BOSKONE Report

Just this weekend past was my second BOSKONE, last year’s report is here. It was for us an abbreviated con, due to the snow here Saturday night we missed the sessions on Sunday. But still an enjoyable and, dare I say? inspiring event. Herewith some short observations on the con …

Short Fiction

I haven’t been too interested in trying to do short fiction. I guess that’s because I don’t read much of it, and the reason for that is I rarely find short pieces to be satisfying reads: to me they are too often trite or one-dimensional. A few things at the con have me rethinking that. First was a great panel entitled Editing Short Fiction: Turning Great Ideas Into Perfect Stories. Panelists included Neil Clarke, publisher/editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, Scott H. Andrews, editor/publisher of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Ellen Datlow, past editor of OMNI Magazine, past editor of SCIFICTION (the fiction arm of the SCIFI Channel) and now anthology editor for Tor.com and Reactor.

While this panel looked at multiple facets of the industry and process of short pieces, it kept coming back to the same question: As an editor, what causes you to buy a story? The answers were not very specific, but they made sense – the story has to sparkle, has to grab you, has to shine somehow. Some quotes from the panelists: “It has to have heart and passion” and “Tell the story only you can tell.”

That absolutely resonated with me. And as I’ll recount down below, clicked with things I heard from the BOSKONE Guest of Honor.

Some other points … All the panelists utterly discounted the so-called “market” – ie, the notion that there is some theme-of-the-moment and writers need to write about that in order to sell. Again, what is important is the story is good. Neil Clarke explained the details of the system at Clarkesworld: He has 2-4 slush readers who go through submissions. They get about 1,100 each month. Clarke himself also reads some of the slush. The majority of slush stories are never read past the first two paragraphs or so. Stories that make it past the slush phase then are given full read-throughs and critiques. The majority of stories here are perfectly good writing – whether they go forward is a matter of whether they have that special quality: the combination of intensity, invention, and heart.

All panelists agreed the number 1 flaw they see in stories is the beginning is too slow – the “real” start to these stories tends to be at the 15-20% mark. Sometime a story is salvageable just by cutting the upfront stuff. Another common thing is the story is more of an intro than a story; Clarke said “It’s the second story here that I want.”

Here’s a hopeful point: All the editors declared strong interest in finding new authors; in fact Scott Andrews said that was one of his measurements of success.

Another window on short fiction was the kaffeeklatsche – round table discussion – I attended with Ellen Datlow. She’s a different sort of editor from Clarke and Andrews, now she works exclusively on anthologies featuring stories from established writers. An interesting bit here was how she overbooks each anthology by 30% or so, assuming a proportion of writers will drop out or not finish. Another thing was how the theme of the anthology is the selling point. Among the themes she’s done are: Homage stories for Edgar Allen Poe (all the invited authors wanted to riff on “The Telltale Heart”); Christmas; and “Body Horror” , featuring gruesome plastic surgery, organ harvesting and more. Her view was “Best of” or “Year’s Best” anthologies are always poor sellers.

Guest of Honor: Jasper Fforde

I was a Fforde reader in the early 2000s. I read The Eyre Affair, Lost In A Good Book and (I’m pretty sure) Something Rotten. I also feel I read The Big Over Easy, the procedural about the murder of Humpty Dumpty. I stopped reading him because, to me, the literary world premise was getting a bit stale, and there’s other things to read. I had no idea what to expect from Fforde at the con, other than he would probably be funny and congenial in the British fashion. I ended up spending 3+ hours with Fforde, 2 in panels, and an hour and half in his kaffeeklatsche – I queued up an hour ahead of time in order to get into that.

So, how to sum up? Fforde was fantastic. Generous and easy-going in his conversation, I also found him to be tremendously inspiring. Something news to me: Fforde is dyslexic. He talked about that as a liberating thing: Having been deemed “stupid” by everyone, his parents included, the pressure was off. He could do whatever he wanted and was not burdened by high expectations. His first career was in film production, a camera man I believe. That work is very intermittent and in some of his downtime he decided to try writing. His first efforts were screenplays and he admitted they were bad. But he persevered and, still unburdened by expectations, wrote things that he liked. Among the books he tried selling was what would later become The Big Over Easy. When everyone passed on that, he kept writing books and in 1999 or so, The Eyre Affair got bought. Later he reworked the Humpty Dumpty story and sold that.  Lessons here: Write what you like; Keep writing; Throw nothing away. He has published 17 books so far.

An absolutely fantastic notion he shared with us is, as he calls it, the Narrative Dare. The idea of the narrative dare is to articulate a story premise that in some way is extreme and on the face of it, unworkable. Then, you write a story that delivers that premise. The dare of The Eyre Affair is: Books are living worlds and someone kidnaps Jane Eyre from her book. This to me was obviously an intensely powerful notion: What better way to make a book that is unique and not derivative than to start with a premise that seems impossible to write?

BTW, he cited an example of a dare: Do Kafka’s Metamorphosis, but instead of changing into a cockroach, change into a banana. Then he talked through a way to deliver on the premise and I have to admit, it was not without appeal … as it were.

Also in the kaffeeklatsche Fforde spoke a bit about his short fiction writing. He does a lot of it, but mainly as an exercise in writing improvement, and to test out ideas for longer works.

Fforde also presented a 1 hour “master class” in writing. This was a bit meandering, but virtually everything Fforde said was valuable. Some quotes/highlights:

You need an answer to the question, Why do I want to be a writer? If the answer is, make money, then you need to educate yourself on formulaic fiction and start churning it out. If your answer is not that, it will dictate what you write and how.

First paragraphs really are important. If yours doesn’t powerfully set the atmosphere, and foreshadow at least some of the book, you need to fix that.

Tell me, what is your book about – and I don’t mean the plot. Have a theme.

Give your characters hidden agendas and they will express those without you consciously doing anything.

If you look at the sentence or paragraph of yours that you are most proud of, you probably didn’t think a lot about writing that – you just did it.

I don’t revise, I revise constantly. Keep writing, then keep changing, then keep writing again.

The universal answer to any writing question: Write better books.

Writing without risk is barely writing at all.

Takeaways

My first takeaway is: Do some short fiction. I will not stop doing novels – the stories I most want to tell are not short. But I now see short work as a “muscle” that is valuable to have. Just one of the benefits is, if you can write a 3,000 word piece that resonates and grabs readers, then you will be more able to write an opening for a novel that does the same. I’m already starting on some brainstorming on concepts. Right now if I can do two in a year, and also meet my long-form goals, I’ll be happy.

Second takeaway: Take on a narrative dare. My 2025 project, Forlorn Toys, has some daring elements, but I don’t think it’s over the top that Fforde is describing. I’m going to try and concentrate what I have, and elevate it, into a premise that will attract attention and force me to take more risks when I write. Fforde’s implicit message – what have you got to lose? – is hard to argue with.

A great con overall. Wish I had gotten to the Sunday part, there was a roundtable with a notable agent I had signed up for. So it goes.

Till next time …