THE ICE PICK

Putting It Together : Turning Sow’s Ear Drafts into Silk Purse Stories, by Mike Resnick. Berkeley Heights, N.J., Wildside Press, 2000. 184 p. $17.50. ISBN: 1-58715-175-8.

This fascinating book has a very different approach to helping you improve your stories.

Instead of the usual how-to-write rules, inspiration, and/or advice, Resnick has taken two of his own stories and shown his earlier drafts, plus the final drafts of three other published stories along with his discussions of various points with fans and other writers.

This is a fun book just to read, but it is not an easy book to use.

If you are a serious writer wanting to improve your craft, you need to sit down with the stories, examine them, and take them apart to learn how they were constructed and how Resnick improved them with his successive drafts, and understand how and why he approached and solved things the way he did.

His replies to the questions asked him about his stories are priceless in themselves, telling far more than just about that particular story.

For example, "Every single [thing] must serve the needs of the story or be jettisoned." "You don’t have to climb on a soap box and lecture to a reader to get your point across. Give him two events to compare and contrast." "You choose words to say exactly what you want, not approximately."

You learn a lot too, just from understanding that even an expert writer, like Resnick, doesn’t start out with a polished, perfect story, but must revise and rework his ideas and his stories to achieve the results he wants.

His three drafts of "The Land of Nod" demonstrate this very clearly, as he comes closer each time to making the story work and to realizing his vision. He speaks of being "dissatisfied with this the entire time" he was writing the first draft, although "the opening was fine," and "the end was what I wanted," but "everything in between [was] pretty poor." And then he shows how and what he changed to repair the story.

This book is a real treasure, and you can learn a lot from it.

{Published in SF and Fantasy Workshop Newsletter, Mar. 2005.}