Kim Huett (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} kimhuett) wrote,@ 2004-11-15 06:34:00 |
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The Jet-Propelled Anteater -- A. Vincent Clarke
This particular article was published in 1954, fifty years
ago and long before there was an Internet. Even though it
contains a number of references which won't make much
sense to anybody not familiar with science fiction fandom
of the fifties I think it's still interesting to consider the
attitudes and that Vince describes and ponder his solution
to them in light of what we have here at LiveJournal.
Sometimes I have an urge to run screaming into the night.
I know some of the nicest people that you could hope to meet outside Alcoholics Anonymous, but they nearly all have one delusion or hallucination in common--a complex that amounts to an idee fixe.
"Write for a magazine? " they murmur, nervously plucking at their glass. "Oh, but no, I couldn't. I'd love to write something, but I don't know what to write about." And a little later, if I'm still within hearing distance, "And I wouldn't know how to begin!" they weep, great salty tears running down their faces and into their beer.
Once upon a time I thought this was the honest-to-SF truth. I would sympathise and murmur that we couldn't all be Walt Willis and buy them another beer, and try and resign myself to the apparent fact that fandom in general, and the London Circle in particular, had more than its fair share of the dumb inarticulate mass. Whereupon this particular portion of the mass would pin me into a corner and discourse, volubly and wittily, for the next two hours, on a variety of subjects ranging from Aristotelianism to Zoology.
This irks me as an occasional fan editor and a frequent fan writer. Give these people a subject on which to argue and they'll talk till the milkman clinks his bottles outside the door, and the neighbours start comparing notes as to how quiet it was before those fantastic people moved in. . .
You can stop making notes on the margin and put that pencil down. I'm quite aware that writing is a different form of expression from talking. You can get away with conversational murder in a convivial atmosphere, and unless your listener has an eidetic memory or a tape recorder, you can cheerfully contradict yourself and leave points unanswered. I know that such conduct is impossible to God-fearing fans, but it can be done. Whereas, in writing, you must be reasonably exact; you have to be careful not repeat words or phrases, and in general you must progress in one direction instead of arguing in circles.
But in writing you can refer back; in writing you can use the rhythm of words as an asset; in writing you can pick your subject and expound on it without interruptions from lesser mortals.
Science fiction fans are alleged to be more literate, more voluble, more interesting, than canary fanciers, tramcar collectors and chess fiends. One rarely gets a short letter from a fan. And yet, British fan magazines are written by less than 20 different people, exclusive of the letter columns. Why?
Sheer laziness is one answer. It's a pretty good answer too, except that it doesn't explain why conventions draw 150+ fans who are willing to give up a week-end and undergo travelling and expense for the pleasure of getting together with other fans--a pleasure that goes on all the year long in fan magazines.
Obviously, there can be a large number of answers, but the one which I prefer, because it's the one that once affected me, and still affects many friends of mine, is simple lack of confidence. You don't believe that what you say can interest anybody, you don't think that you can say it properly, and you're afraid to find out. The same reason that keeps so many story manuscripts gathering cobwebs in the back cupboards of fandom applies to the humble fanzine, except that, in the first instance, you're losing the chance of financial gain, and in the second, the pleasure and friendships of fandom that so many folk seem to miss.
How do you gain that confidence? If I knew the exact answer I'd be running a 'Teach Yourself To Write' school, but I can give a few pointers which may be of some help. Firstly, do a little reading; books like the E.U.P. Teach Yourself To Express Yourself; the Pan pocket-book, Straight and Crooked Thinking; if you can find it, Stuart Chase's Tyranny of Words. This latter is about semantics--not the general semantics of Van Vogt's World of Null A, although it's allied to it--and though it has many faults, most of them luckily emphasised by the 18-year interval since its publication, it is still an engrossing story of a noted economist who suddenly realises that most of his writing is non-comprehensible 'blabbing'.
I'm not going into detail concerning these volumes; I couldn't do them justice, and I'd prefer you to make your own judgment on them. But when you realise how much nonsense passes for wisdom, and how much wisdom is lost through a simple breakdown of communication between writer and reader, you will suddenly realise that writing anything (well in fanzines) from articles on the mysticism of Olaf Stapledon, to the consequences of being bitten by a deer, the possibilities of rain on Venus, to the best way to buy a water-pistol, isn't totally beyond the rustiest typewriter.
Naturally, fanzines, like professional magazines, run to a certain type of matter. If you are interested in science fiction as a serious literary form, and wish to write constructive and critical articles, then you will send to one of the more serious fanzines, such as Operation Fantast. If your interest is in fandom, in fan's affairs and viewpoints, then Hyphen or a similar fanzine is the natural choice. You may write both types--but you'll rarely have them published in the same magazine!
Your style you will have to mould yourself. Remember that you're writing for friends, or at least people with the same quirk of mind as yourself. The only justification for an article written in the style of a Ph.D. thesis is that it makes your meaning clearer. People aren't going to look in fanzines for deathless prose written with Fowler's Modern English Usage in one hand and the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the other.
The value of a 'hook' at the beginning shouldn't be underestimated. You haven't the need to sell your article with some striking phrase as you would in a strictly commercial magazine, but if you can feel that you're off to a good start and that the reader is with you sheer inertia helps you along. I could quite easily have started: 'The factors which determine the exposition of subjects connected with science fiction in amateur magazines. . . ' but if I had, I doubt if you would be reading me this far along.
Don't worry too much about grammar. In this article I've started sentences with 'but' and 'and', practices frowned upon by grammarians, because it seemed natural. If you stop to think about the rules, to chop and change your sentences around, the result isn't your mind freely and openly trying to express ideas; you're damming the flow and damning yourself.
There's lots more. I could write an article twice as long as this on the subject of 'subjects' alone. How Walt Willis wrote 1500 excellent words on the difficulty of managing a typewriter with an extra-long carriage, the Rhodomagnetic Digest article on Modern Methods of Packaging, the articles inspired by some of the big controversies. . .
But space is short, and one of the primary rules is never to cram too much into one article. Leave the reader something to think about. For instance, the reason why I called this article The Jet-Propelled Anteater. . .
The Jet-Propelled Anteater
is reprinted from Fantast
Sidetrack -- Ed. Ken Slater (1954)
and is © A. Vincent Clarke
This particular article was published in 1954, fifty years
ago and long before there was an Internet. Even though it
contains a number of references which won't make much
sense to anybody not familiar with science fiction fandom
of the fifties I think it's still interesting to consider the
attitudes and that Vince describes and ponder his solution
to them in light of what we have here at LiveJournal.
Sometimes I have an urge to run screaming into the night.
I know some of the nicest people that you could hope to meet outside Alcoholics Anonymous, but they nearly all have one delusion or hallucination in common--a complex that amounts to an idee fixe.
"Write for a magazine? " they murmur, nervously plucking at their glass. "Oh, but no, I couldn't. I'd love to write something, but I don't know what to write about." And a little later, if I'm still within hearing distance, "And I wouldn't know how to begin!" they weep, great salty tears running down their faces and into their beer.
Once upon a time I thought this was the honest-to-SF truth. I would sympathise and murmur that we couldn't all be Walt Willis and buy them another beer, and try and resign myself to the apparent fact that fandom in general, and the London Circle in particular, had more than its fair share of the dumb inarticulate mass. Whereupon this particular portion of the mass would pin me into a corner and discourse, volubly and wittily, for the next two hours, on a variety of subjects ranging from Aristotelianism to Zoology.
This irks me as an occasional fan editor and a frequent fan writer. Give these people a subject on which to argue and they'll talk till the milkman clinks his bottles outside the door, and the neighbours start comparing notes as to how quiet it was before those fantastic people moved in. . .
You can stop making notes on the margin and put that pencil down. I'm quite aware that writing is a different form of expression from talking. You can get away with conversational murder in a convivial atmosphere, and unless your listener has an eidetic memory or a tape recorder, you can cheerfully contradict yourself and leave points unanswered. I know that such conduct is impossible to God-fearing fans, but it can be done. Whereas, in writing, you must be reasonably exact; you have to be careful not repeat words or phrases, and in general you must progress in one direction instead of arguing in circles.
But in writing you can refer back; in writing you can use the rhythm of words as an asset; in writing you can pick your subject and expound on it without interruptions from lesser mortals.
Science fiction fans are alleged to be more literate, more voluble, more interesting, than canary fanciers, tramcar collectors and chess fiends. One rarely gets a short letter from a fan. And yet, British fan magazines are written by less than 20 different people, exclusive of the letter columns. Why?
Sheer laziness is one answer. It's a pretty good answer too, except that it doesn't explain why conventions draw 150+ fans who are willing to give up a week-end and undergo travelling and expense for the pleasure of getting together with other fans--a pleasure that goes on all the year long in fan magazines.
Obviously, there can be a large number of answers, but the one which I prefer, because it's the one that once affected me, and still affects many friends of mine, is simple lack of confidence. You don't believe that what you say can interest anybody, you don't think that you can say it properly, and you're afraid to find out. The same reason that keeps so many story manuscripts gathering cobwebs in the back cupboards of fandom applies to the humble fanzine, except that, in the first instance, you're losing the chance of financial gain, and in the second, the pleasure and friendships of fandom that so many folk seem to miss.
How do you gain that confidence? If I knew the exact answer I'd be running a 'Teach Yourself To Write' school, but I can give a few pointers which may be of some help. Firstly, do a little reading; books like the E.U.P. Teach Yourself To Express Yourself; the Pan pocket-book, Straight and Crooked Thinking; if you can find it, Stuart Chase's Tyranny of Words. This latter is about semantics--not the general semantics of Van Vogt's World of Null A, although it's allied to it--and though it has many faults, most of them luckily emphasised by the 18-year interval since its publication, it is still an engrossing story of a noted economist who suddenly realises that most of his writing is non-comprehensible 'blabbing'.
I'm not going into detail concerning these volumes; I couldn't do them justice, and I'd prefer you to make your own judgment on them. But when you realise how much nonsense passes for wisdom, and how much wisdom is lost through a simple breakdown of communication between writer and reader, you will suddenly realise that writing anything (well in fanzines) from articles on the mysticism of Olaf Stapledon, to the consequences of being bitten by a deer, the possibilities of rain on Venus, to the best way to buy a water-pistol, isn't totally beyond the rustiest typewriter.
Naturally, fanzines, like professional magazines, run to a certain type of matter. If you are interested in science fiction as a serious literary form, and wish to write constructive and critical articles, then you will send to one of the more serious fanzines, such as Operation Fantast. If your interest is in fandom, in fan's affairs and viewpoints, then Hyphen or a similar fanzine is the natural choice. You may write both types--but you'll rarely have them published in the same magazine!
Your style you will have to mould yourself. Remember that you're writing for friends, or at least people with the same quirk of mind as yourself. The only justification for an article written in the style of a Ph.D. thesis is that it makes your meaning clearer. People aren't going to look in fanzines for deathless prose written with Fowler's Modern English Usage in one hand and the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the other.
The value of a 'hook' at the beginning shouldn't be underestimated. You haven't the need to sell your article with some striking phrase as you would in a strictly commercial magazine, but if you can feel that you're off to a good start and that the reader is with you sheer inertia helps you along. I could quite easily have started: 'The factors which determine the exposition of subjects connected with science fiction in amateur magazines. . . ' but if I had, I doubt if you would be reading me this far along.
Don't worry too much about grammar. In this article I've started sentences with 'but' and 'and', practices frowned upon by grammarians, because it seemed natural. If you stop to think about the rules, to chop and change your sentences around, the result isn't your mind freely and openly trying to express ideas; you're damming the flow and damning yourself.
There's lots more. I could write an article twice as long as this on the subject of 'subjects' alone. How Walt Willis wrote 1500 excellent words on the difficulty of managing a typewriter with an extra-long carriage, the Rhodomagnetic Digest article on Modern Methods of Packaging, the articles inspired by some of the big controversies. . .
But space is short, and one of the primary rules is never to cram too much into one article. Leave the reader something to think about. For instance, the reason why I called this article The Jet-Propelled Anteater. . .
The Jet-Propelled Anteater
is reprinted from Fantast
Sidetrack -- Ed. Ken Slater (1954)
and is © A. Vincent Clarke
