Review of Premee Mohamed, “Worldbuilding with Legs: Incorporating Insects into Your Stories,” Fantasy Magazine 72 (October 2021): 31-32 — Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
This was an excellent little how-to guide: Practical, straightforward, and readable even if you aren’t a huge fan of our six-legged companions.
Review of Ian McDonald, “Proverbs of Hell for Writers”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 181-188 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)
McDonald closes off the anthology by giving us 94 pithy proverbs about reading, writing, and being a writer. Some obvious, some insightful, some humorous, some inspirational, this was a good way to end the collection. Having devoured the entire book over the course of four days, I now feel like maybe, just maybe, I can tackle again that glorious pain which is attempting to put words of fiction onto paper.
Review of Susan Palwick, “Matters of Life and Death”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 175-179 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)
Palwick in her essay extols the virtues of what she calls “slow writing”, and compares the process of writing to that of learning how to spin and weave cloth — not as a metaphor, but as an actual explication of practice, talking about what she learned about how to write while she was learning how to spin: In neither case should you draft too fast.
Review of Hiromi Goto, “*Take As Needed”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 171-174 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)
When Goto asks, “What if you not only lose your imagination, but you also lose faith in your imagination?” (p. 171), it feels as if he’s exactly addressing me. I read this essay with great hunger and hope. More than anything, living through a pandemic has been exhausting, and it’s useful to read yet another reminder (so many of them in this anthology, and yet every one is worthwhile) that it exhaustion isn’t just physical, and it takes time to recover from, and “solace is necessary when you lose faith” (p. 172). What I didn’t expect, and which made the essay all the more impactful, was to find that it was not written by someone who has been through the dry patch and come out the other side; it was written by someone who is in the middle of it.
Review of Octavia E. Butler, “Positive Obsession”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 163-169 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)
In the review of the anthology as a whole, I said the essays “are like written kaffeeklatsches with people you feel you could be friends with”, and nowhere does this feel more true than with Butler’s essay, a quiet reflection on her life and growth of a writer, and on the central importance of positive obsession:
Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you’re afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It’s about not being able to stop at all (p. 168).
There’s no advice here, but one cannot help but learn from simply seeing someone else’s story of perseverance.
It’s also fascinating to see how things have changed since 1989. At the time this essay was writing, Butler was the only Black woman writing SF, and one of only four Black SF authors. How she would have loved to see the state of the genre today, with the likes of Jemisin, Okorafor, and Adeyemi writing at the top of the SF game, and the existence of entire anthologies to Afrofuturism.
(Originally published as “Birth of a Writer”, Essence, 1989.)
Review of Vonda N. McIntyre, “Pitfalls of Writing Science Fiction & Fantasy: General Useful Information & Other Opinionated Comments”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 153-161 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.
In this extremely helpful essay, McIntyre identifies 14 concrete pitfalls, applicable to any writer but perhaps more apt for the SFF writer, and then provides advice on (a) how to detect these pitfalls in your own work and (b) what to do about them.
All of the advice she gives is great advice, nothing earthshattering but all worth being reminded of, including the advice she opens with:
McIntyre’s First Law: Under the right circumstances, anything I tell you could be wrong (p. 153).
But you’ve got to know the rules in order to be effective in breaking them, after all.
(Originally published in 2012 by Book View Café.)
Review of Cat Rambo, “On Mentors and Mentees”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 147-151 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)
If you aren’t already convinced of the benefit of being both a mentor and a mentee, as a writer whether of SFF or otherwise, then hopefully you will be after reading Rambo’s piece.
Review of Eileen Gunn, “Going Through an Impasse: Evading Writer’s Block”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 137-146 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)
Gunn’s essay is one of the longer ones in the collection, appropriate given how big a feature writer’s block often is in a writer’s life! — in fact, one could probably put together an entire collection on advice on what to do when you want to write but just can’t. Gunn’s approach is to talk about how to deal with writer’s block, rather than how to “cure” it:
I’ll help you analyze the way you experience blocking and offer some suggestions on how to circumvent the trauma and get on with your work (p. 138).
This process of analysis ends up weirdly feeling like sitting in a therapist’s office, being asked questions that probe us and challenge us to answer honestly and emotionally. I suspect people will have varying degrees of success with this approach: my own experience, reading the essay while in the midst of a writer’s drought, was to feel strong resistance to her questions and suggestions, a refusal to engage — even when her suggestions are exactly the same suggestions that I give to other people! And perhaps that’s part of my problem. 🙂
Review of Cory Doctorow, “Writing in the Age of Distraction”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 133-136 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)
You might expect this essay to contain trite suggestions such as to get off the internet and write, but Doctorow’s advice is more nuanced than this. (1) Yes, get off the internet and write — but don’t expect to be able to sustain that all day. Or even a few hours. Aim for 20 minutes instead. (This advice resonates with me, as I’ve found I’m much more likely to hit — and exceed — my daily goals if I make them really really small.) (2) Stop in the middle of things. (I don’t like this advice. If I know how to start a sentence, I probably know how to finish it. If I don’t finish it today, I’ll probably have forgotten how to finish it tomorrow.) (3) Research isn’t writing. (Oh, god, yes, yes, I know, I know, you don’t need to remind me — except, you DO.) (4) Learn to write whatever the day/time/setting/level of caffeine/etc. (Advice that most writer-parents have probably already internalized. If you wait for things to be perfect, you’ll be waiting forever.) (5) “Kill off your wordprocessers” (p. 135), i.e., turn off all the “helpful” suggestions. (I’d never thought about this before, but all the auto-format, auto-spellcheck, auto-this, auto-that that wordprocessers have is one reason why I do almost all my first-draft composition either in long-hand or composing LaTeX using vim. There’s zero automation. And Doctorow is right about the powerful search-and-replace functions in things like vim!) (6) Turn off realtime social media. (This is advice I can basically never follow, though at least I tend to work on a laptop with a small enough monitor that if I’m deep in composition mode, I don’t see the twitter notifications, FB alerts, slack mentions, etc. because they’re hidden underneath another window!)
Seriously good advice, and all the better for being — for the most part — easy to follow.
(First published in Locus magazine, January 2009).
Review of Daryl Gregory, “Congratulations on Learning to Juggle — Now Get on the Unicycle”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 127-131 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)
Like Skillingstead’s piece, Gregory’s essay is all about how hard it is to be a writer — in the most supporting and uplifting way possible. As he points out, “this continuing, ever-morphing, and escalating difficulty is a sign that you’re on the right track” (p. 127). Not only does Gregory discuss the difficulty of writing in a sympathetic and caring way, his piece contains many concrete things that he does to get past and to lean into that hardness in his own writing. Not everything he does will work for everyone, but if you’re like me and really benefit from hearing about other writers’ processes, this is a very useful essay on that count. And so too is the reminder at the very end that “there’s great satisfaction in creating something beautiful, and joy in knowing you can try again” (p. 130).
You can try again.
SFF Reviews