really want to know.
What will teach you is the careful reading of the masters of English prose. This does not mean condemning yourself to years of falling asleep over dull classics. Good writers are invariably fascinating writers-the two go together. In my opinion, the English writers who most clearly use the correct word every time and who most artfully and deftly put together their sentences and paragraphs are Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and P. G. Wodehouse.
Read them, and others, but with attention. They represent your schoolroom. Observe what they do and try to figure out why they do it. It’s no use other people explaining it to you; until you see it for
yourself and it becomes part of you, nothing will help.
But suppose that no matter how you try, you can’t seem to absorb the lesson. Well, it may be that you’re not a writer. It’s no disgrace. You can always go on to take up some slightly inferior profession like surgery or the presidency of the United States. It won’t be as good, of course; but we can’t all scale the heights.
Second, for a science fiction writing career, it is not enough to know the English language; you
also have to know science. You may not want to use much science in your stories; but you’ll have to know
it anyway, so that what you do use, you don’t misuse.
This does not mean you have to be a professional scientist, or a science major at college. You
don’t even have to go to college. It does mean, though, that you have to be willing to study science on your own, if your formal education has been weak in that direction.
It’s not impossible. One of the best writers of hard science fiction is Fred Pohl, and he never even finished high school. Of course, there are very few people who are as bright as Fred, but you can write considerably less well than he does and still be pretty good.
Fortunately, there is more good, popular-science writing these days than there was in previous
generations, and you can learn a great deal, rather painlessly, if you read such science fiction writers as L.
Sprague de Camp, Ben Bova, and Poul Anderson in their nonfictional moods-or even Isaac Asimov.
What’s more, professional scientists are also writing effectively for the public these days, as witness Carl Sagan’s magnificent books. And there’s always Scientific American.
Third, even if you know your science and your writing, it is still not likely that you will be able to put them together from scratch. You will have to be a diligent reader of science fiction itself to learn the
conventions and the tricks of the trade-how to interweave background and plot, for instance.
2) You have to work at the job.
The final bit of schooling is writing itself. Nor must you wait till your preparation is complete. The act of writing is itself part of the preparation.
You can’t completely understand what good writers do until you try it yourself. You learn a great deal when you find your story breaking apart in your hands-or beginning to hang together. Write from the
very beginning, then, and keep on writing.
3) You have to be patient.
Since writing is itself a schooling, you can’t very well expect to sell the first story you write. (Yes,
I know Bob Heinlein did it, but he was Bob Heinlein. You are only you.)
But then, why should that discourage you? After you finished the first grade at school, you weren’t through, were you? You went on to the second grade, then the third, then the fourth, and so on.
If each story you write is one more step in your literary education, a rejection shouldn’t matter.
[Editors don’t reject writers; they reject pieces of paper that have been typed on. Ed.] The next story will be better, and the next one after that still better, and eventually
But then why bother to submit the stories? If you don’t, how can you possibly know when you graduate? After all, you don’t know which story you’ll sell.
You might even sell the first. You almost certainly won’t, but you just might.
Of course, even after you sell a story, you may fail to place the next dozen, but having done it once, it is quite likely that you will eventually do it again, if you persevere.
But what if you write and write and write and you don’t seem to be getting any better and all you collect are printed rejection slips? Once again, it may be that you are not a writer and will have to settle for
a lesser post such as that of chief justice of the Supreme Court.
4) You have to be reasonable.
Writing is the most wonderful and satisfying task in the world, but it does have one or two insignificant flaws. Among those flaws is the fact that a writer can almost never make a living at it.
Oh, a few writers make a lot of money-they’re the ones we all hear about. But for every writer who rakes it in, there are a thousand who dread the monthly rent bill. It shouldn’t be like that, but it is.
Take my case. Three years after I sold my first story, I reached the stage of selling everything I
wrote, so that I had become a successful writer. Nevertheless, it took me seventeen more years as a
successful writer before I could actually support myself in comfort on my earnings as a writer.
So while you’re trying to be a writer, make sure you find another way of making a decent living- and don’t quit your job after you make your first sale.
Writing For Young People
THERE IS AN EXCEEDINGLY USEFUL VOLUME entitled The Science Fiction Encyclopedia edited by Peter Nicholls (Doubleday, 1979) to which I frequently refer. Recently, as I leafed through its pages en route to looking up something, I came across the following passage:
“The intellectual level of a book is not necessarily expressed by a marketing label. Much adult sf,
the works of…Isaac Asimov, for example, is of great appeal to older children, and is to some extent directed
at them.”
The line of three dots in the above quotation signals the omission of a few words in which the writer specifies two other science fiction writers. I omit them because they may resent the original statement and may not feel I ought to give the remark further circulation.
As for me, I don’t object to the comment because, for one thing, I consider it true. I write my
“adult” novels for adults, but I have no objection whatsoever to young people reading them, and I try to write in such a way that my novels are accessible to them.
Why?
First, it is the way I like to write. I like to have the ideas in my novels sufficiently interesting and subtle to catch at the attention and thinking of intelligent adults, and, at the same time, to have the writing clear enough so as to raise no difficulties for the intelligent youngster. To manage the combination I
consider a challenge, and I like challenges.
Second, it is good business. Attract an adult and you may well have someone who is here today and gone tomorrow. Attract a youngster and you have a faithful reader for life.
Mind you, I don’t write as I do with the second reason in mind; I write as I do for the first reason I
gave you. Nevertheless, I have discovered that the second reason exists, and I have long lost count of the number of people who tell me they have an astronomical number of my books and that they “were at once hooked after reading my book, so-and-so, when they were ten years old.”
But if the same books can be read by both adults and youngsters, what is the distinction between truly adult books (ones that the writer of the item in The Science Fiction Encyclopedia would judge as possessing a high “intellectual level”) and truly juvenile books?
Let’s see. Can it be vocabulary? Do adult books have “hard words” while juvenile books have
“easy words”?
To some extent, I suppose that might be so. If an author makes a fetish of using unusual words, as
William Buckley does (or Clark Ashton Smith, to mention someone in our own line), then the writing
grows opaque for youngsters and adults alike, for it is my experience that the average adult does not have a vocabulary much larger, if any, than a bright youngster does.
On the other hand, if an author uses the correct words, hard or easy, then the bright youngster will guess the meaning from the context or look it up in a dictionary. I think the bright youngster enjoys having
his mind stretched and welcomes the chance of learning a new word. I don’t worry about my vocabulary,
for that reason, even when I am writing my science books for grade school youngsters. I may give the pronunciation of scientific terms they are not likely to have encountered before, and I sometimes define them, but I don’t avoid them, and after having given pronunciation and definition I use them freely.
Well, then, is it the difference between long sentences and short sentences?
That is true only in this sense: It is more difficult to make a long sentence clear than it is to make a short one clear. If, then, you are a poor writer and want to make sure that youngsters understand you, stick
to short sentences. Unfortunately, a long series of short sentences, like a long stretch of writing with no
“hard” words, is irritating to anyone intelligent, young or old. A youngster is particularly offended because
he thinks (sometimes with justice) that the writer thinks that because the youngster is young, he is therefore stupid. The book is at once discarded. (This is called “writing down,” by the way, something I try never to
do.)
The trick is to write clearly. If you write clearly enough, a long sentence will hold no terrors. If you hit the proper mix of long and short, and hard and easy, and make everything clear, then, believe me,
the youngster will have no trouble. Of course, he has to be an intelligent youngster, but there are a larger percentage of those than of intelligent oldsters, for life hasn’t had a chance yet to dull the youngsters’ wits.
Is it a matter of subject matter? Do adult novels deal with death and torture and mayhem and sex
(natural and unnatural) and all kinds of unpleasantness, while juvenile novels deal with sweetness and