workshop brings lovely fall-like weather to New Hampshire,
enlivening our bodies and lifting our spirits. Or was it the all night dance
party we held to celebrate the halfway point of Odyssey? The party was an
impromptu event brought about by the big thud! heard after a large group of
us attended the premier of "Artificial Intelligence" (AI) in a Manchester
theater.

AI failed for us not only because it was a monster with a Kubrickian head, a
body by Speilberg and too many (lengthy) tails, but because it violated all
the rules of SF moviemaking, from its long narrations at the beginning and
end to its cliche of a premise (robot wants to be human). That's a wheel
that has been reinvented far too many times in the genre already. One of the
reasons you are supposed to read heavily in your chosen field is to avoid
rewriting what has already been written and written again.

What's really sad is that AI is actually based on a good short story by UK
science fiction/fantasy writer Brian Aldiss, "Supertoys Last All Summer Long
(1969)." It is a story that not only avoids cliche but is actually a
thoughtful exploration of humankind's relationship and responsibilities
towards its machines when they grow complicated enough to respond to us in a
meaningful way--the way a child robot would respond to its mother. That's
something that comes through only momentarily in the movie itself, which
can't avoid taking the Pinocchio twist instead.

The need to avoid cliches is just one of the business tips brought by our
last guest, agent Donald Maass. Maass runs a successful literary agency in
New York with over 150 author clients, of which about a third publish genre
fiction. He's also spent time both as an editor in a publishing house and as
an author of fiction and nonfiction, his latest work being _Writing the
Breakout Novel_.

Over the past twenty years Maass has seen the market for writing tighten
considerably, until there are now principally six major publishers for most
works of fiction. These publishers are in turn owned by major media
corporations who expect a far higher percentage in profits than the 2-3% that
the publishing business has historically returned its investors.

This means that today's publishing houses have fewer opportunities to develop
writers. Once they could wait until a promising writer's third or even
fourth book hit paydirt to recoup their losses and garner a profit. Now the
ceaseless search for profitability means that a writer's first book must be
an instant success to justify a second book, much less a third. Not only do
today's publishing houses keep an eye on the bottom line, but large bookstore
chains like Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com carefully scrutinize their own
sales records and have been known to balk at accepting books from writers
whose works don't show a proven track record of sales.

What does this mean for the writer trying to break into the fiction field?
Be good right away. Find a winning formula for success. For Maass this
formula boils down to gripping, well-rounded characters, nonstop action, and
originality of content. Write the novel that hasn't yet been written, and by
all means avoid cliches like AI. Only a Steven Spielberg can get away with
them, and the way things are going in markets these days, not even him for
long.

James Hall

 

 

Notes From the Odyssey Workshop (July 19, 2001)

A Blue Ear Books Special by James Hall

Research and "Hard Science Fiction"


The beautiful, fall-like weather continues in New Hampshire, though an
occasional surprise shower dumps its load on the unwary student walking out
of a class or cafeteria. We spend much of the week examining our own
writing, determining our style or lack thereof. Are our favored sentences
convoluted or simple? Are they all the same length? Do we lean heavily on
adverbs to make our verbs limp weakly along? How exact to our meaning are
the words that we choose to use? Examining our writing leads to the
unpleasant discovery of bad habits—habits that must be broken.

Along with our stylistic self-examination much of the week is spent talking
about the impending visit of Terry Brooks, the fantasy writer who'll be
leading our workshop all next week. With over 16 million books sold, Terry's
one of the most successful writers in genre fiction, a driven author who has
never failed to have a book of his reach the New York Times bestseller list.
We've heard rumors of Terry's hard-nosed, confrontational style developed as
a Chicago lawyer. Jeanne warns us that Terry will ask us to explain and
defend our story decisions. Terry promises longer workshops and has asked
Jeanne if anyone has left a morning workshop session in tears yet. His query
puts many onedge, wondering how he'll find our work wanting, and as the end
of the week approaches, the tension level rises.

We also have a visitor, Zoe Ingalls, a journalist from the _Chronicle of
Higher Education_, who spends Thursday and Friday attending our workshop
sessions and interviewing us for a feature article on the Odyssey Workshop.
(Full disclosure: her article will feature this writer's cyborg story getting
the full workshop treatment.)

The end of the week also brings our guest writer, Allen Steele, one of the up
and coming stars of hard science fiction, who joins us to talk about
research. Steele, whose first book _Orbital Decay_ was published in 1988, is
known for constructing his science fiction and techno-thrillers like
_OceanSpace_ with the best scientific information available. In order to
write _OceanSpace_, a book involving an undersea research facility on North
America's continental shelf, Steele learned to scuba dive, interviewed
oceanographers, read research reports, and even bought drinks for
professional deep divers in a Dominican bar to hear their stories. Allen
made a detailed drawing of the research center that appears in _OceanSpace_,
and had the book reviewed by several oceanographers before it was published
to avoid reproducing factual errors in his story.

Much of Steele's research is done before he ever conceives a book or story
idea. He collects articles and ideas that interest him in file folders
appropriately labeled. (Alan has a file folder for each planet in the Solar
System, for space station design, spacecraft design, interstellar astronomy,
life sciences, etc.) When a story idea strikes him, he generally has a
wealth of background information to fall back on to develop it before he does
his in-depth research. He then puts together a folder for a story or a
notebook for a novel that contains the information vital to the story,
including scientific background, character sketches and a story outline.

The sort of science fiction that Steele writes is often characterized as
"hard science fiction," a sub-genre of SF whose definition Allen disputes.
He believes that well-written fiction based on realistic science is the
essence ofboth classical and good modern science fiction in general.
Readers of science fiction are as interested in how the science works as they
are of the story told through it, and are inclined to penalize a storyteller
whose solution to a problem involves violating scientific laws. The critics'
isolation of hard science fiction in the last thirty years to a handful of
writers, often conservative/libertarian Anglo-Saxon males writing in venues
like _Analog_, where the science frequently overwhelms the story, is a trend
that Steele sees reversing as more women and people of color enter this
booming field, and more people become interested in reading and writing
science fiction that works scientifically.

Meanwhile, feeling the strain of Terry Brook's impending visit, we
Odysseyites jump into our friends' cars and spend the weekend doing our story
critiques at New Hampshire's one beach, located forty-five minutes away at
Portsmouth (a name the locals pronounce "Portsmith"). The beach itself is
quite nice, the sun appropriately warm, but the water's a dark, dark blue and
freezing cold, reminding us that Terry will soon arrive to throw cold water
on our work.

James Hall

 

 

 

Tags: Notes from the Odyssey Workshop

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12:57:39 PM EST

In 2001 I attended the Odyssey Fiction Workshop at Southern New Hampshire University.  The workshop was a life-changing experience for me.  As part of my visit, I wrote a series for Blue Ear Magazine, a now-defunct internet site for international journalists.

Recently I was approached by Jeanne Cavelos, the workshop leader, about reposting the series for interested readers.  I think it gives them some idea of the things that go on during this intense six-week workshop, which has since moved across town from SNHU to St Anselm College.

So here's the series:

Notes from the Odyssey Workshop (June 18, 2001) Blueear.com

A Blue Ear Books Special by James Hall

What is Genre Fiction?


My first visit to Manchester, New Hampshire, home of the Odyssey Workshop,
reveals an old city recreating itself anew. Driving through this city from
the airport, I saw the dark waters of the Merrimack River rush past long rows
of old red brick buildings where New England mill workers labored a century
ago to produce cloth and clothing. There is an economic hierarchy to the
setting, with the old mill factories themselves closest to the swift-moving
river, taking advantage of its force to produce the power needed to weave and
cut cloth. Higher up the riverbank, the old brick tenements which housed the
mill workers form in a line along the River Road, and higher still, in the
leafy wide streets above the river valley, the comfortable wood trim houses
and Victorian mansions of the mill overseers and their bosses still survive.

Today, however, Manchester is part of an information age economy, not a
manufacturing economy. The mill buildings are being turned to upscale
restaurants, the tenements to shopping malls, and the mansions are owned by
lawyers, accountants, and dot.com millionaires.

In much the same way the genre fiction we are attempting to write here at
Odyssey has transformed itself from its roots in romantic and gothic fiction
and in commercial pulps to a prominent place on the world's literary stage.
Critics like Oxford's Tom Shippey have hailed the 20th century as the great
era of "fantastic fiction," with major works like George Orwell's _Animal
Farm_ and _1984_ , William Golding's _Lord of the Flies_ and _The
Inheritors_, Kurt Vonnegut's _Slaughterhouse-Five_, Ursula LeGuin's _Left
Hand of Darkness_ and Thomas Pynchon's _Gravity's Rainbow_ all celebrating
the power of the fantastic over realism. Shippey himself considers J.R.R.
Tolkien to be the best author of the 20th century.

So what is it about fantastic fiction, in particular the fantasy, science
fiction, and horror genres that has captured the modern and postmodern
imaginations? Tolkien himself makes a stab at an answer in his long essay
"On Fairy-Stories" in _Tree and Leaf_(1965), where he takes issue with anyone
who would relegate tales of Fairie to literary falsehoods or juvenilia. The
good storyteller, says Tolkien, creates a secondary world into which the
reader can enter and through which what he relates is necessarily true. The
creation of this world, for Tolkien, goes well beyond Coleridge's "willing
suspension of disbelief," compelling the reader's belief and changing the
reader's perception of reality after the book has been put down. (Something
that Tolkien's books have done for many of us.)

Ursula LeGuin offers us much the same idea in her short introduction to _The
Left Hand of Darkness_ when she eschews the definition of science fiction as
a literature that extrapolates the future. To LeGuin science fiction is
descriptive rather than predictive, a thought-experiment engaged in to tell
us something about ourselves today, not about events occurring in the future.
Says LeGuin, "In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well
that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word
of it." As a result, when we're reading, we are changed in some
difficult-to-describe way. For LeGuin the conventions of science fiction are
modern metaphors which point to the timeless truths that the imagination
realizes.

These words echo the advice of our workshop director Jeanne Cavelos, who
urges us, paradoxically, to approach genre fiction by reading everything good
outside it as well as much inside it. Read the best works of nonfiction,
read works from different cultures, read what has been done before and done
well in your chosen genre. What you learn provides you with the tools to
appreciate a genre's past, and to then to recreate it in a new, different
way. One look at Manchester, New Hampshire, would tell you that this is how
both life and art work.

James Hall

 

 

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12:47:32 PM EST

I'm adding a release that Jeanne sent to Odyssey grads the other day about the podcasting of Odyssey's guest authors, editors, and agents.  Over the years Jeanne's invited many of the field's top figures to come speak to her Odyssey workshop students.  These remarks, given to about 18 students at a time in the comfort of a university classroom, have been recorded, and they've been available to Odyssey students and TNEO (The Never Ending Odyssey) returning alums who come for a critiquing workshop after the regular Odyssey workshop.

Now these remarks will be available to anyone who wishes to hear them.  That's a great improvement and gives some of the unique flavor of the workshop.  I encourage you to check the list of podcasts and to download a podcast of an author, agent, or editor of your choice.  You won't regret it.

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4:37:23 PM EST

ODYSSEY WRITING WORKSHOP LAUNCHES PODCASTS

Beginning February 1, the Odyssey Writing Workshop will offer free podcasts
on their website, www.odysseyworkshop.org.

Odyssey is an intensive, six-week workshop for writers of fantasy, science
fiction, and horror whose work is approaching publication quality. The
workshop is held each summer in Manchester, New Hampshire.

The podcasts are excerpts from lectures given by guest writers, editors, and
agents at Odyssey. Every month or two, Odyssey will release a new podcast.
Each one is ten to fifteen minutes long. Jeanne Cavelos, the director of
Odyssey, said, "We have taped all our guest lectures since 1997, and these
recordings offer a wonderful collection of insights and advice for
developing writers. With these podcasts, we hope to further our mission of
helping writers of fantasy, science fiction, and horror to improve their
skills."

The first podcast is an excerpt from a lecture Charles L. Grant gave in the
summer of 2000 on characterization. Grant offered some invaluable insights
and provided concrete, practical tips. This was his last teaching
engagement before he died in 2006. "We are honored to present this excerpt
as our inaugural podcast, as a tribute to Charlie's life and his
contribution to the field," Cavelos said.

Future podcasts will feature lecture excerpts from Robert J. Sawyer, Melissa
Scott, Jeff VanderMeer, Gardner Dozois, and many more.

No special hardware or software is required to access the recordings. Users
may download the mp3 files to their computer, subscribe using RSS, or
subscribe on the iTunes page for Odyssey podcasts.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION
Contact: Jeanne Cavelos, Director
jcavelos@sff.net


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