Nascence: 17 Stories That Failed and What They Taught Me, page 1
Nascence
17 Failed Stories and What They Taught Me
Nascence
Copyright © 2011 by Tobias S. Buckell.
All rights reserved.
Cover Illustration
by Gail Cross. All rights reserved.
Electronic Edition
Electronic ISBN:
xxxxxxxxxxxxx
www.TobiasBuckell.com
Table of Contents
Introduction
Spellcast (1996)
Airtown (1997)
The Arbiter (1997)
Abrupt Salvage (1998)
It Is Bitter (1998)
Sea Legs (1999)
Slowboat (1999)
Closed Cycles (1999)
Ambassador (1999)
Ranger Jim (2000)
Free Antarctica (2000)
Days Limin' (2001)
Life! (2002)
Vacuum Cures Everything (2003)
A Slow Burn Passion (2004)
A Jar of Goodwill (1999-2000)
A Jar of Goodwill (2000)
A Jar of Goodwill (2010)
Epilogue
About The Author
Introduction
So this is either a really clever way to monetize a number of old stories that I have in my desk drawers that really shouldn't see the light of day, or it is a nifty way to talk about how I learned how to write. It could also be a neat way to demonstrate a handful of lessons I've learned the hard way over the years about how not to write. Or possibly, I think it could be both.
I'm perfectly comfortable with holding both concepts in hand at once... if you are.
I've been writing short fiction since I was fifteen years old. I've been stubbornly running myself into every single wrong turn in the maze toward publication and making a living, because I'm just the sort of person that learns that way.
I also suffer from ADHD and a touch of dyslexia.
As a result of both the maze of learning and those conditions, I fell into a habit when writing short stories: I preferred if the story failed and fell apart, not to go back and endlessly try to revise it into competence.
As I mentioned, I'm ADHD and dyslexic. Nothing bores me more than going back over a story I know is an utter mess. I already learned the lesson. Been there, done that. I'd much rather incorporate my developing skills in the direction of working on something new. I have an innate tendency toward projects that are new and shiny.
There were many stories that I would try to revise into excellence over the years, only to find myself making them worse. Polishing a story, tweaking it, adding minor revisions… I was comfortable with that. Major structural changes, and big grafts, however, made me feel like I was a plastic surgeon unveiling Frankenstein's monster.
Good God it's so ugly, I could imagine people saying. Put it out of its misery. And where did these people with pitchforks come from?
I have sold 45 stories to different anthologies and magazines and written six novels. But in order to sell those 45 short stories, heck, just to get to the point where I was competent enough to sell my first few stories, I wrote a hundred unsellable ones first.
So there's my dirty little not-so-secret. I've written 145 stories, and not sold 100 of them.
• • •
You can imagine that my focus on not tinkering stories into perfection put me at extreme odds with everyone who ever gave me advice during high school and university. We were taught that writers revise their prose into perfection. The drafting process, one that I found excruciating when attacking essays, was hammered into us.
But I wanted at the time to learn how to create an interesting story. Someone can polish a turd into a smooth sheen, and tinker it into beauty, but I figured that even a diamond in the rough would be more intrinsically interesting than the most polished piece of crap in the world. And some of my early stories were crap. They had to be. I didn't know what I was doing. And I knew it!
I believed that if I could teach myself to create diamonds and then work on polishing afterwards, rather than trying to polish something that wasn't a diamond, then I felt I could maybe sell a story.
My method isn't one I recommend for everyone. I know writers, close friends of mine, who are tinkerers. And it's part of their process. They get to the point where they can take a piece of coal and put it under pressure and turn it into diamond given time and focus. It's just a different path.
For me, however, each story failure was a lesson, a piece of practice, and a chance to try something different. Sometimes I would even know ahead of time that the story was a failure, but that I was trying out something new just to learn how to do it. And that was okay.
And, after a hundred stories, I think I began to create some diamonds in the rough.
Over time critics and my readers will ultimately be the ones to really decide if I've made any well-polished diamonds. But I believe, after having sold 45 stories, that I was not completely insane in my approach. The method worked for me. I don't think I would be a writer today if I hadn't taken this course. I would have given up long ago.
Because the first few stories I wrote: they were bad. They could never have been drafted into salability. And somewhere deep down I understood that, and I kept moving on.
I'm glad I did.
My methods have changed now. I spend more time drafting and tinkering as I move into a new stage in my development. I’m usually able to stop a story if I can tell it’s falling apart. I’m a different writer now. And that’s okay as well. It’s important to try new things, different things, and grow as an artist. I’m always tweaking how I work.
• • •
There’s this funny dilemma I have. An editor will ask me if I have any stories that I haven't sold. Oh yes, I say. Got plenty of those. I have about a hundred or so of those, in fact. But they aren't really for consumption. I don't want someone to think this is the best I could do.
Because it isn't.
Well, says the helpful editor, you could revise them. You're a better author now, aren't you? Don't you have the skills to revise these stories into sellable ones now?
And this is a good point. In some cases, I could resuscitate the story. But to be honest, the two weeks it would take for me to fiddle the story into competence, to resurrect an aging, patched together corpse, would be just as well spent writing a whole new story. One that's sleek, new, exciting, and full of energy and all the new tricks I've learned over the years that separate the me that wrote that old retired story and the new me.
Which would you rather have?
And the editor always goes for something new.
And the old stories continue to molder away in their drawer.
• • •
The idea for this collection began to form when I was reading another author's collection. I realized, about halfway through it, that I wasn't nearly as interested in the stories in the collection, but the introductions to them. Each introduction, based on how the author wrote the story and why, was both a lesson in writing and a fascinating look into the author's mind. I love story introductions because of this.
At the same time, I was also reading over some of my older stories due to a request from an editor for something of mine. Rereading the stories confirmed my suspicion that they were still very flawed, and I turned down the request. But, I thought, it could be a very interesting experiment to write about these stories and why they didn't work. Or what I had learned from them.
Initially, I thought the explanations could work as an essay on what I'd learned from many of those stories that went wrong. But then, as I thought about it, I decided that including the flawed stories themselves, and writing the introductions, could provide an interesting book about the writing process.
• • •
For those of you who are not interested in writing, I’m also hoping this might be a fun artifact as well. If you’ve enjoyed my work over the years and followed it, you’ll see here hints of my writing that later developed into more fully formed stories. You’ll also see hints of the universes I was trying to create that would later blossom into the Xenowealth Universe in my novels. And there may even be some stories that whet your appetite for more of my fiction. It’s very hard to judge my own work, so some of these stories may be fun reading despite their flaws!
• • •
So here you go. I'm going to show you my worst. I'm going to let you in on the flawed beginnings, the failures I was still committing even after I started to sell, and talk a bit about what my mistakes were. I’ll be honest, I’m nervous about doing it, but I’m also excited! Maybe there's something to be learned in there. There certainly was for me. Maybe there'll be a few good chuckles. Who knows?
Hopefully, even if the stories themselves are messes, they are interesting messes.
Enjoy.
Tobias S. Buckell
Bluffton, Ohio
March, 2011
Spellcast (1996)
Spellcast was not the first story I ever attempted. When I was fifteen I read about the Writers of The Future Contest rules in the back of a Writers of The Future anthology and was inspired to write a complete story. I graduated from writing a constant barrage of story fragments and beginnings, to finishing my first complete story.
That first completed tale was a collage of space opera imagery: a prose poem inspired by a novella I'd read and admired earlier that year. It did not have much of a plot, or character, and it prompted my grandfather to berate me after I gave it to him to read. "A story is about a person who does something the reader can understand in a place that they can understand. I don't know what this is," he said.
While that might sound like a harsh judgment to some, it was the first honest critique I'd gotten from anyone about how the story looked to an actual reader. Most people focused on correcting my misspellings, jumbled words, or grammar. But I wanted to understand the bigger picture: could anyone understand what I was getting at, past the typos? My grandfather couldn’t, and no amount of fixed typos was going to change that.
While in high school I wrote a few more complete stories and a portion of a never-ending novel that I was always toying with, revising, and adding 'even cooler' ideas to.
But I still found it easier to fall back on describing the cool images in my head than to create an understandable story. The motivations of people, the idea of plot and interaction, all that still escaped me. I was little more than a transcriber of my own daydreams, to be honest. And as beautiful as the scenes could sometimes be, my stories were about as comprehensible to others as someone's dream is when being relayed to an outsider.
I wrote Spellcast right at the end of my senior year of high school, attempting to write a character with recognizable goals and interactions in a world that readers would recognize. I was trying to create a story, with a beginning, middle, and end. I was trying not to fall back into the habit of relaying daydreams.
On that level, it was a successful attempt and a big step forward.
The first lesson I learned with this story, not too long after finishing it and showing to a friend, was that they didn't feel very invested in the character of Eumir. He was cold and distant. For reference, I felt he was like the stranger who wanders into town in a western, but what I failed to understand at the time was that in wandering stranger stories, the stranger is a vehicle into a number of other characters' lives. In Spellcast, I suffered from a habit I would often struggle with while developing as a writer: I often failed to pay attention to secondary characters and imbue them with depth and a life of their own.
As a result, this wandering stranger story has an archetypal main character who then reads as flat and stereotypical. None of the villagers are very well developed, because at the time I wrote it I didn't think their stories mattered.
I've often heard it said that a short story is about the most important event of a character's life. And so Eumir is the wrong character for the story. This is not the most important event: it's an odd turn in his wandering life.
The idea in the story, the way magic works, was an interesting one. The bargain the villagers make in order to survive, that was also interesting. And none of it really impacts Eumir. Or at least, I didn't think to explain why any of this would matter to Eumir, other than his wanting to stay alive. I didn’t even realize as I was writing the story that those were the interesting parts!
I also failed to give the village much in the way of detail, or even explore the morality of what Eumir had done (he just left the village without its source of livelihood. As bad a choice, or bizarre as it was, people who starve often make hard choices, and I never really looked closely at the consequences of that). This flatness and stereotypical portrayal leaves the story flat.
Beyond that, without explaining the wider world the village existed in, I left out depth there. I also realized, after getting comments back, that I knew nothing about sword fighting, and it showed in some of my attempts to describe the scenes.
I certainly learned that I needed to think through my worldbuilding more, and that I needed to know more things about my characters and their surroundings before starting.
Speaking of a lack of specificity, one should also notice the generic descriptions and lack of telling details. A bush is a bush, a road is a road, and a village is a village. I never discuss architecture, or clothing details that indicate how these things look and feel. These things really help build a sense of realness in a reader’s mind, and I didn’t do it. Other beginning mistakes also included repetitive word choices, and my favorite mistake was the character verbalizing his thoughts out loud for the reader. Very clumsy.
The lessons learned about the wandering stranger, and exploring the impact of his actions on the people he meets, would be employed three years later when I wrote the Fish Merchant. In there, the wandering stranger disrupts their lives, and the story was told from a local's point of view.
But it took Spellcast for me to realize that the cool character wasn't necessarily the one the story was about. And while I wrote a number of other awful stories my senior year of high school, this was the one I felt I learned the most from failing on.
Eumir drew back in amazement.
He’d never seen anything like this. Scaled sea beasts, and even a few flying serpents, but this was the most horrifying. The creature could almost have been human, and that resemblance was what bothered him so much. It had four massive muscled arms, and trunk-like legs.
"Looks like someone set fire to your face," Eumir whispered to himself. Its eyes were out of place and a sagging mouth revealed rotted teeth.
He normally didn't bother monsters; handling people was enough adventure for him, there was no reason for a stranger to go looking for more trouble.
This case was unique.
The beast had weapons from the last few victims in its four hands.
"Four arms is a big advantage." He paused and thought, the thing hadn't seen or smelled him yet.
He shouldn't have stayed around this long. Ten hours ago he could have just left, but curiosity was a strong addiction. He had decided to visit the small village at the base of Eastern Mount Priterion, an area seldom visited as the villagers were well known for their isolationism.
Isolated. They had been expecting him and the twenty other warriors that he had journeyed with. Lodging was ready for them, as well as fine weapons and gossip. Nine of the warriors were now dead, killed by the beast. Eumir had won the next chance to kill it by drawing a straw.
Maybe the villagers were an isolated group, but even an isolated village had services to offer. Services that mercenaries could use as payment for ridding it of a menace.
Now here he was skulking around a smelly lair, the beast only a stone's throw away, wondering how to kill it. It was bigger, more experienced, and probably aided by some supernatural force. The truth was, Eumir wasn't really sure why he had come out to fight.
"Why'd I ever leave home..."...two large oceans and many years away. His country was not even a name to the people here.
The wind shifted. He felt it crawl down his back. The beast sniffed the air suspiciously and began to turn his way. Eumir's deliberations were over, he eased his sword out from the scabbard and balanced himself. He could feel his emotions fade as the beast's eyes caught his, and only a cold calculating feel was left in place. Out from the deepest crevices of his mind old skills re-asserted themselves, and he was a warrior again.
