About Writing. Samuel R. Delany
Quickly He Hardly Realized It Had Snapped, or: Reflections on “The Beach Fire”
Preface and Acknowledgments
If you are a writer, more and more you’ll find yourself writing about writing—especially today, as creative writing classes at the university level grow more and more common.
Writers make their critical forays in many genres: letters to friends, private journals, interviews, articles for the public, general or academic, and at all levels of formality. Rather than try for an artificial unity, I thought, therefore, to give an exemplary variety. Today such variety seems truer to its topic.
After the preface and a general introduction, this handful of pieces on creative writing continues with seven essays, each taking up an aspect of the mechanics of fiction. (I am more comfortable with “mechanics” than “craft”; but use the term you prefer.) The first two, “Teaching/Writing” and “Thickening the Plot,” grew out of Clarion Workshops many years ago, when the workshops were actually held in Clarion, Pennsylvania, under the aegis of their founder, Robin Scott Wilson. (For more than twenty years now they have been given every summer both in East Lansing, Michigan, and in Seattle, Washington. Since 2004, Clarion South, a third chapter, has been held at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia.) “Characters” first appeared as an invited essay in a 1969 issue of the SFWA [Science Fiction Writers of America] Forum, when it was under the editorship of the late Terry Carr. “On Pure Storytelling” grew out of a comment made to me by Hugo and Nebula Award–winning novelist Vonda N. McIntyre, when I was privileged to have her as a writing student at an early Clarion. (The comment itself is recorded in “Teaching/Writing.”)