Lightspeed Magazine Issue 10 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: science fiction, magazine, short story, science fiction magazine, short stories
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2011-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

If I had to describe a “Walter Jon Williams Book” to someone who’d never read one, I’d say that I never know what your next book is going to be about, but I always know it will have big ideas and a rip-roaring storyline. More than anyone else in the genre, you seem to have a talent for following the big idea without losing sight of the need to tell a good story. How do you strike that balance?

I’d like to offer for your approval the highly unfashionable idea that good storytelling trumps everything else. Writers whose characters are made of purest silly putty and who can’t parse a simple English sentence regularly end up on the bestseller list because they know how to tell a story and keep readers turning pages.

There seems to be a school of thought that lovely writing is all that literature is about. I love to bask in beautiful writing, but I much prefer writing to be in aid of something, which is to say a good story. Likewise I fully appreciate well-drawn characters, but well-drawn characters with nothing to do but gaze at the wall and soliloquize to themselves are pretty darn dull.

Am I out of line to expect simply everything? Story, plot, characters, resolution? At any rate, that’s what I try to deliver.

I very often start with a character I want to write about, and so I’ll construct a story specifically around that character, to put the character under pressure and see what he or she is made of.

I tend not to write pure idea stories, which is not to say that I don’t employ ideas. The ideas tend to be in service to the story and characters—if the story is about the distance between the characters, I’ll employ an idea that somehow literalizes that separation. (Put one of them on another planet, say, or in some virtual space that the other can’t enter. Or alternately, jam them together in the same confined space and show how they still can’t talk to each other.)

I will try to have the idea and the characters mirror each other in some way. In my story “Surfacing,” the story was about a researcher trying to communicate with deep-sea creatures. He got involved with a woman who was intermittently possessed by an alien (a metaphor for mental illness, by the way). The various turns of the plot all involved the protagonist’s desperate attempts to communicate with the deep dwellers, the woman, and the alien, and each twist compounded his original problem. (I think it’s one of my best stories.)

(I should point out, by way of self-promotion, that my frustrations in reading fiction which was basically all right except that there was no plot and no pace, led me to found a writers’ workshop, Taos Toolbox, in which the art of plotting is covered thoroughly. This year I’ll be teaching with Nancy Kress and Jack Skillingstead. Applications are now being accepted, so if you’re interested, check out taostoolbox.com. End of commercial interruption.

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