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Worlds Without End Blog

Do You Want to Be a Science Fiction Writer? Posted at 11:42 AM by James Wallace Harris

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This is an important time of year for would-be science fiction writers. The big three SF writing workshops, Clarion, Clarion West, and Odyssey are taking applications for their 6-week workshops this summer. Application deadlines are March 1, March 1, and April 1. These workshops require a serious commitment of time and money, but you get to work with professional writers and editors. You’ll need roughly $5000 to cover tuition and expenses not counting travel costs. The real commitment is finding six weeks free from work. Acceptance is based on a story you submit with your application. James Gunn offers a shorter 2-week Speculative Fiction Writing Workshop June 9-12, for those who have less vacation time.

Clarion, Clarion West, and Odyssey are for people committed to becoming writers. Many modern science fiction writers got their start at these workshops. Each year, around fifty students attend these workshops. Many of them go on to sell stories. A few of them go on to sell novels. Wikipedia even lists alumni for Clarion and Clarion West.

These workshops are based on submitting stories and having them critiqued by fellow students. You’re expected to write a story a week. There are countless general fiction writing workshops, MFA programs, creative writing courses that use the same techniques to get feedback on your work. Then there’s Critters Workshop, an online critiquing system for those agoraphobic writers who never want to leave home.

If you’re a new writer, critiques by other would-be writers are the marketing research you want the most. Don’t expect your first few dozen stories to be worth reading. Jamie Todd Rubin’s experience is more typical. And I’ve read memoirs by writers who claimed it took writing two hundred short stories before they started selling professionally.

Our genre often feels far more open to new writers than other genres. Several sites for science fiction writers such as Duotrope, Ralan, SFWA (you don’t need to be a member to read their market reports), Locus Magazine, Writer’s Digest, Critters Black Hole, will help you find magazine publishers that are open to new submissions.

One way I keep up with the event horizon of the latest science fiction is to subscribe to digital SF magazines at Amazon. For $12 a month I get the latest issues of Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, and Lightspeed automatically sent to my iPad. I wished that F&SF still offered a monthly Kindle subscription. I do miss the wonderful paper editions, but mailing labels ruining beautiful cover art was just too painful, so I’ve gone digital. There’s more free science fiction being published on the web today than any immortal could read, so if you’re too cheap to support the markets you want to sell to, at least read their stories online as market research. If you want to know your real competition, just buy any of the annual best-of-the-year anthologies.

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