Samuel R. Delany - About Writing. Seven Essays, Four Letters, & Five Interviews

ABOUT WRiTiNG

Seven Essays, Four Letters, and Five Interviews

Also by Samuel R. Delany

FICTION

The Jewels of Aptor (1962)

The Fall of the Towers

Out of the Dead City (1963)

The Towers of Toron (1964)

City of a Thousand Suns (1965)

The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965)

Babel-17 (1966)

Empire Star (1966)

The Einstein Intersection (1967)

Nova (1968)

Driftglass (1969)

Equinox (1973)

Dhalgren (1975)

Trouble on Triton (1976)

Return to Nevron

Tales of Nevron (1979)

Neveryna (1982)

Flight from Nevron (1985)

Return to Nevron (1987)

Distant Stars (1981)

Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand (1984)

Driftglass/Starshards (collected stories, 1993)

They Fly at iron (1993)

The Mad Man (1994)

Hogg (1995)

Atlantis: Three Tales (1995)

Aye, and Gomorrah (and other stories, 2004)

Phallos (2004)

GRAPHIC NOVELS

Empire (artist, Howard Chaynkin, 1980)

Bread & Wine (artist, Mia Wolff, 1999)

NONFICTION

The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977)

The American Shore (1978)

Heavenly Breakfast (1979)

Starboard Wine (1984)

The Motion of Light in Water (1988)

Wagner/Artaud (1988)

The Straits of Messina (1990)

Silent Interviews (1994)

Longer Views (1996)

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

Shorter Views (1999)

1984: Selected Letters (2000)

ABOUT WRiTiNG

Seven Essays, Four Letters, and Five Interviews

Samuel R. Delany

Wesleyan University Press
Middletown, Connecticut

This is for Marie Ponsot, in return for the Djuna Barnes.

Published by Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT 06459 www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

2005 by Samuel R. Delany
All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America 5 4 3
ISBN-13: 978-0-8195-6716-1 ISBN-10: 0-8195-6716-7

Teaching/Writing first appeared as Teaching S-f Writing in Clarion (New York: Signet Books; New American Library, 1971).

Thickening the Plot first appeared in Those Who Can , ed. Robin Scott Wilson (New York: Mentor Books; New American Library, 1973).

Characters and On Pure Storytelling first appeared in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (New York: Berkeley Windhover Books, 1977), 15560, 16170.

Of Doubts and Dreams first appeared in Distant Stars (New York: Bantam Books, 1981), 716.

After Almost No Time at All the String on Which He had Been Pulling and Pulling Came Apart into Two Separate Pieces So Quickly He Hardly Realized It Had Snapped, or: Reflections on The Beach Fire first appeared in Empire SF 5.20 (summer 1980).

Some Notes for the Intermediate and Advanced Creative Writing Student first appeared in Shorter Views (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 43357.

A Para doxa Interview: Experimental Writing/Texts & Questions first appeared as Para doxa Interview: Texts & Questions, with Samuel R. Delany in The Future of Narrative, ed. Lance Olsen, a special issue of Para doxa 4.11 (1998): 384430.

An American Literary History Interview: The Situation of American Writing Today first appeared in somewhat different form, as part of a symposium entitled The Situation of American Writing Today in American Literary History 11.2 (1999): 33153.

A Poetry Project Newsletter Interview: A Silent Interview first appeared in The Poetry Project Newsletter , New York, March 18, 1999.

A Black Clock Interview first appeared in Black Clock , no. 1 (March 2004): 6475.

A Para doxa Interview: Inside and Outside the Canon first appeared as Para doxa Interview with Samuel R. Delany, in Para doxa: Studies in World Literary Genres [Vashan Island, Washington] 1.3 (1995), ed. Lauric Guillard.

CIP data is available from the Library of Congress.

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

If you are a writer, more and more youll find yourself writing about writingespecially today, as creative writing classes at the university level grow more and more common.

Writers make their critical forays in many genres: letters to friends, private journals, interviews, articles for the public, general or academic, and at all levels of formality. Rather than try for an artificial unity, I thought, therefore, to give an exemplary variety. Today such variety seems truer to its topic.

After the preface and a general introduction, this handful of pieces on creative writing continues with seven essays, each taking up an aspect of the mechanics of fiction. (I am more comfortable with mechanics than craft; but use the term you prefer.) The first two, Teaching/Writing and Thickening the Plot, grew out of Clarion Workshops many years ago, when the workshops were actually held in Clarion, Pennsylvania, under the aegis of their founder, Robin Scott Wilson. (For more than twenty years now they have been given every summer both in East Lansing, Michigan, and in Seattle, Washington. Since 2004, Clarion South, a third chapter, has been held at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia.) Characters first appeared as an invited essay in a 1969 issue of the SFWA [Science Fiction Writers of America] Forum , when it was under the editorship of the late Terry Carr. On Pure Storytelling grew out of a comment made to me by Hugo and Nebula Awardwinning novelist Vonda N. McIntyre, when I was privileged to have her as a writing student at an early Clarion. (The comment itself is recorded in Teaching/Writing.) That essay was delivered as an after-dinner talk at the Nebula Awards banquet at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, California, in 1970. Of Doubts and Dreams is currently the afterword to my short fiction collection Aye and Gomorrah (Vintage Books: New York, 2003), though I wrote it initially in 1980 to conclude another anthology, Distant Stars . Thus you must put up with my self-references for a page or so. Finally, however, it turns to topics that might interest this books readers.

After Almost No Time at All the String on Which He had Been Pulling and Pulling Came Apart into Two Separate Pieces So Quickly He Hardly Realized It Had Snapped, or: Reflections on The Beach Fire was first requested by a fanzine, Empire , which endured a few years toward the end of the 1970s. Aimed at aspiring writers, each issue printed an amateur short story the editors had previously sent to a handful of professionals for comment. Most writers returned a paragraph of encouragement, in which they also pointed out one-to-three flaws. The editors printed these critiques along with the tale. I decided to send back, however, a fuller response. Incidentally, I have changed the name of the characters, the writers initials, several of the tales incidents, and the story title itself to protect the brave and laudable youngster, who, after all, was not yet seventeen when she or he first wrote it.

Something I dont mention in my piece on The Beach Fire (nor did any of the other three writers who sent in their much briefer notes): however unintentionally, the alien-as-beach-ball is lifted from John ( Halloween, They Live, Escape from New York ) Carpenters marvelously lunatic student film Dark Star , which was shown at hundreds of SF conventions throughout the seventies and eighties and which reduced auditoria full of science fiction fans to convulsive laughter. Since Empire s editors, as well as its readers and writers, all came out of science fiction fandom, likely the author of The Beach Fire had seen, or at least heard of, Carpenters spoof. Perhaps the plagiarism was inadvertent. But Carpenters original was so telling and so widely known that the similarity would have immediately put the piece out of the running with any professional editor who recognized its source. I chose not to bring it up because to discuss what you can and cant take from other artists would have doubled, if not tripled, my essays length. But even the nature of plagiarism has become a new order of problem in the last thirty years. From the eighties through the present, writers from age fifteen to age thirty-five have regularly handed me stories that were pastiches of William Gibsons