Greg Bear on Politics in Writing

"To handle the issue [terrorist action in "The Wind from a Burning Woman"] honestly, I had to make the “Burning Woman” fight for a cause that I, myself, would cherish. One editor, reading the story for an anthology on space colonies, rejected it because it didn’t overtly support the cause. It would have been dishonest to force the story into such a mold; however pleasant or unpleasant the result, my stories must work themselves out within their own framework, not according to some market principle or philosophical bias. It may be remarkable that, with such views, I’ve come as far as I have in publishing."

--Greg Bear from the "Preface" to The Wind from a Burning Woman.

I invited Greg Bear to write for an anthology that proposed a fascinating new ethos. And he said, "Stay away from ethos." My point was an SF-nal one: So many interesting ways of seeing the world. Let's go for a swim. He could have played the game yet opposed the ethos, too. 

His perspective, I think, could be summed up by the above. Each story has it's own way of thinking. Even as I felt he'd misunderstood, I admired as his staunch position about the writer being outside any set of predisposed rules.

Greg Bear on Why He Writes, and Why He Writes Science Fiction

I have friends who believe the world will come to an end in twenty or thirty years.... Serve everybody right, they seem to say. 

What they are actually saying is that within the next few decades—certainly within the next sixty or seventy years—they will come to an end.... The future does not really exist, certainly not the far and unknowable future. Why talk about it? 

They are still my friends, but they are... wrong.... The future will come, and it will be different, unimaginably so. Then why do I bother to try imagining it...?

I’m willing to bet, in our deepest hearts, that we all hope one of our more optimistic imagined futures, or some aspect of a literary time to come, will closely parallel reality. Then we will be admired for our perspicacity....

Perhaps. But it will be accident, not prophecy.

Like my pessimistic friends, I'm not going to live forever....

But when I write, I not only live to see one future, I experience dozens...

When I write, I’m immortal.

--Greg Bear from The "Preface" to The Wind from a Burning Woman

Notes:

A perfect quote for his passing. I also like his willingness to forge friendships with those he disagrees with.

Ursula K. Le Guin on Novels and Good Novels

 "In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find—if it’s a good novel—that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face."

--Ursula K. Le Guin, "Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness"

"The difference between a short story and a novel" by Philip K. Dick

 "The difference between a short story and a novel comes to this...."

"It is in sf stories that sf action occurs; it is in sf novels the worlds occur.... Crisis is the key to story-writing,a sort of brinkmanship in which the author mires his characters in happening so sticky as to seem impossible of solution. And then he gets them out... usually.... But in a novel the actions are so deeply rooted in the personality of the main character that to extricate him the author would have to go back and rewrite his character. This need not happen in a story, especially a short one.... [T]his makes clear why some writers can write stories but not novels, or novels but not stories.... [A]nything can happen in a story; the author merely tailors his character to the event.... As a writer builds up a novel-length piece it slowly begins to imprison him, to take away his freedom; his own characters are taking over and doing what they want to do--not what he would like them to do. This is one one hand the strength of the novel and on the other its weakness."

--Philip K. Dick, The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick [originally 1968, so probably from the 1969 collection, The Preserving Machine.

Kafka on what kind of books we should read

  “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.” 

--Franz Kafka

Food for thought. I couldn't find where this originated, but still a fascinating perspective, no matter who said it.

Free to Watch Ursula K. Le Guin Video through Aug 30

Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin is free to watch in the United States through August 30. It's a discussion of her work and thematic preoccupations.

Writers were quoting her saying stories make their own rules that you cannot break.

Another good quote:

"Imaginative fiction trained people to be aware that there are other ways to do things and other ways to be, that there is not just one civilization, and it is good, and it is the way we have to be."

How true is this of speculative literature today?

"Your job is to find what the world is trying to be."

--"Vocation" by William Stafford

Ted Chiang on Sequels and the Conceptual Breakthrough Story

[T]he “conceptual breakthrough” story, where the characters discover something about the nature of the universe which radically expands their understanding of the world... is a story pattern I like a lot, because ... it lets you dramatize the process of scientific discovery.

[W]ith the good-versus-evil story, it’s very easy to tell a sequel to that story. The world is a good place again until another evil comes along and it’s up to the heroines to defeat this evil again, and they defeat it, and you’re back where you started, and you can tell it over and over again. But in a science fiction story–especially in a conceptual breakthrough story—the sequel... cannot look the same because at the end of the first story, we’re in a completely different place relative to where we started. You can tell a different story as a sequel, but you can’t tell the same story....

--

Ted Chiang on his Writing Process

Note: I have simplified and organized Chiang's responses. It may alter his intent somewhat. Feel free to consult the originals instead. 

1. I usually think about [an idea I'm interested in] for a long time, and 
2. write down my speculations... about how [they] could become a story. [From the McCarron interview:] I think about different possible stories set in such a world; I can usually come up with a bunch of starting points, but I don’t know where those would go.... 
3. I don't [write] the story... until I know how the story ends.... I write... the last paragraph... or a paragraph near the end.... *
4. The second thing I write is the opening of the story.
5. I write the key scenes or landmark scenes. [From the McCarron interview:] I don’t have the whole story worked out in detail, but I have a general sense of what needs to happen. Sometimes I’m able to borrow elements from the other starting points that previously seemed like dead ends to me, although not always. 
6. Then I just in backwards and forwards [in almost random order].

--Ted Chiang in The Metahack Interview (interviewed by Avi Solomon). The book is "free" through subscription to Amazon's Kindle Unlimited program.

--Ted Chiang in Electric Literature (interviewed by Meghan McCarron)

* The explanation of why Chiang writes the ending first:

"[I]f you’re writing a mystery story and you have no idea who the murderer is and are hoping to figure it out along the way, then the odds are not good that the culprit you eventually decide on will match all the clues you laid out. Not all stories are mysteries or whodunits, but I tend to approach my stories in a similar fashion. I need to know “who done it” before I can start."

--Ted Chiang in an interview with Betsy Huang of Asian American Literary Review

Ted Chiang on Explanation in Fiction and Non-Fiction

"[T]here’s something beautiful about a good explanation; reading one isn’t just useful, it can be pleasurable, too."

--Ted Chiang in Electric Literature (interviewed by Meghan McCarron)

Ted Chiang on Genre and the Difference between SF and Fantasy--Specifically Magic Vs. Science

"[M]y work remains close to traditional notions of science fiction. I like performing thought experiments, working through the implications of a speculative idea, and I think that’s something science fiction is particularly well suited for. [G]enre is a kind of conversation that takes place between books and authors over a period of years. [Y]our work is in dialogue with earlier work in that genre.... It’s a conversation I am happy to be a part of."

 --Ted Chiang in Unbound Worlds (interviewed by Peter Orullian)

"[T]here does exist a useful distinction... between magic and science. If... just a handful of special people... turn lead into gold, that implies different things than giant factories churning out gold from lead. The difference... is between the universe responding to you in a personal way, and the universe being entirely impersonal."

--Ted Chiang in The Metahack Interview (interviewed by Avi Solomon). The book is "free" through subscription to Amazon's Kindle Unlimited program.

"Science fiction offers... a story where the world starts out as recognizable... but is ... changed by some new discovery or technology. At the end... the world is changed permanently. The original condition is never restored.... this story pattern is progressive because its underlying message is ... that change is inevitable. The consequences ... are here to stay and we’ll have to deal with them."

--Ted Chiang in The Asian-American Literary Review (interviewed by Betsy Huang)

Ted Chiang's Advice to Slow Writers

"On the occasions that I have hurried to finish a story in order to have something to bring to a workshop, the need to meet the deadline caused me to make bad decisions with regards to the story, and I wound up spending more time fixing those mistakes.... 

"As for advice to slow writers, I’d say that writing is not a race. This isn’t a situation where only the most prolific writers get an audience; publish your story when you’re ready, and it will find readers."

--Ted Chiang in Electric Literature (interviewed by Meghan McCarron)

Ted Chiang on his Work, Translation, Philosophy, and Culture

"To the extent that my work is philosophical fiction, it's not reliant on American culture, and that might make it a good candidate for translation."

--Ted Chiang in The Metahack Interview (interviewed by Avi Solomon). The book is "free" through subscription to Amazon's Kindle Unlimited program.

W. S. Merwin on listening to poems

"Any work of art makes one very simple demand on anyone who genuinely wants to get in touch with it. And that is to stop. You've got to stop what you're doing, what you're thinking, and what you're expecting, and just be there for the poem for however long it takes."

-- W. S. Merwin

R. A. Lafferty on the Hugo Award

"Winning the Hugo Award for 'Eurema's Dam' puzzled me completely*, and I'm still puzzled by it. It was a pleasant little story, but I had four or five better stories published that year.... Still, I was glad to have a Hugo. I don't believe it had much effect on my career. I think the effect of Hugos is greatly exaggerated. And I've heard four or five different writers express puzzlement over winning Hugos with stories that were pretty ordinary and being passed over on stories which they really believed were earth-shaking."

-- R. A. Lafferty interview with Tom Jackson

* I explain why it probably won here. 

Regarding the award's effect, he might be singing a different tune today. 

R. A. Lafferty on Terry Carr on Getting and Keeping a Reader

"Terry Carr taught me that a story must begin with a bang.... Terry also told me that, 'You can lose a reader, completely and forever, in fifteen seconds. Never leave him even a fifteen-second interval without a hook to jerk him back.' Anything else Terry told me is contained in those two very good pieces of advice."

-- R. A. Lafferty interview with Tom Jackson

Gina Berriault on our contemporary culture's inability to venture or artificial limitation of venturing into writing about certain necessary subjects/themes

"We write to be acceptable. Some thing I wanted to write about, I haven't because I was afraid I wouldn't be published.... I like to believe... that I wrote truthfully, but I've always felt the presence of anonymous and not-so-anonymous authority."

--Gina Berriault from Passion and Craft interview

Has this trend gotten worse?

Gina Berriault on characters

"The way to escape from the person you figure you may be is to become many other in your imagination.... I haven't roamed far enough."

--Gina Berriault from Passion and Craft interview

"[Why there is a gap between books is] a question that should never be asked. It opens a wound. What can a writer say about gaps and silences?"

--Gina Berriault from Passion and Craft interview

Gina Berriault on the failing of contemporary writers

"In Unanmo's Tragic Sense of Life he speaks about poets' desperate longing to be remembered, to be immortal. I think that concept of immortality is long... gone from our consciousness.... Now the vying with one another is only for present gain. When I asked the students if they'd read this-or-that greatwriter, most had read only contemporary writers."

--Gina Berriault from Passion and Craft interview