REVIEW: “Absolutes” by Jay Werkheiser

Review of Jay Werkheiser, “Absolutes”, Analog Science Fiction and Fact May/June (2021): 99–104 (Kindle) – Purchase Here. Reviewed by John Atom.

Cal is hell-bent on proving that Einstein was wrong, and that time is absolute. However, no reputable institution will listen to him or grant him any funding to test his hypotheses. He decides to do it himself with his own (or rather his girlfriend’s) money, an ambition that puts a terrible strain on his relationship.

If you can get past the utter implausibility of the ideas used here, “Absolutes” is an enjoyable story with a rather heartbreaking ending. The conflict relies on fairly cliche tropes and characters, but it is nevertheless handled expertly and even manages to surprise once or twice. The prose moves at a brisk pace, yet it is deep enough to allow for the characters to shine through. By no means groundbreaking, but overall a pleasant read.

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REVIEW: “Coincidentally…” by Stephen Graham Jones

Review of Stephen Graham Jones, “Coincidentally…”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 51-55 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

For every “rule” about writing you come across, you probably can find a story that breaks that rule, successfully. Jones opens his piece with a number of such rules and examples of stories that break the rules successfully, in his opinion, in order to set the stage for a rule for which he says “there doesn’t seem to be any wiggle room”:

Coincidence only enables, it never solves (p. 52).

After reading the rest of this piece, naturally I want to take this as a challenge to write a story that successfully, and essentially, breaks the rule. (I do like the idea of using coincidences as enablers, though, and will apply that liberally.)

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REVIEW: “The Devil is in the Details” by Connie Willis

Review of Connie Willis, “The Devil is in the Details”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 45-49 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Not all advice is going to work for all writers in all contexts, and Willis’s piece is one that doesn’t work for me. She rightly points out how it is the little details that can really make the setting of a particular scene, that allow the author to evoke a place or a period without having to spell everything out, and also how getting a detail factually wrong can utterly ruin a story for some readers. What I think this piece misses out is a recognition that sometimes it is the giving of the details, whether they are “correct” or not, that can break the story. She says that these details “have to be specific and vivid” (p. 45); but I’m sure I’m not the only one who has felt the incongruity of the insertion of details that are too specific, too vivid, where their specificity is becomes more important than the detail itself. I think perhaps my complaint comes from disagreeing with her about the purpose of these details. Willis quotes Joseph Conrad on the task of the writer, which is “before all, to make you see” (p. 46) the story through written words alone. This is an unfortunately narrow view of the purpose or point of writing, and does not take into account anyone for whom mental images are either absent or substantially impaired. Trying too hard to draw a picture in the mind of a reader, or to turn a detail into a symbol or metaphor for the story itself (Willis’s “telling details”, p. 47), can be as bad as not trying hard enough.

Then again, perhaps that’s just what makes details so devilish.

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REVIEW: “Some Thoughts on Exposition” by Tobias S. Buckell

Review of Tobias S. Buckell, “Some Thoughts on Exposition”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 39-43 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Buckell’s piece, an adaptation of an earlier piece, “Expository Narrative” published in It’s All Just a Draft in 2019, discusses five ways expository information can be delivered in a story, and identifies positives and negatives for each:

  1. Flashback
  2. Dialogue exposition
  3. Narrator exposition
  4. Exposition through a character’s internal voice
  5. Interacting with information

Most of the negatives for each of these focus on how they can cause the momentum of a story to come to a halt. The more effective ways are the ones that can provide the reader with the background info that they need without compromising the pace and momentum of the story, which is partly why (according to Buckell) dialogue exposition can be more effective than, e.g., flashback — so long as you avoid the “as you know, Bob” dialogue exposition! But as with any good writing, “the key to making exposition work is…in incorporating all of these tricks throughout a story and scattering them evenly in between” (p. 42). He suggests, as an exercise, taking a short story and highlighting all occurrences of exposition, and classifying them according to the categories above. First, it will teach you what is exposition and what is not; second, it will show which types of exposition are most effective in which contexts. I’m certainly going to try this, both on stories written by others and on my own work.

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REVIEW: “Thickening the Plot” by Samuel R. Delany

Review of Samuel R. Delany, “Thickening the Plot”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 29-37 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Delany makes an interesting argument in this piece, namely, that “plot” is an effect of reading, and not one of writing. If I were to put my philosopher’s hat on, I’d be tempted to describe what he is doing as arguing that plot is something that supervenes on a story, rather than is a basic structural component of the story. Thinking of plot this way immediately changes what advice one would give to a writer re: plot. Delany’s own advice is firmly rooted in his own specific process (cf. Connolly and Yoachim’s piece earlier in the collection), which is intimately linked, for him, with rendering in words visual representations in the mind. If you are like me and mildly aphantasiac, much of his process is not transferable; and yet, I still found value in reading through this piece almost precisely because it was so foreign to anything that I do or can do.

(Originally published in Those Who Can, ed. Robin Scott Wilson, 1973).

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REVIEW: “Setting the Scene” by Nancy Kress

Review of Nancy Kress, “Setting the Scene”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 23-28 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I found this piece particularly useful, as I have only the vaguest idea of what counts as a “scene” in a piece of fiction. I’m not sure I could give you a complete answer even after reading the piece, but I certainly feel like I have a better idea of what gets to count as a “scene” and how scenes can (or should) be linked. And I really liked the “Kress Swimming Pool Theory of Fiction”: You don’t have to dive straight into the deep end, drowning your reader in world building and info-dumping, instead, you can push off from the side of the pool with some interesting action that will carry you far enough to glide “with a section of exposition without losing the reader interest” (p. 25).

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REVIEW: “We All Have to Start Somewhere: Finding Your Process and Making it Work For You” by Tina Connolly and Caroline M. Yoachim

Review of Tina Connolly and Caroline M. Yoachim, “We All Have to Start Somewhere: Finding Your Process and Making it Work for You”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 17-22 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

What I loved about this co-written piece was the way the authors compared their own differences in process, using these as an illustration of how other writers can go about figuring out their own processes: What works for them, what doesn’t. Honestly, one of the most useful thing I’ve ever found, for my own writing, is listening to other people describe what they do, as it helps me understand the different ways the same building blocks can be put together, an invaluable skill when you’re sitting in a pile of bricks that keeps falling down around you. Watching some else build something out of their bricks can sometimes show you what you can do with your own bricks that you might never have thought of. And that’s what I got out of this piece — more ways to put my bricks together — but more than that, they also talk about what the bricks themselves can be, so now not only do I have more ways of building things, I have more things to build with.

If “we all have to start from somewhere”, where is that? Connolly discusses how she identified herself as a “character-driven” writer, and how this diagnosis helps her to troubleshoot blocks when they occur. Yoachim describes herself as “idea-driven”, and how much of the advice that is aimed at character-driven writers like Connolly doesn’t work for her. If your inspiration comes in the form “what if X were the case?”, then talk of character motivation is going to see irrelevant. Yoachim astutely diagnoses certain drawbacks that can accompany this sort of process, and provides advise on how to counteract them. But whether you are character-driven or idea-driven or something else altogether, their most important piece of advice works for everyone: The process of figuring out what type of writing process you use is itself invaluable.

Sara L. Uckelman2 Comments

REVIEW: “Being and Becoming a Writer” by Karen Lord

Review of Karen Lord, “Being and Becoming a Writer”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 13-16 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

How does one give at advice on how to write, when the ways of writing are as numerous and distinct as the writers themselves? This is the question Lord tackles in this opening piece of the anthology, and she attempts to answer it via a series of “things I wish I had known earlier” (p. 13). Her recommendations stem from the practical — learn how to schedule your time, how to meet your deadlines and keep track of your correspondence, how to negotiate — to the cautionary, reminding us of the danger of the “starving/suffering artist” (p. 14).

There isn’t anything groundbreaking in this piece, just good solid things that you may already have learned, but which it never hurts to be reminded of. My favorite recommendation is to “carve out time to keep learning”. So often I see people treat the old adage “write what you know” as a limitation — that if you don’t know something about it, you cannot/should not write about it — rather than seeing it as an opportunity: You want to write about X? Go ye thereforth and learn as much about X as you can!

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REVIEW: Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer edited by Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans

Review of Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021) — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

And now for something totally different…

We don’t review much nonfiction on this site, and when we do we choose nonfiction that has close connections with reading SF and F. This anthology, on the other hand, is about writing, and while not everything in it is about SFF specifically, that is its main focus, and all of the pieces are good advice.

This collection is basically the Clarion West Writers Workshop in written format, a series of short reflective and didactic pieces by people who’ve attended the workshop as instructors, guests, and students, providing support and encouragement for writers whatever stage they are at, whether newbie, experienced, or somewhere in between. As a writer myself who has been in something of a dry spell during most of the Covid period, reading these articles has been balm for my soul; they are like written kaffeeklatsches with people you feel you could be friends with, telling me what I need to hear in a way that allows me to hear it. What I love best is how much the pieces themselves reflect the voice and advice of the person who wrote them, showing us how to write well and not just telling.

As is usual, we will review each piece separately, and link the individual reviews back here when they’ve been published.

I’m not normally one for taking advice on how to write from other writers. But I’ll make an exception for this book, and would recommended anyone else do too, whatever stage in your writing development you’re in. I can easily see this book becoming a sort of reference/trouble-shooting text for when you’re having trouble with a particular thing.

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REVIEW: “Five-Star Review” by Beth McMillan

Review of Beth McMillan, “Five-Star Review”, Analog Science Fiction and Fact May/June (2021): 121–124 (Kindle) – Purchase Here. Reviewed by John Atom.

When his car breaks down, the driver of an “Uber”-like service is worried that his passenger will leave him a bad review, effectively ruining his career.

It seems to be somewhat of a theme in this issue, but this was another very short piece full of info-dumping, much of it unnecessary or awkwardly conveyed. However, the final interaction between the protagonist and his passenger was very poignant and sent the story off on a good note. This dystopia the characters live in is a bit too over-the-top (although not entirely unrealistic), nevertheless it’s nice to see these two characters find a connection in such a selfish and judgmental world.

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