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

Sexual apocalypse - no thanks

Last week I finished reading a book, the second in a series, that I came to because of the promise of the environmental SF of the first book.  That promise was badly betrayed in the second book, which seemed to have abandoned the environmentalist principles that made the first one so interesting.  In this book, the focus was on poverty, politics, and war.

The overall tone of the book was depressingly gloomy, as is the cover.  But what really annoyed me was the amount of gratiuitous sexual content and references to sex, some of it alluding to violent sex, some verging on the erotic.  Sorry, but I don't read SF to learn about a squad of elite berserkers who have violent sex with each other every night, an activity encouraged by their leaders.

What really bugs me is that this book was written by a woman, and edited by a woman, both of whom  have been involved in decrying the lack of representation for women in the SF genre.  Sorry, but if your solution to that problem is to write and publish books about sexual apocalypse, count me out.  I'm more likely to write about an apocalypse that occurs because a woman can't be corrupted that way.  

I'm kicking around several ideas for stories where women rulers simply can't be affected by the promise of sex, where "fluff-head" women turn out to be totally immune to any kind of sexual flattery.  But the thing is, if this kind of sexual apocalypse is what the market thinks it wants, do I stand a hope in hell's chance of ever getting those stories published?  Sometimes I despair when I ask that question, as I suspect the answer is 'no'.

But there is one thing I can do. I can refuse to nominate this book, or any other with a sexual apocalypse in its pages, for any awards.  And I can refuse to buy or read any more books by this author.  I can refuse to send my energy her way, and focus on finding and supporting storytellers with more positive messages.

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

Competing to shock - loss of the moral compass

I was appalled to read on Twitter last week that a bestselling thriller writer was boasting that his next book would be his most violent ever. I have only read one of this author's books, and the amount of graphic and unnecessary violence in it ensured I'd never read any more.  I have met women, some of them in their sixties with grandchildren they dote on, who've said that the more violence there is in a book, the more they like it.  This bothers me.

It seems that many crime writers, and some SF ones too, are competing for the award of Most  Shocking Narrative of The Year.  Yes, literature must  reflect the zeitgeist of its age.  Yes, it should comment on and challenge the tenets of the prevailing culture and societal values.  

But at this point the writer's moral compass comes into play.  Both metaphysics and quantum physics tell us that, at a fundamental level, everything is pure energy.  And they also tell us that we affect that energy with the thoughts and words we put into it.  That gives us a moral duty to think very carefully about the amount of death and violence we put into our work, and about how graphically we describe those things.

There is a very successful fantasy series of books, and now its associated TV series, that have gained notoriety for the number of people killed in its stories.  But to me, there's something obscene about boasting that the body count for series five will be even higher than series four.  This is a series of books I've refused to read.

Sometimes I feel like King Canute, trying to hold back the relentless tide.  But then I remember that everything is energy.  And if I can send my energy out into the universe untainted by such violence then that is one clear voice slicing its way through the darkness, showing a different way,  By refusing to add to the sum of graphic violence, by refusing to read about it and watch it, I am making a difference.  I'm throwing a small pebble into the pond from which great ripples arise, ripples of awareness that spread out and help others to say no, and to change things.

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

Every title tells a story

This week I've been sorting our four years' worth of back issues of Writers' Forum magazine.  I cut out the articles I want to keep and file them in alphabetical order in lever arch files. They provide a rich resource for designing workshops.

At the same time as I was sorting through them I was trying to work out - yet again - why I'm not getting any short story acceptances.  I've rewritten the first pages and sections of many of them to make them tighter, and I was looking for any other ways to improve them.  That was when my eyes lighted on an old article about turning rejected stories into accepted ones.  I'd tried most of the remedies suggested in it, but the one I hadn't tried was changing the titles of stories.

Then I came across another article by prolific short story writer Della Galton, talking about rejection.  She too said she'd changed story titles and subsequently had the stories accepted.  She said that sometimes a good title could sway an editor to accept a story.

Hmm. Clearly I've been missing a trick here.  I'm a very solid practical person, and I tend to think of solid, practiical titles for my stories. They tend to be down-to-Earth titles that describe the story, often in one word. Maybe they weren't exciting enough?

Then I went on-line and started reading some more recently-published SF short stories.  And found that many of them have lengthy, often quirky, and sometimes obscure, titles.  When I read the stories, the titles seemed only loosely connected with the narrative they headed up, but they were getting sold.

So my next experiment is to change the titles of stories I believe in and am happy that I've edited to within an inch of their lives.  I've found two good titles already, and am about to submit them in their new guises.  My only problem then will be keeping track of the old and new titles, and where I've sent the story as each.  But if an obscure title really will tempt an editor to buy the story, what have I got to lose?

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