Being honest isn’t easy.

Whit’s workshop honestly wore him out. He would become visibly agitated, as he critiqued our stories, his face flushed, his voice raised. And he put so much effort into marking up our manuscripts that somehow, he never wrote much himself, even though a lucky break had let him pursue writing full time for a number of years. (A situation I’ve been in myself; the luck and the not writing.)

Inside us all lives a creator, an editor, and a critic. Engage that critic too fiercely, rev up its engines, and it will crush every nascent naive, sentimental, derivative impulse from the get-go. Watch that internal critic shut the creator down while the editor, and the rest of the world, shrugs.

Could Whit practice what he preached? Not easily. Themed anthologies with deadlines became his salvation. When he did finish and submit stories, they were good. Pretty damned good, when you factored in the fact that he wrote so few. He progressed faster, further, with a handful of stories, than anyone I’ve ever worked with before or since. He seemed to do it through sheer force of will.

He’d raised the stakes for himself with all that critique.

But you could tell, it was painful, caring so much, about how little we could make him care. And so Whit quit the workshop, to write on his own, publishing ten stories over a ten year span. 

I inherited the Weasels. We were of course, at that point, the Witless Weasels, which was our nameless group’s not really name.

My wife and I had moved to Boston from Jamaica Plain, and then, to Cambridge. Ok, we lived on the Cambridge Somerville line across the street from a creepy bomb-shelter of a bar called The Abbey Lounge, but it was Cambridge, dammit. Our living room was huge, under a big skylight on the third floor of a small apartment building. We had two sofas facing each other and a few chairs that sat a dozen people easily. A big dining room table off to one side was perfect for stacking manuscripts.

At the workshop’s most productive stage the table would support five or six piles of short stories, each stack of ten stories somehow impressive. What my friend Anthony Butler once referred to as ‘evidence of industry.’ Every two weeks people would walk in with a stack of laser-printed courier 12 point double-spaced manuscript under one arm, walk out three hours later with a different stack–composed of everyone else’s stories.

The workshop, already important to me, became the focus of my life.

I had more writing time than most. I had split my full time McJob running an imagesetter at a graphic arts service bureau and ended up with four days a week in which to write. (and three 12 hour days to work.) I quit that job and became a half-assed freelancer, which was even more flexible.

I did write, every day, but I had a hard time finishing things. I’d drink a pot of coffee every morning, write five or six thousand words of email or USENET posts (the paleolithic version of Facebook) and finally crank out some fiction.

I’d start every story with high hopes, write a few thousand words, plot it out in my head, and eventually encounter myself on the page, my limitations, my ego, my hang-ups, my misery, my impatience, my insatiable desire for love and acceptance, my inappropriate lust, my weakness, my despair, my anger.

So I’d stop working on that story and start another.

By now the workshop was stable at around 10 people, who were getting to know each other pretty well. I scouted MIT’s science fiction writing class taught by Joe Haldeman for members. I joined a group of local Extropians and Cyrionicists (you know, people who are going to freeze themselves after death.). I started going to local SF conventions and making friends. Somewhere along the way, I made an executive decision, and named the group Critical Mass. Most people liked the name. A few hated it. I decided I could be autocratic, this one time, so we’d have a goddamn name. I suppose this marks the beginning of the workshop’s decline.

The best known writers to come out of that room were Michael Burstein and Mary Soon Lee. Michael was the 1997 John W. Campbell award winner, an Analog author, whose anthology “I Remember the Future is well loved. Fifteen of the 17 stories were nominated for a hugo or nebula award. Mary Soon Lee published seventy two stories over a period of a decade, breaking into Analog, Interzone, and F&SF, and getting a story into David Hartwell’s Best of the Year Anthology. There were other accomplishments, other points of light as well; one of my MIT finds sold a story called The Portable Girlfriend under the name Doug Teirny, which made it into the Years Best Erotica in 1997. Drax  got a piece in Gordon Lish’s The Quarterly. Being discovered by the guy who discovered Raymond Carver? Pretty cool.

Those who stuck with the workshop got somewhere. Always. Maybe only a few sales. But something, everyone got something. Steven Patten, Rick Silva, Dawn Albright, Sandra Hutchinson, Michael McComas, Jenise Aminoff, Sandra Hutchinson, Gil Pilli, Mark Sherwood, Simon Drax. Many of us became close if not exactly friends, united in this effort; colleagues… comrades.

Here is the thing; love and friendship among writers is sometimes conditional on the writing; leave the church of writing, and you’ll leave some friends behind, too. It’s not that you’re shunned, either. The drifting apart is mutual.

But the person who took the workshop to the next level for me, personally, was Mary Soon Lee, and her process.

1. Finish almost everything you start.

2. Workshop everything you finish.

3. Listen to critique, fix any typos or glaring errors that emerge, but don’t rewrite anything unless you feel like it; and you probably won’t. Just send it out to your top magazine choices. If you think it hasn’t a hope in hell of selling to your top markets, send first to smaller presses that like you.

4. Keep it out until it sells or you run out of markets.

This worked for her pretty well.

I started finishing things. Every two weeks, a new story, on the table. They started getting better. I’d sold that first story to Aboriginal SF; after that I sold another ten stories or so; if two more reached publication without the magazines that bought them folding, I would become a SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) Professional science fiction writer.

Um. Professional here doesn’t mean you  make a living; it means you sold three or more short stories (or one novel) to someone who distributed them as books or magazines by the tens of thousands.

The thing is, my internal critics barely let me write at all. Copying Mary Soon Lee forced me to finish all those stories of mine I hated, which I eventually would grow to love as I finished them, and hate again as they were rejected. Then, like Whit, I upped the ante, raised the stakes, and decided to apply to Clarion.

You know. So I could strengthen that internal critical voice.

You see where this is going.

Stay tuned for part 4: Post Clarion Wipeout: Nineteen Years in the Dark

Let’s return to a time before I had children, before I went to Clarion, before the internet bubble, before my so-called professional identity, before we had a mortgage and a car. I was a guy who’d scraped by for over a decade, in high-school, and college, and after a series of, oh, let’s call them medical problems, finally graduated from Syracuse University with a B average and a BFA.

Only took me the seven years.

Anyway, my first writing group dissolved, a few meetings, a few pieces, important, but transitory. My friendship with Ron and Marty Hale Evans continues to this day, but Steven Burke, his novel about the doomed Red Sox and the Crows, and the Vogon Poet, are long gone.

I do not remember how I found Whit Pond’s nameless group. Was it a flyer in a bookstore? Maybe the Science Fiction bookstore Pandemonium in Harvard Square? I took the Orange line to downtown crossing, caugth the red line and traveled through Cambridge into Somerville, Porter Square. I emerged from the insanely deep subway stop, up the three sets of escaltors, following directions from the flyer carefully, ending up at  new-england ranch house. The houses in Somerville reminded me vaguely of the those in suburban central New York, but the lots they inhabited seemed shrunken, the yards tiny patches of weeds or concrete blocks, the houses packed in side by side in a frightful density. Insufficient tree cover made the neighborhood look a little washed out, dingy.

Still, it was nicer than were I lived, in a brownstone apartment building in Jamaica plain.

The man who opened the door for me was middle aged, thick in the middle, with longish receding graying hair. He had a mild southern accent and radiated a calm and determined intelligence. He shook my hand, smiled somewhat sadly, and welcomed me to the group.

Whit’s critique group style was anarchy. We didn’t take turns. We interrupted each other. We shared a few stories every two weeks, and we talked about what was wrong with them. We didn’t talk about what was right with them, for a few reasons. One, there wasn’t much good about them. Two, Whit was a brutally honest critic, and he set the tone for the group.

Whit told us, over again, he didn’t care. We weren’t making  him care.

“I don’t like your characters. I don’t know what they’re doing. I don’t care about them. I don’t care about what’s happening. By page ten, I hate everyone. I’m hoping they all die horribly,” was what he told us, mostly, and mostly, it was true.

Whit’s critiques were breathtaking. The word flensing comes to mind. They made my heart hammer and my palms sweat. They hurt. And you knew, though, that Whit was only being honest. He liked science fiction, he liked stories. He just didn’t like yours. And, after Whit had pointed out their failings, neither did you.

And so I started to think, seriously, and continuously, about why we care about the stories we read. The made up people in the them. The bullshit situations. The make believe worlds. And suddenly, science fiction, a literature of ideas, became to me something else entirely; writing was really about character and emotion. Why do we care? Why do we care?

Every word I write now passes through that filter. Why should anyone care?

Workshoppers came and went; not many people could stand more than a few Whit crits, a few whittings. But one day, a pretty young woman showed up, in the pouring rain, seven months pregnant, looking like she was going to pass out. We brought her in, and listened to her. Let’s call her Rain. She’d sold a story to a goddamn magazine, to Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy magazine, a story called Black Ribbon.

She brought a copy to a meeting, and I read it. A lovely short  story about a cursed, imprisoned girl, bewitched into something toxic. Finally she is sent out by the people imprisoning her, to go to a dance, a ball. Where she dances with a host of royals, all of whom will be killed by her embrace. She’s just happy to be out of the house, dancing. Creepy. Weirdly moving.

I cared. It was good. And this woman had written it.

She taught us about the rules of workshopping, which she’d done before with actual writers who actually published things. She was  like some ancient goddess bringing fire to a bunch of grunting cave men. We would take turns. We would not interrupt each other. We would use a timer. The author would speak at the end. We would go around the circle. And then, with her in place, the group began to solidify; people started coming back, week after week.

Rain’s life, as it turned out, was a shambles. She’d been impregnated and abandoned by her worthless hippy husband, who had taken all her friends with him when he left her. She’d clawed her way from the bottom of a pit of murderous depression to come to the workshop that night, struggling with pregnancy releated blood pressure issues, staggering through the damn rain to bring the grunting cavemen fire. She came and she kept coming. She brought her baby with her a few times, because she didn’t have a lot of resources, being far from her family in Ohio. She dated one of the guys in the group for awhile, a strange angry bearded man named Jeff.

I talked her up to my friend Peter. They were married the day after I came back from Clarion.

First and foremost, though, Rain was a writer, who had sold a story to a magazine, and she knew how a workshop should be run. Whit, it must be said, took her advice, and while it didn’t soften his critique, somehow,he became more bearable, because his became  just one of a set of opinions given roughly equal weight. He still set the tone, but the group was now bigger than just him. The people who stuck were the people who could keep bringing stuff in. Some would become my friends for life. (but so many would fall away. Rain and Peter included. Life is like that sometimes.)

The group had no name, but we joked, sometimes, about being weasles, ripping each other’s flesh. Like the Frank Zappa Album cover above.

And the day came after a year or two when I would write a story that Whit didn’t hate.

He looked confused, at that meeting, flipping back and forth in the manuscript, trying to say, what it was he usually said, but he couldn’t. Because I’d made him care. He would call me, later in the week, at home, with a new series of complaints about the story, why it was deeply flawed, but it was too late. I’d sent it out.

The story was called Dollhouse, and it was my first professional sale, sold to Charlie Ryan at Aboriginal Science Fiction. In 1994.

Like Rain, I’d sold a story. I had my sign! I knew what was I doing.

Or so I thought at the time. For a while.

Until Clarion.

If you found this essay inspirational, interesting, amusing, whatever, join my mailing list. I mean, if you want to. I can’t make you. But I’m asking. Because you read this, and that means I sorta love you. Um. Okay, this got awkward. Boundaries! This is the link to my mail chimp page.

Once Upon a Time, I was going to Be a Writer. Sorry about the capitalization, but there was no avoiding it.

Of course, at first you don’t really want to be a writer as much as you want to be someone who has written. Better yet, someone who has published, really cool stuff, that you and a few million others really really like; love even.

You want to be so good you change people’s lives.

You want to give back to the Universe that feeling, those feelings, all that life you absorbed, acquired, imbibed, by reading. It’s only fitting, it’s only fair, that someone for whom books have been so important should write them.

So you write, for a few years, and you suck, and you can tell you suck. (See Above.)

Not to mention the fact that if you are as weak, as close to clinical depression, as undisciplined, as lazy, as I am, you talk about writing for years before doing it. (To be fair, I was waiting for word processing to be invented.)

When I finally started, I thought, if I wrote, and rewrote, and rewrote, my first story, long enough, it would be Publishable. Whatever that means. And so I wrote on it for a year, and finally sent it off to Analog, because, well I’d heard of Analog, and read a few issues. Or had I read Asimov’s? Anyway, I knew that Analog had once been Astounding, and Astounding had been great, and well, maybe I was great, too.

I printed the drafts out dot matrix on perforated fanfold paper every few days and marked up the copy with a red magic marker, an extrusion of wretched prose which grew longer and longer, but very slowly. Like a tumor.

Oh, that story. A novel’s worth of ideas, many of them stupid, in a novella length story-like thing. My first story combined elements of Eric Frank Russel’s Sinister Barrier with a Zelazny-like Men as God’s milieu, but set in the modern era; reality was a game played by a cabal of reincarnating immortals. The ending came to me in a dream–in a goddamn dream, a vision, and as I wrote it, I knew, I had tapped into something big, something incredible.

I’d be like Heinlein selling Lifeline to John W. Campbell. Oh, maybe I’d need to revise it. John Campbell sent back letters to aspiring writers longer than the stories themselves, i’d read, for Asimov and Heinlein and Clarke. OK, Campbell was dead, but whoever was editing Analog would probably write me a nice long note.

I remember that envelope, the weight of the manilla, the dot matrix address label, as I slid it into the pivoting maw of the blue Postal Box, and a sense of unease, or disquiet, as it fell away into blackness and suddenly, I couldn’t edit the damn thing anymore. The story was done.

I awaited my ascension.

I’ve lost that story, but I’m pretty sure it sucked donkey dick. An any rate, it was rejected with a half page form in six weeks, and I didn’t write another word for another year. Completely derailed by a completely ordinary foreseeable thing. I had no community. No support group. No friends who were writing. No class I was taking. I didn’t even read any books on how to write. I’d read 1000 novels, I should be able to write one. Jeeze.

Kids! Don’t be like me! They should bring me into writing workshops to give ‘scared straight’  rants to aspiring writers, like the convicts they use to frighten delinquents. It isn’t 1930 anymore, and I wasn’t Robert Heinlein, or JK Rowling or Neil Gaiman, and neither are you, and if you want to do this there are going to some goddamn bumps along the way. (See above.)

But during that year of mourning my Heinleinlessness, I met a friend, in a long-vanished basement used bookstore in Harvard Square, a great friend, a burly, hairy young man with thick glasses and a shy smile and a penetrating gaze. We talked for awhile, and it was like they say, you don’t make friends, you recognize them, and it turned out he wrote, too, and he had a group, and did I want to go? He gave me his phone number, because at that time, we didn’t have email addresses.

I was living  with my girlfriend, friendless in a strange city, in shock at finally leaving my miserable home town, temping and trying to figure out who I was and what the hell I was going to do with my life. Yeah. I wanted to go.

This was twenty five years ago, I still want to go, and I’m going, again. I haven’t yet grown out of the Workshop Thing. I gave them up, for a time, and as it turns out, when I give up on workshops. I stop writing fiction. But I digress.

I took the red line to Charlestown, to a basement cafe, and found my bearded friend Ron, an ordinary looking guy named Steve, and a petite young woman named Carol–who was, as it turned out, a poet. Sort of.

My writing life began that day, everything beforehand was a prelude. I had now created a feedback loop that didn’t require John W. Campbell to write me letters on how to fix my stories, because, John W. Campbell was, and remains,  very dead. I wasn’t dead. I was in my late twenties, the author of a single terrible novella, but I’d found the goddamned workshop, a few writers, somehow, this was going to work.

And it did. Sort of. Stay tuned.