Writers of the Future Volume 31
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:
The response time is so quick, with quarterly contests guaranteeing that you will only wait a few months for an answer.
Writers of the Future is the short-story publication most likely to give a new writer a wide readership and begin to create an audience eager to see more.
Writers of the Future has earned great credibility in the industry, so that submitting your first novel to a publisher with a cover letter saying, “A short story of mine just won the quarterly Writers of the Future Contest,” guarantees that the editor will begin to read it with more trust, more hope, that the book will be worth publishing.
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.
Rough Draft
written by
Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta
illustrated by
DANIEL TYKA
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Kevin J. Anderson is a #1 international bestselling author with over 130 books published and twenty-three million copies in print in thirty languages. He is best known for his Saga of Seven Suns science fiction epic, his Dan Shamble, Zombie PI humorous horror series, his Dune and Hellhole novels with fellow Writers of the Future judge Brian Herbert, his Star Wars and X-Files novels, and the innovative steampunk fantasy adventure Clockwork Lives, a novel version of the concept album by legendary rock group Rush, co-authored with drummer and lyricist Neil Peart.
With his wife of twenty-three years, Rebecca Moesta—also a Writers of the Future judge—Anderson has written fourteen volumes of the Star Wars: Young Jedi Knights series, the novelizations of several science fiction films, Star Trek and original comics, the Crystal Doors fantasy trilogy, and three science fiction adventures for the Challenger Learning Centers for Space Science Education. As a solo writer, Moesta has written novels for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Junior Jedi Knights, and several short stories.
Together, Anderson and Moesta run the high-end Superstars Writing Seminars in Colorado Springs, and they are also the publishers of WordFire Press.
Kevin says, “Over years of watching brilliant, up-and-coming writers burst onto the scene—winning awards, grabbing review attention—and envying their raw talent, I also began to notice a pattern that baffled me. Some of these true creative geniuses, who had the literary world on a silver platter, just … gave up and vanished. I couldn’t understand it. They obviously had the ideas and the skills to become truly well-known and successful, but for some people this scared them to death. I thought a lot about this and wondered about all those wonderful stories that could have been written. In ‘Rough Draft,’ one such writer has the opportunity to see an alternate timeline and read the work that he might have written, if only he’d stuck with it. The idea felt really powerful to me, and as I was putting the pieces together, I worked with Rebecca who could add an extra layer of emotional resonance. Of all the stories I’ve written, this one has a very special place in my heart.”
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
Daniel Tyka is also the illustrator for “Switch” in this volume. For more information about Daniel, please see his bio here.
Rough Draft
After a decade during which he wrote and published nothing new, the fan letters dwindled to a few a year.
“Dear Mr. Coren, You’re the best science fiction writer ever!”
“Dear Mr. Coren, Your book Divergent Lines changed my life. I felt as if you were speaking directly to me, and you helped me work through some major issues.”
The entire experience, though great for the ego, had ultimately proved meaningless. Eventually he’d been forced to return the money for the second book advance, because he simply couldn’t do it again: write another book and, even harder, meet expectations. After enjoying a pleasant day in the sun, Mitchell Coren had retreated to his small apartment to live a normal life. The gleaming Nebula Award and the silver Hugo—both dusty now—were little more than knickknacks on the mantle of a fireplace that he never used.
Having convinced himself of the wisdom of J.D. Salinger’s approach to authorial fame, Mitchell had squelched all thoughts of returning to writing. He immersed himself in a normal life with all its petty concerns.
Today, with an indifference born of long practice, Mitchell opened his bills and junk mail before finally tearing open the padded envelope that obviously contained a book. Another intrusion, no doubt. An annoying reminder of his old life. He still received advance reading copies from editors trying to wheedle a rare cover quote from him, rough draft manuscripts from aspiring authors who begged for comments or critiques, and books presented to him by new authors who had been inspired by his lone published novel.
Inside this envelope, however, he found his own name on the dust jacket of a novel he had never written.
INFERNITIES
Mitchell Coren
Multiple Award-Winning
Author of Divergent Lines
Whirling flakes of confusion compacted into a hard snowball in the pit of his stomach. “What the hell?”
His initial, and obvious, thought was that someone had stolen his name. But that didn’t make sense. Though many editorial positions had changed in the decade since he’d published Divergent Lines, Mitchell was still well enough known in the insular science fiction community that somebody in the field would have noticed an imposter. Besides, how much could his byline be worth after all this time? It wasn’t worth stealing.
Someone had tucked a folded sheet of paper between the book’s front cover and the endpaper. He read it warily.
Dear Mr. Coren,
As a longtime fan of yours, I thought you’d appreciate seeing this novel I came across in a parallel universe.
I’m a timeline hunter by profession. Perhaps you’ve heard of Alternitech? Our company uses a proprietary technology to open gateways into alternate realities. My colleagues and I explore these parallel universes for breakthroughs or useful discrepancies that Alternitech can profitably exploit: medical and scientific advances, historical discoveries, artistic variations. My specialty is the creative arts.
I stumbled upon this book in an alternate timeline while searching for a new Mario Puzo. Since the science fiction market isn’t nearly as large or profitable as the mainstream, I couldn’t spend much time checking out its background, but a brief search showed that the “alternate” Mitchell Coren published a dozen or so short stories after Divergent Lines, then produced this second novel. I’m hoping Alternitech will want to arrange for its publication, but naturally I felt you should see it first.
With deepest respect,
Jeremy Cardiff
Mitchell stared at the letter with mistrust and growing irritation. He had heard of this company that searched alternate realities for everything from new Beatles records, to evidence of UFOs or Kennedy assassination conspir
acies, to cures for obscure diseases. He could understand the more humanitarian objectives, but why fiction? What gave Alternitech the right to infringe on his life like this?
He opened to the dust jacket photo and saw that the picture did resemble him, though this other Mitchell Coren wore a different hairstyle and a cocky, self-assured grin. The bio mentioned that after completing Infernities he was “already at work on his next novel.”
Oddly unsettled, Mitchell pushed the book away. Its very existence raised too many disturbing questions.
Three increasingly urgent phone calls to his former agent went unreturned. Since Mitchell had neither delivered anything new nor generated much income, his agent wasn’t in a great hurry to attend to his so-called emergency. Even in the days when he’d briefly been a hot client, Mitchell had been relatively high-maintenance, needing encouragement and constant contact.
He decided to contact his entertainment attorney instead. After all, Sheldon Freiburg charged by the hour and therefore had an incentive to get right on the matter.
“Mitch Coren! I haven’t heard from you since the last ice age.” Freiburg’s voice was bluff and hearty on the telephone. “What on earth have you been doing? You dropped off the map.”
“I’ve been working a real-world job, Sheldon. You know, regular paycheck, benefits … security?”
“Yeah, I’ve heard of those. Hopped off the old fame-and-fortune bandwagon, eh?”
“A modicum of fame, not a whole lot of fortune—as you well know.”
Freiburg had handled the entertainment contracts for the two movie options on Divergent Lines. Mitchell had been young and naïve then, believing the Hollywood hype and enthusiasm. He’d been surrounded by smiling fast-talkers whose eager assertions of certain box-office appeal and guaranteed studio support were built on a foundation as strong as a soap bubble. After the attorney’s fees and the agent’s commission, the option money had been just enough to pay off his car, which was now ten years old.