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

In search of the story

I've been revising some of my short stories this week, with a view to getting them submitted to magazines.  And I've been taking the magazines' advice and reading what they publish.

Some of my researches have really surprised me. If I'm reading a story about the end of the world, I want to know something about how the world ends, and how the characters survive it.  Instead what I got was a story about a girl delivering books to another girl, going home and taking a suicide pill.  It left me with a sharp intake of breath.  it violated one of the basic rules of storytelling, which is that the main protagonist should survive their ordeal.  

I've read stories of people with symbiotic aliens on their shoulders whose minds and sense of being don't seem to be affected by the presence of the creature at all.  I've read stories that begin with a long discourse on an obscure (invented?) word, but never go on to explain what it means.  That story read more like a dictionary entry than thrilling fiction.  Or perhaps it was supposed to be a bogus history text about this... God?  I really wasn't sure. The author hadn't made it clear.  Then there was the promising story about nanobots cleaning up a radioactive city.  The biotech ideas were good, but it turned out to be far too long, and degenerated into a technical manual for the recycling process.  Somewhere, the story got lost in the midst of the tech.

All this has left me wondering whether this is why I've had trouble selling my stories.  The stories I've read fall into two types.  One set fall into the hard SF mould, and don't seem to worry too much about characters or their fictive journey.  The other set seem to be the other extreme, stream of consciousness ramblings in search of a story.

My stories sit slap bang in the middle.  I have some science and tech, but usually not enough to classify the story as hard SF.  The story is about characters who use that tech, and about its consequences.  And I might be old-fashioned, but I like my stories to have a spine, a recogniseable sequence of events, a beginning, middle and end.  

Hmm. I wonder what reception I'll get when I send the latest batch of short stories out to magazines.