Table Of ContentABOUT WRiTiNG
Seven Essays, Four Letters,
and Five Interviews
Also by Samuel R. Delany
FICTION The Mad Man ()
The Jewels of Aptor () Hogg ()
The Fall of the Towers Atlantis: Three Tales ()
Out of the Dead City () Aye, and Gomorrah (and
The Towers of Toron () other stories, )
City of a Thousand Suns Phallos ()
()
The Ballad of Beta-2 () GRAPHIC NOVELS
Babel-17 () Empire (artist, Howard
Empire Star () Chaynkin, )
The Einstein Intersection Bread & Wine (artist, Mia
() Wolff, )
Nova ()
Driftglass () NONFICTION
Equinox () The Jewel-Hinged Jaw ()
Dhalgren () The American Shore ()
Trouble on Triton () Heavenly Breakfast ()
Return to Nevèrÿon Starboard Wine ()
Tales of Nevèrÿon () The Motion of Light in Water
Neveryóna () ()
Flight from Nevèrÿon () Wagner/Artaud ()
Return to Nevèrÿon () The Straits of Messina ()
Distant Stars () Silent Interviews ()
Stars in My Pockets Like Longer Views ()
Grains of Sand () Times Square Red, Times
Driftglass/Starshards Square Blue ()
(collected stories, ) Shorter Views ()
They Fly at Çiron () 1984: Selected Letters ()
ABOUT WRiTiNG
Seven Essays, Four Letters,
and Five Interviews
Samuel R. Delany
Wesleyan University Press
Middletown, Connecticut
This is for Marie Ponsot,
in return for the Djuna Barnes.
Published by Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, ct 06459
www.wesleyan.edu/wespress
© 2005 by Samuel R. Delany
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America 5 4 3
isbn-13: 978-0-8195-6716-1 • isbn-10: 0-8195-6716-7
“Teaching/Writing” first appeared as “Teaching S-f Writing” in Clarion
(New York: Signet Books; New American Library, 1971).
“Thickening the Plot” first appeared in Those Who Can, ed. Robin Scott
Wilson (New York: Mentor Books; New American Library, 1973).
“Characters” and “On Pure Storytelling” first appeared in The Jewel-
Hinged Jaw (New York: Berkeley Windhover Books, 1977), 155–60,
161–70.
“Of Doubts and Dreams” first appeared in Distant Stars (New York:
Bantam Books, 1981), 7–16.
“After Almost No Time at All the String on Which He had Been Pull-
ing and Pulling Came Apart into Two Separate Pieces So Quickly He
Hardly Realized It Had Snapped, or: Reflections on ‘The Beach Fire’”
first appeared in Empire SF 5.20 (summer 1980).
“Some Notes for the Intermediate and Advanced Creative Writing Stu-
dent” first appeared in Shorter Views (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan Uni-
versity Press, 2000), 433–57.
“A Para•doxa Interview: Experimental Writing/Texts & Questions” first
appeared as “Para•doxa Interview: Texts & Questions, with Samuel R.
Delany” in “The Future of Narrative,” ed. Lance Olsen, a special issue
of Para•doxa 4.11 (1998): 384–430.
“An American Literary History Interview: The Situation of American
Writing Today” first appeared in somewhat diVerent form, as part of
a symposium entitled “The Situation of American Writing Today” in
American Literary History 11.2 (1999): 331–53.
“A Poetry Project Newsletter Interview: A Silent Interview” first appeared
in The Poetry Project Newsletter, New York, March 18, 1999.
“A Black Clock Interview” first appeared in Black Clock, no. 1 (March
2004): 64–75.
“A Para•doxa Interview: Inside and Outside the Canon” first appeared as
“Para•doxa Interview with Samuel R. Delany,” in Para•doxa: Studies
in World Literary Genres [Vashan Island, Washington] 1.3 (1995), ed.
Lauric Guillard.
cip data is available from the Library of Congress.
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments vii
An Introduction: Emblems of Talent
Part I SEVEN ESSAYS
Teaching/Writing
Thickening the Plot
Characters
On Pure Storytelling
Of Doubts and Dreams
After Almost No Time at All the String
on Which He Had Been Pulling and
Pulling Came Apart into Two Separate
Pieces So Quickly He Hardly Realized
It Had Snapped, or: Reflections on
“The Beach Fire”
Some Notes for the Intermediate and
Advanced Creative Writing Student
Part II FOUR LETTERS
Letter to P—
Letter to Q—
Letter to R—
Letter to S—
Part III FiVE INTERViEWS
A Para•doxa Interview: Experimental
Writing/Texts & Questions
An American Literary History Interview:
The Situation of American Writing Today
A Poetry Project Newsletter Interview:
A Silent Interview
A Black Clock Interview
A Para•doxa Interview: Inside
and Outside the Canon
Appendix: Nits, Nips, Tucks, and Tips
Name, Date, Place
Read Widely
Grammar and Parts of Speech
Sentences
Punctuating Dialogue
A Final Note on Dialogue
Apostrophes
Dramatic Structure
Excitement, Drama, Suspense,
Surprise, Violence
Point of View
First Person
Trust Your Image
Write What You Know
vi Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
If you are a writer, more and more you’ll find yourself writing
about writing—especially today, as creative writing classes at
the university level grow more and more common.
Writers make their critical forays in many genres: letters to
friends, private journals, interviews, articles for the public, gen-
eral or academic, and at all levels of formality. Rather than try
for an artificial unity, I thought, therefore, to give an exemplary
variety. Today such variety seems truer to its topic.
After the preface and a general introduction, this handful of
pieces on creative writing continues with seven essays, each tak-
ing up an aspect of the mechanics of fiction. (I am more com-
fortable with “mechanics” than “craft”; but use the term you
prefer.) The first two, “Teaching/Writing” and “Thickening the
Plot,” grew out of Clarion Workshops many years ago, when
the workshops were actually held in Clarion, Pennsylvania, un-
der the aegis of their founder, Robin Scott Wilson. (For more
than twenty years now they have been given every summer both
in East Lansing, Michigan, and in Seattle, Washington. Since
2004, Clarion South, a third chapter, has been held at GriYth
University in Brisbane, Australia.) “Characters” first appeared
as an invited essay in a 1969 issue of the SFWA [Science Fic-
tion Writers of America] Forum, when it was under the editor-
ship of the late Terry Carr. “On Pure Storytelling” grew out of
a comment made to me by Hugo and Nebula Award–winning
novelist Vonda N. McIntyre, when I was privileged to have her
as a writing student at an early Clarion. (The comment itself is
recorded in “Teaching/Writing.”) That essay was delivered as
an after-dinner talk at the Nebula Awards banquet at the Cla-
remont Hotel in Berkeley, California, in 1970. “Of Doubts and
Dreams” is currently the afterword to my short fiction collection
Aye and Gomorrah (Vintage Books: New York, 2003), though I
vii
wrote it initially in 1980 to conclude another anthology, Distant
Stars. Thus you must put up with my self-references for a page
or so. Finally, however, it turns to topics that might interest this
book’s readers.
“After Almost No Time at All the String on Which He had
Been Pulling and Pulling Came Apart into Two Separate Pieces
So Quickly He Hardly Realized It Had Snapped, or: Reflections
on ‘The Beach Fire’” was first requested by a fanzine, Empire,
which endured a few years toward the end of the 1970s. Aimed
at aspiring writers, each issue printed an amateur short story
the editors had previously sent to a handful of professionals for
comment. Most writers returned a paragraph of encouragement,
in which they also pointed out one-to-three flaws. The editors
printed these critiques along with the tale. I decided to send
back, however, a fuller response. Incidentally, I have changed
the name of the characters, the writer’s initials, several of the
tales’ incidents, and the story title itself to protect the brave and
laudable youngster, who, after all, was not yet seventeen when
she or he first wrote it.
Something I don’t mention in my piece on “The Beach Fire”
(nor did any of the other three writers who sent in their much
briefer notes): however unintentionally, the “alien-as-beach-ball”
is lifted from John (Halloween, They Live, Escape from New York
. . . ) Carpenter’s marvelously lunatic student film Dark Star,
which was shown at hundreds of SF conventions throughout the
seventies and eighties and which reduced auditoria full of sci-
ence fiction fans to convulsive laughter. Since Empire’s editors,
as well as its readers and writers, all came out of science fiction
fandom, likely the author of “The Beach Fire” had seen, or at
least heard of, Carpenter’s spoof. Perhaps the plagiarism was in-
advertent. But Carpenter’s original was so telling and so widely
known that the similarity would have immediately put the piece
out of the running with any professional editor who recognized
its source. I chose not to bring it up because to discuss what you
can and can’t take from other artists would have doubled, if not
tripled, my essay’s length. But even the nature of plagiarism has
become a new order of problem in the last thirty years. From
the eighties through the present, writers from age fifteen to age
thirty-five have regularly handed me stories that were pastiches
viii Preface and Acknowledgments
of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, or,
more recently, Rowling’s Harry Potter. Many do not even bother
to come up with new names for the characters. Some have actu-
ally been quite skillful. But all these young writers were quite
surprised when I told them that there was no hope of publishing
such work outside a specifically fan context. More than one told
me: “But whenever you read about movies or television, or even
best sellers, everyone always says what producers and publishers
want is something exactly like something that’s been successful.
That’s what I thought I’d done . . .”
Without going further into the problem, let me say: this is
a book for serious creative writers. That means it’s a book for
writers who have at least resolved that problem for themselves
and come down on the side of originality; that is, writers who
are not interested in formulaic imitation, at whatever level, how-
ever well done, fan to commercial. I stress, too: interest in for-
mulaic imitation is not the same as interest in writing within one
recognizable genre or another. What’s here applies just as much
to the mystery, the science fiction tale, or the romance as it does
to the literary story, however normative, however experimental.
Writers with genre interests are welcome among these pages.
(Much of my own writing has been genre writing.) But the fine
points of the difference between genre and the formulaic within
a given genre are why such distinctions require thought.
The final essay, “Some Notes for the Intermediate and Ad-
vanced Creative Writing Student,” deals with that all-important
problem, structure. What is it? Why do you need it? How do
you control it? That is to say, it speaks to the aspect of narrative
that makes fiction an art—and an art whose elements here alone
are clearly distinguishable from those of the poem.
Four letters to four different writers follow the essays. All are
actual (or based closely on actual) letters sent at their particular
dates (–; again, titles and identifying details have been
changed). Two are to poets. Two are to fiction writers. One of
the poets and one of the fiction writers are affiliated with univer-
sities. Two are out there on their own. Two are black. Two are
white. Two are male. Two are female. Two are gay. One is straight
—and I have no idea what the sexual orientation of the other is;
statistics would suggest straight. But statistics only suggest.
Preface and Acknowledgments ix
