Here’s a couple of interesting article from the Writers of the Future website that I thought I’d post for you guys. The first one, titled ‘Making It‘, is by Mike Resnick and talks a little bit about how writers become successful.
That leads to a plethora of questions. How do you make it as a writer? Do you start with short stories and build a reputation (and can you build one in these days of only a tiny handful of print magazines)? Do you start in an easier field (and is there any easy field)? Do you begin with novels? Nonfiction? Do you attend workshops and conventions, and start networking with other writers, or are they wastes of that rarest of a writer’s commodities: time?
My answer isn’t likely to thrill anyone, because what I’m going to do is quote Rudyard Kipling: There are nine and sixty ways, of constructing tribal lays, and each and every one of them is right.
Well, I’ll qualify it to this extent: every approach is right for those who have proved it is right for them.
The second article, On the Growth of Fantasy and the Waning of Science Fiction, by Brad Torgorsen, discusses examines why Fantasy (especially YA Fantasy) is exploding but Sci-Fi books are becoming more and more scarce these days.
Yet, as humans, we still long for these things. Well, a good many of us long for them, anyway. I believe that part of the reason why Fantasy continues to swell and Science Fiction has somewhat shriveled, is that Fantasy is a genre where we as a society can recapture what we miss: wizards and warlocks and necromancers, Dark Forces allied to battle the numerically-inferior but heroic Light Forces, and above all else a sense that life has meaning and purpose beyond the merely material, or the tangible. That there is a universal justice operating in the world, and while it is not always readily-accessible or apparent, it exists just the same. Not all is random. Not every meaning is a man-made, artificially-imposed meaning.
They’re both good reads, and I recommend checking them out.
Tagged with: Contests • Fantasy • Sci-fi • Writers of the Future
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I’m fantasy-ed out at the moment. There is just TOO much of it. We need a good sci-fi epic.