It was a hard mental transition, when I first started writing on a computer back in 1979. The first time I lost twenty pages of writing, I began rigorously printing out my work every few minutes. If it wasn’t on paper, it didn’t really exist.
Gradually, my mindset changed. Instead of printing everything out, I saved it on multiple eight-inch disks. I no longer looked at stacks of typed-on paper with satisfaction, unless the same text was also saved on disk. Otherwise, typed manuscripts represented writing I couldn’t do anything with.
My writing didn’t become “real” until I could manipulate it with my word processing software. Therefore, printed paper was pretty useless. Only when I had keyed a manuscript into the computer did it exist in any useful way. There were new pleasures, though. When the story or novel was complete, ready to send to the editor, I would issue the print command, and the NEC Spinwriter would start to type away at a lovely speed, as if I had a fantastic typist preparing my manuscript for submission. I would eat dinner, play with my kids, or watch a TV show while hearing that untiring worker typing away in my office upstairs.
When it stopped, I would tear off the last sheet, then separate the fanfold pages of the manuscript on the perforations, until at last I had a tall stack of pages, which I boxed up, wrapped, addressed, and shipped off to the publisher. But I already thought of that pile of pages as a copy—the original, the true document, was the series of bits and bytes electronically and redundantly stored on multiple disks.
Now, more than thirty-five years later, I can’t remember the last manuscript I submitted in a box. Now I attach an .rtf file to an email and poof, it’s submitted. It never touches paper between my computer and the editor’s machine.
And while books printed on paper are still selling well, there are alternatives now. Books are written on a computer, prepared for publication, and issued as ebooks without paper ever being involved, between the writer and the reader. You can find a book that looks interesting on a website, buy it, and download it immediately. Either in print or as an audiobook, you start reading or listening only moments after making the decision to buy.
Yet all these hastenings do not make the act of telling the story one whit easier or faster.
You still have to invent the characters and the things they do and the reasons they do them. You still have to create the milieu of the story. You still have to spawn the language that will help readers create the story in their own minds.
And we still have to find people willing to put forth the work to read. I do mean “work.” Watching a story unfold on a screen is not a mindless process—when the camera skips around in time and space, we have to do the work of organizing the events in some kind of order in our minds.
But that is nothing compared to the work that readers do. Their brains decode the symbols on paper and transform them into words, which enter the brain through the aural centers of the brain, so that they process the text as spoken language.
Then they use those verbal cues to create their own visual and audible sequences. Some people visualize more than others, but they create in their minds the same level of visual reality that they use for their memories of real events.
Just as with the memories of eyewitnesses, the story that they hold in memory is not “what actually happened.” Instead, they remember the story as edited by their perceptions, their world view, the way that these events fit into their previous understanding of the causal universe.
At the same time, the causality offered by the fictional story also adds to or alters their mindset, so that to the degree the story has changed them, it participates in changing all future stories—and all future real events—by adding new elements to the available vocabulary of causes and motives their minds will assign to them.
Put another way, reading fiction makes the reader a willing collaborator. Just as an orchestra performs the notes assigned to each instrument, and actors and technicians in a play recite the assigned dialogue and execute all the set and lighting changes, so also the reader performs all the dialogue, designs and builds all the sets, creates the sound effects, casts and costumes the characters, all while simultaneously acting as the audience for the performance.
This is quite a set of mental tasks for the reader to perform all at once. It requires immense concentration. Yet when it’s done, the reader credits the author with having created all those effects in memory.
I’ve had readers accuse me of writing horribly explicit violence in some of my stories. The few times when I’ve had a copy of the story in question at hand, I’ve challenged them to find the passages where I wrote such painfully explicit events.
They never find them, because they aren’t there in the text. Instead, my text invited them to imagine some awful things—but all the details were put there by their own performance of my story, not by the text I actually wrote. Reading is hard work. There is such a thing as a talent for reading, as well as an acquired skill. Many people never get good enough at it to derive much pleasure from it. Others simply don’t find the resulting performance worth the work.
Especially when there are attractive, easy alternatives like television, films, and video games, reading becomes something that more and more potential readers put off until another time.
When you watch a movie, people are put up on the screen fully formed. There’s the actor, walking and talking. If it’s a movie star we’ve already formed an attachment to, or if the actor is personable, then we engage with him or her exactly as we would with a real person. It takes no imaginative effort.
When characters appear in a story for the first time, however, we don’t know who they are. Their mannerisms can’t be instantly likeable, even if the writer tells us that they are. It takes time and work to get to know them, and, lacking all the easy outward signs we’ve learned to use to evaluate real people, we only get to know them by the gradual process of coming to understand their motives and attitudes—how they view and respond to the world around them, and what they mean to accomplish by their actions.
Gradually, these characters insinuate themselves into our minds so that we believe in them as surely as we believe in the characters we actually see on the screen. In fact, we believe in them more deeply because we understand them from the inside, for fiction can take us where film can never go: inside the character’s mind.
But the effort of getting to know a character on the page can become a powerful barrier to engaging in a new work of fiction. I think that’s one reason why we begin to prefer big thick books as we gain more experience in reading. Even when the cast of characters is enormous, our investment in the learning curve keeps paying off, chapter after chapter.
Short stories are another matter entirely. Each story requires a new round of initial investment. We should think of short stories as much easier than big novels, because they’re so quick to read. But this ignores the fact that reading fiction isn’t a mechanical process, it’s a participatory one. It may take fewer hours to read a short story than a novel, but starting a short story takes as much effort as a novel.
Indeed, because the writer is working within a much smaller space, the reader may have to exert more mental effort to get inside the story, because the writer devotes less text to the task of introducing people and situations. More initiatory work is often required of the short-story reader than of the novel reader.
This may explain why it is that as more and more entertainments compete with fiction, it is the short story, not the novel, that has been the main loser in the public mind. It’s as if, when we decide to read at all, we choose to invest that startup work in a fiction that will reward us with more hours and deeper experiences than are possible within the pages of a short story.
And if we can immerse ourselves in three or five or seven thick volumes set in the same milieu, following the same characters, then with each volume we aren’t really starting at all. We’re merely resuming where we left off. The initiation task is finished.
I think that’s at least part of the reason why the readership of science fiction and fantasy magazines has plummeted in the past decade, while novel sales are as high as ever—or higher. More and more magazines have opted for Internet-only distribution, because they can avoid the costs (and losses) involved in print publication. Yet even with instant delivery of stories through magazine websites, far more readers choose to buy and download novels in ebook or audiobook form than short stories.
Does this even matter? After all, the same problem faces short-story writers as short-story readers: The development and startup time for writing a good short story is every bit as involved and requires every bit as much work as for writing a good novel. But a short story will reward you with only a few hundred dollars (maybe a bit more if it happens to be included in later anthologies), while a novel can pay the writer far more, and continue over a longer period of time. This is why the short story magazines are always searching for excellent new writers—because last year’s excellent new short-story writers are now writing novels so they can make a living.
Yet that’s exactly why short stories matter in science fiction and fantasy more than in any other area of fiction writing. Science fiction and fantasy depend for much of their value on the invention of new worlds—not always planets per se, but milieus in which the rules of the universe, or of the society, are quite different from our own and from all the other worlds invented for previous fictions.
Short stories offer a way for writers to explore new ideas and try them out on the audience. If the story becomes a favorite among short-story readers, the writer is encouraged to continue developing the world. Not every writer and not every milieu follows this pattern—some new worlds spring into being in big thick books right from the start. But for many writers over the years—especially new writers, who represent more of a risk for book publishers, since they don’t have a ready-made audience already eager for the next volume—short stories have provided an entry point, a way to familiarize an audience with their voice and their worlds and characters.
The whole genre benefits from a thriving short-story marketplace. One can argue that it is in the short stories that science fiction actually happens, with novels only the greatly elaborated ripples spreading out from the real point of impact. The general reading audience may see only the novel; but the short story audience were there at ground zero, where the writer first appeared, where the milieu of the story was born.
That’s why it’s even more important than ever before that one annual short story anthology continues to thrive, attracting a far larger readership than any of the surviving magazines.
Writers of the Future has always had the power to launch careers, and that power continues unabated. Thousands of people who never read the magazines, in print or online, pick up Writers of the Future because they know that the juried selection process will deliver stories that are always worth that initial co-creative investment.
It really isn’t just the judging that makes the difference, though. After all, the magazines are often edited by professionals with every bit as much insight and taste as the Writers of the Future judges.
Part of the reason that readers trust Writers of the Future to deliver is that the contest is so efficiently run that new writers lose nothing and stand to gain much by submitting their stories to Writers of the Future first.
I know I’m not the only writing teacher who tells novice writers that all their genre stories should go to WotF before going to any other publication—and that includes the magazine I publish myself, The InterGalactic Medicine Show.
As long as a writer is still new enough to qualify for Writers of the Future, it only makes sense to submit stories to the contest because:
Failing to win a quarterly WotF Contest does not mean, of course, that the story is not good. Because the WotF judges see most new writers’ first stories before anybody else, they have no choice but to pass up many perfectly good stories, because they have only a finite number of awards to give and pages to fill in the anthology.
And even the contest winners have to have someplace to submit their later short stories; so the magazines are all able to find excellent stories even after the cream has been skimmed by WotF.
If it is true that short stories are where science fiction is constantly reborn (and it is), then Writers of the Future is the most trusted midwife. The book you’re holding in your hands is our first sight of the next generation of science fiction and fantasy writers. And it will continue to serve that role, year after year, as long as the contest continues.