I’m currently working on a creative writing book for Abrams and writing the Beginnings chapter. I’ve got my own ideas about some of the best story or novel openings in the history of SF/Fantasy, but I’m curious about yours—and to make sure I don’t miss anything great.

So: opening sentence or sentences to a story or novel that you found particularly effective? Please include the quote and also tell us why you found it effective.

I’ll assume you don’t mind being quoted in the book if you comment.

Cat Rambo recently conducted a three-part interview with my wife Ann VanderMeer and me about editing anthologies and periodicals—for the SFWA website. Together, in our current editing phase, we have co-edited ten anthologies since 2007 and Ann acquired/edited fiction for Weird Tales magazine for five years. (This doesn’t include a myriad of projects dating back to the 1980s, for both of us.)

Here are the links:

Part I: “You also have to be very detailed oriented. You need patience and a belief not only in yourself but in your writers and your reading audience. Give the readers the opportunity to join you on the adventure when you discover the fiction that you love.”

Part II: ” The truth is working on an anthology is like an obsession to me, and the more difficult the execution of the idea or focus, the more I become locked in on it to the exclusion of all else. This is good on one level and fairly scarring on others. I don’t necessarily recommend it as an approach, but it does teach you a lot.”

Part III: “You have to have diversity in every project, even ones with a narrow scope, otherwise it just becomes the boring same old same old. By diversity, I am not just talking about the writer, but the story itself–the type of story and how each writer approaches their fiction. The key to balance in anthologies is being widely read and also knowing as many writers as possible so when making solicitations you don’t just go to the same old names.”

Added to that I’d point to my blog entries about anthology editing, which can be found here:

What Do You Look For in an Anthology?

Editing Fiction Anthologies

Anthologies: A Reader’s POV

Anthologies: A Writer’s POV

(Also see: Maurice Broaddus’s guest post on the subject)

I don’t have much to add to all of this except to re-emphasize that editing anthologies isn’t something anybody can do well or immediately become good at—it requires practice and a specific skillset, and it requires a different skillset to select reprints as opposed to originals. Even the skillset required to select new fiction from a slushpile or open reading period is different than that for soliciting new fiction from established writers. Not to mention the intestinal fortitude seeking out permissions can require. I wouldn’t want to dissuade anyone from editing an anthology, but if you’re going to do it…really think it through and ask yourself why you’re doing it and what you hope readers will get out of experiencing the finished book.

There is also an element of continual learning involved, because anthologies can be so different from one another if you do a variety of them. So it’s hard to say that we’re “experts”—it’s simply that having had these experiences we are presenting information and analysis of the various processes, which we hope might be of use to others. As ever, cross-ref this info to other sources of info for best results.

Below find the table of contents for three of our recent or forthcoming anthologies, with a few notes.

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(At night, scribbling furiously on pieces of paper, in front of this fountain.)

“The Journals of Doctor Mormeck” serial fiction will continue on my blog by tomorrow. As you might expect, teaching at the Shared Worlds SF/F teen writing camp—and also helping manage things—takes a lot out of you. So I didn’t do much writing while there.

However, the trip back through Raleigh-Durham, Charleston, and Savannah proved that Doctor Mormeck is alive in my mind. It’s the kind of story where everything you encounter can be transformed. That’s true of many different kinds of fictions, but doubly true for Mormeck since it involves parallel universes. I entered this kind of state of reverie in which everything around me was being converted and reimagined as part of a parallel universe, even the fountains above. Part of it is the sensory overload of encountering so much cool real-world stuff all at once, part of it was being away from Mormeck for about two weeks and lots of material suddenly coming to the surface all at once. But basically I spent a great deal of time just wandering aimlessly at night, being fed scraps of paper to write on by my wife and our friend S.J. Chambers.

A mosquito smashing into my eye like a tiny electric shock not once but twice. An encounter with an odd building and a grim lighthouse. All of these things sparked all kinds of ideas. It’s exciting to me because I’m truly post-Ambergris now.

So it’s safe to say that Mormeck is alive and well in my imagination—even more so than before Shared Worlds. Some of it is making my jaw drop in anticipation of writing it, and as always I’m mystified as to where all of this stuff comes from, but I try not to question it but just get it all down and worry about editing and control later. There are marvels and wonders ahead, along with hearbreak and despair…as always.

Note: Been reading this serialized long story/novella? Please support a full-time writer. Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com—much appreciated! Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial anthology or stand-alone book appearance.

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck, and first entry is here.

It’s been an interesting journey thus far, writing an online serial, for a variety of reasons. For one thing, it feels much less public than I had expected, and not just because readers are being shy and not commenting much. Site stats reveal these entries are just as popular as the other stuff I post, so plenty of people are reading.) But something about the kind of tunnel aspect of posting here, of physically entering the material into a WordPress blog entry creates a weird sense of separation from audience I hadn’t expected. But I also find that when someone comments, like The Speculative Scotsman, it doesn’t interrupt my train of thought. On most projects, if I post an excerpt for example, I have trouble with outside comments and perspectives messing with my mind and getting in the way of continued writing. Not with Mormeck, and this would’ve held true if Spec Scot had said he hated it.

There’s also the inescapable fact that on days when I get donations from readers, I am more motivated and energized. I’m not writing this for the money in the usual sense. This isn’t a financial emergency; it’s more that as a full-time writer it’s a risk to do anything for free—you’re betting your future is going to be solvent, that future incomes will make up for the time spent. Yet at the same time, you are going to write it anyway; you can’t not write it, or anything else you do. It’s all in the context and the where and when.

Compartmentalization also works extremely well. When not traveling, I work on my novel Borne in long-hand at the coffee shop in the mornings and then after the break of lunch, I return home and I work immediately on Mormeck. That physical and spatial separation in the mental trick that allows me to work on both projects simultaneously without damage to either, or leakage.

As for the actual process of creating the Mormeck work, it starts out when a thought occurs to me, and usually that means something on a piece of paper so I don’t lose the idea.

If I’m at home, it goes right into this journal I bought in Amsterdam, and the scraps of paper with my scrawling—those words get transcribed into the journal so it’s all in one place.

When I first started out, I was sometimes writing full-on parts of scenes in the journal, so although technically the blog entries were rough drafts, parts of them were kinda second drafty.

But as the novella has progressed, it’s gotten more chaotic in the journal. I’m more or less just jotting down ideas, snippets of dialogue, and stage directions, and then letting the actors do their own thing when I sit down to write the entry. The journal is now all out of order in terms of the sequencing of the story itself.

There’s a Latin American writer whose name escapes me now—begins with an “A” and he specializes in short novels—and his process is to sit down and just let the narrative go where it will from chapter to chapter, without worrying about the overall form or whether it will all dovetail and make sense. He says this keeps the fiction alive for him. I’m more or less employing the same methodology. When I sit down to write, I have a few things in my head about the current scene, but no sense of all of the particulars or of the way the scene will end. I’m also not particularly worried about the form of the overall whole. I do, however, now have an ending in mind, which is very useful to me.

But when I started, I had no idea how it would end, or where it was going, and yet the explanations and information my brain has come up with on the fly so to speak has been no less or more logical than when I do a lot of thinking about such things ahead of time. In a sense, I’m finding that doesn’t really matter necessarily.

Anyway, here’s another recap of the story so far–you’ll find all 18,000 words of it below. I’ll have new installments next week.

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Just about all writers have some kind of eccentricity to their work habits, I believe—some quirk that works for them. Mine is that I have to more or less fill up every surface of the folder holding the print-out of my novel-in-progress with words. In the photo above, it’s the folder for Borne, bowed under the weight and confusion of notes. There’s no logic to writing them down on the folder, except that there’s this mental construct in my mind. The work must be surrounded by related thoughts and ideas scrawled in a kind of protective spell. These words keep the work safe—keep bad influences out and let the work marinate and reach maturity under that protection of that binding. It makes no sense at all, but it’s the only magic I engage in, and a blank folder surface fills me with a feeling of unease.

So, tell me, writers reading this…what’re your eccentricities?

Tomorrow I’m going to post one blog entry that has the entire text of The Journals of Mormeck, my serialized story project, to date, before picking up the story on Saturday.

It’s been an interesting experience, and I can’t even really tell you where I got the idea for Mormeck, except that I’d been wanting to use the name for awhile and a still-born story with a character named that had gone nowhere. But suddenly I was looking at some random notes for a new fictional universe and I remembered the name Mormeck and then this Japanese comics character popped into my brain and I knew Mormeck was a huge, mountain-large creature with a laboratory resting atop his head. On a distant planet. Observing a hundred or more alt-Earths.

How I got it into my head to post the entries here, I’m not sure, but the diary form has been instrumental to doing it as a rough draft serial on my blog. It creates a kind of closed-vessel situation where even though I know the parts have to fit together, I can just concentrate on what’s right in front of me, compartmentalize the task at hand.

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What is Steampunk?

Why do you write about squid?

Why do you write about mushrooms?

Why aren’t there airplanes in Ambergris?

Why are you so anti-fungi?

Why is your writing so weird?

Why are you so mean to your characters?

What are you wearing?

(Critics who use in-progress process posts as proof of anything in finished books are jerks and will not be tolerated.)

Avast! When you return to a novel you last looked at a few months before and you’re like me—which is to say, there might be three typewritten alternative drafts and two explorations in handwriting—it takes a bit to get up to speed. Is this me complaining about my own work habits? Hell no. The whole point of my process is inefficiency. Getting too quickly to where you want to go, getting there too smoothly, is antithetical to thinking through complex issues. You want roadblocks, confusion, chaos, and doubt. Unexpected, wonderful things come out of this approach, too.

But I have indeed spent the whole day sorting through variations and looking at the structure of the 25,000 words I’ve got on the page. One thing that just kept annoying me beyond belief was the amount of really cool exposition I needed to cut to keep the foregrounded story moving forward. This is pretty basic stuff, but sometimes your description is doing a lot of other things, like deepening character. Other stuff just needs to go or be rearranged.

What I did find is that rethinking the structure of Borne helped a lot. I had thought of the book as being in two parts, and the sort of book where you get a lot of context up front. As I was looking over scenes with the title character, I realized I should experiment with a three-part structure, and suddenly the whole idea of what scenes had to go where changed drastically, as well as what kind of approach this novel needs in terms of context and divulging certain kinds of information.

First off, thinking of the novel in three parts, roughly corresponding to stages in Borne’s development, meant that scenes involving other characters could now be spread out across all three sections. Before, I’d been thinking in terms of the narrator’s story arc, but that’s not going to be the structural determinant for the novel, as it turns out. Unspooling Borne-related stuff also allows this other spreading-out noted above. It also, for some reason, now means setting context will be situated more node-like at regular intervals along the way. This means the first place I go into extended description is much shorter, and the space created fills up with more of the emotional lives of the characters. And I can relax into that knowing the rest of what I need is coming later, and isn’t needed for reader understanding due to the new pacing and the new ways in which the past and present communicate with one another in the text.

It doesn’t even really matter if I wind up actually dividing the book into three sections, or I just hold that in my head as a construct and do chapters 1 through 20 without any section breaks. The point is, the re-think has allowed for better, more useful ways to distribute scenes and info, while also revealing what material isn’t needed at all. Something about visualizing the novel as a two-parter was also obscuring unintended repetition and wastefulness in what was on the page.

This is all a very dry way of saying that structure isn’t actually an abstract thing. It’s also not always an organic thing, in that you try out different approaches mechanically in aid of getting to a place where everything in the text becomes effortless and organic.

As a kind of side note, I’ve also had a great time on more of a sentence level applying lessons learned from Steve Erickson’s (author of Zeroville) edits to the excerpt of Borne appearing in Black Clock magazine. In the context of finalizing the piece for his mag, I thought of the edits as regular copy-edits, but in the context of revising and moving forward on new sections of Borne at novel-length, I now interpret them as character-related instead. Which is to say, most of the deletions and changes affect how the reader perceives the main character. What is understated by the cuts emphasizes different elements. What is now brought to the front also creates different emphasis. This in effect makes subtle but important changes to the character…and in charting why I think these changes were made, I have gained a much better understanding about the person I’m writing about, and this also now radiates out into my editing of the rest of the draft as it stands.

The good news, from my standpoint, is that because several scenes now bleed into part two, I am much farther along on the novel than I thought. It means I have new scenes to write in part one, but that’s preferable to being more adrift in the middle. This, too, is the advantage of thinking about the structure differently: I no longer have concerns about sag in the middle because of the redistribution of previously front-loaded scenes into that section. The third act is crystal clear in my head, so that was really the last challenge in terms of how to present the material.

Especially in a short novel, like Borne will no doubt be, getting it all right on this kind of technical level is key to the emotional resonance for readers. Pacing, correct development, managing progression aren’t issues of craft—they’re issues intrinsic to success at deeper, more psychological levels. Graham Joyce’s The Silent Land is a perfect example—if Joyce’s craft weren’t brilliant, his insight into human relationships would be useless, because it would be deployed within a malformed novel.

And so instead of a post on the movie Carlos or another Doctor Mormeck entry, you have this, my little weirdlings. I hope you find it interesting. Or maybe I don’t hope anything. Mostly, I’m just happy to be writing.

Sometimes goop gets in the way. Working through my novel Borne, I’m exasperated by some of the exposition that feels inert even though it may not be—it may just need to be recontextualized, broken up, or made to do more work through half-scene. So, goop below. I keep coming up with new combinations, new entry points, to make this stuff work. And sometimes, you just have to throw almost all of it away. Even posting the stuff here is a way of getting a clearer view of it–different font, different location can equal a new way of seeing it.

(BTW–not all of my blog entries are posting to facebook, so don’t rely on facebook for updates.)

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If you haven’t noticed, Nick Mamatas, whose new, highly recommended book Starve Better: Surviving the Endless Horrors of the Writing Life is now out, has been guest blogging at Booklifenow. In fact, he’s not just been guest blogging, he’s been blowing sh*t up.

The fact is, we all need a reality check every now and again. We also need to push back against received ideas and so-called commonsense advice. So here’s Mamatas with a series of Against posts that should shake you up and make you really think about your writing and your career. You may disagree with some of it, but that’s part of defining yourself as a writer, too. He’ll be posting at least one more this coming week.

Some snippets:

Against Professionalism
“Professionalism is a complex of supposedly mandatory and proscribed behaviors that makes a writer “professional” regardless of their ability to write interesting material. Recently, at a science fiction convention I met a former student of mine, and he was very concerned about…his blog. Which he does not have. He was told, however, that today professional writers must all blog, but that these blogs must not offer up controversial political opinions, or negative reviews of popular books, or “ruffle feathers.” Everything must be “politically correct” he believed—to use that famously meaningless term I try so hard to get my students to stop using.”

Against Craft
“Writing is a balance between art and craft, but there is enough suspicion of art—it suggests snobbery, laziness, and even homosexuality in some of the more idiotically conservative quarters—that the stick must be bent in the other direction. Craft is a matter of artisanship, and artisanship is a matter of mastering a relatively small tool kit in order to solve a number of practical problems. These practical problems also allow for aesthetic flourishes to be added. You can thus have a basket with an interesting weave, for example, but you can’t have the weave by itself, without the basket.”

Against Story
“What do people want? ‘A good story.’ How do we know? People can barely say anything else. When editors describe the sort of material they’re looking to acquire, they want “a good story.” Readers are always on the hunt for “a good story.” Good stories are also useful for shutting down a variety of discussions. Are there not enough women being published, or people of color? Who cares who the author is, so long as he or she writes a good story? Can writers do different things with their stories—create new points of view, structure words on the page differently, work to achieve certain effects not easily accessible with more common presentations? Why bother—a good story is the only important thing.”