Here’s a quick update on my Clarion prep. My goal for this first month was to:

• Finish 2 stories (one every two weeks, or half-Clarion speed)
• Critique 9 stories a week (again, half of the 18 stories a week we’d need to critique at the workshop)
• Read books/stories from each of the 6 instructors

Here’s what I actually got done:

Writing:

Averaged about 4 hours of writing a day, 6 days a week. The time was split 50/50 between “serious” writing and more pulpy projects.

• Finished a rough-rough of a near-future SF piece, 6.6k words. I know this story is good, but it’s quite experimental and stylized. It borrows a lot from the Weird tradition and uses techniques I’m not comfortable using yet. Needs a lot of work before I’m happy with it.
• 4k words on a dystopian SF piece about sensationalist media culture how it can transform us. I got stuck on this one. The plot grew into a monster. The protagonist shifts character as the story progresses, which I find really hard to pull off convincingly … Letting this one sit for a while, I think.
• 5k words on a fantasy piece which blends romance with themes of commons-management and progress-tradition tension. This one also ballooned into a monster. This one is maybe also a give-up. I’ll need a novella to tell the story, which just isn’t what I want to practice right now.
• Started ~3 other stories, but they’re in the early stages. Only have 1-2 very rough scenes written, and I don’t know yet where they’ll go.
• Wrote 50k words on a pulp fantasy novel. Really focusing on infusing the scenes with voice and making interesting characters with quirks and attitudes and wants that readers can identify with.

So yea, I wrote a lot. But I didn’t achieve my goal of finishing two stories. Finishing is a big issue for me. The root cause isn’t so much fear or mental block as a … lack of understanding, I think. I don’t understand well enough what the short story form is and what kind of stories it is capable of telling.

For example, here’s something that happens often. I’ll have this good idea. But when I try write a story about it, it grows and grows and grows. I add supporting characters, subplots, subtexts and subthemes, etc. until the thing mutates into a monster that I clearly won’t be able to finish in <5k words.

So what’s the issue? Do I need to discipline the story? Or am I using my novelist’s brain when plotting a short story? Am I missing some unifying thread that would help to contain size? I’m not sure. More research is needed.

Critique. I ended up reading ~20-30 stories a week, mixed between critique stories and professional writers. I didn’t keep a clean count of how many stories I critiqued though. The issue I’m running into is that many stories available on the internet are simply not good enough to learn from. The best stories are from intermediate writers who don’t make basic craft errors anymore. But that’s only 1/3 or 1/4 of the stories I can find.

Reading. I read some stories from all of the instructors, and have a pretty good idea of their styles and what their strengths are. Also made a list of questions I might want to ask. Definitely looking forward to reading more of their stuff in the coming weeks, but maybe I won’t read 3 books from each writer like I said I wanted to last month.

Other things I did:

• Started building a “stories I want to write at Clarion” list.
• I wasn’t as familiar with the various spec fic traditions as I liked, so I’ve been reading criticism on the various fields, especially on the Weird and the New Weird.
• I read through all the journals from previous Clarion attendees and made a huge document with notes. There was lots of good stuff, which isn’t available in trad pubbed craft books (most of those are written for beginners anyway?).

That’s all. Back to writing.