REVIEW: “Writing in the Age of Distraction” by Cory Doctorow

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).

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Congratulations on Learning to Juggle — Now Get on the Unicycle” by Daryl Gregory

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.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Feed Your Engine” by Jack Skillingstead

Review of Jack Skillingstead, “Feed Your Engine”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 123-125 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The “moral” of Skillingstead’s very short essay is this:

I want to impress on new writers that “being a writer” has a lot to do with a working-class mindset (p. 124),

and it’s good advice, too, for writers that are not so new!

Writing is work. Oh, we’ve all had the days when the words come easy and flow off the tips of our fingers like magic; some of us have had the days when more acceptances than rejections arrive in your inbox; but for most people those days are probably the exception and not the norm, and those days only come on the backs of the days where every word is a slog, when “it can still be a real grind” (p. 124). It may seem like this is a sad, depressing piece, but in fact I found it the opposite: A reminder that we writer write because “it’s harder not to write than it is to write” (p. 125), and that while we may each be on our own train, there’s plenty of stations we can visit where we can meet up with other engineers. I, currently in a bit of a dry patch re: writing myself, found this piece enormously comforting.

Sara L. Uckelman2 Comments

REVIEW: “Tapping the Source” by Elizabeth Hand

Review of Elizabeth Hand, “Tapping the Source”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 119-122 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

In this essay, Hand offers an alternative to the standard adage “write what you know”. Instead, she says “write what you’ve felt” (p. 119), and that the scenes which draw upon your own emotional experiences are the ones that will resonate with readers. In order to help people develop the skill of writing what they’ve felt, she provides a two-step exercise, one that she has used effectively in teaching over many years. It feels a bit awkward to simply repeat the instructions in this review, and I’m not sure that summarising would get me something much different, so I’ll leave it at: This exercise looks like a useful and valuable one, even if done individually instead of as part of a group, and I look forward to trying it.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “The Narrative Gift as a Moral Conundrum” by Ursula K. Le Guin

Review of Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Narrative Gift as a Moral Conundrum”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 113-117 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I was let down by this piece, because I felt the title promised something that was never delivered on. The conundrum Le Guin identifies is this:

I believe a good story, plotted or plotless, rightly told, is satisfying as such and in itself. But here, with “rightly told,” is my conundrum or mystery (p. 114).

But what is the moral dimension of this conundrum? I even read the essay twice to see if I had missed the moral aspect the first time around, but didn’t learn anything new the second time around.

I’ll probably read it a third time, on the assumption that the flaw lies with me and not the essay, but it does seem like this piece was included more because of who it was written by than because of what it said.

(First published on https://www.ursulakleguin.com/ in 2004, reprinted in No Time To Spare, 2018).

Sara L. Uckelman2 Comments

REVIEW: “Something to Cry About” by Nisi Shawl

Review of Nisi Shawl, “Something to Cry About”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 107-111 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This essay was not at all what I expected it would be about. I thought it would be about how to write emotion, to get the reader invested, how to give them “something to cry about”. Instead, I was treated to an excellent essay on depictions of race, especially of people from the Afrodiaspora via a glimpse of a life, and a culture, unlike my own. It was another essay that teaches what to do by showing how to do it, rather than just talking about it.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Researching Imaginary Worlds” by Ken MacLeod

Review of Ken MacLeod, “Researching Imaginary Worlds”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 101-106 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I didn’t get what I was hoping I would from this essay. I was hoping for a bit more on what to research than on how to research it. If you are not already a researcher, then there is probably some good advice in here; if you’ve come from a background where you’re already a trained researcher, then this piece will offer little that you don’t already know.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “Diversity Plus: Diverse Story Forms, Not Just Diverse Faces” by Henry Lien

Review of Henry Lien, “Diversity Plus: Diverse Story Forms, Not Just Diverse Faces”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 93-100 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

The take-home message of this essay (one of the ones I was particularly interested in reading when I looked over the table of contents) is simply this:

Diversity can (and should) also icnlude different story forms drawn from diverse traditions (p. 93).

So simple, it almost warrants the response “duh” — but sometimes, the simplest facts are the easiest overlooked if they are never made explicit.

Of course, Lien doesn’t leave it at that: This fact is the opening of his essay, not the conclusion of it. In the remainder, he introduces the East Asian four-act story structure, contrasting it with the “Western three-act story structure and the five-act Freytag pyramid variant” (p. 94) (if you, like me, don’t know what the Freytag pyramid variant is, that’s okay, knowing what it is doesn’t seem to be essential). Like a lot of the other essays in this anthology, Lien takes a very practical, demonstrative approach, not content with simply describing the structures and talking about how they could be instantiated, but taking a concrete example — My Neighbor Totoro — and showing exactly how it does.

Lien’s piece leaves me itching to try this new structure, and thanks to his essay, I have all the tools I need to give it a go.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “The Three Laws of Great Endings and My Two Shameless Hacks” by James Patrick Kelly

Review of James Patrick Kelly, “The Three Laws of Great Endings and My Two Shameless Hacks”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 87-91 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

I read this essay with great interest, because endings are something I struggled with. The rules seem anodyne enough, but I look forward to trying out the hacks on my next story. I also found it instructive to read Kelly’s advice while thinking of endings that I personally find particularly successful (for some value of “success”; if “still be thinking about it next Thursday” (p. 89) is a measure of success, then the ending of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot-49, which made me angry enough to throw the book across the room and still makes me angry some 20 years after I first read it, totally counts).

The first hack is to “dissect your ending into three parts: climax, resolution, and denouement” (p. 87), with Kelly giving specific guidance on what he means by this dissection — concrete questions to ask yourself about each part once you’ve identified them. It’s the sort of exercise that sounds like it would be rather horrific to do the first couple of times but I can see how it would pay off (rather like reading your story out loud to proofread it; terribly cringeworthy when you start, but soon you realise the value of the process and you can’t do without it).

The second hack is “to make up ten different endings to your story…[but] you must spend at least twenty-four hours on this process” (p. 89), and unlike the previous one, this exercise sounds like loads of fun, and I can’t wait to try it.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment

REVIEW: “The Old Marvellous” by John Crowley

Review of John Crowley, “The Old Marvellous”, in Tod McCoy and M. Huw Evans, eds., Pocket Workshop: Essays on Living as a Writer (Hydra House Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2021): 79-85 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

This piece has less practical advice and more ideas and issues to reflect on. Crowley’s focus in his essay is the distinction, and relationship, between allegory and symbolism. It’s hard to talk about allegory without talking about Christian theology, and there is rather more religion, and reference to C.S. Lewis, than one might have expected to find in an anthology of advice about writing. Crowley makes the astute point, though, that while “realist fictions are full of struggles between persons whose moral and spiritual parts are mostly hidden or unfixed”, in fantasy fiction these “same moral or spiritual energies” are embodied and made explicit in the story itself (p. 82). That doesn’t mean that all fantasy fiction is allegorical (nor that all allegory is religious) but that allegory is always much closer to hand for the writer (and reader!) of fantasy fiction than of realist fiction.

Sara L. Uckelman1 Comment