One joy science fiction writers encounter is that, among our readers, so many of them wish also to be writers, and often express a lively curiosity about the craft of writing. I do not know if this applies to writers of romances, westerns, or vampire-samurai technothrillers; I do know it does not apply to other and more dignified craftsmen, such as carpenters and shoemakers. Never once have I sat on a particularly comfy chair while shod with a goodly pair of shoes and wished to know the trick by which the joists were dovetailed, or the heels snugly cobbled.
We who cobble together stories have an audience with whom there is more to talk about. Indeed, the only craft I can think of where the customer wants to know such details is cooking: often someone who eats a fine meal asks the chef to share her recipe, so he can try it himself at home. That parallel between cooking and writing is that both use a few simple basic ingredients nearly anyone can pick up, but from them produce a gamut ranging from hearty basics to airy fantasies, with skill ranging from comfortably workmanlike to sublime genius. Writers, unlike most craftsmen, have an audience that wants to know the recipe.
One difficulty writers have in giving advice is that it is hard to discern between the particular and the universal. Often a writer intending to explain a general principle of the craft of writing, instead finds himself explaining some point that only applies to writers of his type, in his genre, with his tastes, or, worse, he explains only his own personal writing process or inspiration, an effort useful perhaps as autobiography, but not useful as advice.
I have reached that point in my latest project that has happened to me in all my projects save one, which I call ‘breaking the outline.’ My advice to new writers, if it ever happens to you, is not to panic or give in to the temptation to murder your project as you watch it mutate horribly before your very eyes. What you do in such cases, is go back to the beginning, and write up a new outline, this one to incorporate whatever serendipitous elements you discovered during the writing process that you can afford to keep. My advice is to stick to your guns.
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