This Dated Essay of the Month isn’t dated at all. In fact, I have been thinking about the proper use of detail as I prepare for a workshop that we’re doing (for professionals) with Sheila Williams of Asimov’s in mid-September. Writers often forget about detail. They get lazy, they do it wrong, or they’ve never learned it in the first place.

I wrote this essay when I was still going to a weekly workshop in Eugene. I was also editing F&SF at the time. (Note the sentence that begins, “I see a thousand openings….” That’s not hyperbole. That’s truth. I actually had a dream last night that I was reading slush again. Only when I woke up, I called it a nightmare.)

I no longer attend a weekly workshop, and I no longer edit F&SF. Those are the only two things that date this essay. Otherwise, it’s something I could have written an hour ago—or next week—or five years from now.

Detail
Kristine Kathryn Rusch

For the last few weeks, I have been stressing the use of detail, although I don’t feel as if I have been explaining what I mean very well. This is a difficult point to get across in a verbal critique. So I thought a short article might be in order.

We often emphasize the difference between “real” detail and “fake” detail. Fake detail often uses phrases like “smelled of” or “felt like.” Real detail dispenses with those distancing techniques and puts us in the middle of the scene.

Rather than use abstract terms, I am going to use examples. The first will always be composed of fake details — adequate, but not good. The second will be made of real details. In some ways, I am cheating here: the fake details will be mine, and the real details will come from experts in scene setting. I will try to follow their style as much as possible. I will explain the first two and leave analyzing the third up to you. Here goes:

Example One:
It was night. The snow-covered fields looked white against the night’s darkness. A gust of wind swirled across the nearest field and he was there again, a gray shape in the darkness. He was drawing closer, much closer. Then she blinked, and he was gone. [KKR]

Night. The fields lay stark as a charcoal drawing — white drifts, the black clawed talons of the trees, the starlight piercingly bright. A gust of wind-driven snow swirled across the nearest field and he was there again. A shape in the twisting snow. A whisper of moccasins against white grains of ice. One step, another. He was drawing closer, much closer. Then she blinked, the snow swirled in a new flurry of wind, and he was gone. The field lay empty. [Charles de Lint, opening paragraph of his short story, "The Soft Whisper of Midnight Snow," The Best of Pulphouse, St. Martins Press, 1991, P. 314]

The details are okay in the paragraph I wrote. They are vague, but they do give a picture. The arrival of “she” as the viewpoint character is a bit of a shock, because the style of writing makes the mysterious man the focus. By the end of the paragraph, the reader has forgotten that the man is appearing to someone.

Charles reminds you of the narrator by his choice of detail. In the second paragraph, we learn that the woman is an artist — no surprise, given that she sees the world as a charcoal drawing and then he explains that drawing so that we can see it too. His syntax also creates character. She is panicked and not thinking in full sentences. The rhythm carries us.

My paragraph uses the senses of sight and touch. (We can feel the blink and the wind gusting.)

Charles’ paragraph uses sight, touch, and sound, all to greater advantage. Again, word choice is important. The wind doesn’t just gust: the wind carries snow with it. A gust of wind-driven snow which swirls and later twists. He reminds us of the chill and harshness of that by using the phrase “white grains of ice” to describe snow. In his paragraph, we are part of the scene — a frightened observer (the viewpoint character) and when the word “she” appears toward the end, we expect it.

The same events happen in both scenes. Only the use of detail makes the difference.

Example Two
The clouds had rolled in at sunset, black and heavy. The storm arrived as I drove to the edge of town, covering everything in light rain. I was about to stop at Del’s and pick up dinner when a car came out of a side street, hit a curb and swerved down the road. [KKR]

The sky had gone black at sunset, and the storm had churned inland from the Gulf and drenched New Iberia and littered East Main with leaves and tree branches from the long canopy of oaks that covered the street from the old brick post office to the drawbridge over Bayou Teche at the edge of town. The air was cool now, laced with light rain, heavy with the fecund smell of wet humus, night-blooming jasmine, roses and new bamboo. I was about to stop my truck at Del’s and pick up three crawfish dinners to go when a lavender Cadillac fishtailed out of a side street, caromed off a curb, bounced a hubcap up on a sidewalk, and left long serpentine lines of tire prints through the glazed pools of yellow light from the street lamps. [James Lee Burke, opening paragraph of his novel In the Electric Mist with the Confederate Dead, Hyperion, 1993, p. 1]

I see a thousand openings like the one I wrote above. Again, the events are the same as the events in Burke’s opening below, but my paragraph lacks punch even though it sets a scene. (We know we are in a storm, near a restaurant named Del’s, as a car comes off a side street.)

But notice the difference exact detail makes. Burke uses careening language to sweep us into the scene with the storm. The words “my truck” and “three crawfish dinners to go” make the stop at Del’s real. Burke is describing a real place, using place names, but not leaving out the reader who has never been to Louisiana. We know that the air was hot before the storm came. We know we are near the Gulf, on a road with canopied trees, where the air smells of humus, jasmine, roses and new bamboo. (Gee, Toto, guess we’re not in Oregon any more.) My paragraph could have happened anywhere, but Burke’s is unique to one place — a place I can imagine even though I have never been there.

Note too the way he uses verbs to add to the action. The lavender Cadillac fishtails. It caroms. The hubcap bounces on the curb. (Hear it? That’s a sound detail.)

My opening uses sight and touch (again, quite common actually), but Burke uses all five senses, including taste (or have you forgotten those crawfish dinners?) Yet never once does he use “sees,” “sounds like,” “feels like,” “smells of,” or “tastes of.” A master. An absolute master.

Okay. The third example comes from the middle of a novel and describes a place. I want you to examine how static description comes alive with no action to move it forward. This time the analysis is up to you.

Example Three
About twenty minutes away, between the airfield and the motor pool, stood Billy’s. Billy’s had once been a French command post, but it didn’t look anything like a French command post. It looked like a roadhouse. Some boys served drinks, but in all the time I went there, I never learned where those boys went when Billy’s closed.

The building needed paint. It had no electricity, no ice, and no bathroom. When you needed a toilet, you used a hole in the floor. [KKR]

About twenty minutes away, at the curve in the steeply descending road to the airfield and the motor pool, stood an isolated wooden structure called Billy’s. Billy had gone home long ago, but his club, supposedly an old French command post, had endured. When it was open, a succession of slender Montagnard boys who slept in the nearly empty upstairs rooms served drinks. I visited these rooms two or three times, but I never learned where the boys went when Billy’s was closed. Billy’s did not look anything like a French command post: it looked like a roadhouse.

A long time ago, the building had been painted brown. Someone had once boarded up the two front windows on the lower floor, and someone else had torn off a narrow band of boards across each of the windows, so that light entered in two flat white bands that traveled across the floor during the day. There was no electricity and no ice. When you needed a toilet, you went to a cubicle with inverted metal bootprints on either side of a hole in the floor. [Peter Straub, from Part 2, section 2 of his novel, The Throat, published by Signet Books in 1994, p. 80]

Okay. I hope what I mean by the need for crisp detail is clearer now. If it isn’t, I suppose I can always go into more detail — later.

Copyright © 1994 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

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Well…this essay isn’t really dated. When I search for the Dated Essay of the Month and I’m in a hurry, like this month, I just go back to an F&SF editorial from the same month, only years (and years! Ack!) ago. I clicked on this one, and was a bit stunned at how fresh it is.

But that’s another essay. Here’s this month’s old essay, from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July, 1993.

Editorial

I keep looking for the hidden camera. Someday Allen Funt will jump out of the shadows and shout, “Candid Camera!” The rest of us will grin, reassuring ourselves that we knew it was a hoax after all.

It has to be. I mean, how can anyone say these things with a straight face. Did you know that we no longer exercise? We now participate in physical activity. The word “exercise” is pejorative, according to the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. “Physical activity” makes us feel better about…well, exercising.

And at the time of this writing, in California, the Board of Education has decided to ban an Alice Walker story from a 1994 state-wide English test. The story, “Am I Blue,” is “anti-meat eating.” These are the same folks who pulled an excerpt from “An American Childhood” by Annie Dillard because a description of a snowball fight was too violent.

The test is given to 10th graders to assess their writing and reading comprehension skills. Marion McDowell, president of the Board, told the San Francisco Chronicle that the Walker story “could be rather disturbing to some students who would then be expected to write a good essay while they were upset.”

Huh? Excuse me? Many people write good essays when they are upset. It gives them something to write about.

But Ms. McDowell’s attitude upsets me for a more basic reason. Good fiction draws an emotional response from the reader. Devaluing a story because it upsets someone — in any circumstance — devalues literature.

Literature must run the gamut of human emotion from whimsy to terror. Cool intellectual thought should be represented alongside raw animal emotion. I have this fear that we will soon be reading only what I have termed “happy fic” — bland, emotionless fiction about superficial events — because happy fic upsets no one. And in this country, we suddenly have a phobia of upsetting anyone.

When I put an issue of this magazine together, I try to pick stories that will run through as many human emotions as possible. I try to balance humor with horror, upbeat science fiction with downbeat fantasy (or vice versa). I figure an issue is a success if it makes one person understand a new viewpoint or feel an emotion rarely felt. Sometimes I fail — an issue will be one-note (such as the issue I thought was light until someone pointed out that every story (even the funny one) was about death) — and sometimes I succeed. The successful issues get the most letters. For each angry letter, we receive one letter of praise.

But we aren’t careless. I believe that each word, each event, each character, in a short story should be essential to that short story. Writers have revised material as many as four and five times before the work has seen print. We strive for the best fiction we can publish — fiction that should make us laugh, cry, and think.

Some of the stories we publish disturb me. Sometimes I finish reading a manuscript and find that I am done reading for the evening because the experience in the story was so powerful that I cannot go to something different. I must think about the story or let the emotions it aroused in me fade before I move on. And contrary to what Ms. McDowell thinks, such a reaction is good. If I were required to write an essay at that point, the essay would be top-notch because I had an emotional response, not in spite of it.

We are so afraid of upsetting other people that we are afraid to think. We are afraid to express opinions. We are afraid to be ourselves. I don’t expect anyone but me to like every story in this magazine. But I do hope that our subscribers, and science fiction and fantasy readers in general approach literature with an open mind. We are, after all, the literature of the future, the literature of change. If we can’t accept stories that present a plethora of viewpoints, then how can we accept our funny-looking neighbors down the street? How can we march with confidence into the next century if we are afraid of every word we speak?

I am still searching for Allen Funt. I still want this fear and political correctness to be a joke. Because if it isn’t, then I can no longer exercise at the local rec center. I can’t publish powerful stories because they might upset someone.

Is that something glinting in the corner? Please excuse me while I go investigate. I am hoping to find a hidden camera.

Copyright 1993 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

The Dated Essay of the Month comes from the June, 1996 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which I used to edit. As I tried to pick which dated essay I was going to choose this month, I looked at all of my June editorials. Some are REALLY dated and should remain in the issue in which they were published.

The writing advice contained within still holds true, of course, but you can’t use it to sell anything to me, since I don’t edit any more. And that’s about as dated as this editorial gets.

Editorial
June, 1996

The first writer I ever met was a too-tall Truman Capote look alike who wrote poetry and taught at the local university. He spoke to my high school Creative Writing class, and all I remember about him (besides the fact that he was the first person I know to wear a cravat) were his complaints about being misunderstood by the publishing community. His talk before our class consisted of a long whine about publishing, two even longer poems, and a question-and-answer session in which no questions were asked.

The second writer I ever met had the most amazing talent: he could pick up anything — a paper clip, a ball of sand, a marble — and tell you what it weighed to the gram. He sold non-fiction to local publications, and made a good living…or so it seemed, until the police busted him for selling cocaine. He never complained about the publishing community. In fact, he never spoke about publishing at all.

The third writer I ever met was a Big Name Professional who came to speak at my college creative writing class. She had an Attitude. At her meet-the-author gathering in the faculty lounge, she refused to answer questions from us wanna-bes. “You’ll never listen anyway,” she said. “And most of you will go on to your little nine-to-five jobs, and look at this as your moment of glory. Of course, you’ll say you never made it because no one understood your art when the truth is most of you will never make it because you refuse to learn your art.”

Part of me still harbors resentment at BNP’s Attitude. As a professional myself, I justify that resentment this way: she had no idea who was in the room, and she should have been polite. (It should be noted here that I was raised in the Midwest where being polite is a virtue above all others.) But in truth, nowadays my attitude toward new writers is probably harsher than hers.

Every month, I receive about 1,000 manuscripts in the mail. These manuscripts, which I never asked to see, come in all shapes and sizes. Most are improperly done: they are written in crayon on yellow legal paper; they have spiders and other bugs tucked in their pages; or they have paperclips so old that the rust has stained the paper. Another large chunk appear fine until I start to read them: the spelling is abysmal, the punctuation non-existent, and the syntax is convoluted. The final group of the hopeless ones have learned how to handle the mechanics, but they have forgotten to tell a story. I don’t care to read about Joe Everyman waking up, shutting off his alarm and stumbling to the bathroom. It simply isn’t interesting.

So when I approach those manuscripts, my attitude resembles that of a classical music critic at a garage band rehearsal: I know I’m going to hate this experience unless something miraculous happens.

Imagine, if you will, trying to entertain a woman in an empty room. She has her arms crossed, her nose plugged, and a frown on her unlovely face. She has already made it clear that she doesn’t like your inexperience, your pushiness, or your friends. And you have to not only entertain her, you have to entertain her so well that she’ll pay you for the experience.

That’s me, folks.

Meet the editor.

I am the sourpuss neighbor, the old maid school marm, the nasty librarian whom you must convince to pull her hair out of a bun, throw away the glasses and dance the night away. I am a writer’s greatest nightmare.

Or a writer’s best friend.

Because once I am entertained, I will dance the night away. And the next, and the next. I love a good story, and I love a good writer even more. Once you’ve gotten past that grumpy woman guarding the door, you’ll find a friend who always makes certain you know the back way into the party.

Why am I telling you this now, after we’ve become such good friends? You didn’t want to see my dark side, to know that I’ve got an Attitude that puts BNP’s to shame. But you need to know right now, this instant, before you turn the page.

Because, as you’ve probably noticed, none of the names in this issue (with the exception of mine and the columnists) are familiar. Every story here was written by a new writer.

And every one of those writers has crossed that barrier. Every one has entertained the grumpy woman in the empty room, and made her dance with joy.

Every one.

I tell you this now so that you will understand why I believe this to be one of the strongest issues we’ve done all year. Most writers get in the back door. What that means is not that they get special favors, or that they know the secret handshake, or they know which kind of chocolate the editor prefers (dark with caramel). What it means is that when they come in, I’m already dancing. I know I like their work. I know they’ll entertain me. I know we’ll have a good time.

It’s the newcomers who have to prove themselves.

There are occasional anthologies of new writers and there is a very good contest run by Writers of the Future, also for new writers. (New writers, by the contest’s definition, are those who have not published a novel, and who have published less than four short stories. We use that definition here.) These are good ways for writers to “break in.” But they are flawed in one fundamental way: the new writers are competing against other new writers. To be the best in that group is sometimes to be brilliant (Robert Reed and Dave Wolverton got their starts there as the best of the new) but it is sometimes to be merely better than the others (which is to say the only entertaining one in the bunch). At F&SF, the new writers must compete against Ray Bradbury, Gene Wolfe, and Kate Wilhelm for space in the magazine. The new writer’s stories must be as good as an entertaining story by someone whose name is already familiar. And, if the truth be told, sometimes the new writer’s story must be better.

We’re taking a risk here to do an issue of the magazine with only new writer stories. And I wish I could say the risk was entirely mine. This all happened because Matthew Wells sent us a story called “The Aushwitz Circus” which I liked enough to buy. Our publisher, Ed Ferman, liked it enough to assign Kent Bash the cover. Kent’s cover — well, Kent’s cover speaks for itself. Kent showed the cover to our film critic Harlan Ellison, who called Ed and said it would be a crime to put names over this piece of art. Ed agreed and, realizing that I have bought a lot of new writers, suggested the new writer issue to me.

I wish I had thought of it first.

But I’m the guard at the door. If you don’t like a story in this issue, blame me. I’m the one who let the author into the party. But I suspect you’ll like these stories. A lot.

I do.

As for those writers, I mentioned up front, here’s where they stand nearly twenty years later: The Truman Capote look-alike has yet to publish outside of vanity presses. The non-fiction writer, after a long probation (he was sentenced before the War on Drugs), really started to write non-fiction for a living, and discovered it was more lucrative than his previous profession. The Big Name Professional has an even bigger name now, thanks to several literary awards and two bestsellers. I still think she has an Attitude, but I know now that her Attitude is one of the reasons she’s successful. She has seen hundreds of “writers” come and go. Most never listen and most never publish.

It takes a lot of guts, a lot of hard work, and a lot of persistence to sell a story.

It takes even more to make a career.

The folks whose name you see on these pages are real writers.

Let’s hope we’ll be following their careers for years to come.

Copyright 1996 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

I wrote May’s Dated Essay of the Month in May of 1994. So clearly all the references are dated. Very dated. I do find that I’m fonder of The Stand than I used to be. And I did love that mini-series.

Other than that, not many changes. I think this first appeared in The Report, but as usual, I don’t have the exact reference. I think I might have to start a non-fiction page to solve all of this.

Inspiration
by
Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Last week I spent 8 hours watching Stephen King’s The Stand on ABC. Now, I read The Stand when it appeared in 1977, and while I remembered much of it (and hence the book made an impression), I didn’t like it very much. I’m not fond of its simple religion nor do I like King’s English teacher joke: setting up an entire book with a legitimate deus ex machina ending. Still, when I read that King had done the script for the mini-series, I had to watch. I had to know how he cut that 1,000+ page monstrosity to a manageable length.

I expected to watch the first 2 hours and then quit. Imagine my surprise when I got hooked. The good vs. evil story still annoyed me, but less than it had when I was reading it. Instead, I found myself caught up in the imagery: the dead bodies scattered through four nights of opening credits, the detail in the post-apocalypse societies. Once again, King’s imagination sucked me in and didn’t let me go.

I found that very inspiring.

When Dean and I teach, we tell people to shut off the television and write. But I have a confession. I love television. Good television. And I find that it fuels the writing. Not in ideas (god forbid! television is usually behind the times), but in story-telling power. Good television (and I put The Stand in that category) grips and holds through the commercials. The problem is that good television is rare. We hunt and peck each season, finding series that hit the good mark two shows out of three. This year, it’s been Lois & Clark, both Treks, Northern Exposure, Roseanne (for sheer guts no one can beat her), and Picket Fences. In the past, we’ve sampled LA Law, and mourned the losses of Magnum P.I. , Quantum Leap, and Moonlighting. Not every episode hit. Some had bad seasons and lost us (L.A. Law, Moonlighting) but we always gained a bit of inspiration, a reminder that stories exist in many forms.

And I don’t find my inspiration just from television. I find it in music — lately The Crash Test Dummies, again for guts. (Can you see that I admire people on an edge?) I love musicals, symphonies, some country music and most hard rock. Buried in each is something that speaks to the artist in me.

To music and television, add movies. What better way to lose yourself for two hours than in the dark with a bunch of strangers, listening to an expert tell you a story. Dean and I watched Jaws again the other night, and let me tell you, Spielberg can teach Cussler how to mix characters with plot for the sake of suspense.

Then, of course, there are the more conventional means of inspiration. An excellent short story always spurs me on. I read a lot of history and even more biography because I love to find out how famous people became famous. Recently, I read an essay/short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald called “An Afternoon of An Author” about a writer attempting to write. Wonderful, backwards inspiration that showed even the masters had days where the writing was painful.

Novels help too, good and bad. The bad ones show me what I want to avoid or give me the exercise in how-would-I-have-plotted-that (and made it better)? I study the good ones, just to learn the techniques. Please, someone, read Scott Turow’s Pleading Guilty. I need to talk about his protagonist and the style Turow chose to tell the story. I finished that novel on Thursday and haven’t been able to start another novel since.

And conversations are wonderful, especially conversations I eavesdrop on. Like the Middle School students on the Water Polo team who hang out at Emerald Rec center whom I overheard on Friday. “I can’t gossip anymore,” one girl said. “I always have to go to detention.” “Detention? We’re not in school now,” the other girl said. “You can tell me.” “If I tell you, I’ll get in trouble,” the first girl said. “I always do.”

Detention for gossiping (not for talking but for the content of the conversation. Oh, I like that). It will find its way into something, I’m sure.

Finding inspiration is important to me because I have to write every day. Sometimes I have afternoons like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s where I wander through the house hoping that I can find my muse. Other days I need no help at all, because it feels as if my inspiration battery has been charged. Those eight hours last week were not a waste of time. In fact, if anything I have felt since then that my inspiration battery is an EverReady. The muse has been happily scheming in the back of my brain.

My search for inspiration never interferes with my walk to the computer. I need to work even if I am not inspired. Since even a drop of inspiration helps, though, I keep my mind open to it. When I finish writing for the day, I need something to get me going for the next session. And I find that inspiration in the coolest places.

Copyright 1994 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Here’s the promised sidebar to the “Confessions of an Editor” article. Read that first. Then read this.

How to Write a Perfect, if Flawed, Short Story
Kristine Kathryn Rusch

So, how does one go from a group of three-year-olds screaming “Halleluiah Chorus” to singing the tenor solos in the Messiah on the stage at Carnegie Hall?

Practice, my friends. Practice.

And study. Learning to hear the flaws and to expect them, learning how to compensate, and learning how to avoid the obvious ones. Doing scales, day after day after day. Getting training, and listening to the opinions of others.

Realizing that talent is not enough, arrogance is not enough. Talent and arrogance do not make art. Human beings make art.

But enough of metaphor. How do you write the perfect short story? You don’t. But you strive for it, story after story, day after day, even after you are published, even after you are famous. You strive until the day you die.

And you remember that the best moments in life come from the heart. So give yourself to the page with all the warmth and love and understanding you can bring.

You will never know when you have written a perfect short story. But I guarantee that someone else will.

Copyright © 1994 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch