I've been rereading my old stories. I'm going over them with a finetooth comb, looking for awkward sentences, metaphors that don't work, descriptions that seem weak or cliched or repetitive --I'm even reading them aloud, which is an painful yet useful way to make sure that everything really sounds right. In June, these stories are going to be published in a collection called Stranger Things Happen. After several months of reading slush for one of the SF magazines, reading a Terry Brooks novel (in order to write the jacket copy), reading every single selection that comes into the Online Writing Workshop, reading the new Stephen King book On Writing (for fun), and reading my own work, I'm beginning to develop some theories about how fiction works, when it works, and why it doesn't work, when it doesn't.

At the moment, I'm intensely interested in how writers can use small details to convey character, motivations, setting, and mood. I'm not talking about window-dressing sort of details, such as gem-like eye colors. (In real life, how often do you meet women or men with topaz or emerald-colored eyes? How often do you come across them in epic fantasy or SF novels? In real life, do you even notice the color of a stranger's eyes? Or the eyes of your children's teacher? I usually don't. But in standard fantasy novel, it occasionally seems as if each characters is given a brilliantly colored pair of contact lenses upon entering the plot. For further rants on cliches like eye color, pick up a copy of Diana Wynne Jones's Tough Guide to Fantasyland.)

Character description shouldn't be a catalogue of physical attributes--in fact, good writers know how to leave things out. Or rather, good writers go back through their first drafts and prune back all those lyrical descriptions of which they were originally most proud. There's a workshop saying that sums up this process: "Kill your babies." After you've written your first draft, I'd encourage you to cut out as many adverbs, adjectives, internal monologues, and eye colors as you can stand. By all means, experiment with styles, but make sure you've mastered a plain, pared-down prose style. Overwriting, like overexplaining, is fatal to narrative pace. My secret vice is leaving out things like endings, or the gender of my characters--and there's even a French writer, Perec, who wrote an entire novel without using the letter "e." It's called A Void. Try leaving things out--it's a lot of fun.

In place of things like eye color, give your readers something tasty and nutritious--some detail about your characters or your setting that will seem both familiar and strange. (Like the Steven Wright joke in which a man comes home and discovers that all of his furniture has been stolen by burglars and then replaced with exact replicas.) Feel free to cannibalize your own life, or the lives of your friends or relatives (tastefully, of course).

You want to remind readers of the real world at the same time that you're stealing them away. Maybe your character has an obsession with a particular kind of music, or sport--there aren't enough sports in fantasy and science fiction. Don't give your main character a sidekick--make your main character a sidekick! The Tontos of the world are much more interesting than the Lone Rangers, as the writer Karen Joy Fowler has shown us. Maybe the world you're building is flat as a pancake, right up to the horizon--no hills, mountains, or valleys. How would this affect the personality of its peoples? Even religions might be a little odd, in a place where there were not a single mountain (to come to Mohammed), not a single (shadow of the) valley (of death).

There are two basic tricks to writing fantasy or science fiction. You can make everyday things seem strange and magical/otherworldly, like the K-Mart in Shari Willadson's short-short "Roger's Corollary." Or else you can make strange and otherworldly things seem cosy and homey, by comparing spaceships to teacup saucers, spell books to recipe books. The trick is in the details.

--Kelly Link

Copyright © 2000 by Kelly Link

Want to find out more about Kelly Link's writing? Check out her Web site!

Or read some of her published work:

• "The Specialist's Hat" (World Fantasy Award Winner, 1999)
• "The Girl Detective" (Event Horizon)
• "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose" (Fence)
• "Survivor's Ball (or, The Donner Party)" (Dark Planet)
• An excerpt from "Travels with the Snow Queen"