On Sneaking Up On Your Imagination: Writing Submittable SF
Begin with an idea that urges you. Or even a prompt: a “thought experiment.” Daydream. Scribble a few notes about anything that pops up for you. Doodle or draw. Relax. Mess around a little.
On Serious Cutting: Three Metaphors
“Cut it down by half, leaving nothing out.” —James Barrie (of Peter Pan)
On Revising
The morning slog through a max of 300 words of a first draft. Ploughing a rocky field with a Neolithic ploughshare, stopping every foot or so to pry up a boulder and roll it over to the growing drystone field wall.
On Rewriting Speculative Fiction
The challenge peculiar to SF: You’re trying to show, not tell. But how do you “show" a world that, to one degree or another, is unknown, unique, and may even operate by physics that are different from the laws your reader subconsciously applies?
On Following Instead of Fighting
How do you find the discipline to keep writing? Especially through patches when, for whatever reason, the material resists you?
On Pantser First Drafts
I’m about 75% pantser. I can intuit dim outlines; I usually know more or less where I'll end up but have no idea how to get there.
On Drafts
First draft: In your first draft you get to be Wild Being of the Woods. Write crazy. Stop and start, veer off, break rules, color outside the lines. Let the story discover itself. Later you can figure out what to do with it.
On Responding to an Idea
What you respond to in an idea or a prompt—what Ursula K. Le Guin called a “thought experiment”— may be big or small, clearly structural or emotionally subtle. Anything, really.