About writing: seven essays, four letters, and five interviews PDF
Preview About writing: seven essays, four letters, and five interviews
ABOUT WRiTiNG Seven Essays, Four Letters, and Five Interviews Also by Samuel R. Delany FICTION The Mad Man () The Jewels of Aptor () Hogg () The Fall of the Towers Atlantis: Three Tales () Out of the Dead City () Aye, and Gomorrah (and The Towers of Toron () other stories, ) City of a Thousand Suns Phallos () () The Ballad of Beta-2 () GRAPHIC NOVELS Babel-17 () Empire (artist, Howard Empire Star () Chaynkin, ) The Einstein Intersection Bread & Wine (artist, Mia () Wolff, ) Nova () Driftglass () NONFICTION Equinox () The Jewel-Hinged Jaw () Dhalgren () The American Shore () Trouble on Triton () Heavenly Breakfast () Return to Nevèrÿon Starboard Wine () Tales of Nevèrÿon () The Motion of Light in Water Neveryóna () () Flight from Nevèrÿon () Wagner/Artaud () Return to Nevèrÿon () The Straits of Messina () Distant Stars () Silent Interviews () Stars in My Pockets Like Longer Views () Grains of Sand () Times Square Red, Times Driftglass/Starshards Square Blue () (collected stories, ) Shorter Views () They Fly at Çiron () 1984: Selected Letters () ABOUT WRiTiNG Seven Essays, Four Letters, and Five Interviews Samuel R. Delany Wesleyan University Press Middletown, Connecticut This is for Marie Ponsot, in return for the Djuna Barnes. Published by Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, ct 06459 www.wesleyan.edu/wespress © 2005 by Samuel R. Delany All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 5 4 3 isbn-13: 978-0-8195-6716-1 • isbn-10: 0-8195-6716-7 “Teaching/Writing” first appeared as “Teaching S-f Writing” in Clarion (New York: Signet Books; New American Library, 1971). “Thickening the Plot” first appeared in Those Who Can, ed. Robin Scott Wilson (New York: Mentor Books; New American Library, 1973). “Characters” and “On Pure Storytelling” first appeared in The Jewel- Hinged Jaw (New York: Berkeley Windhover Books, 1977), 155–60, 161–70. “Of Doubts and Dreams” first appeared in Distant Stars (New York: Bantam Books, 1981), 7–16. “After Almost No Time at All the String on Which He had Been Pull- ing and Pulling Came Apart into Two Separate Pieces So Quickly He Hardly Realized It Had Snapped, or: Reflections on ‘The Beach Fire’” first appeared in Empire SF 5.20 (summer 1980). “Some Notes for the Intermediate and Advanced Creative Writing Stu- dent” first appeared in Shorter Views (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan Uni- versity Press, 2000), 433–57. “A Para•doxa Interview: Experimental Writing/Texts & Questions” first appeared as “Para•doxa Interview: Texts & Questions, with Samuel R. Delany” in “The Future of Narrative,” ed. Lance Olsen, a special issue of Para•doxa 4.11 (1998): 384–430. “An American Literary History Interview: The Situation of American Writing Today” first appeared in somewhat diVerent form, as part of a symposium entitled “The Situation of American Writing Today” in American Literary History 11.2 (1999): 331–53. “A Poetry Project Newsletter Interview: A Silent Interview” first appeared in The Poetry Project Newsletter, New York, March 18, 1999. “A Black Clock Interview” first appeared in Black Clock, no. 1 (March 2004): 64–75. “A Para•doxa Interview: Inside and Outside the Canon” first appeared as “Para•doxa Interview with Samuel R. Delany,” in Para•doxa: Studies in World Literary Genres [Vashan Island, Washington] 1.3 (1995), ed. Lauric Guillard. cip data is available from the Library of Congress. Contents Preface and Acknowledgments vii An Introduction: Emblems of Talent Part I SEVEN ESSAYS Teaching/Writing Thickening the Plot Characters On Pure Storytelling Of Doubts and Dreams After Almost No Time at All the String on Which He Had Been Pulling and Pulling Came Apart into Two Separate Pieces So Quickly He Hardly Realized It Had Snapped, or: Reflections on “The Beach Fire” Some Notes for the Intermediate and Advanced Creative Writing Student Part II FOUR LETTERS Letter to P— Letter to Q— Letter to R— Letter to S— Part III FiVE INTERViEWS A Para•doxa Interview: Experimental Writing/Texts & Questions An American Literary History Interview: The Situation of American Writing Today A Poetry Project Newsletter Interview: A Silent Interview A Black Clock Interview A Para•doxa Interview: Inside and Outside the Canon Appendix: Nits, Nips, Tucks, and Tips Name, Date, Place Read Widely Grammar and Parts of Speech Sentences Punctuating Dialogue A Final Note on Dialogue Apostrophes Dramatic Structure Excitement, Drama, Suspense, Surprise, Violence Point of View First Person Trust Your Image Write What You Know vi Contents Preface and Acknowledgments If you are a writer, more and more you’ll find yourself writing about writing—especially today, as creative writing classes at the university level grow more and more common. Writers make their critical forays in many genres: letters to friends, private journals, interviews, articles for the public, gen- eral or academic, and at all levels of formality. Rather than try for an artificial unity, I thought, therefore, to give an exemplary variety. Today such variety seems truer to its topic. After the preface and a general introduction, this handful of pieces on creative writing continues with seven essays, each tak- ing up an aspect of the mechanics of fiction. (I am more com- fortable with “mechanics” than “craft”; but use the term you prefer.) The first two, “Teaching/Writing” and “Thickening the Plot,” grew out of Clarion Workshops many years ago, when the workshops were actually held in Clarion, Pennsylvania, un- der the aegis of their founder, Robin Scott Wilson. (For more than twenty years now they have been given every summer both in East Lansing, Michigan, and in Seattle, Washington. Since 2004, Clarion South, a third chapter, has been held at GriYth University in Brisbane, Australia.) “Characters” first appeared as an invited essay in a 1969 issue of the SFWA [Science Fic- tion Writers of America] Forum, when it was under the editor- ship of the late Terry Carr. “On Pure Storytelling” grew out of a comment made to me by Hugo and Nebula Award–winning novelist Vonda N. McIntyre, when I was privileged to have her as a writing student at an early Clarion. (The comment itself is recorded in “Teaching/Writing.”) That essay was delivered as an after-dinner talk at the Nebula Awards banquet at the Cla- remont Hotel in Berkeley, California, in 1970. “Of Doubts and Dreams” is currently the afterword to my short fiction collection Aye and Gomorrah (Vintage Books: New York, 2003), though I vii wrote it initially in 1980 to conclude another anthology, Distant Stars. Thus you must put up with my self-references for a page or so. Finally, however, it turns to topics that might interest this book’s readers. “After Almost No Time at All the String on Which He had Been Pulling and Pulling Came Apart into Two Separate Pieces So Quickly He Hardly Realized It Had Snapped, or: Reflections on ‘The Beach Fire’” was first requested by a fanzine, Empire, which endured a few years toward the end of the 1970s. Aimed at aspiring writers, each issue printed an amateur short story the editors had previously sent to a handful of professionals for comment. Most writers returned a paragraph of encouragement, in which they also pointed out one-to-three flaws. The editors printed these critiques along with the tale. I decided to send back, however, a fuller response. Incidentally, I have changed the name of the characters, the writer’s initials, several of the tales’ incidents, and the story title itself to protect the brave and laudable youngster, who, after all, was not yet seventeen when she or he first wrote it. Something I don’t mention in my piece on “The Beach Fire” (nor did any of the other three writers who sent in their much briefer notes): however unintentionally, the “alien-as-beach-ball” is lifted from John (Halloween, They Live, Escape from New York . . . ) Carpenter’s marvelously lunatic student film Dark Star, which was shown at hundreds of SF conventions throughout the seventies and eighties and which reduced auditoria full of sci- ence fiction fans to convulsive laughter. Since Empire’s editors, as well as its readers and writers, all came out of science fiction fandom, likely the author of “The Beach Fire” had seen, or at least heard of, Carpenter’s spoof. Perhaps the plagiarism was in- advertent. But Carpenter’s original was so telling and so widely known that the similarity would have immediately put the piece out of the running with any professional editor who recognized its source. I chose not to bring it up because to discuss what you can and can’t take from other artists would have doubled, if not tripled, my essay’s length. But even the nature of plagiarism has become a new order of problem in the last thirty years. From the eighties through the present, writers from age fifteen to age thirty-five have regularly handed me stories that were pastiches viii Preface and Acknowledgments of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, or, more recently, Rowling’s Harry Potter. Many do not even bother to come up with new names for the characters. Some have actu- ally been quite skillful. But all these young writers were quite surprised when I told them that there was no hope of publishing such work outside a specifically fan context. More than one told me: “But whenever you read about movies or television, or even best sellers, everyone always says what producers and publishers want is something exactly like something that’s been successful. That’s what I thought I’d done . . .” Without going further into the problem, let me say: this is a book for serious creative writers. That means it’s a book for writers who have at least resolved that problem for themselves and come down on the side of originality; that is, writers who are not interested in formulaic imitation, at whatever level, how- ever well done, fan to commercial. I stress, too: interest in for- mulaic imitation is not the same as interest in writing within one recognizable genre or another. What’s here applies just as much to the mystery, the science fiction tale, or the romance as it does to the literary story, however normative, however experimental. Writers with genre interests are welcome among these pages. (Much of my own writing has been genre writing.) But the fine points of the difference between genre and the formulaic within a given genre are why such distinctions require thought. The final essay, “Some Notes for the Intermediate and Ad- vanced Creative Writing Student,” deals with that all-important problem, structure. What is it? Why do you need it? How do you control it? That is to say, it speaks to the aspect of narrative that makes fiction an art—and an art whose elements here alone are clearly distinguishable from those of the poem. Four letters to four different writers follow the essays. All are actual (or based closely on actual) letters sent at their particular dates (–; again, titles and identifying details have been changed). Two are to poets. Two are to fiction writers. One of the poets and one of the fiction writers are affiliated with univer- sities. Two are out there on their own. Two are black. Two are white. Two are male. Two are female. Two are gay. One is straight —and I have no idea what the sexual orientation of the other is; statistics would suggest straight. But statistics only suggest. Preface and Acknowledgments ix
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