Previously, on Great Writing: We chatted with Cory Doctorow, activist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, co-editor of Boing Boing, and author of several highly-acclaimed science-fiction stories. Cory told us how he came to be a writer, and of the central themes that guide his work. It's all solid gold stuff, and if you missed it last time you need only click here to be among the cognoscenti.

In fact the interview was such a sumptuous feast that we had a bit left over for sandwiches through the week. So without much more ado, here's Cory again on the history of science fiction, his approach to writing and his advice for the rest of us.

Photo of Cory Doctorow by Bart Nagel.

GW: How has science fiction evolved over its lifetime?

Cory Doctorow: There's a grossly over-simplified picture of science fiction that goes in approximately three acts:

In the early days you had engineers; rocketry, radio and electronics hobbyists who felt they could see a technological future coming and wanted to write about the gadgets of their dreams. Being engineers, they didn't have a lot of literary chops, nor did they put on a lot of literary airs; in fact they were generally pretty blunt about the fact that what they were writing was not intended to serve as high art but rather to tell these cracking yarns about the technology they dreamt of. Then when WWII showed us that technocrats made occasional mistakes (discovering the secrets of the atom, and so on) the early style of work was sort of discredited and a period of decline followed during which it became less and less credible and more and more about bug-eyed monsters.

Then came a literary renaissance dominated by people who weren't very technical in nature, but used the dressing of technology to write what they perceived as literary fiction. That new wave of science fiction was non-technological but was always centred around technology; stories about gadgets but not necessarily stories about people who loved gadgets. Again that fell into decline, as I think is natural - all literary movements consume themselves and start to fall into decline.

And then a long interregnum when science fiction wasn't considered very interesting or useful. It was eventually rebooted by the first cyberpunks who fused technological understanding and literary sensibility, and started to write epic work that was both technological and literary. They were succeeded by writers of the modern generation, such as Neal Stephenson, Charlie Stross, and Ken MacLeod, who also have a strong technological background. A lot of these people have worked as programmers or technologists, have been entrepreneurs, have worked at start-ups, have invented stuff, hold patents and so on. Those people are not only skilled technologists but also skilled literaturists who are writing works with both literary merit and technological savvy. I think that that has given us a new kind of science fiction that's different from the kinds of science fiction we had before. It's like the engineer science fiction of the thirties in that it's about technology; it's like the literary fiction of the sixties in that it's well written and often quite poetic, but it's unlike either in that it fuses both.

GW: Do you find novel writing a natural extension to the short story writing, or is the approach different?

CD: The approach is different. I can't speak for anyone else, but for me novel writing is very incremental, like building a pyramid one brick at a time. Every morning I get up and I spend half an hour writing 250 words on the novel and a year later I have a book. Whereas short stories, by and large I tend to write them in bursts and oftentimes at writing retreats where I'll go away for a while and really nail up a short story.

They're also really different kinds of creative processes. Novel writing I think gets me closer to the bone because my subconscious churns for 24 hours on what's going to go on the next page. Whereas with short stories I think you run out of subconscious and you start to move into deliberate craft. If you try and barf one out onto a page in the course of one or two days or a week it really is more about a premeditated 'here is what the narrative art looks like, here are ten things that could go next, and here's the best one and I'll write that now'.

With novel writing I tend to know generally speaking where I want a theme to go, I know where I want a section of a book to go and I know overall where I want the book to go, but in terms of it's emotional effect, not the actual action on the page. There are some tricks of the trade for making that happen, especially if you're going to work impressionistically and one little bit at a time. The three things that great writing teachers have taught me:

One is called the Seven Point Plot Outline which came from Algis Budrys who taught it at the Clarion Writers' Workshop at Michigan State University. It basically states that at every turn of the book your protagonist has to try and solve a problem and that problem has to get worse through no fault of his own, because obviously no-one wants to feel any great emotional connection with a protagonist who fails because of his stupidity.

Repeating that pattern - your protagonist making good try, failing anyway, and things getting worse - builds tension until you eventually have a climax and a dénoument. At any time when you're thinking about how to proceed, you have to think how your tension has proceeded. Whether or not your stakes are higher now than they were two pages ago and how you can raise the stakes again. It's a good rule of thumb.

My next rule comes from Nancy Kress: Think of any story, any narrative, as a journey during which someone's emotional state changes. So you start with someone who is in one emotional state and you end with someone in another emotional state, and you tell the story of how you got from one to the other.

And then the third is something that James Patrick Kelly told me on my first day at Clarion, which is still quite vivid. I had submitted a short story for critiquing by the workshop on our first day - I was the brave volunteer who said ‘well, none of us have written anything yet but you can use the story I auditioned with as kind of the trial balloon'. People really liked it, but when it got to Jim he said, "You're an asshole. You have written a completely vacuous but very clever story, and you convinced a room full of very bright people that it has merit, simply because it's well-written." And he went on to explain to me that a story has some emotional impact on the reader. So, just as Nancy Kress talked about how your character has to undergo some emotional transformation, Jim talked about how your reader has to feel some emotion too. He told me to sit down at the keyboard and open a vein.

So now whenever I'm sitting down and thinking about what page I'm going to write today, those three bits of advice are always in my mind: Am I increasing the tension? Am I moving the character's emotional state through a series of ordered steps to get to an end point? Am I telling a story that has some emotional impact on my readers? I think that to the extent that I have succeeded, I have succeeded because of those.

The key to being a writer who writes naturally is to internalise lessons like those to the point where you don't really have to think about them. You can then tell the story you want to tell and use the lessons as a framework on which you hang the idiosyncratic elements of the story. It's like a train, with structural advice acting as an engine that pulls the cars. It's not really important how many horsepower the engine has, it's not really important how shiny the brass is, it's not really important whether or not it's just like any other engine, the important thing about the train is what's in the cars.

GW: What advice would you offer to writers who are struggling to break through?

CD: Well first off, breaking through is a process that's continuous; you climb a flight of stairs to find that what's at the top is... another flight of stairs. I don't think you ever ‘arrive' in any meaningful sense. However I do have some composition advice, a couple of bits I've been storing up for the teaching that I'm gonna be doing over the summer at Michigan State (that's Clarion - the SF and Fantasy Writers' Workshop - Ed).

The first one is: When in doubt, try cutting the first ten percent, which is usually just you clearing your throat. Then take the last third of the remainder and put it first, because oftentimes what you end up with is the thesis that you want to advance. You can often just take that part and make it first and then have what amounts to the argument, follow it. I've found that works pretty well both for non-fiction and fiction.

And the other piece is from Kelly Link, a very, very good science fiction and fantasy writer: Always look at the last section and see if you overshot. Because just like we tend to throat clear when we start writing, we tend to overwrite as we draw to the end. So look at the last sentence of every paragraph, the last paragraph of every scene, the last scene of every section and the last section of every book and check whether you've overshot. Oftentimes you can make that stuff go resulting in something more powerful.


For more of Cory's advice, check out the book he co-authored with Karl Schroeder, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction. Cory's novels Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe and the anthology A Place So Foreign and Eight More are also available from all good bookshops and as free downloads from Cory's website. His next novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town will be published in July.