Solitude and isolation - driving the plot with silence and nothing

I'm away on a writing retreat this week, in a converted Wesleyan chapel in the middle of the Somerset countryside.  We're down a dead-end road that leads only to a bridleway for horses, and fields.  The nearest village is a mile away.  It's ideal for three writers wanting to get a lot of work done, and it got me thinking about solitude and isolation in storytelling.

I'm the one who always wakes early, and I'm typing this blog post alone while my two friends are still asleep.  The house is quiet around me, and so is the land.  It's around 6.30 in the morning, and the sun is rising on a peaceful new day.

Solitude and isiolation are great devices to put into a story when we need a character to reflect and question his or her life, or when they have to choose between two impossible options. I've just finished reading Julie Kagawa's Rogue, the second in her Talon series of young adult books.  It's all about Ember, a young dragon who doesn't fit in.  There's a character who feels alone and isolated even when she's with others.  

Solitude is perfect for torturing a character who's been ignoring the voice of his or her conscience for years. Put that character in a place where they're alone and can't sleep.  Get them to be tortured by the whisper of that little voice in their mind at 3 a.m.  Have it tell them how bad they've been, or urge them to do something they're afraid to do, and you set them up for challenge and change.

Fiction is about characters who make choices, who change by the end of the story.  In order for the reader to believe in these changes, the writer has to show how the character was induced to change.  We need to see the events and reasoning that have shaped his or her decision to act.  A short reflective scene of a character in solitude can achieve that, and let the reader into the character's thoughts and motivations.

As I finish this blog post its gone 7 a.m. and my friends have come down to join me. My brief period of solitude and isolation is over.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

The dangers of research

One of the pieces of advice all writers get is that, if we want to be published, we have to study the market.  The thing is, when I do that, I come away from the exercise thoroughly depressed.

I got into SF in the 1980s.  I fell in love with the stories of Anne McCaffrey, Mary Gentle, Joan D.Vinge, CJ Cherryh.  I loved Anne McCaffrey's straightforward storytelling style, the richness of her invention of Pern and its people.  I adored Joan Vinge's The Snow Queen.  I turned green-eyed with envy over the incredibly detailed descriptions of life on board CJ Cherryh's The Pride of Chanur, and the hyper-real portrayal of the ship's operating procedures,

Recently I decided to tackle the short story market, and came up against the present-day magazine world.  And here's where I started to despair.  Call me old-fashioned, but I do like my stories to have a beginning, middle, and end.  And I want something to change between the start and end of the story.   I've lost track of the number of published pieces I've read recently that don't follow those basic rules, that aren't really stories.  The beginning never seems to change into a middle, and in some cases there wasn't even an end.  I was left thinking "is that it?" when the story ended.  They're character studies, or little vignettes, the sort of thing a novelist might write while discovering their story or getting to know their characters.  They certainly aren't story in their own right.

So now I have a dilemma.  Should I try to write like this just to get published?  I don't really want to. I like my stories to have a strong narrative drive, and for something to change in them. For me, it's not enough to show a weird planet or weird culture and say "look at this!"  I want to know why you want me to look at it.  What message does that scene contain?

For me, writing has to do something.  It has to make a point, or explore a theme.  So I won't be writing  vignettes any time soon.  And I know that some of my themes are intriguing magazine editors, because they're telling me so in their feedback.  So I'll continue to write stories with a beginning, middle and end, exploring ideas I feel passionately about.  Because that's who I am as a writer, and I'm not prepared to change that.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

A world beyond the labels

As an SF writer, my task is to imagine the future.  So I get a little bemused when so many SF authors use their work as a political polemic for current-day gender politics.  I confess that much of this debate turns me off.  Call me naive, but when I raised the issue of multiple genders with a friend, her response was "but humans only come in two types, males and females."  I do feel rather like that myself.

I've watched the proliferation of gender labels with bemusement, and I confess that when I spot a new one I often have to look up its meaning.  And it seems that some SF writers go out of their way to invent more exotic variations on gender.  The trouble is, I'm a practically-minded person, and I wonder why we need this overlay of gender on our physical sex type.

I think some of it is an attempt to escape the shackles of our current sexualised culture, and that I support wholeheartedly.  We have to challenge the 'sexy girlie' stereotype, but I'm not convinced that inventing multiple genders is the best way to do that.  What's needed is a full frontal attack on sexism and mysogyny, what's required is to demand true equality for all people.

That's why I don't focus on gender in my books,  I write about worlds where people don't define themselves by such labels, a world where people are accepted for who they are.  I envisage worlds where anyone can train for and do their dream job or profession, and not be barred from that career because of sex-based prejudices.  Gender is absent in my books because it's not relevant to them.   I have female project leaders and Presidents working alongside male chairmen of powerful organisations.  I have teams of male and female people working happily together, bound by their respect for each others' professional expertise.  

I see my characters as individuals living in a world beyond ugly sexualised culture, where equality is an expectation of everyone.  That makes them free to be true individuals, without the need to identify with some label or group.  To me, that is true speculation, as it's so far from the world in which we live  today.  But SF has always been a torch-bearer for change, and if what I write can encourage people to see people free from sexual stereotyping and expectations, then it will have served its purpose.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song, and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

Rape and birth control aren't SF? That's news to me

This week I had a Facebook discussion with a group of women SF writers.  I was commenting on an article about a magazine's submission policy that failed to pin down what type of story they liked. I find the blanket statement "we don't know what we want until we see it" totally unhelpful, and I wondered if anyone out there had any opinions or experience that could help.

The first response to my query was from a man, who said that rape and birth control didn't sound like subjects for SF stories.  I immediately replied, demanding to know why they weren't SF when they were issues that affected over half of the human race, and would continue to do so in the future.

The deafening silence from the women members of a so-called feminist SF organisation bothered me. This group's aims include "celebrating women as writers... In SF, fantasy... And the speculative genres."  And yet the majority of its members didn't consider this an important enough subject to comment on.

My comment was a response to an article by a magazine editor who stated "editors select what they think are the best stories for the publication."  Best is a subjective personal opinion of one person, and in this case of a man.  And this particular magazine makes no statements in its submission guidelines about committing to diverse stories and authors, as many others do.

At least other magazines state in their submission guidelines that they welcome work from under-represented groups.  But that doesn't go far enough.  Those guidelines don't address diversity of subject matter.  Do we have equality of submission, but not equality of story subjects likely to be bought?  Are certain issues being labelled as "women's issues" and ignored by the magazines?  I have to suspect so, given the response I got from the man on Facebook.

When I start seeing published stories that question and challenge current cultural assumptions I might start to believe in those magazines' equality  statements, but until then I remain to be convinced.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com