The Stumbling Block

Context: I was reading a story I thought was great, then felt it starting to stumble, and just reached the part where I would get out my form letter to say "I regret to say..."

Write Short, Write Fast, Write Often

Original images by Sebastien D'ARCO, animation by Koba-chan CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1044915

I really think short stories are a neglected form in genre fiction.

There's a real pressure to write long because it seems like the only way to get into print for a lot of people - at least, to get into print in what feels like a meaningful way. But the bar to getting a novel out the door is much higher than for a short.

The Strange Silence of Ernest Kinoy

I have heard the name Ernest Kinoy over and over in recent years as the old archives of broadcast radio have gone online. As an example, look at the episode lists for the two iconic SF radio play series Dimension X and X Minus One from the 50s.[1]

Not only was he involved in the adaptation of nearly every episode of these two series, but he and his partner George Lefferts also contributed original pieces. True, much of his work in SF was derivative in the sense of being derived from the short stories of others[2] but radio plays are a very different beast from print, and it's not as though he did no original work of his own: Kinoy contributed 8 wholly original works to these two series, and is credited with the novelization of several dramatic works in addition to adapting work for radio and screen.

Jack Vance the Magician

"The less a writer discusses his work - and himself - the better. The master chef slaughters no chickens in the dining room; the doctor writes prescriptions in Latin; the magician hides his hinges, mirrors and trapdoors with the utmost care." Vance in the afterward to "The Bagful of Dreams" The Jack Vance Treasury (2007)

August 28, 2016 would have been Jack Vance's 100th birthday.

The man had an incredible gift to spin worlds from nothing and paint them with a palette of the most vivid language imaginable.

His work is so compelling, in fact, that it’s very hard to remember that every word he wrote after 1980 (a list that includes 11 novels, 27 short stories, and a number of essays, forwards, afterwards, and footnotes) was written by a man who was legally blind and growing steadily blinder. This bibliography is impressive enough – but let’s not forget that in 1980 Vance had already been publishing stories and novels for thirty-five years.

Vance reputedly kept an arm’s length between himself and fandom, rarely exposing himself to real world scrutiny. He is said to have compared himself to a stage magician, whose power of illusion would be spoiled by revealing how his tricks were done. But I sometimes wonder if the truth is that he was actually rather shy of the attention he would have gotten if he’d put himself in the limelight.

Experimental Twitter

Last summer, I began an experiment.

But perhaps I should begin at the beginning:

Back in 2013, at the urging of a friend (and also because work was hinting that it might soon be required) I created a Twitter account.  I was late to the party of course, mainly because - quite simply - I couldn't see any point to the platform, and it seemed as though everything I heard about it was bad.

I confess that although it didn't seem quite the cesspool anticipated, even after joining I found it difficult to see any value.

It was like listening to voices chittering in the darkness, occasionally adding my own mad whispers. At worst, it was like talking to myself in a dark room. At best, it was like raving on a street corner, with passers by simultaneously fascinated by my incoherence and wary of being spattered with foam shaken from my fevered lips.

I exaggerate of course, but the point: Twitter really isn't a "social media" platform. 

On top of the fact that it's impossible to say anything substantive in snippets of 140 characters, the utterly unfiltered nature of Twitter makes it impossible to really have anything like a meaningful conversation. Honestly, when taken as a social media platform - ie as a tool to facilitate exchanges between people - to me it seems like a distillation of the worst of the internet. The character restriction makes it next to impossible *not* to misconstrue nuance, the firehose-like flow of tweets makes it next to impossible to follow the flow of any interaction lasting more than a couple of tweets (unless you restrict yourself to a very small, very quiet circle - which seems to rather defeat the point), the very brevity and volume exacerbates the "channel surfing" short attention span of our age.

I tried, early on, to use Twitter in a "meatier" way but it quickly became clear that it was mostly useless for me except as a purely "push" platform, so in the end my use degenerated into little more than sporadic sharing of news items (if I remembered) and scratching out doggerel I knew no-one would ever see/notice in the morass, and which I would later collect back up and revise to publish in other, less pointless formats.

And so it was for about 2 years, until I began my experiment. (Bet you wondered when I'd be getting back to it!)

In the summer of 2015, I decided that I was going to try to make something useful out of Twitter. Inspired by some news-folk I followed who occasionally post multi-part Twitter essays, I decided to try something more substantive than the quasi-poems I'd hitherto been working with. I started with a few essays of my own, but they were unsatisfying; it was just too difficult to develop complex thoughts in that format. What I needed was something where I could stretch my metaphorical legs and pack meaning into small spaces just as I had tried to do with poetry.

The answer, of course, was fiction.

I had already played with fiction on Twitter, building up an elaborate interactive drama under a false account as a prank on the friend who had persuaded me to join - that was really a tweak aimed at his conviction that platforms like Twitter forced people to be more honest because of their enforced brevity and relative anonymity, a confection designed to demonstrate how easy it was to lie and how hard to detect false fronts online. But it did demonstrate an intriguing potential: would it be possible to use the unique character of the medium to build up a new way of writing a story?

I've dabbled with fiction for many years, mostly frustrated by the challenge of finding enough time to finish things I started, so it seemed as though the bite-sized format of Twitter would be ideal. The character limit would force me to write more compactly; the short attention spans would encourage me to keep story arcs short - Hemingway-spartan flash fiction in other words.

Over the past 6 months, I've tried to average about 1 story a week - a pace that I sometimes find challenging, but which has helped me develop some healthy habits.  In this time, I've noticed my writing change - not just on Twitter, but elsewhere as well.

I haven't always been successful at keeping stories within the realm of "flash fiction" - in fact it's not uncommon for me to range as far as fully fledged shorts, and I have written an aborted novella as well.  Everything has been "raw" - unedited and in some cases actually posted live, which has led to some odd editorial decisions on the fly.

But more importantly, the format has given me scope to experiment that a mere blank page wouldn't have - I've tried alternative ways of building stories: "tone painting" in a sort of prose poetry that merely sets a scene, skeletal-spare but otherwise straight up fiction, experimental "found object" stories that built themselves up from things I encountered in a place.

I even theorized and experimented with non-linear narratives - a kind of literary choose your own adventure story where the reader can choose to focus on alternate strands of the tale, following different characters perhaps even along alternate what-if paths - though ultimately that came to nothing (on Twitter) since the actual threading and linking capabilities of the platform simply wouldn't support what I had in mind.

Perhaps I'll continue writing on Twitter. It's certainly been good for me, and not only in terms of (in my opinion) improving my writing. I don't think it's an experiment anymore though - almost all of what I write there is now a story or fragments of one. It still seems necessary to use a curation utility like Storify to make stories coherent and available for review (my Storify is here if you'd like to see my work) but now that I've developed a system I hope it's relatively easy for followers to keep the thread of things. 

Twitter, as the platform its creators seem to have envisioned, still seems rather pointless to me, but I have to thank them for the utility of a place that serves as both a repository for first drafts (I intend to revise and submit a number of the stories produced in the past 6 months) and as a stone to sharpen my writing.

I guess it just goes to show: there's always a use for things.

Alfred Bester - Godfather of modern fiction

Happy birthday to Alfred Bester - sometimes known as "the Godfather of modern fiction"

Bester was born on December 18, 1913 in New York, and apparently remained a New Yorker for the rest of his life.

Although best remembered now for his print science fiction, the truth is that he actually only worked in print SF sporadically, and produced far less than many of his contemporaries with similar reputations.

Consider: according to this bibliography he produced only 5 SF novels (plus one finished by Roger Zelazny in 1998) during his lifetime, and 45 short stories (plus one that was never published) - in comparison to other big names of the era, this is really not very much.  So what was he doing?

Well, the truth is that for part of it he was working quite a bit in SF.

Bester started strong, with a prize winning entry The Broken Axiom in the Thrilling Wonder Stories contest in 1939 [1] and over the next 3 years published 14 of his shorts, including what is probably his most famous story Adam and No Eve (still very well regarded today) but then seems to drop out of sight until the 50s.  Why?  Because instead of the pulps and traditional publishing in the early years he spent a fair portion of his time working in the growing comic industry (Superman, Green Lantern, the Phantom) and then in 1946 turned his hand to radio, penning the scripts for several popular radio shows of the time.

He returned to the pulps in 1950 with a psychological SF story Oddy and Id submitted to Campbell at Amazing, but it wasn't long after that Bester joined several others in jumping ship when Campbell went on his dianetics jag.  This led him into a new phase of his writing during the 50s, producing several of the stories he's most remembered for (including Fondly Fahrenheit - which I actually first came across in the radio adaptation Bester wrote for CBS Mystery Theatre! A copy is available here, titled "The Walking Dead") as well as of course his two iconic novels: The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination.  This period seems to be where he most deeply develops the psychological conundrums and exploration of the human identity that mark his work, as compared to the highly technical speculative engineering or political musings of contemporaries like Heinlein and Asimov.

In the 1960s, he disappears again- why? Because he moved on to a lucrative career in non-fiction.

It starts off innocently enough, with Bester trying his hand at non-SF fiction for magazines, but then he moves off into something more like journalism - travel journalism to be specific.  All through the 60s, Bester wrote consistently for the magazine Holiday, and was particularly well known for his interviews with famous figures such as Sir Edmund Hillary and various Hollywood stars.  He wasn't entirely outside the SF community however: during this period he continued to produce reviews of the new work his peers were producing, as well as interviews with stars of the era like the Heinlein piece I mentioned earlier.

In the 70s, he returned to the fold again, however he published only sporadically - mainly novels like Golem 100 along with a handful of short stories, interspersed with various anthologies or collections.

So, here we have a man who was engaged during four very distinct phases of science fiction - not continuously like some of his peers, but in waves, which is most fascinating.  It's interesting to see the differences between his work in these phases, as well as the sometimes strange innovations he comes up with to present his narratives - things like odd page arrangements, novel punctuation, etc to express mental communication (sometimes between characters, sometimes between parts of the same character).

One of the most interesting things about his earlier periods of publishing, I think, is the way in which his other work is clearly influencing his writing.  The format of comics and radio plays is obviously very different from ordinary literary prose, and you can tell in some cases that he's reaching for ways to achieve the same effect on a page of text as he could over the airwaves or in the speech bubbles of a comic.

Bester was an innovative writer, and his impact on the genre is, I think, clear - mainly in the way in which styles and topics evolved over the years.  He took SF into the mind, which was a bit of departure from the glorious adventures of Leigh Bracket or the engineering fantasies of the "hard SF" most often published in the popular pulps like Amazing and Galaxy.  In some ways, I think he was paving the way for the more introspective "social SF" of the New Wave and even our current era, and there's still a lot that up-and-coming SF writers can learn from him.

--30--

1. Bester claims that when he interviewed Heinlein for Publishers Weekly years later, he learned that Heinlein had decided not to submit to that particular contest, instead choosing to try his luck with a paying market - making $70 on his sale, while Bester won only $50.

Additional reading
http://pabook2.libraries.psu.edu/palitmap/bios/Bester__Alfred.html
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/features/nomadic-alfred-bester-renaissance-man/
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?6
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/10992.Alfred_Bester
http://www.sffaudio.com/cbs-radio-mystery-theater-the-walking-dead-aka-fondly-fahrenheit-by-alfred-bester/