Notes from Clarion 5

At Friday night's party (every Friday night a member of the Seattle sci fi community hosts a party for us and our instructor of the week, last Saturday, Greg Bear held a party for us at his home) all the party-goers were commenting on how un-tired we looked. One guy said half the fun to coming to Clarion parties is watching the participants deteriorate. By week five, we're expected to be dragging around, hardly able to be social, yet, we were all bopping around meeting folks, drinking, laughing, talking. I call us the moderate Clarion: we're getting our sleep (mostly), we're doing all our reading, we're writing smart (An administrator commented on how short our stories were. An average story length is 5,000 words. Past Clarion classes were regularly turning in stories 8,000 - 10,000 words long! Regularly. No wonder folks were burning out. A graduate from Clarion East said she started to hate the prolific folks turning in 14,000 word stories. She said she stopped writing by week three so as not to add to the burden of reading). Another administrator commented on the fact that nobody's ditching class. We've had people late about four times and maybe one absence over the entire course. By the last weeks, many people just skip out on two or three days just to get themselves together. I'll tell you, when I first started hearing these stories, it was only days before I was to leave for Clarion. I started to worry. I wondered what I had signed myself up for. Luckily, my group isn't interested in the burn-out.

The fifth week of Clarion is reserved for an editor. Our editor was Ellen Datlow, fiction editor of scifi.com. At 20 cents a word, she is the highest paying sci fi short story market. In addition, she also compiles a highly popular series of fantasy anthologies, as well as co-edits "The Year's Best" anthology of fantasy and horror. The difference between Connie Willis (last week's instructor) and Ellen was glaring. Connie was once an elementary school instructor, hyper-charismatic and invested in keeping us entertained. Whereas Ellen, as a nonwriting editor, was here to answer our questions and lend us her expertise. I think the change in momentum was jarring for a number of us, especially as our minds aren't very alive, we aren't bringing as much to the table as we could have in the earlier weeks.

Ellen is very New York, practical, direct, honest, and to-the-point. She offered some insight on the technical aspects of manuscript presentation and the editor-writer relationship. For all of you who are not writers, the following paragraphs may bore you to tears, but for those of you who are, here were some of the issues Ellen brought up. In presenting manuscripts, the writer should do everything possible to make the manuscript easily readable. All manuscripts need to have the author's name and contact information on them. Of course, the manuscripts should be double spaced. Use a standard font (Clarion suggests Courier because it's widely spaced and easy to read, Ellen likes Times), and all material should be 12 pt. Any material that is to be italicized should be underlined when presenting a manuscript to an editor because italics can easily be missed when reading volumes of material. I knew all of the above, but the two things I learned are: 1. Put your name under the title. It identifies you easily and more readily to the editor. If the editor/reader is cranky and/or overworked, they won't want to go searching for the author's name. 2. Paper clip your submissions. Obviously, you don't want to leave it lose because pages will be lost in the slush pile. But staples are bothersome because it doesn't allow the editor to flip through the pages and edit them with ease, and when they want to photocopy the stapler has to be removed and sometimes the holes cause the pages to get stuck. Now I know all of this sounds ticky, inconsequential, and silly. On some level it is. If your writing is phenomenal, you can turn in a crappily presented manuscript and it will sell. But it would be a shame to have a wonderful manuscript thrown to the side for technical errors. Some people rolled their eyes at this part of the lecture, but I believe Ellen was taking the opportunity to beg for manuscripts that make her life easier.

One thing I never realized is the point of putting a cover letter on your submissions is to get you out of the slush pile. I always send a basic cursory letter and attach my list of publications, but Ellen says as an editor, she doesn't want to wade through the list of publications. She suggests you include approximately five of your best credentials in the cover letter. When she's viewing manuscripts, she checks to see if she knows the author, if she doesn't, she checks to see if the author has any publishing credits. If the author has none, she puts it in the slush pile and her reader reads it. Again, if your work is good, it doesn't matter, it will get out of the slush pile (assuming someone is actually reading the slush pile). But a cover letter can get you straight to the editor's desk.

During the week, after critiques, we had the opportunity to ask Ellen questions. Our questions ran the gamut from whether it's good to submit a so-so story first, then a better one, then the best one to show the editor that you're developing (no way, says Ellen, send your best most polished work every time) to questions on copyright and permissions (the publication secures copyright in the author's name; it is the author's responsibility to secure permissions for song lyrics, etc. Don't write a story that depends on quoted material to work. If you can't secure permissions, your piece is destroyed. Use other materials in such a way that if you can't use it, your story still stands without it.)

The two questions that I thought received the most interesting responses were: 1. Considering the fact that a writer can not make a living off of short stories, what is the value of the short story to the field of sci fi? and 2. What topics are taboo in sci fi? As a short story editor, Ellen says she doesn't even read novels anymore. She believes short stories are the life blood of the field. The short format makes short stories an excellent place to experiment with style, format, and voice and it is an effective training ground for developing writers. Ellen believes the strongest ideas come out of short stories. Also, short stories are advertisement for the writer. You might not be able to make a living, but you can create a name for yourself, build an audience, win a few awards and make yourself marketable to the book publishers. Sometimes it's prudent to just get your work out there before you start focusing on the immediate financial gain. Advanced writers can benefit from continuing to write short stories because the short form forces the writers to be concise, they can't fall back on their brilliance because short stories have to be structurally sound. Short story writers have to get to the point. Once writers graduate to novels, they often stop writing short stories. Ellen's constantly looking for new short story writers b/c she so often loses her favorite writers to novels.

In response to the second question, Ellen noted that everyone has their built in biases and a good editor is aware of their biases and fights against them. While she doesn't believe there are any taboos in sci fi, there are topics that people won't publish or support. Anything fundamentalist, she says, is suspect. The areas that make people uncomfortable are religious and political. Sex and violence will be published sooner than a politically unpopular viewpoint. She spoke about a story that was told from the point-of-view of a sympathetic Arab terrorist. It was an excellent story, but she didn't publish it because of the unorthodox views and the mainstream perspective on Arab terrorists. At her Tuesday night event at Elliot Bay Bookstore, she went on to discuss other stories that she loved, but did not publish because they would make readers uncomfortable. One way she remedied the situation was by creating anthologies. When someone offered her the opportunity to propose a bunch of anthologies, she made lists of the stories she loved but could not buy, organized them by theme, then proposed anthologies around them. It was great to hear how an editor would go back to work she rejected and find a place for it.

Anyway, the end of week five finds me ready to go home. It was great meeting Ellen, and unless we send her really bad material, we're all out of the slush pile when we send her our work. Also, she's made herself available to us to answer any future questions we might have regarding the editor-writer interaction. I think in the end, our access to her will turn out to be the most valuable outcome of this week. One more week! At the suggestion of Jack Womack, our last instructor, we're all writing short shorts. That means less material to critique and less to write. I hope to coast through this last week and get back home in time to catch a few concerts in the park and enjoy the remainder of the summer.

Blessings.

kis.