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lobo_luna community, I've completed a question and answer session. I thought I'd start posting the questions and answers here as well. I plan to cross-post a question and answer here on Sunday and Wednesday.
Question #4: Can you give us some background on one of your favorites among your stories and how it came to be? How did you get it from first draft to the finished copy?
Written in February of 2005 and published in November of 2006 in Fictitious Force #3, "Out Among the Singing Void" grew from my desire to write a story featuring a blind protagonist. Because of my own battle with a degenerative eye disease, I wanted to describe the world -- and my character William's perception of it -- without using any visual clues.
My hope was to challenge the reader to experience the story through his and her other senses. This proved more difficult than I had expected. Despite being legally blind, I still slipped into the easy technique of using visual descriptions. I found myself returning to the story to add smells, textures, tastes, and sounds while taking out visuals that would have broken the story's point of view.
I also wanted to write a story combining elements of fantasy (William as the "Blind Billy/Pied Piper" archetype from folklore) and science fiction (Maria as the cybernetic enhanced starship pilot). Too often proponents of each genre argue that their favorite one is superior to the other. I wanted to write a story where those elements co-existed.
This blending of fantasy and science fiction proved fun to write. I enjoyed the world-building I needed to accomplish in order to make the story ring true. I really enjoyed writing William as he came to realize that he and Maria essentially do the same work.
Most of all, I wanted to write a story about two lonely, somewhat broken people who still harbor a fierce love for each other. I wanted to create a story about them finding their way back together despite the years and distance between them and their different perceptions of reality.
Because I'm a packrat, I still have most of my original notes. Let's take a look at the starting concept:
Story:
A man and a woman, old friends, lovers. One has had technology rebuild parts of her to allow her to handle space and space flight. The other stays behind on a fading and failing planet Earth. As more and more people leave Earth, the world becomes wilder and wilder, with less run by science and physical laws, with more mystical phenomena appearing.
She is a cybernetic enhanced pilot on a starship. She represents technology and the stars. She is Science Fiction.
He is a pied piper. He represents the mysteries of the spirit world. He is Fantasy.
They are lovers, old lovers in the story. She modified herself for the dream of the stars; he stayed behind, a broken person and slipped into magic. She had come back to the dying world one last time to try and convince him to leave. He shows her his world, and why he must stay. In the end she leaves for deep space, he steps sideways into the twilight realms.
I want to juxtapose the difference between Science Fiction and Fantasy. I want to have two of the more sacred tropes exist side by side, if only for a time.
This was the premise I began from. At this point I sat down and wrote the original first draft in about a week. According to my records, the first draft clocked in at a reasonable 6800 words. At this point I went through and trimmed, cutting redundancy, getting rid of passive voice as best as I could in a story with a somewhat remote POV, and generally tightening it down. This second draft was 5800 words. This is what I sent off to the workshop.
At the time I was a member of the Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, a workshop that has an excellent track record of nurturing emerging writers, and a workshop I recommended for new writers. This is where the story was really whittled down, stripped of all the unnecessary stuff, and tightened to the point of making it sellable.
The main thing that took a big hit in the workshop was the world building. Not that there was anything particularly wrong with it (though a few things needed to be cleaned up) but--well, I'll let the three following comments tell a little about how it was:
~And the world building. I keep thinking, 'geez, I wonder if he's going to write a novel set in this universe. I hope so, 'cause it's amazing. Now, you need to take about 90% of it out of the story.~
~There's some 'as you know, Bob' dialogue (and here I'm specifically thinking of certain world building bits that don't contribute to the central storyline, like the description of exactly what the NorthStar Alliance is, or the war and why the colonists were thrown off the planet, or that this is one of only two spaceports left) that could maybe go as well.~
~It read smoothly and I thought the narrative tone was perfect. It read so easily in fact, that the bit about the Third World War seemed almost like an infodump in comparison to everything else. Suggest paring that down to 2 or 3 relevant sentences. Some of the information delivered there didn't seem all that necessary to me. Maybe Maria could make a comment that William 'should have come with me the first time', or something telling like that.~
There were also plenty of small line nits, where I had missed a misspelled word, or the person reading suggested different word choices. A couple of readers reminded me to carefully consider, within the context of my world building, what resources would be considered precious or would be controlled tightly on my changing Earth.
I did pretty much all the things the reviewers asked: If enough people giving you feedback hit on the same thing (in this case, too much unnecessary world building information crammed into the story as exposition) it's a good idea to give it a closer look.
I ended up cutting out things like...
I was lucky enough to live in one of the better nation states that arose from the chaos. The NorthStar Alliance consisted of the former states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and the former Canadian providence of Manitoba. The eastern parts of the Dakotas and the western half of old Ontario rounded out the alliance. The Alliance remained friendly with the Interstellar Parliament, and one of the last two official lift stations back into space lay just south of Minneapolis on the old airport grounds. The Parliament operates the station; the Alliance leases the land to them for a hefty fee.
...because while I needed to know this information, the reader did not.
And then I took out, for example, this bit...
"Even if I contributed to the destruction of Earth?"
"The choices of Earth's leaders caused the wars. They failed to learn from the mistakes of previous empires."
When the colonies revolted against Earth, Maria took Emily and deserted the fleet; her sympathies lay with the colonists.
The colonies threw off Earth's rule in a short, vicious revolt, and the Interstellar Parliament that formed afterward all but quarantined the planet. The various Earth factions fell to fighting each other. The ensuing limited nuclear exchange, coupled with decades of environmental neglect, seemed to spell the end. The planet was warming; the jet stream had all but vanished. The rising oceans swallowed up entire islands and low-lying coastal regions.
...and rolled it into a couple of tight sentences that did the same amount of storytelling work for fewer words.
At the end, the story finished up at 4200 words. A few interesting (at least to me) tidbits:
1. Everyone who read the story before it was published told me they did not notice that William was blind until they were deep into the piece.
2. Nearly all the readers where pleased that I went with a more uplifting, open-ended ending, instead of going for the full-on sad and bittersweet.
3. Almost all the workshop readers--and several of the people who read the piece outside of the workshop--thought it would be my break-out piece. Other professionals thought it would be the first SFWA pro-sale I made. That did not come to pass, though it did reach the semi-finals in the Writers of the Future contest. Still, it was a fine sale to a well-respected small press magazine I am proud to be published in, so I'm not complaining.
If you are interested, you can read the finished story here: Out Among the Singing Void
lobo_luna community, I've completed a question and answer session. I thought I'd start posting the questions and answers here as well. I plan to cross-post a question and answer here on Sunday and Wednesday.Question #4: Can you give us some background on one of your favorites among your stories and how it came to be? How did you get it from first draft to the finished copy?
Written in February of 2005 and published in November of 2006 in Fictitious Force #3, "Out Among the Singing Void" grew from my desire to write a story featuring a blind protagonist. Because of my own battle with a degenerative eye disease, I wanted to describe the world -- and my character William's perception of it -- without using any visual clues.
My hope was to challenge the reader to experience the story through his and her other senses. This proved more difficult than I had expected. Despite being legally blind, I still slipped into the easy technique of using visual descriptions. I found myself returning to the story to add smells, textures, tastes, and sounds while taking out visuals that would have broken the story's point of view.
I also wanted to write a story combining elements of fantasy (William as the "Blind Billy/Pied Piper" archetype from folklore) and science fiction (Maria as the cybernetic enhanced starship pilot). Too often proponents of each genre argue that their favorite one is superior to the other. I wanted to write a story where those elements co-existed.
This blending of fantasy and science fiction proved fun to write. I enjoyed the world-building I needed to accomplish in order to make the story ring true. I really enjoyed writing William as he came to realize that he and Maria essentially do the same work.
Most of all, I wanted to write a story about two lonely, somewhat broken people who still harbor a fierce love for each other. I wanted to create a story about them finding their way back together despite the years and distance between them and their different perceptions of reality.
Because I'm a packrat, I still have most of my original notes. Let's take a look at the starting concept:
Story:
A man and a woman, old friends, lovers. One has had technology rebuild parts of her to allow her to handle space and space flight. The other stays behind on a fading and failing planet Earth. As more and more people leave Earth, the world becomes wilder and wilder, with less run by science and physical laws, with more mystical phenomena appearing.
She is a cybernetic enhanced pilot on a starship. She represents technology and the stars. She is Science Fiction.
He is a pied piper. He represents the mysteries of the spirit world. He is Fantasy.
They are lovers, old lovers in the story. She modified herself for the dream of the stars; he stayed behind, a broken person and slipped into magic. She had come back to the dying world one last time to try and convince him to leave. He shows her his world, and why he must stay. In the end she leaves for deep space, he steps sideways into the twilight realms.
I want to juxtapose the difference between Science Fiction and Fantasy. I want to have two of the more sacred tropes exist side by side, if only for a time.
This was the premise I began from. At this point I sat down and wrote the original first draft in about a week. According to my records, the first draft clocked in at a reasonable 6800 words. At this point I went through and trimmed, cutting redundancy, getting rid of passive voice as best as I could in a story with a somewhat remote POV, and generally tightening it down. This second draft was 5800 words. This is what I sent off to the workshop.
At the time I was a member of the Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, a workshop that has an excellent track record of nurturing emerging writers, and a workshop I recommended for new writers. This is where the story was really whittled down, stripped of all the unnecessary stuff, and tightened to the point of making it sellable.
The main thing that took a big hit in the workshop was the world building. Not that there was anything particularly wrong with it (though a few things needed to be cleaned up) but--well, I'll let the three following comments tell a little about how it was:
~And the world building. I keep thinking, 'geez, I wonder if he's going to write a novel set in this universe. I hope so, 'cause it's amazing. Now, you need to take about 90% of it out of the story.~
~There's some 'as you know, Bob' dialogue (and here I'm specifically thinking of certain world building bits that don't contribute to the central storyline, like the description of exactly what the NorthStar Alliance is, or the war and why the colonists were thrown off the planet, or that this is one of only two spaceports left) that could maybe go as well.~
~It read smoothly and I thought the narrative tone was perfect. It read so easily in fact, that the bit about the Third World War seemed almost like an infodump in comparison to everything else. Suggest paring that down to 2 or 3 relevant sentences. Some of the information delivered there didn't seem all that necessary to me. Maybe Maria could make a comment that William 'should have come with me the first time', or something telling like that.~
There were also plenty of small line nits, where I had missed a misspelled word, or the person reading suggested different word choices. A couple of readers reminded me to carefully consider, within the context of my world building, what resources would be considered precious or would be controlled tightly on my changing Earth.
I did pretty much all the things the reviewers asked: If enough people giving you feedback hit on the same thing (in this case, too much unnecessary world building information crammed into the story as exposition) it's a good idea to give it a closer look.
I ended up cutting out things like...
I was lucky enough to live in one of the better nation states that arose from the chaos. The NorthStar Alliance consisted of the former states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and the former Canadian providence of Manitoba. The eastern parts of the Dakotas and the western half of old Ontario rounded out the alliance. The Alliance remained friendly with the Interstellar Parliament, and one of the last two official lift stations back into space lay just south of Minneapolis on the old airport grounds. The Parliament operates the station; the Alliance leases the land to them for a hefty fee.
...because while I needed to know this information, the reader did not.
And then I took out, for example, this bit...
"Even if I contributed to the destruction of Earth?"
"The choices of Earth's leaders caused the wars. They failed to learn from the mistakes of previous empires."
When the colonies revolted against Earth, Maria took Emily and deserted the fleet; her sympathies lay with the colonists.
The colonies threw off Earth's rule in a short, vicious revolt, and the Interstellar Parliament that formed afterward all but quarantined the planet. The various Earth factions fell to fighting each other. The ensuing limited nuclear exchange, coupled with decades of environmental neglect, seemed to spell the end. The planet was warming; the jet stream had all but vanished. The rising oceans swallowed up entire islands and low-lying coastal regions.
...and rolled it into a couple of tight sentences that did the same amount of storytelling work for fewer words.
At the end, the story finished up at 4200 words. A few interesting (at least to me) tidbits:
1. Everyone who read the story before it was published told me they did not notice that William was blind until they were deep into the piece.
2. Nearly all the readers where pleased that I went with a more uplifting, open-ended ending, instead of going for the full-on sad and bittersweet.
3. Almost all the workshop readers--and several of the people who read the piece outside of the workshop--thought it would be my break-out piece. Other professionals thought it would be the first SFWA pro-sale I made. That did not come to pass, though it did reach the semi-finals in the Writers of the Future contest. Still, it was a fine sale to a well-respected small press magazine I am proud to be published in, so I'm not complaining.
If you are interested, you can read the finished story here: Out Among the Singing Void
