Returning to simplicity

I'm a big fan of simple storytelling.  But while I've been researching SF short story markets I've come across several magazines that want 'leading edge' and 'experimental' fiction, whatever they are.  Or 'stories that play with form and expectations', whatever that means.

The thing is, a story only is a story if it has a recogniseable structure.  Basically, it needs a boring old beginning, middle, and end.  That's very old-fashioned, I know, but plot is driven by event/action/result/new event/action/result.  The tests and challenges pile up and get steadily harder while we wonder how our heroine is going to overcome this latest impossible challenge.

The very simplicity of simple storytelling structure hides the power of effortless storytelling.  This is particularly so in young adult SF.  There you'll find fast-paced, logical stories, but you'll also find strong SF ideas being well worked out. Which is more than can be said for some of the adult SF stories I've read.  Some of these seem no more than a mish-mash of clever scenes cobbled together with no narrative thread, no obvious connection, and sometimes no obvious storytelling purpose.  They're the sort of thing beginner writers produce thirty years before they learn to write a story.

Perhaps that's why I love YA quest stories.  The little child inside me wants to go on a adventure, wants to face danger (but in a controlled way), wants to struggle alongside the hero/heroine (but not too much.). That's why I wrote my own YA novels The Code River, Geneship, and Auroradawn.  These characters are all people on a quest to find the truth.

To me, far too many adult SF novels are too complex.  They have several viewpoints, jumps in time, alternating first person viewpoints that don't identity the viewpoint character.  All this clutter gets in the way of telling a good story.  Maybe that's why Anne McCaffrey is one of my favourite authors.  Among young adult writers I like Scott Westerfeld, Teri Terri, Anthony Horowitz. All these books have fabulous and hard-hitting ideas, but great storytelling too.  Statistics tell us that more adults than young adults read YA books.  Maybe the simple storytelling is one reason why.

It's time we followed YA's lead in adult SF.  It's time to focus on good old fashioned storytelling, putting over our dazzling ideas without pretentious forms of writing.  And if we returned to simple storytelling maybe more adults would be drawn to SF stories.  Maybe, just maybe, the genre would go mainstream.

Useless submission guidelines

I've been spending the weeks since the New Year getting my story submission records up to date and checking out SF magazines' submission requirements.  And what I'm finding when yet another email  thuds into my inbox with a rejection is that the submission guidelines are useless.

Yes, they tell me to submit stories double spaced in 12 point Times New Roman, and that the magazine won't accept stories with excessive sex and violence.  But that's as far as it goes for content.  The guidelines are totally useless for trying to divine what kind of story an editor might buy.

"Stories must have some element of technology to them" one magazine declares.  Another says it wants "character-oriented stories, in which the characters, rather than the science, provide the main focus for the reader's interest."  Another says that "all types of science fiction will be considered."

Sounds great, doesn't it?  An inclusive magazine market, at last.  Not so fast.  Since the New Year I've had stories rejected exploring the consequences of rape, overpopulation of planets, bioengineering and its effects on alien relations, and psychic abilities stopping a war between humans and aliens.  All of these stories were set in the future, have some speculative elements to them, and were character-driven stories.  So they fit the guidelines, right?  

Yes, there are many female magazine editors out there.  And every time the suggestion that women's stories are disadvantaged is raised they indignantly point out their presence. But the thing is, ladies, my stories never get before your eyes.  Look to who your first readers are.  Most of the rejections I've received this year have been from male first readers.  Is it any surprise that they don't like stories challenging the patriarchy?  I'd like to be proved wrong in this, but I suspect I'm not.

And, of course, a magazine doesn't have a totally free hand in what it publishes. If it proclaims itself as a feminist magazine, but it publishes in print, and most of those print subscribers are white cis males, it's going to be influenced by that demographic.  A magazine can't risk challenging the sensibilities of its majority group of subscribers and having them cancel their subscriptions.

My deep suspicion is that the real guidelines of many magazines reject strongly feminist stories.  Not because the stories aren't good, but because it's too much of a risk to publish them.  It might harm their sales in a competitive market.  I hope that one day somebody will prove me wrong, but until then I'll keep my suspicion that SF magazines aren't quite so welcoming as they would like us to believe.

From blank canvas to brave new world

This week I've started on the process of discovering my story for T'zeen, the second book in the Jade   series.  I have to create the planet T'zeen from scratch.  I'm starting from a blank canvas and I have to create its continents, its geography, its people, and its politics. 

This is the challenge I have at the beginning of each new series, but for some reason it feels daunting this time around.  But because this is a second book I do have quite a lot of clues from book one to go on to give me a start.  I'm not completely without  information on this world.

I don't know what the land masses look like yet, but I do know that there needs to be plenty of them, and that they have to have differing biomes.  A central part of the story is that tupill, the intelligent planimal Kaath met on Jade, came from T'zeen and still grows there.  I also know there is an ocean equivalent to my intelligent rushok on Jade.  Tupill grows in temperate wetlands, so that dictates the climate of some of my landmasses.  

I know that the intelligent aliens who live there are called the Zarnn, and I know that they're like walking lions.  My heroine Kaath's father was a Zarnn.  And in Jade I show Kaath watching images of her now-dead father.  So I know what the aliens look like, I know they have several tribes, and I know those tribes disagree about things.  Some were hostile to Kaath's mother being with K'ynss, her father, and some were supportive.  So I have the start of a political split there to work on.

I want my squabbling tribes to live in different regions, so that will give me the opportunity to provide a richer range of habitats for my planet.   Some of the tribes respect the natural world, some don't, so I want the environment to support that split.  Perhaps I need forests that can be subjected to deforestation, and grasslands that can be intensively and over-farmed. 

And then there's the fact that the the Zarnn are descended from big cats, so they'll be carnivores.  So I need some way for them to get enough meat to eat.  That probably means they have to be livestock farmers, so I'll need spaces for farms on my map.

Even with this meagre amount of information I'm beginning to delineate my brand new world.  The blank canvas isn't quite so blank as it was a day ago.

Close-in focus

I've spent a couple of weeks re-writing old short stories.  Having sorted them out over Christmas into 'saleable' and 'non-saleable', the next step was to re-write some of the non-saleable ones that showed promise.

I've worked on stories about defending artificial wombs, the telepathic treatment of transplant patients, and of engineers fixing hyoergate breakdowns.  And several trends emerged while I was doing the re-writes.

The first was that most of my stories have a close-in focus.  By that I mean the story follows the life of one individual, or a small group of people.  I'm not drawn to pictures of a universe with millions of people spread across it.  Most of my heroines are heroic on a small scale.  That doesn't mean they're nobodies. They're chief engineers, security chiefs, senior doctors, starship captains.  But the problems and challeges they face generally aren't on the scale of a sprawling space opera.

The second trend I discovered from reviewing my old stories was that many of them had no setting.  I'd either not described where my characters were at all, or I'd done it in generic terms that gave no real sense of that place.  I'd been lazy and ducked out of the work of creation.  I needed to focus in on the surroundings my characters were in and focus in on important details in that scene.

The third trend I uncovered was that my stories are usually set within a century of today.  I'm writing about worlds that have a lot in common with ours today. Generally, exotic and magical tech that nobody understands isn't the main focus of my stories.  Future tech may drive social and cultural changes though, and that's usually what my stories focus on.

Often the worlds I write about are recogniseable from today.  And there's a good reason for that.  I'm usually writing to challenge something I don't like in current society.  I want the future situation to be recogniseable to the people of today.  I'm saying "look what will happen if you don't change this."  

Not all SF heroes and heroines travel the Galaxy. Some are just determined to defend freedoms close at hand.  By using a close-in focus the reader's attention is drawn to the issue I want them to consider, and not to shiny, mysterious, tech.

Aim for the top

Over the Christmas break I spent several hours updating my list of paying magazines that accept science fiction stories.  It was tedious hard work, but the outcome was a pleasant one.

The first thing I noticed was that there were a lot more magazines to submit to than last time I did a list.  The big difference is that a lot of them are purely digital, or digital first with an anthology or possible paperback publication later.  This makes their overheads smaller, and gives the magazine a better chance of surviving in tough times.

The next thing that struck me was that the big magazines were still there, even after the toughest recession for a generation.  Asimov's, Analog, Fantasy and Ścience Fiction, all the magazines I'd grown up reading, were still there.  And these unchanging bedrocks of the SF short story market still welcome new writers, a reassuring business as usual. 

What has changed is my attitude towards submitting my stories to these magazines. When I first started magazines like Asimov's and Analog were worshipped as gods.  There was a feeling that you could only send stuff to them if you'd been published elsewhere.  They were "big" magazines, too good for the beginner writer.  I no longer believe that advice.  Take at look at their submission guidelines, and both magazines explicitly state that they're always on the lookout for new talent. This is an invitation a writer rarely gets.  It's more usually 'we don't know you, so you're not welcome here'.  So I've changed my way of thinking about these bastions of the SF scene.

I now know my writing is as good as any published author's.  The thing which will bring a sale or not will be content of the story.  Looking back through some old ones, I see how I fudged the science in them.  I didn't try and explain how something worked.  Now I've realised I can't dodge the challenge.  But equally, researching is so much easier now with an iPad and ready access to the vast resources of the Ihe internet.  I can put in the science, because I can easily research it.

I have set a goal for 2015 to submit five short stories each month to magazines. I've done January's submissions, and yes, two of the stories went to Asimov's and Analog.  My mindset is different.  Instead of thinking "why would they be interested in me?" I now think "why shouldn't they be interested in me?"  2015 is going to be my short story publication year.

You say crime, I say SF

The issue of genre 'pigeonholes' raised its head again for me this week.  With fellow Pentangle Press writers Carol Westron and Christine Hammacott, we were interviewed by a reporter from the Portsmouth News for an article on Pentangle Press's second birthday,

As part of our development we are about to set up a panel to speak at writing events, to market ourselves as writers.  Carol wants to call me a future crime writer for the purposes of this.  It makes sense, as we cover past, present, and future crime then, but it isn't really who I am.  

I spent a year going to crime conferences and reading in that genre, and it didn't take me long to realise that I don't belong there.  I hated the idea of my books being marketed by covers dripping with blood, and I just wasn't engaged by many of the stories.  Some of them even depressed me.  And one thriller writer (a massive best-seller) appalled me with the casual and totally unnecessary violence he put in his work.

And yet, at their heart, many of my books do contain crimes.  Eyemind has my main character Keri Starseer being hired to investigate dodgy interactive artworks.  She's an artist, not a law enforcer, but she's subjected to attempts to brainwash her and is kidnapped and beaten.  In my novel Jade the proposed crime is the rape of a sentient planet.  In my novel Snowbird, the crimes are fraud and illegal exploitation of a sentient species. In the second book of that series, Darius, it is the sabotage of the orbital shipyard, the murder of a starship, and attempted rape.

The crimes that occur in my books are many and varied, and yet, I'm still not a crime writer.  I don't feel comfortable with that label.  My heart belongs in the ideas around the crimes I write about, not in the investigation of the crimes themselves.  And I want starships and beautiful starfields on my covers, not blood.

This is one of the downsides of being pigeonholed into a genre.  I am sure there are a great many crime writers whose stories I would enjoy, if they were not packaged as crime.  And there are probably many crime readers who would enjoy my novels.  But the chances are that we won't discover each other's work.  This is the downside of being forced into a genre.  We can only be one thing there, when In fact we might be several.  We might be SF and crime, like me, or romance and crime, like several of Carol Westron's books, or SF and romance.  Life is richer than strict genre boundaries, and our stories should reflect this.

A lighter shade of darkness

I recently did a sort-out of some of my bookshelves, and found myself giving away a few young adult  series.  The common factor in every case was that I'd only half-read the book, or had managed to struggle through to the end of it but knew I would never read it again.

One series of books was hailed by commentators as a brilliant portrayal of the fear and darkness of ancient times, an accurate representation of how humans lived then.  This was a book aimed at twelve year olds, and that claim of accurate darkness worried me.  Yes, it may well have been like that in those times, but we are writing for people in 2015.  Most of us don't live in fear of supernatural monsters, and most of us don't live short, nasty, brutish lives.  And part of what civilised us is stories.

You might well argue, as many gamers do, that this is pretend violence, and that people can tell the difference between make-believe killing and the real thing.  I'm not convinced by that argument.  I do think that constant exposure to make-believe violence shapes  our life scripts as much as exposure to real violence,

I believe I have a moral responsibility inherent in everything I write, a responsibility to show a better way of being in the universe.  My stories aim to teach respect for the natural world and its creatures, and I don't intend to do that with a thrill-ride side-order of violence.  My writer friend Carol Westron once described me as the most moral writer she'd ever met.  She said she always felt confident that my stories wouldn't be filled with unnecessary evil.

For me that lighter shade or darkness means that I don't give my characters the biggest guns they can find, and let them blast everything around them in glorious technicolor.  Our current TV news channels do that every day, and I don't watch that violence.  My lighter shade of darkness means I put the violence off the page.  People do get killed in my books, but not on-stage.  My story is about the consequences of those deaths, showing the loss and devastation that others feel when a person or wild animal dies an untimely death.

I see it as my responsibility not to add to the evil in the world, so If you're looking for a tale that revels in gratuitous violence, move along there.  I'm not for you.