Greetings all. I went to a workshop recently attended by a professional SF writer (names withhels for professionalism). Below is his letter. Those of you who don't like my writing will feel vindicated, those of you who feel otherwise will feel something else.

Here it goes

Dear Rick,
You might have found yourself in for a bit of a drubbing if you'd stuck around. People did talk about your story. Response seemed to be totally negative on a variety of levels. Some people took offense at the sexual content of your imagery, which I myself think is quite irrelevant to the merit or lack of merit of the piece.

My response was a rather bored, "Oh, an old-fashioned avant-garde story." Several other people mentioned the New Wave. In a negative sense,
this is a New Wave story, that negative sense being (to use Lee Weinstein's definition) "the use of avant-garde techniques to hide the fact that the author has nothing to say."

What you need to appreciate is that the "experimental" story is one of
the most conservative of literary forms. It does not evolve. In every generation, new writers, usually young ones, decide that they will transcend the need for a story, for characters, motivations, themes, point of view, or even coherent sentence structure. They tend to do this the same way that unpromising (though candid) art students will sometimes say, "I can't draw. I guess I'll have to do abstracts," which of course shows no understanding of what abstract art actually is.

"Experimental" stories tend to be like that. They've developed their own set of cliches, and you've got most of them down cold, though the typical experimental story is written in the present tense and your tenses wander all over the place, sometimes within the same sentence. (This is not a good
thing.) There was a time, for a couple years on either side of 1970, when this sort of writing was publishable in science fiction, mostly due to the
naivete of people who thought this was a way to gain Mainstream Respectability. Of course it wasn't, any more than a schoolboy pastiche of James Joyce is the same as James Joyce. Writers who wrote that sort of thing have either learned to do something else, or they are not publishing anymore.

The best advice I can give you is not to go this route. It will lead to frustration. It will waste any talent you may actually have.

Instead, learn to write stories. Learn to have characters, with motivations. Learn what point of view is and how to use it. Use good grammar. Learns story structure. "Plot" is not a bad word. Emotional involvement is not a bad thing. The typical avant-garde story tries to put Brechtian barriers between the reader and the story. Much of the purpose of
the "unconventional" prose, the short passages, a structure self-consciously taken from some other form (e.g. dividing the story into "cantos"), is to
constantly direct the reader's attention to the FORM and away from any possible emotional involvement. I think the ultimate reason for this is ideological, a kind of Marxist/Puritan work ethic of art which holds that if you can enjoy it, it must be escapist, decadent, and wicked.

I recall an "avant-garde" play I once saw, which was performed in a corridor, with a large plastic bag between the audience and the actors. You mostly saw the bag. The result of this sort of thing is more likely to be a complete mess than anything brilliant.

I hope you will come back, but try to bring a story next time. I'd also like to hear a little about your experiences at Clarion. If you wrote this
way there, you must have gotten into some very interesting arguments.

____

BAD PRESS IS BETTER THAN NO PRESS