A friend asked if there was any benefit to taking writing classes in college. I thought I might as well post my disorganized thoughts here as well as in the comments to the entry. What do the rest of you think?

In my experience, classes fall on a long spectrum between the pointless (or worse than pointless) and the revelatory. The absolute best classes will give you guidance not really on how to write, but how to analyze the parts of your own writing; they'll give you tools instead of rules. (Passive voice, for example? Is an excellent tool for when you *want* to pull the actor out of the action, which can be used to very haunting effect. To continue the tool analogy, you can say that a kitchen knife is better than a scalpel, but that only applies when you're trying to cut food. If you're removing a tumour, go for the scalpel every time. A tool's usefulness can only be measured against its desired effect.) They'll teach you to look not at what you're doing so much as how what you're doing affects the story you're writing.

Another thing a writing class – well, a workshop class – will give you is the chance to see how your writing affects people who aren't you, and to get feedback on what people think worked and what didn't. Feedback and the chance to engage in a dialogue are wonderful things, and also hugely useful, if the people involved take time and care in discussing it and if they're somewhere around your target audience. (In my weekly crit group, we had someone who comes from a literary background critiquing an urban-fantastical story, and some of the advice she gave was perfect for a literary story but potentially damaging for a speculative fiction story. It was apparently common-sense things like "You need to explain that this is a fantastical world right off the bat," which – no, because a reader of speculative fiction is going to assume that it is. It'd be like explaining that the main characters were people instead of bricks.)

The most important thing, in my opinion, a class or workshop can do for you is to give you a community you can later draw on. My writing group now evolved from a class I took here at university. I'm in a lot of contact with my Clarion West class, who provide not only help with stories, still, but also advice on a lot of the rest of my life (like where good job markets lie and how to construct my CV.)

The thing is, all of these can be found outside of a class. You can develop those analytical skills on your own, you can find or form your own community, especially online where the cost of gathering is basically null. Classes offer it all in one convenient location and give you a structure to make things not fall apart, but they're not 100% necessary, especially as so much depends on the teachers and the classmates. I would not be where I am now without attending Clarion West, because it was a focused and intense workshop with 6 instructors and 18 students, each of which brought their own perspectives, theories, and toolsets to be picked through. But I've had workshops where the only really valuable thing I got was the encouragement (in fact, the requirement) to write.

Whee... long time no blog.

I have been writing, though, and while my progress on most things has been slower than I would have preferred, I am making some good progress on a variety of things in the Ulan universe. (Jessamine, The Lion And The Lizard, Incarnadine, White In The Moon, and now Nrima and the Ten Good Things.) The problem is, the more I work in this universe the more I realize that its plots tend toward the epic. Jessamine, for example, I'e been resolutely cutting down and cutting down and has finally reached the point where I've gotten it to 7,000 words... and I'm realizing that its plot and character development demand a much longer story. Something along the lines of 20,000. Which, while I'm sure isn't unpublishable, does tend to make things difficult.

So, assuming that you have a variety of stories, none of which are quite children's or young-adults' stories (but of which none are necessarily adult-only), most of which seem to be heading toward that awkward ten-to-twenty-k-words mark, all of which are set in or around the same city... what do you do? Publish a collection of related stories or a chronicle of the city as a novel? Sand them down as much as is possible and try to submit to magazines? Try to find a story that would work as a novel, work on that, and then work on the horter ones as adjuncts to that?

Questions, questions.

The SciFi I grew up on was overwhelmingly Star Trek with a light edge of Star Wars. I watched through every episode of The Next Generation, and for a long time could identify most of them by name based on a vague summary of the plot. In fact, Star Trek was probably one of the most important of my media influences--inside or outside the genre.

So it's kinda weird that I've wound up thinking of SciFi as rigorous (or at least somewhat diligent) science-based fiction; I try to research whatever I write, even if it is only Wikipedia research. I try to stay within the bounds of reality except for what I need to stretch to make the story work--FTL travel and the like, for example. (I don't know nearly enough about physics to make up plausible explanations for FTL; I mostly just handwave that.)

Is there still a place for the magic-science fiction of Star Trek and Doctor Who? (In an episode of TNG, they mention that the Enterprise's sensors can't cut through "the thermal radiation." In an episode of DW, the Doctor remarks that a space station blocks "SONAR, RADAR and scanners." These despite the fact that the Enterprise routinely scans suns, and SONAR uses sound to scan.) Is there still a market for soft, technobabble-filled works, where you can make up things as you go and as long as you allude to a logical explanation you don't have to make it terribly logical at all? I'm sure there must be, but I don't know what it is.

I may or may not ever write something like that. I tend toward harder sci-fi, because I like the texture of it better. It's become something of a prestige genre in my mind. But who knows; someday, for nostalgia's sake, I may want to try something so soft as to fall apart under inspection--and it'd be nice to know where that goes.

Today I submitted The Lion And The Lizard to Abyss & Apex, and I'm going to mail off Machina to Analog. (I also sent Small Monuments to InterZone, but that's not the point.) So today I have the dubious honor of sending off a mythic fantasy piece and what's likely the hardest sci-fi work I've written to date.

If this sums up my writing career, I'm not going to complain.

I really need to get the ball rolling on my submissions. A lot of the stuff I need to revise, but I'm moving so slowly on those that I wonder if it'd be a better idea to keep submitting as I'm editing. I'll try it for a few stories--I'm young, it's at the very beginning of my career, I'm allowed to fumble about and make mistakes a bit--and hopefully I'll get quick enough with revising that I won't have to do it forever.

A while ago, eclective linked to a comic I found particularly moving. And it strikes me that it's a metaphor for... well, a lot of things, really. But for writing, especially.

Entering into the world of writing and submitting fiction, things seem stacked against you. You run into people who have already written the stories you want to write, your prose refuses to cooperate, you don't have a name or a reputation and you're competing with hundreds of stories to get anything into anywhere, and you realize that even with a reasonably polished work and a professional presentation you're still subject to the vagaries of content, layout, and timing. You know, sending a story to any given place, that it will probably not make it in.

But you have to keep doing it, because nothing can happen until you swing the bat.