Coalescent

It’s a truism that in the science fiction community the borders between fan and writer and critic and editor are relatively fluid. And so, curious about the borders, and about the roles I'm probably not going to play, I found myself reading Kate Wilhelm’s Storyteller, an unusual, amiable little writing manual masquerading as a memoir. Or possibly it’s the other way around.

It is, in part, the story of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. Clarion is the most prestigious and well-known workshop in the sf field: a six-week summer academy at Michigan State University (Lucius Shepard apparently called it a boot camp) for aspiring writers. Alumni include a significant proportion of the most lauded writers in the modern field: Kim Stanley Robinson, Kelly Link, Bruce Sterling, Octavia Butler, and many more. The format is simple. Each week for the first four weeks there’s a different writer in residence (for the last fortnight there’s a two-writer tag team). Every morning there are group critique sessions; every afternoon and evening there is writing, and individual conferences with the instructors, and socialising.

Wilhelm and her husband, Damon Knight, were the anchor team for those final two weeks for the best part of three of the four decades for which Clarion has been existence. And so Storyteller explains how the workshop started, how it struggled, how the two of them got involved, and what they taught, enlivened by anecdotes. At the risk of alienating a fairly large chunk of the people reading this, I’ve always been a little sceptical about the cult of the storyteller--Writers are special flowers and writing is a mystical, magical process!--that workshops seem to encourage. Too, the whole enterprise feels semi-mythological; there have been other incarnations (Clarion West; Clarion South, in Australia) but to date, no European spinoff has been successful, so the stories that filter out have a faraway feel to them. On the other hand, perhaps there’s an element of jealousy--if not specifically for the writing aspect, for the element of community that seems to go with it, and the implausibility of ever being able to take that much time off work in one go (or of being able to find sufficient money to make it feasible). But Clarion doesn't seem to be particularly a bastion of privilege, so it must be possible to go if you’re prepared to give up enough. (When they do something similar for critics, you know I'll be there.)

If I wanted to criticise, I could point to the strange sense of cosiness that permeates the book. Few of the anecdotes have names attached; they just happened to nameless students, adding to the general air of clubbiness (insiders, of course, will know who she’s talking about … right?). But you can see why Wilhelm does it--naming names would make the bluntness of the lessons sting that much harder, possibly even seem vindictive, and since the other main element of the book is too dispense writerly wisdom, it would be a counterproductive thing to do.

With the wisdom comes the other easy criticism: that Clarion teaches conformity; that it teaches how to produce saleable fiction, not art; that it’s responsible for too much mediocrity in the short fiction market. Of course that’s a false criticism too, because art can’t be taught, because editors will buy what they will. And moreover (as Wilhelm and Knight realised early on) some things about fiction surely can be taught. What Clarion really teaches, perhaps, is how to break into the market; how to display the basic competence that will earn the trust that allows a writer to experiment. And while it’s easy (as a layman) to quibble with some of the advice, to debate whether stories really have to follow all the rules, some of the other injunctions are beautifully acute. Some are specific to science fiction; most are surely generally applicable. My favourite observation is the definition of style: ‘how each writer solves individual problems of translating nonverbal material into verbal material’.

Most importantly, what is impossible to deny is that Clarion works. And in the end, the book works too. It gets under all my defenses. It’s a slice of history, a picture of the community, a piece of the conversation. And more than that, it engenders respect: for Wilhelm’s perceptiveness, and her compassion, but most of all her commitment to honesty. There is excessive candour in these pages, from years before John Clute formalised the sentiment. Somewhere (I didn’t note the page, for once; I was too engrossed in the reading, which should tell you something in itself) Wilhelm observes that anecdotes don’t make a story. Her own book just about proves that that rule is no more set in stone than any of the others.