Online Writing Groups

Have you heard of writing groups before and wondered what they are. Could they help you to become a better writer?

Writing groups will alloe you to meet other writers, read their work, have your work written and hear a range of views on what is good and bad about it.

The writing group will not just give you a sense of what you need to change about a particular piece of writing. Ideally you will find that the process of reading the writings of others will show you how to achieve things in your own writing that you cannot. The critical thing is that you engage with the processnof critical reading, not just reading like a consumer.

In order to function a writing group requires a lot of trust. You need to trust the other members of your group. They will be seeing your intellectual property in a state long before it will be released, and vice versa. You also need to trust the opinions of others, which can be no small feat for most of us, given that out creative output resides so close to our egos.

The issue of trust is where most online writer's groups fail. The face to face contact of a traditional writer's group builds trust between people, and helps smooth over the inevitable problems that occur when you receive some harsh criticism.

That is the problem that needs to be solved before online writing groups can replace real world ones.

Wool by Hugh Howey

This is the first book by a self-published author that I have truly loved. I have read a lot that I enjoyed, but Hugh Howey grabbed me with this book in a way that made me compulsively buy the rest of the series.

The book is in my weakness genre: apocalypse scenarios and the civilizations that emerge in their aftermath. Nevertheless, Hugh Howey has such a unique approach to the genre that justifies his immense success with this book.

The idea is relatively simple. People now live in small collectives buried under the ground in silos. The society is highly segregated by occupation and people live in fear of breaking one of the rules that will result in them being sent outside to 'clean' the lens of the camera that shows them the decaying outside world. You are thrown into this world and immediately begin to question what is 'known' about the outside and the history of the world. The highly constrained world you are presented with is perfect for creating suspense and mystery. You learn more about the world as the daring characters of the world challenge the authorities. It is well crafted, believable and enjoyable to read.

I highly recommend Wool by Hugh Howey to anyone with a penchant for post-apocalypse scenarios.

Life Persists after the Apocalypse

The dumpster behind the library

I have been going through self published novels on Feedbooks and Smashwords trying to find some worthwhile science fiction to read. To be perfectly honest, it is really, really hard.

If I ignore the famous self published authors like Cory Doctorow, then the pickings are even slimmer.

Perhaps I find it more difficult than other readers because of my peculiar tastes; I like distopias and I like strong visions of alternative societies. I like surprising technologies. I like minimalism, but I like info dumps. I like a good grounding in real science and I like a little irony.

I despise much of the pseudo-spiritual garbage that is released as science fiction these days. I am not interested in vampire romance. I am not interested in magical technologies where the reader has no chance of comprehending how they function. I like some space opera, but you better have a good grounding in astrophysics and some amazing ideas about meta civilizations.

Cowboy stories in space with ray guns have not cut it since the 50s.

When I read Science Fiction I want new ideas, not familiar stories with laser pistols thrown in.

My personal taste aside, I have to say that unless you are completely unconcerned with the craft of writing then going through Feedbooks and Smashwords is worse than going through a dumpster trying to find something to eat. I have personally lived off food I found in dumpsters for six months, so I can say this with full authority: Half an hour of scrounging in a good supermarket dumpster can yield several days of supplies. By comparison it took me an hour of scrounging in Feedbooks to find something that wasn't written by someone who wasn't thoroughly inept at story telling.

I know you think I am being too harsh. I am being controversial for the sake of it. The reality is I am telling you the truth, many of these books should have been recognised by the authors for what they are: desperately in need of rewrites.

Why do I persist in trolling through this garbage you ask? Other than the fact it is free, and I get to blog about it. The answer is that I believe in it, I am an idealist, I believe in the new friction-less models of creativity. I love reading about the success stories of John Locke and Amanda Hocking. Most of all I love seeing the traditional media industries being made to sweat, complain and ultimately work harder.

I have to say though, in the arena of liberated art forms, writers are letting the team down. The progress made by independent musicians and filmmakers vastly outperforms that of the DIY writers. I am not talking about the volume of output or the money being made. I am talking about the development of the craft itself. Musicians are learning music production, engineering and producing high quality recordings from home. Amateur filmmakers are constantly getting better at editing, effects, directing and producing better films every year ( just explore the indie short films on YouTube ). Why then do the open source publishing houses seem to contain large volumes of talent with infantile skill levels?

I think it is partly a question of an absence of technologies to help people become better. To produce better writing, a writer needs good feedback and resources that explain how to overcome weaknesses. The criticism needs to be presented in a way that they will accept, from someone they trust, and they need to engage personally with addressing their own shortcomings.

At this point, none of these things seem to be solveable with better technologies. Local writing groups are the tried and true method of addressing these issues. But not everyone has access to such a group, and its usefulness depends on the membership. This problem should have been solved by some kind of online community. However, those that exist, are sorely laking (I will critique them in another post).

To be fair to writers, one of the reasons that musicians and filmmakers seem to have made greater advances is due to the development of technologies that disguise their weaknesses. As an example consider auto-tune. This is a audio engineering plugin that allows an engineer to disguise the fact that a musician or singer has not performed in tune. Similarly, errors made by camera men, lighting people or set designers can be fixed in post-production, it is costly and time consuming, but it can be done. I will grant that using these tools requires a skill of its own, nevertheless we have to admit that it creates the illusory appearance of great strides of improvement in craftmanship.

If writers had equivalent tools, they might be able to apply a filter to a chapter that removes superfluous adjectives. Another that forces the verb tense to be consistent. Finally run a plugin that changes word choice, via similies, in descriptive paragraphs so that the imagery is similar to their favourite author.
You may think I am joking, or again exagerating for effect. However all of these suggested tools have direct equivalents in audio engineering. Furthermore, we have precedents for these tools in our grammar checkers and plagarism scanning technologies.

When computer scientists get around to really cracking natural language processing by computers, then all of these, and many more, technologies will emerge to help amateur writers produce professional output. When this day comes the gap between a story idea and a professional novel will be much shorter. At which point Feedbooks and Smashwords will start to resemble libraries, rather than dumpsters.

Big Dumb Object

If you believe the hype being generated about the changes going on in the publishing industry, then blogging and tweeting are now essential parts of being a writer.

A good friend of mine, who has now been published the traditional way, tells me that his agent has pressured him to tweet and blog. He does it, under duress, to maintain a good relationship with his agent. He finds it easier than challenging her belief in it.

I read a great article recently that seeks to pour a little cold water on the idea. In essence it suggested that all the blogging and tweeting is wasted effort, and that there was no real egalitarian revolution going on. A small number of people make all the money, while the rest pour out dubious quality blogs and writing on an indifferent world.

In an effort at some empirical investigation I am going to look at some prominent sci fi bloggers, check out their blogs and then their writing and their careers. I am curious to see whether there is any correspondence between their outputs, do good fiction writers make good bloggers, and vice versa.

I start this week with Big Dumb Object, the blog of James Bloomer, a particle physicist from the UK.

His blog consists of book and movie reviews, with a few pictures thrown in and the occasional opinion piece on an issue relevant to science fiction. As far as I can tell he tends to review a lot of unknown writers. In his about section he reveals that he accepts suggestions to review material, as long as the authors accept that he will be honest. He has principles, I like this guy already.

The reviews themselves seem to be true to this principle. He appears honest in saying what he thinks, not mean, but he isn't afraid to say that a story comes up short. However the writing of the reviews themselves, is fairly dry, he is no Oscar Wilde when it comes to literary criticism. (As an aside, I like to imagine that if Oscar Wilde was still with us he would be doing something like Zero Punctuation )

While I found the reviews somewhat dull, the opinion piece I read was considerably more interesting. He artfully critiques the idea that science fiction writers no longer have big ideas.

On to his writing.

His bio, consists of a list of stories published in a variety of magazines going back to 2006 (his blog begins in 2004).

I read the last two.

The latest piece, Extended periods of absence, is an artsy bit of flash fiction meets poetry, in which a man is flicked through time seemingly as a result of his girlfriend's mood swings. It might make you smile, but it wouldn't make me buy a magazine.

The previous piece Trails was published in Daily Science Fiction. It is one if the better stories I have read there. The writing reminded me vaguely of Neal Stephenson, the characters are interesting and he deals with important modern issues like the tension between freedom, privacy and security. For my money, the ending was a little convenient, but I enjoyed it nontheless.

So, it appears Mr Bloomer can both write stories and blog well. Although he does seem to have kept his day job smashing particles into each other, who wouldn't?

Galapogos by Kurt Vonnegut

This is a blog post I have pulled out of the many text files that sit on my computer with unfinished thoughts. I have attempted to finish this thought.

31 March 2010

Today on my way to the airport I finished reading 'Galapogos' by Kurt Vonnegut. This is a classic American post-world war 2 science fiction novel, in which the author as a disembodied ghost watches the end of human history and our emergence through an intense genetic bottleneck to become a new species. With a large serving of irony, Vonnegut centers the final resting place of humankind on the Galapogos islands, where Darwin made so many of his observations about the way species adapt to fit niches.

The book finishes with a motley collection of survivors stranded on the Galapogos island of 'Santa Maria', while the rest of humanity perishes through a combination, of financial collapse, famine, social unrest, war, all rounded off by the emergence of a disease that renders the remainder of humanity infertile.

The species that emerges on the Galapogos islands from the small number of survivors is a water dwelling species with flippers and a very simple life cycle.

As I finished the book, it occurred to me that this story seems more likely in the present day than it did at the time of writing. When it was written it was simply yet another pessimistic story of nuclear disaster. Now however, we live in a time of seemingly unstoppable terrorist cells, man-made climate change and catastrophic economic conditions brought about through willful neglect by people who should know better. There seems to be more reasons to believe now than ever before, that we will be responsible for our own demise.

Climate change in particular seems to lend a great deal of credence to the notion that in our future we may take on a largely different form. We know that species adapt to their environments, and our physical form has remained unchanged through a period of relatively unchanged climate. If we do shift the climate into another large scale pattern (which now seems likely), then evolutionary processes will again have something to chew on. If our future kind live on a hot wet planet, then perhaps becoming marine life is our destiny.

A diet of science fiction

I grew up on a diet of science fiction.

That may sound unhealthy to you. Of all the essential genre groups I have focused on only one, to the exclusion of others. Perhaps it has resulted in a distortion of my world view. I don't have the perspective to say. What I can say is that I still think that science fiction, of all the genres that fit under the trendy new label speculative fiction, is something incredibly important for human society. It is an artistic embodiment of what are perhaps the most defining aspects of humans and the ecological niche they occupy: tool use, invention and the modification of the world to suit us.

Science fiction embodies our capacity to understand the world, and invent new things to change our relationship with the world. No other form of fiction engages so deeply with this aspect of humanity. This aspect of humanity defines the way we live and die, it both creates and solves the majority of the problems we face. For this reason I am proud to say I live on a diet of science fiction.