So, tell your readers a story. Tell yourself a story. And if you start boring yourself you can be certain-sure that you’re going to bore your readers. Go back to the point where you’re still interested in what you were writing and check out the story logic, or the people you’re writing about.
And mind you, everyone I’ve ever talked with in the profession has a different way of getting down to the nitty-gritty of writing. It’s not how you do it, but that you are doing it. For instance, all I know about a story or a novel is its starting point: The initial conflict and the personalities involved in the conflict. I know a story is going well when all of a sudden I find the characters doing something that wasn’t exactly what I had thought they should be doing; that will send the story in a new direction, or provide a different emphasis. I used to put a recalcitrant story to one side, until “they” learned to behave themselves. Now I’ve learned that “they” know who they are better than I do, and I’d better present them to the world properly. It’s a feeling of power like no other to have characters take off on their own and become people to you and the others they are interacting with.
Sometimes you have to go back and rearrange earlier paragraphs or chapters to correspond to what actually happens later on. Great, that sort of spontaneity is a gift of the Muses. I rewrote the first chapter of Dragonsinger fourteen times until I had it right. And that’s after eight or nine rough drafts when I was experimenting with how to start off in the first place. (It’s not always that much hard work. And these days, ain’t word-processors the best things since sliced bread for that sort of tinkering?)
So, my first deathless advice is TELL US A STORY. My next is to learn how to spell and acquire some basic understanding of grammar and syntax. The best “style” emerges from simple clarity of expression, and that requires communicating in accurate language. After all, you wouldn’t drive a car, would you, without gas and oil? Well, how could you expect to drive the vehicle of your imagination without consistent spelling and grammar?
You might think that such matters fall within the province of an editor or copy editor. But you had better convince that copy editor you basically know what you’re doing, or you’re in big trouble. And if you get changes in your syntax, wouldn’t it be much better to know when s/he’s wrong? I remember how incensed my old friend, Elsie Lee, was when she received back the galleys of a Regency novel and every single word of her carefully constructed period dialogue had been rewritten by a conscientious twenty-two-year-old editor who had never been exposed to the idea that people in historical times spoke differently. She made him change it all back.
So, the second deathless line of advice is to “know how to spell and construct a sentence.” It gives you confidence. And that only makes telling a story easier to do.
But in the end, becoming a writer is more DOING than all the agonized inspiration, the grammar, the clever metaphors, the apt similes or polished, witty phrases. So often, brilliant ideas discussed in front of admiring friends die the death of the Doing. They get “talked away” and never reach paper. Writing in itself is a solitary lifestyle. But it has to be done. All the talking in the world won’t do it for you.
As Charles Dickens put it, “I hold my inventive faculty on the stern condition that it must master my whole life, often have complete possession of me, and make its own demands upon me, and sometimes for months together put everything else away from me.”
And he is still right!
So my last caveat is: “Don’t bother to show/send your story to admiring teachers, relatives, or friends.” They aren’t buying it. They can warble delight and envy, approval and admiration. But they are not your audience, which cares naught for your tender ego. Your real audience demands a good story. Your relatives are not going to pay you one ruddy cent for your carefully crafted words. Chance your arm: send the wretched thing to the magazine/book publisher of your choice. And keep sending it until it breaks through into publication on its own merits. Having the story bought is the only positive assurance that you have become a writer.
So, tell us a story!
Gator
written by
Robert J. Sawyer
illustrated by
Joshua Meehan
ABOUT THE STORY
Although most science fiction and fantasy short stories are written on spec—without a contract, and, indeed, usually without even a specific market in mind—there’s also a vigorous trade done in commissioned stories. These are most often created for anthologies devoted to a specific theme.
Some in the industry have tried to denigrate these—rarely, if ever, does such a story make a year’s best anthology or the Locus recommended reading list. But, in fact, lots of innovative, creative, and entertaining work is done in this way. After all, almost every novel you’ve ever read by an established writer was commissioned—contracted for before it was written—and no one ever pooh-poohs those works.
One of the joys of short story commissions is that authors are often asked to write stories that they’d never produce otherwise. All my novels are hard SF, but I’ve been invited to write both fantasy and horror at short lengths. I’ve even been invited to contribute to libertarian SF anthologies; as I quipped (while accepting the commissions!) to those editors, “I don’t think it’s technically possible to be both a Canadian and a libertarian.”
Everybody else in this anthology wrote a story hoping it would place in the Writers of the Future Contest—but our Contest winners have a strong history of very quickly starting to receive story commissions, like the one I got for this story. The late Josepha Sherman—who was one of my favorite people in the SF world—asked me to contribute to an anthology she was editing with Keith R.A. DeCandido of tales based on urban legends, like those described in the nonfiction books of Jan Howard Brunvand, such as The Vanishing Hitchhiker. Jo and Keith loved the story, and used it as the lead piece in their anthology Urban Nightmares—and I’m proud to have it reprinted here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert J. Sawyer is one of only eight writers in history—and the only Canadian—to win all three of the science fiction field’s top awards for best novel of the year: the Hugo, which he won in 2003 for Hominids; the Nebula, which he won in 1996 for The Terminal Experiment; and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, which he won in 2006 for Mindscan. His latest novel is the #1 Locus bestseller Quantum Night. Rob lives in Toronto and was recently named a member of the Order of Canada, the highest civilian honor bestowed by the Canadian government. He is also past president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and one of the initial nine inductees into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
Joshua Meehan is a freelance artist in the science fiction and fantasy field who studied illustration and visual communication at the University of Arizona. Since 2013, Joshua has worked on film, publications, tabletop games, and video games.
His clients include Paizo Publishing, Fantasy Flight, Penny Publications, and Bethesda Softworks LLC. Joshua’s work comprises characters and creatures cast in fantastical locations and scenarios that are sparked from events in history and nature that surround us.
He is a former quarterly winner of the Illustrators of the Future award. His artwork was published in L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 29.
Gator
Something scampered by in the dark, its footfalls making tiny splashing sounds. Ludlam didn’t even bother to look. It was a rat, no doubt—the sewers were crawling with them, and, well, if Ludlam could get used to the incredible stench, he could certainly get used to the filthy rodents, too.
This was his seventy-fourth night skulking about the sewers beneath New York. He was dressed in a yellow raincoat and rubber boots, and he carried a powerful flashlight—the kind with a giant brick battery hanging from the handle.
In most places, the ceiling
was only inches above his head; at many points, he had to stoop to get by. Liquid dripped continuously on the raincoat’s hood. The walls, sporadically illuminated by his flashlight beam, were slick with condensation or slime. He could hear the rumble of traffic up above—even late at night it never abated. Sometimes he could hear the metal-on-metal squeal of subway trains banking into a turn on the other side of the sewer wall. There was also the constant background sound of running water; here, the water was only a few inches deep, but elsewhere it ran in a torrent, especially after it had rained.
Ludlam continued to walk along. Progress was always slow: the stone floor was slippery, and Ludlam didn’t want to end up yet again falling face forward into the filth.
He paused after a time and strained to listen. Rats continued to chatter nearby, and there was the sound of a siren, audible through a grate in the sewer roof. But, as always, he failed to hear what he wanted to hear.
It seemed as though the beast would never return.
The double doors to Emergency Admitting swung inward, and ambulance attendants hustled the gurney inside. A blast of ice-cold air, like the ghostly exhaling of a long-dead dragon, followed them into the room from the November night.
Dennis Jacobs, the surgeon on duty, hurried over to the gurney. The injured man’s face was bone-white—he had suffered severe blood loss and was deep in shock. One of the attendants pulled back the sheet, exposing the man’s left leg. Jacobs carefully removed the mounds of gauze covering the injury site.
A great tract of flesh—perhaps five pounds of meat—had been scooped out of his thigh. If the injury had been another inch or two to the right, the femoral artery would have been clipped, and the man would have bled to death before help could have arrived.
“Who is he?” asked Jacobs.
“Paul Kowalski,” said the same attendant who had exposed the leg. “A sewer worker. He’d just gone down a manhole. Something came at him and got hold of his leg. He hightailed it up the ladder, back onto the street. A passerby found him bleeding all over the sidewalk, and called 9-1-1.”
Jacobs snapped his fingers at a nurse. “O.R. 3,” he said.
On the gurney, Kowalski’s eyes fluttered open. His hand reached up and grabbed Jacobs’s forearm. “Always heard the stories,” said Kowalski, his voice weak. “But never believed they were really there.”
“What?” said Jacobs. “What’s really there?”
Kowalski’s grip tightened. He must have been in excruciating pain. “Gators,” he said at last through clenched teeth. “Gators in the sewers.”
Around 2:00 a.m., Ludlam decided to call it a night. He began retracing his steps, heading back to where he’d come down. The sewer was cold, and mist swirled in the beam from his flashlight. Something brushed against his foot, swimming through the fetid water. So far he’d been lucky—nothing had bit him yet.
It was crazy to be down here—Ludlam knew that. But he couldn’t give up. Hell, he’d patiently sifted through sand and gravel for years. Was this really that different?
The smell hit him again. Funny how he could ignore it for hours at a time, then suddenly be overpowered by it. He reached up with his left hand, pinched his nostrils shut, and began breathing through his mouth.
Ludlam walked on, keeping his flashlight trained on the ground just a few feet in front of him. As he got closer to his starting point, he tilted the beam up and scanned the area ahead.
His heart skipped a beat.
A dark figure was blocking his way.
Paul Kowalski was in surgery for six hours. Dr. Jacobs and his team repaired tendons, sealed off blood vessels, and more. But the most interesting discovery was made almost at once, as one of Jacobs’s assistants was prepping the wound for surgery.
A white, fluted, gently curving cone about four inches long was partially embedded in Kowalski’s femur.
A tooth.
What the hell are you doing down here?” said the man blocking Ludlam’s way. He was wearing a stained Sanitation Department jacket.
“I’m Dr. David Ludlam,” said Ludlam. “I’ve got permission.” He reached into his raincoat’s pocket and pulled out the letter he always carried with him.
The sanitation worker took it and used his own flashlight to read it over. “ ‘Garbologist,’ ” he said with a snort. “Never heard of it.”
“They give a course in it at Columbia,” said Ludlam. That much was true, but Ludlam wasn’t a garbologist. When he’d first approached the city government, he’d used a fake business card—amazing what you could do these days with a decent printer.
“Well, be careful,” said the man. “The sewers are dangerous. A guy I know got a hunk taken out of him by an alligator.”
“Oh, come on,” said Ludlam, perfectly serious. “There aren’t any gators down here.”
Thank you for agreeing to see me, Professor Chong,” said Jacobs. Chong’s tiny office at the American Museum of Natural History was packed floor to ceiling with papers, computer printouts, and books in metal shelving units. Hanging from staggered coat hooks on the wall behind Chong was a stuffed anaconda some ten feet long.
“I treated a man two days ago who said he was bit by an alligator,” said Jacobs.
“Had he been down south?” asked Chong.
“No, no. He said it happened here, in New York. He’s a sewer worker, and—”
Chong laughed. “And he said he was bitten by an alligator down in the sewers, right?”
Jacobs felt his eyebrows lifting. “Exactly.”
Chong shook his head. “Guy’s trying to file a false insurance claim, betcha anything. There aren’t any alligators in our sewers.”
“I saw the wound,” said Jacobs. “Something took a massive bite out of him.”
“This alligators-in-the-sewers nonsense has been floating around for years,” said Chong. “The story is that kids bring home baby gators as pets from vacations in Florida, but when they grow tired of them, they flush ’em down the toilet, and the things end up living in the sewers.”
“Well,” said Jacobs, “that sounds reasonable.”
“It’s crap,” said Chong. “We get calls here at the Herpetology Department about that myth from time to time—but that’s all it is: a myth. You know how cold it is out there today?”
“A little below freezing.”
“Exactly. Oh, I don’t doubt that some alligators have been flushed over the years—people flush all kinds of stuff. But even assuming gators could survive swimming in sewage, the winter temperatures here would kill them. Alligators are cold-blooded, Dr. Jacobs.”
Jacobs reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the tooth. “We extracted this from the man’s thigh,” he said, placing it on Chong’s cluttered desk.
Chong picked it up. “Seriously?”
“Yes.”
The herpetologist shook his head. “Well, it’s not a gator tooth—the root is completely wrong. But reptiles do shed their teeth throughout their lives—it’s not unusual for one or more to pop loose during a meal.” He ran his thumb lightly over the edge of the tooth. “The margin is serrated,” he said. “Fascinating. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”
Ludlam went down into the sewers again the next night. He wasn’t getting enough sleep—it was hard putting in a full day at the museum and then doing this after dark. But if he was right about what was happening …
Homeless people sometimes came into the sewers, too. They mostly left Ludlam alone. Some, of course, were schizophrenics—one of them shouted obscenities at Ludlam as he passed him in the dark tunnel that night.
The water flowing past Ludlam’s feet was clumpy. He tried not to think about it.
As he often did, Ludlam was exploring the subterranean world in the area of the Empire State Building; yes, there were taller towers, but they were also more recent, built with lightweight materials. I
f his theory was right, the best place to look would be near the heaviest skyscrapers, where the stresses would be the greatest.
Ludlam exhaled noisily. He thumbed off his flashlight, and waited for his eyes to adjust to the near-total darkness.
After about two minutes, he saw a flash of pale green light about ten feet in front of him.
Jacobs left Chong’s office, but decided not to depart the museum just yet. It’d been years since he’d been here—the last time had been when his sister and her kids had come to visit from Iowa. He spent some time looking at various exhibits, and finally made his way to the dinosaur galleries. They had been fully renovated since the last time he’d seen them, and—
Christ.
Jesus Christ.
It wasn’t identical, but it was close. Damn close.
The tooth that had been removed from Kowalski’s leg looked very much like one of those on the museum’s pride and joy—its Tyrannosaurus rex.
Chong had said there couldn’t be alligators in New York’s sewers.
Alligators were cold-blooded.
But dinosaurs—
His nephew had told him that last time they were here—he’d been six back then, and could rattle off endless facts and figures about the great beasts—
Dinosaurs had been warm-blooded.
It was crazy.
Crazy.
And yet—
He had the tooth. He had it right here, in his hand. Serrated, conical, white—
White. Not the brown of a fossilized tooth. White and fresh and modern.
Dinosaurs in the sewers of New York.
It didn’t make any sense. But something had taken a huge bite out of Kowalski, and—