Five Things I learned at Clarion West: Part 2

I meant for this second installment to come sooner. The cold germs had other ideas.

So writing is not a competition. What’s next?

Write outside your comfort zone.

You’re not going to Clarion West (or any other workshop) for business as usual. No writing habit you’ve developed is going to survive this experience unscathed. You’ll be writing stories at a breakneck pace without all the usual ideation and warm-up time. There will be enormous pressure to perform (which sometimes means just finishing the damn story). Be prepared to throw out all your old crutches. Embrace the fact that you might be writing at 11pm. 1am. 3am.

I arrived at Clarion West with a handful of ideas. I ended up writing on only one of them. I found myself so caught up in the play of new concepts and exchanges of ideas with my fellow classmates that none of my canned ideas for stories remained as appealing as they once were. Dig a little deeper.

While you’re digging, think about what our second-week instructor Maureen McHugh told us: “Write stories that would embarrass your grandmother.” What she meant was: don’t hold back. Unearth the deep stuff, write boldly. Sex? Check. Violence? Check. Don’t feel you have to be nice to your characters. Don’t be afraid to tell a story that leaves the reader conflicted, uneasy. Reconsider those happy endings.

Experiment. I tried to do something new with every story I wrote while at Clarion West. Sometimes this meant writing outside of the genres I generally like (fantasy, horror). I wrote a magical realism story. I even braved some hard science fiction (which I suspect wasn’t all that hard at all). SF is something I’d avoided, somewhat intimidated by all that “science” stuff. I found I actually enjoyed writing it. Be open to discover that SF writer in you.

You know where I’m going with this, right?

When you leave the workshop, there’s no reason to quit challenging yourself. Every story is an opportunity to take yourself (and the reader) someplace you’ve never been before. When you experiment with voice, structure, or point-of-view, you get better at all those things. Write science fiction if you normally write fantasy. Write horror if you normally write science fiction. Dig deep into the soil of your psyche and fictionalize the things that matter to you.

Not every experiment will be a success, but that’s okay, too.