Martin L. Shoemaker: His program for writing

By Angelique Fawns

 

Martin L. Shoemaker has more than 30 years of experience in programming, writing, and teaching. He’s a popular mentor in the speculative fiction world, and has stories in Analog, Galaxy’s Edge, Writers of the Future Volume 31, and Clarkesworld. I met Shoemaker when I took his Fyrecon short story masterclass, “Tools Not Rules.”

He is a prolific creator and has some great advice for writers looking to learn story structure. Last year, he released a book called Making Story Models: Tools for Visualizing Your Story, and he has a salient bit of advice that stuck out for me.

“There is no One True Path. There’s no rule of writing that someone hasn’t successfully broken, save for one: You must write.”

Shoemaker was kind enough to take time out of his busy schedule to chat with us.

AF: Of all the tools in your writing toolbox, what do you find most useful?

MLS: It’s a tie between dictation and pantsing, because I do them both simultaneously and they’re intertwined in my mind. Dictation allows me to write faster and also to write in time I would otherwise lose: driving and exercising. On top of that, it tends to produce more natural dialogue.

Pantsing (or discovery writing, if you prefer) means I’m never at a loss for something to dictate. I don’t need a plan forward, I just need to know what happened and what my characters want. I think about where they are and what they do and what happens and what goes wrong, and story falls out of my mouth.

 

AF: Do you have any advice for writers hoping to make the transition from short form to long?

MLS: A short story is generally about one crucial event, possibly the most important event in that character’s life, and how you get there and what happens as a consequence. It’s a vision you can generally fit in your head all at once. You can concentrate and focus down as small as a single incident.

A novel almost has to be about a series of events. They might lead up to the single crucial incident (or follow it), but each event should also be worthy of a story in its own right. There should be challenge, build up, confrontation, and consequence; but then the consequence of one event should be or lead to the challenge of the next event.

Or maybe not the next. Maybe some future event, with another storyline with other events in between. A longer work has more room for multiple storylines, switching between them in a metaphorical juggling act. That lets you create tension in one storyline and then keep the reader in suspense as you switch to another storyline.

That’s a lot of words because it’s a big topic, and “fuzzy”. So I’d like to end with one very specific technique: Add more characters.

1. Look at a challenge your protagonist faces. Who else is concerned by that challenge? Do they see it the way the protagonist sees it? Or do they see it differently? Maybe they caused the challenge or benefit from it.
2. As the protagonist’s challenge builds up, does it draw in new characters?
3. When the protagonist confronts the challenge, does someone help? Is someone injured or affected by the confrontation?
4. In the consequences of the confrontation, do we find new characters who are drawn in?

Once you have identified new potential characters, can you identify challenges for them? How do those challenges build? What are their own confrontations? What are their consequences? Look for ways to tie the character’s storyline in to the protagonist, and vice versa. Then repeat, looking for yet more characters.

You don’t have to explore all of these side storylines, but they’re out there, giving you opportunities. They’re potential. There’s mathematics to show that every new significant character doubles the potential storylines. You won’t use all of that potential, but you can pick and choose to build a longer story.

 

AF: What is your writing process/routine?

MLS: Not as routine as it should be! When I apply myself, I can produce 80,000 words in a month or so, finished and ready to send to my agent. When I don’t apply myself, that same book might take a year or more (usually because I get sidetracked by other ideas). I need to settle into a middle ground.

But here’s the process when I stick to it.

1. In the morning, I get into my Jeep and drive to work. (Right now I work in the office two days a week, at home three.) I dictate for about an hour, getting 1,500 to 3,000 words. (My best morning was 5,000 words.)
2. At night, I drive home, and I dictate for another hour.
3. Before I allow myself to sleep that night, I transcribe the day’s recordings. This is as close to an absolute rule as I have: If I don’t transcribe the same day, I fall so far behind that I’ll never catch up.
4. One the weekend, I clean up the week’s transcriptions. This serves as a second draft—and generally a final draft. I don’t believe in a lot of rewriting. I’ve been trapped in the rewrite mentality. On my first nonfiction book, I literally spent a month on chapter one, page one, paragraph one, sentence one, rewriting it every day. Eventually I realized that the sentence wasn’t any better than it was the day before, it was just different. I was in a different mood yesterday, and I would be in a different mood tomorrow, but today’s sentence was my mood today. It was good enough. Move on.
5. Send it out: to first readers, to an editor, or to my agent, send it out. Move on.

I’m not saying this is The One True Process. I just find it’s working for me.

 

AF: You dictate much of your work. Can you tell us about that and how it works?

MLS: I touched upon this above, now let me get deeper into the nuts & bolts. (I describe this in a lot more detail in On Being a Dictator, my book on dictation cowritten with Kevin J. Anderson.)

I usually dictate when driving, so I need a good microphone that filters out noise. A car is a pretty noisy environment. (When I dictate in my home, I can use my computer mic or my iPhone.) The type of mic I use is called a cardioid mic. Skipping over a bunch of math, that means that sound from my mouth is amplified while sound in other directions is suppressed.

I plug that good mic into a good voice recorder. The most important thing for me is that the recorder has actual tactile buttons, not a touch screen. I need to be able to feel the buttons without taking my eyes off the road. (When I dictate at home, a touch screen is fine.)

Next I plug the recorder into my Jeep’s sound system and do a sound check. It’s really easy to hook things up improperly and record an hour of nothing, so I want to test before I get on the road.

Next I push the button to start recording.

Then, and only then, I put the Jeep in gear and start driving. I want to be hands free and eyes free before I hit the road.

Then I start dictating. [INSERT MAGIC HERE.]

When I reach a destination and park my Jeep, I push the button to stop recording.

Later I copy the file to my PC, I load it into Dragon NaturallySpeaking (my choice among many transcription tools out there), and I transcribe the file. When that’s done, I append the transcription to my story document.

Later still, I clean up the transcription. Even with a good mic, I get interesting transcription errors in a noisy environment. I also may choose between multiple recordings of a given line, or I may compose a new line on the spot. I may jump back and forth with touch-ups.

When the clean-up is done, I’m ready for feedback.

 

AF: Why have you chosen short stories and speculative fiction? 

MLS: Unless it’s for an anthology call, I almost never choose the story length. It’s as long as it needs to be, and I don’t know that until I write it. (Even with an anthology call, I often overwrite and then have to cut.) I can tell early on if it’s short or long, but I don’t know when I start dictating.

As for why speculative fiction… I’m torn between two answers by better writers than me. When Ray Bradbury was asked this question (I can’t find a link for it now), his paraphrased answer was, “What else is there?” He argued that science fiction is a way to scout the future, to ask “What if?” before we face a crisis or discovery.

In response to a similar question, the late Terry Pratchett was far less polite. He gave the interviewer a severe dressing down and an introduction to the history of literature, in which he demonstrated that speculative fiction has been the dominant form of literature since literature began, and so it needs no explanation.

I wish I were as eloquent as Bradbury or Pratchett. My answer is more mundane: These are the ideas that come to me, so these are the ideas I write. And these are the ideas I can sell. I have written a few non-speculative mysteries. So far, I’ve had no luck selling them, but my science fiction sells.

 

AF: Who are your mentors and influences?

MLS: Oh, that’s a long list! But let me give you the top of it.

• Jack McDevitt
• Barry Longyear
• Dave Wolverton
• Mike Resnick
• Robert A. Heinlein

Every one of them taught me specific writing lessons and wrote specific stories that had an impact on my writing today.

 

AF: If you were to point to an area of the industry where you have found the most profit, what would it be? 

MLS: There’s no doubt that my novels have been more financially successful overall. But I usually don’t consider that when deciding what to write. I go where the ideas are.

 

AF: What can we expect from you in the future? 

MLS: The May/June Analog will contain my novella, “Uncle Roy’s Computer Repairs and Used Robot Parts”, a humorous story about high tech in a small town. My agent is currently shopping A Fine and Dangerous Season, an unusual story about the stories we tell and the secrets behind them. And I’m currently writing a stoy about a Dwarf, an Elf, and a witch trapped in our world and finding work in the only place where they fit in: Hollywood.