Critical Thinking

 
by Kersley Fitzgerald

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My first published story (not purchased, mind you, just published) is based in the same universe as one of my half-finished novels. It's a rich setting. Not because of the locale, as most everything occurs on run-of-the-mill spaceships and stations and random planets. But historically and technically. In the novel, I employed a “dumb puppet” to learn the ropes as a surrogate for the reader. A short story doesn't give you that kind of time, unless you want half your word count to go toward back-story. Not really a good idea.

The story was published in The Cross and the Cosmos, an emag affiliated with Jeff Gerke's Marcher Lord Press. The Anomaly is the sister-forum for fans and wanna-bes, and I've been active since before I came across you good hobbitses. One of the Anomaly regulars has been good enough to post reviews of the upstart magazine's stories. Here's a portion of what he said about “Christmas Time.”

...an important part of the sci-fi element seems particularly unlikely. The inhabitants of this future universe seem to be able to travel throughout time fairly easily, and the limits of this ability are not clearly defined. Despite its crucial role to the whole point of the story, the time-travel element actually doesn't effect [sic] the course of the plot very significantly. I'm not sure whether or not this produces an undesirable effect. The background of the story feels a little peculiar with such advanced, paradoxical science fiction themes appearing alongside many features that are more-or-less exactly the same as in real life.

I see his point. Not that the back-story isn't full and rich and complete, but that it's impossible to get from the short story. By that, I mean impossible to fit into a short story. It involves genetic gifts, trans-dimensional nano-organisms, and thousands (if not millions) of years of winding, ridiculously complex alternate time-lines. It took three books (one not written yet) to initialize and one to flesh out. All that was required to know about the shorter story's plot was that a family is attempting to travel through time and space to reach family for Christmas—and then they get a bit lost. Time travel, space travel, even the presence of Christianity in a space-opera setting are established in another (unpublished) venue. But there's no word count available to answer all the readers' questions in the short story format.

This problem is by no means uncommon. I finally got around to reading Stephen Baxter's "The Ice Line" in the February 2010 edition of Asimov's. It is a sequel to "The Ice War" (Asimov's, September 2008) and loosely related to the novel Anti-Ice.

It reads like a piece of a larger whole. Even the narrator refers to other people and events outside the scope of the particular story. And yet, I'm not sure these particular characters show up anywhere else. It makes for ambiguous reading; I never knew if I was missing vital information or if anything extraneous was unnecessary.

I recently reread Anne McCaffrey's “The Girl Who Heard Dragons.” (The Girl Who Heard Dragons, Tor, 1994) It's set on Pern, and for most readers, that would be enough information. But those unfamiliar with the world know nothing of Thread or Pernese dragons. Familiarity with the setting is imperative to understand what's going on. What's a “Weyrleader” or a “Lord Holder”? What are the caverns of Igen? And why does the arrival of the character “Lessa” seem to bring out such sentimentality in the author?

Anne does use quite a bit of back-story in “The Girl,” but it's mostly directly related to the characters, not the culture and environment of Pern. The story, as well as “The Smallest Dragonboy” (Get off the Unicorn, Del Rey, 1987), is obvious written as a sort of gift for loyal readers. Perhaps with hope that the stories will be compelling enough to draw new readers to her novels.

This works if you're a real-life-famous author, but what about the rest of us? I think the key is what I tried to do: explain the minimum of the setting/environment/unusual tech that's required for the story, then make the story as independent of the background novels as possible. Not that events and characters can't cross over, but they should be as fully formed as necessary within the short story. We can't rely on the expertise of a loyal readership; the story has to be about the story and the characters.

And the purpose of the story is different. We're not rewarding our fans with a little gift, we're trying to drum up interest in the little-known bigger picture—and in our names as authors. An even bigger reason to concentrate on story over setting.

That's just my take. What problems do you come across when writing a short story affiliated with a novel or series? What do you do to make the shorter plot successful? Can you write an autonomous short story based in a rich, complex setting? How many times can I use the word "story" in one article?

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Kersley Fitzgerald is writing this article on her brand new computer, as the mother board on the old one unceremoniously died (most likely due to dust and dog hair). Maj Tom is in the next room, watching Matthew McConaughey slay dragons. There's something surreal about that whole scenario.