by James Van Pelt
In this short essay, James Van Pelt discusses how his persistent writing habits and lasting friendship with Ed Bryant helped him become a better writer. James also outlines some of the unique questions about pushing his characters that helped inspire his latest story, “Her Fierce Need,” from our March/April issue, on sale now!
I’ve been writing for a while, and during that time my process for writing stories evolved. Of course, at the beginning, I had no real idea what I was doing. I took one of my first pieces to a writing conference where Ed Bryant was a presenter. He also scheduled sessions where he’d critique an attendee’s story. This was in the early ’80s, so I would have been in my late 20s. But I was a high school English teacher who’d been a life-time science fiction reader. Plus I’d been writing for a while, won a local writing contest, and generally was full of myself. Surely Ed would read my story and immediately put me in touch with his agent.
Instead, when I met him, and my manuscript sat on the table between us (with a distressing number of hand-written comments), he said, “If I tell you up front that this is unmitigated shit, everything I say after will sound better. Right?”
Years later, after Ed and I became friends, he told me that before our critique session he’d spent too much time with Harlan Ellison, which rubbed off, and also my meeting was at the conclusion of the week-long conference, and he was tired. At any rate, he decided at the end of our meeting that the story wasn’t entirely “unmitigated.”
Over time, I got better, and as I grew as a writer I learned that there are many ways into a story and many ways to tell one.
I’m a pantser, seldom planning how a story will go. Certainly I don’t write an outline, not even a rudimentary one. I’ll start with almost nothing. It could be a line of dialogue, an interesting first sentence, an image, a mood, a bit of poetry, or a throw-away scene from a movie (I have an entire essay about the music box moment from the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still). I’ve started stories because a song stuck in my head, or an over-heated description on the back cover of a book I’m holding in a bookstore triggered an idea completely unrelated to the cover copy I just read.
Also, it has been my habit to write at least 200 words a day. Some days I don’t have any idea at all, but I do have the writing streak, so I’ll write the first sentence that pops into my head.
Sentences written that way aren’t actually random, you know. The sentence came out of your head for some unconscious reason. Only you could have written it, so continue the thought. Write the next sentence, and then the next and the next. Before you know it, you’re creating a story.
More often than not, I’ll be several days into a story, and if someone asked what provoked me to start, I won’t remember. Do you know how sometimes you’ll wake in the morning after a vivid dream, and you think that you’ll tell someone about it later, but later comes and you can’t recall the dream at all? All you know now is that you had a dream.
Trying to reconstruct what impulse inspired a story can be like that.
This story, “Her Fierce Need,” came from a narrative experiment. The first scene, where the girls do a pretend space flight, came to me pretty much complete. Details appeared as I needed them, as they do, but I didn’t have a story. I did have characters, though, and a vital part of a conflict. I knew what the characters wanted.
My experiment here was to push the story forward based solely on what provoked the first scene: a need to put my characters together to see what happens to them next. I didn’t have an ending. I just had scenes. But writing the scenes was fun. The story appeared slowly using this process.
My normal method in writing a story is based on my idea of conflict, which is someone wants something, something stands in the way, and something of value is at stake.
Once I know those three elements, I can write the story. If I know what the character wants, the question becomes what does the character do to move toward that goal. The character does something, and that changes the nature of the world. If the character didn’t get what they wanted because of what they did (often, what they do makes the situation worse driving them further from their goal), what do they do next?
The story moves forward, following the character as they keep doing things, which changes the world, and then the character doing the next thing. Along the way, other characters can act, sometimes in opposition to my character (villains act in opposition, but “villain” is such a judgy word), and sometimes the world acts: the car won’t start, a message isn’t delivered, a train is missed, etc.
A plot generates into existence.
If I know an ending, I can move toward it at a steady pace. Without an ending for “Her Fierce Need,” I wrote slowly, taking long breaks while I worked on other projects until the next scene came to me.
After I’d written a few scenes, I made conceptual breakthroughs about the story. First, it would be very episodic. No transitional sentences to get from one scene to the next, just page breaks. Second, the story would cover a long period in the characters’ lives. Third, the story had several threads. It traces how a breakthrough in technology might change space travel. It also explores how difficult it might be to get to space, even if the paths out of the atmosphere become more varied than they are now. Mostly I became interested in the relationship between my two main characters. They shared the same goals, and they were each other’s best supporters, but they possessed entirely different skills and capabilities.
I discovered while writing that the background for the story is technological, but the heart of the story is . . . well . . . the heart. I find friendship, truly felt, kindred spirit kind of friendship that is quite rare to be compelling.
The story became about that friendship, along with what I think many science fiction fans possess, a yearning for the potential of spaceflight to be fulfilled.
So that’s how I do it, kind of, sort of, in one way or another.
Everyone writes differently. More than that, even if on the outside two writers might appear to have a similar process, what’s going on in their heads will be quite separate.
I go the Rainforest Writers’ Retreat every year. We have a communal writing area that many of the writers use. I find almost nothing more fascinating than looking up and seeing the other writers staring at their computer screens or scribbling away in their notebooks, composing story, each in their own, unique, unshareable, unreplicable way.
From Earth to the Stars 