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The Clarion workshops are American science-fiction. Kate Wilhelm (Hugo winner for Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang) and her husband Damon Knight were two of the key members of the Clarion workshop, from it's start until Damon's declining health forced them to retire. Wilhelm's thoughts on writing science-fiction could be invaluable, but this collection mixes trivial anecdotes with writing advice that is better present elsewhere, and circles around what makes Clarion unique.
The workshops themselves are invaluable, a six-week bootcamp of writing and work-shopping. Wilhelm is most authentic here when she expresses her disdain at all the terrible first stories she's had to critique over 27 years. Her advice to focus on authentic characters in conflict, master the basics of point-of-views and grammar, and not play games with the reader, ensure that a story isn't an absolute stinker. Her point that a writer needs to write, and that time spent waiting for rejection letters or otherwise playing hooky are not writing, are of course true. And some writers might be gratified to learn that Wilhelm writes from scene and tone first, and fills in plot and character later.
The anecdotes are as I said, trivial. I enjoyed the name-dropping of luminaries in science-fiction (hello serious Kim Stanley Robinson, playful George Alec Effinger, and walking disaster Lucius Shepard), but you may not. Dorms are terrible, some admins are angels, Michigan in the summer sounds miserable. Workshopping is exhausting labor. But this is a collection of anecdotes, not an actual history of Clarion.
The missed opportunity with this book is that there's a reason people go to Clarion over, say the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and that's because they're writing Science Fiction & Fantasy! The advice for short stories is the advice for short stories (and you should read Rust Hill for that), but Wilhelm has almost nothing to say about writing scifi and fantasy, except that you should avoid weirdness for the sake of weirdness, think a few layers beyond the immediate, and not call a rabbit a smeep.
The workshops themselves are invaluable, a six-week bootcamp of writing and work-shopping. Wilhelm is most authentic here when she expresses her disdain at all the terrible first stories she's had to critique over 27 years. Her advice to focus on authentic characters in conflict, master the basics of point-of-views and grammar, and not play games with the reader, ensure that a story isn't an absolute stinker. Her point that a writer needs to write, and that time spent waiting for rejection letters or otherwise playing hooky are not writing, are of course true. And some writers might be gratified to learn that Wilhelm writes from scene and tone first, and fills in plot and character later.
The anecdotes are as I said, trivial. I enjoyed the name-dropping of luminaries in science-fiction (hello serious Kim Stanley Robinson, playful George Alec Effinger, and walking disaster Lucius Shepard), but you may not. Dorms are terrible, some admins are angels, Michigan in the summer sounds miserable. Workshopping is exhausting labor. But this is a collection of anecdotes, not an actual history of Clarion.
The missed opportunity with this book is that there's a reason people go to Clarion over, say the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and that's because they're writing Science Fiction & Fantasy! The advice for short stories is the advice for short stories (and you should read Rust Hill for that), but Wilhelm has almost nothing to say about writing scifi and fantasy, except that you should avoid weirdness for the sake of weirdness, think a few layers beyond the immediate, and not call a rabbit a smeep.