Yesterday I wrote about my first experiences in a face-to-face writing group.

One other thing I learned. I am so out of it when it comes to science fiction and fantasy.

The coordinator brought in a number of science fiction books recently published in Australia. I had not read one of them. (And looking at the covers, I probably won’t either.)

The younger people in the group are heavily influenced by Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Stargate, Battlestar Galactica and a little bit of Star Trek. Other reviewers picked up on similarities to these shows that went totally over my head. One writer seemed to be almost writing a spin-off of one of the shows.

I once read an agent’s blog where the agent reviewd queries sent in by readers. This agent didn’t represent science fiction or fantasy normally (or a lot of other things that came through), but she reviewed everything that came through. She found a couple of SF queries she liked.  I remember my reaction was that the ideas she liked were out of date. They had been done to death twenty years earlier and science fiction had matured way beyond that, but she didn’t know the genre, so she didn’t know that.

That’s how I feel right now about about science fiction and fantasy. I am so out of touch.

So how come I am still finding new books to read?

The writing group I joined had our first meeting last week. We meet bi-monthly for the rest of this year and the aim of participants is that they each write a novel in that time.

It was fascinating to actually meet face to face other writers who are writing in the same genre. Calder and I both know other writers, but no genre writers. Most of the ones we know are writing either memoirs or literary fiction. The only other genre writers either of us have met are online. Not only that, the only writing group experience I have ever had is Critters, an online critiquing group for science fiction, fantasy and horror. I have always been impressed with Critters, and recommend it highly.

Before the session we had to send around a synopsis and a thousand words. I should have picked Barrain—after all, the whole reason for joining this group in the first place is to get Barrain finished so that I can move on to something else—but I thought we had to start something new. My first misapprehension.

The coordinator sent around some critiquing guidelines. This was fascinating in itself—one of the rules was ‘no physical violence’. I wasn’t sure what I had let myself in for. We didn’t get anything else, so I assumed that we would get instructions on the day. My second misapprehension.

The night before the workshop I reviewed the Critting guidelines. Maybe I should be prepared, I thought, and scribbled some hasty notes about each of the other works.

I am glad I did, because pretty much from the moment we arrived we were right into it, critiquing each other’s work.

The group was mixed, roughly half men and half women. Age ranged from 15 years old to mid-fifties. Writing group experience ranged from those who had no experience whatsoever, to me, who had online critiquing experience, to others with face to face writing group experience and still others who had been in this same group the previous year (working on the same novel).

Two-thirds of the novels were science fiction, which really surprised me. I expected more fantasy. I don’t know if this is a trend, just this group, or due to the fact that our coordinator was a published science fiction writer. Many of these novels were past first draft, and some of them had been extensively workshopped prior. Not surprisingly, the workshopped novels were generally more ‘finished’, or if you like, more professional (although they weren’t always the stories that appealed to me most).

We spent the whole day critiquing each other’s thousand words, and still ran an hour overtime to finish it.

You don’t have much time. Those who had attended workshops before came prepared, with printouts of each work and notes on the printout. Once they had finished their critique they then passed the notes on to the author. I like this, because you certainly don’t have time to cover all the points you might like to make.

A thousand words isn’t much, however, and it’s hard to critique in isolation. Most people gave the first thousand words of their novel. Even so, there were still a lot of comments like “I don’t understand what’s happening here” to stories where I was perfectly happy to wait to understand. After all, by their very nature science fiction and fantasy are a little ambiguous at the start. If you write something like:

The spritzer blew 20 klicks out. We had to cannibalise the recycler to repair it, which meant no clean clothes for the next five klicks, which meant that Jenna was furious and spent those five clicks in sub-mode, which meant that I got into trouble because she didn’t calibrate the drive before she went under. No-one likes to take the blame for their gem-partner so naturally I …

I don’t care what the spritzer is. I don’t even care that I don’t know how long or what a klick is. It’s a time or distance unit of some sort, and the time period it covers (or takes to cover) is definitely longer than a day. I don’t even care what sub-modes and gem-partners are yet. It’s science fiction and I expect that in time I will come to know what these things are, if I need to. All I need to get from this is a sense of whose story it is, what’s going to happen next and whether or not I want to read more.

This type of critique—”I don’t get what’s happening. I don’t know what a spritzer is. I don’t get a feel of the story because I can’t visualise it”—came up a lot.

The most valuable critiques were the most specific. “I got confused when you did not start a new paragraph for each new character’s speech,” type thing. I think that was because of the restricted idea we have of each others’ stories at present.

We agreed that a thousand words is the limit that anyone can send through to be critiqued. There is no way we could do any more. It can be any thousand words they want critiqued. Unfortunately, I am the only one who wants to see the rest of the novel. There was a collective ‘no’ when I suggested people send the whole novel up to the thousand words so we could at least get an idea of what had gone on in the story prior.

I’m not sure how much value it is critiquing just that one small part. We’ll wait and see. I know that I will present in sequence, whether or not I think something else needs workshipping, simply because I can’t see the sense in pulling something out of the middle of the book without my critiquers knowing what has gone on before.

Overall, it was a good day and I learned a lot about critiquing face to face. It will be interesting to see what happens as we get to know the stories and the people better.

One thing science fiction and fantasy writers are famous for is giving characters unusual names.

I’m guilty of it myself. I love going through the baby name books, picking out names that are unusual or even, occasionally, making up my own. In this global, multi-cultural age I don’t even have to use the name books, I could use the phone list at my work and people would swear that my names were made up.

Many people say it’s a beginning writer’s thing, and as I gain experience writing I notice that my names are becoming less unique.

You do come across the occasional book loaded with unpronouncable names, and it does make the book harder to understand. Yet what most people complain about when they read a book full of unusual or made up name is not so much the pronunciation or spelling, but the way all the unfamiliar names run together, so that it becomes hard to tell which character is which. 

Introduce one character with an unusual name and providing it’s pronouncable the reader will cope.

Introduce a second and the reader can still cope, provided the names are not too similar.

Introduce a third and the reader starts to founder.

Give every character in your book an unusual name and even you will have problems as you write it.

Give every character in your book a name and even you will have problems as you write it.

The other day I dusted off an old idea for the writing workshop I am taking this year.  I wrote the first chapters years ago. The characters’ names are all … unique is probably a polite way to put it. The obvious solution, change the characters’ names. The problem is, these characters have lived in my bottom drawer for so long, and every so often I have thought about them, and added a little more to their story. Their names are embedded in my psyche. I can’t change the names.

There’s only one thing for it. Write the story using these names. Once the story is complete take a long, hard look at the names and see what I can do with them. If I need to replace them then, so be it. Search and replace in Word was built for times such as this.

I may have bitten off more than I can chew, writing-wise, but I have joined a year long writers’ workshop.

It’s the first face-to-face workshop I have ever attended, so I’m not sure what to expect. We’re all SFF writers and we meet bi-monthly to talk about the progress of our novels.

Why did I do it, when I could be at home writing?

Last year I did so little writing I felt I needed a kick-start.

I think that because I have to meet people face-to-face in this workshop it will force me to produce something. Normally a deadline gets the adrenaline going and helps to push the words out.

Anything to get back into the writing mood.