About Writing. Samuel R. Delany

Quickly He Hardly Realized It Had Snapped, or: Reflections on “The Beach Fire” 107 Some Notes for the Intermediate and Advanced Creative Writing Student 117 Part II FOUR LETTERS Letter to P— 151 Letter to Q— 161 Letter to R— 181 Letter to S— 201 Part III FIVE INTERVIEWS A Para•doxa Interview: Experimental Writing/Texts & Questions 209 An American Literary History Interview: The Situation of American Writing Today 271 A Poetry Project Newsletter Interview: A Silent Interview 299 A Black Clock Interview 311 A Para•doxa Interview: Inside and Outside the Canon 337 Appendix: Nits, Nips, Tucks, and Tips Name, Date, Place 375 Read Widely 377 Grammar and Parts of Speech 377 Sentences 382 Punctuating Dialogue 385 A Final Note on Dialogue 397 Apostrophes 399 Dramatic Structure 400 Excitement, Drama, Suspense, Surprise, Violence 408 Point of View 411 First Person 412 Trust Your Image 415 Write What You Know 417

      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.”)